Category Archives: Fantasy and Science Fiction

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #303, August 1976

Summary:
Algis Budry’s serial, Michaelmas, begins in this issue, but its tale of a newscaster who secretly influences world events with the help of Domino, his AI, is duller than I expected from such a accomplished critic. Fortunately, there is a very good story from Michael G. Coney, The Cinderella Machine, that sees Carioca Jones, the manipulative and amoral media star, prepare for a revival of her work in the exotic Peninsula (against a background of bonded prisoners providing organ transplants for their masters). There are also a couple of good stories from Don Trotter (who doesn’t like AI spaceships and space pirates?) and Raylyn Moore.
The non-fiction columns are worthwhile too.
[ISFDB] [Archive.org] [Magazine Subscription]

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Anne W. Deraps

Fiction:
Michaelmas (Part 1 of 2) • novel serial by Algis Budrys
Theory and Practice of Economic Development: The Metallurgist and His Wife • short story by Richard Frede
Call Me Maelzel • short story by Don Trotter
The Castle • short story by Raylyn Moore
The Cinderella Machine • novelette by Michael G. Coney
The Purple Pterodactyls short story by L. Sprague de Camp

Non-Fiction:
Books • by Algis Budrys
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Films: Things to Come • essay by Baird Searles
Moving Ahead • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Coming Soon: All-Star Anniversary Issue
Letters

_____________________

Michaelmas (part I of II), by Algis Budrys, is the magazine’s second serial this year (the three-part Man Plus by Frederik Pohl ran in the April to June issues), and it opens with the Laurent Michaelmas, a global newscaster in a near-future world, flicking through various news channels at home. Domino interrupts him with the news that an astronaut called Norwood, believed dead in an orbital shuttle crash, is alive.
As Michaelmas and Domino discuss the matter (and in the pages that follow) we learn that (a) Domino is an AI connected to the world’s communications systems which enables Michaelmas to secretly exert a benign influence on world events; (b) Norwood is currently in a Swiss sanatorium run by two shady characters called Nils Limberg and Kristades Cikoumas (their facility normally offers rejuvenation treatments); (c) Norwood was due to command a UNAC (United Nations Astronautics Commission) mission to Jupiter; and (d) Michaelmas is concerned that this event means that someone or something is unhappy with the current course of world events (he asks Domino if they have been discovered at this point, but the AI says no).
The rest of the first part of the serial continues this stream of talking head scenes and (alongside conversations with Domino) Michaelmas next speaks to Horse Watson, an old, burnt-out reporter friend, on the flight to Zurich, where Michaelmas has accepted a broadcasting contract to cover Norwood’s first post-recovery press conference (Watson is accompanied by his colleague Joseph Campion, an ambitious up-and comer who will later feature as a suspect in Watson’s death in a helicopter accident). Then, when Michaelmas arrives in Switzerland, there is more chatter with an attractive forty-something TV producer called Clementine Gervaise. (Michaelmas wonders if this woman, who Domino points out is similar to what his deceased wife would be like at this age, is a honeytrap.)
The rest of the first part of the story is a swirl of events (or, more accurately, Michaelmas and Domino talking about events that are occurring off-stage): Limberg arranges to send a package to a trouble-making US politician; Watson’s helicopter crashes on the way to the possible landing site of Norwood’s shuttle; Michaelmas drives to the sanatorium with Gervaise and talks to various people (in particular, Norwood and Getulio Frontiere, UNAC’s press relations man) before attending the press conference; and, finally, there are two significant developments: (a) we learn that Norwood is privately alleging that he found a false (possibly Soviet-made) telemetry component in the shuttle just before the crash, and (b) Domino senses something very odd while searching the sanatorium’s network:

“Anomaly.”
“Yes. There is something going on there. I linked into about as many kinds of conventional systems as you’d expect, and there was no problem; he has the usual assortment of telephones, open lines to investment services and the medical network, and so forth. But there was something — something began to happen to the ground underfoot as I moved along.”
Michaelmas sucked his upper teeth. “Where were you going?” he finally asked.
“I have no idea. I can’t track individual electrons any more readily than you can. I’m just an information processor like any other living thing. Somewhere in that sanatorium is a crazy place. I had to cut out when it began echoing.”
“Echoing.”
“Yes, sir. I began receiving data I had generated and stored in the past. Fefre, the Turkish Greatness Party, Tim Brodzik…that sort of thing. Sometimes it arrived hollowed out, as if from the bottom of a very deep well, and at other times it was as shrill as the point of a pin. It was coded in exactly my style. It spoke in my voice, so to speak. However, I then noticed that minor variations were creeping in; with each repetition, there was apparently one electron’s worth of deviation, or something like that.”
“Electron’s worth?”
“I’m not sure what the actual increment was. It might have been as small as the fundamental particle, whatever that might turn out to be. But it seemed to me the coding was a notch farther off each time it…resonated.”
[. . .]
“Why did you feel that? Did you think this phenomenon had its own propulsion?”
“It might have had.”
“A…resonance…was coming after you with intent to commit systematic gibberish.”

As the above passage illustrates, sometimes you feel like you are wading through porridge. This work has other problems too: (a) even though there is a lot happening nearly all the events occur off-stage, and none are particularly interesting (b) it is set in a future world that just isn’t that well developed—and that comment isn’t because our history didn’t turn out the way that it does here, the story just doesn’t present a convincing counterfactual (there is a definite first draft feel here1); finally, and perhaps most problematically, there is no obvious idea of what the novel is about. All that said, I suppose this part is okay, but I have serious reservations about what the second half is going to be like.
(Average). 22,300 (of 44,400) words. Story link.

Theory and Practice of Economic Development: The Metallurgist and His Wife by Richard Frede opens by establishing Horowitz as a hen-pecked husband who lives in an overheating apartment. On Saturdays he usually goes fishing and, during one particular trip out on the Many Happy Returns, something very odd happens:

[It] was at that moment that there was such a mighty tug on the dropline that Horowitz was in fear of losing his finger. Then, just as suddenly, there was no tension to the line at all. But as Horowitz looked over the side into the water, a large flounder about twice the size of any flounder Horowitz had ever seen before, surfaced next to the dropline. The fish had a hook and line in its mouth, and it seemed to gaze up at Horowitz and to judge him. After some little time the fish said, “Would you kindly remove your hook from my mouth?”  p. 70

During the ensuing conversation the fish tells Horowitz that taking the hook out rather than cutting the line will reduce the risk of infection, that it is an enchanted businessman, and that it knew better than to take the bait but couldn’t resist, etc. Then, after Horowitz returns the fish to the water, it tells him that it owes him one.
When Horowitz later tells his wife about this fantastic event she is contemplative rather than dismissive and tells him to go back and ask the fish for a better apartment. Horowtiz does so and, after the fish expresses his surprise that he is back so soon, tells him, “It’s in the mail”.
This is the first of a number of demands that the wife makes as she quickly becomes dissatisfied with what she has been given (a country home, a bigger apartment in the city, and a seat as a US Senator soon follow). When Horowitz is eventually told to tell the fish that she wants to be President (spoiler), the fish gets fed up and tells Horowitz that they are both going back to their original apartment. Horowitz says he would be happy to return there but asks if his wife can stay where she is. The fish says it’ll arrange a divorce, that Horowitz can go back to the original apartment, and that his wife can live with her mother.
This entertainingly combines the fantastic elements involving the fish with the mundanity of married life (in this latter respect it somewhat resembles a humorous mainstream story). The ending is a bit of a dud, though.
(Average). 4,200 words. Story link.

Call Me Maelzel by Don Trotter2 gets off to a lively start with a ship AI called Maelzel pranking one of the crew:

I could hear water splashing on the deck in Lloyd’s shower, then the slap of his feet on the wet tiles. I had planned to zap him right away, but he started singing in his wheezy tenor that song about the sailor who’s spent a year and a quarter in his ship’s crow’s-nest and he goes up the river to see Budapest… but you probably know it. “Yardarm Arnie?” Anyhow, it’s a particular favorite of mine, and it sounded kind of nice echoing around in Lloyd’s shower stall. So I let him finish first, and on the final “…mizzen mast, tooooo!” I cut off the hot water and ran up the pressure on the icy as high as it would go. Exit Lloyd, raging wet.
“Goddarnit, Mazey! This time…” he started in, mad as a kicked kitten.
I hit the decompression warning in his cabin, a basso profundo WHOOT! WHOOT! that totally drowned him out. I think he might have called my bluff, but for realism I dropped the air pressure a little, just enough to make his ears pop, and let the emergency airbag fall from its recess in the ceiling. It was as convincing as hell, if I do say so myself.  p. 78

When Lloyd makes it to the muster station he is only wearing a pair of soaking wet shorts under a transparent airbag, and is then subjected to the stares of the rest of the (unpranked) crew. They subsequently vote Maelzel into “Durance Vile” (limbo) for one day.
While Maelzel is disconnected from everything apart from the emergency systems, we get some backstory about the AI and learn that, because of a previous mission which ended in disaster, Maelzel has been, like the ship, hugely overspecified. This means Maelzel is underemployed, bored, and consequently needs to finds ways to entertain itself.
After Maelzel is released from limbo he gets up to his tricks again, this time slowly increasing the gravity and making the crew think about diets and exercise. When they find out about this some days later, they are just about to throw Maelzel back into Durance Vile when they are attacked by pirates. Of course, none of them believe Maelzel’s warnings until just before they are boarded, by which time it is too late:

At each of the four cardinal points of the lounge a tall skinny character appeared, back to the bulkhead, little round shield and big swashbuckling cutlass poised, ready to slay dragons or die trying. At the sight of my crew strewn all over the carpet they relaxed their defensive attitudes, and a couple of them started laughing. The one over by the aquarium, apparently the leader, swaggered over to where Sash was lying, half stunned, against the bar. He poked him with his cutlass.
“On your feet, reptile,” he said without rancor. Sash climbed slowly to his feet, then, with apparent effort, put his grin back in place. He looked his captor in the eye, then returned the careful eying the other was giving him.
Our uninvited guests were worth looking at. Two men and two women, each a shade under seven feet and several shades under two hundred pounds, they were as bald as a bar of soap and naked as a porno flick; nude, but not lewd, they were tattooed. All over. The one holding his cutlass at Sash’s throat had his musculature done in bright red and fine detail, from quadriceps and biceps down to the tiniest facial muscles. He looked like an anatomy chart, or like St. Bartholomew after the Armenians finished flaying him. The lady with her foot on the lens of my best holo projector was done up like a Gila monster, in black and orange pebble pattern, with each pebble carefully shaded to look raised. Black, whole-eye contacts made her eyes appropriately shiny and beady. I wondered how she felt about St. Bartholomew calling Sash “reptile.” The man down by where the fountain splashed into the pool was mostly in bare skin and tattooed zippers — some of which were partly unzipped to show right lung and liver, one temporal and both frontal lobes of his brain, and selected other bits of his internal workin’s, all in five colors and exquisite detail. The woman who had joined St. Bart in front of Sash was done over in spiders — big ones, little ones, hairy and smooth, they swarmed up her arms, legs, and torso (two enormous tarantulas cupped her breasts), all exact trompe l’oeil. If she’d been ticklish, she wouldn’t have lasted two minutes. Her head was done in furry black, with pairs of iridescent patches to match the contacts she wore, the locations of the false eyes being characteristic of the Latrodectus genus: the Widows, black and other colors.  pp. 84-5

That’s a passage that would grace a modern day issue of Planet Stories.
After an initially peaceable takeover, St. Bartholomew gropes Tilly, one of the crewmembers, and Sash gets slashed open when he tries to protect her.
The rest of the story sees the crew try to get Sash to sick bay, while avoiding mentioning Maelzel by name (to leave the AI with the element of surprise). Then (spoiler), when the pirates start wandering around the ship, Maelzel picks them off one by one (the first of the victims gets spaced through one of the ship’s toilets!)
If you are looking for a colourful and entertaining space opera with AIs and space pirates,3 then this will be right up your street.
 (Good). 6,850 words. Story link.

The Castle by Raylyn Moore opens with Beryl the narrator being woken by her husband Miles, who has just had a nightmare where he was attacked by children. After Miles tells her about the experience he goes back to sleep, but she cannot. She thinks about various matters, during which we learn (a) that their house is a part-time toy museum which houses their huge collection and is open to occasional visitors, (b) Miles is Beryl’s second husband, and (c) he is building a huge play fort in the back garden overlooking the gully at the edge of their property. This latter venture does not proceed smoothly:

The first time the children had attacked the castle was before it was quite finished. Miles had left it late one afternoon with the mortar wet and returned in the morning to find the stones prized out of place. It looked as if a heavy pinch bar had been used. “I can scarcely believe it was children,” Beryl had said. “Think of the strength it must have taken.”
“Which is why I’m sure it was children,” Miles insisted. “They’re all just bubbling over with misdirected energy, aren’t they? And if they’re determined enough, they can do anything.”
[. . .]
The next time, the vandals had somehow sheared off the towers of the completed citadel, and once they had blasted a hole under the front wall with some explosive, presumably dynamite, though it didn’t make sense that children should have access to dynamite. (The Hullibargers had been out the evening it happened, and so had heard no sound.)  p. 101

Most of rest the story concerns their otherwise idyllic life (neither seems to work and they do as they wish), but one action after another subtly portrays Miles as a self-centred man-child (earlier in the story Beryl says, “There’s an old wives’ tale that all American men are really little boys in wolf’s clothing”). This is finally made explicit in the last scene (spoiler), where the couple come home to find two children/intruders in the castle and Miles agrees to fight them for it:

He plunged up the slope ready for battle, and the two emerged from behind the stone kremlin to meet him as agreed. For a long time she remained frozen near the bottom of the hill, watching what was happening simply because she couldn’t make herself stop watching. It went on for a long time. They fought desperately, as if for their lives, kicking, gouging, smashing.
And after a while she had to admit that of the three little boys, all of a size, struggling fiercely on the leaf-covered slope, she could no longer tell, through the lowering dusk, which was Miles.  p. 108

I think this is really a slightly surreal mainstream story rather than a fantasy (you would have to squint to see it as the latter), but I enjoyed its slow burn descriptive passages and quirkiness.
(Good). 6,050 words. Story link.

The Cinderella Machine by Michael G. Coney is set in his “Peninsula” series, and opens with Joe Sagar on Flambuoyant, the hydrofoil of the former 3-V star Carioca Jones. Sagar is thinking of a girl he once knew and loved called Joanne, an ex-prisoner who seems to have made a particular sacrifice in this dark future world of prisoner bondage and organ transplants:

I’d been reminded of Joanne by the sight of Carioca’s hands, white and smooth beside mine as they gripped the rail. Recently she had taken to wearing long gloves, but today the skin was bare, and I could see the thin pale lines around her wrists—the only physical reminder of the grafts.  p. 112

The rest of the beginning of the story is equally busy, and sees mention of a forthcoming 3-V film festival, The Carioca Jones Revival Season, a protest march by The Foes of Bondage to the State Pen demanding that the organ pool be disbanded (which, paradoxically given the above, will also feature Jones), and Jones’ order from Sagar of a pair of long gloves made from slitheskin (an emotion-sensitive material).
We are also introduced to Carioca Jones’ pet:

The afternoon had turned to chill early evening as we made our way towards Carioca’s mooring at Deep Cove. I helped her onto the landing stage and dutifully returned to the boat for the unwieldy Nag, her moray eel. Nag is a normally comatose beast and very little trouble—a welcome change from the unpredictable, defunct [land-shark] Wilberforce. I placed the fish on the landing stage, and he undulated slowly after Carioca like an evil black snake, the oxygenator pulsing near his gills. He wore a jeweled collar; Carioca always dresses her pets well.  p. 114

The next part of the story is equally busy, and sees an official from the State Pen ask Sagar for his help in stopping the march by the Foes of Bondage. Sagar tells him he is unable to help. Then, when Sagar later goes out to visit Jones, he is introduced to douglas sutherland, an ex-con with metal hands. It materialises that sutherland was a bonded man who received a reduced sentence after his freeman (owner, essentially) took his hands after the freeman had a farming accident. Sagar also learns that Sutherland was previously a surgeon, but now operates a sculptograph, a device that rejuvenates skin, and that he will be treating Jones before her appearance at the Revival to make her more youthful looking.
When prompted by Jones to demonstrate the machine to Sagar, sutherland gets rid of Nag the eel—the creature has been pestering sutherland and he obviously detests it—and he puts a lump of raw fish in the sculptograph. Sutherland then removes a wart on Sagar’s hand, leaving the treated part blemish free and less aged. He tells Sagar that the rejuvination effect should last for around three days, and adds that, to achieve a permanent change, he would need to use human meat. . . . Three days later, the skin starts sloughing off of Sagar’s hand in a most unsightly manner, but the wart does not reappear.
There are (spoiler) another few pieces put in place before the story’s mousetrap ending, and these involve (a) Sagar going to a sling gliding competition1 and picking up a young woman who he takes for a drive and later starts kissing—only to find out that she is, of course, the much younger Carioca Jones (this part of the story does not really convince); (b) the State Pen official giving Jones human flesh from the organ pool to get the Foes of Bondage march cancelled; and (c) sutherland seeing the scars on Carioca Jones’ wrists just before he treats her backstage at the Revival . . . .
The climax of the story sees Sagar discover how the State Pen official managed to get the march cancelled shortly before he hears screaming from backstage. Then Jones appears:

The curtains slashed down the center, and a creature appeared, blinking at the light, her screams dying to whimpers as the brightness hit her and illuminated her old, old face, her leathery wrinkled skin, her vulture’s neck of empty pouched flesh. . . .
She stood slightly crouched, her fingers crooked before her; but there was nothing aggressive in her stance—it was more as though she was backing away from an attack.
She wore a plain black dress which accentuated the pallor of her legs, her arms, her face. She was Death incarnate; it seemed impossible that a creature so old, so ugly, should possess the gift of life. Slowly she raised her hands until they shadowed her face and the spotlight picked out the white graft scars on her wrists. She gripped the folds of the curtain above her head while a trickle of spittle glistened at the corner of her slack lips, and the most terrible thing was her breasts, high and pale and full and youthful, voluptuous, as they rose from under her dress when she arched her back as though in terminal agony.
For an instant she stood rigid; in the dazzling light she couldn’t have seen us, and it was just possible she was not aware of her audience, or even of her whereabouts. Her single final scream died away into a croak, and she sagged; her arms dropped to her sides; her ancient eyes grew slitted and cunning as she glanced quickly from side to side, seized the curtain and whirled it about her like a cloak. We heard the echo of a cackle of laughter. The folds fell back into place, the stage was empty. She was gone.  pp. 128-129

Wonderfully over the top.
Sagar goes looking for Jones and finds she has tried to commit suicide (she thinks that sutherland has used the human flesh she provided and that the changes will be permanent), but then, as Sagar phones for an ambulance, he finds Nag’s empty collar and no sign of the land-eel. . . .
This is a highly entertaining piece with a brilliantly twisty plot and characters that are, to a greater or lesser extent, wonderfully flawed: Jones is obviously a narcissistic and amoral villain, and Sagar is no angel either (even if he does model “normal” most of the time).
(Very good). 8,400 words. Story link.

The Purple Pterodactyls by L. Sprague de Camp is another of the supernatural adventures of Willy Newbury.5 In this one he is on holiday by the sea with his wife Denise and, when they visit a nearby amusement park, Willy notices something at the rubber ring stall:

The prizes were even more original: a flock of plush-and-wire pterodactyls. They came in several models and sizes, some with long tails and some with short, some with teeth and some with long toothless beaks. The biggest were over a yard across the wings. They were made so that you could hang one from your ceiling as a mobile.
If the wind was strong, you could lock the wings in place and fly the thing as a kite. They were all dyed in shades of purple.
“Purple pterodactyls!” I cried. “Darling, I’ve got to have one of those.”  p. 144

Willy’s attempts to win one of the pterodactyls are unsuccessful, and he also isn’t able purchase one (he asks the stall’s proprietor, Mr Maniu, when he sees him at the beach the next day, but is refused). Willy’s luck changes later, however, when he buys an old ring for a quarter and, when his wife takes him to a jeweller to have it valued, discovers that the ring is ancient and the stone a real emerald. Then, when Willy is asleep that night, the djinn of the ring reveals himself to Willy and says it can perform “little favours” for him. Willy asks the djinn to help him win a purple pterodactyl.
This begins a spat that sees, after Willy subsequently wins more than one of the prizes, (a) Maniu hire his own djinn to stop Willy winning any more; (b) Willy going back to win a third pterodactyl when his own djinn tells him of this; (c) words disappearing off a speech Willy gives at a local women’s club meeting; (d) Willy winning another two pterodactyls; and then (e) Willy and Denise having their boat capsized by a freak squall that comes out of nowhere.
At this point Willy realises that he is involved in a potentially lethal vendetta, so he promises the djinn his freedom if he can get Willy out of his predicament. The story then ends (spoiler) with a shriek in the night, and Willy seeing Mr Maniu on the beach the next morning, his body covered in sand as usual . . . then Maniu’s decapitated head rolls off the mound.
When Willy sees the djinn in a dream several nights later he promptly gives him the ring and his freedom. Then he wakes up and has sex with his wife, as you do when you’ve just caused someone’s death.
This piece isn’t as slight a story as some in the series, but it does have a deus ex machina ending and is tonally a bit off: not only does the final line about sex with his wife not sit well with previous events but, if it wasn’t for Willy’s awful behaviour (who need five purple pterodactyls?), relations between the two men would not have deteriorated. I’m probably reading too much into a piece of light fantasy, but still. . . .
(Average). 5,650 words. Story link.

•••

The issue’s Cover is by Greg Bear, who started writing SF regularly around this time as well (although there were a handful of earlier stories). He would become much better known for his fiction.
Algis Budrys’ Books column (which is immediately after Michaelmas) covers four SF art books, and begins with a discussion of Brain W. Aldiss’s Science Fiction Art:

It’s asking too much of a Brian Aldiss, for instance, to put together a large, effective collection of sometimes quite aptly juxtaposed or dramatically enlarged pulp artwork, without beginning with a philosophical rationale:
“…sf and Gothic (writing) are basically intertwined. The same holds true for sf illustration.”
And then, and only then, do we get the book, which, as it happens, I rather like because Aldiss and I appear to have the same prejudices as distinguished from critical bases. I would guess we have closely correlated reminiscences. I don’t for a minute believe his statement. I didn’t believe it as applied to sf writing. But in shaking my head fondly and chuckling over and suddenly becoming lost in associational memories as I turn the large (about 12″ x 15″) acceptably produced pages of this coffee table paperback, I don’t care. It’s obvious the editor understands pulp creativity, whatever he may think of it, and loves the genre, however he may rationalize it. As for his critical findings — which are set forth logically and systematically, if not in accordance with my prejudices — I doubt that five percent of the book’s consumers will care a rap one way or the other[.]  p. 60

Budrys briefly mentions the omission of Murphy Anderson (an artist I’ve never heard of but who was apparently a Planet Stories artist during WWII) before moving on to the next review, The Science Fiction Book by Franz Rottensteiner. The critical essay in this book gets a complete pasting (sample comment, “The essay is drivel, but so elegantly organized that it sounds meaningful and might even be quoted with impunity in many scholarly circles”) but apparently the artwork and other graphic material is worth a browse.
The third book reviewed is One Hundred Years of Science Fiction Illustration by Anthony Frewin, which devotes half its space to per-Gernsbackian artwork (this is “informative and entertaining” according to Budrys). Last, but not least (that would be the Rottensteiner), is Fantastic Science-Fiction Art, 1926-1954 by Lester del Rey. This one has reproductions which Budrys says are not up to the standard of the Rottensteiner, and are slightly less dramatic than the Aldiss, but:

For leafing and sitting, sitting and thinking and leafing, this is the book for the magazine SF nostalgist. Less broad than the Frewin, less contentious and tumultuous than the Aldiss, it says: “This stuff was eye-catching once; OK, let it catch your eye again without any hype from me.” And provided you are a Frank R. Paul fan — which I guess I am gradually getting to be, after all, despite all resolve, but I do draw the line at Morey — effective and evocative it is, even with its emphasis on Paul.  p. 66

Gahan Wilson’s Cartoon is grisly, and I didn’t get it (not unusual).
Baird Searles uses his film column, Things to Come, to discuss, well, the things to come in what sounds like an expanding field (and this before the release of Star Wars in May 1977):

Regular readers will know that a feature of this column through the years has been a “Things to come” postscript, where I make note of productions in the works — or rumored to be in the works, as it often turns out (the movie industry being prone to announce things that are sometimes only an itch in the producer’s wallet). Never did I think that there would come a point when I would be forced to devote a whole column to things to come, but as I’ve been intimating for some months now, the dam is about to bust (my Ouija board typer just wrote “damn” for dam, which may be all too true), and you might be interested in what may be (see cautionary note above) looming ahead for your screens.  p. 110

The rest of the article lists a huge number of projects, including many that never saw the light of day (I don’t believe that The Demolished Man or Bug Jack Barron ever appeared as movies, for example).
Searles finishes with mention of a TV advertisement:

The highlight of this month’s TV viewing was, of all things, a commercial. It featured a Dr. Asimov, described in little letters under his chin as a “science writer.” He was telling us about radial tires and I was so intrigued that I almost went out and bought some. Luckily, I remembered in time that I didn’t own a car.  p. 111

Talking of Isaac Asimov, his science column in this issue, Moving Ahead, discusses how technological change affects historical outcomes and, in particular, discusses steamboats, steamships, and the economics of the Civil War. There is one particular quote of note:

[All] through history knights have sneered at merchants, the fact is that in the long run the merchants win and the knights lose. The Dutch merchants beat the Spanish knights, and the British beat Napoleon who thought “perfidious Albion” was only “a nation of shopkeepers.”

This reflects a continual observation in a WWII history podcast I’ve been listening to for the last year or so: logistics and materiel invariably win in the long run. This is what happened in WWII, and it looks like what is going to happen again in Ukraine (political will permitting).6
Coming Soon: All-Star Anniversary Issue gives a brief line-up of the names for the October issue.
The (infrequent) Letters column consists mostly of responses to a Barry Malzberg article and Harlan Ellison letter which appeared in the April issue (and which were about the restrictions of the field and the writers’ intentions to leave). The first long letter is by Greg Bear, who comments:

Poking about aimlessly for reasons to explain the Exodus, I come across a common element. Ellison, Malzberg and Silverberg all share an acerbic view of the world, heavily clouded with anger, portents of doom, and general distrust of humanity at large. These sentiments fit well into the sixties, when a large number of people felt the curling wave and hopped aboard. But now the wave has broken and most of the riders lie gasping on the sand, getting very tired of saying “See! I was right after all!” We have slumped into a period with many similarities to the fifties — only now, ecology and nuclear energy have replaced the communists, von Daniken has replaced James Dean. The prophets are in the shallows, still splashing, trying to start up more waves. But sooner beat an exhausted horse after a long race. We still need the splashers, Ellison-Silverberg-Malzberg et al, but they’re facing a hard slough. I beg them not to retire, saddened. The energy will come again, and they’ll be just as necessary, even if older. So go now, rest, try your dreams in other fields, recharge.  p. 157

The second letter is by George Warren, who makes this point:

Mr. Ellison might come to understand that it isn’t being typed as a science fiction writer that’s holding him back; it’s the fact that he’ll never be able to grab that second trapeze — the larger audience he wants and deserves — until he lets go of the first one. And the name of the first one is not Science Fiction but Television.
Ellison needs to get the hell out of Hollywood. He has gone as far in it as a man of talent, taste and temperament can go; beyond that limit — how many years is it, now? — only the shorted-out cyborgs of whom he complained recently on late-night television manage to advance and prosper. Men of superior gifts tend to go down the tube. Maybe if both of our April singers of sour songs gave Budrys’s taxonomic essay some thought, too, they might in time come to reflect that when one is raped by his enemies (the clique for Malzberg, the tube for Ellison) the proper response is not to savage his friends.  p. 158

Lee McGarry observes that, “You don’t get [a] popular (“Jaws”, “Perry Rhodan”) audience unless you write popular stuff”, a blindingly obvious observation that appears to be lost on some writers, who think the world is out of step, not them—a point also made by Arthur D. Hlavaty, who says, “When the map does not match the territory, there is no way of changing the territory and no point in crying about the problem.”
John Wehrle asks:

Do you really want to write for a bunch of longhaired William F. Buckleys? Is it so important that you make it with this little clique of self-styled elitists? Does their snobbery really render your work meaningless? All this whining around sounds like the kid who couldn’t make the football team.  p. 160

Finally, Richard Taylor says:

I read Barry Malzberg’s resignation from the SF genre with some regret, not because I am particularly fond of his work — I find much of it too pretentious for my taste — but because I recognized in his words an affliction that seems to be common among so called genre writers, and particularly common among SF writers: A hatred for the field.
That Mr. Malzberg desires to be a member of the literary elite I can fully sympathize with. The literary elite are, after all, elite. They are paid for their status within the elite group as much as they are paid for their work, which is often sub-standard, even by genre considerations. However, being a member of the literary elite will not, of itself, cause Mr. Malzberg’s work to improve; will not of itself make something greater of the man Barry Malzberg than he was before; will not give Barry Malzberg the satisfaction of being a complete artist. These things derive from the paper, the pen, the mind and the will. Testimonials, if they come at all, come later.  p. 160

All this seems very much a storm in a teacup now.

•••

Setting aside Budry’s middling serial, the short fiction in this issue isn’t bad—one very good story, two good ones, and nothing poor. The non-fiction columns are worthwhile too.  ●

_____________________

1. The book version of Michaelmas (which appeared the following year) was 65,000 words long compared to the 45,000 words of the serial version. There is this note in the book:

This novel incorporates features of a substantially shorter and significantly different version published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Copyright © 1976 by A. J. Budrys.

As I knew at the time that F&SF had a habit of abridging their serials (although it appears from the above comment that Budrys may have revised and/or expanded a shorter initial version of the work in this case), I waited for the book publication before I read this for the first time in the late seventies. I did not enjoy that version either.

2. According to ISFDB, Don Trotter only published three stories. On the basis of this one that is a pity.

3. Call Me Maelzel by Don Trotter reminded me of another recent AI/pirates tale, Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra (F&SF, July-August 2020).

4. The sling-glider launch mechanism in Michael G. Coney’s “Peninsula” stories always confused me a little, but this piece has a good description:

Presdee’s turn came. I watched the spray trailing silver from the distant hydrofoil as it raced for the Fulcrum post; some distance behind followed the figure of Presdee on waterskis, the dartlike glider harnessed to his back. As the speed increased, Presdee rose into the air, kicked off the skis and tucked his legs back into the narrow fuselage. I could just make out the thin thread of the rigid Whip connecting him to the speeding boat. He angled away, gaining height as the boat slowed momentarily and veered to bring him on a parallel course. The Whip was locked into position, now projecting at right angles to the boat, rising stiffly about thirty degrees into the sky where Presdee soared. Then the Eye on the other side of the boat engaged with the Hook of the Fulcrum post and snapped the hydrofoil into a tight turn at full speed.
The flailing Whip accelerated Presdee to a speed which couldn’t have been far short of three hundred miles per hour; he touched his release button and hurtled across the sky, heading northwards up the Strait. p. 121

I note that one of the stories in this series, The Hook, the Eye, and the Whip (Galaxy, March 1974), is mostly about sling-gliding.
I would also note that I am at a loss as to why none of these “Peninsula” stories (bar one atypical piece) ever made it into the “Year’s Bests” (there is a list of stories at ISFDB).

5. The ISFDB page for the “Willy Newbury” series.

6. The history podcast I mentioned above is the fascinating We Have Ways of Making You Talk, hosted by the historian James Holland and the comedian Al Murray.

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #533-534, October-November 1995

Summary:
A less than stellar line-up for F&SF’s 1995 Anniversary double issue—and a less than stellar performance. That said, this decidedly mixed bag of stories has a good to very good story by Dale Bailey, Sheep’s Clothing, which blends the preparation for a hi-tech assassination of a politician with a character study of the veteran who will carry out the task. There are also two good stories by Marc Laidlaw (Dankden, the first of his fantasy series featuring Gorlen Vizenfirth, a bard with the hand of a gargoyle) and the triple collaborators Jonathan Lethem & John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly (The True History of the End of the World, which concerns a group of refuseniks in a world where the rest of humanity is uplifted).
I also found the book review column by Robert K. J. Killheffer instructive.
The first story, Lifeboat on a Burning Sea by Bruce Holland Rogers, won a Nebula Award.
[ISFDB] [Archive.org] [Subscriptions]

Other reviews:
John Loyd, There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor: Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Assistant Editor, Robin O’Connor

Lifeboat on a Burning Sea • novelette by Bruce Holland Rogers
At Darlington’s • short story by Richard Bowes –
The Singing Marine • short story by Kit Reed
But Now Am Found • short story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Count on Me • short story by Ray Vukcevich
Sheep’s Clothing • novelette by Dale Bailey +
Pulling Hard Time • short story by Harlan Ellison
The True History of the End of the World • novelette by Jonathan Lethem & John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly
Nest Egg • short story by John Morressy
Dankden • novella by Marc Laidlaw

Non-fiction:
Dankden • cover by Bob Eggleton
Editorial • by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Cartoons • by Joseph Farris, Ed Arno, Bill Long (x2), Joseph Farris, Danny Shanahan (x2), Henry Martin,
Books • by Robert K. J. Killheffer
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
An Odyssey Galactic • essay by Gregory Benford
F&SF Competition: Report on Competition 64
F&SF Competition: Competition 65
Coming Attractions

_____________________

This issue comes from the period where the magazine was still monthly but issued an anniversary double issue dated October-November. These double issues usually had an All-Star line-up, but this one seems rather lacking in names.

The fiction leads off with Bruce Holland Rogers’ (Nebula award winning) Lifeboat on a Burning Sea, which begins with the narrator/scientist, Elliot Maas, and his two business partners (Bierley, the PR man, and Richardson, the other scientist) at a press conference. They tell the press that have created a “multi-cameral multi-phasic analog information processor”, or what they prefer to call a TOS (“The Other Side”), a device which can store a machine consciousness and which they hope will eventually enable humans to cheat death.
Shortly after this, Bierley dies, and their funding vanishes, so Maas and Richardson use the TOS to build a copy of him:

“Bierley, regrettably, is dead,” said Bierley’s image. He was responding to the first question after his prepared statement. “There’s no bringing him back, and I regret that.” Warm smile.
The press corps laughed uncertainly.
“But you’re his memories?” asked a reporter.
“Not in the sense that you mean it,” Bierley said. “Nobody dumped Bierley’s mind into a machine. We can’t do that.” Dramatic pause. “Yet.”
Smile. “What I am is a personality construct of other people’s memories. Over one hundred of Bierley’s closest associates were interviewed by TOS. Their impressions of Bierley, specific examples of things he had said and done, along with digital recordings of the man in action, were processed to create me. I may not be Jackson Bierley as he saw himself, but I’m Jackson Bierley as he was seen by others.  p. 23-24

After the press conference there is a long conversation between Maas and Richardson, where they discuss possible uses of constructs like Bierley (bringing back dead actors and singers, etc.) before the conversation touches on other (and odder) matters: Richardson starts talking about Shiva and reincarnation, and suggests building a simulacrum of Maas to help work on the project.
Shortly after this Richardson is apparently killed in a terrorist attack on the underground (the story is set in a world where there are constant terrorist bombings) so, of course, a Richardson construct is created with the help of the Bierley one.
After this the story becomes ever more existential: the Richardson construct talks to Maas (whose obsession with cheating his own death is a thread that runs through the story):

Irritatingly, TOS started to suffer again from hurricanes. Those chaos storms in the information flow started to shut down the Richardson construct around one in the morning, regularly.
“It’s like you’re too much contradiction for TOS to handle,” [Maas] told the construct late one night. “A scientist and a mystic.”
“No mystic,” Richardson said. “I’m more scientist than you are, Maas. You’re in a contest with the universe. You want to beat it. If someone gave you the fountain of youth, guaranteed to keep you alive forever with the proviso that you’d never understand how it worked, you’d jump at the chance. Science is a means to you. You want results. You’re a mere technologist.”
“I have a focus. You could never keep yourself on track.”
“You have an obsession,” the construct countered. “You’re right that I can never resist the temptation of the more interesting questions. But that’s what matters to me. What does all of this—” He swept his hand wide to encompass the universe with his gesture, and his hand came to rest on his own chest. “What does it all mean? That’s my question, Maas. I never stop asking it.”
“You sound like him. Sometimes I forget what you are.”  p. 34

Maas then starts to have suspicions about what is causing the information storms, and tricks the machine to make it think he has left the building. He hides beside the Richardson TOS, and then later that night (spoiler) the real Richardson (who has faked his own death—even to the point his wife is fooled) visits his own construct. When Maas challenges Richardson, it sounds as if he has had some sort of breakdown, and keeps saying he is dead and is going to start another life. This baffling exchange pretty much ends the story, and is followed by a repeat of the opening image, a dream Maas has of a man in a lifeboat watching a ship on fire with trapped sailors (him surviving death while the rest of humanity doesn’t, I suppose).
For the first half or so the story is reasonably interesting, but towards the end it takes a deep dive into its own navel. I have no idea what point the story is trying to make and am baffled as to how it won a Nebula award.
(Average). 10,100 words.

At Darlington’s by Richard Bowes1 is the seventh published story in the “Kevin Grierson” series, and begins with his “Shadow”, a doppelgänger, or perhaps more accurately a secret double who normally exists inside Kevin, getting dressed and going to work instead of him. Most of the rest of the story involves the scrapes and encounters that the drug-using Shadow has with the other people at his place of employment (his boss warns the Shadow not to come in late again; he goes to an outdoor fashion shoot with Les; he meets a woman called Sarah who has a boozer/druggie husband, etc.)
Dropped into all of this mostly scene setting description and verbal back and forth, is a short flashback scene where we see Kevin working as a male prostitute (I think) and waking up to find his drill sergeant client is dead.
At the end of the story the Shadow returns from a drug deal to find Kevin has been drafted.
It was hard to keep track of what was going on in this slice-of-life, and I have little memory of what I did read. I’ve no idea what the editor saw in this (at best) borderline fantasy story, and wonder if it got taken on the strength of its prequels.
– (Awful). 6,750 words.

The Singing Marine by Kit Reed is a surreal fantasy (i.e. it ultimately makes no sense whatsoever) that begins with the titular marine reflecting that he may be singing to take his mind off a recent accident involving his platoon where lives were lost. The marine observes that, if he is court martialled, he cannot now hope to love the General’s daughter.
When the marine goes into a drugstore he is unaware that a woman is following him. She tells him to sit down and, after initially resisting, he does so. The marine then then tells her the story of his childhood, or maybe of the song he is singing, about how he was murdered by his stepmother but rose after being buried under a linden tree.
The next part of the story sees the pair go on a bus to a place she says he will know, and they eventually end up, after a further hour’s walk in the woods, at a cavern. The woman tells the marine she wants him to go in and retrieve a tinderbox, for which she will give him enough money to sort all of his problems:

It is as she told him. At the widest point he finds three little niches opening off the tunnel like side chapels in a subterranean place of worship, but instead of religious statuary or mummified corpses they contain bits of blackness that stalk back and forth inside like furred furies; when the animals see the Marine they lunge for him and are hurled back into their niches as if by invisible barriers. Glowering, they mount their mahogany chests like reluctant plaster saints returning to their pedestals.  p. 85

The first dog tries to tempt the marine with a pile of pennies, and the second with shredded dollar bills, but he ignores them and goes onto the third dog. There, he goes into its alcove and tells the dog that he “didn’t want to come back from the dead” and that “being dead is easier”. The dog approaches him:

Huge and silent, the dog surges into the space between them. Still he does not move. He does not move even when the massive brute pads the last two steps and presses its bearlike head against him. Startled by the warmth, the weight, the singing Marine feels everything bad rush out of him: the violent death and burial, the strange reincarnation that finds him both victim and murderer, song and singer, still in the thrall of the linden tree and the spirits that surround it. The great dog’s jaws are wide; its mouth is a fiery chasm, but he doesn’t shrink from it.
When you have been dead and buried, many things worry you, but nothing frightens you.  p. 86

The marine opens the chest to retrieve the tinderbox but, once he leaves the cavern, he kills the woman and returns to his base, sneaking through the fence and hiding in the grounds. Later, when he is hungry, he strikes the tinderbox three times, and the dog appears with food. Then, as he thinks about how only a goddess can save him now, the dog appears once more with the general’s sleeping daughter on its back. The marine wants her, but leaves her unmolested.
Finally, when the daughter is once again taken by the dog, the General notices her absence and the military police eventually come for the marine. The General later questions him, and then the marine attacks the general so the latter will shoot and kill him.
The writing and the dreamlike progression of this make for an initially intriguing read but, as I said above, it ultimately makes no sense at all. If you don’t mind the inexplicable there may be something in this for you.
(Average). 5,300 words.

But Now Am Found by Nina Kiriki Hoffman sees a woman wake up in her bed to find two other bodies beside her. She realises that they are versions of herself, Fat Self and Little Self. They subsequently keep her captive in her apartment and force feed her:

“Eat,” said Little Self, and it and Fat Self worked together to get her out of bed and into the kitchen. Little Self tied her to a chair with clothesline, and Fat Self cooked pancakes. The kitchen smelled of sizzling butter, and flour marrying eggs and milk. Little Self got out the ice cream Iris had hidden in the tiny freezer compartment, the secret shame she couldn’t resist, even though she had been dieting and exercising rigorously for five years. She still cheated some nights when the loneliness overwhelmed her. Mornings after those nights, she adjusted her exercise regimen to work off the extra calories.
Now Little Self was holding out a spoonful of chocolate chocolate mint. Iris heard her stomach growl. She opened her mouth.  p. 95

Later, when the woman is allowed to exercise, she sees Little Self grows larger; this cycle of eating and exercising goes on for some time (the woman is trapped in her apartment, and realises that someone else must be doing her job).
Then, at the end of the story, she wakes up one morning to find they have been joined by a scrawny and starved and crying version of her: the final line is “Overnight, the population of the city expanded. Trails of crumbs led the lost home.”
I have no idea what these final lines have to do with the rest of the story (and, even if I did, I don’t have much interest in surreal fantasy stories about first world problems like dieting or body image).
(Mediocre). 2,150 words.

Count on Me by Ray Vukcevich gets off to a very clever start with this:

It didn’t confuse me that the new occupant of apartment 29A was a woman. The Father of Lies is nothing if not inventive. The number 29A is, of course, the Number of the Beast in base 16, and 16 is the atomic number of Sulfur. Base 16 is commonly called “hex.” It was all too obvious.
Celia Strafford looked to be in her early thirties— 32, to be precise, since 2,3, and 37 are the prime factors of 666, and she looked too old to be 23, and I’m 37, and she looked younger than me, so ergo, as they say, 32. I’m speaking of the age of her body; I couldn’t know the age of the creature inside. She wore her long red hair loose down her back. I watched her closely as she stooped to pick up a box to lug up the stairs to her new apartment. She wore cut-off jeans and an abbreviated yellow halter top. Her legs were that strange golden tan you only see on women. I’ve never been able to figure how they achieve that color. She wore no shoes.  p. 100

The rest of the beginning of the story sees some conversational sparring between the narrator, Palmer (actually Brother Palmer of the Secret Order of Morse), and Celia, the new neighbour, as well as more numerology (at one point she says, when told that he used to be in the Army, that “there are probably 820 things worse”, which Palmer identifies as 666 in Base 9). Eventually Palmer becomes more and more convinced that she belongs to the Army of the Night, something that is repeatedly confirmed by numerology when they meet later on in her apartment. Then, at a climactic moment (spoiler), he leaps away from her and tries to make the sign of the cross. After a couple more fumbled attempts, Celia giggles and makes the sign herself—and reveals that she is Sister Celia of the Divine Order of Symmetry!
At this point the story almost completely deflates, and the second half of the story is a wodge of number and Morse code crunching that leads them to the message, “ONE GOD”, and the realisation that all is well with the world.
A game of two halves (two in any Base from 3 to Infinity).
(Average). 3,350 words.

Sheep’s Clothing by Dale Bailey opens with Stern, the narrator, thinking about different types of assassin before he himself is recruited by a wheelchair-bound man called Thrale to kill a Senator Philip Hanson.
We later learn that the reason for the proposed killing is that Hanson intends to vote for legislation enabling a biowar facility, an action that links to Stern’s own past as he was a spider drone operator in the Brazilian conflict and was exposed to a cocktail of tailored viruses and pathogens, but never fell ill. His family, however, were not so lucky:

After the war, Anna and I remained in her native Brazil. We did not return to the States until several years later, when black pustulant sores began to erupt in our five-year-old daughter’s flesh.
I can never forget the stench of the hospital room where she died—a noxious odor compounded of the sterile smell of the hospital corridors and a fulsome reek of decay, like rotting peaches, inside the room itself. At the last, my eyes watered with that smell; Anna could barely bring herself to enter the room. My daughter died alone, walled away from us by the surgical masks we wore over our noses and mouths.  p. 115

In the next part of the story we see (the now widowed) Stern learn how to operate a marionette-like bodysuit that will enable him to control Hanson’s daughter after she has been injected with nanotechnology. The nanotech will give Stern twenty minutes of control and will than decompose, leaving no trace of external involvement—so the daughter will take the blame for the murder which, apart from the obvious benefits to Thrale, Stern & co., will also prevent her, a politician in her own right, from continuing with her father’s legislative agenda. To be honest, the suit/nanotech gimmick is probably the weakest part of the story, but little time is spent on the tech stuff and the bulk of the piece is mostly a series of scenes where we get a character study of Stern, or learn more about Thrale and his two employees: Pangborn is a female assistant, and Truman is the scientist who developed the system that Stern will be using to control the daughter.
At one point Stern is given a video disc from Pangborn that shows Hanson’s daughter and her female lover in a hotel room, and he later has a disturbing dream:

I was riding the spider, chasing the beacon of an intelligence comsat through the labyrinthine jungle. Luminescent tactical data flickered at the periphery of my vision. Antediluvian vegetation blurred by on either side. Small terrified creatures flashed through the tangled scrub. The forest reverberated with the raucous complaints of brightly plumed birds, the thrash of contused undergrowth.
How I loved the hunt.
I had always loved it.
Razored mandibles snapped the humid air as I drove the spider through the shadowy depths, emerging at last through a wall of steaming vegetation into a hotel room, dropped whole into the tangled Mato Grosso.
I stopped the spider short. Servos whirred. High resolution cameras scanned the area.
The sun penetrated the clearing in luminous shards. The jungle symphony swelled into the stillness. Two women writhed on the bed, oblivious to everything but one another.
“It’s time,” said the voice of Napoleon Thrale.
I urged the spider forward. Whiskered steel legs clawed the moist earth, the bed-sheets. Just as the mandibles closed about their fragile bodies, one of the women turned to look at me, her features contorted in the involuntary rictus of orgasm.
She wore my daughter’s face.
I screamed myself awake, sitting upright in the soured sheets, my penis like a stiffened rod against my belly.  p. 126

After this Stern (a) talks to Truman about scientists like Oppenheimer and the guilt they bear for the inventions they create and (b) sleeps with Pangborn, learning that her fiancé died in Brazil.
Eventually (spoiler), the day of the assassination arrives and Stern, Pangborn and Truman set off to complete the mission. The daughter, Amanda, is shot with a long range hypodermic dart while out on a regular run and the nanotechnology enters her body. Stern takes control of Amanda and takes her back to the house, quickly finding Hanson in his office. Then, when the nanotech starts to break down, Amanda manages to reassert enough control to say “Dad?” just before Stern breaks a mug on the desk and kills Hanson by repeatedly slashing his throat.
There is a final postscript which sees Stern in the Caymans, where he still dreaming of his wife and daughter. Stern says that he has written a letter to Amanda’s attorneys explaining what happened and why she is not guilty of the murder (“the daughters have suffered enough” he adds to himself). After he sends the letter Stern says he will swim off towards the horizon to join his wife and daughter.
If you are looking for the assassination adventure suggested by the beginning of the piece you are probably going to be disappointed—however, if you are looking for a complex and involving psychodrama, then this will be well worth your time.
+ (Good To Very Good). 11,100 words.

Pulling Hard Time by Harlan Ellison opens with a short introductory passage about New Alcatraz, a prison that keeps its prisoners in zero-gee VR.
The story then cuts to Charlie, who kills four bikers attempting to rape his wife in the couple’s restaurant. After this he is imprisoned for their murders, and then he kills another prisoner and cripples a guard. He is transferred to New Alcatraz.
The penultimate section sees a Senator visiting the Warden, who explains to the politician what happens to the prisoners:

Well, they just float there till they die, but it’s in no way ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ because we do absolutely nothing to them. No corporal punishment, no denial of the basics to sustain life. We just leave them locked in their own heads, cortically tapped to relive one scene from their past, over and over.”
“And how is it, again, that you do that…?”
“The technicians call it a moebius memory [. . . we] select the one moment from their past that most frightens or horrifies or saddens them. Then, boom, into a null-g suite, with a proleptic copula imbedded in theirgliomas. It’s all like a dream. A very very bad dream that goes on forever. Punishment to fit the crime.”
“We are a nation in balance.”
“Kindlier. Gentler. More humane.”  p. 142

The subsequent kicker scene (spoiler) sees Charlie as a boy, involved in a car accident and trapped with his dead mother for four days. The story finishes with the “nation in balance” refrain.
This is more a political opinion column than a short story, and one which makes the fairly obvious point that the cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners is a Bad Thing. A squib, not a story, and editor Rusch’s gushing introduction doesn’t improve matters.2
(Mediocre). 1,800 words.

The True History of the End of the World by Jonathan Lethem, John Kessel, & James Patrick Kelly opens with Chester Drummond, an ex-politician, taking a train to a “refusenik” farm for those that have not had the Carcopino-Koster treatments (these are never really explained in any detail, but have given the vast majority of the near-future human race an emotional stability and intellectual uplift that has radically changed society).
When Drummond arrives at his station he is picked by Roberta, a woman from the farm who has had the C-K treatment, and travels to their destination along with another new inmate, the charismatic Brother Emil Sangar.
After they arrive, Sangar, who wants society back the way it was, goes to see Drummond, who has similar plans. Sangar tells Drummond that there is a woman called Elizabeth Wiley at the farm who, after an accident, reverted to pre C-K state and did not want to undergo the process again. Sangar wants to recruit her as he thinks her perspective will prove useful (he describes her as “the Holy Grail”). Later, the pair meet Elizabeth, who says she is in communication with the Virgin Mary (she says she gets messages in the veins of leaves), as well the farm’s other inmates (one is an SF writer “who predicted this” but “my books never sold”).
Further on in the story Drummond learns from Roberta, to his surprise, that he isn’t a prisoner at the camp and can leave any time he wants (she adds that there are only two C-K people at the camp and that they are there as helpers, not as guards). Roberta also tells him about a therapy class, and Drummond’s subsequent visit there (most of chapter 5) is the highlight of the story, as it consists of some entertainingly demented one-liners and exchanges:

Roberta opened the session by focussing immediately on the new arrivals. “Let’s start with you, Brother Emil,” she said. “You were saying this morning that you wanted to be cured.”
“Cured, yes,” said Brother Emil. “Of the coercion of the state. Of the tyranny of reason.”
Roberta raised her eyebrows expectantly.
Allan Fence, the writer, quickly rose to the occasion. “What coercion?” he said. “You checked yourself in here voluntarily, Brother Emil. Of your own free will.”
“When we were neanderthals,” replied Brother Emil, “we developed a taste for mastodon. You know how we hunted them, my friend? We’d form a hunting line and drive the herd toward the edge of a cliff. Within the bounds of that line each mastodon exercised free will, yet today”—he waved at the window, which looked out over the fields—“one very rarely sees a mastodon.”
“No, no, that’s terribly wrong.” Linda Bartly was upset. “We’re not all mastodons, we’re not all the same. They’re like a hunting line, but what they’ve crowded together is a flock of creatures: sloths, butterflies, leopards, loons, platypusses—”
Loons indeed, thought Chester.
“they want us all to be the same, but we’re not—”
“Linda,” said Roberta, “would you like to tell the group what you see in Brother Emil and Chester’s auras?” She turned and explained to Chester: “Linda sees auras. But not around those of us who’ve undergone Carcopino. We’ve lost ours.”
Brother Emil held up his hand. “It will avail us nothing to become mastodons, certainly. But if we all grew wings together, the onrushing cliff would become an opportunity.”
“Or arm the mastodons with machine guns,” said Allan Fence thoughtfully. “Suitably adapted for physiological differences, of course. Trunk triggered, air-cooled fifty calibers with cermet stocks.”
“Mr. Drummond’s aura is huge,” Linda Bartly stage-whispered. “Big enough for all of us. But it’s gray—”
“I’m interested in what the group thinks of Brother Emil’s image of the wings,” said Roberta. “Implicitly, he’s proposing to lead you, to turn you into his followers. He’s not a man who gives up easily—only last year he was preaching the end of the world to his cult on Mt. Shasta.”
“It was postponed,” said Sanger.  p. 155-156

The rest of the story (such as it is) concerns the manoeuvrings of Sangar and Drummond in their attempt to recruit the enigmatic Sister Wiley to their cause. During this, Drummond walks to Roberta’s nearby house and ends up sleeping with her when she arrives to find him inside. At the end of this encounter she tells him that he can’t change the world (and Drummond also later discovers that the explosive he has hidden in a bust in his room has been taken away).
Finally (spoiler), Elizabeth converts Drummond and Sangar to the C-K treatment (Sangar is told that he must take the treatment so he can save C-K souls), and we find that she intends taking the treatment herself, but only once she has convinced the last of the unconverted to do so.
This piece doesn’t have the strongest story arc—the ending, where the unreasonable are converted into the reasonable, seems rather unlikely—but it works on an ironic level, I suppose. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining read, sometimes very much so.
I’d add that it seems a remarkably uniform work given that it has three writers involved.
(Good). 10,900 words.

Nest Egg by John Morressy is one of his “Kedrigern the Wizard” series, and this one sees him receive a summons from a “friend and comrade” called Lord Tyasan to de-spell his household griffin, Cecil. After Kedrigern complains at some length to his wife, Princess, about how it isn’t a job for a wizard, and that he doesn’t like Tysan’s tone, etc., she eventually convinces him to take the job, and tells him she is coming too.
When they finally arrive at the castle, Kedrigern and Lord Tyasan catch up (in what is probably the best passage in a weak story):

“How old are [your children], Tyasan? They weren’t even born when I was here last.”
The king beamed upon them. “I remember the occasion well. I had only recently wed my fair queen Thrymm. She was sorely afflicted, but you came to her aid, old friend.”
“What was her problem?” Princess asked.
“Spiders.”
“Isn’t it customary to call an exterminator?”
“These spiders popped out of Thrymm’s mouth every time she spoke,” Kedrigem explained.
“It was especially unpleasant when she talked in her sleep,” Tyasan said with a slight shudder of distaste. “A single oversight in drawing up the guest list, and it caused us no end of inconvenience and distress. You can imagine how punctilious we were in sending out invitations to the royal christenings.”  p. 190

Seven pages in (about half way through the story), Kedrigern finally inspects the cantankerous griffin and finds it hasn’t been spelled but he still cannot work out what ails the creature. Then, when Princess starts stroking the griffin’s neck feathers, the creature starts to recover and asks for some broth. Kedrigern realises that (spoiler), while Princess was stroking the griffin, her gold necklace was touching its skin.
The story ends with Kedrigern giving Tyasan some blather about griffins needing gold for their nests before realising that Cecil must now be old enough to mate. Tyasan doubts he can find enough gold for the griffin (and doesn’t want to give what he has) but Kedrigern points out that his gold will still be there in the nest, and that griffins are good at finding the material for themselves—so Tyasan and his family will be rich.
This piece is typical of the other series stories in that it is pleasant enough light reading, but is also contrived and padded, and has a weak plot (which, when it finally gets going here, pivots on Kedrigern noticing something and then explaining the solution based on information only he could know).
 (Mediocre). 6,050 words.

Dankden by Marc Laidlaw is the first of a series about Gorlen Vizenfirth, a bard with a difference:

His musical deficiency owed much to the fact that his right hand was made entirely out of polished black stone, carved in perfect replication of a human hand, so detailed that one could see the slight reliefwork of veins and moles, the knolls of knuckles, even peeling cuticles captured in the hard glossy rock. Most of the fine hairs had snapped from the delicately rendered diamond-shaped pores, but you could feel where they had been, like adamantine stubble. His left hand was more dexterous than most, and his calloused fingers hammered the strings as best they could to make up for the other hand’s disability; but his rock-solid right hand was good for nothing more than brutal strumming and whacking. He couldn’t pinch a plectrum. The soundbox was scarred and showed the signs of much abuse, the thin wood having been patched many times over.
“It’s a gargoyle affliction,” he said to most who asked. “Comes and goes. I’m looking for the treacherous slab who did it to me and disappeared before he could undo it.”  p. 202-3

If you read on through the series you will discover that Gorlen and a gargoyle called Spar, who is introduced later, were cursed by a wizard who swapped their hands for reasons connected to a virgin sacrifice gone wrong. None of this backstory is particularly germane to this particular story, however, which has Gorlen arrive at the town of Dankden, a place located in a swamp and whose streets are (literally, as it turns out later) rivers of mud. We subsequently discover that the town is populated by human inhabitants and by creatures that are half-human, half-phib (the phibs are amphibious creatures that live in the swamps).
Gorlen falls into the company of a woman and her brother, and soon encounters their phib hunting father. Then, shortly after this meeting, there is a commotion in the street when a number of half-phibs gather to complain about the killing of one of their young and, during an altercation, the hunter’s son is taken hostage. The rest of the story concerns his rescue, and Gorlen’s dawning realisation that the hunting community has been killing half-breed phibs rather than taking the wild (and non-intelligent) ones.
This story doesn’t entirely work, partly because of the odd and unlikely interbreeding, and partly because of the depressing genocide subplot. There are also a couple of loose ends, and one of these (spoiler) is why one of the phibs would give Gorlen an underwater kiss of life to save him from drowning when he is in the process of trying to escape from them:

The water, black until now, began to fill with streaming lights. A distant liquid music swelled in his ears as though an operatic riverboat were passing overhead. This developed into a rich, throaty vibration, a catfish purr. According to those who had been revived from the edge of watery death, drowning was almost peaceful once you gave in and inhaled the waters, once the body surrendered and let the soul drift free. Gorlen clung to this last hope as he opened his mouth and inhaled—
Warm, fishy air.
He nearly choked. Cold lips out of nowhere pressed tight to his own. Opening his eyes in disbelieving terror, he saw nothing. Nor could he move, something powerful bound his arms to his sides, albeit without hurting him. Reflexively he breathed in deep, then deeper still, unable to believe that there was air enough to fill him. There was a rich taste in his lungs, an undercurrent to the clammy essence, some perfume that flooded his brain and seeped down his nerves like a whisper, nudging him with secret knowledge, eking out revelation on such a fine level that he felt his atoms3 were conversing with a stranger’s atoms. The mouth sealed to his own began a slight suction, encouraging his exhalation, he gave up the stale air gladly. On the second inhalation—shallower, less desperate—his blinded eyes lit up with a vision of the swamp, all its tangled waterways cast through him like a glowing net whose intricacies were as homey and familiar as the sound of his own pulse. He knew his location: near the sea, not far from Dankden. Dankden! Human town! At the thought of the place, he felt a violent urge to flee at any cost, to swim and keep swimming until he had put that loathsome blot far behind him. An evil paradox posed itself in the same instant: there was literally nowhere left to run. The swamps, once vast enough to remain uncharted even by their most ancient inhabitants, had dwindled alarmingly within the span of several generations; encroached on by human dwellings, drained and poisoned and tamed by air-breathers, the swamps had been reduced to a few last drops.  p. 228-9

Notwithstanding my reservations above, the atmosphere and setting in this story are pretty good, and it’s also an entertaining piece.
(Good). 14,300 words.4

•••

The Cover for this issue is a pretty good piece by Bob Eggleton for Marc Laidlaw’s Dankden, but it’s a pity that the person doing the cover design didn’t think about a different name order to minimise overprinting the artwork (swapping Reed’s name for Laidlaw’s would not affect the man in the boat’s head, for instance). Better still, just put two lines of names under the title banner and leave the bottom of the image unmolested. The only other artwork in the issue are the Cartoons by Joseph Farris, Ed Arno, Bill Long, Joseph Farris, Danny Shanahan, and Henry Martin. I didn’t think any of them were particularly funny; they are just odd.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Editorial is about her, her husband, and two friends stumbling upon a virtual golf game in a store. The rest of the piece is about technological innovations (one of those mentioned, the fax machine, is probably extinct by now).
Books by Robert K. J. Killheffer is an interesting, illuminating, and instructive review of two “gender wars” novels, Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand, and The Furies by Suzy McKee Charnas.
The other book review column, Books to Look For, is by Charles de Lint, who reviews novels by Patricia A. McKillip and Vivian Vande Velde, and Dark Earth Dreams by Candas Jane Dorsey and Roger Deegan, a CD containing readings of two stories. The final review is of The Ultimate Evil by Andrew Vachss, a Batman novel written by crime writer Vachss to provide a new forum for “his battle against child abuse”, particularly in the Far East. De Lint finishes his review by exhorting the F&SF readership to join a “Don’t! Buy! Thai!” campaign (in an effort to combat this scourge). I have mixed feelings about SF magazines being used for this kind of naked activism, never mind blanket embargoes that may hurt those not remotely involved in child exploitation.
An Odyssey Galactic by Gregory Benford is one of his A Scientist’s Notebook essays, although it isn’t about a science topic but rather his involvement with NHK (Japanese National Broadcasting) and a TV production called A Galactic Odyssey. Benford gives an account of how he acted as a consultant, then a writer, and ultimately as a presenter. The latter involved, at one point, standing on in a traffic island in Times Square being bothered by a bag lady and then being pestered by a Puerto Rican gang who wanted to become more famous by dancing in the background of his shot.
It’s an interesting enough account but, as with other reports I’ve read about SF writer involvement in Hollywood, etc., this activity seems to involve the investment of huge amounts of time and energy for very little return (either in terms of money or fame):

What did I learn from the fully three year involvement, finally?
First, novelists don’t fit well in intensely committee-dominated projects. Decisions about showing aliens, or even categorizing civilizations by their energy consumption (somehow, not an ecologically virtuous point of view), were made by faceless executives—most of whom had no scientific training whatever. And who don’t think that’s important.
Novelists think in larger chunks.
Hard sf novelists probably don’t make the best diplomats, either, about scientific facts. Or at least, this novelist didn’t.
Second, don’t let the scientific content get compromised for schedule or convenience. Realize that just about nobody else has the same commitment to the material that scientists do—but apply pressure at the essential points.
Third, use a particular rhythm in presenting science, to draw out its human aspects. This rhythm runs, philosophy—>science—philosophy.
[. . .]
Lastly, have some input in editing. Much of A Galactic Odyssey got rearranged, slanted and cut by people who knew little or nothing of the technical material. Such power is hard to get, but essential.  pp. 182-183

F&SF Competition: Report on Competition 64 describes the entries for “a rejection letter for any well-known SF or Fantasy work”. My favourite is probably the winner:

RICHARD MATHESON —
X—This day when it had light editor called me a first reader. You first reader she said. I wonder what it is a first reader.
In my desk place with cold walls all around I have paper things publisher says is slush. He chained me tight. He made me read BORNOFMANANDWOMAN.
XX—I am not so glad. All day it is slush in here. And I have bad anger. If they try to make me read your stories again I’ll hurt them. I will.
R.—
—James Williamson
Omaha, NE  p. 237

F&SF Competition: Competition 65 (suggested by Harlan Ellison) asks for cover quotes from SF writers who have been sent the proofs of a friend’s awful novel from their publishers. The example given is “This book is as good, as readable, as Tolkien!” from a writer known by his friends to loathe Tolkien.
Coming Attractions trails stories by Robert Reed, Ian MacLeod, etc., and mentions that Janet Asimov will be joining the magazine to “assist with our science columns”.

•••

This issue would be a decent enough effort for a “normal” F&SF but, for an anniversary/All-Star one, it is a bit of a disappointment. Apart from the lack of stellar names, the better material by Dale Bailey, Jonathan Lethem & John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly, and Marc Laidlaw isn’t as fully formed as one might like. More generally, nearly all the stories feel like material a writer-editor would pick for other writers because of their particular facets—complexity, or characterisation, or writing, etc. The Marc Laidlaw story does most of these well or well enough, but it is the only one in the entire issue that feels like a conventional genre story.
I’d also note that putting one surreal fantasy (the Hoffman) immediately after another (the Reed) seems like an odd running-order choice to me.  ●

_____________________

1. The ISFDB page for the Richard Bowes’ “Kevin Grierson” series.

2. Rusch’s gushing introduction to the Ellison story:

I have an editorial confession to make: I stole this story.
Well I didn’t steal it exactly. You see, occasionally Harlan Ellison calls me to read a story he has just finished. He wants instant feedback, which I usually give him. Not this time. When he finished reading “Pulling Hard Time,” I couldn’t breathe. Literally. The story had knocked the wind from me.
As soon as my breath returned, I did my editorial duty. I begged, wheedled, pleaded and so sufficiently debased myself that Harlan sent the story to F&SF instead of the other magazine he had promised it to.
But Harlan said we could publish the story only on the condition that I confess. And now I have. Gleefully.  p. 139

3. “Atoms” is not a good fantasy word for Marc Laidlaw’s Dankden.

4. Dankden is listed in the magazine as a novella, but it isn’t even close (14,300 words).  ●

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #314, July 1977

Summary: this is a special Harlan Ellison issue of F&SF but the best story here is the 1968 Cavalier reprint from Eric Norden, The Primal Solution, an intense tale about hypnotic regression and a Nazi-era Jewish survivor who lost his family in the Holocaust. Of the three Ellison stories the best is the nostalgic Jeffty is Five, a multi award winning story but one which probably delivers most of its punch on first reading. Steven Utley also provides an atmospheric piece about Jack the Ripper, The Maw.
There are also a number of non-fiction pieces about Ellison, including a typical essay from the writer himself, a short and amusing biographical memoir from Robert Silverberg, and an appreciation and bibliography. Again, the best of the non-fiction isn’t any of the Ellison material but Budrys multifaceted Books column. The Letters column is also worth a look.
A decidedly interesting issue if not a particularly good one.
[ISFDB link]

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Anne W. Burke

Fiction:
Jeffty Is Five • novelette by Harlan Ellison
Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage • short story by Harlan Ellison
Working with the Little People • short story by Harlan Ellison
Ransom • short story by Edward Wellen
Victor • short story by Bruce McAllister ∗∗
The Maw • short story by Steven Utley
The Maiden Made of Fire • short story by Jane Yolen
The Primal Solution • reprint novelette by Eric Norden +

Non-Fiction:
You Don’t Know Me, I Don’t Know You • essay by Harlan Ellison
Harlan • essay by Robert Silverberg
Harlan Ellison: The Healing Art of Razorblade Fiction • essay by Richard Delap
Harlan Ellison: An F&SF Checklist • essay by Leslie Kay Swigart
.2001 • film review by Baird Searles
Books • by Algis Budrys
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Of Ice and Men • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Letters

_____________________

This issue is one of the “special author” editions that the magazine occasionally did from 1962 to 2015 and—as you would expect from the size of the Harlan Ellison’s ego—contains more stories (three) and more non-fiction pieces than any of the previous ones (but not more pages—that prize goes to James Blish with his long novella Midsummer Century, I think).
The first of Ellison’s three stories is Jeffty is Five, which opens with a short “things aren’t what they used to be” passage about Clark Bars (a period confectionary) before going on to give a nostalgic account of the narrator Donny Horton’s childhood years. During this, Horton talks about a young boy called Jeffty:

When I was that age, five years old, I was sent away to my Aunt Patricia’s home in Buffalo, New York for two years.
[. . .]
When I was seven, I came back home and went to find Jeffty, so we could play together.
I was seven. Jeffty was still five.
I didn’t notice any difference. I didn’t know: I was only seven.
[. . .]
When I was ten, my grandfather died of old age and I was “a troublesome kid,” and they sent me off to military school, so I could be “taken in hand.”
I came back when I was fourteen. Jeffty was still five.
[. . .]
At eighteen, I went to college.
Jeffty was still five. I came back during the summers, to work at my Uncle Joe’s jewelry store. Jeffty hadn’t changed. Now I knew there was something different about him, something wrong, something weird. Jeffty was still five years old, not a day older.
At twenty-two I came home for keeps. To open a Sony television franchise in town, the first one. I saw Jeffty from time to time. He was five.  p. 9-10

After Horton settles back into town he occasionally takes Jeffty out to the movies, etc., and recounts the awkward visits to his house afterwards, where the parents are obviously troubled by their strange son:

“I don’t know what to do any more,” Leona said. She began crying. “There’s no change, not one day of peace.”
Her husband managed to drag himself out of the old easy chair and went to her. He bent and tried to soothe her, but it was clear from the graceless way in which he touched her graying hair that the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him. “Shhh, Leona, it’s all right. Shhh.” But she continued crying. Her hands scraped gently at the antimacassars on the arms of the chair.
Then she said, “Sometimes I wish he had been stillborn.”
John looked up into the corners of the room. For the nameless shadows that were always watching him? Was it God he was seeking in those spaces? “You don’t mean that,” he said to her, softly, pathetically, urging her with body tension and trembling in his voice to recant before God took notice of the terrible thought. But she meant it; she meant it very much.  p. 15

The story’s major development occurs when Horton finds Jeffty in his den under the porch and sees what looks like a brand new Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Badge (not made since 1956). Jeffty tells Horton that it arrived in the mail that day and, when pressed further, says that he ordered the ring so he could decode the message on the next Captain Midnight radio show (not transmitted after 1950). When Horton asks to listen to the show, Jeffty points out that it isn’t on that night (it is the weekend), so Horton returns a few days later:

He was listening to the American Broadcasting Company, 790 kilocycles, and he was hearing Tennessee Jed, one of my most favorite programs from the Forties, a western adventure I had not heard in twenty years, because it had not existed for twenty years.
I sat down on the top step of the stairs, there in the upstairs hall of the Kinzer home, and I listened to the show. It wasn’t a rerun of an old program, because there were occasional references in the body of the drama to current cultural and technological developments, and phrases that had not existed in common usage in the Forties: aerosol spray cans, laseracing of tattoos, Tanzania, the word “uptight.”
I could not ignore the fact. Jeffty was listening to a new segment of Tennessee Jed. pp. 18-19

When Horton checks his car radio he can’t pick up the program, and realises that Jeffty is not only not aging, but seems to live in a world that is largely like his childhood one (with the minor contemporary changes mentioned above).
Horton spends the next part of the story experiencing life in Jeffty’s world: he hears a number of radio programs from his youth, Terry and the Pirates,1 SupermanTom Mix, etc.; he goes to the movies to see Humphrey Bogart in Slayground (a movie of a Donald Westlake novel that was never made); he eats and drinks the products of the time (Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies); and—perhaps the only part of this world that particularly resonated with me—he sees new issues of pulp SF magazines:

Twice a month we went down to the newsstand and bought the current pulp issues of The ShadowDoc Savage and Startling Stories. Jeffty and I sat together and I read to him from the magazines. He particularly liked the new short novel by Henry Kuttner, “The Dreams of Achilles,” and the new Stanley G. Weinbaum series of short stories set in the subatomic particle universe of Redurna. In September we enjoyed the first installment of the new Robert E. Howard Conan novel, ISLE OF THE BLACK ONES, in Weird Tales; and in August were only mildly disappointed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fourth novella in the Jupiter series featuring John Carter of Barsoom—“Corsairs of Jupiter.” But the editor of Argosy All-Story Weekly promised there would be two more stories in the series, and it was such an unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me, that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.  p. 21

(Robert E. Howard was already long dead by the 1950s, so I’m not sure how he is still alive in Jeffty’s world—one of the inconsistencies of this piece, along with the anomalous intrusions of the present day.)
Horton (spoiler) experiences the best of both worlds for a while (he still lives in the “normal” world while being able to savour Jeffty’s) but, of course, this charmed existence eventually slips through his hands on the day they go to the cinema to see The Demolished Man. The pair detour via Horton’s Sony store and find it so busy that Horton has to help out, and Jeffty is parked in front of thirty-three TVs showing modern shows. After some time Horton checks on Jeffty and sees that he looks unwell (“I should have known better. I should have understood about the present and the way it kills the past”). Horton gets him away from the TVs by telling Jeffty to go on to the cinema while Horton attends to a final customer. However, while Jeffty is queueing for the movie, he is beaten up by two youths after he borrows a radio and leaves it stuck in his world.
Horton takes the badly injured Jeffty home, and then, in an ending that is not as clear as it could be, Jeffty dies of his injuries.2
This story won that year’s Hugo and Nebula Awards, and I think I can see why: Ellison was, at that point in time, at the top of his game (in my opinion the period from the mid-60s to the mid-70s) and very popular; the story was from a special author issue of F&SF; and, finally, the subject matter would have been hugely appealing to those of a similar generation who were nostalgic for their lost pasts.3
Personally, I liked the story well enough, but I wouldn’t say it is the strongest of his tales for a number of reasons: while the gimmick is a neat one, the ending is weak and somewhat contrived (the TV set route would have been a better way to go); it could do with another draft (it is a little too long, and some of the sentences sound odd, e.g., “the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him” from the passage above just sounds clumsy);4 the couple’s dislike of their own child is unconvincing (most parents seem to love their children regardless of their infirmities and shortcomings); and, finally, I am not a huge fan of nostalgia (insert your own “it ain’t what it used to be” joke here).5
So, overall, this classic is a good story, but not a great one (although it impressed me more on first reading).
(Good). 8,200 words. Story link.

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) begins with a man called Moth coming out of his cabin on an exotic spaceship and into the lounge. There, he goes from table to table talking to different groups of people (“this ship of strangers”) about various traumatic episodes from his life.
The first of these sees Moth listen to a couple who tell him not to blame himself for letting his child die; then he talks to an abusive and unsympathetic young man about a younger partner who cuckolded him; in his next conversation he tells a woman about how he failed to intervene in a fire in an old folks home; and then he reveals to a fat man how he took a female employee away from her husband and child (and how she later committed suicide).
There are a couple of more confessionals before he tells a woman that:

“I’ve come to realize we’re all alone,” he said.
She did not reply. Merely stared at him.
“No matter how many people love us or care for us or want to ease our burden in this life,” Moth said, “we are all, all of us, always alone. Something Aldous Huxley once said, I’m not sure I know it exactly, I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the quote, but I remember part of it. He said: ‘We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space.’ I think that was it.  p. 36

At the end of the voyage all the passengers disembark except Moth, who asks if anyone wants to take his place for the rest of the metaphor voyage. No-one volunteers.
I’m not a fan of existential mopery, but this is probably a reasonably well done example if you like that sort of thing. (At least the navel-gazing here is mostly about traumatic events and not the more usual—for the current SF field— boyfriend, body, parental or petty political concerns.)
 (Average). 4,100 words.

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is an Unknown-type fantasy in which the highly successful author Noah Raymond finds he is unable to write. While Raymond worries about what he is going to do, he wakes up one night to hear his typewriter in action; when he goes through to his office he sees eleven tiny people (we later find out they are gremlins) jumping up and down on the keyboard.
Their foreman explains to Raymond that they are there to write his stories for him (after some back and forth with the other cockney-sounding little people, a short explanation of gremlin history, and the fact they have been watching him ever since he wrote a story about gremlins).
Later on in the story Raymond also learns that human belief is what keeps the gremlins alive (the “a god only exists if they have believers” theme that features in other Ellison stories), and that, over time, they have changed their form to stay in human consciousness.
At the end of the story (nineteen years later) the gremlins tell Raymond (spoiler) that they have run out of stories as they haven’t been writing fiction but recounting their history. They also explain that, not only does human belief keep gremlins in existence, their belief in humans keeps humanity in existence—and that without stories to write for humans, gremlin belief will wane. The tale ends with Raymond writing the history of the human world for the gremlins to read.
This an okay piece of light humour with a final gimmick twist that shouldn’t be examined too closely (it makes for a weak ending). The best of it is some of the publishing related snark at the beginning:

[He] did not know what he would do with the remainder of his life.
He contemplated going the Mark Twain route, cashing in on what he had already written with endless lecture tours. But he wasn’t that good a speaker, and frankly he didn’t like crowds of more than two people. He considered going the John Updike route, snagging himself a teaching sinecure at some tony Eastern college where the incipient junior editors of unsuspecting publishing houses were still in the larval stage as worshipful students. But he was sure he’d end up in a mutually destructive relationship with a sexually liberated English literature major and come to a messy finish. He dandled the prospect of simply going the Salinger route, of retiring to a hidden cottage somewhere in Vermont or perhaps in Dorset, of leaking mysterious clues to a major novel forthcoming some decade soon, but he had heard that Pynchon and Salinger were both mad as a thousand battlefields, and he shivered at the prospect of becoming a hermit.  p. 40

 (Average). 4,250 words

The three Ellison stories are followed by a non-fiction section about the author (see comments below), and the other stories in the remainder of the magazine lead off with Ransom by Edward Wellen (F&SF, July 1977). This has a good hook:

First the finger, then the ear, then the nose.
But before them, the tape. The tape came in the mail that caught up with the traveling mansion of Peter Kifeson. The tape showed a trembling Junior Kifeson in a limbo shot—no background visible, no furnishings. A two-shot, with the light on Junior and the masked man holding him at blaserpoint, and darkness all around them. You had the sense, however, that this scene took place in a small room.
Old Peter Kifeson watched, listened, and chuckled. Twenty-five million credits, indeed. But at least and at last Junior was thinking big, showing drive. About time. After all, Junior must be all of sixty.  p. 92

When Kifeson later receives a finger in the post he publicises the fact but refuses to pay the ransom (he still thinks his son is behind the extortion attempt). When an ear and then a nose arrive, Kifeson changes his mind about his son’s involvement but continues to hold out.
The police (spoiler) eventually find the blackmailer and a dead Junior. Kifeson decides to clone his son, and the last couple of paragraphs make an unclear point about parenthood and filial love.
 (Mediocre). 1,500 words.

Victor by Bruce McAllister (F&SF, July 1977) opens with worm-like aliens landing on Earth; these initially appear to be indestructible, as when they absorb sufficient material or energy they grow and replicate. However, the professor who is the father of the narrator’s girlfriend comes up with a solution—a whistle that, when it is blown and the sound transmitted through loudspeakers, summons huge flocks of birds to eat the worms. The narrator and his girlfriend figure this out after the Professor falls into a coma, and the pair go on to save the world.
These events would, in most SF stories, be the complete arc of the piece—but in this one we are just half way through, and the rest of it telescopes through time and illustrates an anti-climactic domestic aftermath. First, the media attention on the couple fades; then the Professor gets old and dies; later, the narrator and his girlfriend have problems with their teenage kids and eventually separate, etc.
This is an interesting idea but it isn’t a particularly engrossing one.
 (Average). 2,800 words.

The Maw by Steven Utley (F&SF, July 1977) opens in Jack-the-Ripper territory:

He came on the midnight air, a mist-man, a wraith stretched across the centuries, a shadow two hundred years removed from the flesh that cast it, a wisp of smoky gray nothingness drifting down out of the sky, settling to earth in the darkness of an alley between two decrepit houses. Behind him in the alley, an emaciated mongrel dog sensed his almost-presence and backed away, growling. He stared at it for a moment, his eyes twin patches of oily blackness floating on a face that was only a filmy blob, then pressed his hands against sooty bricks and dug very nearly insubstantial fingers into cracks in the mortar. Time let him go at last, surrendered its hold on him, gave him over completely to the moment that was 11:58.09 p.m., Thursday, November 8, 1888.  p. 110

The mist-man drifts about the city (we get bits of local colour and Jack-the-Ripper lore) until (spoiler) he arrives at the scene of the Ripper’s last victim. There, the mist-man waits. When Jack and the victim arrive, and he is just about to kill her, the mist-man descends from the ceiling and enters him. The mist-man explains to Jack that he isn’t killing the women for the reasons he thinks he is, but to feed a maw that stretches across people and time.
After Jack finishes butchering the woman (which is described in grisly detail) he leaves, and the last section has him remonstrate with the mist-man for revealing the true reason for his bloodlust. The mist-man says to him, in a biter-bit line, “It was terribly cruel of me, wasn’t it, Jack?”
This piece is more of an atmospheric history lesson than a story, but it it’s an absorbing piece nonetheless.
(Good). 2,850 words.

The Maiden Made of Fire by Jane Yolen (F&SF, July 1977) is a short squib (it’s less than three pages long) that tells of a coal burner called Ash who spends a lot of time staring into the flames of his fires. One evening he sees a maiden (glowing “red and gold”) in a fire and pulls her out, burning his hands in the process.
Ash learns she is a fire maiden, calls her Brenna, and builds more fires so she can move around more freely (she can only move over fire and embers).
The story resolves (spoiler) when the village elders turn up and complain that their supply of charcoal has ceased. When Ash points to Brenna the elders cannot see her, and Ash’s sudden doubts about her reality causes her to fade. Ash looks at the villagers and then at Brenna, puts the doubt from his mind, and jumps into the fire to join her.
A pleasant but slight tale, even if there is some personal belief metaphor buried here.
 (Average). 1,200 words.

The Primal Solution by Eric Norden (Cavalier, January 1968; reprinted F&SF, July 1977) begins with a long quote from Mein Kampf about how Hitler changed from a “weak-kneed cosmopolitan to an anti-Semite”.
The epistolary story that follows then opens with a diary entry by the story’s narrator, Dr Karl Hirsch, at a psychiatric hospital in Tel Aviv in 1959. In these entries we learn that Hirsch’s research project on psychological regression in is trouble, and that one of his colleagues is trying to get it shut down.
We also learn that Hirsch is a holocaust survivor whose family was murdered during the war:

[The psychological cases] who remained were the hopeless cases, the last souvenirs of the camps. They were the only ones with whom I identified, the last links with my own past. I cherished those human vegetables, for they froze time and linked me to Ruth and Rachel and David. They had survived, but I forgave them, for they never had the indecency to really live.  p. 136

After the “normalization” in the midfifties I retreated more than ever into pure research. The healthy faces of this new generation, born away from barbed wire and the stench of Cyklon-B, were a constant reproach to me. In the streets of Haifa or Tel Aviv I was almost physically ill. Everywhere around me surged this stagnant sea of bustling, empty faces, rushing to the market, shopping, flirting, engrossed in the multitudinous trivialities of a normal life. With what loathing must the drowned-eyed ghosts spat into Europe’s skies from a thousand chimneys view this blasphemous affirmation! What was acclaimed a “miracle” was to me a betrayal. We had, all of us, broken our covenant with death.  p. 135

A new patient called Miriam comes into Hirsch’s care, a seventeen-year-old girl from Yemen who was raped by her Uncle when she was aged nine and who has been in schizoid withdrawal ever since. Hirsch subsequently treats Miriam (who reminds him of his daughter Rachel), by sedating her and using hypno-therapy tapes to get her to mentally revisit the rape event. During a critical point in the experiment Miriam appears to die—at which point Hirsch’s angina makes him black out—but when he recovers consciousness she is alive, and awake.
When Hirsch later checks her notes he notices that the uncle committed suicide shortly after the rape incident. Hirsch remembers differently—the uncle went to jail—but when he checks what he thinks are the facts of the case with two of his contacts, they cannot remember talking to him about the matter. Hirsch realises after talking to Miriam (“I made him dead”) that she must have projected her personality back in time and into the mind of the uncle—and made him slit his own throat.
After this engaging first half, the next part of the story (spoiler) sees Hirsch plan to go back in time to save his family:

I am determined to go ahead. If I succeed, these notes will in any case blink out of existence with me and my world. They will belong to Prime Time — dusty tombstones marking what-might-have-been. And I will be — where? Sitting somewhere in Germany with my grandchildren playing at my feet, David and Rachel’s children, and Ruth in the kitchen simmering a schnitzel on the stove? Or, just as likely, dead years before, felled by disease or accident. It makes little difference. I have been dead for years, it is only the manner of death that matters. And whatever happens to Ruth or Rachel or David, they shall never have seen
Auschwitz.  p. 144

Hirsch finds out as much as he can about the Adolf Hitler of 1913 (his intended target), and prepares his laboratory to make the trip—against the ticking clock of the administrators trying to close down his project. Then, just before he goes into the laboratory to start the transfer, Hirsch has doubts:

Suddenly, I feel sad. For the first time since the project began I experience something like regret. I look across the terrace at Zvi and his friends laughing under the lantern-laced trees, and I wonder if they know that they have just met their murderer. It is my duty to liquidate their world — to snuff it out like a candle. If I succeed, how many of them will see life — and where? What women will never meet their intended husbands; what children will never be born? Will I not be committing a genocide as real as Hitler’s, and even more final? But I owe no debt to them, any of them. There is only Rachel, and David, and Ruth. To wipe the reality of Auschwitz from the blank slates of their futures is worth a thousand Zvis, and his country, his poor Israel, destined to die stillborn in the placid hearts of a generation that never looked through barbed wire, never heard the tramp of jackboots. And my personality will dissolve along with theirs — whatever path I follow after 1913, what is me today shall never exist. And yet, if I could only see Rachel and David in my mind. I remember their voices, even their touch, but their faces dissolve into mist whenever I attempt to capture them. They are all I have left of reality, and yet they are the substance of shadows. Am I extinguishing a world to remember the faces of my children?  pp. 147-148

The final section is prefaced by a letter from a colleague of Hirsch’s, and refers to a document from 1913 supposedly written by him. This fantastic account sees Hirsch tell of his arrival in Hitler’s mind and how he seizes control of, and humiliates, the future Fuhrer (Hirsch makes Hitler crawl on all fours, pull out his hair, tear at his private parts and, when they go out into the Vienna streets, drink water from the gutters when other pedestrians pass by).
When Hirsch then tries to kill Hitler by making him jump off a bridge and drown, Hitler mentally counter-attacks and repels Hirsch. Thereafter Hirsch is a passive passenger in Hitler’s mind (apart from some limited control when he is asleep). During this period Hitler realises that the invader in his head is Jewish, and rationalises that he will only be free of this malign force if he kills all Jews.
At the end of the story Hirsch realises that his actions are responsible for Hitler’s anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the death of his family—and that he is trapped in Hitler’s mind, doomed to watch the terrible events of the future unfold.
This is a cracking read, fast-paced and intense, and a piece where the Hirsch’s sense of loss is palpable. It also has an inventive twist ending, albeit one that may prove highly problematic for some readers.
+ (Very Good to Excellent). 10,300 words.

•••

As I mentioned above the special author issues of F&SF always contain non-fiction articles about the featured writer (usually an appreciation and a bibliography),6 but this issue leads off with an essay by Ellison himself, You Don’t Know Me, I Don’t Know You. This is a typically forthright piece (i.e. extended rant) where he covers all the usual bases: the essay begins with a list of all the stories that he has published in F&SF and the fuss they have caused (controversy); why Ed Ferman keeps buying and publishing them—”every time I run one of your stories I have twice as many people sign on as I do cancel” (self-aggrandizement); the labelling of his books as “sci-fi” (chippyness); the fact that he knows he is always “shooting off his big mouth about some fancied crime or other” (pre-emptive defensiveness); a lengthy examination of an issue of Publishers Weekly and its relative lack of advertising or notices for SF writers (ignored and unvalued); and an encounter with an obnoxious fan at a convention (vile strangers and me).
After nine pages of this sort of thing he eventually moves on to discussing the stories:

[Let] me tell you where the three new stories in this issue of F&SF came from. In that way, at least, I’ll save myself from having to endure the boring recitations in half-witted fanzines that purport to be knowledgeable analyses of what I really meant, analyses of the twisted psychosexual references that fill the stories. I’ll free myself of having to bear that silliness, at least for these three stories. Which means all the rest are still fair game for the functional illiterates who do most of the fanzine critiques.  p. 58

We learn that Working with the Little People was written in one sitting in the front window of a store in Charing Cross (Ellison does this stunt quite often, and you can usually tell which stories have started life that way) and:

It is, I suppose, an open letter to a famous fantasy writer on whose wonderful stories I grew up. This writer is a person who has become a good friend, someone I love. And because of my respect and affection for this writer, and because of the germinal effect on my writing that the body of this writer’s work had on me during my formative years, it is impossible for me to say to this writer, you stopped writing your best work over twenty years ago. It is impossible for me to take this writer aside and say, “Just for a moment let’s forget that we’re both eminently successful, that we’re canonized by fans and critics. They don’t know. But we know. We know what each of us is writing, and we know when the time has come that we’re only indulging ourselves because our fame is such that they’ll buy whatever we write, no matter how ineffective or slapdash. For just a moment let’s forget we’re who we are, and just look at what you’ve been doing for twenty years!” No, it’s not possible for me to tell this writer of classic stature that somehow the publicity and the fame and the totemization have gotten in the way of writing the stories that made the fame in the first place.  p. 58

Later, after short discussion of fame, Ellison continues:

Perhaps the writer will recognize what I’m doing in “Working with the Little People.” And perhaps I’ll get a phone call and this writer, with whom I talk frequently, will say, “I read your story. Did you mean me?” And I’ll say, fearfully, “Yeah.” And perhaps the writer will say, “Let’s talk. I’m not sure you know what the hell you’re talking about, but at least you cared enough to say it and risk my wrath and the loss of my friendship; so at least let’s sit down alone and thrash it out.”  p. 59

Yes, that’s exactly what will happen! I’d add that Ellison’s point is not at all obvious from the story, so I hope the writer (identified by others I asked as Ray Bradbury) is a telepath.
Ellison finishes by talking about Alive and Well on a Friendless Voyage, written immediately after his third marriage ended (five months long, June to November 1976), and Jeffty is Five (spawned from a word association game and about “losing so many wonderful things that meant so much to us and which we took so much for granted”).
It was interesting to read this essay again because it reminded me of why I stopped buying Ellison’s books (and largely stopped reading his essays and letters) in the early 1980s: too shouty, too aggrieved, too hyperbolic. It became very, very wearing.
Following Ellison’s essay is an entertaining biographical sketch by Robert Silverberg, Harlan, which starts with both writers in the same apartment block in 1950s New York and goes forward in time. There are several amusing anecdotes, including the time Silverberg saved Ellison’s life:

Why he was having so much trouble with the current that day, while I was making my way fairly easily in it, I don’t understand. But he seemed to be at the end of his endurance. I looked toward shore and caught sight of Judith Merril and a few other workshoppers; I waved to them, trying to indicate we were in trouble, and they blithely waved back. (Perhaps they understood the message and were exercising the most effective form of literary criticism.) Since none of them budged toward the water, it was all up to me. So I swam toward Harlan, grabbed him somehow, and hauled him through the water until my feet were touching bottom. It was half an hour or so before he felt strong enough to leave the sand flat for the return journey. Later that day, some of the demigods soundly rebuked me for my heroism, but I have only occasionally regretted saving Harlan from drowning.  p. 68

Harlan Ellison: The Healing Art of Razorblade Fiction is an essay by Richard Delap that is as full of hyperbole as Ellison’s essay:

Even in the early 60s it was still fighting an uphill battle against a reputation for garish cover paintings of women in steel brassieres and tentacled monsters whose sole occupation seemed to be trying to get a peek at what was under those brassieres. Science fiction which seemed to sway toward any serious intention was hustled into the mainstream with due haste — witness 1984, Brave New World, Earth Abides, etc. — where it was shielded by the literary lions who insisted that it was not sf because it was good literature.
The wall was tentatively breeched as the decade marched into history, but it was not until 1967 that Harlan Ellison lined up the science fiction cannons, an anthology of all new stories by the best writers in the field, and blasted the wall all to hell. Dangerous Visions did not meet with unanimous acclaim, either in the field of sf or out of it, but it created reverberations that have echoed and re-echoed continuously ever since. Thirty-two aggressive and intelligent writers came out shooting and the tentacled beasties were blasted to bits, the steel brassieres evaporated in an instant.  p. 78

Harlan Ellison: An F&SF Checklist by Leslie Kay Swigart is a comprehensive bibliography of Ellison’s work. At the time of publication these were hugely useful (no ISFDB in those days).
The final piece of special issue material is the Cover is by Kelly Freas, which features Ellison as the writer in Working with the Little People. It’s an effective piece by Freas, and atypical work.
The rest of the non-fiction leads off with .2001 by Baird Searles, which is about the TV debut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how he refused to watch it in that format. Searles thought much more of the film than I did (dull, dull, dull, incomprehensible).
He provides this interesting snippet about the original version:

And I might also indulge myself further in this orgy of reminiscence by adding that I have seen twice, because of the screening and premiere viewings, the famous lost 19 minutes of 2001 which Kubrick, judiciously or injudiciously, cut from the film after about a week.  p. 91/p. 109

Books by Algis Budrys opens with commentary on the publishing phenomenon that was The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks:

This very review at this time instead of next month, and in different terms, is the result Ballantine’s supplying me — as well as scores of much more influential people — with an advance set of bound pageproofs whose production cost and handling charges might finance an outfit like Advent: Publishers or T-K Graphics for a year. Which is to say nothing about the additional sums involved in the special booklet for retailers, the floor display stands for the Ballantine edition, the store-window poster of the Hildebrandt illustrations, the special postcard mailing, or the national advertising budget.  p. 103

Is Sword harbinging a forthcoming flourish of fiction derived from The Lord of the Rings in the way that Campbellian SF derived from H.G. Wells’s scientific romances? Is there in fact an entire generation of Frodo fans maturing into a cadre of artists who are about to flower in prose and its ancillary creations, so that the bounds of “SF” will expand markedly? Will this suck creativity away from older forms, such as newsstand science fiction? Will there be a Frodo Magazine? Will there be (many) (successful) competitors of it? Will the university of one’s choice accept taxonomic studies of it as PhD credentials? Might one establish a teaching guide? How about a writers’ conference? A TV series? A convention at which the series actors discourse on the nature of Reality, and plastic chainmail shirts are sold to ten-year-olds?  p. 104

Budrys eventually gets around to the book itself, and notes that it was written in two parts, the first half while the writer was in college, and the remainder years later. He says that the latter part is the stronger (less time spent on getting things in order), but mentions several quibbles (the use of “decimate”, “dwarf/dwarves”, “whom”, “holocaust”, etc.). He concludes by saying that is not a great book but “simply a good one of its kind.”
There are three SF novels reviewed Budrys. He doesn’t have much to say about The Starcrossed by Ben Bova (mildly amusing), but he takes some time to put Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny and Under Pressure by Frank Herbert in perspective:

Doorways, which is only moderately cute, only average convoluted, and rather straightforwardly told, is one of the first hopeful signs from this author in some time. It has an ending which appears to have been paced into the scenario at some point earlier than the day it was typed, and it has a protagonist who is rather more than a collection of tics. It represents a return toward the power Zelazny once displayed, plus a maturation that runs deeper than witticism. It is not a reversion, though that would have been nice for us, but a progression, which is nice for Zelazny, as well as us. You cannot keep a good man down.
I have no idea what produced the slapdash, eccentric work of the past few years. I have some understanding of the external and internal pressures undergone by artists, and I assume they apply even more forcefully to someone of Zelazny’s high stature. Therefore I sympathize. But a point had been reached at which it was time to shed a tear for the reader, as well.  p. 108

This is not the Frank Herbert of the Dune series, nor, thank God, of the half-dozen or so soporifics he turned out while trying to find what would work better. Eventually he found Dune World, and OK, that’s fine, but why he wanted to depart from the basic attack he employed in Under Pressure, one would be hard put to understand.
It is a book with a jargony, dull beginning, and a last paragraph which, mixed with lard, could frost a Ladies’ Auxiliary cake. In between, it is one of the finest science fiction suspense novels ever written, not at all out-dated — in fact, enhanced in relevance — by the times and events that have followed its first publication.  p. 109

There is also a brief mention of an essay (which Budrys highly recommends to writers) in a collection by Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder.
This is a cracking review column by Budrys, and one which has everything you might want as a reader: interesting reviews of the books in hand; how the books fit into the authors’ wider careers; and several snippets of publishing news and analysis.
The Cartoon by Gahan Wilson has spectators watching what looks like a military parade populated by skeletons and corpses: “Gee, I don’t know; this is kind of depressing!” say the spectators. Darkly amusing.
Of Ice and Men is an essay about ice ages and how they are linked to the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Asimov begins with the tilt of the Earth and then goes on to describe our orbit around the Sun, but he lost me when he started talking about the foci of ellipses (less maths and more explanation of why the Sun is at one of the foci would have been helpful). All of this latter leads on to a description of the seasons and why they are different lengths in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
The essay concludes with the statement that ice ages are caused by none of these factors, but by the perturbations of Earth’s orbit (orbital variations caused by non-solar masses), which is next month’s essay.
There is quite a lively Letters column this issue, which leads off with an attack on John Clute’s reviews by Barry Malzberg (he disagrees with a comment about Alfred Bester’s They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To, and accuses Clute of being snide and cruel, saying the only way to get a kind word is to “have published in New Worlds”). Clute gets the better of him in his reply, I think, but struggles later with a complaint from a Carl Glover:

Why is it, then, that I am completely unable to extract a shred of sense or understanding from John Clute’s book reviews? Do I possess a receptive aphasic blind spot of which I have been hitherto unaware? Or does Clute write in some obscure and esoteric literary idiom which only certain segments of the literati can understand? For me, trying to make sense of Clute’s writing is like listening to the speech of a shrewd but floridly psychotic schizophrenic: it almost seems as if it should be logically understandable, but the meaning keeps slipping away at the crucial moment of comprehension.  p. 157

I’m glad it isn’t just me.
There is a letter raving about John Varley’s In the Hall of the Martian Kings from Linda Foster; a complaint about immorality from J. B. Post (someone steals a library book in Fritz Leiber’s The Pale Brown Thing); and a complaint from George Zebrowski about Budry’s review of John W. Campbell’s The Space Beyond, which I didn’t entirely follow but will probably come back to when I read Robert A. Heinlein’s Sixth Column (based on All, one of the novelettes in the Campbell collection).

•••

Even though this is a special Harlan Ellison issue of F&SF, and Jeffty is Five won loads of awards, the best story here for me (both times around) is Eric Norden’s The Primal Solution. Of the three Ellison stories, the best is Jeffty is Five (I can’t recall much subsequent mention of the other two). I also liked Steven Utley’s The Maw, but the stories in this issue are a mixed bag.
Budrys’ multifaceted Books column is also a highlight, as are the Letters at the end of the magazine.
A decidedly interesting issue if not a particularly good one.  ●

_____________________

 

1. You can find old Terry and the Pirates radio programs on the Internet Archive. I wouldn’t bother.

2. According to Wikipedia and other sources the mother drowns Jeffty in the bath at the end of the story—that is not clear from the text (and goes to my comment about the piece needing another draft).

3. Jeffty Is Five’s nostalgia for the past comes along with a distinct antipathy for the present:

Today, I turn on my car radio and go from one end of the dial to the other and all I get is 100 strings orchestras, banal housewives and insipid truckers discussing their kinky sex lives with arrogant talk show hosts, country and western drivel and rock music so loud it hurts my ears.  p. 10

Things are better in a lot of ways. People don’t die from some of the old diseases any more. Cars go faster and get you there more quickly on better roads. Shirts are softer and silkier. We have paperback books even though they cost as much as a good hardcover used to. When I’m running short in the bank I can live off credit cards till things even out. But I still think we’ve lost a lot of good stuff. Did you know you can’t buy linoleum any more, only vinyl floor covering? There’s no such thing as oilcloth any more; you’ll never again smell that special, sweet smell from your grandmother’s kitchen. Furniture isn’t made to last thirty years or longer because they took a survey and found that young homemakers like to throw their furniture out and bring in all new color-coded borax every seven years. Records don’t feel right; they’re not thick and solid like the old ones, they’re thin and you can bend them . . . that doesn’t seem right to me. Restaurants don’t serve cream in pitchers any more, just that artificial glop in little plastic tubs, and one is never enough to get coffee the right color. Everywhere you go, all the towns look the same with Burger Kings and MacDonald’s and 7-Elevens and motels and shopping centers.
Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past.

I don’t think the narrator is nostalgic for the past, but for an idealised version of it—cherry picking the things he likes and largely ignoring the things that were also of that time: racism, sexual discrimination, possible nuclear oblivion; the list is long.
I’d also note that this reactionary nostalgia is a not uncommon trait in some SF fans. Although they spend a good chunk of their time reading about imagined futures, some have a pronounced dislike of modern technology: I’ve lost count of the number I have come across who actively dislike ebooks, smartphones, etc.; who shun streaming services in favour of DVDs; use chequebooks rather than credit/debit cards or Paypal, and so on.

4. Further to my comments about Jeffty Is Five needing another draft, the introduction states that the story arrived “in [. . .] an impressive envelope from something called Federal Express Courier-Pak. It screams RUSH /URGENT from every corner”.
It’s also worth reading Joanna Russ’s review about the writing in this story.

5. My corrective for those suffering from too much nostalgia—read Malcolm Jameson’s Blind Alley.

6. As well as the special non-fiction articles there are also advertisements for books by Ellison, one of which includes this mention of The Prince of Sleep, a never-completed novel version of the novella The Region Between (Galaxy, March 1970):

Even more fascinating is that ISFDB lists the novella version as part of a five author, five story “Afterlife of Bailey” series.  ●

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #346, March 1980

Summary: this issue doesn’t have any classics or particularly renowned stories but there are two particular highlights: Buoyant Ascent, from Hilbert Schenck, is a very good and exciting submarine rescue novella and, at the other end of the literary spectrum, we have Keith Roberts’ low-key, post-collapse, anti-hero Hugo finalist The Lordly Ones. These would make this issue well worth a look on their own but there is a solid supporting cast too: Manly Wade Wellman contributes a superior haunted house tale, Ron Goulart provides an amusing look at robotic home security in the future, and Lee Killough shows how jaded, time-bound immortals amuse themselves. Robert F. Young’s ‘Spacewhale’ story is also worth a look. Highly recommended.
[ISFDB] [Archive.org] [Subscriptions]

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman

Fiction:
Buoyant Ascent • novella by Hilbert Schenck +
What of the Night • short story by Manly Wade Wellman
Before Willows Ever Walked • short story by Tom Godwin
Steele Wyoming • short story by Ron Goulart
Secrets of the Heart • short story by Charles L. Grant
“As a Color, Shade of Purple-Grey” • short story by David Lubkin
“The Mindanao Deep” • short story by Robert F. Young +
Achronos • short story by Lee Killough
The Lordly Ones • novelette by Keith Roberts +

Non-Fiction:

Cover • Barclay Shaw
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Books • by Algis Budrys
Films • by Baird Searles
Note to Subscribers
The Noblest Metal of Them All
• science essay by Isaac Asimov
Coming Soon
Letters

_____________________

This issue leads off with Buoyant Ascent, an exciting novella from Hilbert Schenck, and another of a recent batch of stories with a nautical background. This one opens with its protagonist, Izzy Kaplan, trying to play possum:

The phone rang steadily in the dark bedroom and Molly Kaplan blearily brought her wristwatch dial close to a sticky eye. “Jesus, three thirty!” She waited, knowing it was a wrong number. Yet the damn thing kept going. “Shit!” She fumbled for the receiver in the dark, got it, reversed it twice, and finally managed a “Yeah?”
“Dr. Israel Kaplan, please. Cmdr. B.J. Smith calling, U.S. Navy.”
Molly could hardly believe it. “Listen, buster, it’s three-fucking-thirty in the morning!” she shouted in the general direction of the receiver.
A pause. “I understand that . . . is it Mrs. Kaplan? . . . but we have a very urgent emergency. I certainly wouldn’t call you at this time for any other reason.”
Molly, her temper thinning steadily, leaned over and flicked on the bedside light. A soft yet handsome woman in her late forties, she managed to squeeze her bowed, full lips into a fearsomely thin line as she stared at the silent form of her husband.
Izzy Kaplan was not, in fact, asleep, but he had convinced himself that a position of utter passivity coupled with an absolute minimum of respiratory activity would see him through whatever was stirring up his wife.
“Izzy!” shouted Molly, now running at full volume. “It’s the fucking Navy with some kind of super emergency for you. What the hell are you doing with them now? What’s going on?”  pp. 6-7

We learn that Izzy is a hyperbaric specialist, and the Navy have phoned him because one of their submarines has had an accident and is now lying at an angle 940 feet under the sea. There is bad blood between Kaplan and the Navy but he agrees to help as one of his ex-students is on board, and is now in command after the death of the captain. After brief sex with his wife, Izzy drives out to Quonset airbase to catch a helicopter to the USS Tringa, the huge catamaran mother ship for the DSRV (Deep Sea Rescue Vessel) the Navy hope to deploy. However, if that method isn’t feasible, an alternative method using ascent suits may have to be used:

Kaplan could now think of nothing but a high-speed ascent in the water column; the head back in the suit, the gas gushing up the throat, the continuous surge and snap and ripple of the fabric from the tremendous velocity drag. But the throat was the key. Form a tube. Think of forming a tube! The rain pattered steadily on the windows and the slick, black road curved smoothly, almost empty in the glare of the street lights.
Turning east for Quonset, Izzy considered the exit circle of error on the sea surface. How large would the arrival-location uncertainty be? Nine hundred and forty-feet times what angle? If they had to draw the rescue vessels back too far, an embolized escapee might die before they got him out of the water and into a decompression chamber. That data must exist, thought Izzy, at least for some six hundred-footers. We can extrapolate it.  p. 12

The rest of the story sees Izzy arrive on the Tringa only to have the Admiral in charge stonewall Izzy’s suggestion of a rehearsal for a backup buoyant ascent procedure (there is previous bad blood between the pair, and too much money has been spent on the DSRV project). Izzy therefore contacts his wife who works for (and is having an affair with) a Senator. During this conversation Izzy threatens to contact the press about the couple’s dalliance if the Senator doesn’t co-operate and lean on the Admiral.
Once Izzy gets his way, he is flown by fast jet to London Heathrow (which, apparently, has grown an “RAF runway”) to speak to a contact who can provide similar suits, and thereafter flies north to a diving company at Lochstrom in Scotland. There they put dummies in the suits, take them down to nine hundred feet, and troubleshoot the procedure. On the first ascent there is a pressure spike that would kill the escapees, but the very smart owner of the facility eventually (spoiler) works out that the flutter valves in the suit are slowing down the escaping air and modifies them.
The final, exciting part of the story sees Izzy back at the site of the accident to see the buoyant ascents (the DSRV has been unsuccessful). The first escapee, a woman, survives almost unscathed, but later there are casualties, some fatal; the last one out, after a period during which the weather has deteriorated and they have had to revise their surface rescue procedure, is Izzy’s student, Commander Ferguson. He suffers a spinal embolism and dies, even though Izzy enters the decompression chamber to treat him.
The final scenes see an overwrought Izzy lose his temper with the Admiral (who should have started the buoyant ascent rescue earlier), his wife, and the Senator (ill-chosen comments from both) before he goes to do the post mortem on his friend.
If you are up for a fast-paced, near-future techno-thriller with larger than life, shouty (and consequently non-PC) characters, and which oozes verisimilitude, then this will be right up your street. (PS It’s exactly the kind of story you should find in Analog).
+ (Very Good to Excellent). 17,550 words. Story link.

What of the Night by Manly Wade Wellman begins with a man called Parr taking shelter in a disused Southern Highlands house when his car breaks down. After he eats he falls asleep on the dank and dirty sofa.
When he wakes he sees a glow of light, and a young woman called Tolie asks if he is alright. Parr is instantly smitten by her, and then he notices that the surroundings are clean and in good order. Tolie introduces Parr to the owner of the house, Mr Addis, and another man called Fenton. The latter serves them all a thimbleful of drink (they toast “unity and Sitrael”), and then Parr is invited to see Addis’s room. There, Parr sees Addis has books on magic (one is by John Dee, “the Queen’s Sorceror”) and also has a pentacle painted on his desk, “to help his work”.
After this the pair return to the living room for a second round of drinks and toasts, and then Parr visits Tolie and Fenton’s rooms. When Parr is in the latter’s room, he realises that Fenton is in love with Tolie and jealous of him.
During this experience Parr asks twice if he is dreaming, and also learns that the occupants of the house do not know what he means by “Korea” and “telephone”. He eventually asks them if they are haunting the house: Addis partially dodges the question and suggests they have their fifth drink. As they prepare to do so, Fenton declares his feelings for Tolie and knocks the drink out of Parr’s hands: he tells Parr if he has the fifth drink he will be trapped here. Parr flees.
Some time later Parr stumbles into to a local town, where he learns that the house has been deserted for ninety years. He also learns of Addis’s strange habits and death, and the deaths of Tolie and Fenton when they stayed overnight at the house.
Most haunted house tales would stop there, but there is an effective coda in this story where the local preacher takes Parr back to the house to recover his car (no-one else from the town will take him). When they go inside the gloomy house Parr asks the preacher to perform an exorcism. The preacher says that isn’t a ritual he knows, but he conducts a baptism, a communion (both for Parr), and then the rites for the dead: each of these acts unburdens and lightens the house:

Finally they both stood and Preacher Ricks repeated the service for the burial of the dead. The gloom seemed to thicken itself around them. But at last the hushed voice came to, “Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you.” Then light suddenly stole into the room. Parr, looking sidelong at the open door, saw sunshine in the yard that had been so shadowed.
Preacher Ricks cleared his throat. “Do you think it looks sort of different in here?” he asked Parr. “Like as if it had somehow cleared up?”
“In here and outside both,” replied Parr. “Maybe you’ve truly put those spirits to rest.”
“Let’s devoutly hope so.”
They walked out. No haze, no shadows.
“Bring your car along behind mine, back to Sky Notch,” said Preacher Ricks. “We’ll see if some kind soul there won’t let us have some breakfast.”  p. 64

A quietly effective and atmospheric piece.
(Good). 5,100 words.

Before Willows Ever Walked 1 by Tom Godwin begins with Jake Derken experiencing, not for the first time, the lash of a Joshua tree’s branch as he returns to his house from the mail box. He then goes in to tell the other occupant of the house, Joe Smith, that there isn’t a letter from his granddaughter. We subsequently learn that (a) Smith is the alcoholic, dying house guest of Derken, (b) Derken is attempting to inherit Smith’s estate by isolating him from his grand-daughter, and (c) Derken hates Joshua trees.
After the two men discuss whether plants have feelings, and whether the Joshua tree might have sensed Derken’s antipathy towards them, a letter falls out of the pile of circulars. Smith sees it is from his granddaughter, and quickly opens and reads it.
Derken then has to work fast to preserve his scam: he pretends to phone the daughter but tells Smith line isn’t working and that he’ll go into town to call her. When Derken later goes out he is given a letter and cheque to post to the granddaughter, but he stops in the desert and burns it. Then, as he walks back to the car, he gets hit by a falling Joshua tree branch. Derken rages at the tree and then stamps on a young offspring nearby.
The rest of the story works through various plot developments (spoiler): Smith stops drinking so Derken starts adulterating all Smith’s food and drink with vodka to hasten his demise; several days later, Smith dies (but not before realising what Derken has been doing); Derken then waits for the will to go through probate while avoiding the surrounding Joshau trees, which seem to be getting closer to the house; finally, another letter arrives from the granddaughter saying she has scraped together enough cash to send a PI to find out what has happened to Smith.
The climactic scene sees Derken rush to the bank to get the money and flee but, at the place he stamped on the young Joshua tree, he crashes his car and is trapped in the wreckage. Then the adult tree speaks to Derken “in his mind” while it summons a lightning storm (the fact that Joshua trees can do this has been suggested in an earlier conversation). The lightning then strikes the Joshua tree, which falls on Derken and kills him.
I don’t think that my disbelief was suspended for even a single moment by this story’s silly premise and, even if it had been, the car crash at the end is far too convenient.
(Mediocre). 7,000 words.

Steele Wyoming by Ron Goulart opens with a group of “Outside” down-and-outs roasting a dog for dinner (“Tastes pretty good” . . . “It’s the wild oregano gives it zing”). One the group, Otto, claims he invented Steele Wyoming, a revolutionary guardbot, and proceeds to tell his tale of riches to rags.
This account begins with him rescuing a female friend, Bev, the owner of a pest extermination company called Zapbug (a running joke is that her sonic repellents cause Otto continual problems) from a group of Poverty Commandos and Suicide Cadets who are attacking her mansion. When Otto later tries to convince her to give up her career for him, she says he’ll need to amass greater riches first.
This subsequently leads Otto to create Steele Wyoming, which he then demonstrates to Carlos, a contact at NRA (National Robot & Android):

Carlos chuckled. “He’s very impressive, amigo.”
“Designed to scare the crap out of any looter, rapist, housebreaker or other unwanted Outsider.”
“Steele Wyoming, huh? Catchy.”
“A cowboy name.” I’d gotten butsub on my fingers somehow. Wiping them on the plyocloth, I tossed it aside and one of my little servobots came scooting over to gather it up.
Carlos, slowly, circled Steele Wyoming. “I assume he’s lethal as well as frightening?”
“Tell him, Steele.”
“First off, let me say howdy, Mr. Trinidad, sir,” drawled the big android in his rumbling Old West voice. He reached a huge horny hand up to tip his highcrown stetson. “I kin be lethal or I kin merely stun varmints. Depends on how the nice folks who owns me wants the deal to go down.”
Carlos laughed, pleased. “He’s terrific, amigo.”
“What I figured,” I said while Carlos stood gazing up at the seven foot tall cowboy android, “is that to a great many people in America, even in this year of 2020, the cowboy remains a symbol of honesty, dedication, law and order.”
Steele adjusted his hat on his head.
“That is surely true.”  p. 86

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees the homicidal results of Wyoming’s trigger happy attitude2 (starting with a noisy subrock millionaire neighbour, and followed by the three policemen who see Wyoming dumping the body). Further complications result from Bev’s infidelity.
Amusing stuff.
(Good). 4,750 words.

Secrets of the Heart by Charles L. Grant opens with the child narrator all alone in a house (“the others are gone”, “some of them died”, “it wasn’t my fault though”) when five adults turn up at her door. They have had a car accident and need to use the phone, etc., so the girl invites them in and lets them make a call and asks if they want coffee.
This domestic routine continues for a while, but the telegraphing at the start of the story is then fleshed out. First, the girl tells the adults about her “rules”, then she makes one of the adults stop breathing, and then none of them are able to open the doors or windows, or leave the house.
Later on (spoiler), one of the men asks if she is a telepath or telekinetic before she eventually lets them go (although they do not know she has arranged for a truck to crash into them when they get back to their car). The story ends with her deciding that she will leave the house and make the outside world obey her rules.
This reads like a slightly muddled version of Jerome Bixby’s It’s a Good Life and, if you have read that story, there won’t be much new for you here.
(Average). 3,600 words.

“As a Color, Shade of Purple-Grey” by David Lubkin (F&SF, March 1980) is a groan-worthy half-page Feghoot (pun story) which sees an astronaut return to a colourful welcoming party after a forty year trip to Tau Ceti. The punchline (spoiler) has him fainting because of “fuschia shock”.
(Average). 120 words.

“The Mindano Deep” by Robert F. Young (F&SF, March 1980) is one of the later stories in this writer’s ‘Spacewhale’ series3 and opens with Jonathan on the asteroid-size leviathan Starfinder. He is watching various events from the American War of Independence concerning Nathan Hale, Colonel Prestcott, and Patrick Henry (during these episodes we learn that Starfinder the spacewhale has the ability to travel through space and time). We also learn that a young woman called Ciely Blue, who also lives on Starfinder, appears to be under the guardianship of Jonathan and is currently attending school on Earth.
Once this series housekeeping is dealt with Jonathan decides to use his solo time to “dive to the bottom of the Space-Time Sea” in Starfinder, i.e. go back to the creation of the Universe. At this point we see that Starfinder communicates with Jonathan using mental hieroglyphics:

The rest of the story is a strange account which sees reality dissolve around Jonathan when they get to the bottom of the Space-Time Sea, leaving him standing in a little room with two doors, a fireplace, and a picture window. Later he sees a model of the whale and, when he looks through the portholes, sees a miniature version of himself doing the same; this Mobius-reality effect is then repeated a couple times more, most strikingly when he goes through one of the doors of the room and, while looking over his shoulder, sees himself—and eternity’s worth behind him—doing exactly the same.
These weird events are accompanied by various philosophical observations, the last of which comes from Starfinder, which suggests that Jonathan himself has created this microcosmic reality as there is no macroscopic one at the beginning of Time. After this they climb up off the bottom of the Space-Time sea and return to 1978.
This non-story, its initial series-itis, and the (possibly cod-) philosophical musings may sound like an unpromising mix but I enjoyed it anyway, even though it doesn’t really work.
+ (Average to Good). 4,900 words.

Achronos by Lee Killough (F&SF, March 1980) opens with Neil Dorn—an unsuccessful, burnt-out artist—going to a faraway beach to get away from it all. There, after finding a tribolite (an unusual find in that location), he comes upon what he initially thinks is a group of children:

They circled him, looking at him with curious eyes. He stared back. He had been wrong. They were not children, though they were still very young, hardly past adolescence. They were as tall as he and slender as willows, with skin tight and smooth. Clear, lively eyes watched him from unlined faces. And they were completely nude, he discovered with a start. What he had taken to be scraps of bathing suit were only designs painted on their skin.  p. 117

Initially he struggles to understand their speech but, over the course of the next few hours, he discovers they are adults from the future, and learns that the beach they are on is an “achronos”, a timeless place connected to all other times.
The woman who tells him all this, Electra, eventually gets bored discussing the matter and insists that Dorn draws her, and then the others demand the same. After he finishes sketches of them all, Dorn and Electra spend the night together (or what passes for night in this place—the light levels never change).
Later, one of the other women, Hero, gets Dorn to paint an oil portrait of her, and he learns more about the group:

Hero was beginning to emerge from the canvas. She looked different than he intended. Instead of a Parrish subject, she looked more like something created by Toulouse-Lautrec, bright and gay on the surface but hard and sad beneath. He peered at her. To his surprise, he found the painting correct. His eyes had seen and his hands transmitted what his mind did not notice. He remembered her remark about boredom.
“Where would you rather be than here?” he asked.
Her sigh came from her soul. “Just about anywhere. I want to see different faces, experience new weather. I’d like to see the night sky again. I’ve always wanted to go to the stars. I was going to go to Zulac after school, but of course that trip was ruined along with the laser cannon on Pluto.” Her voice grew wistful. “I was just two years late to ever visit the stars. I’m trapped here instead.”  p. 124

Dorn realises that, unlike him (he has previously left the achronos to get his art materials) the group cannot go back to their own time as they left in the last few moments of safety.
The story concludes (spoiler) when Dorn and Hero are interrupted by the news that a dinosaur has stumbled in to the achronos. Dorn and the others watch as Clell baits and fights the creature before the group finally rush in for the kill. Immediately after the dinosaur’s death Electra wants Dorn to paint her with its blood, even though Hero is bleeding to death, untended, beside them. When Dorn refuses, Electra joins in the orgy that has started. Dorn’s unease intensifies and he realises that he may not be safe with these capricious and bored individuals. He retrieves his artwork and drives out of the achronos with a head full of artistic visions.
A fairly good piece about, essentially, jaded immortals.
 (Good). 5,200 words.

The Lordly Ones by Keith Roberts4, 5 (F&SF, March 1980) is not so much a story but an extended character portrait of the narrator, Tom, and it begins with his childhood memories of driving a pedal car in the family’s garden:

Wherever I traveled though, I would always end up in my favorite place of all. I called it Daisy Lane, from the big mauve clumps of Michaelmas daisies that grew close by each year. Here, by careful reversing, I could slide myself right out of sight between tall bushes. Once in position I could not be seen from the house at all, but I could see. I could stare down through the gaps in the hedge at the men working in the field, easing the car backward a little by the pressure of a pedal if one of them paused and seemed to glance my way.  p. 141

Tom’s shyness (or solitariness) is further limned when he is put in a special class at school—although Tom can read and write perfectly well, an inability to answer questions and his physical clumsiness give the impression that he is “slow”.
When Tom later enters the world of work he is first employed, courtesy of his gardener father, at the council nurseries. However, things do not go well (he is always breaking pots and then there is trouble with one of the women that works there) and, after that, Tom works at the town tip and then as a binman. Finally, at the age of 45, he becomes a lavatory attendant at “The Comfort Station”.
Tom describes his job at the lavatory in some detail—we learn how he cleans and repairs the facility until it is spotless and in good order—and we are briefly introduced to a couple of other (fleeting) characters: there is the woman who takes care of the other side of the facility (a distant figure), and Mr Ireland, Tom’s sympathetic and helpful supervisor who takes to visiting him on a semi-regular basis.
For most of the story, however, Tom is at the comfort station on his own (he has taken to living in one of the storerooms), and there are disturbing signs from the start of the story that society has experienced some sort of cataclysm: apart from the fact that no-one has come to the comfort station or its bucolic surroundings in the country for some time (including Tom’s co-worker), he has also seen bodies in the deserted nearby town where he goes to get food and supplies; there are also lights in the distant hills during the hours of darkness.
Later on (spoiler) we get a few hints as to what may have happened (and an insight to some of the social problems of UK society in the late 1970s):

I do not know why the Trouble happened. There was a lot on the telly about the black people fighting the whites and the unions trying to take over, but I could never understand it. I do not know why black people and white people should fight. I knew a black man once when I was on the carts. He was a very quiet person and used to bring small fruit pies to work that his wife had made. He shared them with me sometimes. They were very nice.

Tom starts looking after the other side of the comfort station as well as his own, and later goes into town later to stock up on as many supplies as he can find. Then the sounds of battle draw closer, and the water comes back on for a while. But, despite all this, it appears as if Tom is suspended in time:

I supposed it will sound funny, but I felt at peace. I have been feeling like that a lot since everybody went away. I cannot really find the right words to describe it.
When I wake up in the mornings, the sun makes a patch low down on the wall by my head, always in the same place. Birds are singing in the trees by the stream, and I know if I go to the window the sun will be on the brick wall round the car park, and the hills. As it moves round through the day, all the shadows change until they point the other way. Sometimes, if there is a wind, the dust blows across the car park in little whirls. When I lock the doors last thing at night, the moon is coming up. The moon makes shadows too of course, and they change as well, as it goes across the sky. The moonlight makes the car park look nearly white, but the shadows by the stream are black, like velvet. At night it always seems you can smell the water more clearly. The mist usually comes when it is starting to get light. It makes long streaks that reach as high as the bridge parapet. Nothing else happens. I do not want anything else to happen, ever again.  pp. 152-153

One night, however, he finds signs of blood in the lavatories; then, shortly afterwards, he is surrounded, and guns fire through the windows. Tom is told to come out by unseen characters. As he leaves the comfort station, Tom wishes he was back in his pedal car again:

I have had a silly thought, the silliest of all. I would like my little car back again now. I always felt safe in it; I could pedal it through the door and they would laugh. They would see I was only a little child after all.  p. 156

This penultimate paragraph not only links back to the opening passage, but perhaps distils Tom’s shy and uncomplicated character, outlined over the course of the story, into one line.
When I first read this story in the 1980s I didn’t think much of it—I suspect I was impatient at the amount of description and the lack of a plot—but this time around I enjoyed it a lot more. Some of the description is particularly evocative (there are a number of passages that I would like to have quoted) and the unusual protagonist and setting make for an original piece: there aren’t many End-of-the-World stories that take place away from the main events and feature lavatory attendants.
One that I will reread again at some point.
+ (Good to Very Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

•••

The rather dark Cover is by Barclay Shaw and shows the guardbot Steele Wyoming from the Ron Goulart story. The only interior artwork is a Cartoon by Gahan Wilson (a miss for me, pretty much as usual).
The Books column by Algis Budrys provides negative reviews of both of the books covered. In particular, Budrys doesn’t seem to think much of Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta by Doris Lessing:

For my money, only the most masochistic reader could penetrate much beyond the second chapter unless he were paid to do so. The scalp crawls at the news that Lessing is so enthused with her construct that this particular file drawer in the Canopean archives represents only the first in a series of projected books. We may be in at the inditing of a note of professional suicide.  p. 48

Budrys also doesn’t care for the post-apocalyptic A Secret History of Time to Come by Robie Macauley. He thinks it offers nothing new (Budrys points to several other novels on the same theme) and has complaints about the abilities of both the writer and his editors:

Nothing. Nothing ever comes to a recognizable conclusion. For all Macauley’s prose skill, and his ability to make an individual scene come alive, we get nothing but broken promises. If the whole of his message is that in the blasted future that is exactly how life will be, then that is a fit task for a nicely crafted short story [. . .]. Macauley’s excellences work against him; time after time, he maneuvers his characters, or his reader, into a situation that cries out for more about it, and every time he detumesces.
A literary gent like Macauley can pull that sort of trick forever, provided someone will continue to pay the freight. Any damn fool can write great opening scenes if he doesn’t have to know what they’ll lead to. Any clown can take a snip of this and a bit of that and keep it up for 60,000 words until it’s time for the cop-out ending.
Is this damned thing any good to read? Do you hear me, Knopf? IS THIS DAMNED THING ANY GOOD TO READ?  p. 52

Films by Baird Searles reviews a three-part British mini-series from the late seventies, An Englishman’s Castle,6 which is set in an alternate world where Germany invaded and conquered Britain in 1940. The story sees a current day scriptwriter leant on by his superior to remove references to a Jewish character. Later, as well as dealing with this issue, and his bolshie and rebellious son, he (spoiler) discovers his mistress is Jewish . . . . Searles liked this a lot and, one episode in (I bought the DVD on strength of Searles’ comments), so do I.
Note to Subscribers explains a delay to F&SF subscription copies due to a fire at the mailing plant.
The Noblest Metal of Them All by Isaac Asimov is an interesting essay on the Noble metals (maybe that’s just the Chemistry part of my degree speaking) which starts by discussing the relative density of lead and gold, and eventually concludes by hypothesising about the rise in the concentration of Iridium 70 million years ago. Asimov suggests this may have been caused by a huge solar ejection/flare but Wikipedia now ascribes this (for the area concerned) to the asteroid that formed the Chicxulub crater (and killed the dinosaurs).7
Coming Soon is a brief note that mentions, along with Marta Randall’s Dangerous Games, Stephen King’s The Way Station, the first in a very long series (and one of the few things by King I didn’t read all the way through while I was keeping up with his output).
The Letters column includes praise from writer Arthur Jean Cox for Michael Shea’s The Angel of Death (there is a note from Ferman about his forthcoming The Autopsy). Next is a letter from James Tucker about the omission of Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury from the 30th Anniversary issue of the magazine, which he follows up with a question about F&SF’s most prolific contributors. Ferman replies:

If we omit non-fiction and verse, the writers with the most stories published in F&SF are: Avram Davidson, 45; Poul Anderson, 44; Ron Goulart, 43; Robert F. Young, 38; Miriam Allen deFord, 31; Zenna Henderson, 30; Fritz Leiber, 29 and Gordon R. Dickson, 29.

Interesting in many ways, especially the number of de Ford’s contributions.
The third letter is a long one from Sam Moskowitz about the magazine’s history and his own, and it has a few interesting passages:

I also said [in my review]: “Boucher and McComas have a fair knowledge of fantasy in a generalized fashion, but withal one staggeringly inadequate to the task of selecting the best little-known stories from the past.” I also said they would have to downplay fantasy and supernatural and give more stress to science fiction (which they discovered all by themselves), but Tony was furious at my comment regarding his inadequate background to select reprints.  p. 158

Though I had sold science fiction professionally to Planet Stories and Comet as far back as 1940, after World War III decided I would take a regular fulltime job, let the other writers get wealthy at writing science fiction, and engage in it as a hobby, contributing a good deal of what I wrote free of charge to fan magazines and putting an extraordinary amount of research, time and money into it. By the year 1956 I was fed up with fan magazines. Teen-age editors rewrote and cut material at will (sometimes inserting libelous remarks where none had previously existed), edited grammatical errors into my material and worst of all, often held material five years or more without publishing it.  p. 158

The last letter, by Joy A. Schlenberg, is partially in response to a comment about an “amateur witch”.

•••

This is a strong issue. I particularly liked Hilbert Schenck’s exciting Buoyant Ascent, and Keith Roberts’ Hugo finalist The Lordly Ones. There is also a solid supporting cast with no obvious duds. Highly recommended.  ●

_____________________

1. The title of Tom Godwin’s story comes from a superstition which suggests there was once a time when willow trees could walk at night.

2. One wonders if Steele Wyoming’s lethality was modelled on Clint Eastwood’s movies of the time (the spaghetti Westerns and Dirty Harry series).

3. The ISFDB page for Robert F. Young’s ‘Spacewhale’ series. I note that the first story does not seem to be set in the same world as these (it has a Spacewhale, but there are substantial differences—see my review here).

4. The Lordly Ones  was Keith Roberts’ only Hugo finalist—it placed 4th in 1981 behind The Cloak and the Staff by Gordon R. Dickson, Savage Planet by Barry B. Longyear, and Beatnik Bayou by John Varley, and ahead of The Autopsy by Michael Shea and The Ugly Chickens by Howard Waldrop.
Roberts also wrote a sequel to this story, The Comfort Station, which appeared two months later in the May 1980 issue of F&SF.

5. Robert’s title The Lordly Ones comes from a song that is referenced in the story:

There was a song we had to learn at school, about the Lordly Ones. Miss Chaston, who taught us music, said that meant the fairies. It was a strange song and puzzled me very much at first. It said they lived in the hollow hills but I thought the other children were singing “the Harlow hills” and that all fairies lived at a place called Harlow, wherever that might be. I often used to make mistakes like that.
I did not think about the song again for years. Then, when I was working on the dust carts there was a man called Smudger. I never knew his proper name. He was a big man, much bigger than I, and had a lot of friends. I used to go with him sometimes to a hotel near the town center to have a drink. I would never have dared go to such a place on my own. The public bar was up the yard, and to get to it you had to pass a room lit by candles where all the guests were eating their dinner. The first time I looked in I thought some of the ladies were the most beautiful I had ever seen, and for some reason I remembered the song at once. I knew they were not fairies of course, just very rich people, but afterwards whenever I went there, the song always started in my mind.
Then when I had my flat I used to sit quite a lot looking down over the cathedral wall at the grass and driveways inside, especially if there was a wedding there or some other big function, which often happened. The people who came were very grand. Some of them even wore top hats like in the films. So I thought they must be the Lordly Ones too. So, although I was always getting shouted at for being clumsy or in the way, I thought if I could get the job at the Station, some of them might come there and see the towels all clean and soap in the dispensers, and be pleased. I wonder if Mr. Ireland knew that, and that was why he set me on.  p. 147

6. An Englishman’s Castle on Wikipedia.

7. The Wikipedia page for Iridium.  ●

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #249, February 1972

Summary:
This is one of the best issues of F&SF I’ve read. Not do you get the Hugo and Nebula winning Goat Song by Poul Anderson, but also The Elseones by Dennis O’Neil, and good work by Kit Reed, Pamela Sargent, Dean R. Koontz, and James Tiptree Jr (her first F&SF appearance). Recommended.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy]

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Andrew Porter

Fiction:
Goat Song • novelette by Poul Anderson +
Dog Days • short story by Kit Reed
Gather Blue Roses • short story by Pamela Sargent
The Elseones • short story by Dennis O’Neil +
Cosmic Sin • short story by Dean R. Koontz
Painwise • novelette by James Tiptree, Jr.
Ecce Femina! • novelette by Bruce McAllister

Non-Fiction:
Cover • Bert Tanner
Books • by James Blish
Coming Soon
Cartoon
by Gahan Wilson
Films • by Baird Searles
The Asymmetry of Life • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Editor’s Note

_____________________

I stumbled upon this issue while reading one of the stories (Painwise by James Tiptree Jr) for my last review (Terry Carr’s second ‘Best of the Year’ volume) and noticed it also contains one of the year’s best stories, the Hugo and Nebula winning Goat Song by Poul Anderson (which Carr overlooked or just didn’t like—it’s not even in his “Honorable Mentions” list). I was curious about the story and, before I knew it, I’d read not only the Tiptree and the Anderson stories, but the entire issue. It helped that they are an almost uniformly good bunch of tales and, in particular, those who liked the mythical parts of Anderson’s previous contribution to the magazine, The Queen of Air and Darkness (F&SF, April 1971), will probably like the Anderson even more, given that Goat Song is even more of a myth-story than Queen (I originally described the story as a Greek myth, until I realised I know little if anything about that subject—but, according to Wikipedia,1 it seems my guess was correct).

The story itself opens with Harper, a poet and bard who is mourning the death of his partner (variously named in the story, “Blossom-in-the-Sun,” etc.) with his friends in the wilderness, while waiting for the Dark Queen to pass by. She is the immortal representative of a computer called SUM, which rules this far-future Earth, and also stores the souls of the dead for resurrection in the far future:

The car draws alongside and sinks to the ground. I let my strings die away into the wind. The sky overhead and in the west is gray-purple; eastward it is quite dark and a few early stars peer forth. Here, down in the valley, shadows are heavy and I cannot see very well.
The canopy slides back. She stands erect in the chariot, thus looming over me. Her robe and cloak are black, fluttering like restless wings; beneath the cowl Her face is a white blur. I have seen it before, under full light, and in how many thousands of pictures; but at this hour I cannot call it back to my mind, not entirely. I list sharp-sculptured profile and pale lips, sable hair and long green eyes, but these are nothing more than words.
“What are you doing?” She has a lovely low voice; but is it, as, oh, how rarely since SUM took Her to Itself, is it the least shaken? “What is that you were singing?”
My answer comes so strong that my skull resonates, for I am borne higher and higher on my tide. “Lady of Ours, I have a petition.”
“Why did you not bring it before Me when I walked among men? Tonight I am homebound. You must wait till I ride forth with the new year.”
“Lady of Ours, neither You nor I would wish living ears to hear what I have to say.”
She regards me for a long while. Do I indeed sense fear also in Her? (Surely not of me. Her chariot is armed and armored, and would react with machine speed to protect Her should I offer violence. And should I somehow, incredibly, kill Her, or wound Her beyond chemosurgical repair, She of all beings has no need to doubt death. The ordinary bracelet cries with quite sufficient radio loudness to be heard by more than one thanatic station, when we die; and in that shielding the soul can scarcely be damaged before the Winged Heels arrive to bear it off to SUM. Surely the Dark Queen’s circlet can call still further, and is still better insulated, than any mortal’s. And She will most absolutely be recreated. She has been, again and again; death and rebirth every seven years keep Her eternally young in the service of SUM. I have never been able to find out when She was first born.  p. 13-14

In their ensuing conversation Harper tells her he wants SUM to resurrect his partner; she tells him that is impossible but agrees to take him to see the computer.
The middle part of the story takes place in SUM’s underground fortress. Here, Harper is put to sleep for a time while the The Dark Queen is subsumed into SUM and her gathered data downloaded. Later on Harper is woken and given an audience with the computer and, after some back and forth, he gets SUM to agree to the resurrection of his lover in exchange for his service as its prophet. There is one condition however: he must walk out of the complex without looking back at his beloved, who will join him at some point in the journey.
There is an excellent and suspenseful passage that tells of this journey and (spoiler), of course, he fails at the last hurdle:

Was that a footfall? Almost, I whirl about. I check myself and stand shaking; names of hers break from my lips. The robot urges me on.
Imagination. It wasn’t her step. I am alone. I will always be alone.
The halls wind upward. Or so I think; I have grown too weary for much kinaesthetic sense. We cross the sounding river, and I am bitten to the bone by the cold which blows upward around the bridge, and I may not turn about to offer the naked newborn woman my garment. I lurch through endless chambers where machines do meaningless things. She hasn’t seen them before. Into what nightmare has she risen; and why don’t I, who wept into her dying senses that I loved her, why don’t I look at her, why don’t I speak?
Well, I could talk to her. I could assure the puzzled mute dead that I have come to lead her back into sunlight. Could I not? I ask the robot. It does not reply. I cannot remember if I may speak to her. If indeed I was ever told. I stumble forward.
I crash into a wall and fall bruised. The robot’s claw closes on my shoulder. Another arm gestures. I see a passageway, very long and narrow, through the stone. I will have to crawl through. At the end, at the end, the door is swinging wide. The dear real dusk of Earth pours through into this darkness. I am blinded and deafened.
Do I hear her cry out? Was that the final testing; or was my own sick, shaken mind betraying me; or is there a destiny which, like SUM with us, makes tools of suns and SUM? I don’t know. I know only that I turned, and there she stood. Her hair flowed long, loose, past the remembered face from which the trance was just departing, on which the knowing and the love of me had just awakened—flowed down over the body that reached forth arms, that took one step to meet me and was halted.
The great grim robot at her own back takes her to it. I think it sends lightning through her brain. She falls. It bears her away.
My guide ignores my screaming. Irresistible, it thrusts me out through the tunnel. The door clangs in my face. I stand before the wall which is like a mountain. Dry snow hisses across concrete. The sky is bloody with dawn; stars still gleam in the west, and arc lights are scattered over the twilit plain of the machines.  p. 26-27

Another robot stops him battering his head to a pulp on the closed door. SUM tells him that, now he is the computer’s sworn enemy, he will be a source of useful information.
The last section tells of Harper’s madness, and then the revolution he starts during the Dark Queen’s next visit: he cuts off his resurrection bracelet, smashes it with an axe, and encourages others to do the same.
This lyrically written tragedy is a very good, near excellent piece, and I can see why it won Hugo and Nebula Award—but not why Terry Carr left it out of his anthology. (PS I found it surprising that, as per the introduction above, (a) this was written several years previously and (b) was bought by a men’s magazine. I would have thought it was far too literary a piece for that latter market.)

One of the more offbeat stories in Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss’s Best SF: 1971 was The Cohen Dog Exclusion Act by Steven Schrader (Eco-Fiction, 1971), an ‘if this goes on’ story about dog fouling—so it was a bit of a surprise to come across another piece about the same subject from the same time period: Dog Days by Kit Reed:

He found it hard going; traffic had stopped moving some weeks before, which meant he had to vault rusting Volkswagens and climb over taxi bumpers to get to the other side. Abandoned automobiles took up so much room that the dogs were confined to the sidewalks, and by this time they were thick with ordure, studded with an occasional carcass and whorled with traces of scenes of gallantry or carnage, depending.
Since the mayor’s announcement, Sanitation had been put on the extermination detail, and there seemed to be no keeping up with the problem after that. The program was in its fifth week now, and the damnable thing was that conditions seemed to be not better but worse. The strays had mushroomed in number, and in addition to everything else, a number of humans had taken to using the sidewalks and the parks as toilets as part of a radical movement designed to prove some kind of point.  p. 45

This odd, dark satire goes on to show us more of this dystopian society, and also limns the husband’s ambivalent attitude towards the couple’s dog. In a surreal ending (spoiler) the extermination teams arrive at their house one evening, and the wife has a choice to make . . . .

Gather Blue Roses by Pamela Sargent is a slow burn piece that has the narrator remember her childhood as the daughter of a concentration camp survivor who would occasionally leave her family to be alone for short periods of time:

By the time I reached my adolescence, I had heard all the horror stories about the death camps and the ovens; about those who had to remove gold teeth from the bodies; the women used, despite the Reich’s edicts, by the soldiers and guards. I then regarded my mother with ambivalence, saying to myself, I would have died first, I would have found some way rather than suffering such dishonor, wondering what had happened to her and what secret sins she had on her conscience, and what she had done to survive. An old man, a doctor, had said to me once, “The best ones of us died, the most honorable, the most sensitive.” And I would thank God I had been born in 1949; there was no chance that I was the daughter of a Nazi rape.)
By the time I was four, we had moved to an old frame house in the country, and my father had taken a job teaching at a small junior college near by, turning down his offers from Columbia and Chicago, knowing how impossible that would be for mother.  p. 48-49

As the story progresses the narrator and her brother start school, and we find out that (spoiler) she experiences other people’s pain—she is an empath of sorts, to put it crudely.
This is a short, minor piece, but a quietly evocative and effective one.

The Elseones by Dennis O’Neil3 is about a man who meets a woman called Elvira at a religious Crusade at Madison Square Gardens. As their relationship develops we find out that the narrator is an “Elseone,” someone who has the ability to get things from people without payment (as Elvira notes when they get free hotdogs from a vendor shortly after they meet). During the story we also see various people tell the narrator that his “B’raja” is damaged. He also has strange dreams:

Then sleep, and another alien experience, a dream.
Warm sand between my forked toes, I squatted on the marge of a crimson sea, a vista of breakers capped with pink foam dwindling to a horizon hidden in ocher mists. And I was saying in a language native to me a word meaning both serenity and soon, a strange, garbled syllable—chanting it in rhythm with the beat of the waves . . .
I was awake: without being conscious of it, I had been staring at the splash of light on the ceiling from the mercury vapor lamp outside my single window, a bluish rectangle like a phantom television screen. In it, I saw—and recognized—a vast, savage wilderness, and I saw and recognized people I’d never met in cities I’d never been to—Atlanta, London, Budapest, Shanghai: people sitting and lying on beds in dank, anonymous chambers. I blinked: the vision vanished.
I got up, crept into the chill, foul-smelling hall, down the stairs. From somewhere on the bottom landing came a crooning of garbled syllables, meaningless yet recognizable, similar to my dream-chant.  p. 56

It soon becomes apparent (spoiler) that the narrator is an alien who has been stranded on Earth for some considerable time, and who is waiting for collection/rescue by “Servants” long after a conflict that exiled him and his kind to Earth (one of his interlocutors remarks at one point that “they’re close, well within this universe”). The story climaxes with a scene of thwarted transcendence.
This latter passage, and the story’s general description of his mental and emotional state (feelings of dissociation and detachment that will probably be familiar to city dwellers) prove to be an effective mix, and I enjoyed this a lot. It has some similarities with Moore’s The Children’s Hour, and if you like that, you’ll probably like this.

After a run of more serious stories there is some light relief in the fast-moving and wise-cracking Cosmic Sin by Dean R. Koontz (a jobbing SF writer at the time, not the superstar he is now). This has as its hero Jake Ash, who has a body chemistry that makes it possible for him to function as a “doorway between probability lines.” The story begins with a Probability Policeman and two aliens jaunting into his bathroom:

They looked like two enormous heads of cabbage, each somewhere near four foot in diameter, though one was slightly larger than the other. They were leafy and gray, with eyes, nose and maw half hidden in greener clumps of leaves. The larger of the two hung from my shower rail by two ropy tentacles while its other two appendages waved quietly at me, like seaweed stirred along the floor of the ocean. Creepy. You know? The smaller one stood on the closed lid of my toilet, its four tentacles bunched and stiffened beneath it, like legs. Both of them watched me with the prettiest blue eyes I’d ever seen and made—as I listened more closely—very soft, gentle mewing noises, like kittens.
They didn’t seem to want to eat me, strangle me, or suck my blood. If anything, they appeared to want to be cuddled and petted.
Just the same, I kept my eye on them.  p. 72

The policeman explains that the aliens are two of a breeding quartet, and that the other two have disappeared to make pornographic sensie films. This is considered a sacrilegious act by their species, so they want his help to find the pair. The story continues with an aeroplane flight to the house of another “receiver” like Ash, and the eventual rescue of the cabbages, although they are further complications at the house of a local “sender.” The plot is ramshackle and on the light side, but the enjoyment here is in the story’s breezy style, one liners, and general humour.

Ecce Femina! by Bruce McAllister begins with an Army veteran called Mac returning from the war in “Cam” (Cambodia?) to his home in Emerald Hills. There are various hints that the relationship between men and women has profoundly changed in this future:

I kept walking and staring at the sign. When my neck started aching, and I finally looked down, I was at the tract’s eight-foot cinder-block wall.
It was covered with writing in red spray paint.
.
WHOS GOT OSCAR MEYER CLASS? WE DO! YOUD BETTER!
CHAPTERS UNITE SHOOT E9 TONIGHT!
BEWARE OF DOGGIES AND
.
I kept walking. The writing seemed endless.
.
SEE ORGAN LA FAY ON SATURDAY!
RALLY YOU MOTHERBROTHERS!
WE ARE THE WOMEN’S LEAGUE
THE RIDERS OF THE NIGHT
WERE ORNERY BROTHERMUCKERS
WED RATHER BITE THAN—

Mac is then accosted by a chapter of female Hells Angels, who question him on the outskirts of town, and laugh at his plans to return to the garage/filling station he once owned.
When he finally gets to his destination he meets the new owner, Jack, who turns out to be a physically intimidating, cigar chomping woman who eventually wrestles and bear hugs him into submission (her and the Hell’s Angels apparently use a—presumably steroid—drug called E9).
The rest of this piece is a tedious and overlong tale that has the Hell’s Angel’s gang repeatedly turn up with men they have captured (and possibly castrated—there is talk about “Oscar Meyer” patches gained by the Angels for unspecified acts). One of the men is eventually kept by Jack (after a few more wrestling matches) and (spoiler) the end of the story sees her and the captured man leave the area. Mac later receives a photograph of them together with a baby.
I have no idea what this story supposed to be about or what the message is, and I note in passing that this is the only piece in the issue that squarely fits into “the future as present” category described by James Blish in his book review2 (see below). It is also the worst. When I think about the sub-optimal nature of much current SF (often concerned with the political, cultural and personal concerns of the present), I suspect there may be a link between this subject matter and the general quality of the work produced.

I’ve already read the Tiptree in the Carr ‘Best of the Year’ volume for 1972, so the following comments are a cut and paste for the convenience of anyone that hasn’t read that review previously.
Painwise by James Tiptree, Jr. (F&SF, February 1972) has a great hook opening (and one similar to John Baxter’s The Hands in New Writings in SF #6, also reviewed here):

He was wise to the ways of pain. He had to be, for he felt none.
When the Xenons put electrodes to his testicles, he was vastly entertained by the pretty lights.
When the Ylls fed firewasps into his nostrils and other body orifices, the resultant rainbows pleased him. And when later they regressed to simple disjointments and eviscerations, he noted with interest the deepening orchid hues that stood for irreversible harm.  p. 350

The protagonist is wired to experience pain as colour and, as he completes his repeated missions to observe aliens (who variously mutilate or torture him), a boditech mechanism called Amanda puts him back together again.
Eventually there is a battle of wills between him and Amanda—he wants her to provide conversation—and he eventually realises that their mission is overdue and she is faulty. At this point Amanda malfunctions and he is marooned in space.
The second part of the story sees him picked up by a starship occupied by three aliens, a bushbaby like creature called Lovebaby, the butterfly-like Ragglebomb, and the python-like Muscle. None of them can stand the pain experienced by the universe’s creatures (they are empaths/telepaths) so they use him to go and get them the foodstuffs they desire. Initially he complies, but then stops helping them when he realises they are not going to take him back to Earth.
In the final part of the story (spoiler) he hears the phrase “snap, crackle and pop” from their descriptions of the sounds picked up on one of the planets. He knows this is Earth, so he recites a long list of enticing foodstuffs to encourage them to go there.
The story ends with him back on Earth, where he suddenly experiences a massive amount of pain. When he empathically transmits this to the other three they all try to get back to the shelter of the ship. For whatever reason, he makes the decision to stay rather than leave with them.
This is an original, entertaining, and trippy piece, but it appears to get off to a false start (the Amanda section), and I’m not sure that any of the rest of it bears close examination.

•••

This issue’s Cover is by Bert Tanner, another good piece from this impressive artist.3
Books by James Blish opens with a review of Science Fiction: The Future by Dick Allen, and a categorisation similar to one I’ve seen earlier (made by P. Schuyler Miller in his review of Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year #2):

Part two, “Alternative Futures,” is subdivided into “The Present as Future” and “The Future,” which neatly separates works exaggerating current dilemmas from stories which, for the most part, offer real alternatives or have no sociological significance.  p. 36

He also reviews Tactics of Mistake by Gordon R. Dickson:

I would guess [that Tactics of Mistake and The Genetic General] were responses to the late John W. Campbell’s final new policy for his magazine, which was to emphasize heroes who set out to accomplish something and by gum succeeded at it.  p. 37

. . . and The Flame Is Green by R. A. Lafferty:

Like this author’s Fourth Mansions, the intent of the work this far seems to be that of a spiritual pilgrimage through symbolic events, another journey toward the Grail; but unlike the previous novel, the symbolism does not seem to be systematized, the protagonists and antagonists don’t fall into well-defined groups, and their motives are either cloudy or are not given at all. The net effect is that of a writer hypnotizedly beating his way deeper and deeper into a purely private world which threatens in the end to become entirely meaningless to anyone else, and perhaps even to himself.  p. 39

I see I’m not the only one who sometimes bounces off of Lafferty.
The final review is of the collection The Lost Face by Josef Nesvadba, which Blish discusses in some detail:

More characteristic is the volume’s title story, the gimmick of which is the discovery and use of a technique of plastic surgery which allows a dead man’s face to be superimposed upon that of a living man. Inexorably, the recipient finds himself driven, mostly but not entirely by circumstances, into living the life of the donor.
Superficially, this might be taken as a parable of the fatal power of the assumption that things are what they seem, but I think also that Nesvadba is re-using here the theme of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, that contrary to Nineteenth Century assumptions, the brain is at the mercy of the body (as concentration-camp experiences and the later development of brainwashing have since gruesomely proved). It is powerfully and circumstantialy told, and also brings off a difficult technical feat: The author tells you the ending first of all, and then leads you back to it, by which time it has completely changed from ordinary melodrama to a situation packed with irony.  p. 40

Blish concludes by saying that Nesvadba is “well worth your attention.” Given that I’ve had this book sitting on my shelves for forty years, I’ll take his advice.
Coming Soon promises Love is a Dragonfly by Thomas Burnett Swann (a novella or “short novel”) in the next issue (he had previously published The Manor of Roses and the novel The Goat Without Horns in the magazine), and a number of big names in future issues: John Christopher, Frederik Pohl, Gene Wolfe and Anthony Boucher, plus a special James Blish issue in April.4
The Cartoon by Gahan Wilson is an amusing one about tombs and Egyptology.
Films by Baird Searles begins by dismissing a movie called The Peace Game (which sounds like a pretentious bore) before going on a Trojan kick with two movies, The Trojan Women and Helen of Troy, both of which sound like they are worth a watch.
The Asymmetry of Life by Isaac Asimov, like most of his essays, starts off with a good anecdote:

Only yesterday (as I write this) I was on a Dayton, Ohio talk show, by telephone; one of those talk shows where the listeners are encouraged to call in questions.
A young lady called in and said, “Dr. Asimov, who, in your opinion, did the most to improve modern science fiction?”
I answered, after the barest hesitation, “John W. Campbell, Jr.”
Whereupon she said, “Good! I’m Leslyn, his daughter.”  p. 106

Following this there are six deadly dull pages explaining mirror-image molecules (I assume this is another way of describing optical isomers). If ever an essay called out for diagrams this one does—half my degree was in chemistry and I could barely follow some of this:

All enzyme molecules are proteins. Protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids which come in some twenty varieties. All twenty varieties are closely related in structure. In each case there is a central carbon atom to which are attached: 1) a hydrogen atom, 2) an amino group, 3) a carboxyl group, 4) any one of twenty different groups which may be lumped together as “side-chains.”
In the case of the simplest of the amino acids, “glycine,” the side-chain is another hydrogen atom so that the central carbon atom is attached to only three different groups. For that reason, glycine is not asymmetric and is not optically active.
In the case of all the other amino acids, the side-chain represents a fourth different group attached to the central carbon atom, which means that the central carbon is asymmetric and that each amino acid, except glycine, can exist in two forms, one the mirrorimage of the other. And, in fact, each amino acid exists in living tissue in only one of the two forms; and the same form is found, in each case, in all living tissue of any kind.  p. 113

I hope no-one was driving or operating heavy machinery while reading that.
The article finishes by discussing enzymes, the stuff of life, and a possible non-conservation of parity (if I recall correctly, Asimov states all enzymes are all levo- and not dexorotatory, left not right handed).
The short Editor’s Note at the end of the Asimov article mentions that, unknown to the magazine, and as the result of a misunderstanding with his agent, Fritz Leiber’s The Price of Pain Ease (F&SF, November 1971) had previously been published in book form before it appeared in the magazine.

•••

This is one of the better issues of F&SF I can remember reading. Not do you get the Hugo and Nebula winning Anderson story, but all the other fiction bar the McAllister is good or better.  Recommended.  ●

_____________________

1. Goat Song’s Wikipedia page says the “story has strong parallels to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice”

2. Kit Reed’s Dog Days superficially fits into the “future as present” category but the ending is so surreal that it also fits the “no sociological significance” criteria of the other category.

3. As the introduction to his story hints, Dennis O’Neil went on to be a big wheel in the comics industry. Our loss. His Wikipedia page is here.

4. Bert Tanner did some striking artwork for a number of other issues of F&SF, most of which were double page spreads like this:

He also did a number of single page covers for Venture, F&SF’s sister magazine, which, oddly enough, were not up to the same standard. His ISFDB page is here.

5. The James Blish special issue is reviewed here.  ●

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #42, November 1954

ISFDB
Luminist

_____________________

Editor, Anthony Boucher

Fiction:
Dead Center • novelette by Judith Merril ∗∗∗
Dead-Eye Daniel • short story by Larry Siegel
The Grom • short story by Arthur Porges
Lease on Life • short story by Lee Grimes
The Test • short story by Richard Matheson
Transformer • short story by Chad Oliver
A Matter of Ethics • short story by Clifton Dance [as by J. R. Shango]
Sacrifice Hit • novelette by Edmond Hamilton +
The Weissenbroch Spectacles • short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Non-Fiction:
Cover • Chesley Bonestell
Coming Next
Recommended Reading
• by Anthony Boucher

_____________________

This issue of F&SF comes from the period where Anthony Boucher was in sole charge of the magazine,1 and the reason I’m reading it is because it contains Dead Center by Judith Merril.2 This story is one of two in this month’s magazine that focus on the domestic circumstances of the characters.

The story concerns the impending departure of husband/father/astronaut Jock Kruger into space, and is largely seen through the eyes his wife, Ruth Kruger, and their four year old son, Toby:

They took him up in an elevator, and showed him all around the inside of the rocket, where Daddy would sit, and where all the food was stored, for emergency, they said, and the radio and everything. Then it was time to say goodbye.
Daddy was laughing at first, and Toby tried to laugh, too, but he didn’t really want Daddy to go away. Daddy kissed him, and he felt like crying because it was scratchy against Daddy’s cheek, and the strong fingers were hurting him now. Then Daddy stopped laughing and looked at him very seriously. “You take care of your mother, now,” Daddy told him. “You’re a big boy this time.”
“Okay,” Toby said. Last time Daddy went away in a rocket, he was not-quite-four, and they teased him with the poem in the book that said, James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, Took great care of his mother, though he was only three . . . . So Toby didn’t much like Daddy saying that now, because he knew they didn’t really mean it.
“Okay,” he said, and then because he was angry, he said, “Only she’s supposed to take care of me, isn’t she?”
Daddy and Mommy both laughed, and so did the two men who were standing there waiting for Daddy to get done saying goodbye to him. He wriggled, and Daddy put him down.
“I’ll bring you a piece of the moon, son,” Daddy said, and Toby said, “All right, fine.” He reached for his mother’s hand, but he found himself hanging onto Grandma instead, because Mommy and Daddy were kissing each other, and both of them had forgotten all about him.
He thought they were never going to get done kissing.  p. 6

After the launch takes place, matters take an adverse turn when Jock comes around to find he has been blacked out for an abnormally long period, over twenty minutes. Ruth discusses the episode with one of the team:

“Wasn’t it . . . an awfully long time?” [Ruth] asked. She hadn’t been watching the clock, on purpose, but she was sure it was longer than it should have been.
Allie stopped smiling. “Twenty-three,” she said.
Ruth gasped. “What . . . ?”
“You figure it. I can’t.”
“There’s nothing in the ship. I mean nothing was changed that would account for it.” She shook her head slowly. This time she didn’t know the ship well enough to talk like that. There could be something. Oh, Jock! “I don’t know,” she said. “Too many people worked on that thing. I . . .”
“Mrs. Kruger’” It was the redheaded reporter, the obnoxious one. “We just got the report on the blackout. I’d like a statement from you, if you don’t mind, as designer of the ship—”
“I am not the designer of this ship,” she said coldly.
“You worked on the design, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, to the best of your knowledge . . . ?”
“To the best of my knowledge, there is no change in design to account for Mr. Kruger’s prolonged unconsciousness. Had there been any such prognosis, the press would have been informed.”
“Mrs. Kruger, I’d like to ask you whether you feel that the innovations made by Mr. Argent could—”  p. 9-10

The situation worsens when Jock is stranded on the Moon after using more fuel than necessary to land. After this the military takes over the rescue mission, and Ruth becomes involved when they decide to use the older KIM-III model she designed.
This convincingly described section is followed by more material about Ruth and Toby, which also covers further politicking at the spaceflight bureau. Eventually Ruth and Toby attend the launch of the rescue vehicle and (spoiler), when Toby is shown around the craft before launch, he stows away. The ship crashes after take-off.
In the coda of the story we find that Ruth later commits suicide, and that Jock’s starved body is eventually brought back from the moon. The family are buried together.
This bare bones description doesn’t convey the kind of story this is—it feels like a mainstream novel about the NASA program that, although it has an underlying plot structure, develops naturally (well, at least until the last couple of pages). I particularly liked the group interactions, the organisational politics, and the press intrusion material, as well as the sections from Toby’s point of view. That said, the ending overdoes the bleakness and tragedy, and I couldn’t help but think that it would be a more effective (and realistic) story if Ruth lived—in its current form it’s like one of those Greek tragedies where the Gods turn up at the end and kill all the mortals. If Merril had kept Ruth alive but grief-struck the story would have continued developing organically, and avoided the omnisciently told and distancing coda (which reads like something from a different story).
If this is not an entirely successful piece, it is an ambitious and noteworthy one.3
The other story in this issue that focuses on the characters’ domestic circumstances is less successful. The Test by Richard Matheson starts with Les helping his eighty year old father Tom revise for a test he has to attend the next day. As Tom becomes exasperated at his inability to complete the cognitive and co-ordination tests Les gives him, we learn that, in this world, old people have to pass assessments to keep living. If they fail, they get a month to sort out their affairs before receiving a lethal injection.
It soon becomes clear that Tom will not pass the test, and this is the subject of an ensuing conversation between Tom and his wife Terry. This is an ambivalent exchange as there are domestic tensions in the household including, among other matters, the fact that Terry doesn’t want Tom with them for another five years (there is reference here to a letter couples can submit to have their elderly relatives removed).
Les gets up the next morning and sees his father away. When the father returns that night he goes straight to his room and, when Les later quizzes his father, Les learns (spoiler) that he did not attend but instead went to the pharmacist to purchase suicide pills. The story ends with the implication that Tom has taken his own life.
This is competently executed, but it is hard to take the central premise seriously.
If the amount of time that people spend on their mobile devices concerns you, Dead-Eye Daniel by Larry Siegel may be of interest, as it shows similar 1950’s anxieties about television:

TV, in case you didn’t know it, first came out in the mid ’40’s. You probably won’t believe it, but before television was around, people used to visit places called libraries (they were nothing but big halls that held books), parks (large sections set aside so that people could—of all things—sit on the grass, lie under trees, and row on lakes), and other nonsense like that.
Other folks (and so help me, this is true!) used to spend hours visiting friends and relatives—and get this—doing absolutely nothing but talk!
Of course, after TV really set in, things became normal. By 1957, husbands were paying little attention to wives, mothers were ignoring kids, and kids rarely left their living rooms—except in emergencies, like fires and stuff. You know, the way it is now. We take care of our basic needs, and spend all the rest of the time watching TV or talking about it.  p. 26-27

This story proceeds to give an account of a competitive (non-stop) TV viewing contest, which starts when two men encounter “Dead-Eye Daniel,” who watches TV in an apparently catatonic state. Seeing their chance to make some money they set up a match against the Russians (this takes place in the Cold War 1950s after all), who field a UN envoy who has a habit of walking out during votes on the accession of “Grubonia” to the UN. This latter fact (spoiler) is used to trick the Russian into walking out of the contest and losing. A weak ending to an unlikely and overlong story.
The Grom by Arthur Porges is told from the point of view of a cat called Tamberlane, who follows a grom (an invisible, malevolent spirit) around town while it causes trouble for humans. The Grom’s trouble-making peaks when it almost manages to incite a mob to hang a man (the police intervene).
The ending (where the grom meets a black hobo coming off a train) concludes with the line (spoiler): “He knew that the grom would not be frustrated again.”
The first time I read this story the point entirely escaped me. Part of this was undoubtedly me, but I think that the ending, and its implication that the grom will incite a lynch-mob, could have a sharper focus.
It is interesting to see this grim subject appear in the magazine (I can’t remember reading another fantasy or science fiction story from this period about these dreadful events).4
Lease on Life by Lee Grimes is a time travel story where two doctoral students and their professor develop a time machine. Baxter, one of the students and also the narrator, prepares to go forward in time, while the other, Casselton, controls the equipment. Professor Durward acts as Baxter’s temporal “anchor”:

[Casselton] checked the helmet [Doc] Durward would wear. One mind had to be both lever and anchor, and that was Doc’s function. Next Casselton checked the cables from the helmet to the power pack and to the cage. The latter was a skeleton of vertical tubes, spaced two feet apart around a circular base, and supporting the activating mechanism. The whole device was just tall enough for a man to stand inside. Finally he checked the cutoff timer. Since the mental effort to send me into the future would throw Doc into a trance, the timer was set to cut off power at the proper moment. Doc and I would be linked by an elastic, immaterial bond that would snap me back to “base time” when the field collapsed.
“It’s set for one hundred years ahead,” Casselton said. “Five minutes to get there, ten minutes to make observations, and five minutes to get back.” He gave me a speculative look, much as if I were some lower organism about to be plunged into a test tube.
“I’m ready,” I answered.  p. 43-44

The narrator, Baxter, finds himself in the near future, not a hundred years ahead as they planned, and on his return they deduce that the period a traveller can visit is limited to the lifetime of the anchor (the professor says, “My heart, I suppose.”) Casselton switches places with the professor and acts as the anchor for the next trip: Baxter goes forward a hundred years—only to find himself arrested by a totalitarian theocracy. This turns out to be ruled by Casselton, who, once he discovered he was going to live for a further hundred years, took many risks to become world dictator.
This clever piece is written in the form of a long letter to the future resistance.

Transformer by Chad Oliver is a fantasy about a toy town in a model railroad setup, and the residents’ trials at the hand of the thirteen year old owner:

The only rest room in town is in the gas station, and that’s all the place is used for. It’s ridiculous. They only know how to serve one dish at the diner, because that’s all that was on the counter. Bacon and fried eggs and coffee. You think about it, Clyde. Two meals a day every day for seven years. That’s a lot of bacon and eggs. You lose your taste for them after awhile.
The train runs right by the side of the hotel, only two inches away. It rattles the whole thing until it’s ready to fall apart, and every time it goes by it pours black smoke in through the upstairs window. There’s a tenant up there, name of Martin. He looks like he’s made out of soot.
The whole town is knee-deep in dust. Did you ever see a kid clean anything that belongs to him? And there’s no water, either. That cellophane in the Ohio River may look good from where you stand, but it’s about as wet as the gold in Fort Knox. Not only that, but it crinkles all the time where it flows under the bridges. It’s enough to drive you bats.  p. 75

Eventually the occupants of the toy town tamper with the transformer to try and electrocute the kid, but (spoiler) they fail, and then the kid sells off all the parts of the train set to various buyers. The narrator finds herself out of the frying pan and in the fire.
This is an entertaining piece for the most part, but the first page is confusing and unnecessary, and the story peters out a bit at the end.

A Matter of Ethics by Clifton Dance gets off to a cracking start when Colby, a junior doctor, has to treat a cardiac surgeon called Mendez for a heart attack after their spaceship comes out of “transition”. The initial paragraphs crackle with energy and information:

It was certainly a coronary. Mendez wasn’t too old, but he was in a position of wealth and authority. He no longer needed to worry about pleasing other people so he’d let his body go. A common enough situation with specialists; no inherent sense of artistry except in connection with one thing. They could be perfectionists in fire sculpture, hypothalamic surgery, or Venusian phonetics, but they didn’t carryover their perfectionism to the care of their bodies and this was what happened. The coronary vessels of the heart wall had lost their resiliency—perhaps foolish or capricious eating habits had thickened the vessel walls—and now, a sudden stress, the cushioned acceleration of the space drive, and a slight alarm reaction, the coronary vessels constrict stopping the flow of blood to the heart wall, pain in the heart, more alarm, more constriction, more pain. A vicious circle, and if it lasts over a minute, clots start forming ill the vessels, and cells in the heart wall begin to die from lack of blood. If the lack is long enough a large area of the heart wall will die. If it is large enough, nothing can save the victim except immediate intervention by a skilled mural cardiosurgeon, like Mendez.
Colby sighed. Yes, like Mendez. Not like Colby. He’d only had five years residency in surgery, then five years in cardiology, then three years in mural cardiosurgery. Thirteen years in labs, autopsy rooms, surgical amphitheaters.
Thirteen years of emergency call, interrupted sleep, hasty meals, and class four subsistence level pay. Thirteen years and then he’d taken his examination for the Intergalactic Board of Mural Cardiosurgery.
And what had Mendez said? Mendez, the president of that august body!
“It would be criminal for you to operate on humans at this stage in your development.” Criminal! And what had the Board recommended? Five more years of special supervised training under a Board man!
Five more years of crap from Harkaway!  p. 83

After Mendez is stabilised, and Colby has spoken with the ship’s doctor about the possibility of operating (illegal for Colby as, per above, he is not qualified/Board approved), Colby brings Mendez round. There is an extended conversation between the two men as Mendez tries to convince Colby to operate; Colby says that if Mendez wants him to operate he needs to put Colby on the board, otherwise Colby will suffer severe legal and professional penalties. Mendez says he can’t do that without fellow board members. Eventually (spoiler), when Mendez realises that without an operation he will die during the next transition, he tells Colby that the Board is a closed shop, set up to ensure that the only successful operations are ones conducted by Board members using a special healing scalpel that makes the operation a routine one.
Colby agrees to operate on Mendez but then, during the anaesthesia stage, gives him a massive overdose of ephedrine and kills him. Once Colby arrives at his destination he demands an examination from the Board, during which he not only gets his own back on Hathaway, his supervisor, but blackmails the Board over the secret of the scalpel.
Colby later becomes famous for “discovering” the scalpel, and breaks the Board’s stranglehold on cardiac surgery.
This is an interesting look at the restrictive practices of the (pseudonymous) writer’s profession, and its jaundiced view is one of its strengths, as is its generally engrossing and energetic narrative. The story’s weaknesses are its baggy and not entirely convincing middle section, and the omniscient viewpoint ending (another one). Overall though, it’s a pretty good piece, and it is a shame that this obviously talented writer didn’t contribute any further tales to the field.5

I hadn’t read Sacrifice Hit by Edmond Hamilton before I started writing this review otherwise I may have opened this post with comments about “three stories that focus on interpersonal relationships” rather than “two [which] focus on the domestic circumstances of the characters”.
In Hamilton’s story events focus on three characters: General Weiler, the commander in charge of a UN Interplanetary Service Base in Colorado which controls a number of exploration colonies scattered throughout the solar system; Secretary Ebbutt, the politician in charge, and the one responsible for funding; and Colonel Alsop, the commander of the Europan expedition, and a man who Weiler regards as a potentially reckless, “fame-happy” character (Alsop never appears onstage although he is frequently referred to, and is heard from in a number of time-lagged radio communications).
The story itself starts with a message coming into the base that an expedition on Europa has suffered quake damage to their domes and rocket, with one fatality so far. General Weiler thinks that he will need to send rescue rockets from Ganymede, but in a phonecall Ebbutt asks him to wait for further information so as not to jeopardise upcoming appropriations. While General Weiler waits for Ebbutt to fly in, he reflects on what the expedition might be going through:

Weiler sat in his office and thought about 32 men in prison.
They had been in prison for a long time, those men. First, in the iron guts of a rocket, lying in their bunks, telling dirty stories, eating, getting sick, smearing salve on their radiation-itch, sleeping, and waking, and sleeping again. Then strapping in, and praying, and getting bumped, and yelling to each other that they’d made it.
Made it to where? To another prison, a whole little chain of them. Four interconnected metal domes that you helped put up, and that were going to be your world from then on. The same blank metal walls, the same air that always smelled of hot metal and machine oil, the same food and faces, and always the grabbing drag of your weight-shoes that were supposed to make you feel your normal weight but never did.
You went out, to help run the parties testing for uranium, and that was when you were in the worst prison of all. Your suit was your prison then, pressing you close on every side, hanging wrong on you and trying to topple you over, smothering your every movement, never feeding oxygen quite right, making you want hysterically to move the way you used to move.
You saw everything wrong and distorted through your face-plate, and through the cold and bitter fumes that swathed it all. It always looked like a bad copy of a Bonestell painting, the rocks and ridges uncertain because your perspective and horizons were all wrong, the sky all wrong too with nothing in it but that enormous white mass that was supposed to be a planet but only looked like a vague, big brightness. You hated it, you hated all your prisons, but when they began to open up, when the ground heaved and the domes began to split and the cold poisonous murk of atmosphere began to seep in, you were scared, you wanted them back . . . .  p. 105

The situation deteriorates when Ebbutt arrives at the UN base, and he and Weiler hear Alsop’s optimistic but unrealistic report about the damage. Weiler and Ebbutt argue about what to do, and Weiler’s job is threatened.
Ebbutt sleeps for a couple of hours (he had a boozy night with two Senators the night before), and when he wakes he visits the control room to find that (spoiler) there is a new message from the deputy commander of the Europa colony stating that the quakes have got worse and there is more dome damage. Ebbutt also learns that Weiler has ordered the launch of the rockets from Ganymede.
The two men argue some more, and Ebbutt says he will sack Weiler and replace him with his compliant deputy. Weiler, who suspected that this may be the Secretary’s play, tells him he has already summoned the press. Then they are interrupted by a message about another quake:

“General, an Urgent-and-Immediate from Fifteen! General—”
Weiler moved fast. By the time he reached the door, Vaughn had switched over and it was Gresznik’s voice coming out of a roar of static. The Pole sounded excited, and scared.
“—sixty six-oh-one plus, causing ridge-slips northwest of us. Dome One split wide open, personnel evacuated into Three but two men caught under collapsing rocket-cranes. Afraid this is it. I am afraid this—”
Weiler heard the voice break off as they ran down the corridor and there was only the roar of static as they entered the Communications Room. Vaughn, pale and scared, turned from the panel briefly. He said, “I’m still getting their wave but Colonel Gresznik just stopped talking,”
“If their wave is coming in, they must still be all right,” Ebbutt said.
But Weiler, his first startled excitement all washed out of him, went over to the wall and sat down heavily in the chair there.
“Hell, they’ve had it,” he said harshly. “Three was their last dome.”
“But if we’re still getting their wave, they must—”
Weiler wouldn’t listen. He was through arguing. He felt that he was through with a lot of things.
He thought, “I was too late, [. . .] I was too late [. . .]. I should have sent that order twelve hours ago and told Ebbutt to go to hell”
Suddenly Vaughn exclaimed, “Fifteen! Listen—”
He switched over as he spoke. Out of the loudspeaker came not only the dull surge and roar of space static but other, irregular sounds—sounds like cannonadings and crackings and distant voices.
Then from the loudspeaker a hoarse voice that rose almost to a shout.
“Alsop speaking! I tried to stick it out but we’re done for, dome collapsing under ridge-slip, no use—” The roar drowned him for a moment as they listened, no one moving at all, then Alsop’s hoarse shout again. “—tell them I did my best! I—”
There was nothing more. There was nothing at all, except the static, nothing until Vaughn said tightly, “Their wave’s gone.”
“They’re all gone,” said Ebbutt.  p. 115-116

The story ends with Ebbutt giving a press conference where he plays Alsop’s message to make sure he gets his appropriation through.
This is a pretty good story (quite different, I suspect, from the sort of pulp that Hamilton produced for most of his career), and I enjoyed the wrangling between Weiler, whose prime concern was the welfare and safety of his men, and Ebbutt, who is more interested in the survival of the program.
This story could have easily have appeared in Astounding (if Hamilton hadn’t got fed up with Campbell’s rewrite requests6 earlier in his career).

There used to be an advertisement that you would see in the comic books of my youth which advertised “X-ray Specs”.7 I always wondered who would buy these glasses (unlikely to work, and illegal if they had) but this device has provided de Camp and Pratt with the gimmick for The Weissenbroch Spectacles, another episode in their ‘Gavagan’s Bar’ series. This opens, after some obligatory bar and character scene setting with the sale of a painting to a visitor called Bache, who buys it after viewing it through his glasses:

The painting was one of a wood nymph of extreme, not to say flagrant, nudity. She sat on her curled-up right leg, which in turn rested upon a tree stump. Her left leg was thrust out to the side and rear. Her body was upright, with her head tipped back and her hands clasped behind her neck beneath a coiffure of approximately 1880. She was gazing at a painted sunbeam with a smile of ineffable idiocy, and a pair of gauzy wings, though absurdly small by aerodynamic standards, testified to her supernatural origin. They failed to balance a pair of mammae of transcendental size and salience.  p. 127

Bache then buys a round and tells the tale of how his glasses were made from rock quartz owned by the kobolds, and how he can see through things when he uses them. The story wanders on (spoiler) to an ending as vaguely puerile as the quote above: a pair of women Bache is due to meet enter the bar (one of them film star gorgeous) but he goes off with someone else who is less attractive. This sets up the punch line “I wonder what he sees in her.” Okay, I suppose, but Boucher should have ended the issue with the stronger Hamilton story.

The Cover for this issue is by Chesley Bonestell, and is described on the contents page as, “Planet lit by Antares and companion star.”
There isn’t really any Interior artwork in the F&SF of this period (or most of them) but there is a solitary spot illustration by Emsh on p. 118, opposite the de Camp and Pratt story, which itself has a hand lettered title (see above). I’ve decided to start including the odd title page because some of the introductions provide useful information or context.
Coming Next trails a number of interesting sounding writers for the next issue: Robert Abernathy (whose name I recognise but who I know little about), Saki (ditto), Philip Jose Farmer, William Morrison (just after Country Doctor), and Philip K. Dick.
Recommended Reading by Anthony Boucher starts with mention of the 1954 International Fantasy Awards:

It seemed rash to single one novel out of so rich a year as 1953—a much brighter period than 1954 has been so far; but apparently the experts are in full agreement with us, for More Than Human has just received the International Fantasy Award, bestowed by a panel of thirteen distinguished judges from the United States, England and France. And now, having been quite unable to get this beautifully written and sensitively conceived story of human symbiosis out of my mind for almost a year, I’ll be even more rash and say that this is the finest novel yet to receive the IFA.
The runners-up are very nearly as impressive in quality of writing and thinking. Second place went to Alfred Bester’s pyrotechnic ESP-detective story, The Demolished Man (Shasta, $3; Signet, 25¢), and third to the
bitter satire on an advertising-agency future, The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (Ballantine, hardcover $1,50, paper 35¢). Both of these novels were serialized in Galaxy, and a large portion of the Sturgeon novel first appeared as the Galaxy novella, Baby is Three. My warm congratulations, not unmixed with envy, to Galaxy editor Horace Gold for publishing such notable stories.
Note of consolation: F&SF’s Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore (Farrar, Straus & Young, $2; Ballantine, 35¢) very nearly ran in the money, and wound up in an unofficial fourth place, which is reasonably gratifying for the only F&SF-originated book eligible in the contest.  p. 96

After this, Boucher looks at a few spaceflight books, a few that he likes, and a few that he doesn’t:

Martin Caidin’s Worlds in Space (Holt, $4.95) is the most expensive and least necessary of this current crop; its material is readily available elsewhere more clearly organized and written in sentences more nearly resembling English prose. Spaceflight is one of the countless subjects treated in Alfred Gordon Bennett’s Focus on the Unknown (Library Publishers, $3.95), an inordinately ambitious book which tries to embrace almost every scientific or parascientific theme which might come under the fantasy-fact heading. The writing is characterized by prosaic stuffiness, a powerful will to believe, and a careless disregard for the nature of evidence.  p. 98

He then reviews some reprints before coming to a new novel:

Most rewarding of 1954’s new novels this month is Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (Gold Medal, 25¢), an extraordinary book which manages to do for vampirism what Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think did for lycanthropy: investigate an ancient legend in terms of modern knowledge of psychology and physiology, and turn to be stuff of supernatural terror into strict (and still terrifying!) science fiction. Matheson has added a new variant on the Last Man theme, too, in this tale of the last normal human survivor in a world of bloodsucking nightmares, and has given striking vigor to his invention by a forceful style of storytelling which derives from the best hard-boiled crime novels. As a hard-hitting thriller or as fresh imaginative speculation, this-is a book you can’t miss.  p. 99

I read the Matheson a year or so ago and thought it pretty good, and wondered why it hadn’t been a serial in F&SF (probably because the magazine hadn’t started using them at that time).

In conclusion, a worthwhile issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Founding co-editor J. Francis McComas took a back seat in 1952, and finally resigned in September 1954.

2. There was a discussion in the Great SF Stories group about Merril’s Dead Center and So Proudly We Hail, and whether they were stories that should have made the ‘Year’s Best’ collections. (Actually, Dead Center did make a year’s best—it is in The Best American Short Stories 1955. There is a letter from Andy Duncan in Locus about the handful of SF magazine stories that have made it into that anthology series and the O. Henry one.)

3. Dead Center can perhaps be described as an anti-Astounding story. In that magazine, they would have more likely Solved the Problem and rescued the astronaut (if it was possible to do so within the physical constraints of the Universe that is—see The Cold Equations). In any event, I don’t think that Campbell would have gone for an ending where (like the recently reviewed So Proudly We Hail in Star Science Fiction Stories) a major plot point depends upon inadequate spaceport security (one suspects that the security company in both these stories will not be invited to retender).

4. Wikipedia has a page on Lynching. Note that the year after this story appeared, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was kidnapped, beaten, mutilated, and murdered for allegedly having wolf-whistled at, or flirted with, a white woman in Mississippi.

5. Dance’s first published story was The Brothers (reviewed here), a promising piece which appeared in the June 1952 issue. This also indicated a bright future.

6. Hamilton has this specific comment in an interview on Tangent:

I never sent [Campbell] a story after 1938 because I had to revise that one. First, to suit John’s idea, and then to suit John’s wife’s idea. That was a little hard to do, so I never sent John any more stories.

7. The Wikipedia page for X-ray Specs, believe it or not.  ●

F&SF is still published: F&SF subs/Amazon UKUSA/Weightless Books

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #716, November-December 2014

ISFDB link
F&SF subs/Amazon UKUSA /Weightless Books

Other reviews:
C. D. Lewis, Tangent Online
John Loyd, There Ain’t no Such Thing as a Free Lunch
Lois Tilton, Locus
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Mark Watson, Best SF
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Gordon Van Gelder

Fiction:
I’ll Follow the Sun • novelette by Paul Di Filippo ∗∗+
Yeshua’s Dog • short story by Tim Sullivan
Nanabojou at the World’s Fair • short story by Justin Barbeau
The Judging • novella by Rand B. Lee
Feral Frolics • short story by Scott Baker
The Bomb Thing • short story by K. J. Kabza +
Golden Girl • novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey +
The Old Science Fiction Writer • short story by David Gerrold
Hollywood North • novella by Michael Libling

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Mondolithic Studios
Cartoons • by Mark Heath, Arthur Masear (x2)
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Musing on Books • by Michelle West
Films: On Novelizing Noah • by Alan Dean Foster
Films: Coming Soon to a Tablet Near You • by Kathi Maio
Coming Attractions
F&SF Competition #88: “Anagram/Raga Man” (Results)

F&SF Competition #89
Index to Volumes 126 & 127, January-December 2014
Curiosities: The Condemned Playground, by Cyril Connolly (1945)
• book review by David Langford

_____________________

Editor Gordon Van Gelder’s introduction to I’ll Follow the Sun by Paul Di Filippo sets the tone for the issue:

There was a time—or so it seems to your editor—when writers turned to science fiction to explore ideas they couldn’t touch in any other medium. A fair number of stories regarded as classics today were transgressive when they first came out.
These days, however, the internet seems to thrive on posts by people who aren’t keen on tolerating viewpoints that differ from their own, and some of those posts focus on the science fiction and fantasy field. They’ve inspired us here at F&SF to give this issue an extra helping of stories that deal with touchy themes or go beyond the bounds of Political Correctness.  p. 5

Di Filippo’s story isn’t particularly edgy or transgressive (there are later stories that fit the bill better) but it does offer a different viewpoint to the homogeneity of today due to its time-traveller protagonist from 1964. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story opens with a student called Dan Wishcup visiting his maths professor Chan Davis1 (the science fiction writer) with the news that he has got a draft notice for the Vietnam war, but doesn’t want to go. Davis suggests that Dan claims asylum in Canada, but Dan doesn’t want to do this because of various male relatives who have served in the military, including an uncle killed in the last days of WWI. After some back and forth over the next day or two, Davis suggests that Dan time-travels to the future to wait out the war (Davis’s mathematical research has revealed the secret of time travel). Dan agrees and goes home to arrange his affairs, which include writing to his girlfriend. He also time travels to the past to find his uncle before he joins the army, and saves him from death by taking him forward in time to 1964. After the pair arrive back, Dan abandons him there and goes to see the professor. Davis gives Dan three small gold bars for him to use as money in the future, and they also bury a copy of the first issue of Action comics, for Dan to later retrieve and sell.
The rest of the story is set in Dan’s future (our present), and is largely a comedy of manners:

People appeared at first to be interacting in the manner Dan associated with 1964-era parties. Boozing, flirting, laughing, arguing, showing off, telling jokes. But all the one-on-one interactions looked to Dan to exhibit a telltale shallowness, as if the attentions of the interlocutors were not fully present, not fully engaged. And, indeed, every few minutes each person would pull out his or her phone and obsessively surf to some site—currently, the big social media buzz centered on something called “Dawgbutt”—or dash off a selfie or read a text—or even play a few rounds of some video game!
With his Martian Vision, Dan saw a room full of parasitized Pavlovian puppets.
And when their conversations did sound authentic and enthusiastic, the topics revolved around what to Dan were the most banal and pointless threads, mostly revelatory of trivial, vapid consumerist fetishes. Who discussed anything of high import these days?
“Did you see Duck Dynasty Goes to the Golden Globes?”
“I just bought this great new skin for my smartwatch. It makes it look just like a Blake’s 7 bracelet!”
“You mean to tell me you haven’t tried the Mappuccino at Starbucks yet? It’s just like drinking a stack of pancakes and syrup!”
Dan sighed deeply and moved away from his corner to get another beer. One undeniably good thing about the future: the beer tasted much better. But did that compensate for all the ills?  p. 29

Some of the story is more serious:

The task was not pleasant. In fact, the surfeit of rancid history sickened Dan. He encountered a tapestry of nuclear meltdowns, genocidal slaughters, inauthentic recycled pop culture, social rancor, and crushed utopian schemes. By Dan’s lights—by the hopes and dreams of 1964—the past five decades represented a global litany of failure and disappointment, a catalogue of horror and insults to the human spirit, a trash heap of cheap thrills soon discarded, an abattoir of incessant suffering and slaughter. Humanity had landed on the Moon, then abandoned it, for God’s sake! Oh, sure, there had been shining moments that exalted the human soul, and some debatable technological advances. Medicine had come a long way, that was nice. Lots of bad old prejudices had been unearthed and extirpated. (Or, as current continued instances appeared to show, had they merely been driven hypocritically below public acknowledgement?) On the whole, the world seemed a mingier, more miserable, more frightened and harried place than it had in 1964. Less tenderness, more contention. Fewer vices, more bad habits. Less ease, more stress.  p. 27

At least future Dan does not have the stress of impending nuclear annihilation, such as in the Cuban Missile Crisis a couple of years before his departure.
In the last section he meets an attractive young woman who he suspects is his daughter (Dan presumes he eventually goes back in time at some point and fathers her), and then has to cope with the unwanted sexual attraction he experiences. He finally tries to resolve matters by going to see her mother and father (Dan thinks the latter will be an older version of himself). When they all meet, Dan realises (spoiler) that her father is actually his uncle, who hooked up with his old girlfriend in 1964. There is also some chat about avatars in this part of the story, and some hand-wavium about time-travel, neither of which made much sense to me, and rather spoiled the ending of the story. A pity, as most of this is quite entertaining.
Yeshua’s Dog by Tim Sullivan takes place in in Galilee almost two thousand years ago, and tells of the death of an old storyteller and carpenter called Yeshua. The story then flashbacks to when Yeshua was alive and a Greek traveller visited to collect stories for a book. After this setup—which details the prosaic origins of many bible stories and reveals that Yeshua is most likely Jesus—there are revelations about his early years as a prophet, and his subsequent imprisonment and release.
The final act (spoiler) concerns the death of Yeshua’s faithful dog Judas (this occurs after a period of pining for his dead master), and the dog’s eventual interment alongside him. After this occurs, a bright star rises in the East, The Dog Star, or Sirius, and the villagers decide to check the tomb to see if the dog is still there. They find a miracle has occurred, but not the one the reader expects.
This is an enjoyable if provocative look at Christian history (there is a note in the introduction stating that “this story is a work of fiction”), but pieces like this always leave me (an atheist, for what it is worth) cynically wondering if the editors and publishers would be as brave with transgressive stories about other religions.2 (And no, I’m not sure I would be.)
Nanabojou at the World’s Fair by Justin Barbeau is a tale about a Native American spirit/man who, after he is swindled by a forestry agent, goes to the 1904 St Louis Fair. There, after wandering around for awhile, he gatecrashes a show as a fictional “Indian”:

Slipping behind the marquee, he summoned his animal allies. “I need you to help me, my allies,” he said. “I need you to make me look authentic. First, I will need a horse.”
“I will be your horse, Nanabojou,” said the muskrat. And it became a muscled white stallion tossing its flowing mane.
“Now I need a headdress,” said Nanabojou.
“I will be your headdress,” said the grouse. It became a noble eagle-feather war bonnet with a long trailer.
“A tomahawk.”
“I will be your tomahawk,” said the eel, and it became a menacing weapon with a long wooden handle.
“Breechclout.”
“I will give you my skin for a breechclout,” said the catfish. Its skin became a gloriously beaded garment and its whiskers turned into sumptuous fringe.
When he mounted his horse, Nanabojou was noble, savage, and thrilling. He looked like no Indian had ever looked before him, though quite a few have looked like that since.
The show had already started, and a whiteman was in the sawdust-carpeted ring demonstrating his lasso tricks when Nanabojou rode into the tent with a blood-curdling yell. He raced around the ring shaking his tomahawk at the children in the front row, making them drop their ice-cream cones and scream in delicious terror. His snorting horse reared on its back legs, and no one suspected he was really dressed in fishskin, with a grouse on his head, riding a rather large muskrat. They were all too entranced with what they thought they saw.  p. 77

This is short and slight piece which recalls R. A. Lafferty and, like some of that writer’s work, doesn’t amount to much. But it is a pleasant enough piece anyhow.3
The Judging by Rand B. Lee is the sequel (it’s more like the second part of a serial) to Changes (F&SF, May-June 2013), reviewed in my last post. That story introduced us to a post-apocalyptic world where a Probability Storm has turned the world into a patchwork mosaic of different times, places, and possibilities. We also met the central character Whitsun, a lay brother of an order committed to bringing stability to those parts of the world they visit, a feat accomplished the “wealfire” they host.
The story picks up as Whitsun, his burro Francesca, and an uplifted husky called Treats penetrate a lethal (if you do not have wealfire) mist barrier at the edge of a human settlement. They immediately see a manned barricade and are interrogated by one of the men behind it. The first question Whitsun is asked concerns the recent Fortean-like rain of objects over the settlement:

“I regret to say that the collapse of the column was my doing, sir,” said Whitsun. “It was a columnar zone of nullified gravity that did not belong in our world, so the fire within me sent it back where it had come from. In so doing, all the creatures and debris that had been trapped within the column were released into the grip of gravity once more. I apologize if any damage was done on this side of the bridge. The fire within me took action before I could consider the possible repercussions.”
“No harm done,” said the headman slowly. “We were protected.” He hesitated, then looked Whitsun directly in the eye. “The fire within you, you say?”
“The Breath of God, sir. The same Spirit that manifested as tongues of flame above the heads of the disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ at Pentecost, and granted them the gift of understanding and speaking languages they had not learned.”
“And you believe you wield this Spirit?” the headman said.
“No, sir. We of my Company serve the Spirit. It does not serve us. We have no control over what It chooses to do or chooses not to do. But its action is always to heal, never to harm. To seek that which is hidden, to restore that which is lost, to bring harmony out of chaos, and to protect the weak when the strong threaten them.”
“Hey, Brother!” called a mustached rifleman in a red cap. “Could this magic of yours give me a bigger Juan Garçia?” The men laughed.
“Why, that depends, sir,” replied Whitsun politely. “Would your having a bigger Juan Garçia bring more or less harmony to your community?” The men laughed a second time.  p. 81-82

Writers take note of a neat way of doing a data dump.
After his preliminary interrogation Whitsun is told to strip, and Sheriff Montoya (Whitsun’s interlocutor) searches his possessions, finding a partially melted crucifix. Montoya pulls out his own nearly identical cross, and Whitsun explains he found the melted one at the site of many burned bodies. Montoya wonders what this similarity means, and dispatches men to investigate. Whitsun, Francesca, and Treats are eventually allowed into the town.
Here Whitsun meets Rosalie, one of the settlement’s matriarchs, and there is talk about the Probability Storm that changed the world, and Whitsun’s warning that there is another storm coming. Whitsun meets an old hippy called Hank, and at this point the story starts to drag a little. This is partly because some of the material from earlier in the story is rehashed, and partly because numerous other characters turn up (Hank’s vet son, and his pregnant and near hysterical wife, etc.).
While all these new characters are milling around, a volatile young gunman called Arthur arrives, pointing a rifle at Whitsun and accusing his of being one of them. This sets up the climactic events of the story, which involves Arthur shooting Whitsun. At the moment Arthur fires, Whitsun sees a vision of a woman called Sister Merit. She tells Whitsun she is like him, and was killed by the townspeople for her blood, which they use to protect the town. She says that they will do the same to him. There is also a suggestion in among all this that she may be responsible for the burned bodies.
More crucially she tells Whitsun to choose which version of the future he wants: one where he is killed, or one where Arthur is shot by Sheriff Montoya. Whitsun chooses the latter, time reverses, and Arthur is badly wounded as Montoya arrives and shoots. Whitsun then treats the injured man with his wealfire, the effort making him pass out. When Whitsun comes to he finds himself in captivity.
The rest of the story (spoiler) is about how he escapes what the townsfolk have planned for him.
This is a story that is vivid, original, and very entertaining in parts, but it has major problems, the most obvious that this story and Changes should have been published as a single novella. This isn’t a huge ask as together they run to around 31,000 words—doable in the large size issues of F&SF (it would be about 80 pages long)—and in any event the text could do with some trimming (chapter three of this story drags because Whitsun explains his backstory to everyone he meets). The other major failing it has is at the climax of the story, which has Whitsun making another timeline choice (I think) but one that baffled me—what exactly happens here?
These two stories feel rather like the rough draft of a superior unbifurcated work—one that could have been a ‘Best of the Year’ story.
Feral Frolics by Scott Baker4 won’t be one for cat-lovers, as it starts with an animal control contractor called O’Callaghan killing cats rather than taking them alive to the shelter. He does this because (a) they make less of a mess dead, and (b) he gets paid more, as they don’t then have to be euthanized. Unfortunately (for him) he is filmed killing a pedigree cat, and prosecuted:

[The] image was crystal clear. You could see the Persian’s shiny white fur and bright lavender collar, two and a half million volts of blue sparks crawling up and down the baton and crackling off the cat’s nametag each time I zapped it. When I saw the video on the big screen in court, saw myself grinning and giggling and almost hopping up and down with delight, it even creeped me out.
[. . .]
Because of the angle you couldn’t make out my features all that well, but my red hair, black clothes, and holstered red-and-black wildlife Taser, not to mention the truck and logo, were there for everyone to see. There was no way anybody could claim it wasn’t me, and my lawyer didn’t even try.
Instead, he went for an insanity defense that got laughed out of court. I paid him a fortune and the only thing he accomplished was making people believe that not only was I a sick, evil pervert, I was an insane sick, evil pervert.  p. 129-130

After his trial he goes to prison, an experience described with more black humour:

I lost my job and my license, which was no surprise, but I hadn’t expected to be sentenced to a full year in Soledad for aggravated cruelty to animals. The guards despised me even more than they despised everybody else, and there were dozens of crazy-violent cat lovers locked up there. Killing people was okay if you were a psychopath, but you better not touch their fucking cats. Even the Aryan Brotherhood looked down on me like I was some wannabe serial killer pervert without the balls to stand up like a man and kill real people. All of which meant I was lucky the worst that happened was getting raped a couple of times and getting the shit beat out of me whenever somebody was looking for an easy target.  p. 130

The story then moves forward a few years to the present, where O’Callaghan has left behind the notoriety of his crimes—then (spoiler) the furniture company he works for tells him to deliver a couch to a kitty-cafe. O’Callaghan worries that he might be recognised, but this doesn’t happen, or so it seems . . . .
The supernatural ending does not have the verisimilitude of the rest of the story (those green teeth, etc., are  little odd), and it suffers accordingly. If the author had treated the cat-humans that run the café in a more naturalistic way I think this would have been more effective. Still, this is quite a good read and, notwithstanding the unsympathetic viewpoint character, the enjoyment comes from O’Callaghan’s unvarnished and pointed observations about the world.
The Bomb Thing by K. J. Kabza opens with the narrator Blaine, an employee at Wacko Taco, talking about his buddy:

Mason is my best friend. He’s about 5’10” and 185 lbs., and with the buzz cut and the scar by his eye from that fight in junior year, he looks like a real asshole. And he is, sometimes. But then he smiles, and his whole face lights up, and you feel like everything in the world is gonna be okay. One look at that smile and you’d follow him anywhere.
And I have, too.
But I’m not gay, or anything.
Mason works at the university. He’s a janitor, but he’s like the janitor in that movie who secretly solves all those problems on the blackboard in the hallway. Mason says he could make significant contributions to science, if he felt like it, which he doesn’t. That’s one thing that’s so great about him: Mason is his own man, and you can’t tell him what to do. The fight he got into junior year? The other guy was a cop.  p. 146

The story carries on in much the same vein as the pair have their lunch outside the university while eyeing up a female student unloading her car outside the “Nerd Department”. After commenting on her physical attributes in forthright terms, Mason goes over and hits on her while Blaine watches. Blaine later finds out that Mason has arranged to give her a private tour of the Math department that evening.
Of course, the visit is far from straightforward, and it materialises that Phyllis, the “girl”, is actually an alien sent to Earth to stop the development of a time machine—but we only discover this after Mason picks up the device and accidentally triggers it, sending all three of them back to 1968. The rest of the story details Blaine and Mason’s adventures there as they hideout from Phyllis in the basement of a frat house. This is all told in a very amusing but politically incorrect manner (when Phyllis correctly identifies Blaine’s secret crush on Mason, he repeatedly protests “I’m not gay”). However, despite this latter aspect, the story manages to have its cake and eat it (i.e. it gives the appearance of being politically incorrect but isn’t really). In the final scene Blaine also manages to have his (not-gay) cake and eat it, but you’ll need to read the story to find out how.
One for my imaginary ‘Best of the Year’ collection, I think.
Another story for that anthology may be Golden Girl by Albert E. Cowdrey. This opens with a young woman called Doreen at the home of a man called Valois. She is supposedly there to catalog the old eccentric’s book collection, but really wants to find information about four recent deaths (three insect-related, and one of those her grandmother) in the neighbouring properties.
As Doreen settles into the job she befriends the butler and his wife and, one day, when Valois is out, the butler shows her the secret elevator key that takes them to the third floor and Valois’s private quarters. Later, after she moves into her grandmother’s nearby house, all the staff are fired—a result of her discovered trip to the third floor—and she remains the only one working there.
In the penultimate section the insect theme surfaces again (there are previous mentions of bee-keeping as well as the deaths) when Doreen (spoiler) explores the surrounding properties, and discovers it isn’t smoke coming out of the nearby chimneys but swarms of bees. Valois catches her snooping around—he has become younger since she last saw him—and then imprisons and rapes her, all of which is described graphically. We later learn that his youth—and his insect-like lack of pity—is due to a special kind of royal jelly the bees produce, and which he proceeds to feed to her. There is a biter-bit, or stinger-stung, denouement.
If I have one niggle about the story it is the fact that, despite the fact the pair are supposed to become more pitiless the more jelly they consume, Doreen still gets her grandfather out of the hospital at the end of the story to care for him. That apart, this is an atmospheric and immersive horror story, and one of Cowdrey’s best.
The Old Science Fiction Writer by David Gerrold is yet another story that has the writer as a character, and has a future version of Gerrold telling his grandson what things were like before the Big Think, what a science fiction writer was, and what they did. It includes modest little snippets like this:

“I wrote stories. People paid to read them. They gave me their money, sometimes a lot, so I ate every day and wore nice clothes and lived in a big house.”
“People really paid you for your stories?”
“Yes, they did. Once they even gave me an award.”
“No, they didn’t!”
“Yes, they did. And they paid me a lot because I was good at it.”  p. 192

How modest, but apart from that irritant it’s okay I suppose.
Hollywood North by Michael Libling is set in late 1950’s Trenton in Canada, and concerns the narrator Gus’s friendship with another boy called Jack—or Jack the Finder as he is known because of his knack for finding things. The descriptions of these childhood days are very well done, as is shown by the passage where Gus, who hero-worships Jack from afar, first encounters him:

Jack and I went to the same school. Dufferin Public. I could have told him easy how I felt, but I knew the risks. One ordinary kid declaring fandom to another is a bad idea any way you cut it. It is going to come off as weird. Smart kids nip the inclination in the bud. And I counted myself among them, until the morning my brain turned to Jiffy Pop.
I scoured the playground, locked him in my sights, and charged ahead. “You’re Jack,” I said.
“Yeah. I know.”
And without additional formality, my three years of self-restraint and meticulously cultivated anonymity went down the toilet in a sycophantic rush of verbal diarrhea. “I just want to say that uh how I think it’s really neat how you know how like how you find stuff like me too uh five dollars once outside the A&P uh I’m always looking uh Mommy uh my mom uh she said uh uh.” Mommy. I’d said Mommy. My mastery of the awkward was flawless. Kill me now.
His buddies were roaring. I was by far the funniest thing they’d heard and seen since Moe last blinded Curly.
“You got a screw loose or what, kid?”
“Look at that, Jack. You found yourself a little girlfriend.”
“You gonna cry? You gonna go tell Mommy on us?”
Jack laughed along with them, and man, I hated him right then like I’d never hated anyone. “Is that so?” he said to me, and returned to his friends and their football, jogging long and deep as he signaled for a pass, leaving me behind, alone, and, in retrospect, shielded from further ridicule.
I was never anything more than an average student. But when it came to beating up on myself, I was scholarship material from the get-go. Never took much. A minor setback, the slightest slight, and I’d agonize like nobody’s business. On those days, I knew to avoid Annie. She’d only try to cheer me up. Good thing, outside of school, we went our separate ways.  p. 200

Annie is Gus’s other friend, and in due course all three become close friends.
As Gus and Jack’s relationship develops we find out that Trenton used to have a film industry (hence the “Hollywood North” of the title) but that it shut down when the “talkies” started. More ominously, we also learn that the town has had a disproportionate number of disasters: a train wreck; an ammunition plant blowing up; planes colliding over the town; a landslide; multiple drownings, etc.
The initial arc of the story, however, concerns a set of caption cards which Jack finds (these are intertitles for silent movies, and are presented as images throughout the story). Initially the boys take the cards to the local newspaper reporter Bryan McGrath, who Jack knows well, having been interviewed and photographed by him on multiple occasions about his previous finds. McGrath reacts badly to the intertitles however, threatening the two kids and forcing them to promise to burn them.
What they actually do is go to the local dry cleaners and talk to a Mr Blackhurst, an acquaintance of Jack’s from his father’s diner. They discover that the intertitles are from films that Blackhurst made during his time in the movie industry (and which McGrath wrote for), and the boys learn about the town’s history of movie production. When Blackhurst comments that it was the fear that closed the studios, not the talkies, they are interrupted by Evie, Blackhurst’s Hollywood-beautiful wife. She makes Jack and Gus leave.
Before the two boys can make any further progress on the mystery (and while avoiding McGrath, who constantly snoops on them), Jack abruptly moves away from the town due to his parent’s divorce. He doesn’t tell Gus he is going.
A few years pass before Jack returns to the town and, after some frostiness, all three all end up as friends again. However, there is tension later when Jack and Annie become boyfriend and girlfriend.
The two boys then get jobs at the marina, where they start seeing Mr Blackhurst regularly (he commutes across the water from his house). When (spoiler) he dies suddenly, the boys are told by the dockmaster to return the boat to his wife. They are met by Evie at the house, and she takes them to a private cinema in the basement and shows them Blackhurst’s films: the mystery of the town’s tragedies is revealed.
After this there is an accident that involves the three children, and then a further section which takes place years later, when Evie dies and leaves Gus the house in her will. Gus is told to watch one final movie, which reveals the horrific events that really occurred during the “accident” that the three were involved in, the details of which Gus has forgotten or suppressed.
This is a very good piece which not only has a satisfying and original supernatural mystery set in a convincing milieu, but also has a coda that chillingly recasts previous events. Definitely one for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections.5

The Cover is a fairly bland looking effort by Mondolithic Studios, but the more I look at it (especially at larger size) the more I like it. (I note that no effort has been made to left justify the list of contributors’ names, or move them down the page to avoid overprinting the central image).
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint has reviews of a comic book superhero mashup, the third in Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘Jumper’ series, a children’s book, a werewolf trilogy, and what seems to be a novella/graphic story hybrid from Gaiman & Campbell. The usual random selection, in other words.
Musing on Books by Michelle West starts with a review of The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is the third in a trilogy—not the kind of book to start a column with I’d suggest (it’s an instant turnoff for those that haven’t read the first two). The next review is the fifth of Charles Stross’s ‘Laundry’ novels (although you can apparently can jump into the series here, as West has). The remaining novels sound like the usual fantasy product (spirits, souls, werewolves, half-goblin emperors, etc).
Films: On Novelizing Noah by Alan Dean Foster is a conversation between Foster and the voice of God where they discuss the prospective novelisation of the movie Noah. A treat.
Films: Coming Soon to a Tablet Near You by Kathi Maio begins with Hollywood business talk about theatre release vs. video on demand release before discussing the promising sounding SF adventure movie Snowpiercer (I haven’t heard of it, or the second more thoughtful film I Origins—I’ll have to track them down). Snowpiercer features a train that constantly circles a post-apocalyptic world, and which contains a microcosm of our current society and its social inequality:

The series of battles—most as hand to hand combat—that the rebels must fight are only to be expected in this kind of (literally) linear warfare plot. But Bong Joon-ho is such a skilled director that he adds a ferocious grace, and even a smattering of humor, to the proceedings; each bloodbath is fresh and gripping. It helps that each car offers a striking new backdrop for the next confrontation. From the gray landscapes of the prison car and the manufacturing car where a feverish worker produces the horrific gelatinous protein bars that are the back-car peons’ only form of sustenance, Curtis and his cohorts move forward to increasingly posh and colorful cars where the elite live. These include a botanical garden car, an aquarium car (and sometime sushi bar), a meat locker car, a schoolroom (overseen by a frenetic, pregnant schoolmarm played well by Alison Pill), salon and spa cars, and even a disco car more drug-drenched than the most hedonistic days of Studio 54.  p. 185

The film essays are of much better quality than the book ones.
F&SF Competition #88: “Anagram/Raga Man” (Results) has some submissions that aren’t bad (Blade Runner = Beerland Run). The new competition, F&SF Competition #89, requires limericks.
The Index to Volumes 126 & 127, January-December 2014 reveals four stories each from Oliver Buckram and Albert E. Cowdrey (Van Gelder does have his favourites), two and a half (one collaboration) from Paul Di Filippo, and two each from David Gerrold, Michael Libling, Robert Reed, and Tim Sullivan.
Curiosities: The Condemned Playground, by Cyril Connolly (1945) by David Langford looks at a book which contains, among the other “essays and squibs”, some funny satires.
There are the usual Cartoons, and Coming Attractions.

This is an impressive issue, with one very good supernatural novella, and several other good stories.  ●

_____________________

1. I learned this about Chan Davis from Di Filippo’s story:

In 1953 Chan Davis had been a professor at the University of Michigan—with an odd sideline as a writer of curious and accomplished science fiction stories—when he had run afoul of the House Un-American Activites Committee for his “subversive” leanings. He had lost his job, been blacklisted from academic employment in the whole nation, and, after some delay in coming to trial, received a short but punitive prison sentence.  p. 7

Davis’s Wikipedia page is here.

2. There is a joke in Steve Coogan’s movie Alpha Papa (which features the character Alan Partridge, an inept radio show host, chiding his sidekick Simon)—“Never, never criticise Muslims. Only Christians. And Jews a little bit.”

3. There is a (very short) review of a second ‘Nanabojou’ story by Justin Barbeau (Nanabojou and the Race Question) by me here.

4. The introduction to Scott Baker’s story states he last appeared in F&SF in 1986. His ISFDB page shows substantial activity during the eighties and nineties, but not much this century.

5. Hollywood North was a novella finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy Awards.
As the author notes below in the comments, the story has been expanded into a novel and will be published soon (Amazon UK/USA). ●

F&SF is still being published: F&SF subs/Amazon UKUSA/Weightless Books

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #707, May-June 2013

ISFDB link
F&SF subs / Amazon UK, USA / Weightless Books

Other reviews:
Lois Tilton, Locus
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Michelle Ristuccia, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Gordon Van Gelder

Fiction:
Grizzled Veterans of Many and Much • novelette by Robert Reed ∗∗∗
By the Light of the Electronic Moon • short story by Angélica Gorodischer (translated by Amalia Gladhart) –
Changes • novelette by Rand B. Lee
The Woman in the Moon • novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey
Wormwood Is Also a Star • novella by Andy Stewart
Directions for Crossing Troll Bridge • short story by Alexandra Duncan
The Bluehole • novelette by Dale Bailey
The Mood Room • short story by Paul Di Filippo
Doing Emily • short story by Joe Haldeman
Systems of Romance • short story by Ted White
Canticle of the Beasts • novelette by Bruce McAllister

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Kristin Kest
Editorial • by Gordon Van Gelder
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by Elizabeth Hand
Coming Attractions
Cartoons
• by Arthur Masear, Bill Long, S. Harris
Films: A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Mirkwood . . . Well, Not Really • by Lucius Shepard
Results of F&SF Competition #85
F&SF Competition #86: First Draft
Curiosities: Bull’s Hour, by Ivan Yefremov (1968)
• review by Anatoly Belilovsky

_____________________

I picked up this issue to read Andy Stewart’s novella, Wormwood Is Also a Star, the prequel to Likho, his piece in the March/April 2018 issue (which I had intended reading next). Apparently you don’t need to read the former before the latter, but as it is about Chernobyl, the subject of a recent (and excellent) TV drama,1 I thought I’d read it anyway.
The story takes place in an alternative world where the reactor explosion also occurred, but where there are significant differences:

It happened almost instantaneously—inexplicably, this dome-shaped anomaly swelled up on the day of evacuation to pocket nearly five blocks of midtown Pripyat. The Angel’s Tear. And what of the angels? At the center of it, like the nucleus of a cell, a cluster of eight children of varying ages was found huddled in the bathroom of their orphanage, alive and miraculously unradiated. And, as the military doctors and scientists soon discovered, impervious to radiation. The scientists still don’t know how the bubble came to be, how it works, or why the kids developed a psychic gift they did not previously possess (or if the events are even correlative), but the truth was this strange oasis existed in a radiated desert. The scientists found a way to monitor the bubble’s energy signature when occasional bursts of excited atoms bombarded it, causing the energy field to fluctuate, to ripple, become visible for seconds at a time but not buckle.  p. 125-126

The story deals only glancingly with the Angel’s Tear, focusing on one of the older children called Vitaly, who is now nineteen, and who is the lover of a woman called Mitka. She is a married journalist who previously wrote an article about the Tear and the children which upset the government.
Events revolve around the pair, and come to a head when she and Vitaly are summoned to a Kiev house party organised at the behest of her father, a powerful official in the Defence Ministry. Several elements come together here: the death of Mitka’s sister several years previously; Mitka’s deteriorating marital relationship; why the children have been given cyanide capsules (three have mysteriously committed suicide so far); and what Vitaly learns when he “reads” Yuri the husband.
The story is generally a character driven one (in some ways it reads like a Russian novel), although it has a satisfyingly convoluted mystery underneath it all. It also has moments of dark lyricism:

Mitka dreams she is on the banks of the river at night. It must be countryside, for there are no buildings nearby. There is no moon, only starlight brighter than she has ever seen, so bright that each star reflects in the dark, calmly flowing waters. And she is not alone on these banks. Kassandra is with her—not Kassandra as she looked when she was alive, but dead Kassandra, clothes soggy and torn, her dark hair resting mossy on her head. Only her face is less swollen, so that she is actually recognizable. Mitka’s dead, gray sister, a rusalka now, smiles and offers her hand, and Mitka takes it and walks toward the river. She has never been to these banks before, but when she puts her bare toe into the frigid water, she knows it to be the Dnieper, this ancient, long river.
Kassandra guides Mitka waist-deep into the water, and although it is freezing, the current feels more like a cold wind flowing across her legs.
Mitka follows her sister’s gaze up to the sky where a single star burns brighter than the others, this one greenish in color while the others are white or pale blue. She watches as the star grows bright and brighter, as it slowly falls, arcing down from the sky like a green flare with a shimmering trail.
This star is such a small, bright thing as it splashes into the river far ahead of them, but the water doesn’t extinguish it. Beneath the water, the point of light grows ever brighter, casts its sickly green hue upward. And then the river ceases to flow, and human-shaped shadows surface, all around. One by one the naked figures breach, dead, floating on their backs. First her father, and then her mother, who she has only seen in pictures, and then she sees Yvonna bobbing, and then Gregor, and then Bethai. The rest of the Witch Children follow, all except Vitaly. She searches for his face among the dead, but cannot find him. She splashes through the floating mass. Some of these she recognizes: an old primary school teacher, a grocer who used to sneak her candy. More and more faces from her past, and then some unknown. The still river is thick with them.
When she turns to ask her sister for help, she finds that her sister is gone. And in the skyline all around her, the distance is ablaze, smoking. One by one, the dead open their eyes.  p. 160-161

If this has a weakness it is that the SF parts of it—the Tear, the way the children are immune to, or suppress, radiation—are not explained and, apart from Vitaly’s use of his contact telepathy ability at the party, are background furniture. That criticism apart it is quite a good novella overall, and in places better than that. I look forward to reading Likho.
Grizzled Veterans of Many and Much by Robert Reed opens with an eight year old boy called Brad at his billionaire grandfather’s Aspen house at Christmas. There, Grandpa makes an announcement that he intends to Transcend:

“There is a process called Transcendence,” Grandpa said. “It’s very new, and it is not easy. But the people who undergo it…well, they gain certain benefits. Blessings. Skills nobody else in the world can enjoy.”
“Like Spider-Man,” I said.
My uncles snarled.
But Grandpa said, “Exactly. When you Transcend, your mind is improved in so many ways, and you turn superhuman, and nothing is ever the same again.”
Superheroes had physical gifts. But even an eight-year-old kid can see the benefits in being a whole lot smarter than before.
“I’m going into the hospital tomorrow,” he said.
Most of the room groaned.
“It’s a special clinic where doctors and their very smart machines will put these tiny, tiny hair-like tubes inside my blood. It won’t take the tubes an hour to join up in the brain. I might have a headache, but I probably won’t. And once those tubes piece themselves together, I’ll be tied into computers and some very special software.”
[. . .]
“I’ll live another hundred years,” Grandpa said. “My new mind will think wondrous fancy original thoughts, and maybe some of my ideas will make life better for all of you. Though that’s not why I’m doing this. I’ve already done plenty for everybody, in my family and beyond.”  p. 10-11

The downside of this process is that, although the Transcendees experience a subjectively long period of enhanced ability (Grandpa reads Moby Dick and writes a college textbook about Melville in one ninety minute burst) they only live a matter of weeks in reality. Indeed, he dies before his wives and family can visit the clinic, the news of which comes from a video avatar of the man himself, the first of many communications his digital remains make from beyond the grave. This particular message ends with a prediction:

“One way or another, everybody will follow me. What I am is just the first drop of moisture in what will be a soft, nourishing rain.”  p. 13

After this eccentric family beginning, the rest of the story follows an older Brad through a world where an increasing number of people elect to Transcend, and charts his adventures—which are mostly to do with helping his extended family out of various scrapes. The future portrayed is an immersive and intriguing one, as is shown when Brad travels to Africa to visit his ageing mother, who is living in a back-to-nature commune (and when the Earth’s population is down to two billion and projected to drop to a quarter of that):

Mogadishu looked prosperous, looked happy. There were as many smiles in the streets as there were faces, and I couldn’t count either, the city was so jammed with people. Children and their parents crowded me, plus a very few elderly, and there were armies of machines busily chasing jobs and hobbies and whatever else it was that our mechanical servants did with their neurons.
I walked through the crowds for an hour before finding a proper rental shop. I said that I wanted a car, except what I got was more a spaceship with tires. The grinning young office worker had been in town only three months, but he acted like the expert that I needed. And I needed nothing less than the best, he claimed. Driving through the interior could turn frustrating without warning.
No, there weren’t any explicit dangers outside the city. Unless I looked delicious to a saber-lion or cybernetic hyena, I was going to be safe enough.
[. . .]
As promised, the car was a wonder, and my drive proved interesting, what with the beautiful scenery woven around an endless boredom. Rains had been reliable for several years and rivers and grasslands were prospering in what used to be wastelands, and of course the wild game had returned, often wearing embellishments given by cold clever dreamers. The young highways were still in good repair, but the last economic boom that had swept across the continent, destroying drought and civil unrest, had also erased the farms that would have thrived in the new Eden. When every patch of ground is a national park, parks cease to matter very much. Each slice of this countryside was as splendid as most of its neighbors, and every time one more person Transcended, another ex-peasant from the wilderness could move into a magical city, buy an empty apartment for cheap, and settle into a robot-aided existence free of dust and dreariness.
Modern life was just the proving grounds for the greater Heaven to come, which was Transcendence. p. 26-27

Brad’s answer to all this—a world where the dead are more interesting than the living—is (spoiler) to create a simulated world and go back to that original Christmas announcement from Grandpa. There, once more an eight year old boy, Brad tells the rest of his family where they are, that there is no Transcendence in this reality, and that they need to get on with their lives. Then the simulated Brad goes outside and gets knocked down by a car, leaving them in their new world.
I can see that this closing scene mirrors the opening one, and that it provides a sense of poetic justice/balance to someone who feels as Brad does about the Transcendence process—but it seems rather quixotic, and doesn’t really convince. It also slightly spoils what is, at times, a occasionally dazzling story.
By the Light of the Electronic Moon by Angélica Gorodischer (translated by Amalia Gladhart) is a tall tale told in a café in between endless cups of coffee and glasses of sherry. One man relates to another the trouble he got himself into on a planet governed by a thousand woman:

“The next day I received another note, on letterhead but without seals, in which I was told that the interview was with the Enlightened and Chaste Lady Guinevere Lapis Lazuli.”
“What did you say?” I jumped in. “That was her name?”
“No, of course not.”
Marcos had put down the paper he had collected at one of the other tables, and now he was coming with the fourth double coffee. He didn’t bring me anything because this didn’t look like a special occasion.
“Her name,” said Trafalgar, who never puts sugar in his coffee, “was something that sounded like that. In any case, what they told me was that the interview had been postponed until the next day because the enlightened, chaste and so forth, who was a member of the Central Government, had begun her annual proceedings before the Division of Integral Relations of the Secretariat of Private Communication. The year there lasts almost twice as long as here and the days are longer and so are the hours.”
Frankly, I didn’t give a damn about Veroboar’s chronosophy.  p. 53-54

Me neither. I also found the mannered style tedious beyond belief, and struggled to get through what is a heavily padded story, but this may appeal to others.
Changes by Rand B. Lee is set in a post-apocalyptic world:

Nobody knew why the Great Probability Storm had struck when it had, fifteen years previously, or where it had come from. In an instant, millions of people the world over had vanished—faith-keepers and faith-scorners alike—leaving their clothing behind, in an eerie mockery of the Fundamentalist Christian “Rapture” predictions.
[. . .]
But nobody had any explanations to proffer concerning why the Storm had splintered the world into probability-zones, replacing slices of the known, familiar present with slices of past, future, or alternative presents more or less probable. Some mini-zones had been found as small as a meter or two across. Others—such as the zone that had changed the former Washington, D.C., back into a malarial swamp—had been large enough to affect entire cities (or in the case of Luxembourg, entire nations). And the Storm had continued to generate smaller probability-squalls at irregular intervals, sending ripples of Change throughout a splintered world that now resembled a mosaic more than anything else.
A husband and wife might lie down together one evening and wake up the next morning to find that one of them had been replaced by a stranger who possessed a complete memory of their nonexistent years of married life together. A Manhattan bicycle courier, zipping round a corner, might find himself splashing through the muddy streets of old Nieuw Amsterdam under the astonished eyes of black-hatted burghers. And sometimes the squalls, like the Great Probability Storm before them, wreaked Changes of Lovecraftian surrealism.  p. 66-67

The story concerns Whitsun and his burro Francesca as they travel through this unstable, changing world. Whitsun is a lay-brother of a non-religious order, or “Fair Dealer,” immune to the changes, and the host of “wealfire” which can stabilise, retrieve, or banish items from the probability squalls. An example of the latter occurs when Whitsun comes across an abandoned auto of a type he hasn’t seen before, and which the wealfire does not like:

Quickly, driven by the sudden sense of urgency that always gripped him at such times, the red-robed man pushed up his left sleeve. His forearm emerged, and the moon picked out the haze of pale scars that covered his forearm from wrist to elbow. Taking a knife from his belt, he clicked open a blade and made a small cut in his skin right below the wrist. A dark spot welled up, grew, elongated, began to trickle.
And the wealfire rejoiced. The tension in him was suddenly released, like an arrow from the bow. He felt the lightest pulse of pleasure, not the coruscations of joy he endured during a Judging. But the outlines of the vehicle trembled, and with a pop of inrushing air, appeared (without moving a centimeter) to dwindle, faster and faster, its ceramic white reddening as it shrank, as though it were receding at impossible speeds into the distance, not shrinking in place. And then it disappeared, leaving only three slim smudges on the desert clay to mark where it had been.  p. 69-70

After this, Whitsun and Francesca journey towards a futuristic looking city on the horizon. Before they get there a probability storm changes this glass and steel vision into a more prosaic looking Southwestern town—although Whitsun soon revises that estimation when he sees a number of crucifixes with burned bodies on them. They continue into town and see other odd things too: jackrabbits that have a malevolent appearance; a vertical column of what appears to be brown smoke (this turns out to be an null-gravity column); and a mist-wall that cuts through the town. Then they meet a pack of telepathic uplifted dogs. The greater part of the story concerns Whitsun’s dealing with the pack, and his attempt to get to the humans who live behind the (according to the dogs) lethal grey mist.
This is all entertainingly fantastic, and I was thoroughly enjoying the story when it just stopped dead in its tracks! I note that the sequel, The Judging (F&SF, November-December 2014), carries on exactly from this point, so what we have here isn’t a novelette but part one of an unannounced two-part serial. This is unfair to readers, and it loses a star for that.
The Woman in the Moon by Albert E. Cowdrey is a rambling monologue from a Professor Threefoot of the year 2077. Threefoot lectures his fellow academic, but unemployed, son-in-law about his own early career, marital infidelity, and a female colleague/lover’s discovery of the Selenite civilisation on the Moon. We further learn of the Professor’s plagiarism of her work after she is killed in a reactor explosion, and how the research material he used for his definitive book on the Selenites may include parts of a novel his ex-lover had been writing.
This is moderately humorous but rambling and unstructured.
Directions for Crossing Troll Bridge by Alexandra Duncan gives five short rules for doing just that. If there is a point to these 334 words, I missed what it is.
The Bluehole by Dale Bailey is set in the summer of 1982 and, for those who were of a certain age at that time, it will provide an immersive, Stephen King-like reading experience:

The soundtrack of that summer still thunders in my ears—Television, the Jam, the Undertones, Jimmy’s long row of vinyl. Summer days we used to lie roasting in his bedroom listening to Blank Generation and talking about girls. Jimmy was infinitely more knowledgeable than I was. I had my kiss. He had a hand job in the back seat of a ’77 Caprice while Darkness on the Edge of Town played on the eight-track mounted under the dash.
And I remember the day out on the stoop when he changed the course of my life forever. He handed me a Marlboro with the butt snapped off and a battered paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The smokes will probably kill me—I still snap the filters off and flip them into the street—but the books saved my life. It started with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect and the Vogon Constructor Fleet, and it went on from there— Silverberg and Bradbury, Simak and Lovecraft, the lights that would illuminate my miserable high-school years.  p. 175

The story tells of the narrator’s friendship with (and unrequited love for) a new neighbour called Jimmy, a good-looking, cool, and charismatic young man. Most of the story details their everyday adventures—shoplifting at the local store, playing games in the local arcade, going to the movies, etc.
There are three major events that stand out: the first is when they go to see the movie The Thing (they also find, read and discuss the John W. Campbell story beforehand); the second and third consist of two swimming trips they make to the Bluehole, a large lake reputed to be the home of a monster that has killed in the past.
There is a lot of engaging period description in the story, and the writer’s domestic circumstances provide even more complexity (there is a dead mother, an absentee cop father, and a drug dealing and hostile older brother). And on top of this are his feelings for Jimmy. This material is the story’s strength; its weakness, on the other hand, is the material about the monster (even though this is buttressed by much reference to Campbell’s tale), which (spoiler) finally appears in the climactic scene, attacking Jimmy while the pair are swimming, and pulling him under the surface (he does not reappear). This doesn’t entirely convince (its hard to see how the monster could kill people—even on an occasional basis—without the news eventually getting out, and what does it eat when it isn’t dining on the occasional human?)
A better than good story for the most part, but one that is flawed.
The Mood Room by Paul Di Filippo is a short piece that takes the form of an interview with a programmer involved in the development of Mood Rooms:

We called our start-up Total Immersive Environments, or TIE, and our goal was to build an artificial-reality chamber responsive to the user’s thoughts. Kinda like Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” right? You don’t know Bradbury? They burnt all his books? Ha! You had me going there for a minute.  p. 195

The ending involves the two inventors making love in the mood room whereupon (spoiler) the room joins in—leading to its subsequent marketing as a sex toy/partner.
This all very talky (it’s essentially a monologue) and the ending struck me as a bit puerile.
Doing Emily by Joe Haldeman is another VR tale (and immediately after the di Filippo story, too). This one has a university professor in a bar talking to a simulator engineer about his recent experiences as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, before making an appointment to be Emily Dickinson that afternoon.
This is an entertaining and engaging piece for the most part, with a number of lively touches, such as when the professor deliberately explores the program limits of Dickinson:

A young man in a blue uniform approached with an expression that in a less innocent age would signal the intent to couple.
Well, this age was not so innocent. Boy and girl both knew the game and the rules, though Emily had had little practice.
“Miss Emily. You look even more lovely than last time.”
“And when was that, pray tell? Grammar school?” My voice startled me, because of the female template, vocal cords vibrating too fast and in the wrong place. At his expression I added, “The heat is sapping my brain. When did we meet?”
“The Fourth of July celebration last year. There were many men in uniform; no wonder you might not remember a particular one.” He touched the brim of his hat. “Lieutenant Joshua Brilling, U.S. Cavalry, at your service. I was in charge of your father’s escort from Washington.”
“Of course I remember.” I touched his forearm, hard and strong, and stepped sideways, tipping the parasol so no one else could see my face. “You look like a nice man. Shall we repair to my room?”
“Pardon me?”
“Come up to my room and pleasure me relentlessly?”
“Miss Dickinson!”
“I know I’m not very pretty. But you have been chaste a long time, have you not? Marooned in Washington, on your best behavior?”
The alternation of expressions on his face was amazing to behold. He paled and started backing up. Emily’s quiet laugh turned into an infectious bray, and in a rush of postmodern narcissism I started to fall in love with myself.
“Come on, now; I am the virgin mother of modern American poetry. If you want, I could have Walt Whitman join us in a threesome. That would be a story for the boys back in the barracks.”
He froze and started to glow green around the edges. The goggle-eyed Roberto appeared, looking weary and anachronistic with his face mods and white lab apron. “Emily! Professor Tomlinson! You set off a parameter alarm.”
“Sorry. Just testing it.”  p. 212-213

Unfortunately, this promising piece unravels at the end with (spoiler) a deux ex machina malfunction that leaves the professor thinking he is Dickinson, and the men in the white coats taking him away.
Systems of Romance by Ted White is about a musician in the future who is over two hundred years old. He meets a young wunderkind called Cecilia-B at a party, she moves in, and they become lovers and musical collaborators. Later it materialises that she is more interested in his longevity connections than his musical ones (not everyone in this future world is offered extended life), and they have a fight about this that causes them to separate.
The remainder of the story (spoiler) has the narrator reflect on their relationship after she dies in a natural catastrophe six years later. He ponders what would have happened if she hadn’t left him.
None of this really amounts to anything, but it’s an okay future slice-of-life I guess. I note in passing that it reminded me of a 1970’s fashion for stories about artists or musicians.
Canticle of the Beasts by Bruce McAllister is an episode in the writer’s ‘Child Pope’ series,2 and tells of three children who are pursued by “Drinkers” (vampires) and other (secular) forces in fifteenth century Italy. The trio are the narrator Emilio, who is the Emissary of the spirit of La Compassione, and whose skin glows in the presence of Drinkers; the Child Pope Bonifacio; and Caterina, who is a reincarnation of the Madonna of Provenzano, and a seeress. They are travelling to see Emilio’s father at Lake Como for a final battle with the Drinkers.
This episode concerns their journey to a place of sanctuary, a chapel and caves in St. Francis’s forest. As they approach the chapel they have a strange encounter with a stag and an owl:

It was a cervo . A stag. What children called a “man-deer.” But it could not be. It was too large, too much like a dream, and yet it was no dream. A great man-deer with antlers that reached out like arms toward the oaks around it. I had seen a statue of such a creature in the abandoned garden of a Roman villa in Luni the second time my mother took me to the carnival there. The bronze had been touched by so many fingers that its nose and antlers were bright as the sun. I had seen little replicas of the same creature carved of wood or cast in metal and sold every Saturday at the village market, and had often wished for the money to buy one. I had also once seen a “woman-deer” in the hills above the village, when my mother and I had traveled by wagon to the witch who slept with lizards, hoping for a blessing for my rash. Yet nothing like this—nothing so huge and grand. Bonifacio and Caterina, it was clear, had never seen such a creature either.
It was then that I felt it: the tingling on my skin, on my arms and legs—the same tingling I had felt upon meeting Caterina for the first time. The tingling that told me she was indeed the incarnation of the Madonna. The tingling I had felt on the road from Siena, too, at a tiny chapel of blue tiles—the sensation that had made me decide we should take another road. I had come to believe that, just as the glow of my skin foretold the arrival of Drinkers, so the tingling meant the presence of something sacred, incarnate or not.  p. 239-240

The stag and the owl (spoiler) are the spirits of Saint Francis and Saint Clare, and these two protect the trio when searching soldiers, and then Drinkers, arrive in the caves.
The alternate world presented in this engaging tale convincingly combines both vampire and religious mythology, but the story is obviously part of a longer work—it starts with a fairly clunky data dump which synopsises earlier tales, and the ending telegraphs future events on the way to a final battle. It’s an entertaining fragment though, and interested me enough to make me want to dig out the other stories in the series.

The Cover by Kristin Kest is for Andy Stewart’s novella, and (I think) illustrates the dream passage above.
The Editorial by Gordon Van Gelder is a short piece that has information about new anthologies from the publisher of the magazine, Spilogale; an obituary for F&SF’s ex-managing editor (from 1979-1989), Anne Deveraux Jordan; and a fact check item about the first use of the term “computer virus” (Greg Benford’s story The Scarred Man from the May 1970 issue of Venture, probably).
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint covers a number of what appear to be generic fantasy books (and I don’t mean that in a good way—the content includes vampires, werewolves, ghosts, dead people, exorcisms, etc. There isn’t anything here that sounds remotely original.)
Books by Elizabeth Hand opens with a review of a new translation of a two thousand-year old novel, The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which she usefully compares to previous translations. The second book is a graphic novel, and the third a YA one.
(Insert here my usual complaint about the dissonance between F&SF’s review coverage and the fiction it runs.)
Films: A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Mirkwood . . . Well, Not Really by Lucius Shepard begins with a discussion of trilogies before launching into a less than flattering review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. There are a couple of other short horror movie reviews too (The Devil’s Business and Lake Mungo, which he liked).
Results of F&SF Competition #85 details the winners of the “Chick-Lit” versions of SF novels (ho-hum), and F&SF Competition #86: First Draft sets out the next one.
Curiosities: Bull’s Hour, by Ivan Yefremov (1968)
is an interesting short essay about an “unbook” from the Soviet era (the writer read it in the Kislovodsk public library in 1971, but on later enquiry was told that the writer had never written a book by that name . . . .)
There are the usual Coming Attractions, Cartoons, and Classified Ads.

In conclusion this is a somewhat exasperating issue, given the amount of material that is potentially very good indeed but which is let down by various failings (the lack of ending in the case of the Lee and McAllister stories; an ending that doesn’t quite work in the Reed; and unintegrated SFnal elements in the Stewart and Bailey). I note that the short fiction is much weaker than the novelette and novella length material. An interesting issue overall, though.  ●

_____________________

1. Chernobyl is a five-part TV drama that premiered in May 2019, and I highly recommended it. There is a Wikipedia page here.

2. McAllister refers to an unfinished 100,000 word novel about Emilio (the Emissary) in this short interview.  ●

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: F&SF subs / Amazon UK, USA / Weightless Books

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #735, January-February 2018

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Gardner Dozois, Locus
Rich Horton, Locus
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
John D. Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Patrick Mahon, SF Crowsnest
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Filip Wiltgren, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Fiction:
Widdam • novelette by Vandana Singh ∗∗∗
Aurealia • short story by Lisa Mason
Neanderthals • short story by Gardner Dozois
Jewel of the Heart • novella by Matthew Hughes
A List of Forty-Nine Lies • short story by Steven Fischer
An Equation of State • short story by Robert Reed
Galatea in Utopia • novelette by Nick Wolven –
The Equationist • short story by J. D. Moyer +
A Feather in Her Cap • short story by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Donner Party • novelette by Dale Bailey +

Non-fiction:
Galatea in Utopia • cover by Mondolithic Studios
Cartoons • Arthur Masear, Bill Long, S. Harris
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by Elizabeth Hand
This Way • poem by Neal Wilgus
Dear Creator • poem by Mary Soon Lee
Films: Get Off the Sink and Other Unheeded Commandments • essay by Kathi Maio
Plumage from Pegasus: Toy Sorry • essay by Paul Di Filippo
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: Up the Ladder of Gold, by E. Phillips Oppenheim • book review by Graham Andrews

_____________________

I’ve fallen behind with my reading of both this magazine and Asimov’s SF over the last year (I’ve been a time traveller, mostly in the early 1940s), so I’ve resolved to try to catch up. I figure that if I read one of each magazine every month I’ll be caught up by the end of the year. Good plan, but I note that it is the 22nd of January already and I’m already behind (that Asimov’s SF isn’t even started yet). Onward. . . .

Widdam by Vandana Singh starts off this month’s issue of F&SF with an evocative piece:

Winter is a memory he holds close. When he was young, winter in Delhi was a tender thing, a benign spirit wafted down from the snowbound Himalayas, bringing cold air and the mist of morning. Winter was shawls and coats, the aroma of charcoal braziers in the shantytown he passed on the way to work, his breath a white cloud. Later came the smog age, the inversion layers and choking fog that crept into rooms and nostrils and lungs. Today, the poison has not left the air, but winter is gone. Dinesh lies in bed thinking about this — the covers thrown off, he looks at the crack in the ceiling, the superhero posters on the walls. The mynahs are nesting on the ventilator sill, cackling away at some private joke; on the road down below, Ranjh the taxi driver is already having an argument with one of the drugstore delivery boys over some porn video not returned, and Dinesh’s landlady in the flat below is berating the cleaning woman, who is giving it back with interest. The pack of pariah dogs is barking in the park across the road — they will be at the house any moment, waiting for him to come down and share breakfast with them. Outside his window the jacaranda tree is blooming and it’s only January. Sweat has congealed in his armpits and groin. He thinks of something Manu might have said, had he been lying next to him, but Manu has fled, like winter itself.  p. 6-7

Set in a global-warmed future we quickly learn that Dinesh is a newspaperman by day and a trawler of the dark web by night, where he talks to rogue AIs who roam the net. His partner Manu is on the Moon running a mining operation. Meanwhile on Earth there are huge mining machines called Saurs who plunder the world for resources (this uncontrolled ravaging does not really convince, especially when some of it takes place in northern Sweden). Dinesh obsesses/fantasises about the Widdam, the World-Destroying World Machine, the WDWM.
Interweaved with this spinal story, there are episodes that feature other characters. One, Val, finds a rogue Saur on her tribe’s reservation, which later receives asylum in exchange for prospecting for water; the other, Jan, is the son of the creator of code intended to control the Saurs but which made some of them go rogue. This all culminates in an epiphany for Dinesh when he stumbles into a startlingly green garden after having managed to forestall a riot.
This is a dense slice of future life that is well written, if rather slow-moving and somewhat open-ended. It is also one of those stories that, while presenting its themes of global warming and resource scarcity, avoids saying anything about overpopulation—the first order problem.
Aurealia by Lisa Mason is the story of a not particularly likeable (borderline amoral) corporate lawyer who meets a strange woman called Aurelia and quickly marries her. The rest of the story is about their relationship, and the wife’s strange behaviour. It also details his relationship with a lawyer friend, and their infidelities while on business.
The story essentially revolves around a couple of lines of dialogue (spoiler):

“Your wife, Aurelia. What a pretty name.”
He beckoned a server over, ordered vodka tonics. “Yeah, it is pretty. Means the imago of a lepidopterous insect. A butterfly. You want to hear something weird?”
“I love weird.”
“Butterflies aren’t the innocent, romantic shits everyone makes them out to be. Flitting around. Sipping nectar from flowers. No. Butterflies would just as soon slurp muddy water from a rain puddle or the juice of rotting fruit or blood from a dead animal. There’s nothing sweet about them. See them fluttering in the sun? They’re looking for a mate. That’s all they think about. They just want to copulate and reproduce.” The server brought their drinks. Robert sipped greedily. “The chrysalis, you see, has a golden color.”
“A golden cocoon,” said the little tax attorney.
“Exactly. That’s Villa Aurelia. The house where my wife and I live.”

The story then references a piece by E. T. A. Hoffman to introduce part of the gimmick when it doesn’t need to, and I’m not sure it is directly applicable anyway given that latter story is about ghouls and this one ends (spoiler) with butterflies that feed on the protagonist’s blood.
The piece is overly long, and there is probably a shorter and more effective story buried under all the lawyer/banker bashing going on in this one.
Neanderthals by Gardner Dozois is an interesting if rather fragmentary story set in the near future about a hitman teaming up with a Neanderthal guard to kill the latter’s boss. Later, when they are having drinks in a bar, we find the hitman is a time traveller. . . .
This has quite a few plates spinning for a short piece but Dozois manages to pull it off.
Jewel of the Heart by Matthew Hughes is a novella in his ‘Baldemar’ series, and this one starts with an urgent summons for him when Thelerion comes under attack by two other wizards. Thelerion orders his henchman to don the Helm—a helmet that is the manifestation of a supernatural entity in this world, and which will only communicate with Baldemar—and seek help. The Helm is aware of the attack but uninterested, whisking Thelerion and Baldemar away to the Second Plane to put Baldemar through a test which involves him finding his way out of a maze. When this task is complete, the Shadow Man (the Helm’s form in this plane) attempts to set  him further tests but Baldemar refuses until he finds out what is going on:

“I have a job for you.”
“Surely there is nothing I can do for you that you cannot do for yourself.”
“That is not the case,” said the shadow man.
“I don’t understand,” Baldemar said.
“Of course you don’t. You are a mortal of the Third Plane. You can no more understand what is possible or not possible for a being that exists simultaneously on several planes than a fruit fly could imagine what it is like to be a mist sculptor.”
Baldemar had no idea what a mist sculptor was, either, but he kept that information to himself. Besides, the Helm was still talking.
“On your plane,” it said, “I manifest as a helmet. Here on the Second Plane, I am the walking shadow that you now see. On the Fourth, I am something like a tree made from something like fire. On the Seventh, I am a multi-limbed entity called an athlenath, though you would probably call me a demon made of very busy smoke.”
“What about the Fifth and Sixth and the Eighth and Ninth Planes?” Baldemar said.
“I cannot describe to you what I am on the Fifth and Sixth Planes,” the shadow said, “because everything to do with those realms is beyond your conception. And I do not exist on the Eighth and Ninth Planes because the one who fashioned me saw no need for my presence there.”
“Someone ‘fashioned’ you? Who? What for?”
“Better to ask ‘What?’ and ‘Who for?’ But I still couldn’t answer you in any way that you could understand.” The dull black shoulders shrugged.
“I was created for a purpose. That purpose is long since fulfilled. My . . . creator chose not to exert the effort to unmake me. But he did something else, something that I would like to see undone.”
“What did he do?”
“He removed a part of me.”
“What part?”
“I’m not sure.”  p. 96-97

Baldemar agrees to the task on condition that the Helm will save his master Thelerion and the estate, and his quest starts when he puts the helm down and it generates a new reality. In this new world Baldemar is eventually ends up in a giant house. There he finds the dead owner in a huge bed and a talking doll underneath. Baldemar and the doll leave the house and continue on the quest, and later come to a river and an ogre. Baldemar is killed by the ogre and finds himself back at the gate. Next time around he picks up a sword in the giant’s house and kills the ogre.
Baldemar agrees to the task on condition that the Helm will save his master Thelerion and the estate, and his quest starts when he puts the helm down and it generates a new reality. In this new world Baldemar is eventually ends up in a giant house. There he finds the dead owner in a huge bed and a talking doll underneath. Baldemar and the doll leave the house and continue on the quest, and later come to a river and an ogre. Baldemar is killed by the ogre and finds himself back at the gate. Next time around he picks up a sword in the giant’s house and kills the ogre.
This latter sequence illustrates this story’s biggest problem, which is that the bulk of it essentially reads like someone’s account of a video game they recently played, and is about as interesting. Apart from Baldemar going through the various levels there are other things that don’t work, such as the realities that Baldemar ends up in after the fight with the ogre. These include one ‘level’ where he ends up in a Western and is killed by three cowboys, and then one where he finds himself getting off a motorbike at a gas station and going for coffee. These completely obliterate any suspension of disbelief. Matters do not improve in the rest of the piece which, in short, involves Baldemar dragging the doll into the non-reality greyness that has been creeping up behind them during their previous adventures. The pair arrive in yet another world and end up in a castle looking for a jewel.
Finally, if all this isn’t bad enough, Baldemar wanders around throughout most of this (overly long) story following his intuition until he finds various objects, a process that makes the reader a mere spectator.
I’ve really enjoyed several of Matthew Hughes’ previous stories in F&SF—this one was a big disappointment.
A List of Forty-Nine Lies by Steven Fischer is a short two page piece about a man on his way to detonate an EMP bomb in a future totalitarian state. If you like the style (it is written in negative sentences that contradict the reality of the story, e. g., “My name is not Levi”, “I am not afraid”, etc.) then you may like it better than me. I thought it rather pointless.
An Equation of State by Robert Reed tells of aliens arriving in our solar system and setting up in the asteroid belt (or thereabouts). There they build a wall, or a series of defences around the solar system, waiting for humanity to break out from their planet.
While they wait, one of their number, a diplomat, goes to observe humanity and lives as a horse, a rat, and then a number of humans:

I am a horse because horses always stand near the fight. But I can make myself into any creature, including an upright beast that wears blue and talks about mating rituals and cooked birds, joking about his fear and his death when he isn’t casting long gazes at the green hills to come.
Why not be human?
Because the temptation to influence these creatures would be too much. I never stop reminding myself of that. Yet something is happening, some portion of my mind shifting.
“Time to move,” says the soldier in charge.
“Looking good, son,” says the soldier who likes horses, patting my flank with a flattened hand.
I snort once, with authority. I don’t want this man to die. Which is the oddest thought for an entity like me. Empathy for a drop of water and the warm, slow life inside that water. Another fifty wars need to pass before I begin to make sense of my impulses…these wicked, obvious thoughts secretly dancing inside my mind…   p. 150

At the end of the story (spoiler) one of his own kind comes to retrieve him but the diplomat refuses and turns rogue. The motivation for this wasn’t clear to me, and I didn’t entirely understand the ending—even if there is a subtext here about current US immigration politics it is a bit mystifying—but the slice of life section in the middle is quite good.
I’m beginning to develop a distinct dislike for Nick Wolven’s work (although I enjoyed his recent Confessions of a Con Girl in Asimov’s SF, November-December 2017) and rapidly started losing patience with Galatea in Utopia. This one’s about gender fluidity in the future (enabled by machines), and it starts with the narrator turning himself into a 100% XX woman at home before going out:

I end up at the Wrecked Room, which is not my usual crowd. The table in the back is almost full. Steve is here, doing his Great White Male impression. We call him Moby Dick because he’s a living myth. Blond hair, blue irises, right down to the F. Scott Fitz-all-American chin. Which to my eyes reads as a little desperate, but his mom’s from Iceland, so who can say? Then there’s a blazingly beautiful South Asian woman, except she’s not actually a woman, and probably not South Asian. I scan her TruMe earring when she pushes back her hair. Her — no, his name is Logan Ames, and he identifies as ninety-nine XY. (And while we’re on the subject, why do so many people stop at ninety-nine?) Tonight, like me, he’s decided to play against type. You can always tell the ones who are into role-playing. We’re the showboaters, the caricatures, getting off on our own otherness, whatever that means.
Also at the table are Charlotte and Dean, who are a little younger and tend to stick to safe zones. Charlotte’s always around seventy-five XX, pretty but not too pretty, red hair, light brown skin. Dean: same, except eighty percent XY. Most nights they end up going home together.
It’s the fifth person who gets my attention.  p. 160-161

This is a man called Alan who is apparently unable (for auto-immune reasons) to change his body to whatever combination of XX/XY he wants. They start seeing each other, and the rest of the story is an account of their dysfunctional affair.
If you are into issues of gender fluidity, identity, and relationships, then this may be of interest (although personally I find Wolven’s characters and their endless solipsism tedious beyond belief), but you will have to contend with the writer’s baggy, talking-heads, down-with-the-kids style that made this, along with the subject matter, almost unreadable for me.
It also has a scene that qualifies it for the 2018 Bad Sex awards:

As I draw him inside me, I imagine it’s his heart pulsing up between my hips, ticking down in a rhythm set by nature, the very same heart he had in his mother’s womb. I slide off and he fountains for me, spilling silver thread. And I know that something has been pulled loose inside him, that he is a little more perfect at this moment, a little more completely his unalterable self.  p. 167

Awful.
After a very mixed bag of stories so far, the final three entries manage to avoid adding another duffer to the total, and a couple of them are pretty good. The Equationist by J. D. Moyer is the first of those and is about a gifted child who realises his mathematical ability enables him to work out what people’s “equations” are. The rest of the story, which telescopes out along the rest of his life, shows how the people he encounters are actually more complicated than that.
It is initially quite dazzling, throwing out handfuls of passages that you want to quote:

When Niall was eight, he thought his father was a slightly curving line. Gus Skinner worked as an accountant at a large Seattle-based technology company, and watched basketball on television while drinking beer, and boiled hot dogs in a saucepan on Friday evenings. At some point, Niall’s father lost his taste for basketball and switched to watching tournament poker on television (while drinking Scotch), and cooked steaks in the cast-iron skillet for Friday dinner instead of boiling hot dogs.
His father’s life changed in slow, gradual, inconsequential ways.
Or so Niall thought.
Niall’s mother was a wavy line. At the peak of each wave, Lori Skinner started writing epic historical fiction novels, or made plans to remodel their house (and once began the remodel herself, with safety goggles and a sledgehammer). At the trough of each wave, his mother spent most days in bed and cried a lot, while his father heated microwave dinners and installed drywall.  p. 200-201

That night at dinner his father was absent, and his mother quiet and strict. Niall and Nathan exchanged puzzled glances. In the next months they learned their father had moved in with a woman named Monica, was smoking marijuana, and no longer worked at the Seattle technology company. The brothers overheard hushed conversations they weren’t supposed to hear, as well as shouted and screamed exchanges where the adults gave no heed to who heard what.
[. . .]
The most disturbing thing was that his father’s life was no longer a predictable square root function. Some unknown force had intervened. Either that, or Niall’s idea was completely wrong, and people could not be described by functions or equations. Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing.
His mother’s regular oscillations continued, though reduced in amplitude, maybe as a result of her new regimen of vitamins, yoga, and green juice. Their neighbor Mr. Markham began to visit, once to adjust the water-pressure valve in the basement, another time to ignite an extinguished pilot light. Afterward, his mother served Mr. Markham coffee and the two spoke quietly, the former glancing at Nathan and Niall nervously, as if the boys might attack. Niall didn’t mind having him around. Mr. Markham was a cubic function, gradual progress interrupted by regular reversals.  p. 201

The latter half of the story, where Niall learns that he can alter people’s equations, is more muted, but it is still a strikingly original and engaging piece of work. If I have one minor quibble it is the use of the word “brutish” in the last sentence. It doesn’t seem quite right given his final decision. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
A Feather in Her Cap by Mary Robinette Kowal is about a hat maker in some non-specific feudal world who has a side-line as an assassin. When she is stiffed by one of her clients, she enlists the help of a burglar friend to rob his strong-box. While the friend does this, she goes to her client’s chamber to leave a particular type of calling card. . . . Matters do not go as planned.
This is a slick piece, but it has a slight, episodic arc that makes it read like part of a novel or series and, by the by, has no fantasy content.
The Donner Party by Dale Bailey is a parallel world story set in a Victorian Britain where the upper classes partake of ensouled (human) flesh at the start of the society season. This is all seen viewed through the eyes of Mrs Breen, a lowly born woman whose self-made grandfather’s fortune bought her a match above her station She is now a social climber.
After an unexpected invitation to a “First Feast” for her and her husband, she finds herself at Lady Donner’s table:

What she would recall, fresh at every remove, was the food — not because she was a gourmand or a glutton, but because each new dish, served up by the footman at her shoulder, was a reminder that she had at last achieved the apotheosis to which she had so long aspired. And no dish more reminded her of this new status than the neat cutlets of ensouled flesh, reserved alone in all the year for the First Feast and Second Day dinner that celebrated the divinely ordained social order.
It was delicious.
“Do try it with your butter,” Mr. Cavendish recommended, and Mrs. Breen cut a dainty portion, dipped it into the ramekin of melted butter beside her plate, and slipped it into her mouth. It was nothing like she had expected. It seemed to evanesce on her tongue, the butter a mere grace note to a stronger, slightly sweet taste, moist and rich. Pork was the closest she could come to it, but as a comparison it was utterly inadequate. She immediately wanted more of it — more than the modest portion on her plate, and she knew it would be improper to eat all of that. She wasn’t some common scullery maid, devouring her dinner like a half-starved animal. At the mere thought of such a base creature, Mrs. Breen shuddered and felt a renewed sense of her own place in the world.
She took a sip of wine.
“How do you like the stripling, dear?” Lady Donner asked from the head of the table.
Mrs. Breen looked up, uncertain how to reply. One wanted to be properly deferential, but it would be unseemly to fawn. “Most excellent, my lady,” she ventured, to nods all around the table, so that was all right. She hesitated, uncertain whether to say more — really, the etiquette books were entirely inadequate — only to be saved from having to make the decision by a much bewhiskered gentleman, Mr. Miller, who said, “The young lady is quite right. Your cook has outdone herself. Wherever did you find such a choice cut?”
Mrs. Breen allowed herself another bite.
“The credit is all Lord Donner’s,” Lady Donner said. “He located this remote farm in Derbyshire where they do the most remarkable thing. They tether the little creatures inside these tiny crates, where they feed them up from birth.” “Muscles atrophy,” Lord Donner said. “Keeps the meat tender.”
“It’s the newest thing,” Lady Donner said. “How he found the place, I’ll never know.  p. 230-231

Mrs Breen later becomes friends with Lady Donner and the story charts the former’s upward trajectory until, that is, the next year, when the refusal of a Second Day invitation by Mrs Breen (she perceives it as inferior to last year’s) leads to a rift between the two and Mrs Breen’s subsequent social exclusion.
Running in parallel with this are encounters with the lower classes (who object to the upper classes’ cannibalism—“The Anthropophagic Crisis”), and various scenes with Sophie, the Breens’ daughter and one-time favourite of Lady Donner.
When the Breens return to London the year after the rift, an unexpected First Feast invitation arrives for them—and their daughter—from Lady Donner.
The story proceeds to an obvious but nevertheless compelling end.
There are obvious metaphors in this piece about class, capitalism, and inter-generational fairness that, for a change, actually added to my enjoyment of the story. If I have one quibble it is about the ending, which (spoiler) reveals that Sophie’s sacrifice was arranged by Mr Breen alone, and comes as a surprise to his wife. I think it would have been a more effective end if she, having already revealed herself as an entirely unsympathetic character, had colluded in the plan.
I’ll be surprised if this one doesn’t end up in quite a few of the ‘Year’s Bests’.

I’m not a big fan of this month’s Cover for Nick Wolven’s story. While it certainly represents the story, and is eye-catching enough, there is something off-putting about that plastic-looking face.
There are three Cartoons: I liked the Narcissus one by Arthur Masear, but didn’t like Bill Long’s slimming space suit, and thought S. Harris’s quantum car okay.
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint is nine pages long, the first four of which deal with two comic books, and the last page is about manga art (sigh). Books by Elizabeth Hand covers, amongst others, Amatka by Karin Tidbeck, which she obviously liked, but her review makes it difficult to fathom exactly what the book is about:

Amatka can be read on many levels: as a straightforward interplanetary adventure; as a satire on the communal experiment; as a stark warning against censorship; as environmental fable and a critique of colonialism. But mostly it’s a novel about the importance of words and imagination, and how a culture suffers and ultimately declines into fascism when those are repressed or forbidden, as Vanja learns toward the book’s end, when she dares to do “that shameful thing, to truly imagine that a thing was something other than it was.”  p. 83

I didn’t think much of This Way, a poem by Neal Wilgus which seems to be imaging a scene from a B movie, but thought Dear Creator by Mary Soon Lee, a verse rejection letter for universe creators, quite good.
Films: Get Off the Sink and Other Unheeded Commandments by Kathi Maio is a mixed review of Mother! It did not make me want to rush out and see it.
Plumage from Pegasus: Toy Sorry by Paul Di Filippo is a humour piece that contains an idea that should probably have been used in a story. It tells the tale of two kids who get MiniScribezTM set for Xmas. These are miniature living dolls of writers who can generate a VR environment of their books to tell their stories. Of course the kids eventually get bored with their toys, and the group of writers they have by now amassed are left to their own devices (literally). They go native:

In the basement, the MiniScribez™, now apparently self-actualized — whether from boredom or a programming glitch or some unanticipated synergy amongst themselves — were having a wild party or rave or orgy. Wild music issued from the rec room’s commandeered audio system. Many of the MiniScribez™ had shed some or all of their clothing. They had borrowed appropriately proportioned accessories from my GI Joe collection and from Kendra’s Barbie gear. Worst of all, they had somehow made their way to Dad’s bar and gotten into the liquor.
And so a drunken, topless Stephenie Meyer was hanging halfout of an upper-story dollhouse window and vomiting — very realistically, I should add, in tribute to the makers of the MiniScribez™. John Green was behind the wheel of Barbie’s hot-pink Zero-CarbonFootprint Convertible with Suzanne Collins beside him. They had somehow overclocked the little electric motor and were tearing madly around the basement at about twenty miles per hour, with bendy straws extending from their lips into a nip-sized bottle of vodka perched in the back seat. Homer and Mark Twain had stripped to their underwear and were locked in a grunting wrestling match. Neil Gaiman was perched, singing, on the ridgeline of the roof with J. K. Rowling on one knee and Andre Norton on the other. Scott Westerfeld and Lois Lowry were fencing with plastic machetes formerly employed by the bad guys of Cobra Command. Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were arguing over who had gotten the bigger advances, and seemed ready to trade punches.  p. 195-196

Curiosities: Up the Ladder of Gold, by E. Phillips Oppenheim by Graham Andrews reviews what sounds like a very dated techno-political thriller (“League of Nations”, “Benevolent Dictators Appreciation Society”, etc.), Up the Ladder of Gold by E. Phillips Oppenheim (1931).

This issue is a mixed bag at best, and one of the most uneven issues I can recall.  ●

_____________________

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #199, December 1967

ISFDB link

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Associate Editor, Ted White

Fiction:
Sundown • novelette by David Redd ∗∗∗
The Saga of DMM • short story by Larry Eisenberg
Brain Wave • novelette by Stuart Palmer and Jennifer Palmer
Cerberus • short story by Algis Budrys +
To Behold the Sun • short story by Dean R. Koontz
The Power of the Mandarin • short story by Gahan Wilson
The Chelmlins • short story by Leonard Tushnet
The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D • short story by J. G. Ballard +

Non-fiction:
The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D • cover by Jack Gaughan
Books • by Judith Merril
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Coming Next Month
Noise • science essay by Theodore L. Thomas
The First Metal • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Index to Volume Thirty-Three – July-December 1967

_____________________

This issue of F&SF is from early on in Ed Ferman’s editorship: I read it for a change of pace (it’s a quick read compared with those huge bedsheet issues of Astounding), and because of another project I’m working on.1
The issue opens with Sundown by new British/Welsh writer David Redd, who had recently published a couple of short stories in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds (the Compact Books incarnation). This was the first of four longer novelettes that he would publish in the US magazines around this time (two were published in F&SF, and two in the pages of Worlds of If).2
The story begins with a prologue about a travelling showman who displays a captive troll from the northern wastes:

He was exhibited in the open air, at night. One morning after the people had departed, just before dawn, the troll was visited by a wandering poet.
“This is not your world,” said the troll to the poet, as they watched a passing satellite and waited for the dawn.
The poet replied: “We are here, therefore the world is ours.”
The troll: “You live in our lands without being part of them. You make your own lands around you, and you huddle together within them, refusing to face the natural world.”
The poet: “We fear the dark and the unknown.”
The troll: “To you, life is light and vision. On your home planet the creatures must dwell in continuous light. Here, we live only in darkness. When the sun sets, all the creatures of the rocks come alive and dance, that the sun shall not rise again. We were born in darkness, and the darkness shall return.”
The poet: “There are eyes in the deep forests, glimpsed by travellers. At night the goblins come out and light fires on the hillsides. Do they too pray for the end of day?”
The troll: “All creatures pray for the end of light. One evening the sun will go down into the mists forever.”  p. 5-6

The story then moves to a dryad called the White Lady, who is watching fur-sprites digging holes down through the frozen snow and ice to a deserted human settlement in search of metal. While the fur-sprites are doing this the twice-a-day wind blows and the White Lady senses a human coming towards them: he is on his way to mine a node of living rock. The White Lady and the sprites stop work and leave for Homeland to raise the alarm.
Once they arrive there the creatures who live in Homeland discuss the matter and decide on their defence. The White Lady offers to go and probe the human for weaknesses, and an oreade, a mountain spirit, says he will go with her, as do two fur-sprites and a gnome:

Travelling so closely together, they could not help overhearing stray thoughts from each other, despite their rigid mental control.
The dryad gradually absorbed the basic personalities of her companions—the unemotional maternalism of the oreade; the earnest passions of Jaerem and Moera, the two fur-sprites; and the comforting stolid strength of the gnome.
Before an hour had passed she knew them as well as she knew her closest friends. This intimacy was a feature of all journeys made by a small number of people.  p. 11

It becomes apparent through this passage and similar ones that, although the story is told in fantasy language, this is a science-fictional world, more or less (the powers the various creatures have are paranormal ones). This is most obvious when the White Lady, who has hidden in the middle of the valley, probes the man as he approaches:

With a shock she realised that the monsters mind was almost empty of surface mental processes. Below the shallow layers of surface thought its mind was a dreadful thing. The finding of the living-rock was equated with the concepts of wealth, sexual achievements, social power and status. Ignorance rather than ambition had brought the human here. It did not understand the forces within it, and it believed that possession of the living-rock would satisfy its needs and somehow atone for the wasted years of its past life. Yet despite this lack of self-awareness, the human could react quickly when faced with a problem—
The dryad ceased her examination of the human’s hidden thoughts before they distracted her further. She should not be wasting time. She should be testing the human’s mental defences, not exploring its vile memories.  p. 13

Despite hiding herself with a camouflage ‘spell’, the human almost steps on her, and she launches an all-out mental attack, only to discover that it has no effect on him. While she escapes the two fur sprites distract the man by throwing snowballs at him, but they are shot and killed. The man recovers their bodies, and the White Lady senses that this is so he can eat them later: she and the others are horrified, and they follow him in order to recover their fallen comrades. When the man stops they distract him and retrieve the two dead sprites.
The story concludes with the group returning to Homeland. En route they meet the troll from the prologue and, as they approach the seam of living rock (spoiler), the man arrives and the story comes to a bloody and brutal climax, one which is even more jarring given the almost fairytale feel of most of the rest of the story.
It is interesting to compare this piece with Redd’s first two appearances in New Worlds. Whereas the first two could be identified as the work of a new writer, this one is considerably more polished.
The Saga of DMM by Larry Eisenberg is the first of his ‘Duckworth’ stories. In this one the scientist invents a highly calorific substance called DMM. It is later found to be an aphrodisiac, and also turns people into human bombs. This is all a setup for an okay punchline.
Brain Wave by Stuart Palmer3 and Jennifer Palmer has a college student telepathically contacted by aliens:

His first impression was that of a flashlight being flicked across the ceiling by some joker, or maybe it was the reflection of auto headlights from the street outside. But there it was, a little lost erratic light where no light should reasonably be. He could see it just as well with his eyes closed as open, which was odd. The apparition was faintly prismatic, in subdued technicolor. And it was somehow attractive, too—just as a lure skipping the surface of a stream might be attractive to a fish down below.  p. 36

The message now seemed to come clearer and stronger. “Brother Garyjones, do not be alarmed. We are (I am?) rejoicing at making first contact with any mind on your world. Praise God (Allah, Buddha, Osiris, Siva, Somebody Up There?) for this important breakthrough. All the best minds of our planet (world, earth?) are linked in this effort, amplifying each other and helping to project thought”
“Who are you?” Gary managed to whisper, still not believing.
“We are (I am?) speaking for the people (folk, denizens?) of our world, the second planet of our star. Will you, of your own free will, try to keep in mental communication with us, oh please?”
“Why not? Only I’m not sure I dig you.”
“Please to understand that we can only send thoughts. You must translate them into language, using your own vocabulary. Perhaps this contact may be of great value to both peoples as we learn to think together. It may seem very new and strange to you, but please be patient.”  p. 37-38

The rest of the piece is a light-hearted and inconsequential tale of what happens when he tries to talk about this visitation to his on/off hippie girlfriend and, later, a college friend. He gets no help from either of them.
After further telepathic contacts, and when his unhappiness becomes obvious to the (humanoid) aliens, they offer him the chance to translocate to a vacant body on their planet. The minor twist (spoiler) is that he ends up in the body of an infant.
This is lightly peppered with hippie neologisms, references to casual drug use, and mentions of the Vietnam war, etc., so the story sounds very much of its time.
Cerberus by Algis Budrys is, as Ferman says in the introduction, neither fantasy nor SF, but it is an unusual and original piece of black humour that fits perfectly into the magazine. It starts at a party of advertising execs where Marty’s wife is canoodling outside on the balcony with another man, something that apparently happens at all parties she attends (and with a different man each time). This makes the other party-goers uncomfortable but, whereas Marty appears oblivious to his wife’s actions, he always senses the tension in the room and habitually tells shaggy dog stories to improve the atmosphere.
The rest of the piece consists of three of Marty’s tales: he tells the last one (spoiler) after an accidental confrontation with one of his wife’s illicit partners, which leaves him lying on a broken coffee table with a shard of glass sticking through his chest. While the assembled group wait for an ambulance, they lean over Marty to hear his final story. . . .
An impressive piece.
To Behold the Sun by Dean R. Koontz has more than a whiff of Zelazny about it: the poem at the beginning; the tortured hero who is training to ‘cybernetic’ (mentally control) a spaceship going on a voyage to the sun; the beautiful ex-film star girlfriend who is ignored as he starts his preparation for the trip.
There are other crew going on the mission along with the narrator, but their function is never convincingly explained:

In the shadows stood the captain, without duties, trying to look like his job really mattered. We all knew that it didn’t; he was an ornament, a leftover from the days when men sailed the seas and lower skies.  p. 75

In due course (spoiler) we find that their role is as cannon-fodder. Bad things start happening on the ship while Jessie’s consciousness is out of his body and in the ship: an entity, something as “big as a robomech”, with “two gaping craters instead of eyes”, terrorises the crew while muttering “Not to the sun, my boy. Not to the sun, the sun.”
The stylistic and emotional froth of this piece doesn’t conceal what is an unconvincing story that doesn’t make a lot of sense. One to put in the “mad astronaut” file, probably.
Gahan Wilson not only has a cartoon in this issue but one of his rare short stories, The Power of the Mandarin. This starts with an alarming conversation:

Aladar Rakas gave a wicked grin and raised his brandy glass.
“To the King Plotter of Evil. To the Prophet of our Doom. To the Mandarin.”
I joined the toast willingly.
“May he never be totally defeated. May he and his vile minions ever threaten the civilized world.”
We drank contentedly, Rakas leaned back, struck a luxurious pose, and wafted forth a cloud of Havana’s very best.
“How many have been killed this time?”
Rakas tapped an ash from his cigar and gazed thoughtfully upward. I could see his lips moving as he made the count.
“Five,” he said, and then, after a pause, “No. Six.”
I looked at him with some surprise. “That’s hardly up to the usual slaughter.”
Rakas chuckled and signaled the waiter for more brandy.
“True enough,” he said. “However, one particular murder of those six is enough to make up for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ordinary ones.”

We soon find that Rakas is a popular writer who is talking to his editor about the Mandarin, the evil mastermind of his books, killing off the clean cut English hero. Rakas has committed this rather perverse act as he is a Hungarian émigré who has a chip on his shoulder from his time in Britain.
Later in the story Rakas uses a model of himself as the hero in his new book. He then finds that the reality of the book starts seeping into his life. . . . At this point Rakas’s editor (and narrator of the story) is involved, and discovers that Rakas is unable write a story that kills off the Mandarin.
There are a couple of reasonable twists at the end of this, and it is competently done but, for whatever reason, I wasn’t particularly enthralled. I either partook of the story too late at night, or there is a limit to the number of stories you can read where the writer ends up in, or is affected by, a world of his own creation.
The Chelmlins by Leonard Tushnet is an example of a what I think is probably a distinct F&SF sub-genre: fantasy stories based on Jewish folklore or culture. Avram Davidson published a few of these and Ed Ferman would continue that tradition throughout his editorship.4
This piece is about the foolish people of a Polish village called Chelm, and how the Chelmlins, a form of Polish gremlin, protect them from their stupidity.
After WWII the survivors of Chelm move to the USA (given that only six survive the Holocaust out of a population of two thousand you may observe that they need more able Chelmlins) and eventually form a corporation like RAND to sell ideas and inventions:

Edward Everett [had] the first idea. “Listen, brothers,” he said, “why don’t we make big bubbles out of plastic to fit over the electric light bulbs so bugs won’t come to them. Bugs are attracted by the light, everyone knows, so let us make black bubbles and the bugs won’t see the light.”
“Brilliant! A genius! Another Edison!” Acclaim was general. HEHE pooled the resources of its members, got a manufacturer to make thousands of the black plastic bubbles,—and then discovered that no one wanted insect-free non-illumination. Here the chelmlins took over. A toy merchant bought the entire stock (at a profit for HEHE, it goes without saying), made eye holes in the bubbles, and marketed them as children’s space pirate helmets.  p. 109

And so it continues. Like the Palmer story, this is a pleasant enough piece, but there’s just not much of a story here.
The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D by J. G. Ballard is one of his ‘Vermilion Sands’ stories and it gets off to a cracking start:

All summer the colud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West. The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the rising air above the sandreefs was topped by swan-like clumps of fair-weather cumulus.
Lifted on the shoulders of the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve sea-horses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film-stars, lizards and exotic birds. As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun. Of all the cloud-sculptures we were to carve, the strangest were the portraits of Leonora Chanel.
As I look back to that afternoon last summer when she first came in her white limousine to watch the cloud-sculptors of Coral D, I know we barely realised how seriously this beautiful but insane woman regarded the sculptures floating above her in that calm sky. Later her portraits, carved in the whirlwind, were to weep their storm-rain upon the corpses of their sculptors.  p. 113

The story then flashbacks three months to Major Parker, the narrator, arriving at Vermillion Sands: he is a disabled pilot, and takes over a disused studio where he starts manufacturing kites and gliders. Later, while he is flying them and a sudden gale starts, two men appear and help him recover his fleet. They are a malformed dwarf called Petit Manuel, and another man called Nolan. Manuel suggests using the larger glider the narrator is building, along with silver iodide, to “carve clouds”:

So were formed the cloud-sculptors of Coral D. Although I considered myself one of them, I never flew the gliders, but I taught Nolan and little Manuel to fly, and later, when he joined us, Charles Van Eyck. Nolan had found this blond-haired pirate of the cafe terraces in Vermilion Sands, a laconic teuton with droll eyes and a weak mouth, and brought him out to Coral D when the season ended and the well-to-do tourists and their nubile daughters returned to Red Beach. “Major Parker—Charles Van Eyck. He’s a head-hunter,” Nolan commented with cold humour, “—maidenheads.”
Despite their uneasy rivalry I realised that Van Eyck would give our group a useful dimension of glamour.
From the first I suspected that the studio in the desert was Nolan’s, and that we were all serving some private whim of this dark-haired solitary. At the time, however, I was more concerned with teaching them to fly—first on cable, mastering the updraughts that swept the stunted turret of Coral A, smallest of the towers, then the steeper slopes of B and C, and finally the powerful currents of Coral D. Late one afternoon, when I began to wind them in, Nolan cut away his line. The glider plummeted onto its back, diving down to impale itself on the rock spires. I flung myself to the ground as the cable whipped across my car, shattering the windshield. When I looked up, Nolan was soaring high in the tinted air above Coral D.
The wind, guardian of the coral towers, carried him through the islands of cumulus that veiled the evening light.
As I ran to the winch, the second cable went, and little Manuel swerved away to join Nolan. Ugly crab on the ground, in the air the hunchback became a bird with immense wings, outflying both Nolan and Van Eyck. I watched them as they circled the coral towers, and then swept down together over the desert floor, stirring the sand-rays into soot-like clouds. Petit Manuel was jubilant. He strutted around me like a pocket Napoleon, contemptuous of my broken leg, scooping up handfuls of broken glass and tossing them over his head like bouquets to the air.  p. 114-115

The three of them start displaying their cloud-sculpting skills to spectators who arrive in their cars:

Nolan turned from the cloud, his wings slipping as if unveiling his handiwork. Illuminated by the afternoon sun was the serene face of a three-year old child. Its wide cheeks framed a placid mouth and plump chin. As one or two people clapped, Nolan sailed over the cloud and rippled the roof into ribbons and curls.
However, I knew that the real climax was yet to come. Cursed by some malignant virus, Nolan seemed unable to accept his own handiwork, always destroying it with the same cold humour. Petit Manuel had thrown away his cigarette, and even Van Eyck had turned his attention from the women in the cars.
Nolan soared above the child’s face, following like a matador waiting for the moment of the kill. There was silence for a minute as he worked away at the cloud, and then someone slammed a car door in disgust.
Hanging above us was the white image of a skull.
The child’s face, converted by a few strokes, had vanished, but in the notched teeth and gaping orbits, large enough to hold a car, we could still see an echo of its infant features. The spectre moved past us, the spectators frowning at this weeping skull whose rain fell upon their faces.  p. 116-117

After this Leonora Chanel’s secretary hire them to perform at Lagoon West, with the condition that they are only allowed to create images of their employer, a famous movie star.
The remainder of the story has a number of threads: there is the initial show put on for Leonara and her guests; she and Nolan (apparently an old lover) later fall out; Van Eyck, sensing an opportunity for another conquest, moves in. The climax comes when (spoiler) the storm clouds make the final performance too dangerous, but Leonora goads Petit Manuel into trying anyway. His glider disintegrates and he dies, whereupon Nolan takes to the air and guides a nearby tornado over the villa. Leonara and Van Eyck are later found dead the wreckage.
There is some amazing imagery in this extraordinarily imaginative story but towards the end it becomes a rather too straightforward story of jealousy and revenge—I never thought I’d ever complain about a story of Ballard’s being a little too mechanistic. I’m quibbling here though: it is a striking piece and one I would expect to see if the ‘Year’s Bests’ anthologies.

The convincingly Daliesque Cover is for Ballard’s story (which mentions that artist) and is, I think, one of Jack Gaughan’s better works.
Books, by Judith Merril, is largely taken up by a long and interesting review of Dangerous Visions by Harlan Ellison, and it starts by noting that Ellison’s ‘New Thing’ is not the same as hers or Moorcock’s, and is “characterized by pyrotechnic style and shock content”. She then mentions the anthology’s original raison d’etre of publishing “taboo” stories and mentions an earlier attempt of her own some years before, and how nearly every story in that collection was later published anyway. From this Merril learned there was probably no such thing as a (good) unpublishable story:

Presumably, Ellison made the same discovery I did, because the emphasis in his introduction to the completed anthology is much more on his concept of The New Thing than on the Dangerous Visions idea.
And certainly the large majority of the inclusions would seem quite in place, for instance, in the pages of this magazine.  p. 28-29

She then notes that there are only half-a-dozen stories out of the thirty-three that might have had to go outside the American SF magazines for publication (“the Emshwiller, Bunch, and Sladek stories; possibly Delany’s, Ballard’s, and Spinrad’s.”)
She then goes on to observe that the anthology does contain dangerous visions and that:

The Dangerous Vision has become a commonplace of our society; the forecasting of such visions is one of the chief roles science fiction has played in the past twenty or thirty years. Yet this book, which began as a direct request to presumably stifled authors to voice their most terrifying, shocking, or extreme viewpoints, is (with two—well, perhaps three—exceptions) most effective in those stories which concentrate on literary values and technical excellence, rather than idea content.  p. 29

She then mentions her dislike of the introductions (and how she ignored them until she finished the fiction):

Even more than the editorial selections, the extensive and often painfully personal and detailed introductions confirm the evidence of Ellison’s earlier collections of his own work: as writer and editor, he is a man of vision, boldness, determination, generous loyalty, intense sensitivity, strong beliefs, unbelievable egocentricity, and very nearly complete lack of taste.
With any reasonable exercise of editorial judgement, one standard length anthology could have been selected from this giant, to match and perhaps surpass any previous collections of imaginative fiction.
As it stands, the total wordage breaks down into four roughly equivalent portions: one quarter is composed of twelve titles ranging from good to superb; one quarter consists of four stories of remarkable, but flawed, quality—each or any of which should have been susceptible to marked improvement with discerning criticism; one quarter are fair-to-good stories, which would neither grace nor quite disgrace an average-good issue of F&SF; and one quarter (almost exactly by length) is composed of commentary by Ellison or about him (including Asimov’s forewards and the personal material on Ellison contained in some authors’ comments)—comprising one of the least pleasant autobiographies I have ever been unable to stop reading.  p. 30-31

Merril identifies Delany’s Aye, and Gomorrah as the standout story and, after listing the rest of the best, she provides detailed commentary on Philip José Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage:

[This] is perhaps the one story in the book that would not have been published anywhere else—in its present form. It is certainly one of the most entertaining—and least “dangerous”—selections, and it suffers only from the fact that it is not quite good enough to sustain its highly specialized humor for more than 30,000 words. It is a cheerful, careening combination of neo-Joycean word-gaming and science-fiction imagery, homespun philosophy, homeloomed psychiatry, and witty comment on the contemporary scene—particularly in the arts and academia. But so much of the humor is (Joycean or s-f) in-group, that I suspect there is a relatively small audience eager for such a large dose. I myself laughed delightedly for 10,000 words, grew quieter for another ten, and then put it down to finish—as a duty—later on. (Turned out the only plot point was a lovely pun on Finnegan’s Wake.)
Some incisive editing might have done a great deal, also, for the stories by Robert Silverberg and Frederik Pohl: both of these seemed to me to be written with an emotional involvement, and on a level of prose, right at the (rarely touched) top of both writers considerable powers—and both concluded with endings that seemed so feeble by comparison as to be virtually unrelated to the body of the story.  p. 32

She continues by commenting on Sturgeon’s story, and its weak ending, before finishing with this:

Summing up, then—I am afraid Ellison’s New Thing resembles to a great degree the same New Thing Anthony Boucher and J. F. McComas brought into s-f in 1949: the not-so-radical-really notion that literary standards could and should be applied to science fiction. A good thing, but—
But, among other things, it needs an outstanding editor to use that principle as the main line of guidance—an editor with taste.  p. 32-33

An interesting—an obviously opinionated—review, but one worth reading in its entirety.
There are short reviews of a couple of other books at the end of the column, plus this about Day of the Minotaur by Thomas Burnett Swann:

Classical mythology has cluttered up the pages of so many recent ponderous-philosophical s-f novels, and magical trappings have become routine accessories for so many shabby medievalist-heroic romances (flourishing for some reason under the “science-fiction” label), that Thomas Burnett Swann’s Day of the Minotaur (Ace, 40ȼ) came as a complete surprise. Imaginative, entertaining, and original, it sometimes approaches a Mary Renault level of sophistication in prose and concept, and conveys throughout a color and charm reminiscent of the first-viewing impact of Disney’s Fantasia.  p. 34

Gahan Wilson’s Cartoons are usually hit or miss for me—usually, and in this case, the latter.
Coming Next Month has news about a significant event:

Next month will mark our 200th issue, a milestone which we think is certainly deserving of some small celebration. A proposal to fly staff and subscribers to Acapulco for a weekend has been temporarily shelved. (We are told that the weather is uncertain.)  p. 95

Stories by Richard McKenna, Robert Sheckley & Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Fritz Leiber and Lloyd Biggie, Jr., and Sonya Dorman are promised.
Noise is an interesting short-short science essay by Theodore L. Thomas:

By checking the hearing of the Meban tribe in Africa, a quiet-living bunch if there ever was one, the scientists have about established that people’s hearing does not get worse simply because they grow older. The din of modern living does it.
What we need, then, are tunable ear plugs. Our skills at microminiaturization could develop an ear plug that would pass only those sounds we choose to hear. The ear plugs could be set for conversation or music, or whatever. Truck and traffic noise could be reduced to a susurrus. There would be no more shouting and yelling because no one would hear it. The shriek of jet aircraft and the sonic boom would no longer be with us. At night the white noise would put everyone to sleep who wanted to sleep. People’s dispositions around the world couldn’t help but improve.  p. 68

The First Metal by Isaac Asimov is a science essay about the metals that were known to the ancients. Although these essays are often dull, there is usually an interesting fact or two to be found:

The Latin word for “lead” is “plumbum,” and now you can see what a “plumb line” must be. Since you would attach a piece of lead to a line you wanted to throw into the ocean and have sink as far as possible, you see what “to plumb the depths” means.
Again, since the ancients believed that the heavier an object the faster it fell, it seemed to them that a lead weight would fall faster than the same-sized weight made of other less dense materials. So you see what “to plummet downward” means.
Finally, since a lead weight makes a line completely vertical, there grew to be a tie-in between lead and completeness, so that now you see why, in a Western movie, the old rancher says to the young schoolmarm, “By dogies, Ah’m shore plumb tuckered out, missie.” (At least you know why he says it if you know what the other words mean.)  p. 104

Index to Volume Thirty-Three — July-December 1967 is another of F&SF’s very useful indexes (or at least they were before the likes of ISFDB and other internet resources). A quick skim shows that Ferman was friendlier to British writers than most US editors: in this six month period he published stories by Hilary Bailey, J. G. Ballard (x2), John Brunner, George Collyn (a Moorcock New Worlds regular), J. T. McIntosh, David Redd, & Josephine Saxton.

Not a bad issue.  ●

_____________________

1. I’m just finishing an interview with David Redd, and it will appear here sometime next month.

2. David Redd’s first two sales were to Micheal Moorcock at New Worlds, Prisoners of Paradise (New Worlds #167, October 1966) and The Way to London Town (New Worlds #164, July 1966): they appeared in reverse order of purchase (this information was provided in an answer for the upcoming interview). The other three novelettes subsequently sold to the American magazine market were: Sunbeam Caress (If, March 1968), A Quiet Kind of Madness (F&SF, May 1968), and The Frozen Summer (If, March, 1969). Redd’s ISFDB page is here.

3. Stuart Palmer appeared in the first issue of F&SF with A Bride for the Devil. His ISFDB page is here.

4. It was Avram Davidson who published Tushnet’s first story in F&SF. Most of the rest of his stories were published there too but he also appeared in Vertex magazine and New Dimensions #1. His ISFDB page is here. I note in passing that the very first issue of F&SF I bought, the July 1976 issue, contained another story about Jewish folklore, Mel Gilden’s The Golem (reviewed here). His daughter (or granddaughter), Rebecca Tushnet, has kindly provided copies of his stories on her website.  ●

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #734, November-December 2017

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
C. D. Lewis, Tangent Online
John D. Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Patrick Mahon, SF Crowsnest
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Fiction:
Attachments • novelette by Kate Wilhelm ∗∗∗
Carbo • novelette by Nick Wolven
Big Girl • short story by Meg Elison +
Stillborne • novella by Marc Laidlaw
By the Red Giant’s Light • short story by Larry Niven
Marley and Marley • short story by J. R. Dawson
Water God’s Dog • novelette by R. S. Benedict
Racing the Rings of Saturn • novelette by Ingrid Garcia
Whatever Comes After Calcutta • novelette by David Erik Nelson

Non-fiction:
Attachments • cover by Kent Bash
Down at the Goblin Boutique • poem by John W. Sexton
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Musing on Books • by Michelle West
Cartoons • by Danny Shanahan, Bill Long, Nick Downes, S. Harris, Arthur Masear
The Science of Invisibility • by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
It’s a Wrap • film review by David J. Skal
F&SF Competition #94: “Explain a Plot Badly”
F&SF Competition #95: “Titles the Rearrange”

Coming Attractions
Index to Volumes 132 & 133
Curiosities: A Christmas Garland by Max Beerbohm (1912)
• review by David Langford

Attachments by Kate Wilhelm is a traditional ghost story about an American woman visiting Britain. While she is visiting an old ruin with a friend, two ghosts attach themselves to her. Back in America one of them explains their different agendas:

He stood up, removed his hat, and bowed slightly to me. “Let me introduce us. I am Major Timothy S. Fitzpatrick. I succumbed to a heart attack on October eight, in nineteen aught one when I was seventy years of age. This person is Robert Moleno, who died in nineteen fifty-five when he was twenty-five years of age. And I repeat, we mean you no harm. But we do require your assistance.”
“I didn’t just die,” Robert said. “I was fucking murdered. Wade Orso killed me.”
“You started it,” the major said. “You pushed him; he pushed back and you fell down the stairs and struck your head. It was entirely your fault.”
Robert clenched his fists. I could see the knife under one of them. “Then he took Alice away. Making googly eyes at her, holding her hand up a little step, teaching her French, and she let him. She was my girl and she let him.” He looked murderous, glaring at the major, who ignored his malevolent gaze.
Robert turned to face me, a little more transparent than just a minute before, as if he were dissolving. “We were going to spend a couple of months riding our bikes, England, France, even Italy, and Wade butted in, invited himself along. Hot to trot with Alice. But she was my girl. You’re going to help me find her, teach her a lesson.”
“That’s all he can think of,” the major said. “Brutish revenge on a woman who is in her eighties if she’s alive.”
“She’s alive,” Robert muttered. “And she needs to be taught a lesson. Fucking bitch.” p. 14

Fitzpatrick, meanwhile, needs a fortune dug up, and her help in liberating the other ghosts from the ruin. The rest of the story plays out entertainingly, with a stalker ex-husband in the mix. If there is one weakness it is (spoiler) the ending, where the remaining ghosts easily attach themselves to the cows driven through the ruin, after which they disappear. Why wouldn’t they have done that with the visitors over the years?
Oh, and in nitpicker’s corner:

According to the dashboard information panel, it was seventy-six degrees outside. p. 10

Unlikely. I haven’t been in a car in the UK that has had a Fahrenheit rather than Celsius display in years.
Carbo by Nick Wolven concerns a different kind of haunting: Jim’s AI-controlled car is hacked by a friend and later starts acting like an automotive sleazeball, informed as it is by the owner’s internet porn history:

I sat in the passenger seat, waving at the mapping interface, which as usual had become a geography of obscenities. Two hundred strip clubs were within driving distance. It was almost lunchtime, and there were three Hooters knock-offs nearby, and unless I shouted my override, Carbo would take the liberty of swinging by. Lingerie stores, modeling pageants, art galleries…if there was a naked lady within fifty miles, or a chance of looking at a naked lady, or even a chance of standing near a scantily clad mannequin, my car wanted to drive to it.
I couldn’t stop it. I could hardly control it. If I didn’t exercise constant diligence, Carbo would have turned my entire day into a round of lubricious possibilities. It wasn’t just the route-finder. Sexy commercials played while I drove. Carbo slowed down for salacious billboards. He insisted on photosnapping titillating attractions and filing them away for later review. p. 51-52

After various incidents (including what seems like a completely random trip to Mexico, which ends up with Jim and his friend being offered a radio pulse cannon by some dodgy dudes) his mother helps him purge the cars programming.
I didn’t like anything about this story: the narrative is rambling and baggy; it is unconvincing; the narrator’s porn consuming behaviour is puerile; and, finally, the idea of getting your AI-expert mother to sort the problem made my skin crawl. I have no idea what this tone-deaf piece is doing in the magazine.
Big Girl by Meg Elison starts with a great hook:

The girl woke up with a sore neck and three seagulls perched on her eyelashes. As her eyes fluttered open, the startled gulls flapped away. They squawked in alarm, but continued on in the gray predawn light.
She shook her head a little, still not fully awake. She blinked a few times, and the men on the fishing boat saw a chunk of yellow sleep-crust the size of a bike tire fall from her eye and splash in the water beside them. As she stepped into the water, the boat rocked as if it were passing through the wake of a much larger ship. She blundered forward, slipping and falling to her knees. The impact registered as a 3.1 on a nearby seismograph, and the wave pushed the boat out to the end of its anchor chain. p. 67

The story continues with various print and social media commentary:

SFGate.com Reports are coming in that a huge inflatable sex doll has been spotted floating near the Richmond Bridge. Tweet sightings or pics to @SFGate. p. 67

@3librasalad: hey @USCG is approaching #baybe right now. Image: a U.S. Coast Guard vessel pulls in front of a light-brown calf, kneecap visible above ship’s antennas.
@USCG: All vessels and individuals steer clear of #baybe phenomenon until further notice. We are assessing the safety of the situation.
@SFExaminer: The #baybe is a real girl! Sources have identified Bianca Martinez of East Oakland, age 15. sfexnews/1gt5hjY p. 67

. . . and at one point there is even a piece of internet amateur porn fiction.
Her continuing growth and the oppressive media scrutiny cause her to wade out to sea and she eventually takes refuge on a deserted island. The (spoiler) tragic ending has her eventually shrink back to her normal size and then, ultimately, to nothing.
Apart from being a story about “women never being the right size,” it is equally an acid look at the response of the internet and media to these kind of phenomena, and her objectification by society and the establishment.
I imagine we’ll be seeing this one in the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
Stillborne by Marc Laidlaw is the ninth entry in his ‘Gorlen Vizenfirthe’ series.1 One of Gorlen’s hand has been replaced with “the stone paw of a gargoyle named Spar, who is reciprocally afflicted,” and they are both searching for the mage who did the exchange.
The story opens with a desert caravan which has on it a new series character called Plenth. She is a bard like Gorlen, and is heading to a once in seven years pilgrimage to see the hatching of the Prophet Moths. En route the caravan comes upon Spar and Gorlen, who seem as if they are slowly being devoured by clouds of insects. Sister Quills is ordered into action by the Abbess, and she disperses the insects with fumigant. Later, as Sister Quills is attending to their wounds, she offers some unsolicited advice to Gorlen:

“You’re lucky you stepped on that gnaggot nest in daylight, when most of ’em are out gathering carrion. At dusk, you’d have had ’em in your mouth and throat. They taste all right, a few at a time, but in such numbers they make breathing difficult.”
“It never entered my mind to eat my way through the swarm!”
“Might give it a try next time,” she said with a shrug. p. 102

The stories in the series have occasional humour.
Gorlen and Spar join the caravan, and it becomes clear that Plenth is the young woman mentioned repeatedly in the earlier series stories, the one whose virginity Gorlen took years ago, thus stymieing the plans of priest who subsequently punished him by performing the exchange of hands. The rest of the story has two strands: the first is the pilgrimage to the Prophet Moths, and the second is Gorlen and Spar’s backstory.
After they arrive at the pilgrimage site Spar eventually realises that the Prophet Moths are slowly being wiped out by the massive numbers of people who are now flocking to see the moths hatch. The eggs the moths lay in the roots of giant cacti are used by the local businessmen to produce an alcoholic, euphoric drink for the pilgrims called shu’ulk-ilk; this aids the pilgrims’ desire for visions or physical healing during the moths’ flight. Spar manages to communicate the danger to the moths after the first night of their hatching: the latter is a lacklustre event that ends in the first few that fly failing to mate and dying.
The other strand will be of much interest to those that have been following the series as it consists of several flashbacks that focus on Spar’s role in Gorlen’s past, beginning with what happened the night where Gorlen and Spar’s fingers were exchanged. We also learn about the threat that Gorlen was dispatched to defeat:

Spar’s vigil through the second half of the night was held atop the temple’s highest tower. From here, he watched the whole of Nardath spread out sparkling like a rumpled quilt set with dark gems; but what always drew his eye in the small hours were the stars and constellations, which gyred all night about the central void known as the Crypt. That starless region was steady and unmoving; long had it offered steadfast guidance to sailors at sea, to wanderers of the plains. But this permanent fixture of the night had lately begun to expand, to creep. The stars at its edges had snuffed out as if a pall were spreading. None knew its cause. Few worried. Spar supposed that it, like most cosmic phenomena, had nothing to do with him. But on that night, it became central to his life…as did Plenth and Gorlen. p. 110

Goren learns of the menace later on:

The priest raised his own untouched, original finger to the heavens, pointing out the Crypt. “It spreads,” he says. “It is contagious. A Darkness from the deep of space comes nigh. He’s found a mistress here on Ique, and in order to claim her as his bride, he must extinguish every star, and finally our own sun. You must prevent this consummation. You must disappoint his bride. You must send that great lord back into the Crypt, or else our world will die in darkness, devoured by the spawn of their unhealthy union. They are filling black jars with their ilk already, like caviar that only await the wedding day to hatch.” p. 113

There are then a number of episodes where Spar watches Gorlen and Plenth together as the former goes about his task of vanquishing the Crypt but, exasperatingly, this is sketchily developed and perfunctorily resolved for such a major story arc (spoiler: Gorlen essentially sleeps with the Crypt’s would-be bride).
After both these story arcs have played out (spoiler) most of the pilgrims are dead, the moths are saved, and the three of them decide to go to the wood that is home to Spar’s dryad lover from Songwood (F&SF, January-February 2010). Plenth is pregnant (earlier in the story she reveals that she has been pregnant for over a decade with what appears to be both Gorlen’s and Spar’s child). It seems the quest for the wizard is, for the moment, over.
While I enjoyed this I don’t think the novella is a satisfying whole. The flashback episodes should have been a separate origin story, preferably one that provides a convincing narrative arc for those events. The pilgrimage story could stay the same, with possibly more of a subplot about Plenth’s pregnancy, perhaps tying it to the reproductive trials of the moths.
By the Red Giant’s Light by Larry Niven concerns a near-immortal human on Pluto in the far future. There is an asteroid heading towards the planet, so she tries to co-opt a robot that is on an observation mission to help her alter the course of an asteroid. However, the robot thinks its mission to watch Mercury flying through the photosphere of Earth’s now red-giant sun is more important.
This is a lucid and economical tale (and one I would have used to lead off the issue) and a welcome return from the well-known SF writer.
Marley and Marley by J. R. Dawson is an interesting addition to the ‘go back and meet yourself when you are younger’ time-travel sub-genre. In this case it involves a 28-year-old woman going back in time to foster her orphaned 12-year-old self. The woman is under strict instructions not to do or communicate anything that will change the course of history but under the onslaught of her 12-year-old self, and the aftermath of her husband’s recent death, she eventually begins to wonder about whether it is possible to influence events without the Time Law Department noticing.
All the above notwithstanding the story is not really plot driven, and is more of a slow-burn meditation (perhaps too much so) on what our younger selves would think of the lives of their elders, and how the latter should perhaps be as intolerant of the outcome as the former.
Water God’s Dog by R. S. Benedict is a fantastical tale of a priest who serves a water god called Ganba in a society that is starved of water. The only way to fill one’s cistern is to make offerings at the god’s altar. Ganba tells the priest to gather three items for him: the first two are a knife and a strip of ox hide; the third turns out, after some searching, to be a boy. The priest takes all three to the temple where they find a young woman making an offering:

Waterskin woman drapes a length of fine cloth across Ganba’s altar. Even at a bit of a distance, I can see her work is beautiful: threads of blue and gold woven together to depict Him blessing our fields with water and seeds in planting season.
But He is not impressed.
He accepts her offering. Stone splits, swallows her cloth. Water trickles down Etemenkigal’s slope, down through a maze of canals and pipes, down to her cistern. But it’s hardly more than a mouthful, barely enough to fill a drinking-jug.
Still, she kneels and thanks Our Lord, and waits until she’s a good distance away from His altar before she lets herself frown. Then she sees me.
“Ur-Ena!” she cries. “Can you tell me what was wrong with my offering? You saw it. It was good cloth, wasn’t it? Ganba used to love my weaving. I don’t understand it.”
God tells me nothing. Still I say, “Your design was beautiful, but it might come across as begging. You shouldn’t look desperate.”
“But I am desperate,” she replies. “My cistern is drying up. My children are thirsty.”
“Yet you still have a household, and a cistern, and children,” I remind her. “Many people don’t. Be grateful.”
Before she goes, waterskin woman bows, barely bending her waist. No wonder Ganba dislikes her. No respect. May her cistern fill with mud. p. 193

After this, the priest and the boy are taken by Ganba down into the depths of the temple and pass through a series of gates. Each chamber is different: the first holds all the offerings given at the altar above; the penultimate one has a huge lake. They eventually end up in front of Ganba and his two servants, and the boy undergoes a weird ritual.
The story has an ending that doesn’t really match up to what has gone before (spoiler)—the elderly priest goes back to the surface but no longer hears the voice of his god anymore; the boy reappears, and it initially appears as if he is the priest’s replacement. Instead, he gathers men to dig a shaft down to the lake, to free his people from Ganba. Probably best read for the journey and not the arrival.
Racing the Rings of Saturn by Ingrid Garcia is a debut story that is, for the greater part of its length, about a race round one of the rings of Saturn. It focuses on a racer called Tsarki and a rival called Smouck. The sub-plot is about a planned uprising against the rulers of Jupiter and their puppets on Titan. These strands come together at the end.
This one didn’t entirely grab me. In parts it attempts a Zelaznyesque swagger but comes over more like a brash comic book (at one point the hemaphrodite (?) resistance leader strips off and makes a victory speech in the nude—no particular reason is given); also, the detail about the race either doesn’t entirely convince (the ring-dwellers’ predictive software) or makes it sound rather boring (but then again, I have a dislike for Formula One racing). This all makes it sound much worse than it is; it isn’t, but this racer is only firing on three cylinders. Compare and contrast with the Niven story.
Whatever Comes After Calcutta by David Erik Nelson has an unusual beginning where the central character, a public defender called Lyle Morimoto, discovers his wife in bed with a police detective (“Good Cop”). At which point his wife shoots him in the head. Although this doesn’t kill him, he has a bullet crease in his cheek and an ear hanging off. As he lies on the floor, and before he passes out, he hears them planning to go to a cottage the couple own. Once he regains consciousness he superglues his ear to his head and decides to follow them. He is not particularly annoyed about any of this but thinks that events merit an explanation.
Things get weirder. While he is on the road he sees a woman in the process of being hanged from a tree. Morimoto stops his car and rushes to pull her down. He proceeds to slacken the network cable from around her neck:

He finally got the knot to budge a single gasping inch, and then another, and then they were yanking the cord freely. She immediately rolled over and crawled blindly away on elbow and knees, hacking and grinding like an engine full of sand, one arm still bound. Lyle had a single panting moment to notice how clean the soles of the woman’s feet were, soft and seashell pink as a toddler’s, before he heard a throat clearing behind him.
“Pardon me?” someone asked. “No offense or nothing, but what the heck do you think you’re doing?”
Lyle rose slowly, sliding his hand into his jacket pocket as he did so, finding his pistol and the “Good Cop’s” badge. The owner of the twang was clear-eyed and amiable. He wore a filthy mesh-backed Marlboro cap and a similarly grimy work jacket, the cuffs black and chewed up from long years spent elbow-deep in engines. EARL was embroidered over his heart in red floss.
There was a crowd of very surprised people behind Earl, standing or sitting in lawn chairs shaded by the collapsing barn. To Lyle’s eye, they were prototypical rural Ohio: white people, men and women, mostly dressed like they’d just got off from work, mechanics and Subway sandwich girls and schoolteachers and farmers. There were even a few kids, seated cross-legged on a wide, flat board to keep their pants clean.
The youngest looked confused by what had been — and was still — happening, but the older kids were keenly, sickeningly thrilled, both by the spectacle of the hanging of the woman and by the action-hero antics that had interrupted the show.
Lyle immediately understood how he’d managed to miss the spectators: He’d been focused on the woman fighting the strangling line in the blazing light of the sunset. They’d been sitting quietly in the barn’s deep shadow, as quiet and watchful and unobtrusive as birds on a wire. He glanced at his watch. Fewer than five minutes had passed since he’d looked up from his car radio. Behind Lyle, the woman hacked and retched, dragging her breath down her throat like a blade scraping a dry whetstone.
“You could have killed this woman,” he panted.
“Well, yeah,” Earl said. “Duh. If you hadn’t messed it up. Now we gotta start from scratch. She ain’t even a little dead.” p. 239-240

From this point on the story gets exponentially more surreal and loopy, and at points you are unsure whether this is going to turn out to be a crazed militia story (the group are heavily armed and insist they are “sovereign citizens”), a supernatural horror (they had subjected the hanging woman to a common law trial for witchcraft), or both. The last section impressively ties the Wife/“Good Cop” and Hanging Woman subplots together in an unexpected way.
I liked this as much as Nelson’s previous story here a few months ago, i.e., a lot. This is a piece of modern horror as good as anything Fritz Leiber did, and definitely one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.

The cover for Wilhelm’s story Attachments is a flat, amateurish-looking affair, not helped by the dull background. I was surprised to see it was by Kent Bash, an occasional contributor. If you lay this issue beside the last, which features Manzieri’s cover (also a portrait) the difference in quality is stark.
Down at the Goblin Boutique by John W. Sexton is quite a good poem about a coat of sand, and the potential perils of wearing it.
There are the usual Books to Look For and Musing on Books columns, and my usual moans: scattershot selection in the first, over-synopsising in the second.
The Cartoons are by Danny Shanahan, Bill Long, Nick Downes, S. Harris, and Arthur Masear. I cracked a smile at Long’s ‘Falling Rocks’ warning sign (stone gargoyles defecating from a high building), and at Danny Shanahan’s ‘Rip “Power Nap” Van Winkle’ one.
The Science of Invisibility by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty is really an essay about human sight and not what the title suggests but, as usual, an interesting one. As ever it is full of interesting snippets:

The distribution of rods and cones in the retina explains a trick that night watchmen and astronomers use. To spot an intruder in a dark warehouse or a dim star in the night sky, they never stare directly at what they’re trying to see. Instead, they look slightly above or below the object of interest. Try this trick yourself when you are trying to see something in dim light.
When you stare at something, you are focusing its image on the fovea. In daylight, that’s great: The densely packed cones in the fovea give you a very detailed, colored view of the world. But when your cones aren’t functioning, staring directly at something you want to see is a rookie mistake. Since the fovea lacks rods, it’s virtually blind in the dark. When you look just above or below something, the image falls outside the fovea, on the periphery of the retina, where there are more rods than cones, giving you a much better view. p. 179

Sadly, the essay is followed by a short note reporting that, as the issue was being compiled, Paul Doherty passed away from complications due to cancer. A sad loss for the magazine as well as family and friends and colleagues.2
It’s a Wrap by David J. Skal reviews The Mummy movie, and gives an interesting account of Universal Studios involvement with horror over the decades.
F&SF Competition #94: “Explain a Plot Badly” has the results of that contest, and F&SF Competition #95: “Titles the Rearrange” starts the next one. I think they are beginning to struggle for competition ideas.
There is the usual Coming Attractions, and the annual Index to Volumes 132 & 133.3 The latter shows no prolific fiction contributors (I think Robert Reed sometimes had five or six entries in some years): a number have two stories this year, but none have three or more.
Curiosities: A Christmas Garland by Max Beerbohm (1912) by David Langford looks at what sounds like an interesting collection of Xmas parodies, including ones of Kipling, Hardy and Wells. These three at least are fantasy or sf.

There are a number of solid stories in this issue, and it is worth getting for the Nelson story alone. ●

____________________

1. I don’t normally read any previous series stories otherwise these reviews would take twice as long as they do (which is too long). However, in this case I didn’t particularly want to jump in at the last story in a cycle, and I’ve quite enjoyed a couple of recent Marc Laidlaw stories, so I made an exception and read the previous eight. I’m glad I did given the content of this issue’s story, but also because they are an entertaining bunch ranging in quality from good-but-minor to very good (the standout story is Quickstone (F&SF, March 2009) which, surprisingly, did not feature in any of the ‘Best Of’ anthologies or short lists for the year, according to ISFDB. My other favourites include Songwood (F&SF, January-February 2010); Rooksnight (F&SF, May-June 2014; and Bellweather, (Lightspeed #40, September 2013).

2. Paul and Pat’s article is here, with the obituary note at the end.

3. Seeing as it is the end of the F&SF publishing year here are my Hugo Award nomination choices from F&SF (I’ll probably only have read F&SF and Asimov’s SF in their entirety before the initial ballot so this is a bit unfair on the other magazines. That said, these two magazines were woefully under-represented last year, probably because their fiction is not online for free.)

My English Name • novelette by R. S. Benedict
There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House • novella by David Erik Nelson
I Am Not I • novelette by G. V. Anderson
Whatever Comes After Calcutta • novelette by David Erik Nelson
C. C. Finlay for Best Editor (short-form).

This is just the tip of a quality iceberg, with about a dozen stories close behind. I may add more if I have any picks left after getting around to some of the other magazines. ●

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UKKindle USAWeightless Books or physical copies.

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #733, September-October 2017

ISFDB link
F&SF subs / Amazon UK, USA / Weightless Books

Other reviews:
Gardner Dozois, Locus
Steve Fahnestalk, Amazing Stories
Rich Horton, Locus
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
John D. Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Jason McGregor, Tangent Online
Patrick Mahon, SF Crowsnest
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Evil Opposite • short story by Naomi Kritzer ∗∗
We Are Born • short story by Dare Segun Falowo ∗∗
Leash on a Man • novelette by Robert Reed ∗∗
Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coast • short story by Gwendolyn Clare ∗∗
The Care of House Plants • short story by Jeremy Minton ∗∗
The Hermit of Houston • novelette by Samuel R. Delany ∗∗
On Highway 18 • short story by Rebecca Campbell ∗∗+
Hollywood Squid • short story by Oliver Buckram ∗∗+
Still Tomorrow’s Going to Be Another Working Day • short story by Amy Griswold ∗∗
Bodythoughts • short story by Rahul Kanakia ∗∗
Riddle • short story by Lisa Mason ∗∗+
Children of Xanadu • novelette by Juan Paulo Rafols ∗∗+
The Two-Choice Foxtrot of Chapham County • short story by Tina Connolly ∗∗
Starlight Express • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Starlight Express • cover by Maurizio Manzieri
Cartoons • by Danny Shanahan, Nick Downes, Arthur Masear, S. Harris
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by James Sallis
Vanishing Act • science essay by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
On Finding Her Inner Kaiju • film review by Kathi Maio
Curiosities: The Great Demonstration, by Katharine Metcalf Roof (1920) • review by Robert Eldridge

_____________________

This issue begins with three stories of average quality.
Evil Opposite by Naomi Kritzer actually gets off to an engrossing start with its tale of a post-graduate and his dislike for fellow research assistant Shane. The latter not only irritates the narrator constantly but has also managed to get a position working with their professor. While the narrator is trawling through the latter’s research papers he comes across an undeveloped paper on a ‘quantum viewer.’ He builds this, and it lets him observe other-world versions of himself to the point that his absorption in this process adversely affects his life. However, these observations, and the deductions he draws from them, eventually lead him to a better path in life and, in particular, he manages to avoid one particularly calamitous action involving Shane.
Unfortunately this promising piece rather peters out, and I also didn’t buy the narrator giving the machine to Shane at the end.
It would be unfairly reductionist to describe We Are Born by Dare Segun Falowo as a ‘golem’ story, but that label gives you an idea of what is happening at the start of this story.  A village sculptress in rural Nigeria, who has previously lost three babies, forms a child from the Earth:

The earth, softened by pattering raindrops, fell away beneath her fingertips as she pulled the entrails of the land to the surface. Red mud, soft and thick; brown mud, dour and fragile, no better than a leaf sucked dry by harmattan; pink mud, heavy like raw meat. These formed a discolored hill around her, and as she dug deeper and deeper, rain fell harder.
With a lunge that thrust her shoulder-deep into the hole she had dug, she hit it with aching fingers — clay, off-white and exuding a warmth like it had been waiting for centuries, holding sunlight in itself. She had never seen it in all her time sculpting the medium, but she knew it would be there and she knew it would give her what she needed as it pulsed in her fist with life.
She scooped it up and began to work. Rain fell harder but the mud did not run.  p. 21

Subsequently, however, the story unfolds its own myth of storm-borne spirit children.
I found this story a little overwritten and consequently slow-moving, but it has an effective last section.
Leash on a Man by Robert Reed is narrated by Porous Mirth, a genetically modified guard who works in a future Earth prison. They receive a young woman called Constance who has killed every person on an L4 habit called Crystals. It takes Reed about ten pages (of thirty odd) to get to this point in the story, and this is followed by a murky plot about the warden plotting to have Constance murdered.
I couldn’t work out the warden’s motivation for this, or fathom what happens during the sequence (spoiler) when she escapes. I also did not like the frequent passages where not much happens, nor that they are told in a stilted and telegraphic style. Take this passage about Porous encouraging one of the cons to greet the new inmate:

“When are you going?” I ask.
Russell looks at me. It takes him a few seconds to figure out my question, and that’s when he looks away.
“What are you talking about?” he asks the empty street.
“She’s been here a few days,” I say. “You should go to her front door, give her your warmest and best.”
“Yeah, well,” he says.
I’m having a little laugh.
He looks at me again, hard as he can. “You think I want to get some of that.”
“You’re our resident stallion,” I tease.
He would normally relish that description. Smile and kind of fling his head to the side. But not today. “I couldn’t get in the mood with that. You know?”
Russell is throwing out the impotence card.
I say, “You’re scared of her.”
“Yeah,” he says. No bravado, just blunt agreement.
So I say, “I’ll go with you.”
“You?”
“You need backbone and I’ve got enough back for three men. So you can be the residents’ official greeter and I’ll be your chaperone. How’s that?”
Russell licks his lips when he’s thinking hard. Which doesn’t happen often.
“Okay,” he says finally.  p. 43

My considered response was: ‘Get on with it.’
Reed used to be a reliable and prolific producer of short fiction, but I can’t recall anything recent of his that I particularly like. This one isn’t bad, but it is barely okay.
Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coast by Gwendolyn Clare has an introduction from editor C. C. Finlay where he says “she writes a whole world into existence in just a few short pages.” He is not wrong: in short order the author conjures up what would seem to be an alternate Roman Empire that is waging a plague war on the Qati for their territory, vineyards and wine. The highlight is the narrator, a master vintner who only cares about the latter:

In Rambekh there is a body floating in the mashing vat — gray and bloated and utterly disgusting, though I could not say whether from the plague itself or the putrefaction after death. Such a waste, eighty or ninety gallons in total, all of it ruined. The whole harvest from the west-facing slopes above the city, if I had to guess.  p. 65

The Care of House Plants by Jeremy Minton is a tale about two enforcers from a future biotech company looking for an employee who has absconded with samples from the lab. They arrive at a house overrun with modified plant growth:

Beyond the door it was humid, dark, and dusty. It smelled of overripe life and moist decay. I rubbed my hand through my glove, praying the skin was unbroken. Something had slashed me while I groped for the door handle. NuGenera retune my B-cells once a week, so theoretically I was safe from anything here, but it was a theory I’d rather not put to the test.
Trails of foliage threaded the verdant wall. Some plants I recognized — honeysuckle and roses, briar and devil’s ivy promiscuously pressed together with no respect for season. More looked unfamiliar. Beneath the broken floor tiles I saw scurrying bugs.
Fat-leaved violets spread across surfaces, coiling fleshy heads around stove burners. Saucepans and spice racks almost disappeared beneath elephant’s ear and peacock plants. A book poked sadly from the window sill: The Care of House Plants.  p. 70

In the sitting room they find an old woman, the employee’s mother. An effective piece of SF horror.
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to The Hermit of Houston by Samuel R. Delany as I’ve never really liked (or understood) much of his work (probably because I read most of it too young) but I got on with this one okay. That said, this future slice-of life is not what you would call an easy read, especially the first few pages which has a rambling narrator give a garbled account of a future history.
After that it settles down to an account of a strange male-only society, although some of the characters are referred to as she (a product of the gender fluidity that seems to be either culturally or surgically available). The unfolding narrative (there is no particular ‘story’ here) centres on the narrator’s relationship with another man called Cellibrex and, alongside the account of their relationship, we learn about their world. This involves (another) data-dump later in the story when he visits the Hermit, where he is told a number of things, one of which is that the male society he inhabits is part of a population control plan. There are various other snippets of background information throughout the story, such as the mention of an (occasionally) brutal post-Facebook, post-Handbook society where the discussion of certain ideas will get you killed.
If you get the sense that I am struggling to synopsise the story then you are correct: it is one of those discursive and rambling pieces that would probably reward a second reading, although that rather begs the question of why the writer didn’t make it clearer than it is. Perhaps this is a deliberate choice to let the reader sieve out information one their own, or this may be an early draft of a longer work in progress. While it is more opaque than the kind of fiction I normally enjoy, I liked how Delaney creates a convincing world and some of the ideas touched upon. I think this short passage may illuminate what the story (or possible longer work) is at least partially about:

It works so much better now that we’ve separated the sexes and mixed up the genders — given them their proper dignity along with that of the ethnicities. All you have to do is dissociate them from where someone actually comes from and how they got here. Then you can do anything you want with them . . .  p. 124

Before I finish up with this one, there is this at the end of the introduction to the story:

As readers of “Aye, and Gomorrah…” or Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand might expect, this new story would get an NC-17 rating at the movies and is not appropriate for younger readers.  p. 105

If you forensically examined each issue of the magazine I suspect you could find a lot that is not appropriate for younger readers: violence, immoral behaviour, drug use, etc. Why a couple of briefly described episodes of gay oral sex calls for a specific warning I am not sure, especially in what I assumed was a magazine with a sophisticated readership. I note in passing that there is no warning about the sex with an alien in the Kanakia story (see the quote below) or the sex with cat-like sphinx in the Mason story.
On Highway 18 by Rebecca Campbell is about the disintegrating relationship between two teenage girls:

This was how it used to be. You are both sixteen. You will be an actress. You will be a world traveler. You will direct great films, or write epic novels. You will fuck a million beautiful men. Just for now, though, you’re lying together on an air mattress in a backyard and listening to a mix tape you have listened to a thousand times already and which has been distorted by all those listenings and by the cheap cassette deck in the car, and by the heat of summer. For twenty years afterward you will keep the tape, and when you listen to it, and hear the familiar distortions that time and repetition make, it will break your heart a tiny little bit.  p. 138

They live in a town where a couple of dead girls have been found, and ghosts with knowledge of the future appear. This is an atmospheric tale with some convincing description.
If Campbell’s story reminded me a little of C. L. Grant, then Hollywood Squid by Oliver Buckram reminds me a lot of Ron Goulart. The story is about a washed up Hollywood director and an alien squid pitching a cop/squid buddy movie. Apart from the project’s unusual pairing, another script plot twist is that the Oscars are used to smuggle diamonds, which turns out to be dangerously close to the truth.
Still Tomorrow’s Going to Be Another Working Day by Amy Griswold is a short piece about a kid being repossessed as the mother hasn’t kept up the payments to the fertility clinic. It is a promising notion, and well enough done, but the writer doesn’t go anywhere with the idea.
Bodythoughts by Rahul Kanakia is about a young alien on Earth who becomes infatuated with a captain who was held prisoner during an interplanetary/interspecies war, During the latter’s captivity he had sexual experiences with the aliens:

And after those long talks, they embraced him, and he touched them in their deep-inside places until they spurted their smelly ink at him. And he wasn’t forced into doing this. No! Even now he could admit he’d done it because he liked it! Liked how it relieved him from feeling guilty over putting them in danger. Because if he could give them pleasure, then somehow the risk was squared and became even.  p. 171

The story is told from three points of view: the young alien George, his three progenitors, and the Captain. It is an offbeat story whose last image helps make it.
Riddle by Lisa Mason establishes its jilted artist protagonist in a gritty urban background quickly and effectively, before having him meet a strange creature in the alleyway where he lives. He initially thinks it is a woman needing shelter, and lets it in to his house:

The overhead light never shed much illumination on his studio or his life. But he sees the curve of her rump, her haunches with knees thrust forward, golden fur ruffling her rib cage. Her tail twitches, knocking over his pottery wheel.
Edwin could accept that — a puma downtown. Why not? With a lair on Telegraph Hill where the cliff falls too steeply to build condos and the weeds grow thick. A puma could account for lost pets and lost children.
She’s not a puma.
The furred rib cage sweeps up into smooth shoulders. The spine of a big cat arches into a woman’s spine. Her skin is pale as milk, her biceps like a body builder’s. The human arms, elbows flush on the tabletop, are nude-smooth. Each outstretched human finger is tipped with more of those long, glistening nails. Or claws.
She smiles at him. Golden hair springs out around her face in disheveled tufts. Black pupils expand in her silver eyes. Her nose slopes long, her mouth full and wide. She licks her lips, the pink flick of a tongue.
In a husky voice, she says, “It has legs, but never runs. What is it?”  p. 186-7

The story then details his sexual relationship with the creature, the constant riddles it poses him, and a later encounter with his ex-partner, Nikki, and her boyfriend. The story is a very good one till that point but I rather wish it had gone in a different direction thereafter. That said, it is still a strong piece.
Children of Xanadu by Juan Paulo Rafols is a resistance story set in a future Chinese hegemony. The latter aspect of the story is initially made clear by a striking passage at the beginning of the story, when the narrator is sailing to the offshore hi-tech city of Xanadu:

My presence was tolerated on the viewing deck where, fortuitously, I was left alone. The other passengers were bureaucratic functionaries, offduty military, and their related families. Those who did notice me assumed I was one of the serving staff.
While on the viewing deck, I noticed that the vessel was off-course. Instead of following the general contours of Palawan to the southwest, the ship cut into choppy sea. The afternoon sun was at our back and the green of distant slopes faded to blue. I tugged on the sleeve of a passing sailor and asked about our destination.
“Sightseeing.” The sailor’s teeth flashed. My stomach knotted in realization. Of course hydrofoils to Xanadu would be made to take this detour.
The other passengers anticipated this, too, or else they had already known. They streamed on deck from their compartments — a parade of dress uniforms, airy cotton shirts, summer dresses, and straw hats. Mothers unfolded umbrellas, protecting the hue of their pale children. Pairs and families populated the railing.
They did not have long to wait. The first ruin could have been mistaken for a squat mountain of rock, jutting from the sea at an angle. Crawling vines obscured its contours; layers of kelp accumulated at its base, giving it the appearance of something melted. It was only when the hydrofoil fell beneath its shadow that one could clearly make out the shattered windows, the bent antennas, the bridge, and the metal twisted by impact. Waves became uncertain eddies as they passed over the slanted, submerged flight deck.
The wreck of the CVN Gerald R. Ford had been driven by current into the tablemount of the Reed Bank. Mist receded; what had appeared to be islands and shoals revealed themselves to be the remains of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. A flock of gulls spiraled about a gutted flight tower. Beneath, silver fish schooled amidst broken hulls. It was a graveyard for more than just ships. Tens of thousands of men fought and died here. Their remains added to the bedrock, buried by coral.  p. 199-200

The narrator is a Filipino doctor who works on a eugenics program that uses children who are kept in virtual reality tanks and artificially aged before being disposed of. The results of the genetic research are used by wealthy Chinese to competitively equip their children to advance in the ruling meritocracy.
This is an impressive (and longer than normal) début which uses a variety of SFnal elements to produce a convincing setting, has a well-realised narrator, and a plot structure that works in conjunction with all these elements. l look forward to seeing more from this writer.
The Two-Choice Foxtrot of Chapham County by Tina Connolly is a short and original rural fantasy about an unmarried young woman who gets pregnant with a stone baby:

Suzie never was one for chasing the boys, that was the funny thing. She told me later she’d been sent to get a packet of tobacco for her da at the general store. And there was Tony, sorting out the threepenny nails from the fourpenny screws, and their eyes met over the hogshead fulla metal and that was that.
There’s only two choices if you’re gonna have a stone-baby, a course.
The first one, and best one, is you get the daddy to marry you, and if you’re quick enough, you can catch most of it in time. Sure, the baby’s born with a little flint toe, or a patcha marble back of her left elbow, but that ain’t too uncommon in this town. Mildred Percy’s got a whole swatch of granite on her skull, where the hair don’t grow. She combs it over and we pretend we don’t notice. Our fathers maybe give Mildred’s mother an extra wink in the grocery store, and we pretend we don’t notice that too.  p. 241-242

Starlight Express by Michael Swanwick, according to the introduction, appeared in both Esli magazine in Russian and Science Fiction World in Chinese before its first English language publication here. It is set in the Rome of a future, post-peak Earth. One of the creations left from earlier days is the Starlight Express:

His apartment overlooked the piazza dell’Astrovia, which daytimes was choked with tourists from four planets who came to admire the ruins and revenants of empire. They coursed through the ancient transmission station, its stone floor thrumming gently underfoot, the magma tap still powering the energy road, even though the stars had shifted in their positions centuries ago and anyone stepping into the projector would be translated into a complex wave front of neutrinos and shot away from the Earth to fall between the stars forever.
Human beings had built such things once. Now they didn’t even know how to turn it off.  p. 246

No one has arrived on the Starlight Express for generations, until one day Szetta steps off the platform and is taken in by Flaminio, the narrator.
The rest of the story details his infatuation with her and what is discovered about her origins. This story is on the slight side but works well enough; in particular (spoiler) the ending convincingly limns the ennui that can be caused by losing ‘the one.’

The cover, Starlight Express, is another superior piece by Maurizio Manzieri. There are Cartoons by Danny Shanahan, Nick Downes, Arthur Masear, and S. Harris, none of which did much if anything for me.
I got on with Books to Look For by Charles de Lint more than I normally do, probably because there is more contextualisation than normal, as well as a number of the titles which sound interesting (books by Seanan McGuire, A. G. Carpenter, and the Thorne Smith-ish Playing with Fire by R. J. Blain).
Books by James Sallis covers two titles, including The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge, a review whose synopsis just left me confused.
Vanishing Act by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty is a short science essay about invisibility cloaks, which starts by examining the flounder (a fish that camouflages itself against the sea floor).
On Finding Her Inner Kaiju by Kathi Maio is an informative column about the movie Colossal and the work of its director Nacho Vigalondo.
Curiosities: The Great Demonstration, by Katharine Metcalf Roof (1920) by Robert Eldridge examines what sounds like an interesting piece of supernatural fiction.

A solid issue after a lacklustre start.  ●

_____________________

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: F&SF subs / Amazon UK, USA / Weightless Books.

Edited 16th July 2019: formatting changes.

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #732, July-August 2017

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Steve Fahnestalk, Amazing Stories
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
John D. Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Patrick Mahon, SF Crowsnest
John Siebelink, Amazing Stories
Adrian Simmons, Black Gate
Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Fiction:
In a Wide Sky, Hidden • short story by William Ledbetter ∗∗∗
The Masochist’s Assistant • novelette by Auston Habershaw
The Bride in Sea-Green Velvet • novelette by Robin Furth +
There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House • novella by David Erik Nelson
A Dog’s Story • short story by Gardner Dozois
I Am Not I • novelette by G. V. Anderson
Afiya’s Song • novelette by Justin C. Key 
An Obstruction to Delivery • short story by Sean Adams +
An Unearned Death • short story by Marissa Lingen 

Non-fiction:
There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House • cover by Nicholas Grunas
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Musing on Books • by Michelle West
Cartoon • by Nick Downes
With the Best of Intentions • science essay by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
Ghoulies, Ghosties, Beasties • film review by David J. Skal
Northwest Cruise • poem by Sophie M. White
Coming Attractions
Curiosities
• review by Paul Di Filippo

The fiction leads off with In a Wide Sky, Hidden by William Ledbetter, which has the narrator arriving (via quantum transportation) on an alien planet where he is met by an eight foot high humanoid robot. He is on a quest to find his sister, a planetary artist who disappeared decades ago (there is life extension in this future as the transportation device can alter the traveller’s reconstructed body to a younger biological age). His last contact with his sister ended with her vanishing:

I spent the rest of that night getting drunk and slept in the next morning. When I woke up, I found a handwritten note waiting for me.
COME FIND ME. — Regina
I assumed she meant to find her for breakfast or lunch, but as I learned from the local news, she had taken advantage of the media focus on her show and staged a dramatic disappearance. Her statement, sent to the local press and soon spread across all settled space, was simple yet mysterious and teasing.
“I have found a world of my own. It will be my masterpiece.”
p. 14-15

He has been searching for her ever since.
As he recovers from the journey, the robot tells him that there is no natural life on the planet but that the probes have found something artificial. As the man and the robot investigate this there are a couple of scenes spliced in that limn the relationship between the narrator and his sister, including a disagreement they have about him giving up his ambition to be a planetary explorer for a young woman he is in love with at home.
Eventually (spoiler) they find his sister’s body and deduce she died forty years ago. She let herself to age naturally and die. He must now decide whether to continue exploring.
This is well enough done, but I wasn’t really convinced about the sister deliberately stranding herself on the planet just to motivate her brother to become an explorer.
The Masochist’s Assistant by Auston Habershaw, according to the introduction, takes place in the same world as his fantasy trilogy, The Saga of the Redeemed,1 although it is complete in itself.
Georges is the famulus (servant/assistant) to Magus Hugarth, and has unusual duties:

This particular morning, though, Georges found his master on his back and stabbed him in the front almost without thinking about it. As his master’s blood soaked through the linen, his mind was on the salon to be held in the Silver Room of Madame Grousand’s château that evening. He had responded to the invitation in the positive without his master’s knowledge, hoping that his master wouldn’t want to go and send him in his stead when Georges pointed out that the event was tonight. This happened often enough to be reasonably certain, despite his master priding himself on his unpredictability.
Georges pulled his ruffled sleeve up and away from the bloody linen with his free hand and considered what he ought to wear to the salon while gazing out the open window and over the rooftops of the village and into the vastness of the deep summer-blue sky. He indulged in a daydream — himself, the center of attention at the salon in his periwinkle doublet, telling riddles that amused an array of highborn ladies. In time, though, he heard his master cough roughly and Georges was pushed away by one meaty hand.
Master Hugarth sat up in bed, blinking in the morning light. His voice was hoarse. “How long?”
p. 23

This passage illuminates two of story’s threads: Magus Hugarth’s quest to reduce the amount of time he remains dead after being killed; and Georges’ desire to advance in the etiquette bound society in which he lives. Unfortunately, Hugarth’s disreputable behaviour (i.e. running naked in the street, saying exactly what he thinks in company, etc.) poisons Georges’ chances at advancement.
The last part draws all these elements together in a satisfying way.
The Bride in Sea-Green Velvet by Robin Furth begins with Sir Henry buying a woman’s skull from a member of thieves’ guild, then taking it to a man called DeMains. The latter will build up a face on the skull from clay and pins. While they are discussing the project, DeMains questions Sir Henry about his plans for his forty-ninth birthday—seven by seven, so a significant occasion—and the sacrifice he must make to the sea goddess. Using a local girl for this is problematical, so De Mains asks if Sir Henry intends to use the skull. Sir Henry is reluctant, but realises he may have no choice.
Later Sir Henry retires to the catacombs under his chateau. There he selects a favourite skull from his collection and takes it deeper into the caves to see the Abbot, who is long dead and appears as a shadow. Sir Henry asks him for his treatise on turning clay into flesh.
The highlight of the piece (spoiler) is when Sir Henry goes down to the shoreline on the evening of his birthday and starts creating a body for the restored head, with a view to using it as a sacrifice:

With the deference of a courting suitor, Sir Henry laid the head of his lady upon the sand. Then he set about building her a body.
Her spine — from neck to curved pelvis — he took from the remains of the amorous mermaid. The bones of legs and feet, arms and hands, lovely fingers and precious toes he built from driftwood and coral. Her lungs were sea sponges and her tendons long strands of kelp wrapped around the muscular innards scooped from great scallop shells. Womb and bladder were sea cucumbers, her ovaries starfish, and her liver a giant sea leach. Her gallbladder was a yellow snail and her innards a writhing sea worm pulled from below the sand, its circular mouthful of teeth snapping. For breasts, two more lovely rounded sea sponges, and for nipples, tiny pearls.
Almost finished, he sat back on his heels and gazed upon the body of his beloved, and at her head, which rested several feet away. She looked like a beautiful saint — beheaded and flayed — though the gods this lady served were no Christian ones. Sir Henry sighed. The only missing organ was a heart.
p. 56-57

This process becomes weirder and more visceral.
For the first half or so of the story I found this one a bit hard to get into, but the gripping resurrection scene provides a strong second half.
It was only after reading There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House by David Erik Nelson that I realised I hadn’t recognised him as the author of Where There Is Nothing, There Is God, a ‘New Guys’ time-travel novella from last December’s Asimov’s SF. That one was a lively and entertaining story which I enjoyed, and I liked this one even more.
The obvious starting point for this one is Robert A. Heinlein’s novelette “—And He Built a Crooked House—” (Astounding, February 1941), the well-known story whose architect protagonist inadvertently builds a house that collapses during an earthquake to become a tesseract. (A tesseract is to a cube as a cube is to a square. Long story short, this leads to a lot of dimensional weirdness inside the house. From Wikipedia2: “—the stairs seem to form a closed loop. There appears to be no way to get back out, as all the doors and windows lead directly into other rooms. At one point, they look down a hallway and are shocked to see their own backs.”)
Nelson takes this basic idea and places his tesseract house in a grittily described Detroit, where the building is about to be cleared, repaired and flipped by a couple of house renovators called Glenn and Lennie. Glenn, who is the narrator, realises there is something wrong with the house while he and his assistant do their survey (during which they are hassled by two cops). The property is in a run-down area but it has an immaculate exterior, and there are many intact period features inside.
The pair discovers the building’s dimensional weirdness when Glenn manages to pick the lock of the door and opens it:

This joint was spotless. And scentless: no mildew or rot or garbage, but also none of the good smells of old wood oil or antique books or mellow, ancient fireplace smoke. No nothing.
I started through the doorway, then stumbled, even though the porch and entryway were flush, without so much as a thick threshold. I heard a door clap shut behind me and found myself on my knees in the backyard, nothing before me but dirt, rubble, and the distant Detroit skyline against a flat, gray sky. Somewhere Lennie was shouting his head off. I turned around and was looking at the back of the crooked house. There was a shallow screen porch with a wood-framed door tacked onto its back. Three wooden steps led down to the yard, where I crouched.
“I’m back here, Lennie!” I hollered, finding my feet. “Come join me!”
I heard Lennie’s workboots crunching through the rubble, and a second later he popped around the corner.
“Glenn!” he shouted. “How’d you get back here?”
p. 92-93

Further confusion follows when entering the back door results in Glenn exiting an upstairs window. When he climbs back into the attic room, he ends up on the front porch. They then contact Fleischermann, the owner, and show him what they have found. He is less than impressed:

“Well, fuck.” He sighed. “This went from dandy to dog shit in record time.”
“You had no clue this place was, um…,” I faltered, then came up with, “Special?”
Fleischermann turned and looked at me like I was an idiot. His face worked oddly as he processed through a string of emotions — wonder, annoyance, offense, shame, then something akin to grief — before settling on anger. Then he unloaded with both barrels.
“Yeah, Glenn, fucking shockingly, I had no fucking notion that I was paying cash money for the only red-stone French Revival in Detroit that’s also a fucking Möbius strip!” His voice quickly got shrill. “The buyer’s always the last to fucking know, right?”
“No, no,” I said, hands raised placatingly, “I just meant the condition, that it’s so well preserved, fully furnished!”
“Of course it’s fucking fully furnished, Glenn!” Fleischermann shouted. “No one can get in to loot the fucker!” Lennie had drawn back to Fleischermann’s Jag, hands covering his ears. “I’ve bought a beautiful house you can’t go into on a piece of land that’s less than worthless embedded in a fucking necrotic abscess on the diabetic ass of the most notoriously moribund city in North fucking America, Glenn! We can’t even fucking strip it for the copper and doorknobs!”
p. 96-97

Up until this point the story is essentially a contemporary version of Heinlein’s, but it then gets a lot stranger. Glenn gets a set of keys for the house from Fleischermann with orders to lock it up. The story then moves on a week or two: Glenn is at a bar and picks up a woman called Anja with a promise to show her something special. They go to the house where Glenn expects to show her the front door/back door trick, but he finds that when he unlocks the house using the keys they manage to enter the house normally.
They look around, and find books inside the house with strange titles: A Brief History of Time by Warren G. Harding, A Theory of Colour and Palettes: My Struggle by Adolf Hitler. There are also unusual views out of the windows which do not match the neighbourhood. And then (spoiler):

There was a pair of sneakers on the mantel, a pair of like-new LeBron 11s — the limited edition “What the LeBron?” ones, with their crazy blacklight-blender-puke rainbow scribbles and splashes. Ugly, ugly fucking shoes. Still, those shoes are coveted by teens and corner boys alike. They wait in line for hours and then pay hundreds for them, or get them from resellers online for a grand. But there was something off about these shoes: The left sneaker had a weird brown tiger-stripe motif cutting through the hot pinks and glowing teals. I took a couple steps closer and wasn’t shocked to see that the brown was old blood. There appeared to be a healthy portion of a foot still in that left shoe. The sock was neatly snipped off and singed, showing a little slice of dark skin. The exposed cut was blackened like a steak fresh off the grill. The neat end of the bone was glistening ivory sliced with laser precision. I sniffed the air without thinking, but it didn’t smell like a cookout. I was grateful for that.
“I think we better go,” I said.
p. 106

The rest of the tale involves (more spoilers) the house being sold another developer, the two cops reappearing and exhibiting a particular interest in the house, and, of course, the malevolent alien entity inside which is responsible for the severed human foot. I’ve probably over-quoted from this story already, but I can’t help but add the great description Nelson provides of the creature:

There was a thing in the room, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. At first I took it to be a shadow, but that wasn’t right. Shadows are flat, cast onto a surface, and this darkness hung in the air. And it was grappling with the man. The thing moved in jagged fits, like a time-lapse film of germination, or video that’s dropping frames. It elongated and contracted, bulging like motor oil floating in zero G, extending and withdrawing appendages of some sort — arms, maybe? Or roots? Or tentacles? One of these extrusions was a broad, flat wing. Another was spiky, infinitely, infinitesimally branching like a fractal. p. 119

Part time-lapse photograph, part tentacle, part wing, and part fractal—isn’t that a great image?
This is a very entertaining and readable story, and what makes it even better is the sheer amount of incidental detail that Nelson includes. At the end, just when I thought it was coming off the boil a little, there is a neat little twist that pulls it back up again, as well as allowing for sequels. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections.
A Dog’s Story by Gardner Dozois is about a dog who finds a woman lying dead in an alleyway, raped and murdered. So the dog goes to see a cat called Talking Pete, and they discuss what is to be done.

Talking Pete was silent for an even longer time, and then, just as Blackie was wondering if he’d fallen asleep with his eye open, he made a sound as close to a sigh as a cat could make, and said, “All right.” And cat-sighed again. And a messenger was sent to the basement of an abandoned warehouse near the railroad tracks where the Rat-King dwelled, dozens of rats tied tail to tail to tail.
After a while, the rats arrived in a rustling tide, and were given their instructions.
Rats go everywhere, of course, and see everything, so it wasn’t long before one was found who had seen the killer leave the alley and seen where he went, or at least followed him long enough in the right direction that Blackie was able to go to that particular corner and pick up the killer’s scent even with his aging nose.
p. 145

This an is unusual and original piece that would shine more brightly if it wasn’t stuck between the very good Nelson and Anderson stories.
I Am Not I is by G. V. Anderson, who won a 2017 World Fantasy Award for her short story Das Steingeschöpf (Strange Horizons, 12 December 2016), and I think I can see why from this story. The narrator of this piece, Miss Strohm-Waxxog, is the daughter of a high-society Varian, and is a genetic throwback, or sap—human as they were once known. She has had surgery to change her appearance so she can pass as Varian, and hopes it will fool Madame Qlym, who is interviewing her for a job at her Emporium:

“You must be Miss Strohm-Waxxog! Oh, let me look at you!” and before I could protest she was inches away, jerking my chin this way and that to admire the glitter of her lamps in my six eyes, twirling me round to look, to pat — I flinched. My wings, stale as a new butterfly’s, rustled against my clothes as I moved.
“Ah,” she said, withdrawing her hands. “No true flight? It happens, it happens. What a pity. And your poor eye.…”
I knew I looked unspectacular. When I’d telephoned to arrange this interview I’d given her my real surname — a reckless move, but I needed her to employ me; few would turn away a member of the city’s most powerful family. She’d probably spent all morning imagining what beauteous manner of mutation would be walking through her door later. And here I was, with sore, brittle wings and a gammy eye.
“It’s the Strohm gene,” I gambled. “Infections in the third pair are common.” I needn’t have worried. She was so blinded by reverence for my family that she swallowed this without question.
p. 148

Madame Qylm is an acristologist, and her Emporium conducts a very specific trade:

I eased open the door to the emporium and slipped inside.
There was only one aisle, wide enough to spread out my arms and brush the shelves with my fingertips — not that I wanted to get too close. The shelves creaked under the weight of thousands of dusty jars containing hands tinted amber by formaldehyde; eyeballs trailing optic kelp; and butter bean fœtuses that watched me with milky, unformed eyes. Sap parts, all of them. Collected and sold for the pleasure of Varians.
p. 147

Strohm-Waxxog gets the job, and so begins her struggle to get enough money to pay for the surgical repair of her implanted eyes and wings.
In due course she meets the source of Madame Qylm’s sap specimens, the honey man:

He was more hive than flesh. He wore a loose shirt and pressed trousers, braces slung uselessly about his hips; and every available patch of skin was riddled with deep, black holes. Holes that went nowhere at all.
They obscured his face, his mouth; he had no hair, just tunnels boring into his head. As Madame ushered him through for refreshment, a bee emerged from the depths of a neck-hole and perched in the opening to watch me.
p. 153

The honey man soon realises what Strohm-Waxxog really is and, given her society connections, what she would be worth as a specimen. The rest of the story details their conspiracy to cheat Madame Qylm out of her business.
This is an original work, and one which creates a strange but entirely convincing world. The ending allows for sequels, and I hope we will see them. Another one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
Afiya’s Song by Justin C. Key is a long novelette set on a slave plantation in 1821, and is mostly concerned with the dreadful treatment of the inhabitants. The two aspects that set this apart from a straight historical story are that it takes place in a parallel world where there was a slave rebellion, and the main character—the person who sets the rebellion in motion—has a magical song that has various properties, including the ability to heal.
Later on in the story she teaches one of the male slaves the song with the hope that he will be able to use it in a similar way, but that doesn’t happen. Nonetheless, the song seems to spread throughout the slave community as an anthem-cum-vision.
Although this is worthy and well enough done there are a couple of problems with it, and those are that both the parallel world and magical song aspects are not entirely convincing. The parallel world rebellion is presented as a given and there is little explanation of how this happened. As for the magical song, I couldn’t quite see the point of this as nothing much ultimately seems to come of it that wouldn’t be provided by a word of mouth rebellion. If you have seen the film Twelve Years a Slave, I don’t think you will get anything more out of this piece. Personally, I would have been more interested in a story that was about a parallel world slave rebellion and how it happened—with a view to illuminating why that wasn’t the case in this world.
An Obstruction to Delivery by Sean Adams is another original piece, a loopy and meandering story about a town where postal workers use underground tunnels to deliver the mail because of the behaviour of one of their operatives, Peter Ponducci:

Peter was known for a variety of troublemaking activities, such as:
• carrying with him at all times a small cloth dampened with sedative to be used on dogs he deemed a danger;
• climbing atop the statue of the city’s founder in the central park, sitting upon its stone shoulders, and delivering sermons on the importance of “absolute adherence to the postal code, with observance of both the written and unwritten mandates dispensed therein”;
• and enforcing mailbox cleanliness by removing all junk mail left for more than a day and setting fire to it on the recipient’s lawn, just long enough to ensure an appropriate area of charred grass remained to serve as a warning.
p. 224-225

Peter goes missing, and then piles of bones start appearing in the tunnels . . . .
This synopsis doesn’t even scratch the surface of this quirky, offbeat, multifaceted and very original tale. That latter comment notwithstanding, I was vaguely reminded of Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster. If you liked that, you’ll love this. Another one for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections. Oh, and a nice editorial touch to follow this story with F&SF’s moving notice:

An Unearned Death by Marissa Lingen is a tale about a woman who is a Messenger for the Gods. She goes from village to village with her magic cloak telling the dying which god, if any, will take their souls. If a god accepts their soul their bodies go to the cemetery—otherwise they go to the bone yard, and what would seem to be a living death. . . . When the Messenger comes upon a grandmother who appears destined for the bone yard she attempts to intercede with one of the Gods, and summons Lora the Just.
The idea of the Messenger and her cloak is a good one, but this story didn’t really grab me and I thought it the weakest piece in the issue.

I rather liked the cover, There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House by Nicholas Grunas3, surprising perhaps given that it is just a picture of a house with a police car in front.4 I’d like to see the original as the cover blots out the front of the car with a barcode. I also wondered if the cover designer had overly cropped the left and right hand sides of the work.
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint covers a number of writers unknown to me (P. L. Winn, Nathan Van Coops, Patricia Briggs, James E. Coplin), and nothing came up when I searched SFE so I may not be the only one. That said, the Coplin book, Creaking Staircases, sounded interesting, and the Kindle edition was cheap enough to make it an impulse buy for me. Musing on Books by Michelle West has one name I recognise, Peter S. Beagle.
There is a Cartoon by Nick Downes, which I didn’t get the point of.
With the Best of Intentions by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty is a science article on honey– and bumblebee decline. This one didn’t grab me like their articles normally do.
Ghoulies, Ghosties, Beasties by David J. Skal is a positive review of The Beauty and the Beast remake, a film that would have otherwise slid under my radar. (It is Sky TV’s Xmas Day movie, so I’ll probably have a look.)
Northwest Cruise by Sophie M. White is a poem about a future when the North-West passage is open, and the view future travellers have of the past.
Coming Attractions trails next month’s anniversary issue with, drum-roll, Samuel R. Delaney’s first story for the magazine in four decades (the last was Prismatica, F&SF, October 1977—even though I can’t remember reading David Erik Nelson’s novella last December, I managed to dredge this one up from memory ).
Curiosities
by Paul Di Filippo considers a reasonably modern novel (1972), A Report From Group 17 by Robert C. O’Brien.

This is perhaps the strongest issue that editor C. C. Finlay has put together so far, and one of the best I’ve read since I started this blog. If he does not make the Hugo finals next year then there is no justice.

  1. Auston Habershaw at ISFDB.
  2. “—And He Built a Crooked House—” at Wikipedia.
  3. It looks like Nicholas Grunas is a mainstream artist. A number of his works can be seen at this site. If David Erik Nelson has any sense he’ll buy this cover painting to go with next year’s Hugo 🙂
  4. Another F&SF cover with a house (and one which I also liked) is Ron Walotsky’s, which illustrates Fritz Leiber’s serial, The Pale Brown Thing, from January 1977:

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UKKindle USAWeightless Books or physical copies.

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #322, March 1978

ISFDB link

Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Anne W. Burke

Fiction:
The Persistence of Vision • novella by John Varley ∗∗∗+
Hundred Years Gone • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗∗
The Family Man • short story by Theodore L. Thomas
The Seventh Fool • short story by Glen Cook ∗∗∗
Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose • short story by Charles L. Grant ∗∗∗+
Down the Ladder • short story by Robert F. Young ∗∗
The Horror Out of Time • short story by Randall Garrett ∗∗∗
Papa Schimmelhorn’s Yang • novelette by Reginald Bretnor ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Chesley Bonestell
Books • by Algis Budrys
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Films and Television: The Road to Albany • by Baird Searles
Coming next month
Anyone for Tens? • science essay by Isaac Asimov

The reason I picked up this issue was that I’d watched the movie Damnation Alley1 and couldn’t recall what Baird Searles had said about it in his column (although I remember he reviewed it). After finding the copy and reading Films and Television: The Road to Albany, I discovered that he thought as little of it as I did:

All I can say further is that all those people who came down on Star Wars because it was “childish,” “mindless,” “inept,” “silly,” or “fatuous,” should be condemned to see Damnation Alley ten times to find out what those words really mean. p. 99

He also briefly mentions a UK TV series called Star Maidens, which I’ve never heard of, never mind seen.
After I’d read the column I skimmed the rest of the contents and thought that the line-up of names looked like that of an all-star issue—before noticing, a few moments later, that description on the cover. This was quite unusual for the time as F&SF normally ran only one all-star issue every year, its October anniversary issue. Why there was an extra one in the March of this year I have no idea—I suspect that Ed Ferman realised he had inadvertently put one together, and labelled it as such. That said, there were quite a few special issues around this time,2 so it may have been a marketing decision.

The fiction leads off with The Persistence of Vision by John Varley, who was, at the time, probably the hot new writer of the mid-seventies. Although this wasn’t one of his acclaimed ‘Eight Worlds’ series,3 it would go on to win both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
The story takes place in a near-future America, and is narrated by a man who has been travelling from commune to commune. In New Mexico he comes upon Keller, a settlement created for a group of deaf-blind people who are the result of a 1960’s German Measles epidemic. He ends up staying, and the story mostly describes the very different way the Kellerians live to compensate for their lack of sight and hearing. More significantly, it is also about how they communicate.
Initially the narrator is taught by Pink, a teenager who later becomes one of his two lovers, how to ‘speak’ to the group.4 She teaches him to spell out letters using his hands. However, there is another level of language more complicated than this which he calls ‘shorthand,’ which is turn is exactly that for a even more complex whole-body form of expression. He sees this at the unusual nightly gatherings the group has:

I thought I was in the middle of an orgy. I had been at them before, in other communes, and they looked pretty much like this. I quickly saw that I was wrong and only later found out I had been right. In a sense.
What threw my evaluations out of whack was the simple fact that group conversation among these people had to look like an orgy. The much subtler observation that I made later was that with a hundred naked bodies sliding, rubbing, kissing, caressing all at the same time, what was the point in making a distinction? There was no distinction.
I have to say that I use the noun “orgy” only to get across a general idea of many people in close contact. I don’t like the word, it is too ripe with connotations. But I had these connotations myself at the time, and so I was relieved to see that it was not an orgy. The ones I had been to had been tedious and impersonal, and I had hoped for better from these people.
Many wormed their way through the crush to get to me and meet me. It was never more than one at a time; they were constantly aware of what was going on and were waiting their turn to talk to me. Naturally, I didn’t know it then. Pink sat with me to interpret the hard thoughts. I eventually used her words less and less, getting into the spirit of tactile seeing and understanding. No one felt they really knew me until they had touched every part of my body, and there were hands on me all the time. I timidly did the same. p. 23-24

Much later (the story is a slow burn) he discovers that the Kellerian adults also get together to ∗∗∗:

The German shepherds and the sheltie were out there, sitting on the cool grass facing the group of people. Their ears were perked up, but they were not moving.
I started to go up to the people. I stopped when I became aware of the concentration. They were touching, but their hands were not moving. The silence of seeing all those permanently moving people standing that still was deafening to me.
I watched them for at least an hour. I sat with the dogs and scratched them behind the ears. They did that chop-licking thing that dogs do when they appreciate it, but their full attention was on the group.
It gradually dawned on me that the group was moving. It was very slow, just a step here and another there over many minutes. It was expanding in such a way that the distance between any of the individuals was the same. Like the expanding universe, where all galaxies move away from all others.
Their arms were extended now; they were touching only with fingertips in a crystal lattice arrangement.
Finally they were not touching at all. I saw their fingers straining to cover distances that were too far to bridge. And still they expanded equilaterally. One of the shepherds began to whimper a little. I felt the hair on the back on my neck standing up. Chilly out here, I thought.
I closed my eyes, suddenly sleepy.
I opened them, shocked. Then I forced them shut. Crickets were chirping in the grass around me.
There was something in the darkness behind my eyeballs. I felt that if I could turn my eyes around I would see it easily, but it eluded me in a way that made peripheral vision seem like reading headlines.
If there was ever anything impossible to pin down, much less describe, that was it. It tickled at me for a while as the dogs whimpered louder, but I could make nothing of it. The best analogy I could think of was the sensation a blind person might feel from the sun on a cloudy day.
I opened my eyes again. p. 38-39

Not only can he not grasp this ineffable sensation, neither can the children of the group, who can all see and hear. His inability to connect with the group on this level (and his other inner demons) eventually lead him to leave the commune.
The last few pages of the story (spoiler) have him return to the group shortly after the Millennium, to find that the adults have ∗∗∗-ed, vanished, transmigrated to what- or wherever. He sees that Pink is now blind and deaf, as are the other remaining ‘normal’ children, and the story finishes with her putting her hands on his ears and eyes and making him the same way.
When I first read this story all those years ago I found the ending exasperating; this time around I thought it worked better. My reservation on this occasion is that the story feels a little dated and hippy-ish, but you can see how its Stranger in a Strange Land/Mimsy Were the Borogroves mashup won it a Hugo and Nebula Award.
Hundred Years Gone is one of Manly Wade Wellman’s ‘Southern Appalachia’ stories according to ISFDB,5 which essentially means that it has the feel of a ‘Silver John’ story without Silver John. In this one a young man makes his way up a hillside trail and collapses at the door of a cabin. When he wakes he finds two woman caring for him, one younger and one older. Eventually we find that the man has made his way there because of a folklore tale about the original owner of the place, which used to be an inn for travellers. The owner killed the visitors for their money, horses, and darker reasons involving devil worship.
In the cabin there is a storeroom with a cross on the door and the windows. There is also a hundred year anniversary of the owner’s death, etc. It is a competent enough tale that plays out pretty much as expected, but it feels a little uneven, and the authorial hand manoeuvring the actors through their paces is too obvious. It rather reads like a by-the-numbers pastiche of Wellman’s work by another author.
The Family Man by Theodore L. Thomas tells of an astronaut whose spaceship is exploring the plume of a comet. This narrative is intercut with scenes from his domestic life with his wife and kids. While he is in the plume he sees a kid’s marble ball go by, as well as a desk. The last scene has him on the surface where he sees another anomalous object:

At ten seconds he looked around, glanced back behind him out the porthole for the first time. Thirty meters behind him, on the surface, was a perfectly square depression on the surface, framed in a rim. A raised bar ran across the center of the surface of the square within the rim, and the bar had openings along its length. Openings, like handholes. p. 77

I was mystified as to what this, and the point of the story, was.
The Seventh Fool by Glen Cook is a slight but entertaining fantasy about a con-artist and thief who arrives in Antonisen, one of the Hundred Cities, and tries to scam one of the candidates in the election for a new Fool. The biter is bit, or nibbled at least.
Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose by Charles L. Grant is an unsettling horror story about a man and his three daughters at a new house in the country, and the trouble brought by the young men of the area. The father is particularly possessive of one of the three daughters, Abbey, and this is the core of the story.
I thought this was excellent piece the first time I read it and, while I didn’t appreciate it as much this time around, it is still a strong contribution.
Down the Ladder by Robert F. Young is a nostalgic story of a boy’s childhood, and the visits he made to his grandfather’s and uncle’s house, an old, creaky, and ill-maintained affair with an overgrown garden. The narrative alternates between Jeff’s childhood and the present day, where he runs a restaurant and lives in a new house on the site of his uncle’s old one. Late on in the story (spoiler) there is a rather tacked-on ending that has the uncle extracting from Jeff a promise not to tear down the house after his death, and a mention of the critters that live there . . . .
I think that this story may be typical of Young’s later work: they are well-written and absorbing pieces, but don’t always work as a story.
The Horror Out of Time by Randall Garrett tells of an explorer on a sailing ship which encounters a storm caused by volcanic eruption. After barely surviving the event they come upon land that has risen from the depths. While the captain anchors the ship to make repairs, the explorer goes to investigate a structure he has seen:

The close-up view through the spyglass only made the island look the more uninviting. Rivulets of sea water, still draining from the upper plateau, cut through sheets of ancient slime that oozed gelatinously down the precipitate slopes to the coral-crusted beach below. Pools of nauseous-looking liquid formed in pockets of dark rock and bubbled slowly and obscenely. As I watched, I became obsessed with the feeling that I had seen all this before in some hideous nightmare.
Then something at the top of the cliff caught my eye. It was something farther inland, and I had to readjust the focus of my instrument to see it clearly. For a moment, I held my breath. It appeared to be the broken top of an embattled tower! p. 115

Once on the island and inside the tower he comes upon what he suspects is a sacrificial altar. He sees a carven monstrosity above it and flees back to the ship.
This reads for the most part like a middling Lovecraftian pastiche, but its twist ending is quite clever.
Papa Schimmelhorn’s Yang by Reginald Bretnor starts with the eighty year old lecher having been once again grounded by his wife for his amorous adventures:

So he had retreated to his basement workshop and to the more congenial company of his old striped tomcat, Gustav-Adolf, whose tastes and instincts were much like his own, and had devoted several days to assembling and installing the curious miscellany of valves, gears, tubing, solenoids, and oddly formed ceramics which, in and around a device resembling (though only when you looked at it correctly) the illegitimate offspring of a translucent Klein bottle, constituted the functioning heart of his invention.
The job done, he fired up the boiler and stood over it while it produced a proper head of steam.
Ach, Gustav-Adolf,” he exclaimed, “how nice it iss I am a chenius! Imachine—no vun else knows dot for anti-grafity you must haff shteam, instead of elecdricity vhich gets in der vay. Und I myself do not know vhy, because it iss all in mein subconscience, chust as Herr Doktor Jung told me in Geneva vhen I vas chanitor at der Institut fur High Physics.”
“Mrreow!” replied GustavAdolf, looking up from his saucer of dark beer on the cluttered Schimmelhorn workbench.
“Dot’s right, und predty soon ve see how it vorks.” Papa Schimmelhom made some fine adjustments and peered at the steam gauge on the dashboard. He closed the hood and clamped it down. “Zo, ve are ready!” he exclaimed. Thinking of Dora Grossapfel’s plump behind under easily removable stretchpants, he climbed into the driver’s seat. “Ach, such a pity, Gustav-Adolf! Imachine, my nice Dora among der predty clouds maybe at two thousand feet!” p. 135-136

His nephew Anton turns up and takes him and the modified car to Hong Kong, where he meets two businessmen, Mr Peng, and Mr Plantagenet. Mr Peng explains the latter is the rightful heir to the British throne:

“He is descended directly from another Richard Plantagenet, known as the Lion Hearted, and he is the rightful King of England—”
“Your Machesty—” murmured Papa Schimmelhom politely.
“Thank you,” said His Majesty. “Yes, after we became friends Horace explained the influence of dragons on our history. All that dreadful St. George nonsense, and the other horrible myths and fairy tales. I at once saw the role they’d played in enabling the usurpation of our throne. Not that I have anything against the present usurper, who seems to be a very decent sort of woman, but I do want to set the matter right, you know. That’s simple justice, isn’t it? Besides, Horace and I have all sorts of plans. We shall re-establish the Chinese and British Empires. No one will be able to stand against us. My dear Papa, we shall rule the world!” p. 143

They tell him about the connection between his anti-gravity car, black holes and a parallel universe. This other reality has dragons and a Chinese Empire, and yin and yang are in balance. Papa agrees to work on a portal that will connect the two universes.
As his subconscious works on the problem he works his way through the local women, much to the annoyance of the two stewardesses who were his playmates on the flight over: they tell the wives of the two tycoons what is going on, and they fly to the States to convince Mrs Schimmelhorn to come back with them to put an end to the project:

Mrs. Peng did her best to explain the technicalities of Black Holes and anti-gravity and yang and yin—to engineer a breakthrough into another universe, where there were dragons and the Chinese Empire still flourished.
Mama Schimmelhorn stood up. “Donnerwetter! Die yang und yin I do nodt undershtand, also Black Holes except like maybe in Calcutta. But Papa—dot iss different. Vhen it iss nodt naked vomen, it iss time-trafel, und gnurrs, und sometimes X-rated cuckoo-clocks. Such monkey business. Vell, now I put a shtop!”
“We were hoping you could,” Mrs. Plantagenet said fervently. “I assure you that I have no desire to become Queen of England. I couldn’t possibly cope with that dreadful Labour Party at my age. Besides, Richard keeps talking about crusades against the Saracens, and though I dare say they deserve it, it does seem a bit late in the day for that sort of thing, doesn’t it?”
“Primula’s quite right,” declared Mrs. Peng. “I myself certainly do not want to be Empress of China, surrounded by eunuchs and slave girls and palace intrigues and all that rubbish. Of course, Horace has promised me that he doesn’t want the throne, but there aren’t any other candidates, and—well, you know how men are.”
Mama Schimmelhorn indicated grimly that indeed she did.
“But worst of all,” Mrs. Peng continued, “he wants to bring the dragons back again, even though he knows I can’t stand snakes and lizards and all those horrible crawly things. You see, in ancient China his family had charge of them, and they became quite devoted to the creatures. Can you imagine having the sky full of dragons, Mrs. Schimmelhorn?”
“Dragons?” Mama Schimmelhorn snorted. “Herr Gott, iss bad enough vith seagulls und die filthy shtarlings!” p. 149

The story eventually resolves at an imperial palace in the parallel world. Entertaining and amusing stuff, if you can take its occasional Benny Hill-like sensibilities.

The Cover for this issue is a very poor affair: dull, static, and with amateurishly drawn lizards. Surprisingly, it is by Chesley Bonestell.
Books by Algis Budrys is a rambling column that supposedly starts with a review of Fred Pohl’s Gateway, but it is really a reflection on a type of fiction he suggests is different from Campbellian SF, and stems from the Futurians. Budrys variously describes this:

What is clear is that the major artistic weakness of Futurian technique was a gimmicky, sometimes mordant, always slightly withdrawn effect which lent itself tellingly to important but flashy work such as The Space Merchants, but even at Kornbluth’s hands had difficulty coming to grips with the deeper feelings. Perhaps a term we’re groping for is “anti- Romanticism.” p. 65

Futurians liked to thump you with a cartoon beginning, tell a straight story spotted with wry observations, and hit you with a twist ending. Not until the 1950s did Cyril Kombluth begin making it a rule to end in the withdrawing, omniscient auctorial comment to be found ending such stories as “The Luckiest Man in Denv.”
Or, not ending—terminating… a technique that can be seen again in Pohl’s “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus,” et seq. p. 65-66

He finishes by saying how Gateway transcends this model:

Gateway represents two departures from the Futurian style, even the evolved Postwar ex-Futurian style. One is that general collage-y technique, like a restrained version of Joe Haldeman’s Mindbridge, whose roots are much elsewhere. But the other is that, in the ending, Brodhead weeps.
Now, people at the endings of many Futurian stories weep. Or they stand aghast, or scream, or drop their jaws. They are cartoons. Not Brodhead. Pohl would not be true to his past if Brodhead were a full figure; he is still not a personality but an archetype—a prole. But he is a lost prole. His enemy is not the fat cat; his troubles are not those of the innocent victim within too large a mechanism. He is, in a sense, not a victim at all. He is large enough a person within himself so that he has the capacity to inflict pain on himself, and to recognize whence it comes. He weeps real tears. From the author of “Let the Ants Try,” Gladiator-at-Law and Slave Ship, this is more than unexpected.
I think Gateway is more than an excellent piece of SF. I think it is a sign that the Futurian/Campbellian dichotomy is at an end just as we begin to grasp the extent of its existence. p. 66

The last part of the essay reviews Knight’s The Futurians, but quickly veers off into how, since the Futurians, SF writers have been taught: universities, Milford, Clarion, etc.
It is a pity there isn’t a letters column in F&SF; it would have been interesting to read the replies to this essay.
Gahan Wilson contributes a Cartoon (God hurling thunderbolts from a cloud and moaning that it isn’t easy) that is a miss for me.
Anyone for Tens? by Isaac Asimov starts with an anecdote:

Occasionally I will write an article for F&SF that will accept, as a matter of course, the development of the Universe and life and man and brain by evolutionary processes. This is taken quietly by my F&SF audience.
Not so if I reach beyond to people not ordinarily exposed to such ideas. If I make similar assumptions in articles in TV Guide, for instance, I rouse the Bible Belt, and I am promptly bombarded with letters on the iniquity of evolutionary ideas or of any notions that are post-Biblical in nature (except for television sets, I presume).
At first, I would conscientiously try to send reasoned replies, and then it became clear that this was equivalent to trying to bail out the ocean with a spoon, I spent some time brooding on human folly.
Then I decided that such brooding also got me nowhere, and so what I do now is glance over each letter for laughs before dumping it.
My favorite recent letter, coming in response to an article on the big bang theory of the origin of the Universe, began as follows: “The trouble with you scientists is that you don’t observe. If you only took the trouble to make the simplest observations you would see at once that the Bible says, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’”
Imagine scientists overlooking that key observation! And it is actually the first verse in the Bible! You would think it was impossible to miss. It makes me feel sad that I must turn now to a mathematical topic concerning which there is no controversy and on which the Bible Belt makes no stand based on their superior powers of observation. p. 123-124

The article itself is about number bases, logarithms, and slide rules. I briefly used the latter before electronic calculators became available, so this was a trip down memory lane.
Finally, Coming next month trails a promising All-British Special issue, with stories from Aldiss, Priest, Cowper, Brunner, Roberts, Watson, Aickman and Bulmer.

A good issue.

  1. The movie of Damnation Alley gets off to a good start actually. The first ten or fifteen minutes take place in an underground missile control room when a Soviet attack occurs. A nuclear conflagration ensues.
    We then cut to two years after the holocaust, and the Earth’s weather has become very strange. By this time Hell Tanner, one of the missile officers, has left the Air Force and we find him on his motorcycle, evading man-size insects. His rebellious attitude does not stop him and his black friend going to Albany in two armoured Air Force cars.
    The rest of the movie consists of various characters either dying (in a storm, and by armoured, killer cockroaches) or being picked up (a woman with a French accent, and a teenage kid). The unifying features of these adventures are people acting like idiots (just as in the more recent Promethus) and Hell Tanner zooming about on his muffler-less motorbike.
    There is also a spectacularly bad piece of script-writing when they discuss the cause of the freak weather (nice SFX skies). This is attributed to a change in the Earth’s axial tilt but, after a half-hearted attempt at explaining this, the scriptwriters give up.
  2. The tail end of 1976 had an October anniversary issue and a November Damon Knight special author issue; 1977 had a July Harlan Ellison special author issue and an October anniversary issue; 1978 had a March all-star issue, an April all-British issue, and an October anniversary issue.
  3. The ‘Eight Worlds‘ series, like much of Varley’s other writing of the time, took the sense of wonder SF of the forties and fifties and married it to a very modern attitude to sexuality, gender and characterisation.
  4. After decades of paedophile scandals it is difficult to view this relationship, between a forty-seven year old man and a thirteen year old girl, dispassionately. However, the sexual attitudes in the story, probably a hangover from the hippie ‘free love’ era, are perhaps best summed up by another passage in the story:
    I also don’t seem to have mentioned homosexuality. You can mark it down to my early conditioning that my two deepest relationships at Keller were with women: Pink and Scar. I haven’t said anything about it simply because I don’t know how to present it. I talked to men and women equally, on the same terms. I had surprisingly little trouble being affectionate with the men.
    I could not think of the Kellerites as bisexual, though clinically they were. It was much deeper than that. They could not even recognize a concept as poisonous as a homosexuality taboo. It was one of the first things they learned. If you distinguish homosexuality from heterosexuality, you are cutting yourself off from communication—full communication—with half the human race. They were pansexual; they could not separate sex from the rest of their lives. p. 40
    Presumably this philosophy applies across the (puberty onwards) ages and well as the sexes.
  5. Wellman’s ‘Southern Appalachia’ series at ISFDB.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UKKindle USAWeightless Books or physical copies.

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #133, June 1962

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Gideon Marcus, Galactic Journey

Executive Editor, Avram Davidson; Managing Editor, Edward L. Ferman

Fiction:
Such Stuff • short story by John Brunner ∗∗
Daughter of Eve • short story by Djinn Faine
The Scarecrow of Tomorrow • short story by Will Stanton
The Xeenemuende Half-Wit • translated short story by Josef Nesvadba
The Transit of Venus • short story by Miriam Allen deFord
Power in the Blood • short story by Kris Neville +
The Troubled Makers • reprint short story by Charles Foster
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: LI • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton]
The Fifteenth Wind of March • novelette by Frederick Bland
The Diadem • short story by Ethan Ayer

Non-fiction:
Cover & Interior Art • by Emsh
In this issue . . . Coming soon . . .
The Egg and Wee • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Books • by Alfred Bester
Index to Volume Twenty Two – January-June 1962

Such Stuff by John Brunner is about a man called Wills who is running a dream deprivation experiment on a volunteer called Starling. Although the other volunteers have previously dropped out of the experiment— they only lasted a couple of weeks due to the adverse side effects—Starling has been going for six months. Wills, however, is increasingly having strange thoughts about garlic, stakes and crossroads . . . .
A decision is later made by Dr Daventry, the project supervisor, to end the experiment at the six month point. Wills is on duty for the last night, and the climax of the story (spoiler) has him hammering a stake into Starling’s chest . . . only to have Dr Daventry come into the room and suck up all the blood with a syringe. Wills wakes to discover that he has been having a dream of his own, and realises that Starling has resolved the problem of not having dreams by getting other people to do it for him.
This idea didn’t really work for me but I found the increasing sense of foreboding effective, as well as the dream reality shift at the end. An interesting story, if not a ‘good’ one.
Brunner would go on to write a celebratory essay on Philip K. Dick for New Worlds a couple of years later, and perhaps that writer’s influence is visible here.
Daughter of Eve by Djinn Faine is narrated by a girl:

She was very unsun. I never knew my mother but Daddy said she looked like she ate violets and cream for breakfast. I always thought that was pretty silly because I never heard of such fare on starships and Daddy doesn’t raise such crops here, but anyway, she had pale golden hair and was very unsun.
Daddy is a big man. He is two or three times bigger than me and very sun—it has burnt him all rich golden brown. The sun doesn’t pain him, it just makes him look more like the earth he hoes. Daddy is very strong too. He can work even more land than the tin farmer they sent him from Oldfolks Ground. Daddy sent the tin farmer back—he says we have to work the land ourselves and smell and feel and taste it and dig our toes in it if we are going to stay here and grow. p. 20

Her mother is dead, and the girl spends her days playing with one of the local aliens.
Later on in the story she goes with her father to visit the Oldfolks Ground. The people there are not refugees from a post-holocaust Earth like they are, but part of an exploration starship from a forgotten part of the Empire. This group want the father to leave the child with them so they can raise her.
The final scene has the father and daughter again visiting the settlement and, once more, the group implore the father to leave the child. The payoff (spoiler) is that he is planning an incestuous Adam-and-Eve relationship with the girl. Davidson would publish a number of stories that would push back the boundaries of the genre during his tenure as editor: this was the first.1
The Scarecrow of Tomorrow by Will Stanton starts with a man sitting in his garden having a beer and shooting arrows at crows. His neighbour joins him and, as they drink several cans of beer, they discuss the crow problem. This eventually spirals into a project where they build a robot-like scarecrow to replace the one that is there.
The next day, both of them are hung over, and they see that the number of crows has markedly increased. When they try to approach the scarecrow one of the crows dives down and tries to attack the men. There is (spoiler) a hint here that the crows recognise a new species and are trying to protect it, but this isn’t entirely clear. Pity, as the story is an entertainingly told one otherwise.
The Xeenemuende Half-Wit by Josef Nesvadba (trans. of Blbec z Xeenemünde, 1960) is about the idiot son of a German rocket engineer working at Xeenemunde during WWII. The story is mostly told from the perspective of a retired teacher who is employed to replace a governess apparently killed by a stray allied bomb. He struggles to control the boy, and later sees him beating up younger children in the street, until he is forcibly stopped by the butcher’s wife. That night the butcher’s shop is also destroyed by a solitary bomb . . . .
This has a convincing setting even if (spoiler) the boy’s ability to design and launch highly accurate miniature rockets, modified from a copy of his father’s plans, is kept off-stage.
The Transit of Venus by Miriam Allen deFord is a weak attempt at humour, a supposed account by a future archaeologist of the scandal surrounding the ‘Buticontest’ of 2945. The winner, a Venerian, turns out to have come from America, and has lied about her qualifications. The backstory of this atavism and her fate are revealed.
Power in the Blood by Kris Neville is an odd piece about a family having breakfast when the mother announces she is about to have one of her visions:

When the dew had scarcely formed and the sun was no more than rosy promise in the East, Mink Smight, seated at the breakfast table, reasoned that it was going to be a beautiful day.
Mink said, “It’s going to be a beauty.”
Ma Smight pursed her lips, thinking. “It might, and then again it might not.”
Joey recognized certain sure indications in Ma’s tone. With his gun-metal eyes flashing, he pleaded over a plate or corn bread: “No more visions—”
Ma set her jaw and rolled her eyes to show how yellow her eye-balls were. “When I feel a vision coming on, I jest naturally have to go ahead and have it.”
“Not now, when things have been going along so nice for a while,” the youngest girl said, hoping to cry back the inevitable. “Please. Remember the time I had that cute little soldier over? And then—” this to Mink—“Ma had to go and have a totally unnecessary vision right in front of him. He never did come back. I was so embarrassed I like to died.”
“You were only eleven,” Ma said placidly.
“Suppose I was. Suppose I was. How was he to know?” p. 49

As the story develops (as you can see from the above most of the fun is in the telling) it materialises that the mother’s visions are causative as much as predictive, and there are hints of strange things happening to the outside world (the machines stop running, a neighbour screams for help, a cat is tearing down houses…). It is an offbeat and effective fantasy.
The Troubled Makers by Charles Foster (Evergreen Review #4, 1957) gets off to a disorienting start before resolving into a character sitting at a restaurant bar talking to a waitress. His behaviour becomes erratic, and then disorderly, at which point Watusi Chief appears and puts him over his shoulder, saying that they have to get to the employment office. At this point the waitress looks up at the ceiling and sees an apple tree, with both fruit and blossom, sticking out of the roof. She sees an idealised version of herself sitting in the tree:

Bare feet and bare legs dangled down from the low limb, almost touching the ground. But the girl’s body was wrapped in a short cape. Desert Princess had never in her life seen a cape anything like that cape but she was immediately sure that she had to have one just like it. For when she stared at it, all she could think of was a fan coral with delicate tracery veins of blood, taken from the turquoise deeps of a warm and liquid tropic sea, carried up and up to the surface of the world of air, and there transformed to texture sheer and smooth as incredible silk, silk passed by gentle hands through an adhering cloud of butterfly wings.
“At it again,” Watusi Chief groaned. “Jesus Christ, Boss, don’t you ever relax?”
But Desert Princess hardly beard Watusi Chief. Because now she saw the face of the girl. And it was her face. Duplicated exactly in every detail, right down to the almost imperceptible forceps mark on her left cheek bone. But somehow, through the perfection of the likeness, there glowed a beauty, both ethereal and sexy, that Desert Princess had never herself discerned when she looked into her mirror.
“Gee,” Desert Princess said, “am I really like that?”
“Boss says so, why then it’s so,” Watusi Chief said. “But he’s sure takin’ a long time saying it.”
“Was I really like that-before? Or—did he, just now—did he just now make me that way?”
Watusi Chief sighed, resigned. ’’The Boss only brings out what’s really there all the time, miss. He knows it’s there because he can see it. And then he makes you see it too—with words, or colors, sounds—or little scenes like this.” p. 64

The Boss is a ’maker.’
This vision is interrupted by the town Marshall, who is the woman’s uncle. He has previously threatened to run the Boss and The Watusi Chief into jail, and is only stopped by the protestations of his niece. The story continues on in this vein until its appropriately cosmic ending.
It is an original piece, like the Neville, and the nearest comparison I can think of would perhaps be R. A. Lafferty. It is certainly a different type of story for the time.
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: LI by Reginald Bretnor is another dreadful pun that just misses unintelligibility by a whisker.
The Fifteenth Wind of March by Frederick Bland is very British disaster story where the cause of the catastrophe is a series of short-lived winds that occur with increasing strength and frequency. This phenomenon is entirely unexplained and is therefore rather unconvincing—as is some of the other story detail—yet it is still an interesting, if terribly dated, read; part of this is due to the relentless inevitability of the repeated winds, the rest is from some of the social detail portrayed in the narrative.
Events begin with John Drake, who is doing errands outside his houseboat when he is almost killed in one of the earlier storms. Shortly afterwards a neighbouring trainee meteorologist tells him he has noted a pattern to recent wind events, and that the prognosis is not good. John organises himself to go to his girlfriend’s house to rescue her and her father. After they experience the next wind early the following morning—which convinces the pair—they fill up the father’s van and head for a cave near the village where John lived as a child. I mentioned earlier that there was some fascinating social detail: this scene occurs during their van journey:

[John] pulled into the courtyard of a prosperous looking hotel. Expensive cars filled the car-park.
“We won’t get lunch here,” Beth said.
“Why ever not? They serve lunches, don’t they?”
“Look at the cars parked outside. Look at the way you’re dressed and me in slacks. Dad’s the only one of us dressed to go in a place like that.”
“We’ll make them serve us. I’ll . . .”
“I wouldn’t enjoy it, John. If I go somewhere like that, I want to be properly dressed.”
“She’s right, son. We’ll enjoy what we eat a lot more in a smaller place.”
John was inclined to be stubborn, but gave in. “Well, as long as you understand that I’m not going to be satisfied with sandwiches.”
He drove out of the courtyard and within the next mile found a place that satisfied Beth. They had a roast beef and apple tart luncheon and John complained that nobody could make Yorkshire pudding like his mother. p. 106

The world is coming to an end but the British are still worried about whether they are appropriately dressed. Keep calm and carry on . . . .
Once they get to the cave they take shelter with other people from the village. The winds continue with increasingly calamitous results—people go deaf due to the pressure drop, get nosebleeds, become unconscious, etc.—giving events an almost surreal feel. By the time of the fifteenth wind (spoiler) there are eight people left alive on Earth . . . .
I’m not sure I’d describe this as a ’good’ story—there is too much unexplained and it is very dated—but it is certainly an absorbing read.
The Diadem by Ethan Ayer is a fantasy about a nurse who has an anonymous caller leave a box of jewels and rings on her doorstep. She gets her boyfriend to bring a jeweller, who (spoiler) gets her to put the rings on and then worships her as the four-armed daughter of Kali.
There is another narrative thread in the middle of this which has a man called Mesir (who had left the jewels at her door) doing a number of odd jobs before ending up in a club with a naked girl who looks like the nurse. I have no idea what the connection between the women is supposed to be.

The Cover is a lovely untitled piece by Emsh (I don’t think it is for any of this issue’s stories)—that’s what I call a customised spacesuit. Emsh also contributes a few spot illustration fillers, the first of these I can remember seeing—in this year’s issues, at least. There is one rather awkwardly placed on p. 26, and others on pp. 49 & 84.

In this issue . . . starts with Davidson noting that Faine, Foster and Ayer are newcomers who he hopes will become regulars (Faine and Ayer turned out to be one-shot wonders; Foster had published a handful of stories in the early to mid-fifties and had already stopped producing—this one is a reprint). The rest of the comments are redundant, apart from the mention of an upcoming Leiber story, The Secret Songs—this should probably have been mentioned in Coming soon . . . That section mentions upcoming work from Randall Garrett and Harlan Ellison, plus a novel serialisation from Robert Sheckley. The rest of the space on this page is given over to an announcement for Westercon XV.
The Egg and Wee by Isaac Asimov is an article about the size of cells and sub-cells. It has one or two interesting parts.
Books by Alfred Bester has this to say about Fritz Leiber’s writing in his review of the collection Shadows with Eyes:

Mr. Leiber seems to function most powerfully in the first-person story form. When events are related by a protagonist, when characters are seen through his eyes, and when the conflicts are revealed by his reactions, then Mr. Leiber is at his best. But when he works from the omniscient or third-person point of view, he is handicapped. There isn’t any opportunity in this form for the marvelous nuances, references, allusions . . . the network of stream-of-consciousness that is the quintessence of his unique style.
Proof of this is the fact that the two best Leiber stories of the past, classics today, are first-person stories: “The Night He Cried” and “Coming Attraction.” And five of the six stories in Shadows with Eyes are also in the first-person form. Mr. Leiber and his many fans will probably disagree with this analysis; but isn’t that a function of the critic, to provoke controversy? p. 89

I’ve never noticed this before: I shall bear it in mind in future.
There is a useful Index to Volume Twenty Two – January-June 1962 and, at the end of the Market Place classified adverts, we have Communicate:

This issue has a much better selection of stories than last issue and there is little if any of Davidson’s verbose feyness. He still can’t put an issue together though. There are five SF stories in a row at the beginning of the issue followed by two distinctly offbeat fantasies, which is very odd sequencing. Also, why wouldn’t you have the last two stories in reverse order, so you finish with the more substantial, readable, and better structured Bland story rather than the minor Ayer?

  1. The Faine story is almost certainly a Davidson purchase as it was accepted/bought at the end of February 1962. It would seem from the acceptance/bought dates (kindly provided by the F&SF office) that Mills finished buying stories at the end of 1961 (with one exception), and Davidson was purchasing from the 31st of December. The raw data follows, and I have asterisked the stories I believe Davidson bought.

March 1962:
Manly Wade Wellman – 15 September 1961
Robert F. Young – 2 November 1961
Doris Pitkin Buck – 2 November 1961
Edgar Pangborn – 2 November 1961
Isaac Asimov – 1 December 1961
Zenna Henderson – 15 December 1961

April 1962: (according to Davidson’s editorial these were all bought by Mills):
Doris Pitkin Buck – 15 October 1960 (accidental reprint?)
Jay WIlliams – 1 January 1961
Kit Reed – 31 May 1961
Henneberg – 31 May 1961
Sylvia Edwards – 15 August 1961
Brian Aldiss – 1 August 1961
Ted Thomas – 15 September 1961
Isaac Asimov – 15 December 1961
Robert Arthur – 31 January 1962 (Mills’ last purchase?)

May 1962:
Terry Carr – 31 December 1961* (claimed by Davidson as his purchase in the introduction)
James Blish – 1 September 1961
William Bankier’s story – 2 October 1961
Gordon Dickson – 18 October 1961.
Josef Nesvadba’s three F&SF pieces were all bought on 1 September 1961
Isaac Asimov – 31 January 1962 (Mills? See Robert Arthur above.)
Walter Kerr’s – 2 November 1961
Ron Goulart – 1 September 1961
Otis K. Burger – 31 December 1961 *
Avram Davidson – 12 January 1961
Eric Frazee – 15 September 1961
W. F. Nolan – 31 December 1961 *

June 1962:
Ethan Ayer – 31 March 1961
Djinn Faine – 28 February 1962 *
Charles Foster – 6 December 1961

  1. Djinn Faine and Ethan Ayer at ISFDB. Faine’s husband at the time was Robert Russell, she had previously been married to Gordon R. Dickson; there is more biographical information at her ISFDB page. Charles Foster at ISFDB—this listing doesn’t mention a story listed at Galactic Central under the pseudonym Mark Ganes: Evil Out of Onzar, Planet Stories, September 1952.
rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #132, May 1962

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Gideon Marcus, Galactic Journey

Executive Editor, Avram Davidson; Managing Editor, Edward L. Ferman

Fiction:
Who Sups With the Devil • short story by Terry Carr
Who’s in Charge Here? • short story by James Blish
Hawk in the Dusk • short story by William Bankier
One of Those Days • short story by William F. Nolan
Napoleon’s Skullcap • novelette by Gordon R. Dickson
Noselrubb, the Tree • short story by Eric Frazee
The Einstein Brain • short story by Josef Nesvadba
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: L • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton]
Miss Buttermouth • short story by Avram Davidson
Love Child • short story by Otis Kidwell Burger
Princess #22 • short story by Ron Goulart
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed • short story by Vance Aandahl

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Emsh
Editorial • editorial by Avram Davidson
By Jove! • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Books: Mutterings from the Underground • essay by Fritz Leiber
The Mermaid in the Swimming Pool • poem by Walter H. Kerr

A short while ago I suggested that the March 1962 issue of F&SF may be the best issue of the magazine—this one may be the worst. Not only are the stories a generally weak bunch—Davidson is still ploughing his way through the inventory left by Mills—but he also manages to make matters worse by the way he presents them. Not only are there a number of irritating introductions but it also appears that he doesn’t yet know how to put a magazine together.
The issue starts with Davidson’s Editorial, which opens with half a page of wittering before he gets to anything of substance. After briefly mentioning his lack of a secretary, we get this:

For the time being we will continue to do our very best with what staff we have, videlicet: our ace agent, Mr. Pettifogle, whose pursuit of biographical intelligence regarding our shyer authors has carried him into the remotest bat-caves and perilous seas; our Miss Mossmolar, whose vast experience with periodical fiction began with her employment on Godey’s Ladies’ Book, and whose inability to master the typewriter is more than compensated by her keen eye for such double-entendres and rude words which certain of our contributors continue to attempt to smuggle into their stories; and Horatio, our somewhat elderly but industrious office-boy whose last name we can never quite remember—he is said at one time to have written quantities of popular juvenile fiction of a wholesome and improving nature-and whose conviction that he will yet (as he puts it) “Rise in the world” never flags: bonne chance, Horatio! p. 5

The rest of it is a list of things he won’t be doing: letter column, fanzine reviews, raise word rates, reduce subscription prices, accept mss that use red ink on yellow paper, etc., etc., very little or any of which needed saying.

Who Sups With the Devil by Terry Carr would seem from the introduction to be one of the first stories bought by Davidson. It is a moderately diverting deal-with-the-devil story where Old Nick’s lack of success with his contracts is pointed out to him. The ending is weak (spoiler: after the contract is signed the Devil states he reserves the right to cheat, completely undermining the contract premise).
Who’s in Charge Here? by James Blish is an odd piece about a building that disgorges a number of panhandlers and their dogs, all of who subsequently get on a train and go uptown. Once there they take up their pitches and listen to the conversation of the district’s literary agents, ad men, and others. There doesn’t appear to be any point to this but it’s a well observed slice of life.
Hawk in the Dusk by William Bankier is another strange fantasy. This one has an unpleasant old man wake up in the middle of the night to find that the grandfather clock is producing strange objects, one every second:

From the face of the great clock, right at the centre spot where the hands joined, a small, cylindrical object appeared and dropped onto the floor. Another followed, and another. They came in a steady flow, a little greater in frequency than the swinging of the pendulum. Sometimes they fell directly to the floor. Other times, their progress impeded by the movement of the second hand, two or three would pile up and drop simultaneously. Peering over the edge of the cot, Hagbart saw a large mound of the things covering the floor and obscuring the base of the clock to a depth of more than a foot. Whatever was happening, it had been going on for some time. p. 19

The old man falls back to sleep and, by the time he wakes up again, they are up to the level of his cot. Reluctant to have any contact with the objects, he sits on a nearby chair and observes them, noticing that they have numbers on them and are counting down to zero; he has several hours left until that point. By the time he eventually decides he should leave the room it is too late: the objects act like quicksand and he returns the chair. At this point he starts reflecting on his earlier choices in life . . . .
One of Those Days by William F. Nolan is an irritating three page story that has an irritating three-quarter page introduction. A man hears a singing butterfly and decides he needs to go and see his shrink. Several more wacky things happen on the way there (talking cat, friend looks like a camel, etc.). The title is the punchline.

Napoleon’s Skullcap by Gordon R. Dickson is, for the most part, an interesting story about a clinical psychologist called Carl and his friend Sean Tyrone. Tyrone is a lawyer who has invented a copper banded cap that he says is a ‘psychic lever,’ and he wants to use it on a patient of Carl’s who thinks he is Napoleon. His theory is that mad people who think they are someone else were once psychically connected to the person in question, and that his lever can re-establish the contact.
Tyrone manages to arrange a visit to Carl’s patient. While visiting, Tyrone surreptitiously gets the patient to wear the cap before Carl interrupts him. Matters develop pretty much as you would expect thereafter, but the ending is baffling and I’m not exactly sure what happens in the last scene.
I note in passing that these events unfold at a fairly leisurely pace, and include several descriptions of the winter weather:

Carl looked down at the broad, snow-clad lawn below, spread out under the towering pines of the grounds. It would be spring in a few weeks, he thought, and then suddenly everything would be breaking out at once; earth-patches showing raw through the melting snow, water running loudly in the gutters, under a fresh, clean sky flecked with puffy clouds—and at night a damp, wet wind from the south, stirring the soul of a man even as it stirred the buried seeds in the ground with the call of new life. p. 36

Noselrubb, the Tree by Eric Frazee has this second and third paragraph:

With a moan he looked down at his exposed feet. They were cold. He was cold. His name was Noselrubb and he was the tree.
He shook vigorously, throwing snow from his branches. He thought of his home, Slupbh, on the planet Phid. There it was warm. There he had been happy. There he had met Lechtmi at Phid U. She took one look at him, whipped out her portable computer, ran twenty-three factors through it in a twinkling, and announced that Noselrubb loved her. p. 48

Do I need to say any more about what is possibly the worst story I’ve ever read in F&SF?
The Einstein Brain by Josef Nesvadba (trans. of Einsteinův mozek, 1960) starts with a lot of professor-type talking-heads lamenting the lack of youngsters entering the sciences. They then turn to the limitations of cybernetic machines:

But technical progress has not solved the fundamental problems of the human mind. People are still asking how and why we should live, we still know nothing of how the universe came into being, and we still cannot understand the fourth dimension Einstein worked out. Whenever we set this question to our cybernetic machines they refuse it as unscientific, wrongly set out, too personal, private, human. But this does not make the question any the less important for every one of us. p. 74

So, after this, they agree that one of their female scientists should take the brains from three recently dead people and uses them to form the Einstein Brain. Initially, the experiment goes as predicted, but then the Brain starts behaving erratically and, eventually, demands a body.
I’m not sure this is an entirely successful piece, but its philosophical ending improves it.
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: L by Reginald Bretnor is another pun that escaped me.
Miss Buttermouth by Avram Davidson starts with a man receiving a pamphlet that predicts the winner of a horse race. He contacts the sender hoping for a repeat performance. A notion stretched out to three pages.
Love Child by Otis Kidwell Burger would seem, again from information in the introduction, to be another Davidson purchase. The story is about an American woman in Paris looking after not only her own two children but also three of her male cousin’s. The woman and the cousin were raised together and were very close, but argued in their early twenties and became estranged. They later married other people. One day, when the five children return from the park, a strange child accompanies them. He turns out to be (spoiler) the child that the cousins would have had if they had married.
Although this has a guessable dénouement, its dense prose and reflective style make it better than it would be otherwise.
Princess #22 by Ron Goulart is the best piece in the issue. This droll and slightly loopy tale concerns Bert, who is touring the planet of Osbert with Donna Dayton android #22—Dayton was a famous Martian torch singer a few years before and, although passé back in the Solar System, still does well in the sticks. When Bert gets to the town of Monarchy Hill he hopes to meet the Princess but ends up meeting several underlings instead, including two Junior Prime Ministers and the former Minister of Cafeterias (recently demoted to Secretary of Chalk and Erasers). Bert asks about the political system:

“Look,” said Bert. “What kind of monarchy is this? I’m impressed by meeting prime ministers and all, but I had hoped to shake hands with the princess herself. Not only don’t I meet her, I have to sit here a week and do nothing. Maybe I should just take my android and go on about my business.” Bert stopped. He hadn’t intended to speak so strongly to someone of the Prime Minister’s station.
“You like princesses, do you?”
“As a class, yes. They have a certain status that one can respect.”
Barnaby smiled, his head bobbing. “I feel I can trust a man with your beliefs.”
“You can.”
“Princess Louise has been abducted. Three days ago while she was cutting the ribbon that opened a new downtown cafeteria”. p. 102

As the Princess looks like Donna Dayton, they borrow Bert’s android for an important event:

“I don’t know if you know how our age-old system of government works,” said Barnaby. “I’ll explain. Each year we hold a contest to select the prettiest girl in each town. This girl must be more than just a likeable beauty. She must have either great political wisdom or be able to play some musical instrument. From these girls the princess who rules all the territory is picked. The finals are held right here on Monarchy Hill.”
“Sounds like as good a system as any,” said Bert, sitting down on the crate.
“Careful of that,’’ said Barnaby. “I think you will get some idea of Princess Louise’s intense personal charm and accordian playing ability when I tell you that she has won the contest five years in a row.”
“I’d like to meet her.” p. 103

Bert then goes off with a man called Vickens to search for the princess. At one of their stops they pick up a woman Bert has previously met on the train to Monarchy Hill, Jan Nordlin. Jan does a ventriloquist act, and is interested in Bert. He is more interested in meeting ‘important people.’
This is an entertaining and amusing story. I note that it meanders and rambles more than his later and more polished work, and is probably the better for it.
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed by Vance Aandahl1 is, for the most part, a pretty good story about a man in a post-apocalyptic world. He starts to hear a voice in his head telling him to join ‘It.’ Having seen several of his companions taken over by ‘It’ he leaves the city.
Later, when he is out in the country, he sees a young woman and chases her, only to be trapped by others of her tribe. The next part of the story concerns his time as a captive in the village, where the woman takes it upon herself to instruct him in their form of Christianity.

For one entire day, they talked about God.
“He is your Father,” she said. “He is my Father, and your Father, and all [men’s] Father. He is the Father of the world, for He made everything when there was nothing. And He has given us the flowers. They are our comfort and protection.”
“How could anyone do all that?”
“God is perfect. He knows everything. He is everywhere. He can do anything.”
“But why can’t we see him?”
“You can,” she cried. “You must! If you only open your heart, you will see all His divine goodness and mercy!”
But Robert Smith could not see God. Sitting on the hill, gazing across the land or into the sky, he would try with all his strength to see the divine Father. He could see the green summer grass, undulating in countless waves toward the horizon; he could see a river, wandering in aimless beauty, eddying into little ponds and lakes, where trees grew and birds sang; he could see the colors of the great mountains, whose purple peaks, even under the summer sun, were [. . .] dotted with a fleet of far distant clouds. But he could not see God, no matter how hard he tried. p. 123

In the end (spoiler) all the villagers are all possessed by ‘It,’ and are commanded to go to a cave some distance away. He is taken with them and, when they go inside the cave, he sees a vast chamber containing what would seem to be a global consciousness. He is plugged into it. This rather unconvincing ending somewhat spoils a quite good story.

There is the usual limited non-fiction. The Cover by Emsh uses, I believe, his wife as a model for the woman in the foreground. In this issue . . . Coming next . . . is on page 30, and part of the text describes at least two of the stories I had already read by that point. To be brutally honest, even if this blurb had been at the beginning of the issue it would have been a complete waste of space.

By Jove! by Isaac Asimov is a science article about the physical characteristics of the outer gas giants and the possibility of finding life on Jupiter.
Books: Mutterings from the Underground by Fritz Leiber is a guest essay in lieu of the normal book review column by Alfred Bester. It is about how the mainstream views SF and, to begin with, is quite hard to follow. Once he gets into his stride it is mostly a moan about the situation:

It seems to me that the situation of the other literary forms with science fiction in their midst is like that of a respectable family with a crackpot uncle who is forever going off prospecting for gold with a donkey, a stubbly red beard, a pack of unregimented fleas, and a general unwashed smell. One day he strikes it rich. He finds himself the family hero, his gold is immensely popular, but he soon discovers that just as before the family wants neither him nor his donkey in the house when visitors call. For one thing they might have to explain to people what fools they were not to believe in his dreams, and no one ever likes to do that. p. 70

Near the end there is this:

What the purist can legitimately demand is that wherever the author take off from, he be completely honest, remember science, keep his eyes open, and see all he can—not flinch from any dark wall in popular or scientific worldview or in his own mind. The science-fiction writer’s noblest task is this: to awaken, in a story, a world on the very edge of impossibility, and then, in the midst of the story, on the verge between the written and the unwritten, to study and search with all the passion of a scientist scrutinizing his experiment, or an analyst his patient’s thought-stream, or a Holmes a Moriarty, or a lover his beloved.
And if, in such a wild pursuit, the science-fiction writer [fails] to achieve ungrudging recognition, or if the science-fiction reader lack the wholehearted approval of his peers, neither should grieve. p. 72

—the last part of which is what I would have said at the outset.
The Mermaid in the Swimming Pool by Walter H. Kerr is an OK poem about a man in a swimming pool thinking/dreaming about a mermaid.
Finally, there are a couple of items that don’t normally feature; there is a Hugo Awards Nomination Blank for those wanting to vote for the Hugo Awards, and an F&SF—For A Lifetime subscription offer.

A poor issue, and this is not helped by Davidson’s editorial material or the running order of the stories. Concerning the latter, if a new reader had picked this one up I wonder whether they would have made it past the first few stories (even the Bankier, while good, is a little odd). I thought the ideal in compiling a magazine issue was start and finish with something strong, and if you can’t start with something strong, use something relatively conventional.
There are also quite a few typos in this issue.

  1. Vance Aandahl’s story introduction states he is a nineteen year old sophomore English literature major at the University of Colorado. A look at his ISFDB page shows him to be the quintessential F&SF writer: out of twenty-nine stories all but three have appeared in F&SF. His first story appeared in 1960 and the last in 1995 (at the age of fifty-three). There is a photo on this site where he publishes film reviews.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UKKindle USAWeightless Books or physical copies.

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #131, April 1962

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
John Loyd, There Ain’t No such Thing As a Free Lunch
Gideon Marcus, Galactic Journey

_____________________

Executive Editor, Avram Davidson; Managing Editor, Edward L. Ferman

Fiction:
Gifts of the Gods • short story by Jay Williams ∗∗∗+
The Last Element • short story by Hugo Correa
The End of Evan Essant . . . ? • short story by Sylvia Edwards
Shards • short story by Brian W. Aldiss
The Kit-Katt Club • short story by John Shepley
To Lift a Ship • short story by Kit Reed
Garvey’s Ghost • short story by Robert Arthur –
Moon Fishers • novelette by Charles Henneberg
The Test • short story by Theodore L. Thomas
Three for the Stars • short story by Joseph Dickinson

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Emsh
Editorial • by Avram Davidson
Vintage Wine • reprint poem by Doris Pitkin Buck
The Weighting Game • essay by Isaac Asimov
Books • by Alfred Bester

_____________________

This is the first issue under the editorship of Avram Davidson. He is listed as the “Executive Editor” and, if I recall correctly, was either living abroad or would shortly do so.1 I presume his duties consisted of reading and selecting manuscripts, and writing introductions, while the donkey work fell on the shoulders of Edward Ferman (son of the publisher, Joe Ferman), who also appears on the masthead for the first time.2 Robert P. Mills is now listed as “Consulting Editor”, replacing J. Francis McComas as “Advisory Editor”.3
Davidson starts off the issue with an introductory Editorial, which begins with this:

In 1950, when this magazine was still a quarterly, we picked up a copy of it at a newsstand in the Times Square subway station, over towards the BMT. Possibly we were going to see a girl who lived in Brooklyn; in those days all the girls seemed to live in Brooklyn. We had just come back from abroad and were shortly to go abroad again, and consequently missed many of the earlier issues: but no matter: we were hooked. In that same year we made our first submission to this magazine; it was returned with what Ward Moore (at whose suggestion we sent it) called “the gentlest letter of rejection he had ever seen.” Anthony Boucher, then (with J. Francis McComas) co-editor, had a way of turning down a story which was more encouraging to authors than some editors ways of accepting.  p. 5

The stories in this issue are selected by Davidson from an inventory purchased by Mills.4 As we shall see, it is a lacklustre collection—I rather suspected this would be the case as Mills had raided the larder for his last few issues (which contain at least half a dozen particularly strong stories).
That said, the issue gets off to a good start with Gifts of the Gods by Jay Williams, a Galactic Federation story that takes an entertainingly cynical view of humanity. When an alien ship lands on Earth their representatives go to the UN. The spokesman explains the rules for joining their organisation, and how they aid and make gifts to those groups that they consider ‘pre-Federable’:

Spokesman held up a small, glittering object between the fingers of his right hand. From it, a metallic voice spoke:
“A group, or unit, of human beings, shall be said to be in a pre-Federable condition when they have successfully reached the following level of sophistication:
“They must have adapted successfully to their environment without drastically changing the ecology of the region so that it becomes unfit for other living beings.
“They must have developed creative arts which reflect their culture and are an integral part of their social organism, the performance of which arts does not rest on economic or political motivation.
“They must not take other life except for direct protection of their species, or the natural requirements of their own survival.
“They must have developed a social order in which no individual goes hungry or shelterless, and in which the physical well-being of one is the responsibility of all.”
The voice ceased, and Spokesman put away his device.
The delegate from the United States broke the stillness. “Well, sir, everything you have said is embodied in the principles by which our great democracy, throughout its history, has attempted to . . .”
He fell silent before the grave, penetrating gaze of the Visitor.
Spokesman said, “We are not speaking of principles, but of practise. Our words are precise and admit of no loose interpretation.”
“I protest!” said the delegate from the Soviet Union. “Civilized beings must admit of principle.”
“We are not civilized,” said Spokesman, placidly.
“But it is not a simple matter to put principles into practise when one is surrounded by hostility,” cried the delegate from Pakistan.
“I did not say it was simple,” Spokesman returned. “Principles are no more than good intentions. The hungry, the wounded, the dead, are not concerned with good intentions.”
The French delegate, who had once visited the prisons in Algeria, cleared his throat several times. The British delegate, too proud to ask whether fox-hunting fell into the third category, shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The delegate from the United States, thinking of the increase in Unemployment figures, tapped his teeth with a pencil. The Soviet delegate, considering state edicts on the nature of Art, buttoned and unbuttoned his jacket uneasily. No one spoke.  p. 12-13

The Spokesman subsequently identifies a small tribe of Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert as the only society that meets these conditions. Of course, the UN members rebel and refuse to send for the Bushmen, so the aliens freeze all of the nearby humans in place until they get their way.
The story’s focus then switches to the Bushmen. After the tribe discusses the matter among themselves they insist that all fourteen hundred of them come to the UN to meet the aliens. The story develops as expected (spoiler) when the aliens ask what gifts the Bushmen want from them:

“Master” he said, “we are content to have flown in the sky, to have seen this great werf with its high tower and shining windows and strange people, and to have beheld you and the other gods with our own eyes. Now, all that we want is to go home again.”
Spokesman said, “We can make you richer than all other men. We will teach you how to build scherms like this one you stand in, how to wear splendid clothing, how to cure all your ills, how to fly through the air yourselves and speak to other men at a great distance.”
Tk’we looked over his shoulder at the others for a long time. He shrugged. “As for me,” he said, “I do not want those things. If the Gods will give me some meat, I will not refuse it. Also, some medicines to cure the aches in my bones; that would be very good. But why should I want to fly, or to live in one of these great scherms? What I want is to be left alone.”
Behind him, hundreds of soft voices murmured discreetly: “Yes, yes, that is so. Meat and some medicines. Do not forget tobacco. Perhaps a little tea, that would be nice.”
“I think those are the gifts we expect, Master,” said Tk’we, grinning. “If you gave us all the other things, then for a little while perhaps we would seem like great men. But then the Bantus and the white men would come and quarrel with us, and there would be war, as there was in the old days, when many Bushmen were killed and we were driven into the desert.
“It is this way with me,” he went on. “I was a good hunter, and I loved hunting. Also, I liked to lie with women. You cannot give me those things again. Nor can you give them to the young men, for they already have them. Now, I like to have a full belly. I enjoy seeing the children play about, and I love to see the young people dance. Sometimes, when my heart is heavy or full of longing, I like to sit apart and play on the guashi and sing the songs I have invented. You cannot give me these things, for I already have them.
“What other things are there for men? No one needs more. If he says that he does, he is not yet a man but a child, who, no matter what he has always desires more, and looks from the bag of tsi nuts that he has to the bag someone else has. But we are not all children. Therefore, give us the promised gifts and let us go.”  p. 19

The story’s philosophy and politics are, perhaps, naïve and simplistic, but it is smart and amusing entertainment.
There are a couple of other stories of note in the issue. The End of Evan Essant . . . ? by Sylvia Edwards is fantasy about a man who goes to see a psychologist as he fears that his name is also what is happening to him, i.e. he is becoming evanescent. He tells the doctor the story of his life, his job, of an unexpected marriage to a woman who improves his life, and his authorship of a novel called Sol, which he writes under the name Mark Clifton (an SF writer of the time and Hugo Award winner). He initially sells the manuscript to a publisher but when they find out he isn’t the ‘real’ Mark Clifton, they change their minds.
The rest of the story (spoiler) details his journey to non-existence.
Shards by Brian W. Aldiss is, for most of its length, an early New Wave entry that reads like an SF version of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (comparison disclaimer: I only got a few pages into the latter before giving up):

“What comes after us?”
“After us the deluge.”
“How big is the deluge?”
“Deluge.”
“How deep is the deluge?”
“Ai, deluge.”
“How deluge is the deluge.”
“Deluge, deluger, delugest.”
“Conjugate and decline.”
“I decline to conjugate,”
“Who was that dinosaur I dinna saw you with last night?”
“That was no knight. That was my dinner.”
“And what comes after the vertebrates?”
“Nothing comes after the vertebrates because we are the highest form of civilization.”
“Name the signs whereby the height of our civilization may be determined.”
“The heights whereby the determination of our sign may be civilized are seven in number. The subjugation of the body. The resurrection of the skyscraper. The perpetuation of the species. The annihilation of the species. The glorification of the nates. The somnivolence of the conscience. The omniverousness of sex. The conclusion of the Hundred Year War. The condensation of milk. The conversation of muts. The confiscation of monks—”  p. 52-53

There are several pages of this moderately entertaining wordplay, leavened with more straightforward but still baffling material. It ends up having a standard SFnal explanation (spoiler): two men’s brains have been inserted into fish bodies so they can be sent into the sea to gather information about a hostile alien race that has invaded Earth. As one of the scientists says:

“I would so much like to know, though, the insane sensations passing through those shards of human brain embedded in fish bodies.”  p. 56

I’m not sure this piece is entirely successful but it is quite original and, despite myself, I rather enjoyed it.

The rest is a mixed bag. The Last Element by Hugo Correa has a spaceship land on an alien planet that has variable radiation, varicoloured terrain that glows, etc. The crew start exploring and have visions, people disappear, die etc. Nevertheless, the captain persists with his mission to get the deadly Element X—there is a war to be won after all—and it becomes apparent that this substance is part of the reason for the demise of the race that previously inhabited the planet. It has a perplexing last line, and is not really up to F&SF’s standards. I doubt if it would have been published without Ray Bradbury’s recommendation (mentioned in the introduction). I note in passing that Correa is a Chilean writer, and wrote this in English—something that shows in some of the prose.
The Kit-Katt Club by John Shepley consists of two parts. In the first half a boy called Tony looks for his alcoholic mother in a cheap hotel; the second half has him leave the hotel and go to a bar run by talking animals, where he mostly ends up listening to a heavy drinking terrier. Both of these parts are well observed and occasionally entertaining but they don’t amount to anything.
To Lift a Ship by Kit Reed has a woman and a man who are telepathically linked and who use their psi powers to pilot a ship. The woman, Mary Lee, has a thing for the man, Ike, who is an arrogant and obnoxious womaniser. He later steals the ship with Mary Lee, and puts on a display for a rich industrialist.
At the end of the flight the scales have fallen from Mary Lee’s eyes and she realises that Ike is not interested in her. When the industrialist comes on board for a test flight they cannot make it fly. After Ike and the industrialist leave she flies it back herself.
This reads like it was written for the woman’s magazines: the two-dimensional relationship stuff is prominent, and the SFnal aspects are largely ignored. It is not a very good story, but is perhaps notable for its early feminist ‘woman doing it on her own’ ending.
Garvey’s Ghost by Robert Arthur Daft is a silly tall tale. One night a boy goes to visit a man who is haunted by a ghost. He listens to the man tell him that the reason he lives his life at night is because (spoiler) the ghost is an inky black shape that haunts him  during the daytime—this is, of course, his shadow.
Moon Fishers by Charles Henneberg (trans. by Damon Knight of Pêcheurs de lune, from La première anthologie de la science-fiction française, ed. by Alain Dorémieux, 1959) has an interesting introduction:

The novels and stories signed “Charles Henneberg” were actually written by Charles Henneberg zu Irmelshausen Wasungen and his wife, Nathalie, in collaboration. Henneberg, bom in Germany in 1899, had an active and varied career. He and his wife met when he was a member of the French Foreign Legion stationed at Homs, Syria; she was a Russian journalist. After their marriage they spent four years in the Arabian desert, and during the war fought together under de Gaulle. He was subsequently appointed Directeur des Medaille’s Militaires. Henneberg died of a heart attack in March, 1959. His widow is carrying on the series of science-fantasy novels they had planned together, signing herself in his honor, “Nathalie Charles-Henneberg.” p. 84

This story starts in the year 2500 with two or three pages of distinctly hand-wavey material about paratime travel and Atlantis. The next section takes us to the Egypt of the Pharaohs, and a blue-skinned Atlantean woman called Neter who is visiting a friend. During their conversation, she discovers a plot by the Ptah to replace the soul of the soon to be crowned pharaoh, Amenophis:

Now in those days, Egypt was throwing off an ancient oppression: the Hyksos invaders were being expelled, the Eighteenth Dynasty was mounting the throne, and the age of gold was about to open. Not that the land was entirely free; dark terror reigned in the desert. The Interplanetarians were landing in these sands. They, were of many kinds. Much later, the Pharaoh Psammetichus III noted: “They fell front the sky like the fruits of a fig-tree that is shaken; they were the color of copper and sulphur, and some had three eyes.
These were paratroops from a neighboring planet. But at the dawn of the Eighteenth Dynasty, others were landing in those manyeyed wheels of which the prophet Ezekiel speaks: they had a lion’s body, wings, and a human face. Their leader was called Ptah. His statue—that of the Sphinx—burdened the plain.  p. 87

Hugh, a paratime-traveller from 2500, arrives to this developing situation. This unlikely mix isn’t entirely successful but works better than you might expect. I suspect it will be one of those Marmite stories.
The Test by Theodore L. Thomas is about a young man driving a car with his mother as a passenger. They have a blow-out that makes them cross to the other side of the road where they crash head-on with another car. A young woman dies.
The young man (spoiler) then wakes up and realises that the accident was a simulated part of his driving test. However, as he shows no concern about the experience he has just undergone the examiners tell him he is ill and needs treatment. So far, so routine. Its Dickian ending improves it a little:

But don’t you worry now, Son. They’ll take good care of you, and they’ll fix you up.” He nodded to the two men, and they began to march Robert Proctor out. At the door he spoke, and his voice was so urgent the two men paused. Robert Proctor said, “You can’t really mean this. I’m still dreaming, aren’t I? This is still part of the test, isn’t it?”
The uniformed man said, “How do any of us know?” And they dragged Robert Proctor out the door, knees stiff, feet dragging, his rubber heels sliding along the two grooves worn into the floor.  p. 119

With the imminent appearance of driverless cars this one feels dated.
Three for the Stars by Joseph Dickinson starts with a scientist involved in a forthcoming space shot sitting in a bar and getting hammered. The next day he has a breakdown at the launch site and rips a handful of clothing off a female colleague. The launch continues and an ape goes to Mars, returning later with (spoiler) a bottle containing a stupid message (‘No cream today. Leave three quarts milk, and a kiss for me’.)
This is only peripherally SF and seems more like something written for a mainstream magazine, what with its drunken, angst-filled scientist, his Ice Maiden colleague, and the Colonel Blimp-like military. It is a particularly weak finish to the issue.

The Cover for this issue is by Emsh.5 Vintage Wine by Doris Pitkin Buck is a vampire poem and is, I think, an accidental reprint (it first appeared in the July 1961 issue). The Weighting Game by Isaac Asimov is an interesting science article about atomic weights.
Books by Alfred Bester starts with this about The Primal Urge by Brian Aldiss and The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber:

We are appalled this month to be forced to slate two of our favorite authors; men whose work we admire, whose talent we envy, and whose books we always open eagerly, anticipating an exciting adventure in literature. They are Brian Aldiss and Fritz Leiber.  p. 113

. . . and ends with this:

[Humor] is meaningless and can never come off unless it stems from the absurdities of human nature. Mr. Aldiss and Mr. Leiber have succeeded in being absurd, but somewhere along the line they lost their grasp on humanity.  p. 114

It is a short but acerbic book review column.
There is a one page advert for a magazine called Space World at the beginning of the issue, and the back page is an advertisement for a Mercury Press collection of Dashiell Hammett stories, A Man Named Thin.

An average issue at best.  ●

_____________________

1. Davidson was initially in the USA. This is from Edward L. Ferman’s preface in the facsimile edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1965, ed. by Edward L. Ferman & Martin H. Greenberg, Southern Illinois University Press, 1981:

Avram edited F&SF from his home in Milford, Pennsylvania and came into New York once weekly, ostensibly for an “editorial conference,” but primarily, I think, to buy kosher meat at a market on Houston Street. Our conferences were mostly agreeable meetings, although my father and I would occasionally object to Avram’s affection for stories that we found obscure or unclear. “It’s not that this story is not clear,” Avram would explain. “It’s just not explicit.” To which we had no good answer. During the summer of 1963, Avram moved to Mexico, and F&SF became quite possibly the only U.S. magazine to be edited from another country. We had agreed to the move with some reservations, but in fact it proved workable enough, despite some awkward complications. For instance, letter of 5/26/64 from Avram: “Two days ago I got 3 big batches of mss. which the silly Mexico post office had held up for a month—testing each page under ultra-violet rays for tamale weevils, maybe.” Or, letter of 5/22/64: “Hope to mail the batch of mss. including the Ballard this afternoon, but things are at sixes and sevens here; the maid has a) quit, b) been fired, c) is taking care of her sick mother—choose one.”
Each month I would mail a list of stories we had set in type and ask Avram for a phone call giving me the issue contents. He wrote: “These letters asking for telegrams or phone calls present certain difficulties. There is one (count it) one public phone in this whole town—in a candy store. It opens late, closes early, and has a two or three hour siesta.” And so I gradually took over the job of deciding the contents of each issue, with some general guidance from our editorial headquarters in the small Mexican town of Amecameca.
In May 1964 I got married, and Avram and his wife Grania promised to send us a Mexican wedding gift:
4/20/64: “Happy May 24! Grania is out buying you both an iguana. ‘But maybe they don’t like an iguana,’ I said. ‘Nonsense,’ she said briskly. ‘Everyone likes an iguana.’”
5/7/64 (after my query about the necessity for walking the beast): “We are getting an iguana that not only is house-broken but does card tricks.”
5/19/64 (after I wrote asking if it was safe): “The iguana eats raw meat and is perfectly harmless if kept well fed.”
5/26/64: “We are measuring the iguana for a cage. You won’t mind paying the freight, will you.”
6/3/64: “Today when I went to feed the iguana she snapped at me. It must be she thought I had designs on the eggs. The carpintiero is making a strong box with air holes. Please don’t be impatient.”
While the sojourn in Mexico was, as I’ve said, workable, and while it provided me with reams of amusing correspondence (from one of the wittiest and most interesting letter writers in the field; I would love to see a collection of Davidson letters some day), it was not wholly successful for Avram. Late in 1964 he returned to the U.S. and settled in California, where he concluded that he would be better off resigning as editor and returning to full-time writing.  p. viii-ix

2. From the volume above:

Avram and I both joined F&SF in early 1962. He had been (and still is) one of science fiction’s brilliant short-story writers, and he took over the editorship from Robert Mills. I was four years out of college. I had put in a sleepy year as an assistant editor with a large publisher of textbooks and was fresh from two more eventful years as a financial writer at Dun & Bradstreet. My job at the magazine was to assist Avram and Joe Ferman, my father, who was publisher. I opened the subscription mail, wrote circulation promotion letters, kept the accounting books and prepared the monthly trial balance, read the slush, proofed the galleys and page proofs and dealt with printers and advertisers. In fact, I was assistant publisher, editor, business manager, circulation manager and advertising manager, but the title Managing Editor had an engaging “Front Page” ring to it, and nobody objected when I inserted it after my name on the masthead.  p. vii-viii

3. I thought that these positions were probably honorary ones, but Ferman notes on p. ix of his preface that, when he took over from Davison in the Fall of 1964, he had help from Ted White and Robert P. Mills.

4. From In this issue . . . on p. 6: “All the stories in this issue were selected from the treasury handed on to us by Bob Mills.”

5. There is a rough for this cover on Pinterest.  ●

Edited 7th July 2019: Updated formatting, and added first review link.

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #130, March 1962

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Gideon Marcus, Galactic Journey

Editor, Robert P. Mills

Fiction:
Jonathan and the Space Whale • novelette by Robert F. Young ****
Wonder as I Wander: Some Footprints on John’s Trail Through Magic Mountains • short story by Manly Wade Wellman **
The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity • short story by Fritz Leiber ***+
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLIX • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton] *
A War of No Consequence • novelette by Edgar Pangborn ****
The 63rd St. Station • short story by Avram Davidson ***
Shadow on the Moon • novelette by Zenna Henderson *****

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Mel Hunter
In this issue . . . Coming next . . .
Communication • poem by Walter H. Kerr
That’s Life! • science essay by Isaac Asimov
The Stone Woman • poem by Doris Pitkin Buck
Books • essay by Alfred Bester

The big news in this ‘All Star’ issue is that the magazine’s editor, Robert P. Mills, is stepping down and Avram Davidson will take over from the next (April) issue. Mills says:

Coming next . . . a new editor, and regretful as we are to step down from the chair, the change is made enormously easier than it might well have been because matters are being turned over to a man as varied and able as Avram Davidson. Mr. Davidson’s name has shown up regularly on F&SF’s contents page—as it does again this month—and even semi-regular readers are surely familiar with his wide range of interests, deft, sure command of the language, and extraordinary erudition. We leave this magazine, after being associated with it from its first issue in the fall of 1949, solely because the demands of other professional responsibilities no longer leave enough time to do the kind of job on F&SF we feel should be done. p. 4

Mills’ last issue is outstanding, and has four very good or excellent stories.
It opens with Jonathan and the Space Whale by Robert F. Young,1 which is by far the best story of his I have read. It is, in part, a Jonah and the Whale story, with the SFnal element provided by a spacewhale that is a vast space-travelling creature, first detected by humankind when it takes a bite out of the asteroid belt.
The spacewhale is intercepted by a spaceship which has orders to destroy it but Jonathan, a gunner on the ship, disobeys. His gunnery pod disintegrates and he ends up in orbit around the whale before he is consumed by it. Although there are touches of real science here (there is mention of the Roche limit for his orbit around the whale) it doesn’t entirely convince on a realistic level (the massive size of the whale, the mention of magnetic fields providing gravity). This didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story.
Once Jonathan is inside the whale he finds a world that has a miniature sun that heats and lights it, and a ‘backward’ community of people (i.e. 20th century America). They are descendants from a spaceship crew that was lost centuries ago. He gets a job on a farm and, around the same time, the whale starts speaking to him telepathically.
The rest of the story follows Jonathan’s rise in this society and his many conversations with the whale. He finds out that the whale is female and he calls her Andromeda. All of her people have departed for Messier 31. He discovers that her equivalent human age is seventeen and that she will die soon (soon for her: in our time a thousand years will pass). The cause of her impending death, the disease that will kill her, is given to Jonathan in a passage that is a remarkable Bradburyian howl of anti-consumerist rage:

The aerobic pathogenic multicellular bacteria. A few at first, then doubling, tripling, quadrupling, consuming, destroying. Not out of malevolence but in response to the life force within them. Melting and marketing the ores I need for my sustenance, draining me of oil deposits accumulated over millennia, laying low my forests, enervating my topsoil, taking and not returning, polluting my lakes and my atmosphere; trying to attain the technological El Dorado promised them by their Sunday-supplement Christ . . . The Founding fathers were well-intentioned, but their memories were short. In their eagerness to exploit my vast and virgin lands, they forgot the lesson of Old Earth . . . Yes, Jonathan, I am dying. In a thousand of your years the disease will have run its course and I shall be dead.
Aghast, he said, I did not know, I did not realize. And then, But a thousand years is a long time. At least you could cross the Deep and be with your people when you died.
No, Jonathan, l cannot. The sadness of the thought was almost tangible. Even travelling at my maximum velocity I could not hope to reach the shores of Messier 31 in less than three millennia. I—I am afraid to die in darkness, Jonathan, in the cold and callous emptiness of the sea. I am not really like the cetaceous creatures you named me after. They were bold and brave and savage. They feared nothing and no one—not even man.
But man destroyed them, every one. And the sea they lived in and the land that rose out of the sea. Not out of malevolence, no—but was our motivation any better? Is greed noble? Is selfishness? Is anthropocentricism? Tell me, Andromeda, is there nothing we can’t destroy?
The horizon of his mind remained empty. Nothing? he repeated. Is there nothing, Andromeda?
He stood up on the hill, beneath the pulsing stars. “Andromeda, answer me,” he said. “Is there nothing we can’t destroy?”
The stars looked silently down on him. The night wind sighed, but made no comment. Seemingly at his feet glowed the light-inflamed ulcer of the city, and in the distance the new infection showed, insignificant now, but tomorrow vast and sprawling and malignant. “Answer me, Andromeda!” he cried. “Answer me!”
Silence. Stars. Darkness. The lonely wind against his face.
“All right,” he said, “so be it,” and started down the hill. “If destruction is our destiny, then destruction will be our way of life.”
He climbed into his car. Starlight gleamed gently on the rakish hood, glittered harshly on the chrome filigree. The framework of the half-completed house showed against the hillside like the gaunt ribs of a flesh-stripped whale. He backed into the arrow-straight highway and headed for Prosperity. PROGRESS, a sign by the roadside said. ONLY THROUGH PROGRESS CAN MAN’S DREAMS COME TRUE. Sponsored by the Prosperity Chamber of Horrors. No, not “Horrors.” He looked at the sign again. This time he read it right. The Prosperity Chamber of Commerce. p. 31-32

Jonathan eventually manages to convince Andromeda to expel the humans living inside her onto a suitable planet, and she leaves to find the rest of her race in an emotional last scene.
With the message above, its myths, symbols, and religious references, I look forward to rereading it again.
The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity by Fritz Leiber is a good modern horror story that starts with an estate agent called Scott who is struggling to rent a house. The problem is the nearby high-tension electric pole beside the house. A prospective tenant notices the line:

“Listen to that!” Mr. Leverett said, his dry voice betraying excitement for the first time in the tour. “Fifty thousand volts if there’s five! A power of power!”
“Must be unusual atmospheric conditions today—normally you can’t hear a thing,” Mr. Scott responded lightly, twisting the truth a little.
“You don’t say?” Mr. Leverett commented, his voice dry again, but Mr. Scott knew better than to encourage conversation about a negative feature. “I want you to notice this lawn,” he launched out heartily. p. 43

Later on in the tour they come back to the powerline:

On the quick retrace, however, Mr. Leverett insisted on their lingering on the patio. “Still holding out,” he remarked about the buzz with an odd satisfaction. “You know, Mr. Scott, that’s a restful sound to me. Like wind or a brook or the sea. I hate the clatter of machinery—that’s the other reason I left New England—but this is like a sound of nature. Downright soothing. But you say it comes seldom?”
Mr. Scott was flexible—it was one of his great virtues as a salesman. “Mr. Leverett,” he confessed simply, “I’ve never stood on this patio when I didn’t hear that sound. Sometimes it’s softer, sometimes louder, but it’s always there. I play it down, though, because most people don’t care for it.”
“Don’t blame you,” Mr. Leverett said. “Most people are a pack of fools or worse. Mr. Scott, are any of the people in the neighboring houses Communists to your knowledge?”
“No, sir!” Mr. Scott responded without an instant’s hesitation.
“There’s not a Communist in Pacific Knolls. And that’s something, believe me, I’d never shade the truth on.”
“Believe you,” Mr. Leverett said. “The east’s packed with Communists. Seem scarcer out here. Mr. Scott, you’ve made yourself a deal. I’m taking a year’s lease on Peak House as furnished and at the figure we last mentioned.” p. 43

Mr Scott becomes a regular visitor to Mr Leverett after his son tells him about the tricks the new tenant can do with electricity. Mr Leverett tells Scott the stories that he has heard from the electricity. Leverett later falls out with the electricity when he learns there is American electricity in Russia and vice versa. Moreover, electricity isn’t going to let humankind start any big war that will destroy its infrastructure, and it tells Leverett not to go to the FBI, or else.
You can probably see the ending coming (spoiler): a high-tension line electrocutes Leverett during a storm. Leiber still owns the ending, though, due to a particularly effective last few lines:

The police and the power-and-light men reconstructed the accident this way: At the height of the storm one of the high-tension lines had snapped a hundred feet away from the house and the near end, whipped by the wind and its own tension, had struck back freakishly through the open bedroom window of Peak House and curled once around the legs of Mr. Leverett, who had likely been on his feet at the time. He had been killed instantly. One had to strain that reconstruction, though, to explain the additional freakish elements in the accident—the fact that the high-tension wire had struck not only through the bedroom window, but then through the bedroom door to catch the old man in the hall, and that the black shiny cord of the phone was wrapped like a vine twice around the old man’s right arm, as if to hold him back from escaping until the big wire had struck. p. 50

This is a convincing and atmospheric story, with Leverett’s political views and the background nuclear threat giving the story a district edge.
A War of No Consequence by Edgar Pangborn is a sequel to last issue’s The Golden Horn, and another in his ‘Davy’ or ‘Tales from a Darkening World’ series.2 This one begins with Davy sneaking through town of Skoar in the dead of night. He is on his way to recover a charm he lost in a fight with one of the town’s sentries, during which the latter was killed. On arriving at the scene he finds the policers have found the body and flees into the woods. The rest of the first part of the story is a tense and intensely atmospheric account of his journey to the cave where he has the Golden Horn and his other valuables stashed:

I had to move with dismal slowness. I don’t remember too much fog of fear in my mind, but the short journey was an experience outside of time. During what may have been ten or fifteen minutes, I walked a thousand years. Then bearing at last the mumbling wet monotone of the brook, I returned abruptly to a place and time scheme I knew, in a kind of waking. A big frog jumped and ploshed from blackness to blackness unseen, less startled than I was and maybe less afraid.
Struggling upstream with no guide except the feel of rushing water was a different nightmare. Instead of too much time, I imagined there was not enough, yet I knew it was dangerous to hurry. The brook itself was shallow and moderate; at the small rapids and waterfalls I only needed to step out on the bank and keep the noise of the stream at my left until it changed back to the sound of easier flow. But I could lose my footing and brain myself on a rock. I could step on a black water-snake—moksins they call that kind in my home country, fat and timid and sluggish, not as bad as rattlers or the coppersnakes because they can’t bite so well, but bad enough. My smell could reach black wolf anywhere in the night, and he could come take me before I had time to free the knife I carried under my shirt. Spring is the season too when the bear are thin and hungry, their males edgy with the beginning of the sex fret and sometimes in a mood to kill for the pleasure of it, as they say the great brown bear of the northern countries may do at any time.
Or I could walk innocently by one of brown tiger’s favorite drinking holes and save him a lot of trouble, never being aware of it until it was too late to be aware of anything. A man’s a small thing in the dark. p. 54-55

After Davy recovers his belongings he begins a journey to the faraway town of Lebannon. Further on he hears noise, and takes cover up a tree. From his vantage point he watches Moha troops pass by on the road below, en route to Skoar, and then watches while Katskil troops ambush them mid-column. He watches a bloody battle ensue. At a pivotal point of the battle the Moha troops scatter in disarray and Davy sounds his horn to rally them. The Moha troops eventually prevail and chase the Katskil survivors into the woods.
Much later Davy watches the troops leave, and continues to watch the battlefield. He cautiously makes his way there and sees a dying man. He brings him water and gives what comfort he can. The dying man talks to Davy and asks where he comes from. Then he asks:

“What do they say about us there?”
“You mean the war talk?”
“Tell you something, boy. It’s all crap. No consequence.” He wanted to talk, but it was hard for him. “Pretty country around here,” he said. “Laid up all night in the woods, our mudhead hard-luck outfit. Three companies, you had two battalions. Another comp’ny, likely we’d’ve had you. That’s all crap too, boy. All night in the woods waiting for you, and a foggy son of a bitch too, had trouble keeping my gear dry.”
“Waiting for them,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to do with the army.”
“Ayah. No country. Running away. Be glad you haven’t, boy it’s all crap. I’ll tell you what you got for a major in one of them battalions. ‘No prisoners,’ he says, ‘just bring us the evidence.’ I was off in that ‘ere thicket, heard him give the order. ‘Any old thing,’ he says, sitting his hoss real handsome, you know, and you could’ve heard him laugh ’way back in Nuber. ‘Any old thing, but a head’s troublesome to carry, a hand’ll do, just bring us the evidence.’ “
“You wanted to run away?”
“Ayah. A kid’s thought. Maybe you’ll make it.”
“Maybe you can run away with me. We could travel together, to Levannon, that’s where I’m going.
Further too. Maybe—”
“Sure enough?” Why, he was thinking of it, with the arrow in his side, and taking pleasure from it I believe, seeing the idea for that moment as I saw it myself, the horizons, the friendship, the new places.
“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” I said.
“Nay, of course not.’’ He said that easily. And that remains with me most clearly out of that morning—the flash of what I call recognition because I have no other word. I don’t know his name, but he was in some way my kind, and we both knew it well for that little time before his face smoothed out completely and I had to let him lie back on the earth. p. 72-73

On the face of it this is a profoundly anti-war story, but I think what it actually shows, along with The Golden Horn, is Pangborn’s deep compassion for humanity.

Shadow on the Moon by Zenna Henderson is the second published story in a new sequence of ‘People’ stories3 (these are about a group of humans with paranormal powers, who come from another planet and are shipwrecked on Earth). This story revolves, initially at least, around Remy, a teenager (although his sister Shadow narrates). He is desperate to go into space and cannot see why the People don’t share their knowledge and paranormal powers with the human race to achieve this. It leads to arguments with his father:

“What’s the use then!” Remy flung at Father. “What’s the use of being able to, if we don’t?”
“Being able to is not always the standard to go by,” said Father.
He flicked his fingers at the ceiling and we three watched the snowflakes drift down starrily to cover the work bench. “Your mother loves to watch the snow,” he said, “but she doesn’t go around snowing all the time.” He stopped the snow with a snap of his fingers and it dampened the wood shavings with its melting.”No, just being able to is not a valid reason. And reason there must be before action.” p. 95

Remy and Shadow later discover an old man called Tom at a nearby mine. He initially warns them off with a shotgun but, while Shadow is away for a fortnight, Remy wins his trust. He discovers (rather too conveniently) that Tom is  working on the  construction of a spaceship in the mine but, even though Remy has befriended him, Tom remains in an emotional and volatile state. The reason for this (spoiler) is that his son has died. Tom had come to help him finish the ship, but he died in a rock fall; he is determined to take his son’s remains to the moon.
Shadow knows none of this as she has been away for a fortnight and, when she comes back, Remy does not explain what he has learnt, telling her it would be better for her to find out for herself. This happens when she goes down the mine to see the spaceship for the first time:

“You’d better channel,” whispered Remy.
“You mean when we have to scrape past—” I began.
“Not that kind of channeling,’’ said Remy.
The rest of his words were blotted out in the sudden wave of agony and sorrow that swept from Tom and engulfed me—not physical agony, but mental agony. I gasped and channeled as fast as I could, but the wet beads from that agony formed across my forehead before I could get myself guarded against it.
Tom was kneeling by the heaped up stones, his eyes intent upon the floor beside them. I moved closer.
There was a small heap of soil beside a huge jagged boulder. There was a tiny American flag standing in the soil, and, above it on the boulder, was painted a white cross, inexpertly, so that the excess paint wept down like tears.
“This,” mourned Tom almost inaudibly, “is my son—”
“Your Son” I gasped. “Your sonI”
“I can’t take it again,’’ whispered Remy. “I’m going on to the ship and get busy. He’ll tell it whether anyone’s listening or not. But each time it gets a little shorter. It took all morning the first time.” And Remy went on down the drift, a refugee from a sorrow he couldn’t ease. p. 112

Shadow later becomes alarmed that Remy intends to go into space with Tom and won’t let her go with them. Remy tells her:

He’s so wrapped up in this whole project that there’s literally nothing for him in this life but the ship and the trip. He’d have died long ago if this hope hadn’t kept him alive. You haven’t touched him unshielded or you’d know in a second that he was Called months ago and is stubbornly refusing to go. I doubt if he’ll live through blast-off, even with all the shielding I can give him. But I’ve got to take him, Shadow. I’ve just got to. It—it—I can’t explain it so it makes sense, but it’s as necessary for me to do this for Tom as it is for Tom to do it. Why he’s even forgotten God except as a spy who might catch us in the act and stop us. I think even the actual blast-off or one look at the earth from Space will Purge him and he will submit to being Called and go to where his son is waiting, just the Otherside.
“I’ve got to give him his dream.” Remy’s voice faltered. “Young people have time to dream and change their dreams, but old people like Tom have time for only one dream, and if that fails them—”
“But Remy,” I whispered forlornly. “You might never make it back.”
“It is in the hands of The Power,” he said soberly. “If I’m to be Called, I’m to be Called. p. 117

Shadow later touches Tom and finds out how near he is to dying:

I took one of his hands in mine to examine the cut flesh—and was immediately caught up in Death! Death rolled over me like a smothery cloud. Death shrieked at me from every comer of my mind. Death! Death! Rebellious, struggling Death! Nothing of the solemn Calling. Nothing of preparation for returning to the Presence. I forced my stiff fingers to open and dropped his hand. p. 118

There is a particularly religious or spiritual element here that I hadn’t noticed (or can’t remember) in the original series of stories.
One aspect of this story that is initially a little unconvincing is the home-made spaceship idea, but this is convincingly dealt with: not only does Tom state that his son may have stolen the parts from the military, but the unusual power source, a small box with no obvious function, eventually leads to further revelations.
As the spaceship nears completion the old man increasingly starts to unravel. He takes Remy hostage and threatens to kill him if he doesn’t launch the spacecraft. Remy does not know what to do as there is no obvious power source, so he tries to move it using his telekinetic powers and fails. Shadow and summons her family, who put Tom to sleep and rescue Remy.
The final section has the family and other members of the People examine the ship, at which point they realise it is of People design, and they conclude that Tom’s mother must have been one of the People who had been lost when they were dispersed across the Earth. Shadow then accidentally lifts the spaceship out of its launch tube using her weak telekinesis—and they discover that the small box is an amplifier for their paranormal powers.
The last few pages describe the People taking Tom (still unconscious and very close to death) and his son’s remains to the moon. After they arrive they take the coffin out onto the surface of the moon and wake Tom:

Then inside the ship they lifted Tom to a window. Mother went in to him before she woke him completely and told him where we were and where his son was. Then she awakened him gently. For a moment his eyes were clouded. His lips trembled and he blinked slowly—or closed his eyes, waiting for strength. He opened them again and looked for a long moment at the bright curve of the plain and the spangled darkness of the sky.
“The moon,” he murmured, his thin hand clenching on the rim of the window. “We made it, Son, we made it! Let me out. Let me touch it.”
Father’s eyebrows questioned Mother and her eyes answered him. We lifted him from the cot and, enveloping him in our own shields, moved him out the door. We sustained him for the few staggering steps he took. He half fell across the box, one hand trailing on the ground. He took up a handful of the rough gravel and let it funnel from his hand to the top of the box.
“Son,” he said, his voice surprisingly strong. “Son, dust thou art, go back to dust. Look out of wherever you are up there and see where your body is. We’re close enough that you ought to be able to see real good.” He slid to his knees, his face resting against the undressed pine. “I told you I’d do it for you, Son.”
We straightened him and covered him with Mother’s double wedding ring patchwork quilt, tucking him gently in against the long, long night. And I know at least four spots on the moon where water has fallen in historical time—four salty, wet drops, my own tears. Then we said the Parting Prayers and returned to the Ship. p. 128-129

The story ends on a final spiritual note:

But what will never, never change is the wonder, the indescribable wonder to me of seeing Earth lying in space as in the hollow of God’s hand. Everytime I return to it, I return to the words of the Psalmist—the words that welled up in me unspoken out there half way to the moon.
When I consider thy heavens,
the work of thy fingers, the
moon and the stars which thou
hast ordained; What is man that
thou art mindful of him . . . p. 129

An intensely emotional story.

The rest of the fiction contains a good story from Davidson and a couple of minor pieces.
The 63rd St. Station by Avram Davidson starts normally enough with a man in a train. He lives a quiet life with his sister but is going to move out and marry a woman at his work called Anna. He hasn’t yet told his sister as he worries about the effect it may have on her:

And what would Fanny do? Fanny would die. She had put so much of life away from her, it would be no effort to let go of what remained. p. 75

We also learn of an unmarked station that he passes every day on his journey. The train never stops but today—as he suddenly realises he cannot leave his sister— it does. He gets up to leave the train to immediately tell Anna his decision.
At this point there is a surreal break in the story: an old woman—who has told him to leave the train quickly—screams, and he is taken by two men called Legs and Shoulders (names that are part of a private joke with Anna) to a series of mortuary-like drawers, where he is put in one. I assume that this is a metaphor for his renunciation of his new life with Anna but, whatever it signifies, the story is an unsettling piece.
Wonder as I Wander: Some Footprints on John’s Trail Through Magic Mountains by Manly Wade Wellman is a group of seven ‘Silver John’ vignettes, connecting material from a forthcoming collection, and all about half a page long. OK I suppose, but very minor stuff.
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLIX by Reginald Bretnor is a masterclass in straining for effect, with a last line so bad it is almost good.

The Cover by Mel Hunter is a wraparound effort: I tried to get a decent image online but failed.
In this issue . . . uses its half page to discuss Pangborn’s story, which includes this from the writer:

“These stories—I don’t quite think of them myself as science-fiction—deal with a world that doesn’t require a true suspension of belief. Conditions like these could come into existence, simply as a result of factors operating in today’s world: the mutations, change of climate, destruction and disappearance of modern culture after a time of upheaval in which atomic war was only one element, human beings thrown back into a primitive (call it medieval) way of living with a latent possibility of staggering up and trying again some time. Civilizations have perished before; personally I don’t think ours will perish in this way, but it could.
These stories are fantasy; I’d like to call them fantasy used as a special lens for looking at present reality.” p. 4

Communication is a poem by Walter H. Kerr whose first stanza I followed, but the second one lost me. The other poem, The Stone Woman by Doris Pitkin Buck, is about just that: a woman leaves a man and turns to stone. There may be a bit of a break-up thing going on here (he said glibly) but I liked it anyway.
That’s Life! by Isaac Asimov is, on the whole, an interesting essay about a definition of life but it does rather teeter, as with a number of his essays, on the edge of reductive boredom.
Books by Alfred Bester is an odd column, an interview with an SF fan. I think the take away is:

“We’ve got to become non-conformists again. I’m telling you, if science fiction doesn’t come up with something new and daring and unacceptable, we’re going to look around for something else.” p. 93

It will be two or three years until the New Wave gets going.

This is possibly the best single issue of F&SF I’ve read (or of any title). I’d have all three of the novelettes for a ‘Best of the Year’ collection for 1962 (but would probably swap the Pangborn for his story in the last issue).

  1. Although it is listed by ISFDB as one of the ‘Spacewhale’ series, it does not appear to be part of the fix-up novel Starfinder, which incorporates the rest of the series. I suspect the idea of massive space whales is the only thing that the original story and the others have in common.
  2. This story is chapters 9 and 10 in the book Davy.
  3. Shadow on the Moon is the second published story in this cycle of stories but the last entry in the second People collection, The People: No Different Flesh; contents at ISFDB.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UKKindle USAWeightless Books or physical copies.

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #16, September 1952

ISFDB link

Editors, Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas; Managing Editor, Robert P. Mills

Fiction:
Budding Explorer • short story by Ralph Robin ♥♥
Hilda • short story by H. B. Hickey
Ganymedeus Sapiens: Modern Scientific Dilemma • short story by Kenneth R. Deardorf ♥
Mother • short story by Alfred Coppel ♥♥♥
The Factitious Pentangle • short story by H. Nearing, Jr. ♥♥♥
Extracts From a Bibliomaniac’s Journal • short story by Harry Lawton ♥♥
The Good Provider • short story by Marion Gross ♥
The Fly • short story by Arthur Porges ♥♥♥
The Mist • short story by Peter Grainger [as by Peter Cartur] ♥♥
Three Day Magic • reprint novella by Charlotte Armstrong ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Mother • cover by Emsh
With Dignity Yet • news item
Recommended Reading • by The Editors

There is a short note on the inside front cover that has some interesting news items.1 The first is, with this issue, F&SF is moving from bi-monthly to monthly publication; second, in line with the editor’s ‘efforts to please [readers],’ they are going to increase the amount of science fiction; finally, there will be a new cover layout (the ‘three colour bars’ design) to make it easier to find on the newsstands (at least I presume this is what they mean from the ‘we think you’ll find it easier to read and recognize’ comment). This last change is a shame, I think: I rather like Salter’s original title.

As for the fiction, the vast bulk of this issue is taken up by a 30,000 word novella by Charlotte Armstrong, Three Day Magic. This is an uncut version2 of the original story that appeared in Today’s Woman, December 1948, and it takes up a whopping 72 out of the 128 pages!
When I first saw this my heart sank a little—the reprint fiction in F&SF is almost equally hit or miss, and the previous long reprint novella they ran (Jane Brown’s Body by Cornell Woolrich, F&SF, October 1951), struck me as, at best, a variable piece which seemed rather out-of-place in the magazine. I was pleasantly surprised by this one though.
The editors describe the author in the introduction as:

—a writer who understands the true nature of logical fantasy like few authors since E. Nesbit and F. Anstey, who can take all the formula ingredients of magic stories and twist them back to glittering newness, who can manage to be warm and imaginative and tender and extremely funny all at once. p. 56

An approximate genre comparison may be de Camp and Pratt’s ‘Incomplete Enchanter’ stories, and I can imagine this novella appearing in the likes of Unknown, if it was still being published at the time.
The story itself starts with a saxophone player called George who works in a quiet hotel in coastal Maine. There he meets a visitor called Katy, who is a wealthy heiress, and before long he is abandoning his sleepy life and chasing her to New York, determined to make a million dollars and secure her hand despite the reservations of Kathy’s guardian, Mr Blair. However, once he is in the city he finds further problems to add to the ones he already has, and matters reach a nadir when he can’t find employment and the rent is due. He manages to negotiate a reprieve from his landlady until the end of the day, and then goes to see Kathy and Mr Blair. His situation becomes even bleaker when Mr Blair rebuffs him and he argues with Kathy.
On his way home he goes into a pawnshop to get some money for his saxophone, but the strange proprietor doesn’t offer him a suitable price. To sweeten the deal he takes George into the back of the shop and offers him an old carpet bag and its contents. George opens the bag:

George pulled at the double handle. “Nuh-uh. What would I want with . . .? Hey, what’s that?” He reached in. There was an old sword wedged diagonally in the bag. George had a fancy for old things and a smallboyish love for swords. He fondled the hilt of this one. The scabbard was some worn crimson stuff.
George waked himself out of a dream. The old man’s bright eyes were avid and sly. “No, no,” said George.
“Maybe isss antique . . . .”
“Looks antique, all right,” George fished into the bag and found a small carved box. The lid opened by sliding. There was nothing in it but a flower. A rose. Artificial, he supposed. He dropped the box and rummaged again. There were soft cloth masses. There was a piece of flat metal, framed with a wrought design, burnished in the center. Old, very old. There was a small dark leather pouch. “What’s this?”
“Open,” said the proprietor softly.
George pulled the thong fastenings. Inside, he found a single piece of metal. Flat, lopsided, with some worn engraving on it, perhaps it was gold.
“Hey,” said George, “did you know this was in here?” The old man made his butterfly shrug. “Is it a coin? Is it gold?”
“Maybe . . .”
“This might be worth something,” George said honestly. “Old coins, y’know.”
“Maybe . . .” said the proprietor indifferently. “You take?”
“Wait a minute,” said George, “how do you know this isn’t gold? How do you know it isn’t worth a lot of money?”
“I am tired,” said the old man.
George looked dubious. He chewed on his lip. The whole thing was queer. Queer shivery feeling to this place. “I certainly don’t want this bagful of junk. Give me $25 and the coin. How about that?”
“I give twenty and all thisss. So no more, not less.” The sibilants sighed on the dusty air.
“You seem to want to get rid of it,” murmured George. His imagination was jumping. Maybe the coin was worth a lot. Maybe the sword would sell for something to a man who knew about swords.
“I am going,” said the proprietor softly, “to California.” p. 68-69

During the rest of the story George learns (spoiler) that the contents of the bag are: a magic ring that gives three wishes to each person who wears it; a magic lamp that will summon Aladdin; the Rose of Love (self-explanatory); an invisible cloak; a pouch that produces identical gold coins; a youth potion; a mirror that shows you the location of the person you are thinking about; a flying carpet; and a sword that will cut through anything.
The story that revolves around the eventual use of all these items is an enjoyable farce that involves George’s continued pursuit of Kathy, complicated by, among other things, his landlady smelling the Rose of Love and then falling in love with George; the Russian spy in the room opposite (!) discovering that George has a device that can cut through anything; the Genie of the Lamp building George a big house that later causes zoning and regulation problems for him; Kathy’s guardian Mr Blair taking the youth potion, then smelling the Rose of Love and falling for his ward; journeys across the country on a flying carpet, etc., etc.
It’s certainly worth reading, as you would expect from someone who would go on to win a 1957 Edgar Award for her novel A Dram of Poison.

There is one novelette in the issue, which is The Factitious Pentangle, the sixth ‘C. P. Ransom’ story from H. Nearing, Jr. It starts, as usual, with the two professors shooting the breeze:

“Suppose you wanted to get to Mars,” said Professor Cleanth. Penn Ransom, of the Mathematics Faculty. “What would you do?” He stuck out his little belly and began to swing in his swivel chair.
Professor Archibald MacTate, of Philosophy, smiled with half his mouth. “I suppose I’d see my psychiatrist,” he said.
“No, no.” Ransom stopped swinging and waved a reproachful hand at him. “You know what I mean. How would you get there?”
“Oh. Well—” MacTate crossed his long legs, folded his arms, and regarded the ceiling thoughtfully. Then he looked at his colleague and cocked an ingratiating eyebrow. “Fourth dimension?”
“Fourth dimension.” Ransom’s tone was acid. He began to swing again. “Every time you ask anybody a hard question, they say ‘fourth dimension.’ As if that meant anything. Why don’t they—?”
“Very well.” MacTate shrugged. “I give up. How would you get to Mars? If you wanted to?”
Ransom stopped swinging and faced him. “Now that’s better. Don’t throw some silly word around just because it sounds scientific. You can’t get to Mars through a word.” He aimed a finger at MacTate. “You’ve got to get there through— You’ve got to use— Well, as a matter of fact it is the fourth dimension. Sort of.” He frowned accusingly. “But you had no way of knowing that, MacTate. You just picked a word out of—”
“I apologize, old boy.” MacTate held up his hands. He looked somewhat nervously around the room. “I presume you’ve already worked out a fourthdimensioner?”
Ransom nodded. “Over there.” He pointed to a black box, the size of a large suitcase, that sat next to the door. “You plug that in, and the door opens on Mars.” p. 23

After a further and perhaps over lengthy description of the device, an alien couple from Mars come through his door and we are off. After moaning about their marital problems, caused by a third member, they leave. The professors quickly receive a visit from the third alien in question. At the end, they all meet to thrash things out with the two professors, Ransom and MacTate. Lightweight nonsense, but quite well done.

After the space taken up by the Armstrong and Hearing stories, there is little room left for the remaining eight stories and they are mostly very short (the Hickey, Gross and Porges stories occupy four pages each, the Coppel, Lawton and Grainger, three).
Budding Explorer by Ralph Robin is amusing story of an alien who materialises on Earth and starts doing research on the American presidential election:

Trying on a gray gabardine, Yeevee started his primary investigation. He asked the salesman, “Who, in your opinion, is going to be elected president today?”
The salesman laughed, in an embarrassed way. “That’s kind of a tough one to ask a salesman,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to give a customer the wrong answer.”
“I am not a citizen of this country, so you may speak freely. Will it be Ferris or Nicholson?”
“Well, I think Bob Ferris is likely to win.” The salesman still seemed reluctant to talk.
“Is that just your prediction, or are you personally in favor of the Democrats?”
“I’m for Ferris, all right . . . It fits very nicely in the back, sir.”
“Tell me,” Yeevee persisted, “what are your reasons for supporting Ferris?”
“My wife’s hot for Nicholson,” the salesman said. p. 4

After questioning a few people at a polling station party workers chase him away, and ends up in the house of an essayist. The alien questions the essayist about the election and, when the latter leaves to vote, he is left alone with stenographer. He lies down on a bed with her—attempting to do ‘secondary research’—and then dematerialises. A weak ending.
Hilda by H. B. Hickey is a pretty awful story about a gigolo, and Hilda, his domestic robot. After saving him from an angry husband she makes coffee and meatballs. At the end she copies his love making routine and inadvertently kills him. No three laws, then.
Ganymedeus Sapiens: Modern Scientific Dilemma by Kenneth R. Deardorf is a sequel, accompanied once again with line drawings, to the writer’s non-fact article in the December 1951 issue about the skiametric forms of Ganymedeus Sapiens. This one left me cold, but there is an OK joke in the last line.
I didn’t much care for Alfred Coppel’s previous attempt at fictionalising the possible psychological problems of space flight (The Dreamer, F&SF, April 1951) and thought that Mother, initially at least, was going the same way.
An astronaut is in his ‘womb,’ and his spacecraft is en route to the moon:

I can look outside if I choose, he thought. I can look out into the black sky and see the stars burning like beacons in the night. I can see the earth and moon as no man has ever seen them before. But he did none of these things. He lay in the warm darkness and let the ship comfort him.
They had made the ship so—the scientists and the surgeons and the psychologists. They were clever men, learned men. And though Kier was the most fit of many thousands, they knew that no man could live and be sane in space without the warmth, the darkness, the feeling of safety.
For Kier they made a mother. A metal mother shaped like a projectile and pointed at the sky. They bound him to that mother so that he could step forth—so that he could be born—when she carried him across the
gulf.
Gulf. Compared to the distances between the stars, it was no gulf. And yet for a single man—the first—it was a chasm laden with the madness of loneliness, the terror of the unknown.
Kier stirred within the ship’s womb. p. 20

It’s difficult to take this type of story seriously as events later proved their theories wrong, and there is a little of that here, but this has a neat ending: he finds out why a competing country’s astronaut did not emerge from a preceding spacecraft . . .
Extracts From a Bibliomaniac’s Journal by Harry Lawton is an unlikely if OK story, told in diary format, about a collector acquiring books in the middle of an ongoing nuclear war. He sees the destruction and chaos as an opportunity to get the books he desires until, that is, he eventually gets radiation sickness. Unfortunately, none of his books are later than 18th Century, so he can’t find out anything about the treatment for his symptoms.
The Good Provider by Marion Gross is an overly contrived tale about an inventor who creates a time machine—but it will only take him to a specific place in the nearby town, only twenty years ago, and only for twenty minutes. His wife uses it to get cheap meat from the butcher. I realise that not all SF can have an epic scope, but . . .
The Fly by Arthur Porges is a short-short about a man looking at a spider’s web while having his lunch. He notices a bluebottle—or what he thinks is a bluebottle—landing on the web. (Spoiler: a metal rod comes out of the fly, penetrates the spider and sucks it dry. When the man tries to catch the fly it burns his hand with something highly radioactive.)
If you think about this afterwards it seems a rather daft idea, but it convinces as you read it. In that way it is probably typical of those short shockers that are endlessly reprinted.3
The Mist by Peter Grainger is about one man begging another to come to his bedroom and see an apparition. When they walk through it together (spoiler) they are both transported to an alien world.

The cover by Emsh, Mother, is quite good, and an improvement on his first effort in the June issue. Emsh will be one of F&SF’s semi-regular cover artists in the year ahead.
With Dignity Yet is a short half-page notice advertising the tenth World SF Convention.
Recommended Reading by The Editors starts with this:

The trend toward original hard-cover appearance of stories unpublished in any magazine reached its peak to date in the two-month period under consideration in this column, with the publication of ten new imaginative novels, eight of them science fiction. Unfortunately only two of these can be commended to the adult reader; but these two earn this department’s loudest praise. p. 43

They go on to recommend Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke and Takeoff by Cyril M. Kornbluth. They also go on to favourably review the rest of the reprint material, ending with this about Five Adventure Novels of H. Rider Haggard by H. Rider Haggard:

The Haggard collection, which includes She, King Soloman’s Mines, and Allan Quartermain, can hardly be overpraised, despite the Victorian ampleness called “wordy” by those same readers who tolerate the outrageous padding of most pulp science fiction. Here are lost-race themes treated with a combination of mysticism, depth of character, and glorious high adventure that no other story-teller has yet equaled. p. 44

This is an issue that is worth reading for the Armstrong novella and some of the other material.

    1. The announcement page:

      I had a look at the address on Google Street View, but it looks like the original house has been torn down and a new house built on the site.
    2. There is an account of the previous publication history of Armstrong’s novella in The Virtue of Suspense: The Life and Works of Charlotte Armstrong by Rick Cypert (Amazon UK/Google Play):
      Although Today’s Woman purchased Armstrong’s “Old Fashioned Magic,” the magazine changed the title to “Three-Day Magic,” much to the author’s dismay. In addition, Armstrong worried in a letter to Bernice Baumgarten about her family’s financial challenges with their new home and still unsold former home in New Rochelle: “We are on the point of getting ourselves into a ruinous loan at incredibly bad terms, because we simply must give out with 3,000.00 on November 1st. It’s this house, of course, and the fact that we can’t sell our New Rochelle house fast enough. … I don’t see how they [Today’s Woman with the title “The Three Day Magic”] could have done worse. And if they have monkeyed with the text I’m going to put my head under a pillow and howl. Sometimes I wish I was a bricklayer.”
      After reading the story, Armstrong also expressed her concerns about its publication—especially the omitted material—with Carl Brandt: “Oh gosh, it isn’t anything now. They knocked out the character drawing, the satire, the wit, the rhythm . . . everything that mattered, as far as I can see. And the very handsome blurb on the cover just makes me feel terrible. . . . Taint so . . . although it could have been nearer so. Is it legal for a magazine to cut a piece to ribbons and then print my name on something I am ashamed to read? Especially after I, having been asked, stated my opinion that it could not be cut to 20,000 words without bad damage?”
      Carl Brandt, in his typically supportive way with authors, responded: I don’t blame you for having a broken heart but I can’t tell you anything except that this is one of the hazards of the magazine business. . . . Magazines are a tribe apart and you never get any real criticism from a cut version of a story from anyone that matters. Just what the legal situation is I’ve never been able to find out. I suppose a case might be set up but precedent would be too much against you. They’d call it editing and that would be that. My own idea about these things is that an author should never read the story when it appears in the magazine. Look at the pictures but don’t read it. You’d be surprised how many people will come up to tell you what a good story it is even if you think it’s dreadful!’’
      Cecil Gold beck of Coward-McCann rejected “Old Fashioned Magic” for publication as a book. Armstrong, in her letter of response to Bernice Baumgarten about the rejection, stated: “It’s not delusions of grandeur I’ve got about that story. It’s just that I have sat and watched several ‘readers’ or ‘customers’. . . just folks, you know, read it. . . . I’ll do another mystery. In fact I am doing one. But don’t you-all think you’ve got me pushed back in my box. I’ll break out again, another time, another way.” p. 70-71
      Charlotte Armstrong (Lewi) has a page at Wikipedia.
    3. I had a quick look at ISFDB for The Fly reprints: it looks like eight English language anthology appearances.

Revised 20/10/2017 to add the footnote material about Armstrong’s novella (thanks to @F&SF for pointing this out).

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #15, August 1952

ISFDB link

Editors, Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas; Managing Editor, Robert P. Mills

Fiction:
Hobson’s Choice • short story by Alfred Bester ♥♥♥+
The Ancestral Amethyst • short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥♥
W. S. • reprint short story by L. P. Hartley ♥♥♥
The Tooth • short story by G. Gordon Dewey ♥♥♥
Nine-Finger Jack • reprint short story by Anthony Boucher ♥
The Sling • short story by Richard Ashby ♥♥
The Soothsayer • short story by Kem Bennett ♥♥♥
“Who Shall I Say is Calling?” • short story by August Derleth ♥♥♥+
Listen • short story by Gordon R. Dickson ♥♥♥+
Nor Iron Bars • short story by Cleve Cartmill and Dan Kelly ♥
Extra-Curricular • short story by Garen Drussaï ♥
Stair Trick • short story by Mildred Clingerman ♥♥♥+
Proof Positive • reprint short story by Graham Greene ♥♥♥
The Gualcophone • short story by Alan Nelson ♥♥♥
The Hour of Letdown • reprint short story by E. B. White ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Lunar Landscape • cover by George Gibbons
Note on a Grave Situation • poem by Leonard Wolf
Recommended Reading • by The Editors

Alfred Bester opens this issue with another in his run of superior 1950s stories. In Hobson’s Choice Addyer is a statistician in the near-future who fantasises about living in other times, and who notices that the population is increasing even though radioactive fallout has adversely affected the birth rate. He eventually concludes that a town in the middle of America is the centre of the anomaly and gets his boss’s permission to travel there:

Now travel in those days was hazardous. Addyer took ship to Charleston (there were no rail connections remaining in the North Atlantic states) and was wrecked off Hattaras by a rogue mine. He drifted in the icy waters for seventeen hours, muttering through his teeth: “Oh Christ! If only I’d been born 100 years ago.”
Apparently this form of prayer was potent. He was picked up by a Navy Sweeper and shipped to Charleston where he arrived just in time to acquire a sub-critical radiation burn from a raid which fortunately left the railroad unharmed. He was treated for the burn from Charleston to Macon (change) from Birmingham to Memphis (bubonic plague) to Little Rock (polluted water) to Tulsa (radiation masks) to Kansas City (The O.K. Bus Co. Accepts No Liability For Lives Lost Through Acts Of War) to Lyonesse, Finney County, Kansas. p. 5

Later, after his enquiries in the town are fruitless, he notices something strange across from his hotel window:

He was aroused by a curious sight. In the street below, the O.K. Bus Co. had just arrived from Kansas City. The old coach wheezed to a stop, opened its door with some difficulty, and permitted a one-legged farmer to emerge. His burned face was freshly bandaged. Evidently a well-to-do burgess who could afford to travel for medical treatment. The bus backed up for the return trip to Kansas City and honked a warning horn. That was when the curious sight began.
From nowhere . . . absolutely nowhere . . . a horde of people appeared. They skipped from back alleys, from behind rubble piles; they popped out of stores, they filled the street. They were all jolly, healthy, brisk, happy. They laughed and chatted as they climbed into the bus. They looked like hikers and tourists, carrying knapsacks, carpet-bags, box-lunches and even babies. In two minutes the bus was filled. It lurched off down the road, and as it disappeared Addyer heard happy singing break out and echo from the walls of rubble.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
He hadn’t heard spontaneous singing in over two years. He hadn’t seen a carefree smile in over three years. He felt like a color-blind man who was seeing the full spectrum for the first time. It was uncanny. It was also a little blasphemous.
“Don’t those people know there’s a war on?” he asked himself. p. 6

The story is quite different from those of the period in that it exhibits an atypical wit, dark humour and quirkiness. The latter aspect is best illustrated by the short italicised sections that punctuate the main text. These are, it would seem, short spoken passages from a beggar:

Can you spare price of one cup coffee, honorable sir? I am indigent organism which are hungering. p. 3

Addyer subsequently tracks down the tourists to a farm and (spoiler) discovers a time-travel operation. Once again the story defies expectations: rather than becoming a routine adventure spanning various ages, it debunks the idea of living in those other periods (and therefore Addyer’s fantasies):

“You’d find it damned inconvenient trying at your time of life.” Jelling shook his head, “Because you’d find that living is the sum of conveniences. You might think plumbing is pretty unimportant compared to ancient Greek philosophers. Lots of people do. But the fact is, we already know the philosophy. After a while you get tired of seeing the great men and listening to them expound the material you already know. You begin to miss the conveniences and familiar patterns you used to take for granted.”
“That,” said Addyer, “is a superficial attitude.”
“You think so? Try living in the past by candlelight, without central heating, without refrigeration, canned foods, elementary drugs … Or, future-wise, try living with Berganlicks, the Twenty-Two Commandments, Duodecimal calendars and currency, or try speaking in metre, planning and scanning each sentence before you talk … and damned for a contemptible illiterate if you forget yourself and speak spontaneously in your own tongue.” p. 11-12

After having had the time-travel operation revealed to him, Addyer can’t be allowed to stay in the present, and the story ends with an unexpectedly poetic passage:

Where did he go? You know. I know. Addyer knows. Addyer travelled to the land of Our pet phantasy. He escaped into the refuge that is Our refuge, to the time of Our dreams; and in practically no time at all he realized that he had in truth departed from the only time for himself.
Through the vistas of the years every age but our own seems glamorous and golden. We yearn for the yesterdays and tomorrows, never realizing that we are faced with Hobson’s Choice . . . that today, bitter or sweet, anxious or calm, is the only day for us. The dream of time is the traitor, and we are all accomplices to the betrayal of ourselves. p. 15

There is one further twist, and it is one that confusingly (to me anyway) subverts the Hobson’s/No Choice argument about living in one’s own time. The beggar who has provided the italicised quotes finishes the story with this:

Can you spare price of one coffee, honorable sir? No, sir, I am not panhandling organism. I am starveling Japanese transient stranded in this so-miserable year. Honorable sir! I beg in tears for holy charity. Will you donate to this destitute person one ticket to township of Lyonesse? I want to beg on knees for visa. I want to go back to year 1945 again. I want to be in Hiroshima again. I want to go home. p. 15

After asking around I got two other interpretations of this last paragraph (and, indeed, what the story is about). The first (which I think is the most likely) is that the story isn’t literally about living in one’s own time but, as this last paragraph shows, is more generally about the pointlessness of yearning for other times. The second comment I received suggested that the speaker in the last paragraph knows about the eventual atomic bombing of Hiroshima but that he still wants to return to his own time because he can’t tolerate remaining where he is. You choose.
There are three other stories in this issue that I particularly liked. “Who Shall I Say is Calling?” by August Derleth has a couple crashing a costume party in a house but, after dancing with a couple of the guests, they start to feel a sense of unease:

I gazed past Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty and picked out Cinderella. She looked good—flushed with youth and vibrant. She was pink and white and too pretty to hide it behind anything more than a domino on a stick, which she held up dowager—like as a lorgnette. Just at the moment she did not appear to be engaged. I walked over.
“May I?.” I said, leering and showing my teeth. “Count Dracula, at your service.”
She squealed and giggled. “My, what pointed teeth you have, Dracula!” she said.
“The better to bite you with, my dear,” I answered.
She gave me her arm. “If you promise not to bite you may have this dance.”
“I promise,” I said. “It’s too early, anyway. I’ve just had supper.”
She laughed.
She danced well, but there was something about her that repelled me.
Maryla had had luck, too. “That was a good dance,” she said. “Who are these people, anyway?”
“Don’t ask me. Are you beginning to feel there’s something queer here, too?”
“Yes, a tension or something.”
“Sure, I noticed it right away.”
Had I? I wondered. But it was there—a strange, intense sense of waiting, as if they all expected something to happen, or were waiting for someone who was late.
 p. 72

It later materialises that (spoiler) the couple are actually the wrong ’uns, and are actually vampires—something that is unnecessarily telegraphed in the introduction to this vivid, witty tale.
Listen by Gordon R. Dickson is short but substantial, and a rare piece (for the magazine) of straight science fiction. The story opens with a husband and wife having breakfast with their four year old, Taddy, on an alien planet called Miria. After Taddy is finished his breakfast, he goes off with his alien nanny called Reru to ‘the green and silver place’—a nearby swamp. Reru is a vegetarian member of the planet’s hugely complicated symbiotic ecosystem. He can ‘hear’ a lot of the life on the planet, and tells Taddy its stories:

Reru increased his glide and they hurried forward until they came to the silver-and-green place. It was fairy-like in its beauty. Little green islands and clumps of vegetation were interspersed with flashing slivers of water, so that no matter where you stood, some small reflective surface caught the yellow light of the sun and sent it winking into your eyes. It looked, for all the world, like a toy landscape on which some giant had broken his mirror and left the bits to sparkle and shine in the daytime brightness. Reru squatted and Taddy sat down on the edge of one of the pools. “What does it say?” asked the boy. “Tell me what it says, Reru.” The Mirian trilled again his little trill of pleasure; then composed himself. For a long time he sat silent, listening, while the boy squirmed, impatient, yet not daring to say anything that might interrupt or delay what Reru was about to say. Finally, the Mirian spoke. P. 81-82

When Taddy arrives home for lunch (spoiler) he finds out from his father that the colonists are planning to put up a building on the swamp and he does not take this information well. The last scene has the boy communing with the life on the planet, and he makes a promise that he will remove the buildings when he is older.
It is an interesting story that, as the introduction states, doesn’t portray human-alien relationships in the usual terms of empire or bafflement.
In the introduction to Mildred Clingerman’s second F&SF story, Stair Trick, the editors mention they bought her third before publishing her first, so convinced were they by her talent. That hunch is confirmed in this strange fantasy which starts with a barman’s set piece:

Day after day the bartender did his fool’s routine of a man going down stairs. The regular customers loved it. Of course there weren’t any stairs, but sooner or later somebody would call down the long length of bar,
“Dick, old boy, I’d like a bottle of that Chateau Margaux ‘29 to take home to the wife. How about it?”
After twenty years of it, Dick could recognize his cue. “Certainly, sir,” he’d say gravely. “It won’t take me a minute. You’ll excuse me while I step down to the cellar?”
The regulars would grin and nudge the newcomers, the uninitiated. “Watch it,” they’d say. “Just watch this.” And the newcomers would set their faces in accommodating lines tinged with the resentment of those who aren’t in on the joke, and watch Dick carefully. Dick, his bald head gleaming in the overhead light, would start his stately descent into the cellar, until, step by step, the bald head had disappeared from view.
“What’s so hot about that?” Nine times out of ten some disgruntled stranger would challenge the regulars. “Hell, I can still walk down a few stairs.”
“Just wait. Just wait and listen.” Gleefully the regulars would shush the unimpressed stranger until reluctantly he subsided and listened. Nobody knew, or cared to inquire too closely, just what it was Dick had rigged under the bar for his sound effects, but they were good. One heard the rattle of a chain lock, the squeak of the heavy door at the foot of the steps, a clicking light switch, and then the stone-muffled tramp, tramp of Dick’s feet to the wine racks. Some hesitation then followed while the customers imagined Dick selecting the wine asked for, then they heard him crossing the stone floor. They heard again the click of the light switch and the door closing behind him with a hollow booming sound, the rattle of the lock, and Dick (a heavy man) was climbing the stairs, puffing a little. As he gradually came into view, one often saw a wisp of cobweb trailing across the bald head, and in his arms he cradled a dusty bottle. The bottle was always the same, but the puzzled stranger didn’t know that.
“Now!” the regulars would shout. “Look! Look!” Everybody would raise himself from his bar stool to peer over the bar, pointing at Dick’s feet and the floor he stood on, the stranger along with the rest. It was always a pleasure to watch the stranger’s face as he took in the solid cement floor that showed through the slatted walkway running unbroken behind the bar. p. 97-98

After this engaging story hook the tone changes markedly, and shifts to the barman’s belief in the cellar, how he would have liked to marry, and his awareness of the Hunters and their prey in the bar (by Hunters he means sexual predators).
The story resolves (spoiler) with a female Hunter, who he hasn’t really noticed before, asking the barman about the cellar and whether he has found the door to the other side. After some argument between the two, during which she tells him that (a) he can’t go through it alone and, (b) if he took her she would be different on the other side, they both go down to the cellar; the regulars hear the usual noises and, on this occasion, something more.
If this sounds like a rather obvious metaphor, all I can say is that I was impressed nevertheless.

There are a handful of other good, if perhaps minor, stories in the issue. W. S. by L. P. Hartley (World Review, January 1952) starts off with a novelist getting a strange postcard from someone he assumes is a reader. Over the following weeks he continues to get these cards, each more unsettling than the last. Then he realises that the sender is getting geographically closer and closer to his home with each card. After this unsettling setup, the sender (spoiler) turns out to be a character from one of the writer’s books who has come to take the writer to task for the black-hearted soul he has been given. . .
This last part isn’t as effective as the build-up, but it does have this great line from when the character (who is impersonating a policeman) and the writer are in the kitchen:

The policeman, if such he was, seemed to be moving towards him and Walter suddenly became alive to the importance of small distances—from the sideboard to the table, from one chair to another. p. 30

The Tooth by G. Gordon Dewey begins with a pianist who has lost his hands in a railway accident being taken to a room in a building called the Tooth. He is told to visualise his hands while he sits in front of a red crystal. His hands reappear and he later performs a concert.
The rest of this story—with sections that telescope back in time—has an interesting structure. These sections are mostly about the couple who discovered the crystal, Mike and Helen, and their discovery of, experimentation with, and use of it.
Initially, this struck me as a rather pulp wish-fulfilment story—but I’d have to confess that the story’s clever development won me over. Even at the end, when it turns out (spoiler) that two aliens lost the crystal during an unauthorised stay on Earth, there is a clever last paragraph.
The Soothsayer by Kem Bennett is an Irish tall tale about a deaf man called Tom who has a hearing aid fitted and later hears a voice asking him if he would like to be a prophet. The voice belongs to Ianto, a ghost in heaven. Tom’s short career as a prophet has its ups and downs.

Tom had discovered that he only had to think his questions and Ianto the ghost would answer them.
“If I go on giving the names of winners and filling in the football pools all correct, what will happen?” he wondered.
“The bookies will go out of business and so will the football pool promoters,” Ianto answered.
“That was what I was thinking. Life would be very dull for the boys without a bet now and again. Also, Ianto, I am thinking that the £20,000 I have won has come from the pockets of many people like you and me—and they all sure they would have a chance of winning, which they have not while I am a prophet. It is not right.”
“That is for you to decide, Tom.”
“I have decided, man. I shall give no more winners.” Tom sighed. “I shall be as popular as the foot and mouth hereabouts when I refuse to give winners, but that cannot be helped. It seems to me that being a prophet is a complicated business.”
“It must be, Tom. I would not know. Being a ghost is very simple.” p. 66

A pleasant tale.
Proof Positive by Graham Greene (Harper’s, October 1947) is a neat little chiller about an ex-army officer giving a talk at a local psychical society. He mentions he is suffering from cancer and throughout his talk he struggles and his speech starts to wander. Throughout it all he insists ‘the spirit is much stronger than you think’ and that he will give them proof. At the end of the talk he collapses. A doctor in the audience (spoiler) confirms he has died and, indeed, has probably been dead for a week. There is a sombering last line.
Alan Nelson1 follows his interesting Cattivo (F&SF, August 1951) with something equally original. The Gualcophone is narrated by the owner of a firm that makes unusual instruments: oversized piano keyboards, left-handed violins, that sort of thing. One day a man called Gualco offers to work for him for free—all he requires is a soundproof booth (he suffers from extreme sensitivity to sound) and permission to work on his own projects after hours.
Sometime later he reveals the instrument he has worked on to the owner—an instrument that can transmit one person’s emotions to others, ‘telempathy’ as Gualco calls it. After a demonstration, he asks his boss to demonstrate it to the world.
The instrument’s public debut takes place during a concert by a famous violinist, but matters do not go to plan when it is played: (spoiler) the violinist is devoid of any emotion at all and, in an attempt to rescue the performance the narrator plays the instrument, only to transmit his stage fright to the audience, and then his anger. Matters rapidly get out of hand. Some aspects of this last part are not entirely convincing (the emotionless violinist, the narrator’s rage) but it is done well enough to easily overcome these quibbles.

The other stories include The Ancestral Amethyst by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, a ‘Gavagan’s Bar’ story about a drinking competition between a Danish skipper and an Irishman who used to be a pickpocket. The former never seems to show any adverse effects, and he credits this to an amythest he possesses that prevents drunkenness. Needless to say the Irishman exercises his old pickpocket skills as he gets drunk, and the Dane, relieved of his amythest, catches up instantly and falls over. Slight but pleasant enough.
Nine-Finger Jack by Anthony Boucher (Esquire, May 1951) is a light-hearted tale of a serial wife-killer who, when he tries to drown his ninth bride, finds she starts breathing through her gills. She confesses to being a Venusian and that, if he tries to reveal that information, she’ll send a dossier about his previous eight wives to the authorities. The rest of the story concerns a number of further murder attempts that fail. Eventually (spoiler) he succeeds. This story failed for me as I didn’t get the punchline: ‘one finger sufficed for Hester.’ Pity, as it was an enjoyable piece until that point.
The Sling by Richard Ashby is about a college professor who invents a teleportation device and subsequently uses it to swing an election for a colleague who is being intimidated by a redneck mayor (who is supported by the Riders). The science aspects mention Rhine a lot but are otherwise pretty hand-wavey; the picture drawn in the story of southern politics is the stronger aspect.
Nor Iron Bars by Cleve Cartmill and Dan Kelly has two men discussing the disappearance of a man from a psychiatric cell. The doctor in charge hands over an account written by the man who states that he was dreaming his existence in this world. The payoff last line would be reasonably effective if this wasn’t, essentially, a ‘I woke up and found out it was a dream’ story variant.
Extra-Curricular by Garen Drussaï has an introduction where, once again, the editors can’t stop drooling over an attractive female writer:

The one occasion upon which we regret our policy of no interior decoration is when we introduce some of our authors—especially a few of our discoveries. Physical beauty is not (we are devoutly thankful!) a necessity for a literary career; but it can undeniably brighten the lives of a couple of middle-aged editors. Garen Drussai, whose first story we present here, is Hungarian and stunning; she is an impassioned and articulate debater on such topics as pacifism and Forteanism; and she has a refreshing ability to come up with new variants on science-fictional notions. p. 90

The story itself gets off to a very promising start when a women talking to her baby suddenly finds that it is talking back to her using adult language. Next, a man meets a woman who he thinks is an airhead in a nightclub, and is stunned when she runs intellectual rings round him:

She took a sip of her drink and laid her hand across his, squeezing his fingers. “Your perspicacity is really amazing, Robert. Do you mean that it’s that apparent?”·
Robert’s jaw sagged open.
“Do you want me to elucidate?” she smiled.
He shook his head feebly.
“Well, Robert, I want to explain it to you anyway. You see, I’ve been thinking . . .”
Robert managed a weak smile.
“… my current status in this stratum of existence is primarily the consequence of planet-wide stupidity.” ‘
Bob’s eyes almost crossed. “What in the hell has got into you?” he spluttered. p. 92

There is a final section with a female scientist that is less convincing (the language is more gobbledegook than advanced) before it unfortunately resolves (spoiler) as being the actions of a time-travelling child from the future.
The Hour of Letdown by E. B. White (The New Yorker, 22nd December 1951) has a slick start that has a man taking a box-shaped robot into a bar, setting it in the counter, and ordering two drinks. The bartender takes an exception to the robot, even more so when the man pours a drink into one of its hatches. This trundles long pretty well until it gets to its weak ending, exemplifying your typical slick reprint: all notion, no substance.

This issue’s cover is by an artist new to the magazine: George Gibbons. His Lunar Landscape continues a trend to more orthodox paintings. It is also the first partial wraparound cover the magazine has used.2
Note on a Grave Situation is an OK poem by Leonard Wolf about a couple, each of whom is likened to different metal ions.
Recommended Reading by The Editors is another interesting, wide-ranging column. They cover a lot of books in three pages, and comment a lot along the way:

Out of a half-dozen science fiction novels published [this year], only one can be offered to you as “recommended reading.” That is James Blish’s Jack of Eagles (Greenberg), a book that is both extraordinarily good and curiously bad. It is one of the strongest pieces of real science fiction to be published in years. Those who glibly label as science fiction what is, after all, pure fantasy would do well to· study the thinking and logic behind Blish’s postulation of the development of psi powers, ESP, psycho-kinesis and kindred potentials of the human mind. Yet, plotwise his novel is tritely melodramatic, wholly devoid of characterization and rather flatly written. But we think it is to be strongly recommended, not only for its thinking, but for its brilliant understanding of the essential problem behind the superman thesis, the necessity of integrating superman with humanity. p. 103

Another fine specimen of early van Vogt story-telling has just been republished: the I943 novel The Weapon Makers (Greenberg). First printed in hard covers in a minute edition six years ago, this has been one of the scarcest books in the science fiction field; now readers without a collector’s purse can again read a grand fantasy-melodrama of the remote future (and perhaps wonder whether its noble imaginative adventure has anything to do with science fiction). p. 103

There is also a short filler piece at the end of Boucher’s story, titled Les chevaux dans le sky:

Science fiction is starting to boom again in the land of Jules Verne, and the French presses are busily turning out both originals and translations—unfortunately largely on the lowest level. Which poses a problem for French critics, since their language has never developed any term equivalent to space opera. Igor B. Maslowski, the excellent reviewer for “Mystere-Magazine” (French edition of EQMM), is forced to describe novels of that type as ‘‘l’anticipation scientifique genre western.” p. 51

A good issue.

  1. After two good stories in a row I tried to find out more about Alan Nelson. According to ISFDB, he produced about a dozen stories between the mid-forties and mid-fifties. These were (mostly) collected in a collection edited by Gary Lovisi, Man in a Hurry and Other Stories (three bucks on Amazon.com, couldn’t find it on the UK site). The two missing stories mentioned in the useful introduction are one in Esquire, April 1944 (The Wheel Named Prudence) and one in Good Housekeeping, September 1946 (The Tune).
  2.  Gibbons’ wraparound cover:

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UKKindle USAWeightless Books or physical copies.

rssrss