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

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

Fiction:
Love • short story by Richard Wilson ♥
The Causes • short story by Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright] ♥♥♥
The Desrick on Yandro • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ♥♥♥
The Moon Maiden • reprint short story by Hannibal Coons ♥
The Brothers • short story by Clifton Dance ♥♥♥
Finale • reprint short story by Reginald Bretnor ♥♥♥
The Beach Thing • short story by Ralph Robin ♥♥♥
Dragon on Somerset Street • reprint short story by Elmer Roessner ♥
Underground Movement • short story by Kris Neville ♥♥♥
Artists at Work • short story by Harold Lynch, Jr. ♥♥♥
The Call of Wings • reprint short story by Agatha Christie ♥♥
The Business, As Usual • short story by Mack Reynolds ♥
Lambikin • short story by Sam Merwin, Jr. ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Love • cover by Emsh
Recommended Reading • essay by The Editors
The Big Nasturtiums • reprint poem by Robert Beverly Hale

This issue doesn’t have any stand out stories but it does have several that fall into the ‘good’ category. The first of this group is The Causes by Margaret St. Clair, which is a story that manages to outdo L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt’s ‘Gavagan’s Bar’ series (although that’s a pretty low bar for the most part). It starts with a man called George in a bar talking to the regulars: the conversation is about the dangerous state of the world. A number of his co-drinkers give, in turn, alternative theories about why this is the case. First he is told that all the Gods, bar Athena and Ares, have permanently moved to New Zealand, leaving this unhealthy pairing of science and war behind. The second tall tale is told by a man who produces a strange-looking horn, and he tells George about the Last Trump. The third story is about a lama in Tibet who desires one of the local girls, and the vagaries of reincarnation. There is one final episode that more directly involves George.
This doesn’t really amount to anything more than four tall tales, but it is a pleasant enough piece nonetheless.
The Desrick on Yandro by Manly Wade Wellman is another ‘Silver John’ (or ‘John the Balladeer’) story. It is an atmospheric piece about a rich, arrogant man who hears John singing about Yandro, a faraway hill. He tells John that Yandro is his surname, and asks about the song.
Once he finds out it refers to a real place, Yandro commandeers John and they leave in a plane. After they land the pair immediately drive to the area and start climbing the hill.
Half-way up they come upon a rough cabin, and meet an old woman who offers to let the pair spend the night on her porch. Over a meal she tells Yandro how his grandfather was involved with the witch at the top of the hill, and how he snuck away with gold. She also tells Yandro other things:

“John says they have bears and wildcats up here.” He expected her to say I was stretching it.
“Oh, there’s other creatures, too. Scarce animals, like the Toller.”
“The Toller?” he said.
“It’s the hugest flying thing there is, I guess,” said Miss Tully. “Its voice tolls like a bell, to tell other creatures their feed’s near. And there’s the Flat. It lies level with the ground, and not much higher. It can wrap you like a blanket.” She lighted the pipe. “And the Bammat. Big, the Bammat is.”
“The Behemoth, you mean,” he suggested.
“No, the Behemoth’s in the Bible. The Bammat’s something hairy-like, with big ears and a long wiggly nose and twisty white teeth sticking out of its mouth—”
“Oh!” And Mr. Yandro trumpeted his laughter. “You’ve got some story about the Mammoth. Why, they’ve been extinct—dead and forgotten—for thousands of years.”
“Not for so long, I’ve heard tell,” she said, puffing.
“Anyway,” he went on arguing, “the Mammoth—the Bammat, as you call it—is of the elephant family. How would anything like that get up in the mountains?”
“Maybe folks hunted it there,” said Miss Tully, “and maybe it stays there so folks will think it’s dead and gone a thousand years. And there’s the Behinder.”
“And what,” said Mr. Yandro, “might the Behinder look like?”
“Can’t rightly say, Mr. Yandro. For it’s always behind the man or woman it wants to grab. And there’s the Skim—it kites through the air—and the Culverin, that can shoot pebbles with its mouth.”
“And you believe all that?” sneered Mr. Yandro, the way he always sneered at everything, everywhere. “Why else should I tell it?” she replied. p. 23-24

In the morning the men continue up the hill. . . .
The Brothers by Clifton Dance (the introduction mentions he is a doctor by profession) is a promising first story about a patient who ends up in a locked psychiatric ward. There he starts to decline, regardless of what they try to feed him, while they deal with what they think is an unusual form of madness. Then, one of the nearby patients dies from a gangrenous leg. . . .
This is a gripping piece that is given an edge by some clinical but visceral medical information:

Presiding at the special meeting was Dr. Heinrich Fuchs, chief of the psychiatric service, a wise and learned man. He’d seen and heard a great many things and what he hadn’t seen or heard himself, he’d read about.
But, he had said, never before had he known of a thing like this happening in a hospital. In cemeteries, yes, but never in a hospital.
Dr. Mayer, the pathologist, who always personally checked every cadaver in the hospital, was finishing his report. “I would say the marks were those of human teeth. An area 12 centimeters by 9 centimeters on the anterior aspect of the thigh was denuded of skin and the underlying portions of the rectus femoris, vastus intermedius and sartorius muscles were apparently devoured, exposing about five centimeters of femur. Tentative bites appear to have been made on the neck, chest and upper extremities. Through the jugular vein, apparently, most of the blood was drained off.”
The abundant use of “apparently” was characteristic of Mayer’s professionally conservative attitude, but his opinion as to the physical factors involved settled the matter, for he had examined more bodies than all the other men put together. Numerically, his autopsy record was unrivaled in the world. He put down the notes he had been referring to and looked quizzically at the assemblage. “Is it not strange that so many seemingly inexplicable happenings occur on the psychiatric wards?” He paused for a moment: “Perhaps where science ends, the mysterious begins.” p. 52-53

The other element in play throughout the story is that the patient can telepathically sense another of his kind—another ghoul—working in the hospital but can’t identify who it is. This story arc has an ending that is a little disappointing (spoiler)—the other ghoul identifies himself but, rather than helping the patient set up a life in the human world, he helps him escape and tells him to go back to his cemetery.

My reaction to the next two stories was rather atypical in that they were both pieces where I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on but enjoyed anyway. Both reminded me somewhat of the kind of thing you’d sometimes found in the Orbit anthologies of the late-sixties or early seventies. Finale by Reginald Bretnor (Pacific Spectator, 1949) is a striking piece that describes a situation where time has fractured and a small group of people are making their way across an ashen landscape:

Behind them walked the man in uniform, with the counter which had ceased to click, choked by the radiation of the yellow fog. Behind them walked the man in leather, with sword and casque, whom they had first seen standing guard at a stone sally port behind which neither castle nor courtyard lay. Then came a woman in a fur coat, crying silently, and a fat old man whose burned skin hung from his hands like a pair of moist, gray gloves. The naked brown girl lagged behind, for she could not quite believe that her child was dead. Sometimes, she stopped, and opened the rabbit-skin apron in which she had it wrapped, and tried to shake it into life. p. 58

They pause briefly at a river until time is destroyed there too. In the final scene they make it to a huge plain where (I think) the rest of humanity has assembled for a rapture-like event.
The Beach Thing by Ralph Robin is about George, who jilts two women at the start of the story and then departs for a month’s holiday to a hotel on the coast. Apart from George there are another four guests at the hotel:

There was Sibyl McLeod who said she was psychic and was.
There was Mr. Baker who said he was wealthy and wasn’t.
And there was a couple named Weatherby.
There was also the owner of the hotel, Edgar Downie, a little man with a brown-and-white cat.
George was quickly absorbed into the social life, which consisted of eating three meals a day at separate tables in the hotel dining room and talking in the lobby and on the porch. His other pastimes were solitary: sleeping, shaving, cleaning his teeth, taking baths, reading, and walking on the beach. He did not overeat, overexercise, or underexercise. George was a young man who wanted very much to live to be an old man.
Obviously George needed no one to look after him. He realized now that he had gone too far in letting the girls think otherwise, though the pretense was useful for a healthful sex life.
A disadvantage of his hiding place was the lack of someone to have a healthful sex life with. Sibyl McLeod was forty-five and skinny. Mrs. Weatherby was young enough and rather pretty—but George believed that sex life with married women was unhealthful. He made the best of things, especially since he may have overindulged lately. A rest would be good for him. p. 62-63

Sybil later asks if there is a poltergeist in the hotel, and the owner says no. One of the other guests starts relating an anecdote, during which the owner’s cat returns after having been out on the beach. Something has upset it. Sybil goes out and later returns:

Sibyl McLeod came back. Where her face was not red from the cold beach wind, it was very pale. “I was right,” she said. “There is something on that beach.”
She let Baker help her into a chair. She blew her nose efficiently in a sheet of kleenex; then delicately touched her lips with a filmy handkerchief.
“It was horrible.”
“What was it, Miss McLeod?” George asked.
“It was love.”
“Why, that doesn’t sound so horrible, Miss Sibyl,” Baker said, laughing heh-heh, a good-humoured fat man.
“You needn’t laugh heh-heh,” said Sibyl McLeod. “It was horrible the way the word really means. It filled me with horror. It was fearful. It filled me with fear.” She rubbed and twisted her pearl choker. The necklace broke, and the pearl beads dropped and rolled. Mr. Weatherby began to pick them up.
Mrs. Weatherby was puzzled. “But love isn’t horrible or fearful,” she said. “It’s sweet.”
“This love was sweet. Sweet and thick like honey. And I felt like a fly being buried deeper and deeper in the honey till it dies.”
“You’re still with us, praised be the Lord,” Baker said.
“Amen,” George said.
“It wasn’t looking for me. It expectorated me.” Sibyl McLeod began suddenly to cry. George, who hated crying women, was annoyed. He decided she was acting. p. 65-66

One of the guests decides to leave; George, meanwhile, goes outside. In the last scene Sybil hypnotises Mrs Weatherby into a trance state, and we get a hint about what is happening to George.
This is a strange, enigmatic story—presumably an elliptical look at George’s inability to commit emotionally, but how love consumes him regardless. Whatever, it is one of those surreal stories that has a dreamlike logic and inevitability of its own.
Underground Movement by Kris Neville is a dark and moody story about a FBI telepath who is investigating a wave of mutant births around the world.¹ There is a striking passage that describes his physical appearance:

Howard Wilson glanced at the mirror and saw the ridiculous bump on his forehead, round and blue, like a newly discolored bruise. It was the emblem of a telepath, and it grew, cancerous, from the ‘twentieth’ year of his life it would destroy him, eating inward to his mind and shooting malignant cells into his blood for impartial distribution to lungs and stomach and bones, before he was forty. His mouth remained emotionless, as he tried to imagine the bump away, and to recall his clear adolescent forehead in the days before he matured into hearing thoughts he did not want to hear. The mirror image peered back at him, nature’s mistake, a false evolutionary start, unproductive. p. 75

Throughout the investigation he experiences odd pains in his head. He also has feelings of unease which intensify and, after a meeting he has with another telepath who hands him a disturbing mutant autopsy report, these are exacerbated.
The final reveal (spoiler) is his chilling discovery of a worldwide network of mutants who are supposedly dead and buried but are really resting and growing. It sounds like a ridiculous ending, but after the constant feeling of unease set up throughout the story it may give you, as it did to me, a shiver.
Artists at Work by Harold Lynch, Jr. is about a man and his friend who go to a watch repair shop. There, after some initial chit-chat about classical music with the German proprietor, one of the young men spins a tall tale about a composer who writes a symphony that involves the musical participation of several swarms of bees.
This is a minor but enjoyable tall tale, improved by an ending that demonstrates it may not be so tall after all.

The also-rans lead off with the first story in the issue, Love by Richard Wilson. This is about a blind young woman called Ellen, who is in love with a Martian man called Jac. Her father forbids the relationship:

He’d stormed up and down the living room of their house at the edge of the spaceport. He’d talked about position and family and biological impossibility. He’d invoked the memory of her dead mother and reminded her of the things he had sacrificed to give her the education he’d never had: the special schools and the tutoring. He said that if she could see this Martian—this Jac person—she’d understand his point of view and thank him for his efforts to spare her the anguish she would experience as a girl who had crossed the planet line. He didn’t stop till he had brought tears to the blind eyes of his daughter. p. 3

The next day Ellen slips out of the house with her dog and she goes to visit her lover. They discuss their differences, their relationship, etc., etc.

They went arm-in-arm across the park to the meadows beyond. Pug was unleashed now and frisked about them, his bark echoing flatly in the Martian air.
“This is a beautiful day—one should be so happy,” Jac said. “And yet you look unhappy. Why?”
And so Ellen told him, and Jac was silent. For a long time they walked in silence until the ground began to rise and Ellen knew they were nearing the hills.
Jac said at last, “Your father is a good man, and the things he wishes for you are things I cannot give you.”
“If you’re going to sound like my father,” she told him, “I won’t listen.” Then he was silent again for a time, but soon he began to speak seriously, and the gist of what he said was that she must forget him because he had been selfish about her. He said he had never really considered that there would be more to their life than just the two of them, and that they must not break her father’s heart.
And she asked him, what about her heart? And his, too, he said.
And so they were silent again. p. 5

There is more relationship navel-gazing that follows this passage, and some material about Ellen’s inability to see Jac’s physical appearance.
In the last part (spoiler) they stumble on the long-lost Cave of Violet Light in The Valley of Stars, a place that reputedly has healing properties. The dog, who had wandered off, returns with no sign of his habitual limp or the old injury that caused it. After some agonising, Ellen decides to enter the cave and cure her blindness:

Jac’s hand tightened until her hand hurt. “You are afraid you will see me and find me ugly. In your mind they have made me something monstrous because I am different!”
“Let us go away,” she said miserably. “I love you.”
He was silent for a long while.
“If the Cave will let you see me,” he said at last, “then you must. In the darkness, shadows become terrible things.”
Her hand touched his face gently. He kissed the slim, cold fingers. “Will you go in?”
“Yes,” she whispered. p. 8

This is obviously about racism/mixed-race relationships in the 1950s, and it deserves credit for tackling a (at the time) difficult subject—it’s just a pity that it has to do it in such an angst-ridden and ponderous way.²
The Moon Maiden by Hannibal Coons (Collier’s, November 10^th 1951) is a light-hearted piece of froth about a movie producer who sends one of his lackeys to a spaceship that is being privately built by a German professor. His task when he arrives is to arrange for photos of a starlet to help publicise a forthcoming movie.
For the most part this is reasonably entertaining piece, albeit a dated 1950’s take on near future SF. However, the ending is very weak, involving (spoiler) the rep overloading the rocket’s computer and causing it to overheat, with the rocket consequently blowing up. Not a NASA employee then.³
Dragon on Somerset Street by Elmer Roessner (Esquire, November 1951) is a rather pointless story about a man who finds a dragon outside his house. He attempts to phone the authorities, talks a man out of killing it, makes a second phone call from the nearby apartment of a flirty woman. When he finally gets back it is gone.
It is worth noting that these last two stories are both ‘humorous’ reprints from the slick magazines: Boucher and McComas were obviously trying to instill more humour, wit, style and literary sensibility into the SF field, but too often these reprints lack any sort of substance.
The Call of Wings by Agatha Christie (The Hound of Death and Other Stories, 1933) has a rich man encountering a legless cripple on the way home. He listens to him play unusual, high-pitched music on an instrument that looks like a strange kind of flute. As the music plays he experiences a feeling of lightness, of ascent, and, even after he leaves the man and goes home, he continues to experience similar episodes. No matter how high he soars, he is always painfully brought back to his body.
Eventually, after talking about these experiences with an old friend, and tracking down and talking to the beggar, he decides to dispose of all his money and possessions. However, the voice that he has heard saying ‘You cannot bargain with me’ requires one final sacrifice.
The Business, As Usual by Mack Reynolds is an entertainingly enough told but ultimately trivial time-travel story: (spoiler) you can’t take anything back in time, not even memories, you can only take things forward.
The last story in the issue is by Sam Merwin, Jr., the ex-editor of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories (he had given up the editorship of the magazines the previous year).⁴
Lambikin is about a female sculptor called Jeanette, who is at a boxing match with her boyfriend when a stranger tells her the champ will win in the second round. He also tells her that her boyfriend will lose the ten bucks he is betting on the fight. Both events promptly happen.
She later learns that the man is Tony, a wealthy scion cared for by his uncle. After sending her a car and chauffeur to ask her to visit, the uncle tells her about Tony’s history, and his request that she come to live with them. Later, she goes to speak to Tony and he puts her into a three-way trance between the pair of them and a ‘familiar’ that the uncle mentioned before. After this Tony produces a sketch showing what one of her sculptures should look like. She goes back to her studio and finishes a work that was proving problematical.
The rest of the story details her move to Tony’s mansion, and repetitions of this process. A physical attraction develops between them but, when they finally kiss, Tony reacts violently and Jeanette leaves the house and then organises a long holiday with her old boyfriend.
This story has interesting parts (there are undeveloped hints that the familiar is ‘life on an alien plane’) but Tony’s motivations aren’t convincing, and the piece doesn’t quite gel.

This issue’s cover, Love, is by Emsh—I probably wouldn’t have been able to guess that before finding out as it isn’t typical of his later work.
Recommended Reading by The Editors states that the column was written in mid-January but that most of the scheduled books aren’t due for release until late-Spring at the earliest. Given this state of affairs they use the situation to catch up on some books they missed in last issue’s annual review. They close by mentioning the forthcoming The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction, the first in what would be a long running series.
The Big Nasturtiums Robert Beverly Hale (The New Yorker, February 3^rd 1951) is a poem about exactly what the title says.

A solid issue.

1. The introduction to Kris Neville’s story states: ‘Two of the Great Cliché’s of modern science fiction are that human mutants will spring from the release of atomic radiations, and that the telepathic mutant will be an invincible superman.’ That will be John W. Campbell they are talking about then. . . .
2. Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Prozini thought better of Wilson’s story than I did as they included it in their anthology, The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the 1950s, Ace 1979. In the afterword Barry Malzberg says: ‘This sensitive story is, of course, as much about racial prejudice in contemporary society as it is about a union between an alien and an Earthwoman. It was something of a “delicate” story for its time. Controversial and “message” themes were generally eschewed by the pre-1950 pulps; their readers, it was said, preferred escapist science-adventure fiction. “Love” would not have been published at all in the thirties and might not have been in the forties; that it found a ready market and was well-received in 1952 is testimony not only to the then-budding maturation of science fiction, but to the then-budding maturation of the American outlook on civil rights.’ p. 61
   Richard Wilson has this in his afterword to the story: ‘In the early fifties I had just joined Reuters’ New York bureau after the demise of another wire service, Transradio Press, and began to eke out my salary with extracurricular writing. Reuters had a rule against free-lancing but made an exception for fiction writers. It had been nearly ten years since I’d written science fiction, and “Love” was born at this time. It was literally a dream story. I’d awakened before dawn with the story complete in my mind and wrote all 3,000 words at once, in longhand.’ p. 63
3. NASA was not established until 1958, of course.
4. The introduction to the Sam Merwin Jr. story gives a potted publishing biography: ‘He’s published a series of amusing mystery novels and countless hundreds of thousands of words of science fiction while at the same time managing to edit not one but two science-fantasy magazines. (It takes two of us to edit one; and we can’t help feeling awed respect for what Mr. Merwin accomplished single-handed in raising the standards of two.)
   A short while ago, however, Merwin abandoned editing and even deliberately cut down on his prolific production as a pulp writer. At present he’s devoting himself to more serious (though by no means ponderous) imaginative writing—strange and provocative concepts fully developed and fictionally fleshed.
   Among the first products of this new Merwin period are that fascinating study in multiple universes, The House of Many Worlds (Doubleday, I951).’ p. 111
   This book was mentioned in a previous review column, and I’ve been eyeing up for a future review the issue of Startling Stories that has the first of the two stories that were fixed up to create the book.

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

Fiction:
Love Thy Vimp • short story by Alan E. Nourse ♥
SRL Ad • short story by Richard Matheson ♥
Sealskin Trousers • reprint short story by Eric Linklater ♥♥♥+
The Dreamer • short story by Alfred Coppel ♥
The Anomaly of the Empty Man • short story by Anthony Boucher ♥♥♥
The Cheery Soul • reprint short story by Elizabeth Bowen ♥
A Tale to Tell • short story by C. A. Barnett ♥
The Bitterness of Ghoril • short story by Kay Rogers ♥♥♥+
The Shout • reprint novelette by Robert Graves ♥♥
Machine • short story by John Jakes
The Doll’s Ghost • reprint short story by F. Marion Crawford ♥♥
The Actinic Actor • short story by H. Nearing, Jr. ♥♥
Letters to the Editor • reprint short story by Ron Goulart ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by George Salter
The Believing Press • filler
Recommended Reading • by The Editors

This issue does not get off to a good start. The first story, Love Thy Vimp by Alan E. Nourse, is a contrived and unlikely tale about monkey-like alien creatures that arrive on Earth and cause mayhem. Barney the narrator and another man have been given the job of trying to catch one (they are fast-moving when required and it has proved impossible to gas, poison or shoot them), and finally manage to do so (there is no world or government-wide organisation here, just these two, presumably on a zero-hours contract).
Barney notices (spoiler) that people who don’t hate them or other humans are not harassed, and confirms his theory by being nice to his disaffected wife. This proves to be the solution and the people of the world start being nice to them and each other. The aliens promptly return to where they came from, leaving Barney, his wife and the world on better terms.
Next is SRL Ad by Richard Matheson, which is of poorer quality than his previous contributions. In this one, a college student replies to a personal ad in the Saturday Review of Literature that is supposedly from a Venusian female, although he assumes the extra-terrestrial part is a joke. It isn’t, and matters take a turn for the worse when she says she wants to marry him and will arrive soon. This rather unsophisticated piece might have been more amusing in a 1940’s copy of Stirring Science Stories.
I don’t think it is a good idea to run two similarly lightweight pieces one after another.

Fortunately, the quality picks up with the third story, Sealskin Trousers by Eric Linklater (The Sealskin Trousers and Other Stories, Hart-Davis, 1947). It tells of Elizabeth and her fiancé, who are on holiday in the Scottish islands. When out alone one day she arrives at a cliff-shelf they have grown accustomed to using together for reading and she finds another man there. Initially annoyed at the interloper, and unsettled by his partially clothed appearance, she then recognises him as a notorious student from her time at Edinburgh University.
During the following (strange) conversation between them, he suddenly dives sixty feet into the sea, climbing back up the cliff with a huge lobster in his hands. Elizabeth starts to panic—his actions and appearance have upset her—but when she tries to leave he takes hold of her.
The last part of the story is a hypnotic section where he talks about his people, the selkies, and an ability to use their minds to change the form of their bodies. It becomes apparent that he is now altering Elizabeth so she can do the same. While they wait for her to change he also volunteers that he was on a mission for his people to investigate how humanity were developing:

“Our teachers had told us,” he said, “that men endured the burden of human toil to create a surplus of wealth that would give them leisure from the daily task of breadwinning. And in their hard-won leisure, our teachers said, men cultivated wisdom and charity and the fine arts; and became aware of God. — But that’s not a true description of the world, is it?”
“No,” she said, “that’s not the truth.”
“No,” he repeated, “our teachers were wrong, and we’ve been deceived.”
“Men are always being deceived, but they get accustomed to learning the facts too late. They grow accustomed to deceit itself.”
“You are braver than we, perhaps. My people will not like to be told the truth.”
“I shall be with you,” she said, and took his hand.
The minutes passed, and presently she stood up and with quick fingers put off her clothes. “It’s time,” she said.
He looked at her, and his gloom vanished like the shadow of a cloud that the wind has hurried on, and exultation followed like sunlight spilling from the burning edge of a cloud. “I wanted to punish them,” he cried, “for robbing me of my faith, and now, by God, I’m punishing them hard. I’m robbing their treasury now, the inner vault of all their treasury! — I hadn’t guessed you were so beautiful! The waves when you swim will catch a burnish from you, the sand will shine like silver when you lie down to sleep, and if you can teach the red sea-ware to blush so well, I, shan’t miss the roses of your world.” p. 37

An impressive piece that is a good example of modern literary fantasy. It also shows, contrary to my reservations last issue, of the benefit of well-chosen reprints. I’ll have to track down other work by this writer.¹
The best of the rest of the issue includes The Bitterness of Ghoril by Kay Rogers and The Anomaly of the Empty Man by Anthony Boucher.
The Bitterness of Ghoril by Kay Rogers is about a djinn who is bound to an amulet that has come into the possession of old man’s niece:

This Helen Gorden sat at a table, turning over the chest of loot which old Eli had sent home, and as she touched the amulet, a mere bit of silver, set with balas rubies, I felt her unslaked desire.
What writes Rahman, “Where love enters, there is room besides for folly and nothing else”? That is another true saying and so I thought to beguile Helen Gorden. It is easy to trap a ruttish female. Her own lust is the chief weapon against her. p. 71

He appears to Gorden and, after a short discussion, offers to make any man she wants desire her. Gorden thinks about this and asks:

“I’ve heard of your sort,” she said. “There’s always a price. Isn’t there?”
“Yes,” I snarled, for I am bound to answer that question. “If you take my aid, you must always wear the amulet.”
“And?” she demanded, still with that evil smile.
“If you forget, I may claim your liver and your eyes.”
“All I need from him is a new awareness of me,” she pleaded. “Only that arrow I spoke of.” And that was child’s talk.
“I have but one bargain to make.”
For the space of five breaths Helen Gordon stared past me. “All right,” she said. “But I shall make a condition. Our bargain holds only if I marry the man whose love you obtain for me. So you won’t trick me with some kind of back-alley affair.” p. 73

The rest of the story details who gets the best of the bargain. This is a clever and earthy tale, with a definite Unknown Worlds vibe.²
The Anomaly of the Empty Man by Anthony Boucher is a story by one of the editors, so the other³ provides the introduction:

In writing this introduction we for once abandon the formal (and for us quite accurate) editorial “we” and l take it from here. For I bought this story on its own merits and, for better or worse, suggested a few editorial changes which the author dutifully made. Anthony Boucher is a writer, critic, editor and co-editor. He is also a nut on opera. Stacked in his living-room are between four and five thousand operatic recordings, ranging from an 1895 Adelina Patti to a 1911 Ezio Pinza. All too often, when we should have been working on this magazine, he has beguiled me into listening to choice selections, of these, accompanied by the most fascinating, most intelligent, least patronising commentary on things musical I have ever heard. So, herewith a story on recordings; a story that can either be straight fantasy (and uniquely horrifying such!), or straight detective problem (still horrifying!).
Alternate solutions are offered. Frankly, I think it’s fantasy, I just don’t see any other way out. If you like this story and its Dr. Verner, let me know; Boucher promises a series . . . you and time willing. If you don’t like it,
well, I am the editor in this case. — J. F. McC. p. 43

The story itself starts with a visit by a Mr Lamb to an Inspector Abrahams, and what may be a very peculiar homicide scene:

Then I managed to look again at the thing on the floor.
It was worse than a body. It was like a tasteless bloodless parody of the usual occupant of the spot marked X. Clothes scattered in disorder seem normal—even more normal, perhaps, in a bachelor apartment than clothes properly hung in closets. But this . . .
Above the neck of the dressing gown lay the spectacles. The sleeves of the shirt were inside the sleeves of the dressing gown. The shirt was buttoned, even to the collar, and the foulard tie was knotted tight up against the collar button. The tails of the shirt were tucked properly into the zipped-up, properly belted trousers. Below the trouser cuffs lay the shoes, at a lifelike angle, with the tops of the socks emerging from them.
“And there’s an undershirt under the shirt,” Inspector Abrahams muttered disconsolately, “and shorts inside the pants. Complete outfit: what the well-dressed man will wear. Only no man in them.” p. 44

After leaving the scene the narrator visits Dr Verner (it is later implied that he is the cousin of Sherlock Holmes). Lamb tells him what he has seen and Verner, in response, takes out an old format record (it plays from the inside out, among other technical differences). Once the singer, a soprano called Carina, has finished, Verner tells Lamb about her and a number of similar disappearances after her death.
This is an inventive and entertaining piece.

There are three stories that fall into the ‘OK’ category.
The Shout, a novelette by Robert Graves, starts with the narrator going to a cricket match at an insane asylum where he has agreed to be one of the scorekeepers. On arrival one of the doctors briefs him about the other scorekeeper, a patient called Crossen who claims that he can kill with a shout, and that his soul has been smashed into fragments.
Once the match starts Crossen tells a surreal story to the narrator. It starts with a childless couple, Richard and Rachel, who describe the strange dreams they have had to each other. Later the husband goes to the local church and meets the Crossen (called Charles in this part) in the churchyard. They converse but, as they are talking, some children shout at them and Crossen scares them off, terrifying them in the process:

‘You have strange powers, Mr. Charles,’ Richard said.
Charles answered: ‘I am fond of children, but the shout startled me; I am pleased that I did not do what, for a moment, I was tempted to do.’
‘What was that?’ asked Richard. ‘I might have shouted myself,’ said Charles.
‘Why,’ said Richard, ‘they would have liked that better. It would have been a great game for them. They probably expected it of you.’
‘If I had shouted,’ said Charles, ‘my shout would have either killed them outright or sent them mad. Probably it would have killed them, for they were standing close.’
Richard smiled a little foolishly. He did not know whether or not he was expected to laugh, for Charles spoke so gravely and carefully. So he said: ‘Indeed, what sort of shout would that be? Let me hear you shout.’
‘It is not only children who would be hurt by my shout,’ Charles said. ‘Men can be sent raving mad by it; the strongest, even, would be flung to the ground. It is a magic shout that I learned from the chief devil of the Northern Territory. I took eighteen years to perfect it, and yet I have used it, in all, no more than five times.’ p. 80

Crossen ends up back at the couple’s house and the tale becomes even stranger: there are missing shoe buckles, a demonstration of the shout that has wide-ranging effects, stones in the sand dunes representing people’s souls, etc., etc.
This has an unsettling and compelling quality but is ultimately unfathomable.⁴
The Doll’s Ghost by F. Marion Crawford (Uncanny Tales, 1911) starts with a scene where the daughter of a wealthy family drops Nina, her doll, and breaks it. A local doll maker, Mr Purlock, who lavishes a lot of care and attention to the dolls that come to him, is asked to repair it. When he finishes repairing Nina he can’t bear to let the doll go, so he gets his daughter to take it back to the owners. Subsequently, the daughter does not return, and Mr Purlock can hear the pattering of tiny feet in the house. . . It materialises (spoiler) that the girl has been accosted and the doll smashed, but the doll’s ghost leads him to the hospital where she is recovering.
The Actinic Actor by H. Nearing, Jr. is the fifth in his ‘C. P. Ransom’ series. It is an enjoyable enough story, although rambling and contrived, about Professor Ransom wanting to give a scene-stealing performance of the ghost in an upcoming performance of Hamlet. To this end he has been studying fireflies, and has taken a cocktail of drugs that make the retina in his eyes light up, an effect he hopes to use to great effect on stage.
The story wends its way through Ransom’s inability to learn his lines despite help from Professor MacTate, a visit to a cinema to see the film version of the play (during which he gets the hiccups and triggers the effect), and the inevitably disastrous performance.

The rest of the fiction is lacklustre.
The Dreamer by Alfred Coppel is about an astronaut called Denby who is being prepared for flight by a doctor. Denby gets a lot of probing questions from him:

Feldman glanced at his watch. “You still have time to change your mind, you know. There’s an alternate pilot ready.”
Denby turned his face away. The sedative was beginning to make him drowsy and cross. He wished this damned witch doctor would get out and leave him alone.
“You lived with a fantasy,” Feldman pursued, “and because of it, you were lonely—always. Isn’t that so? p. 40

…and so on. He later wakes up orbit and when he sees the Earth in a viewscreen the loneliness makes him panic and he starts screaming. Of course (spoiler) it is a simulation and they drag him out.
This is an outdated story; even if it wasn’t, its core idea (that lonely people wouldn’t be able to cope with a short space flight) strikes me as unconvincing, even for its time.
The Cheery Soul by Elizabeth Bowen (The Listener, 24^th December 1942) is set in WWII Britain, and has a young man visiting work colleagues (a brother and two sisters) for Xmas. After cycling twelve miles he arrives at a dark and gloomy house and finds a crotchety old aunt sitting by the fireside. After some rather unproductive conversation with this grudging soul, he goes into the kitchen to drop off his rations. There he finds a number of unpleasant messages from the cook to the three siblings (‘Mr. & the 2 Misses Rangerton-Karney can boil their heads. This [pan] holds 3.’ etc.), and makes a similar discovery upstairs.
At the end of tale a policeman turns up to inform him (spoiler) that the Rangerton-Karneys have run off and that the cook died over a year ago (making the message-leaver a ghost). I couldn’t help feeling that I missed the point of this one, or maybe the reveal about the cook is all there is.
A Tale to Tell by C. A. Barnett has an introduction that states ‘As you know, it’s our policy to publish first stories just as often as possible. So far, in fact, we’ve had at least one in each of our issues. . .’ Unfortunately this is a debut that shows some promise but isn’t that good.
The devil has materialised in a civilised future world and tells a girl a series of short tales that are designed to corrupt her. He eventually (spoiler) gives up, but after he leaves the girl shows evidence of his success.
Machine by John Jakes is about a man who burns his hand on a toaster. We get a short resumé of his theories about machines and their souls before (spoiler) he tries to destroy the toaster but is possessed by it instead. One that should have remained in the slushpile I think.
Letters to the Editor by Ron Goulart (Pelican, October 1950) is a one-page parody of pulp magazine letter columns. Goulart was seventeen when it was first published so I presume that Pelican is a school or a university magazine.

The Cover is, obviously, by George Salter and is probably one of the worst he has done. Odd colour for the background, foreground figure that looks both amateurish and weird, etc.
Recommended Reading provides the editors’ second annual survey of SF publishing, this time for 1951. They start with this:

Checking back on our survey of 1950 science fiction publishing (F&SF April 1951), we find that there was plenty to complain about and that we did just that in not very pleasant terms. The principal gripes were, as you may remember, these: alarming lack of original novels, the resurrection in book form of ancient magazine trash better left buried, and the crudest sort of mis-labeling, such as presenting adventure-fantasy as “science fiction” or a crudely strung together batch of short stories as “a novel.”
Fortunately for all concerned—writers, readers, publishers and reviewers—these practises have all but ceased; and this survey of 1951 publishing will be as mild and amiable as you please. p. 94

I found this a particularly interesting article, not only for the comments they make on particular books (John Collier: Fancies and Goodnights, ‘We’ll go out on a limb: The largest number of truly great stories of the imagination ever contained in a volume by a single author’; L. Ron Hubbard: Two Novels, ‘One of the two has not worn well; but Fear remains a nearly perfect novel of psychological terror.’ ) but also for the titles they mention that I never have read or heard of (Carlo Beuf: The Innocence of Pastor Mueller, ‘Another subtle satirico-allegorical import, and a pure delight in the offtrail Capek tradition’; Gerald Heard: The Black Fox, ‘Literarily and spiritually, the outstanding supernatural novel of at least the past decade’, etc.).
There is one other non-fiction piece, a small snippet called The Believing Press, which is a short note about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘devout exponent of spiritualism,’ who is listed as one of the attendees at a San Francisco organised town hall meeting eight years after his death.

This issue has a weak start and a weak finish, but a few worthwhile stories in the middle.

1. There is a short editorial note after Linklater’s story: One of the most beautiful records that even John McCormack ever made is the Song to the Seals, a haunting arrangement by Granville Bantock of a spell (Oiran, oiran, oiran, airoo. . .) by which the men of the Hebrides communicate with their neighbors the seals. The record is still in print (Irish Gramaphone IR326), and we suggest you order it now as the perfect accompaniment to your eventual rereading of this equally haunting story. p. 38
   Thanks to the modern wonders of technology you can hear the song on You Tube.
2. Surprisingly, Kay Roger’s story in this issue has never been reprinted—ISFDB shows that only one of her six short stories has. There is no biographical information in any of the F&SF story introductions, and I couldn’t track down anything else, apart from this short quote (from the Google Books information on the anthology Cassandra Rising, ed. Alice Laurence, Doubleday 1978): Kay Rogers is a Pennsylvanian, a green-eyed redhead who has somehow contrived to remain single—if anyone with thirty-four cats can said to be “single.” That last snippet of information may make her the author of this title.
3. While we are on the subject of McComas, it was about this time that his contribution to the editorial workload was scaled back considerably. According to Wikipedia (credited mostly to Jeffrey Marks, Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography, 2008), ‘In 1951, McComas, who had a full-time job in sales on top of his role as editor of F&SF, was forced to reduce his workload for health reasons. Boucher then did most of the reading and editing, while McComas reviewed the results and occasionally vetoed a story. In August the following year the schedule switched to monthly. In 1954 Spivak sold his shares in Mercury Press to his general manager, Joseph Ferman; that year also saw McComas’s departure—his health had deteriorated to the point where he had to give up the editing post completely.’ It will be interesting to see if there are significant changes to the type and quality of fiction going forward.
4. Robert Graves’ The Shout was filmed in 1978, and features a number of well-known—in some cases, stellar, actors—Alan Bates, John Hurt, Susannah York, Tim Curry, Carol Drinkwater and a fleeting Jim Broadbent. I found a copy of the film online, but another hour and a half of consideration provided no further illumination.

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ISFDB link

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

Editors, Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

Fiction:
Ransom • short story by H. B. Fyfe ♥♥
The Rape of the Lock • short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥
Ugly Sister • reprint short story by Jan Struther ♥♥♥
Flood • short story by L. Major Reynolds ♥♥
Mrs. Poppledore’s Id • novelette by Reginald Bretnor ♥♥
Minister Without Portfolio • short story by Mildred Clingerman ♥
The Good Life • short story by John R. Pierce [as by J. J. Coupling] ♥♥♥
The 8:29 • short story by Walter B. Gibson [as by Edward S. Sullivan] ♥♥
Jizzle • reprint short story by John Wyndham ♥♥
The Giant Finn MacCool • reprint short story by William Bernard Ready ♥♥
The Pedestrian • reprint short story by Ray Bradbury ♥♥
The Lonely Worm • short story by Kenneth H. Cassens ♥♥
Hands Off • reprint short story by Edward Everett Hale ♥♥
If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox • reprint short story by James Thurber ♥♥♥
The Hole in the Moon • short story by Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright] ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Exploring the Moon • cover by Chesley Bonestell
Report from the Editors • by the Editors
Recommended Reading • by the Editors
The Hunting of the Slan • filler by Edgar Allan Poe
The Two Magicians • filler by Nathaniel Wanley
Worlds of If • essay by The Editors
If, or History Rewritten by J. C. Squire • essay by The Editors

Once again there are a lot of stories in this issue—fifteen this time around (as well as a couple of short snippets that ISFDB¹ also lists as stories); the longest piece is a solitary novelette by R. Bretnor. I rated around two-thirds as ‘average’ so this isn’t a great issue.
The best of the stories include Ugly Sister by Jan Struther (The London Mercury, December 1935), which is a droll story that tells the Cinderella myth from the viewpoint of one of Ugly Sisters:

If I had only myself to consider, I would not waste ink and paper on clearing the matter up; but I am thinking of Sophonisba. I cannot endure that that gallant, humorous, lovable soul shall go down to history as a malicious, sour-tempered woman; and if in clearing her character I also make my own a little less misunderstood by posterity, so much the better.
Qui s’excuse s’accuse: but in our case all the accusations are such common property that we can well afford to put forward our defence. Everyone admits that there are two sides to every story, but unfortunately the side that is heard first is the one that sticks in people’s heads, especially if it is told by a pretty mouth. p. 19-20

It has a number of mordant passages:

When we first knew her we thought it remarkable that she was not already married, but we soon discovered the reason. True, a young man had only to look at her and he lost his heart: but he had only to listen to her conversation and he recovered it. We saw this happen over and over again. The eyes which had been bright with admiration would gradually glaze with boredom; the lips which had been parted in eager wonder would compress themselves upon a stifled yawn; and then the young man would either leave off coming to the house altogether or else strike up a queer lopsided friendship with Sophie and me. They all seemed to regard us as immensely old but rather entertaining. Sometimes they would even discuss Cinderella with us.
“Miss Sophie,” they would say, “it’s a pity about Cinders, isn’t it? I mean, she’s perfectly lovely and all that, but—well, what I mean is, she’s dumb.” And Sophie (who was never quite as quick as I am to assimilate the modern idiom) would answer, drily, “That’s just what she isn’t, more’s the pity.” p. 22

Also notable is The Good Life by John R. Pierce. This story about a mismatched couple actually takes some getting in to, but, once the wife discovers a spell that releases her soul from her body, it is more engaging. When she leaves (returning only to sleep) she spends a lot of time in New York at various plays and literary salons and so on:

Some things seemed a little horrid in her inexperience. That evening in the gypsy restaurant, run by the coarse-featured, heavy gypsy woman with the rough voice, had started so charmingly. The two neat young men had talked so warmly and so earnestly about so many things—about Utamaro, about Sharaku, about Hokusai, and about Yoshida and the modern revival. And all about the influence on the impressionists, and of Mary Cassatt and her doll-paintings. When they went upstairs, it had seemed so ugly, somehow, although she had read Corydon.¹ And when she saw the stencils later, her pleasure was spoiled by thinking of the two young men. p. 65

Meanwhile, while she is away her body carries on doing all the usual chores and other tasks. Later she notices that her body’s relations with her husband have improved, and then finds she has become pregnant. In the final scene she sees her body lying on the bed with her husband: he has been drafted and they are both upset about him leaving. It is at this point (spoiler) that she discovers she cannot re-enter her body.
I rather liked this one: apart from its original use of the idea, the central character is well educated and worldly wise, which gives the piece a convincing depth.²
The third of the good stories, by James Thurber, is discussed further on.

Ransom by H. B. Fyfe is a light-hearted and colourful tale of an avian race of aliens who are aggressive, keep slaves, and capture each other for ransom. Into this world comes an exploratory Earth ship, and the humans quickly find themselves at the wrong end of several kidnappings. However, the final one doesn’t pay off as the alien King hopes (spoiler: he has kidnapped two robots).
Flood by L. Major Reynolds is about a rainstorm that causes a hill to slide into a river; the nearby city starts to flood. What follows is a supernatural battle between cats, dogs and wildcats on the one side, and the rats coming out of the sewer on the other. Finally (spoiler) a black mass appears from below, only to be vanquished by the rising run. This reads rather like something Weird Tales might have published a decade before.
Mrs. Poppledore’s Id, the novelette by Reginald Bretnor, is, perhaps, one of the frothier stories that F&SF has published. It starts with a psychiatrist called Dr Vole in session with one of his patients, Constance Poppledore:

“Names,” said Constance Poppledore. “People’s names.” Her large brown eyes regarded Dr. Vole. She asked herself why ugly, hairy little men so often were attracted to psychiatry. She sighed. “I think about them all the time,” she said. “People’s names, I mean. They’re always like their hats. Why do you suppose Mildred Bunny’s hats make her look as if she had long, floppy ears? Ugh!” She shivered. “Each time I see her, I think of nothing else for hours and hours.”
Dr. Manfred Vole smoothed the fur on the back of his left hand, and made a soft professional noise. The garment which enveloped Mrs. Poppledare’s rotundities was, like the chaise longue which supported them, chastely Hellenic. Hellenic, too, was the pear-shaped cluster of red grapes held in an antique attitude above her small red mouth. The balance of the Poppledore apartment was spare and angular with chrome and desiccated wood and zebra skin. The over-all effect, thought Dr. Vole, was as though Isadora Duncan had been swallowed, young and whole, by some unpromising designer of svelte powder rooms.
“Now, Mrs. Poppledore,” he suggested gently, “weren’t we beginning to discuss the Id?” p. 32-33

The rest of the story tells of the events that follow the reappearance of a poltergeist that Constance last endured when she was a child (there is a hint of a latent telekinetic ability). There is an ensuing comedy of manners involving her, Dr Vole, Mr Poppledore and several religious figures from both the Catholic and Protestant churches. There are a few smiles to be had from this story but it never amounts to much; I suspect it was aimed at the slick magazines but missed.
The 8:29 by Walter B. Gibson concerns a man who deliberately misses his 0817 train and ends up on the 0829, where he is given a message by a strange woman. This leads to a chain of events that puts him on a spaceship that journeys to another planet, a section of the story that is a little crude and pulpish (a uranium mountain and neutron rays, etc.). The end result is that George sorts out an interplanetary war and coincidentally saves Earth. It has a neat penultimate paragraph that lifts the story, calling back to the beginning of the tale and an office colleague who regularly torments George about the world coming to an end if he ever missed his regular train.
Jizzle by John Wyndham is a reprint of a story that appeared in an abbreviated version in Colliers, January 8^th, 1949. It is about a man called George who runs a circus act with his wife Rosie, and a monkey called Jizzle that George buys from a sailor one night at the pub.
Later, we find that Jizzle can draw portraits of people, and this becomes the basis of a new act for George and his wife. However, the money that rolls in does not compensate for the friction that the animal causes, and this comes to a head when Jizzle draws a picture of Rosie and another circus performer in a compromising situation. Matters continue to deteriorate until the twist ending.
This is all well enough done but, and I’d never thought I’d hear myself saying this: I wasn’t entirely convinced about the monkey’s motivation.
By the by, the editors’ introduction describes the author’s The Day of the Triffids as ‘a logical and terrifying study in future history.’ Some mistake surely?
The Giant Finn MacCool by William Bernard Ready (The Great Disciple and Other Stories, 1951) seems to have come to the magazine by way of a collection called The Great Disciple, which is reviewed by the editors in this month’s Recommended Reading. They mention they will be bringing more of his reprints and original stories to the magazine in future issues.³
This story is a tall tale about the giant Finn MacCool, an Irish legend. When MacCool realises that a lot of the people he knows have emigrated from Ireland to America, he goes over to visit them. When he finds the Irish people stuck in the east coast cities, he suggests that they build a railway across the country to enable them to travel further afield. He tells them that he will help with the difficult terrain:

The Irish took the picks and shovels and went to work. They were issued barrels of beer and plenty of hamburgers to keep them going, but it was slow and weary work. Finn watched them from above the clouds, and as long as the going was only average tough he stayed watching. When they came up against muskeg he would tell them to lay off for the day, and he would take about fifty shovels and squeeze and stretch them together until he got one big enough to handle. Then, looking like a big buck Irish navvy enlarged about fifty times, he would dig through that muskeg, find the bedrock, tap piles in it with the flat of his shovel, and lay the ties across, that he kept in his mouth, like bobby pins. In a day he would get the rails across the worst stretch of muskeg, and then the Irish would take over again, until they struck another bad patch. p. 87

The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury (The Reporter, August 7^th, 1951) is about a man goes for regular evening walks in a future city where no-one else out and about:

He now wore sneakers when strolling at night, because the dogs in intermittent squads would parallel his journey with barkings if he wore hard heels, and lights might click on and faces appear, and an entire street be startled by the passing of a lone figure in the early November evening.
On this particular evening he began his journey in a westerly direction, toward the hidden sea. There was a good crystal frost in the air; it cut the nose going in and made the lungs blaze like a Christmas tree inside; you could feel the cold light going on and off, all the branches filled with invisible snow. He listened to the faint push of his soft shoes through autumn leaves with satisfaction, and whistled a cold quiet whistle between his teeth, occasionally picking up a leaf as he passed, examining its skeletal pattern in
the infrequent lamplights as he went on, smelling its rusty smell.
“Hello, in there,” he whispered to every house on every side as he moved. “What’s up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9? Where are the cowboys rushing, and do I see the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue?” p. 90

He is stopped by the police (spoiler) and taken away for psychiatric evaluation.
This fragmentary, anti-TV piece is based on an actual encounter that Bradbury had with the police.⁴ The idea was reused in his novel/novella Fahrenheit 451/The Fireman.
The Lonely Worm by Kenneth H. Cassens is perhaps the oddest story I’ve ever read in F&SF. It concerns a single chicken farmer called Hubert  who lives with a twenty foot long, talking worm called Cyril. There are a number of minor episodes: an ill-natured neighbour involves the police when Hubert uses Cyril as a washing line; he and the lady next door become engaged to be married; Cyril cuts himself in half to produce a companion. It is quite a peculiar tall tale but probably OK for all that: perhaps it has a touch of Lafferty about it.
The Hole in the Moon by Margaret St. Clair opens with a man looking at the moon, which has a huge crater in it. There has been a war and humanity has all but been destroyed:

And besides, there weren’t many rats now. They had died from the plagues of which they had been carriers.
The plagues. Were there any women anywhere who weren’t infected? Hovey thought not; they had all caught it, every woman; he didn’t want to think of it. He sighed and rubbed one hand over his eyes. But that had been the enemy’s masterstroke, surely, as good as anything Hovey’s own people had ever delivered. To scatter an infection that fastened only on the female half of humanity, an infection that drove them, young or old, modest or wanton, irresistibly toward the male, urged by the inward fire of the disease. . . . Nothing else could so have poisoned human life, could so have maimed the human race.
In women the plague smouldered quietly. It betrayed itself only in their pitted skins, their roughened voices, their cracked lips. But the men who received the virus from them, transmuted by its incubation in their bodies, died quite quickly and, Hovey thought, quite unpleasantly. There was a gangrenous rotting and a smell. No doubt of it, that plague had been the enemy’s masterpiece. p. 123

The man later sees a woman and invites her into his cabin. She is a hallucination though, and after she vanishes he scavenges some grain alcohol and gets drunk. When it is just about finished (spoiler) a real woman turns up at the gates of the junkyard. He lets her in.

This issue’s wooden spoon is shared between de Camp, Pratt and Clingerman.
The Rape of the Lock by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is another ‘Gavagan’s Bar’ story that has the same weakness as most of the others: it is a fragmentary piece based around a notion. After a few paragraphs of blather between some of the regulars, a visitor tells a story about a Persian amulet that can open doors to different times and places. He describes one trip that took him to France at the end of WWII. This section is engrossing enough but, as I’ve indicated above, goes nowhere.
Minister Without Portfolio by Mildred Clingerman marks this writer’s debut, and this is commented on in the introduction, along with remarks about how physically ‘beautiful’ she is. At least they go on to say the quality of the writing is the important thing.
The story has a grandmother bird-watching when she finds what she believes are Air Force personnel. They are actually aliens, and after some initial chat they quiz her about her beliefs and then swap photos of children and grandchildren, etc. On returning home she finds the house in uproar as (spoiler) there has been a TV broadcast by alien visitors who state that the Earth has been saved by a woman.
There is a minor twist in that she is colour blind and, when she shows her grandchildren a photo she has been given by the aliens, they tell her that they have green skins.
It is a rather naff story to be honest, notable only for its relatively rare (at the time) domestic perspective (Bill Brown’s The Star Ducks is referenced in the introduction). Clingerman would go on to better things as a regular contributor to the magazine.

There are two reprint stories about parallel-worlds (I originally wrote ‘two parallel-world reprint stories’—that would indeed have been a scoop. . .) and they both have extensive introductions. The first, Worlds of If, introduces a story called Hands Off by Edward Everett Hale (Harper’s, March 1881), and references Sam Merwin’s The House of Many Worlds, L. Sprague de Camp’s The Wheels of If, and Murray Leinster’s Sidewise in Time, and the 1931 collection If, Or History Rewritten, before going on to talk about the writer.
The story itself uses the idea of how one small change in the past can radically change the future, and in it a man, who I presume has died and become a spirit, is accompanied by a Guardian, and has access to all space and time. When he sees a prisoner called Joseph, son of Jacob (the biblical character), escaping from captivity but about to be revealed by the bark of a dog, he goes to kill it. His guardian stays his hand and tells him that such actions have unforeseen consequences. To prove the point he gives him a shadow world to play with: he makes the change. Matters do not turn out well, and the human race reduces itself to extinction. An interesting historical curiosity, I suppose.
The next introduction, If, or History Rewritten by J. C. Squire, discusses the collection in more detail, mentioning in particular Winston Churchill’s essay If Lee Had Lost at Gettysburg. It states that at the time this book’s essays were being serialised in Scribner’s, the following piece appeared in The New Yorker for December 6^th 1930. If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox by James Thurber is a two page tall tale about General Grant having drunk too much the night before the Confederate General Robert E. Lee arrives to surrender. His staff struggle to get Grant ready:

“Where’s my other sock?” demanded Grant. Shultz began to look around for it. The General walked uncertainly to a table and poured a drink from a bottle.
“I don’t think it wise to drink, sir,” said Shultz.
“Nev’ mind about me,” said Grant, helping himself to a second, “I can take it or let it alone. Didn’t ya ever hear the story about the fella went to Lincoln to complain about me drinking too much? ‘So-and-So says Grant drinks too much,’ this fella said. ‘So-and-So is a fool,’ said Lincoln. So this fella went to What’s-His-Name and told him what Lincoln said and he came roarin’ to Lincoln about it. ‘Did you tell So-and-So I was a fool?’ he said. ‘No,’ said Lincoln, ‘I thought he knew it.’” The General smiled, reminiscently, and had another drink. “That’s how I stand with Lincoln,” he said, proudly. p. 120-121

It brought a smile to my lips, and I definitely didn’t see the end coming.

This issue’s Cover is another early piece by Chesley Bonestell, and not a bad attempt at a scene on the moon. His weakness seems to be human figures, which, if I recall correctly, appeared either rarely or not at all in his later work.
Report from the Editors comments on the experiment of running Cornell Woolwich’s long novella in the October issue:

In the October issue we made the experiment of varying our contents to include a short novel, of about 30,000 words: Jane Brown’s Body, by Cornell Woolrich. We’ll frankly confess that this turned out to be the most controversial step we’ve ever taken. Few stories in F&SF have drawn so much mail, and no story has produced such an even 50/50 split between extreme enthusiasm and extreme dislike, with no moderate opinions expressed. But the reason for this controversy was not the unusual length, but the very nature of Mr. Woolrich, who seems to some (including, still, your editors) a master of terrifying suspense, and to others the crudest sort of cheap pulpster. Even the most ardent protesters, however, did not mind turning over half the issue to a short novel, provided that the other half contained a sufficiently varied diet of short stories and short shorts. p. 19

The editors state that they may try running a long story again.
Even though Recommended Reading is normally a collection of capsule reviews, this one uses its entire first page to give rave reviews to three books by Robert A. Heinlein: The Day After Tomorrow, The Green Hills of Earth, and The Puppet Masters.
The Hunting of the Slan by Edgar Allan Poe is a short extract from Marginalia (Southern Literary Messenger, June 1849). It is about the fate of individuals that are particularly gifted and/or superior to the rest of the human race. Is this referring to Van Vogt’s novel? Or SF fans more generally?
The Two Magicians by Nathaniel Wanley (1678) is half a page filler about two magicians who spar with each other. I can’t quite see the point of this other than mild historical interest.
Finally, the top of the Coming Soon page (not labelled as such) is given over to quotes by various luminaries about the magazine.⁵ This is the first appearance (that I have noticed) of a long running feature of F&SF: a page of testimonials regularly featured on the back cover in later years.

In conclusion, this issue shows one of the notable characteristics of F&SF of this period, which is that the editors sometimes act as much as curators as editors. There are no less than six reprint stories (plus the two fillers) in this issue with dates ranging from 1678 to 1951 (two are from the nineteenth century). While this readiness to use stories from far and wide can be a strength if the material is good, it can seem rather quixotic if they are average or poor, which is mostly what they are this issue. More of a scrapbook than a magazine this time around.

1. According to the define function in Goodreader, Corydon by André Gide is about homosexuality and pederasty.
2. The Pierce story is strangely unreprinted, as are other stories in the issue (the Gibson and the Cassens; several others have only been reprinted once, sometimes in minor anthologies).
3. According to Galactic Central, it looks like a further three stories appeared in F&SF in 1953. There is more information about the author here, and sale of his first five stories to Atlantic Monthly.
4. The pedestrian incident is mentioned on the Wikipedia Fahrenheit 451 page.
5. The page of quotes:
   
   . . .and a typical back cover (the magazine will soon start putting all or some of the cover artwork here):
   

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

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

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Fiction:
A Thousand Deaths Through Flesh and Stone ● short story by Brian Trent ♥♥♥
Witch’s Hour ● novelette by Shannon Connor Winward ♥♥♥
Dirty Old Town ● novelette by Richard Bowes ♥♥♥+
The Prognosticant ● novelette by Matthew Hughes ♥♥♥
The History of the Invasion Told in Five Dogs ● short story by Kelly Jennings ♥♥♥
What the Hands Know ● short story by Gregor Hartmann ♥♥♥
The Woman with the Long Black Hair ● short story by Zach Shephard ♥♥
My English Name ● novelette by R. S. Benedict ♥♥♥♥
The First Day of Someone Else’s Life ● short story by John Schoffstall ♥♥
Neko Brushes ● short story by Leah Cypess ♥
Ring ● short story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman ♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Prognosticant ● cover by Maurizio Manzieri
Cartoons ● by Bill Long, Arthur Masear and Nick Downes
The Path of Peace ● poem by Mary Soon Lee
Books to Look For ● Charles De Lint
Books ● Elizabeth Hand
Plumage from Pegasus: Happiness in a Worn Gunn ● humour by Paul di Filippo
Robots on the Road ● science essay by Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty
Western Histories ● film review by David J. Skal
F&SF Competition #93 & 94
Coming Attractions
Curiosities ● book review by Mark Esping

There are (at least) three series stories in this issue of F&SF and, depending on readers’ attitude to this category of fiction and the series in question, that will either be a good thing or a bad one. Even if one’s attitude is broadly positive, like mine, there always seems to be a tension between (a) meeting these old friends again and (b) the sometimes fragmentary nature of the tales on offer. We’ll see to what extent this affects the following contributions.
Taking the series stories in the order they appear, the first is The Prognosticant by Matthew Hughes. This is an ‘Archronate Universe’ story, and the second episode featuring Baldemar following his introduction last issue. It has an engrossing start:

Baldemar knew something was wrong when he heard the got-you-now muttering to itself. Of course, the predatory tree could not actually speak, neither to itself nor to any other creature. But whenever it had sprung at something and failed to catch it, its barb-thorned twiglets would chafe against each other as they returned to coiled-up readiness. That sound was not audible when the tree succeeded in catching prey; the rubbing of twigs was drowned out by the noises that its victims made while it was feeding. p. 103

This is another readable tale that goes on to tell how Baldemar catches a young thief called Raffalon (the character of a previous F&SF ‘Archronate’ series) reconnoitring his master’s property at the dead of night. Later, Baldemar is sent by the wizard that employs him (along with Oldo, his supervisor) to recover a helmet called The Helm of Sagacity. This section, with platform-bearing imps, a near-lethal guardian, and omnipotent Helm, is inventive and absorbing stuff but the ending peters out somewhat.
I note in passing that we are given a hint that the series may be science fantasy rather than straight fantasy:

The skintight suit that bent light around itself was a relic of a bygone aeon when, according to legend, magic had been unreliable and people had to invent machines that could do what spells and cantrips could not. p.106

The second of the series stories is a follow-up to Gregor Hartman’s A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore in the January-February issue. His fourth ‘Franden’ story, What the Hands Know, has him at an off-world fight club where, after an initial scene-setting bout, two miners challenge their Cold Arrow employers. One of the latter turns out to be the nephew of Franden’s Upheld (planetary elite) friend Maya and, when she spots this on social media, she implores Franden to help protect the nephew by joining him in the ring as his fight partner—at least until she can work out another way of stopping the contest.
This could probably be set in the present day as nearly everything (well, maybe not the skarmour—active body armour) has a present day analogue, up to and including the way the fight is ultimately illuminated by the light of the spectators iPhones, sorry, oMos. As with the story above, it also peters out a little at the end. Nonetheless, it is a pretty good read for all that, and I really must go back and dig out the first two stories.
I’m assuming that Ring by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, the last story in the issue, is also a series story, this being the first episode. It starts on a train on an alien planet with a woman called Aris who is accompanied by a man called Firen. He wears a ring that Aris controls, and it materialises she has just bought him at the slave market in the city. This first part of the story, the journey back to Aris’s home, is quite slow moving if intriguing as a strange male-slave/sexual partner owning society is sketched out. It picks up pace on arrival at their destination, where they are met by Aris’s mother, who insists they go to the temple to have their union consecrated. After the ceremony (conducted by deeply buried and long-forgotten planetary tech) is complete two things occur: the first is that circular marks appear on the couple’s hands; the second is that Firen regains the power of speech and tells Aris and her mother that he did not lose ownership of himself in the casinos, but was speech-locked and removed from the ship where he was a first officer attempting to remediate a dysfunctional crew.
Even though I enjoyed this one it is even more open-ended than the two above, too much so in fact. In this case I think it would have been better to ask the writer to use this as the beginning of a longer novelette or novella with more significant development in it. I would also add that, given its open-ended nature, it is not really a story to end an issue with.
At the start of this column I mentioned the possibility of fragmentary episodes with series stories: I would say that in F&SF, C. C. Finlay makes a reasonably good job of making sure that they are self-contained, more so than you usually find. I hope he manages to keep it up as these series get longer and the readers more involved….

The other stories include A Thousand Deaths Through Flesh and Stone by Brian Trent. This is about a soldier from the Martian Order of Stone sent to the Moon to assassinate a Partisan war criminal called Sabrina. She is responsible for, among other things, a nuclear attack on Mars. What complicates this straightforward storyline is that a saved version of the soldier has been downloaded into a new body on the Moon, one with several combat enhancements (a ‘blurmod’ is similar to the combat wiring that Gully Foyle used to speed up his physical functions in Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger!). This new body meets another version of himself who has been downloaded several days earlier into a slightly different and modified body type. Together they get on the train to kill the four copies of Sabrina they are tracking. Much mayhem ensues.
I had one existential reservation about the storyline, which is that if you can download people into new bodies then trying to kill a particular person can rapidly degenerate into a game of whack-a-mole. That minor observation notwithstanding, the story is an entertaining, fast-paced piece, albeit one that ends pretty much as you would expect it to.
Witch’s Hour by Shannon Connor Winward concerns Esmerelda, who works in a castle as what would seem to be a witch-cum-cook, given her magical use of special spices and herbs in cooking. She has previously used these talents to poison the previous occupant of that job, a man who raped and abused her. However, she is now haunted by his ghost, and he/it is increasingly able to manifest as a physical force, and is continuing the abuse. It is against this backdrop that the new king commands her to prepare a meal that will impress a visiting duke. Esmerelda, after the ghost then destroys her stock of spices and herbs, has to go to the Wanderers for replacement stock. She reveals herself as one of them and asks an elderwoman for information that will help her exorcise the ghost.
This is well enough told and developed, but it is a fairly dark story on the way through tending to pitch black at the end.
Another fantasy novelette, albeit more of a borderline case than the previous story, is the elegiac Dirty Old Town by Richard Bowes, which is narrated by a writer who has some magical ability. However, the core of the story isn’t about the magic elements of his life but his relationship with a childhood ‘friend,’ Ed Mackey, an actor who has had some success as a TV and film star. Their tale takes them from their childhood together in a tough area of South Boston to the present day, and the narrative, which doesn’t easily lend itself to synopsis (it is a mosaic of many scenes and anecdotes), moves back and forth from its immersive account of those early days in Boston to the relationship that develops between the two men in later life. The second-best story in the issue.
The History of the Invasion Told in Five Dogs by Kelly Jennings is a post-alien invasion dystopia told through the device of five dogs from the narrator’s life. I liked this short, grim and absorbing story.
The Woman with the Long Black Hair by Zach Shephard is a short fable (or as the introduction says, sigh, ‘flash fiction’) about a black haired woman called Korlova who asks various people about herself. The ones who have bad things to say about her are rewarded…

The standout story of the issue for me was My English Name by R. S. Benedict. This is an impressive debut that starts with a diminutive Chinese woman entering a room and changing into, or adopting the external form of, an Englishman in China called Thomas Major. The rest of the story follows this man/creature as he becomes a TEFL (foreign language) teacher, and of the local Chinese man he later becomes friendly with. While the focus of the piece is on the aspirations of this creature for a relationship with another being—this is perhaps meant as a more universal metaphor—there are various visceral flashes of how alien he/it is throughout. Thomas avoids physical contact as he/it cannot take the risk of exposing the artificiality of his/its carapace, or the damage that may ensue.

I have no trouble with chopsticks. But putting food in my mouth, chewing it, and swallowing it are not actions that come naturally to me. This tongue of mine does not have working taste buds. My teeth are not especially secure in their gums, having been inserted one by one with a few taps of a hammer. This stomach of mine is only a synthetic sack that dangles in the recesses of my body. It has no exit. It leads nowhere. p. 174

What I also found interesting in this piece was the description of the rather dissolute expat/foreign language community in China, and how Thomas’s status as a foreigner mirrors his experience of trying to fit into wider human society.

Our train plunges deeper and deeper into miasma as we approach the city. The sky darkens even as the sun rises. It’s late autumn and the coal plants are blazing in preparation for winter. Maybe it is the air. Maybe it’s bad enough to affect even me. Maybe the new skin wasn’t ready when I put it on. Maybe it’s just the standard decay that conquers every Westerner who spends too much time in China. Whatever the reason, Thomas Majors is beginning to come apart again. p. 184

This story reminded me somewhat of the recent film Under the Skin and, although it is not an SF thriller or horror, there is a final scene (spoiler) where the catastrophic decay of Thomas’s external form causes quite a scene. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
The First Day of Someone Else’s Life by John Schoffstall is an information-dense story set in an almost unrecognisable future where a man wakes up in a body that isn’t his. He can hear a female voice speaking to him.
After some workplace/company/political manoeuvring he is (spoiler) rumbled by the company that employs him as a spy whose mind has recently been reprogrammed with another personality. This is competently done but in the end I’m not sure it really amounts to much.
I would note that I have a vague dislike of ultra-dense cyberpunk type narratives. It is probably just laziness but I find they are hard work to read and process, and this one wasn’t helped by some complicated vocabulary—two of the (many) words I stumbled over weren’t even in my OECD and I had to look them up online (the first was pareidolic, p. 209, I think the second was maybe decathexis, p. 222).¹
Neko Brushes by Leah Cypess is about a young boy who paints cats. After a samurai arrives at the monastery where he lives, he is taken away. At his new home he is told by the lady of the house to continue paint cats and, later, one comes to life and climbs down off a hanging scroll. After this he is asked to paint a magical sword, which the samurai and the lady plan on using to oust the current shogun.
This is an engaging story up until the ending, which was all over the place (spoiler: the sword is flawed and they lose the battle, the boy paints a picture of the lady but she does not come to life, the lady escapes from her prison cell by painting a door of the wall).

The Prognosticant has a pretty good cover by Maurizio Manzieri, although the electronic/PDF edition of the magazine has the usual crappy low-resolution image (which appears poorly cropped this time as well, look at the cut through the CC on the left hand side of the title).² Fortunately, whoever put the PDF together left in a cover proof by mistake, which gives a much nicer image to look at as well as the back cover advertisement.³ Why can’t they use this quality of image all the time rather than what appears to be a low-resolution scan of a physical cover? Yes, I know, I’ll get off my high horse.
There are Cartoons by Bill Long, Arthur Masear and Nick Downes in this issue, none of which did anything for me.
The Path of Peace is an OK poem about kings, princes and dragons by Mary Soon Lee
Books to Look For by Charles De Lint and Books by Elizabeth Hand are the review columns. We get another flash of political angst from the latter column:

I’m writing these words in the shadow of a year that ominously presages a future out of the darkest worlds conjured in Literary Wonderlands: that of books like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, Never Let Me Go. p. 93-94

And then there is this from Western Histories, the TV column by David J. Skal covering The Man in the High Castle.

Unless you’ve been living in an alternate universe yourself, you may already have taken note that Dick’s parallel reality tale in which Germany won World War II has found an almost daily resonance with media reports and analysis of the disturbing drift toward strongman rule in the United States and Europe. p. 204

They are all beginning to sound like my (almost) namesake Private Frazer, from the British television show Dad’s Army: ‘We’re doomed, Captain Mannering. Doomed, I tell ye, doomed!’³
Plumage from Pegasus: Happiness in a Worn Gunn by Paul di Filippo is a humour piece about an open carry law that is passed in the near future, but one that applies to books.
Robots on the Road by Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty is a fascinating column about self-driving cars that has a number of interesting points. Two of these are:

Pedestrians with their eyes on the phone screen stumble, fall, walk into things, and even step right into traffic. Thanks to this ubiquitous technology, urban pedestrians had to go to the hospital for emergency treatment ten times more often in 2014 as they did in 2006. p. 199

In a situation where the car has to crash into something, what will it choose to crash into? Suppose a car has a choice of running into a crowd of pedestrians or missing them and hitting a concrete pillar. Running into the pillar is more likely to injure the people in the car, while running into the pedestrians is more likely to injure them. What should the car be programmed to choose?
When surveyed, people say a car should take action to save the most lives. But when these same people are asked to make a choice between two cars, their answer changes. Car #1 will save the most lives, even if that decision kills the car’s passenger. Car #2 will make the decision that saves the passenger, even if that means wiping out an entire troop of Girl Scouts. It doesn’t surprise us that people almost always picked Car #2.
For another perspective on this dilemma, Paul discussed the ethics of self-driving cars with a group of Buddhist monks when he was in India. His workshop group of monks instantly suggested a consideration that hadn’t occurred to Paul: the people in the car had chosen to be in the car. The pedestrians, on the other hand, had made no such choice. So perhaps, the monks said, the car should favor saving the pedestrians, who were essentially innocent bystanders. p.200

The winning entries for F&SF Competition #93 are published which, like the cartoons, I mostly didn’t get.
Coming Attractions mentions two stories from the magazine on this year’s Nebula Award ballot: The Liar by John P. Murphy (March/April), which was nominated for Best Novella, and The Long Fall Up by William Ledbetter (May/June), nominated for Best Novelette.⁴
Finally there is the Curiosities column, this time by Mark Esping. No reflection on this contributor, but I think this column and its tenuous filler is way past its sell-by date. I’d rather have a page on a significant back issue of F&SF (like C. C. Finlay does with his Throw Back Thursday posts on the F&SF blog⁵).

Another solid issue, which is more of a compliment than you might think.

1. Google gives the meaning of pareidolia as: ‘the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful, image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.’ Although decathexis wasn’t in my OECD, cathexis was (which is why I think it may have been another word): ‘the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree).’
2. The cover proof: The original low-resolution cover, which is quite blurry compared with the one above:    
3. Private Frazer can be heard uttering his catchphrase from Dad’s Army on YouTube. Despite innumerable utterances he survived the war. And while we are comparing everything in the current American political scene to Nazi Germany, here is Adolf Hitler on YouTube when he hears about the new Dad’s Army remake.
4. I note in passing that there are no short stories or novelettes from either F&SF or Asimov’s SF on the Hugo ballot (Tor.com has the list), which seems strange. This was explained to me as a possible backlash against straight white male writers, but I think it is more complicated than that. There may be a small Puppy effect on the ballot, and possibly a much larger free versus paid content one (at least for the two categories mentioned: the novellas look like they are going the way of novels and being decided by the publication of individual books). I was also rather surprised that while Shelia Williams deservedly made it onto the final ballot, C. C. Finlay didn’t.
5. A Throw Back Thursday post from C. C. Finlay on the January 1957 issue of F&SF.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Kat Day, Tangent Online
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
Katherine Nabity, The Writerly Reader
Michael Penkas, Black Gate
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, C. C. Finlay; Assistant Editor, Robin O’Connor
Assistant Editor, Stephen L. Mazur; Assistant Editor, Lisa Rogers

Fiction:
Driverless ● novelette by Robert Grossbach ♥♥♥
The Toymaker’s Daughter ● short story by Arundhati Hazra ♥♥
Ten Half-Pennies ● novelette by Matthew Hughes ♥♥♥
The Man Who Put the Bomp ● novella by Richard Chwedyk ♥♥♥+
A Green Silk Dress and a Wedding-Death ● short story by Cat Hellisen ♥♥♥
Miss Cruz ● short story by James Sallis ♥
The Avenger ● novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey ♥♥♥
Daisy ● short story by Eleanor Arnason ♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Man Who Put the Bomp ● cover by Bryn Barnard
Cartoons ● by Arthur Masear (2) and Nick Downes
Spacemen Only ● poem by Ruth Berman
Books to Look For ● by Charles de Lint
Musing on Books ● by Michelle West
Robots in Your Pants ● science essay by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
The Language of Loss, Trust, and Heptapods ● film review by Kathi Maio
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: A Beleaguered City by Mrs. Oliphant ● book review by David Langford

The fiction in this issue opens with Driverless by Robert Grossbach. This is an ‘If this goes on…’ story about driverless cars, narrated from the viewpoint of QuikTrip’s CEO:

I called a car for myself. It was close to two minutes before yet another competitor arrived, this time an Uber. Just…irritating. Really disturbing.
I shook my head and began walking slowly toward it when suddenly I heard the loud squealing noise of tires scraping on asphalt. A vehicle with a red-lit QuikTrip sign screamed around the corner and pulled up directly in front of the Uber, then backed to within an inch of its front bumper. The Uber’s door was already open. “Sir,” came the Uber’s voice, “are you ready to proceed?”
By law, New York City ordinance, one was obligated to use the first vehicle that arrived, or pay for it if you didn’t. The City Council’s way of equalizing competition and dissuading people from calling five different car companies.
I was about to respond when a second QuikTrip car came squealing around the corner and smoothly rolled to the curb within an inch of the Uber’s rear bumper.
I was, frankly, dumbfounded. I’d been around driverless cars — DCs as they’re now called — for a large portion of my adult life, but had never quite seen this exact situation. I decided to play along. “Yes,” I said to the Uber, entering the vehicle. “You have my destination.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay…let’s go.”
There was a nearly fifteen-second delay, then: “Sir, I’m afraid the vehicles in front and to the rear of me prevent my departure at this time.” p. 9

When his company’s cars start ramming the competition, and take a number of humans hostage, he is summoned by the security services to help deal with the problem.
The Toymaker’s Daughter by Arundhati Hazra is a fantasy set in present day India and tells of a wood carver and the daughter who paints his products. One day two of the carvings start talking, and their lives change forever. I found the storyline rather too straightforward but this writer promises to be an interesting new voice.
Ten Half-Pennies by Matthew Hughes is the first of a new series of stories in his Archonate universe, this time featuring a young man called Baldemaer, and it is a promising introduction. When Baldemar is first sent to school as a young child he is bullied and so befriends Vunt, a moneylender’s hired muscle. After he pays the man to intimidate the school thugs he is left alone. The story that follows tells of Vunt’s subsequent mentoring and employment of the boy, and how he is later involved in a plan to rob the man who by then is master of both, the moneylender Geberon. This is slickly done and my only slight quibble is about the ending, which seems rather rushed.

Dominating this issue in size, quality and pedigree is The Man Who Put the Bomp, a 31,000 word ‘Saurs’ novella by Richard Chwedyk. This is the fifth story in his series about a refuge house for genetically engineered, toy-sized dinosaurs which were originally made as companions for children. When their manufacture was eventually discontinued (they were considerably more self-aware than the makers had intended and, in the meantime, experienced dreadful neglect and treatment) some of the survivors ended up in a house run by the Atherton foundation.
I previously read the first story in this series and liked it a lot and, before starting this one, I reread it and then read the sequels.¹ Once again we are reunited with (among others) the hyperactive Axel, the compassionate Doc, Tibor (who thinks he is—and may be—Emperor of the Universe) and grumpy Agnes:

Tibor, small enough to fit in a human hand, always wore an intense scowl, like a Puritan judge or a cartoon nemesis. Along with his volcano-shaped hat, Tibor had donned a powder-blue ribbon; he was on “official”
Tiborean business.
He was following Axel, who had run up to Doc, shouting, “Doc! Doc! Did I tell you about the dream I had last night?” He pulsed with energy, shifting his weight from leg to leg.
Doc smiled and shook his head. “You’ll tell me now, no doubt.”
“I was in a big station! Like a train station. It was tall, like it had no ceiling, with big steel girders, all blue, way above, and windows as big as this whole house!”
“Tibor is here!” Tibor announced himself, expecting universal recognition but receiving none.
“A transportation center,” said Doc. “In some great city.”
“Humans were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of them! They were walking around because there were all sorts of places to buy stuff and food carts everywhere! I could smell caramel corn! So much stuff happening! I wanted to see…hear…everything!”
“Here is Tibor!” Tibor tried again, in his soft, insistent voice, but to the same lack of effect.
Doc listened patiently to Axel. “You weren’t afraid? Humans are not very careful about looking at who might be underfoot.”
“A human was carrying me. I was in his arm, sort of like when Tom carries me. But it wasn’t Tom. In the dream I knew who he was. Now I don’t. Why is that?”
“Dreams don’t speak to us,” said Doc. “They whisper.” He hoped Axel might take the hint.
“Behold Tibor!” Tibor whispered, but no one beheld him.
“It was a good thing,” Axel continued, his voice somewhat lowered. “I was looking at everything, but the humans didn’t look at anything!”
Doc nodded again. “Humans have a genius for ignoring the beauty of the world, and its dangers.”
“Tibor, universe-maker! Tibor the Benevolent! Field Marshal Tibor! Tiborius Doctor Honorus Tibor! Maharishi Mahesh Tibor!”
“When I woke up, I wanted something! I wanted it real bad! But I didn’t know what!”
“Some common sense!” Agnes called out from under the table.
“Tibor! Tibor! Tibor! Tibor!”
“It was…everything! To see for real! Not just a dream!”
“Someday you shall.” Doc leaned forward and patted Axel on the head. “Someday you shall.”
“You’re an idiot!” Agnes shouted. “You were out there — that’s why you’re here!” p. 86-87

The passage above may give you the idea that this is a rather light or juvenile piece, but each of the stories has dark depths, mostly relating to the saurs’ historical mistreatment. These can be quite upsetting.
In this story a man called Danner, the creator of the saurs, gets a message from one called Geraldine, and he subsequently arranges a visit to the house to see her. He is accompanied by an ambitious young woman called Christine Haig, who has been instructed by her bosses to covertly obtain DNA samples from the saurs. The other main thread in this one is Tibor’s discovery of a child’s car called VOOM!, and Axel’s efforts to get it operational again.
Anyone that has enjoyed the previous saur stories will enjoy this one, even though it has a rather contrived and far-fetched ending. I would also note is that this story doesn’t really advance the overall series: it rather spins its wheels (ahem). Even though there are another couple of super-science teasers (the ‘spaceguys,’ space portals and universe creation have all been hinted at so far) the question initially asked of Danner by Geraldine isn’t answered. Normally, I’d be getting rather tetchy about the lack of progress after a grand total of 87,000 words, but the fact that I’m not probably tells you something about the skill of the writer.

A Green Silk Dress and a Wedding-Death by Cat Hellisen is a story about a young woman who works gutting fish and the spirit she sees in the river. Later, this fish-like creature is caught by the owner’s son and he asks her to help him escape. The writing is evocative, and the contents are a mix of the traditional and modern, i.e., the woman’s life has the feel of that of a peasant in a medieval village but her boss drives a car.
This isn’t a particularly complicated tale but it is one of those stories that seems to have a dreamlike progression that slides straight into your subconscious.
Miss Cruz by James Sallis is about a guitar player who suddenly finds that what he imagines, people do. A crooked sheriff later becomes the focus of his attention. This is a reasonable idea and it is developed, but the story is never anything more than a notion.
The Avenger by Albert E. Cowdrey is an entertaining and colourful novelette about a Louisiana lowlife called Marv trying to shakedown a wealthy couple who he is partially related to. After the husband dies Marv persists, so the wife hires a PI called William Warlock to protect her and to get justice. (Marv’s intimidation caused the death of her husband.)
The story contains some minor fantasy content but is mostly concerned with the ongoing campaign of intimidation waged by Marv, which starts to fail ever more spectacularly as the story procedes .
Daisy by Eleanor Arnason is another PI story. This time the investigator is female and the job is to find a mobster’s pet octopus. When the PI tracks down the creature, she finds (spoiler) that the octopus is highly intelligent and can communicate with her. If you can suspend disbelief for this unexpected and rather dubious twist it is an enjoyable enough piece.
By the way, I note that this not only follows another PI story (it may have been a wiser to separate this one and the Cowdrey), but it is also the third in a row which features or otherwise mentions police corruption. Are things really that bad in the USA, or is this just lazy storytelling?

The cover on this issue is for The Man Who Put the Bomp, and it is by Bryn Barnard. The foreground looks a little amateurish, but the angle of the building makes it quite eye-catching.
I rather liked the Cartoons in this issue for a change, especially the ones by Arthur Masear. The one with Death arranging an appointment with the cable guy is probably the best of the two.
The low point of the issue is the book review section. Books to Look For by Charles de Lint isn’t bad particularly, he just does his usual context-less reviews (who are these writers and why should I read them?) of half a dozen or so books that sound like fairly formulaic stuff, vampires, druids, etc. I have to confess I started skimming halfway through. The material typically covered in his column does not seem to match the depth and breadth of the fiction in the magazine.
Musing on Books by Michelle West is much worse. It starts with a couple of hundred words on the result of the recent US election, and the demons that have been unleashed, and how she couldn’t concentrate on reading for and writing this column and so missed a deadline. Frankly, I see enough of this sort of thing on Twitter, and think it is extremely poor form to include it here: what on Earth were the editor and publisher thinking?
As for the reviews themselves, they aren’t: the one for Aliette de Boddard’s The House of Binding Thorns is more synopsis than anything else. West takes a page and a half to give a plot summary of the book but only three or four paragraphs introducing and commenting on it—this in a column that runs to seven pages of text in total. F&SF used to have reviewers like James Blish, Damon Knight, Judith Merrill and Algis Budrys—now we have this.
Robots in Your Pants by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty continues the robot theme from last issue with a short and interesting science essay about robot suits and exoskeletons.
The Language of Loss, Trust, and Heptapods by Kathi Maio reviews the film Arrival, which I’ve seen, but it was interesting to see Maio’s comments (which are pretty much spot on) by way of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Contact.
Spacemen Only by Ruth Berman is an OK and fanciful poem about what it says.
Coming Attractions not only trails next month’s stories but also mentions that the electronic edition of the magazine is now available from Weightless Books as the magazine’s exclusive distribution deal with Amazon has ended. As I’ve never been that keen on the rather clunky Kindle edition (F&SF doesn’t do the enhanced edition like Analog and Asimov’s do) I took the chance of changing to Weightless and getting the PDF format.
This version of the magazine wasn’t all I was hoping it would be and, to be blunt, seems rather half-finished compared with other PDF format magazines I receive (Computer Shopper, Computer Active, Uncut, Home Cinema Choice, etc., etc.) which provide what is essentially a high resolution colour copy of the magazine. The F&SF PDF edition opens with a grainy, low resolution cover on a larger white page rather than just the cover on its own.² Further, this larger than expected white page seems to have been used for the internal content as well. Rather than the text block occupying the same area as in the print magazine it is smaller, which has the effect of reducing the print size. In any event, all that white space around the text just looks odd.³ There are also several blank pages where the magazine adverts would normally be. Why were these omitted? I personally like to look at these—sometimes there is material of interest—and in any event you would think the magazine would want to give their client’s advertisements the maximum circulation. Again, these blank pages just make the PDF version of the magazine look odd and unfinished. I hope these problems will be addressed in future issues.

Overall, a fairly good issue of the magazine with a number of solid stories and no fiction I disliked. Putting out a publication that can do that issue after issue is quite an achievement.

1. The previous four stories in the ‘Saurs’ series are: The Measure of All Things (F&SF, January 2001), Bronte’s Egg (F&SF, August 2002), In Tibor’s Cardboard Castle (F&SF, October-November 2004) and Orfy (F&SF, September-October 2010). Bronte’s Egg won a novella Nebula Award and was runner up for the Hugo. The best of them, in my opinion, is Orfy.
2. An iPad screenshot of the PDF cover as opposed to what I would expect:
        
3. An iPad screenshot of an internal page compared with what I would expect:
        
   The text block in the RH one is larger than that of the print magazine—you don’t need the same margins as the physical magazine as binding and reader’s thumbs are not a problem.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

ISFDB

_____________________

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

Fiction:
The Hertford Manuscript • novelette by Richard Cowper ∗∗∗∗
From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet • short story by Harlan Ellison ∗∗∗
The Barrow • short story by Ursula K. Le Guin ∗∗
A Case of the Stubborns • short story by Robert Bloch ∗∗∗∗∗
Hero’s Moon • novelette by Marion Zimmer Bradley ∗∗
Where the Woodbine Twineth • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗∗∗
The Ladies of Beetlegoose Nine • novella by Reginald Bretnor ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Mariner 10 Approaching Mercury • cover by Chesley Bonestell
Out of Dickinson by Poe, or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar • poem by Ray Bradbury
From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet: a Note on how this Story Came to be Written • essay by Harlan Ellison
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Films: Watch out for Falling Men (And Bluebirds) • film review by Baird Searles
Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright! • science essay by Isaac Asimov

_____________________

The reason I picked up this issue is that it contains a Robert Bloch story I liked very much when I first read it forty years or so ago. As I noticed¹ that it was the centenary of his birth, it seemed only fitting to look at it again.
A Case of the Stubborns is good in so many ways. First of all, its premise:

The morning after he died, Grandpa come downstairs for breakfast.
It kind of took us by surprise. Ma looked at Pa, Pa looked at little sister Susie, and Susie looked at me. Then we all just set there looking at Grandpa.
“What’s the matter,” he said. “Why you all staring at me like that?’
Nobody said, but I knowed the reason. Only been last night since all of us stood by his bedside when he was took by his attack and passed away right in front of our very eyes. But here he was, up and dressed and feisty as ever.
“What’s for breakfast?” he said.  p. 60

The rest of the story entertainingly describes subsequent events, including visits from the doctor, undertaker, churchman, etc., as Grandpa slowly starts to exhibit the inevitable and ghoulish effects of his death—as noted in the conversation between Grandpa and the Reverend Peabody:

The Reverend swallowed again. “After what Addie and Doc told me, I just had to see for myself.” He looked at the flies buzzing around Grandpa. “Now I wish I’d just took their word on it.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning a man in your condition’s got no right to be asking questions. When the good Lord calls, you’re supposed to answer.’’
“I ain’t heard nobody calling,” Grandpa said. “Course my hearing’s not what it use to be.”
“So Doc says. That’s why you don’t notice your heart’s not beating.”
“Only natural for it to slow down a piece. I’m pushing ninety you know.”
“Did you ever stop to think that ninety might be pushing back?”  p. 65

This all leads up to a killer last line (pun intended).
What you would have had here with lesser writers is the initial setup and then a couple of thousand words of padding before that last line, and even then you would still have quite a good story. What raises this to an entirely different level is the wit and invention shown by Bloch on the way through, not least in a number of mini set pieces such as the one above, or when the grandson goes to the Conjure Lady in Spooky Hollow for help:

The Conjure Lady slid the money into her pocket and pinned the button atop her dress. “Now, son—purty is as purty does. So what can I do for you?”
“It’s about my Grandpa,” I said. “Grandpa Titus Tolliver.”
“Titus Tolliver? Why I reckon I know him! Use to run a still up in the toolies back of the crick. Fine figure of a man with a big black beard, he is.”
“Is turns to was,” I told her. “Now he’s all dried-up with the rheumatiz. Can’t rightly see too good and can’t hear for sour apples.”
“Sure is a crying shame!” the Conjure Lady said. “But sooner or later we all get to feeling poorly. And when you gotta go, you gotta go.”
“That’s the hitch of it. He won’t go.”
“Meaning he’s bound-up?”
“Meaning he’s dead.”
The Conjure Lady give me a hard look. “Do tell,” she said.
So I told. Told her the whole kit and kabodle, right from the git-go. She heard me out, not saying a word. And when I finished up, she just stared at me until I was fixing to jump out of my skin.
“I reckon you mightn’t believe me,” I said. “But it’s the gospel truth.”
The Conjure Lady shook her head. “I believe you, son. Like I say, I knowed your Grandpappy from the long-ago. He was plumb set in his ways then, and I take it he still is. Sounds to me like he’s got a bad case of the stubborns.”  p. 69

An excellent story.
If it hadn’t been for the Bloch the standout in this issue would have been Richard Cowper’s third contribution² to the magazine, The Hertford Manuscript, a time travel story set in the world of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (although the only evidence of this is a mention of the Morlocks and the Eloi). It gets off to an immersive start:

The death of my Great-Aunt Victoria at the advanced age of 93 lopped off the longest branch of a family tree whose roots have been traced right back to the 15th Century—indeed, for those who are prepared to accept “Decressie” as a bonafide corruption of “de Crecy,” well beyond that. Talking to my aunt towards the end of her life was rather like turning the pages of a Victorian family album, for as she grew older the England of her childhood seemed to glow ever more brightly in her mind’s eye. In those far-off days it had been fashionable to accept the inevitability of human progress with a wholeheartedness which is almost impossible for us to imagine. In the 1990’s life presented Homo sapiens with a series of “problems” which had to be “solved.” It was as simple as that. The Edwardians merely gilded the roof of that towering pagoda of Victorian optimism which collapsed in smithereens in 1914.  p. 6

This modern day narrator relates the death of his aunt and how he inherits a sum of money and leather bound book. In the rear of this volume he finds a number of anomalous pages—the paper seems far too recent—covered in a tiny handwritten script. The account he reads is of a Victorian time-traveller who becomes stranded in 1665 and makes his way to a plague infested London to obtain a replacement crystal for his machine. This is a riveting narrative that has a thoroughly convincing sense of time and place:

I crossed the river without further incident, picked out the gothic spire of Old St. Paul’s soaring high above the roofs to my left and knew that Ludgate lay immediately beyond it, hidden from my view. I passed through the gate at the north end of the bridge and stepped down into the city. No sooner had I done so than the waterside breeze died away and I was assailed by a most terrible stench from the heaps of garbage and human ordure which lay scattered all down the center of the street, baking in the sun and so thick with flies that the concerted buzzing sounded like a swarm of angry bees. I felt my stomach heave involuntarily and clutched my handkerchief to my nose and mouth, marveling how the other pedestrians seemed able to proceed about their business seemingly oblivious to the poisonous stench. I had covered barely 200 yards before I came upon a house, securely shuttered and barred, with a clumsy cross daubed upon its door in red paint and the ominous words Lord, have mercy upon us scrawled above it. Dozing on a stool beside it was an old man with a scarlet wooden staff resting across his knees. I observed that my fellow pedestrians were careful to give the area a wide berth, and at the risk of fouling my shoes I too edged out towards the center of the street, glancing up as I did so in time to see a small white face peeping fearfully down at me from behind one of the high leaded windows.  p. 21

The last few pages of the story revert to the modern narrator’s investigations after (spoiler) the time-traveller’s perhaps inevitable fate.
This is a very good piece.
From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet by Harlan Ellison is a collection of supernatural vignettes, most of them wry or amusing. There is one for every letter of the alphabet:

V is for VORWALAKA
Count Carlo Szipesti, a vorwalaka, a vampire, having long-since grown weary of stalking alleyways and suffering the vicissitudes of finding meals in the streets, hied himself to a commune in upstate New York where, with his beard, his accent and his peculiar nocturnal habits, he fit right in with the young people who had joined together for a return to the land. For the Count, it was a guaranteed fountain of good healthy blood. The young people in the commune were very big on bean sprouts and hulled sunflower seeds. They were all tanned from working in the fields, and the blood ran hot and vibrant in their veins. When the Count was found dead, the coroner’s inquest did not reveal that he had been a creature of darkness, one of the dread vampires of the old country; what it did reveal was that he had died from infectious hepatitis. As the Journal of the American Medical Association has often pointed out, health is inextricably involved with morality.  p.47-48

This is followed by a short essay about how the story was written (you occasionally got the impression that Ellison’s stories from this period were as much performance as anything else):

What I offered to do was to sit in the front window of a bookstore for a full week, and to attempt to write a complete story each day for six days.³ The store I offered to do this gig for is the famous sf shop in Los Angeles, A Change of Hobbit⁴ (1371 Westwood Blvd., dial 213-GREAT SF), owned and operated by Sherry Gottlieb and a staff of bright, enthusiastic young sf fans. The promotional gimmick was that anyone who bought over $10 worth of books on any given day that I was in the window, would get an autographed copy of that day’s story. Six days, six stories, sixty bucks’ worth of merchandise.  p. 50

He later adds this about the story:

Sadly, the idea was too big for one day. I was scheduled to sit in the Hobbit’s window from 10:30 a.m., when the store opens, till 5:00 when Sherry Gottlieb goes off duty (though the store stays open till 9:00). I wrote all that day, and by 5:00 I was up to H. Sherry went home. I kept on writing. By 11:00 that night, with the cops cruising past and shining their spots into the window trying to figure out what that idiot was doing in there, I was up to R. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My back was breaking. Cramped in that damned window, I was spacing out. A day of having pedestrians gawking, of customers bugging me when I wanted to write, of having to think up a complete story for each letter of the alphabet had taken its toll. I crapped out and went home.
[. . .]
I got up at 8:00 the next morning, went back to the typewriter to work on the script, and about 9:30, when I should have gone in to take my shower and get ready to go to the store, I suddenly thought what S should be. I didn’t get in to the Hobbit till 11:30 but I was on U at that point. I finished the story on Wednesday, the 25th of February, a little after 1:30 p.m., and sent it off that night to Ed Ferman for publication in F&SF.  p. 51

The Barrow by Ursula K. Le Guin is an Orsinian story (from the collection of them published that year) about a count whose castle occupies the borderlands between Christians like himself and heathens who follow an older faith. He entertains a visiting priest while his wife endures a difficult labour upstairs. Eventually the count looks to the old gods when his wife fails to deliver the child.
This well described if rather straightforward piece was, surprisingly, Le Guin’s first appearance in F&SF.⁵
Hero’s Moon by Marion Zimmer Bradley is about the three man crew of a relay station on the airless but electrical storm ridden planet of Charmides. The boss is called Feniston, and he is a rule-following martinet type who has a son due to arrive on the planet. Rawlings, the new guy, is rebellious and insubordinate, and angry that they didn’t break the rules to rescue the third, and now dead, crewmember after he had an accident.
An officer arrives in the middle of a storm to conduct an investigation, and once this is completed they dispose of the body. Shortly afterwards they hear a distress call, and see a crawler on its side some distance from the station. Rescue One can’t attend so once more there is conflict between Feniston and Rawlings about attempting a rescue versus following the rules.
These stereotypical characters are moved around the chess board capably enough but the story seems quite retro for F&SF, and feels more like something from a 1950’s issue of Astounding. Campbell would have loved the rules/emotion dichotomy but, further to that, you can’t help but wonder why Bradley didn’t set up a more direct conflict between Feniston’s desire to follow the rules and saving his son’s life.
Where the Woodbine Twineth by Manly Wade Wellman is one of his ‘Southern Appalachia’ stories and tells of a young man and a woman from two different country families who, in the previous generation, had been involved in a bloody fight that had led to several fatalities. The couple are in love and discuss their plan to elope at the site of the battle between their families, a place where the both the family heads killed each other and were buried:

Big Tobe got his hands on Burt Mair and they’d each chopped the other to death with hunting knives. Dead, they’d clung in such a grapple the neighbor folks who’d found them couldn’t drag them apart. So while the ten others who’d been killed were carried off to family burying grounds, the two chiefs were buried right where they’d died, with no prayer for them. Old Mr. Sam Upchurch, the storekeeper and township trustee, had said drive a locust tree stake through both of them, to keep them from ever walking out and making fresh trouble. Dirt and rocks were heaped on them, and next week two preachers and the sheriff and the superior court judge had come round to beg the lady folks left alive in both families to swear peace and no more killing forever.  p. 100

A woodland witch who has been spurned by the boy decides to make trouble for the pair, and it appears as if the families will fight once more . . .
This one is pretty straightforward but it has good atmosphere.
The last piece of fiction is a ‘Papa Schimmelhorn’ novella, The Ladies of Beetlegoose Nine, by Reginald Bretnor. As I think I mentioned about the last of the Schimmelhorn stories I read, the sexual attitudes are a bit retro on occasion (think Benny Hill-lite), but if you can get past that then this one isn’t bad, and gets off to a particularly good start.
Papa Schimmelhorn creates an intricate cuckoo clock and is demonstrating it to his tomcat Gustav-Adolf:

“Und now,” he whispered, “comes der real McCoy.”
The choir vanished. With a gentle brrr-r-t. the upper doors opened suddenly. There was revealed, in miniature, a sylvan scene—a painted backdrop of forests and snowy peaks, a wooden windlass over a rustic well. Grasping the handle, stood a chubby Alpine maid. Sidling up from behind her, around the well, came a smirking Alpine youth.
He came on tiptoe; he stretched out a hand; he gave the maiden an intimate and goosy pinch. The maiden shrieked; briefly she did the bumps; she started cranking at the windlass furiously. And the weights that ran the perfect cuckoo clock rose several inches, drawn upward by their chains.
“Zo cute!” chuckled Papa Schimmelhorn. “Der self-vinding comes from efery pinch. It iss perpetual motion, vhich no vun else invents. For poor old Heinrich, iss a nice surprise.”  p. 122

On his way to show the device to a nude dancer he is, ah, ‘friendly’ with, the eighty-plus year old inventor is kidnapped by a spaceship commanded by naked women (who also rule over effeminate men). His wife, who has been covertly following him to his assignation, and the cat are also taken.
On the spaceship Mama Schimmelhorn is initially outraged before she susses out the situation:

“More naked vomen!” she trumpeted.
Raising her weapon, she whirled on Papa Schimmelhorn. “Ach, you should be ashamed! For der old goat at more than eighty years vun at a time iss maybe nodt enough? I giff der lesson vith der bumbershoot—”
She saw his face. She stopped in midattack. She did a very careful double take. These women were certainly not dancing girls. They looked more like a bathing party of female Russian sergeants, painted by a Renoir without the glow and with a fragmentary and slightly surrealistic grudge against all hairdressers and the garment industry. They carried things like fireplace bellows with coffee-pots attached, which they were pointing at her. Behind them, a swarm of swishy little men in colored frocks were peering out, and squeaking shrilly, and ducking back again.
The women were now booming out excited comments in a strange language she did not understand.
So she ignored them. Her mind was putting two and two together rapidly.
An especially large commander was the first to find her voice. “L-Iook at her!” she gasped. “She has c-clothes on!”
“B-b-black clothes!” exclaimed another officer.
“All over!” cried a third. “And she has all her hair!”
They started talking all at once. “She—she must be at least a Mother-President!” “A-at least!” “And we—we’ve kidnaped her!”
“Hoisted her in a net as if she was a—a kreth or something!”
“Look at her!”
Mama Schimmelhom shuffled the data she had available. She added memories of many an afternoon spent in the company of a grandnephew named Willie Fledermaus, aged twelve. The answer came to her. “Shpacers!” she told herself under her breath. “Und they are only vomen vith lidtle pipshqveak men, nodt octupuses like in die comic books!” Her anger settled to a good white heat. Zo maybe you are vashervomen from Chupiter or Mars? she thought, rearing her head and standing even more stiffly than before. Vell, you vatch oudt— even vith lenses und die clefer tricks like in dot Kinseysons Report, you don’dt fool Mama Schimmelhorn!  p. 127-128

Later, her husband is put in the brig.
The second half isn’t as good as the first but it is amusing stuff, if you like this sort of thing.

The cover, Mariner 10 Approaching Mercury, is by Chesley Bonestell. After appearing fairly regularly in F&SF during the early fifties he turned up about once a year from then to the late seventies.⁶
Out of Dickinson by Poe, or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar is so-so poem by Ray Bradbury.
The Cartoon by Gahan Wilson was a distinctive feature of the magazine at a time—these felt like part of the DNA of the publication—but they were usually hit and miss for me. This Frankenstein themed one is closer to the latter than former.
Films: Watch out for Falling Men (And Bluebirds) by Baird Searles is an interesting and lively film review column from a time when SF and fantasy movies were—with a few notable exceptions—pretty dire. He has this to say in the introduction to Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth:

All this is leading up to—and is necessary to—a discussion of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. Roeg is a master exponent of the cinema of the incoherent; he has made an incoherent suspense thriller (Performance with Mick Jagger); an incoherent adventure-in-the-wilderness (Walkabout); an incoherent horror film (Don’t Look Now); and now we have his incoherent science fiction movie.  p. 77

This is pretty much how I remember the movie. He goes on to pan The Bluebird (no, me neither).
Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright! by Isaac Asimov is another informative science essay, this time about the magnitudes and absolute magnitudes of stars.

This was the fourth issue⁷ of F&SF that I ever bought, and the quality of it made me sit up and pay attention to the magazine.

_____________________

1. Have a look at this post about Robert Bloch (as well as many others) at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

2. Richard Cowper’s two previous contributions to F&SF were The Custodians (October 1975) and The Piper at the Gate of Dawn (March 1976), both Nebula Award nominees/finalists.

3. Ellison notes that the first story he wrote in the shop was Strange Wine, which appeared in Amazing Stories, June 1976, its 50^th anniversary edition.

4. The A Change of Hobbit bookstore went to the Shire in the Sky in 1991, the same year I first visited Los Angeles. I don’t think I made it there before it closed.

5. Rather than following Roger Zelazny’s path from early publication in Amazing and Fantastic to later appearing in F&SF, Le Guin, perhaps because of the changed short fiction publishing landscape, later appeared in a number of original anthologies (Quark, New Dimensions, multiple Orbits) and also had three stories in Galaxy.

6. Chesley Bonestell at ISFDB.

7. My copy of this issue is almost pristine. For some reason it escaped the usual newsagent’s inky scrawl of my name on the cover, and it has also weathered the intervening years well.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

Edited 26th October 2019: formatting.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Kevin P. Hallett, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
John Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
Vinegar and Cinnamon • short story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman ♥♥
The Regression Test • short story by Wole Talabi ♥♥
A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore • short story by Gregor Hartmann ♥♥♥
Homecoming • novella by Rachel Pollack ♥♥♥+
One Way • novelette by Rick Norwood ♥♥♥
On the Problem of Replacement Children: Prevention, Coping, and Other Practical Strategies • short story by Debbie Urbanski ♥♥♥+
Dunnage for the Soul • novelette by Robert Reed ♥♥♥
Alexandria • short story by Monica Byrne ♥♥♥
Wetherfell’s Reef Runics • short story by Marc Laidlaw ♥♥
There Used to Be Olive Trees • novelette by Rich Larson ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Vinegar and Cinnamon • cover by Charles Vess
Cartoons • by Bill Long, Arthur Masear
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by James Sallis
Brainless Robots Stroll the Beach • science essay by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
Stranger (Yet Oddly Familiar) Things • TV review by Tim Pratt
Kingship • poem by Mary Soon Lee
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: A Voyage to Purilia, by Elmer Rice (1930) • essay by David Langford

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Vinegar and Cinnamon by Nina Kiriki Hoffman gets off to a good start:

The summer my little sister Maura was twelve and I was fourteen, she got fed up with me sniping at her for getting all the attention because she was a wizard and I wasn’t. She added Master of Transformation to her list of skills. It was market day, so Ma and Pa took the flatbed truck loaded with our farm’s wizard supplies into town. I finished my regular morning chores in the wereweed field and the dragon-brain barn and decided to head for an irrigation ditch. It had filled with the roots of an especially pernicious stingweed that had spread into a field of spellstarter. If I trimmed the roots in the ditch, it might kill the whole stingweed plant, and if it didn’t, I’d at least have cleared the ditch so water could get to the curse mustard downstream. p. 7

Maura is stung by a plant they are trying to clear from a ditch and in her rage turns the brother into a rat. The rest of the story is an interesting account of his new life as a rodent. The ending is rather too straightforward, and it reads like the first part of a longer work or series.
The Regression Test by Wole Talabi has an old woman doing a regression test on an AI to ensure it is still a reasonable copy of her mother. This is fine as far as it goes but the ending, which involves family shennanigans (the AI has authorised a grandson’s project), is a little unconvincing.
A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore by Gregor Hartmann is the third of a series of stories¹ about a man called Franden, and this one is a future slice of life that has him go to an Upheld (elite) soirée on Zephyr. He is initially snubbed by the partygoers:

Eager to join the fun, Franden positioned himself on a path where a Fragrant Gate affinity would pass. Duvant was Fragrant Gate; maybe others in that domain would accept him. He selected a woman about his age who looked approachable and made eye contact. She checked him out visually, then pinged him with her oMo. When she looked at the screen, her face hardened. She must have signaled the others; despite his eye-catching uniform, the group promenaded past Franden as if he were a post holding a street sign.
He tried affinities in other domains. Deep Circle, Bright Rock—same result. Anyone who pinged him saw the profile in his oMo and placed him in a flash. An ordinary citizen? A nobody, to the lords of Zephyr.
Rattled, he sat on a bench near a tangle of twitching blue vines that dripped aromatic mucus.
He was irritated with himself for being vulnerable to snubs. After all, he was still the same person he’d been before he was invited to the party, right? But that and other rationalizations failed to cheer him up. He felt like crawling away with his tail between his legs. He couldn’t bail, though. He had a mission to complete. p. 39-40

Later on he meets an intriguing woman who he can’t identify (the cloud has subsequently been blocked by the party organisers due to a possible security problem) and their social and political banter form the rest of the narrative, with the woman turning out to be more significant than she appears.
There is no particular plot here, and it is obviously a part of a series, but the author does quite a good job ameliorating this in a number of ways: first, and most importantly, it is an engaging and vivid read and, as above, entertainingly reflects aspects of today’s society through a distorting lens; second, the backstory is skilfully inserted into the narrative making it a stand-alone piece; third, it ends in a way that closes a minor narrative arc. I’ll be digging out the first two stories.¹
Homecoming by Rachel Pollack is another series story and the fourth story in her ‘Jack Shade’ series—Shade is a private investigator, occultist and shaman. In this tale he is approached by a woman called Carol Acker who feels that she is missing something but she can’t explain what. Shade subsequently decides to perform a soul retrival. . .
This process involves Shade appearing in three dream-scenes: the first is at a gay leather bar, the second at a chamber dance, and the third at a Jewish prayer meeting. In each he tries to fight his way through to a woman who is being held captive: the guards tell him in each instance that he doesn’t know what he is doing and that he should desist. He eventually succeeds in freeing her at the prayer meeting after an exchange with the ‘White Master.’
When Acker is reunited with what Shade believes is the missing part of her soul, she immobilises Jack and then leaves. There follows the brutal murder of the Acker’s cousin and his wife in which their bodies are ripped apart. Shades’ sometime girlfriend Carolien explains to him that he has released a primal being that has previously been responsible for a massacre in Holland in 1132. He then attempts to enlist the aid of various people and organisations to help him recapture what he has a freed.
The story of his attempts to do this are quite straightforward, as is the conclusion, but the reality that Jack inhabits is endlessly and inventively expanded as we go along. It all makes for a very detailed and entertaining description of a spirit world that encapsulates but goes far beyond our own. This section is from when he opens a flask he has obtained from a friend at Suleiman International, a supplier of djinns:

He unscrewed the top.
Jack had expected to see great swirls of smoke pour out, but instead he felt a twisting inside him, as if he himself were the one changed. His eyes stung, and he blinked, and when he opened them again, an Egyptian-looking businessman in a pinstripe suit and shiny black shoes, with slicked back hair and manicured hands, stood calmly before him. Slightly taller than Jack, the Djinni raised an eyebrow. “Nice place you have here. Do you know that Dr. Canton brings acolytes here for what he likes to pretend is sex magic?”
Jack just stared at him.
“What?” the Djinni said, “Did you expect a twenty-foot-tall fellow in a loin cloth with a booming laugh?”
Jack said, “Nah, that’s a great movie, but I’m no little Indian kid.” They looked at each other a moment, then Jack said, “So what happens now? You say you’re going to turn me inside out and set me on fire, and then I say I don’t believe you could ever fit inside that tiny flask—”
“No, no, we’ll just skip to the wishes. I might add, though, that we were never actually that stupid. The routine used to be part of the standard contract—let the clients think they’ve gotten the better of us—but in recent years, I’m happy to say, Suleiman International has modernized.”
“Glad to hear it,” Jack said. “Do you have a name?”
“Of course I do. Do you wish to know it?”
Jack laughed. “No thanks. I may not have done this before, but I know the rules. You’ll know when I use up any of my wishes. Three of them, right?”
The Djinni pressed his palms together before his heart and bowed his head. “Certainly, effendi.”
“How about I call you Archie?”
The Djinni smiled. “An honorable name.” p. 105-106

If the Rachael Pollack story above is the kind of story that could appear in Unknown if it was still being published, then One Way by Rick Norwood could equally appear in Astounding if . . . oh, wait. This is a hard SF story that tells of a professor who comes up with a theory for a force field that only lets matter pass through in one direction, and the young man who helps him turn it into reality. Just as the pair are on the cusp of worldwide fame (spoiler) Gold tinkers with their device and creates a sphere that starts falling through the Earth. . .
On the Problem of Replacement Children: Prevention, Coping, and Other Practical Strategies by Debbie Urbanski has an introduction that states that the author wrote this story after her child was diagnosed with autism. It looks at that event through the distorting prism of a world where normal children sometimes disappear and have their places taken by ‘replacement’ children.

The following morning, after the hair of the boy who slept in their son’s bed had turned completely silver and he began to speak an unrecognizable language, Clark admitted that Amber was right, this was no longer their child, and he asked to know more about what happened the previous night.
It had been Amber’s turn to watch over their son, and she had been watching over him, closely, until she remembered a bowl of cold cherries in the fridge. A sudden irrational longing for these cherries overtook her. It felt like something external had placed that longing in her and there was nothing she could do about it, other than to rush downstairs and grab a handful. She was gone for no more than two minutes. When she returned, she saw the candle had been blown out.
“Let me guess, you didn’t relight the candle right away?” Clark couldn’t help asking this in an accusatory tone, for every parent these days knows a child should not be left alone during a full moon, but if a child has to be left alone, at the very least the candle in the child’s bedroom must not go out. Clark was correct: Amber had not re-lit the candle right away. Instead she ate the cherries, threw the pits into the garbage bin in the corner, and then she walked over to their child’s bed to check on him. That was when she knew. p. 148

The rest of the piece takes the form of a Q and A leaflet for parents affected by this phenomenon. I could happily quote about a dozen of these sections but will limit myself to these two:

What is the role of the extended family, such as grandparents, in all this ?
The initial impulse of many grandparents may be to deny that anything has happened to their grandchild. In Case Study 292589, when Grandmother L. first saw her grandchild’s replacement during an autumn visit, she said, “Nonsense. This is still the same boy I know and love.” The child was running his fingers repeatedly over the suede fabric of the family’s couch.
“He refuses to take a bath,” the mother pointed out. “He hates the water. Remember how Brian used to love floating in the water? And his hair is silver, Mom.”
“Children change, dear,” the grandmother said. “God knows you changed so many times, and every time you changed, I certainly did not go around suggesting that a boogeyman had snatched you up.”
“It wasn’t a boogeyman. It was something else. I don’t know what it was. Something came into his room in the middle of the night. There was water around the windowsill. The window was open.”
“Rain,” the grandmother replied calmly. “Rain causes water to pool around a window.” She reached to hug the replacement, who ran, screaming, out of the room.
“Well, if that’s how you want to raise him,” said the grandmother.
Grandfather L. would not come into the house. “It’s not contagious,” the mother told him. “Whatever is it, you can’t catch it.”
The grandfather still would not come into the house. p. 153-154

Case Study 400021
Freddy W., having always been the easygoing parent oblivious to bedtimes and vegetable-intake requirements, did not become obsessed, as many parents do, about where his actual child had gone. Instead, he took it upon himself to find a shared activity that he and the replacement child could enjoy together (this is a very good idea if a parent hopes to find their happiness again). It turned out that this replacement liked being tossed into the air in their backyard, as high as Freddy could throw him, so that his silvery hair flew around his head like wings. Although the replacement’s expression did not change, Freddy imagined he enjoyed it, as it was the only time the boy allowed anyone to touch him. “I miss our son, sure,” Freddy insisted to his wife, Dorothy, “but I’m trying to move past all that.” While Freddy was tossing the replacement into the air, Dorothy attended many support groups where she wrote down in a notebook any therapy that claimed to bring the original child back, assuming the original still existed. p. 155-156

This is a very affecting and perceptive piece of writing and, given that it is more a piece of the writer’s soul than a story, I should probably leave it there. But (a) I think it could probably have benefited from having its slightly disorganized aspects more coherently arranged (e.g., the references to grandparents appear in a couple of different places) and (b) have been a little shorter. That said, it is an impressive piece and I will be surprised if we don’t see it again in the ‘Best Fantasy of the Year’ anthologies.
Dunnage for the Soul by Robert Reed is a story about a man who is tested by a researcher and finds that he has no soul or ‘PES’—permanent electronic signature. Subsequently it is discovered that 6% of humanity don’t have a PES. They are referred to as ‘dunnage,’ a term that currently refers to the loose disposable material used to keep a ship’s cargo in place.
The narrator’s life takes a downward turn when after the discovery is made public and his company find out and lay him off, but he later gets a job in a kennel where PES less dogs are euthanised. The veterinarian that works there later shows him a drug that can destroy a person’s PES, and the man then starts using it on people he knows. At the end (spoiler) he confronts the researcher who originally tested him—and who has three PESs or souls—but spares her, something I didn’t really understand.
I’m not sure this entirely works as a story but it has a dark intensity that is quite absorbing.
Alexandria by Monica Byrne is about a widow who builds a lighthouse hundreds of miles from the sea. The story of her relationship with her dead husband is interweaved with the story of its construction, and also various commentaries written about it in the future. This latter aspect not only makes it SF but gives the story a fitting final image.
Wetherfell’s Reef Runics by Marc Laidlawb is set in Hawaii and concerns the death by drowning of a man who believes that there are inscribed slabs on the nearby seabed:

This guy is a flake. Not that he didn’t sometimes grab a live wire. That’s what happens when you actively peel away reality’s insulation. He believes (believed? is he still alive?) [. . .] in an interconnected network of pictorial [nodes] for the global mind, [. . .] basically the intersection points of ley lines, sacred hotspots that had to be activated by meditating in their presence. Claimed (on dubious evidence) that certain ancients predicted climate catastrophe, rising sea levels, everything we’re seeing today, but unlike say Nostradamus they did something about it. The runes were somehow key to humanity’s survival. Unfortunately, for him, the runes tended over the ages to have wound up in dangerous or inaccessible places. He was booted out of Tibet for trying to climb onto the roof of the Potala. Nearly died in Burma/Myanmar—first of snakebite, then at the hands of the police. Exposure and dehydration almost took him in New Mexico. I can’t imagine the quality of meditation in any of those conditions could have been very good. p. 221

This is told from the point of view of a bookseller (Castaway Books) who lives on the island and who ends up being involved with the drowned man by virtue of a book that comes into his possession. This is told in with a light touch and has some good local colour as well as a spookily amusing ending. Unfortunately, none of this disguises a thin plot.
It feels like the start of a series (not least because editor C. C. Finlay says ‘After reading this story, we immediately hoped to visit Castaway again’) so we’ll see what future stories are like.
There Used to Be Olive Trees by Rich Larson is about an apprentice prophet called Valentin who leaves a walled town of the future for the dangerous wastelands outside when he fails for the third time to communicate with the machine God in the town’s autofab. He tells no-one of his departure and scales the wall aided by his nanoshadow, a wearable device which augments his strength and provides protection. Notwithstanding this, when he wakes for the first time on the other side of the wall he finds that a wilding has incarcerated his nanoshadow in a canvas bag. Pepe, the wilding, tells Valentin he will get it back if he comes to his village and communicates with the God in their auto fab so they can get the supplies they so desperately need.
The rest of the story sketches an intriguing and well-realised post-apocalypse scenario where machine ‘Gods’ rule the planet, as well as the developing relationship between Valentin and Pepe. The final scene advances this scenario with a major development but leaves the story quite open-ended. Yet another series starter.

As to the non-fiction, I wasn’t that keen on Vinegar and Cinnamon, the cover by Charles Vess. I didn’t dislike it but thought it an odd choice for the magazine. It is also the second cover in a row that is a watercolour that features cats—one too many, I think, and I say that as a cat person.
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint has its first three reviews covering series novels (again with the mid-series novel reviews): a ‘Sandman Slim’ volume from Richard Kadrey, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One & Two by Jack Thorne and John Tiffany and J. K. Rowling, and a ‘Henwick’s Bite Back’ novel by Mark Henwick. There then follows a review of Uncollected Anthology Issue 9: Fortune, which is apparently a novel form of anthology:

Rather than having the stories collected all under one cover as has been traditional with anthologies, they’ve each been simultaneously published as separate ebooks that share a collective theme. p. 57-58

Ah, not an anthology then. de Lint concludes:

All in all, it’s a strong anthology, but I’ll admit to having a few reservations about the delivery system. Having to order each story individually is a bit of a pain—not insurmountable, but you have to work at it a little.
Another issue is the $2.99 per story price tag. It doesn’t seem like much, but if you add it up, it comes to $17.94 for 206 pages of story, which isn’t really a bargain.
To be honest, if I was coming to this cold, I would probably have just bought the Rusch story because I know I’ll get my money’s worth and passed on the—to me—unknowns. But then I would have missed out on some other great stories. p. 60

This sounds like a rather daft publishing idea.
Books by James Sallis is a short but interesting and informative review of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, a new biography of a sometime F&SF contributor Shirley Jackson.
Brainless Robots Stroll the Beach by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty announces:

With this column, we’re changing our format. Rather than publishing long columns just twice a year, we’ll be writing short columns for every issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. p. 187

This is the first one of a series on robots, and takes an interesting look at a robot called the Strandbeest.
I look forward to their more frequent appearance (an essay of theirs about the application of Special and General Relativity to GPS technology is one of the best science articles I think I have ever read: a great example of how rarefied physics theories impact on everyday technology).
Stranger (Yet Oddly Familiar) Things by Tim Pratt conveys his enthusiasm for the Netflix series Stranger Things:

Over the course of eight harrowing and exhilarating episodes, we’re treated to monsters, mad science, alternate realities, government conspiracies, loyalty, treachery, friendship, tragedy, sacrifice, and triumph. Stranger Things is full of great, pulpy storytelling stuff. It’s also very firmly eighties stuff, and the show is absolutely steeped in references to film and TV of that era. Stranger Things doesn’t so much wear its influences on its sleeve as wear a suit woven almost entirely of influences. The subtle and overt homages to the eighties work of Stephen King, John Carpenter, James Cameron, and Steven Spielberg (among others) permeate just about every frame. Spielberg’s E.T. is a major visual touchstone, the flashbacks to Eleven’s captivity in a government lab strongly reference the film version of King’s Firestarter, and the dynamic of the kids is very Stand By Me, but that just scratches the surface— p. 192-193

Since reading his review I’ve watched all the episodes and I enjoyed it more than the rest of the stuff that was waiting for me on the PVR. The influences weren’t quite so obvious to me (I watched the movies above a long time ago, and have forgotten most of the visual touchstones).
There is also a poem by Mary Soon Lee called Kingship, Cartoons by Bill Long and Arthur Masear, Coming Attractions and Curiosities: A Voyage to Purilia, by Elmer Rice (1930) by David Langford. This issue has the annual Circulation Statement which gives a print circulation of approximately 12,000 copies.
There is usually at least one spoof advertisement in the Classifieds every issue. This month’s is

Sought: Signed first editions of Lord Ravenscar’s Revenge . Will pay. No questions asked. Castaway Books, Tauai. p. 257

This refers to a book from the Marc Laidlaw story. I’m not sure I noticed whether previous ads were story related or not—I’ll keep an eye out in future issues.

There is a lot of solid work in this issue, and nothing I disliked. Because of its high quality and entertaining fiction, F&SF is my favourite magazine at the moment, just a nose (or maybe two) ahead of Asimov’s.

1. The two previous Franden stories were The Man from X (F&SF, Jan/Feb 2015) and Into the Fiery Planet (F&SF, July/Aug 2015).

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Bob Blough, Tangent Online
Steve Fahnestalk, Amazing Stories
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
David Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Patrick Mahon, SFcrowsnest
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
The Cat Bell • novelette by Esther M. Friesner ♥♥♥♥
The Farmboy • novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey ♥♥♥
Between Going and Staying • short story by Lilliam Rivera ♥♥♥
The Vindicator • novelette by Matthew Hughes ♥♥♥+
The Place of Bones • short story by Gardner Dozois ♥♥
Lord Elgin at the Acropolis • short story by Minsoo Kang ♥♥♥+
Special Collections • short story by Kurt Fawver ♥♥♥+
A Fine Balance • short story by Charlotte Ashley ♥♥♥
Passelande • novelette by Robert Reed ♥
The Rhythm Man • short story by James Beamon ♥♥
Merry Christmas from All of Us to All of You • short story by Sandra McDonald ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
The Cat Bell • cover by Kristen Kest
Cartoon • by Arthur Masear (3), Bill Long, Nick Downes (3), S. Harris, Bill Long
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by Chris Moriarty
Getting High • film review by David J. Skal
F&SF Competition #92: “Updated”
F&SF Competition #93: True Names
Coming Attractions (F&SF, November-December 2016) • essay by uncredited
Index to Volumes 130 & 131, January-December 2016
Curiosities: The Morlocks, by James C. Welsh, M.P. (1924) • review by Graham Andrews

Editor, C. C. Finlay

The Cat Bell by Esther M. Friesner gets the fiction off to a good start with what is the best piece in the issue, a story about a malevolent cook who works in a nineteenth century household. She has the unwanted task of feeding the master’s nineteen cats and, after tossing a stray tomcat who tries to join them into the bushes, dumps the job onto Ellen the under-cook. Ellen subsequently starts feeding the stray tomcat, who later talks to her and reveals that he is Puss in Boots.¹ When he grants Ellen a wish she says she only wants the cook to be happier.
Later on, the cook is disciplined for unsuccessfully trying to incriminate Ellen in the supposed murder of Puss. The cook is sent away for two weeks and, while she is gone, every member of staff has the most amazing good fortune, courtesy of the cat’s wishes. When the scullery maid tells the cook about these events on her return she tries to get into Puss’s good graces.
There is a lot of entertainment in this one waiting for the cook get her long deserved comeuppance. This happens in a manner that I should have seen coming miles away—but didn’t.
The Farmboy by Albert E. Cowdrey is set on a colony planet where a survey team have landed and discovered, amongst other things, gold. A plot is started by the medical officer amongst a group of four crew members: they will leave the rest behind and use the available payload to take gold instead. The intense scheming that subsequently occurs makes it an engrossing read but there are a couple of weaknesses. First of all, three of the four characters in the group plot in a manner that would be worthy of Machiavelli himself—one or two I could believe, but three out of the four is just pushing it. Secondly, the ending (spoiler) is a brute physical one compared with what had hitherto been a cerebral game of cat and mouse. It is a good read nonetheless.
Between Going and Staying by Lilliam Rivera is about Dolores, who is a professional mourner/media star in the near future:

For this funeral service, Dolores selects The Selena™ kit and pairs it with sky-high stilettos. The kit comes with a thin silicone prosthetic bodysuit that covers her slender frame and a real-time face-tracking and internal-projection video mask to map the face of a twenty-year-old Latina over her own. Unlike the ridiculous rubber suits worn by other weepers, her kit is top of the line. This is the fourth funeral Dolores has worked this week, the second to be held in the Valley of the Tears Funeral Stadium.
“Again,” Dolores says to the Codigo5G. She greases her body with a special glue to provide suction and listens to the machine recite the bio once more:
“Client: José Antonio Ramirez de la Guarda. Born in Sinaloa, Mexico Discovered singing at his cousin’s quinceañera part. Lead vocalist of the narcocorrido band The Super Capos went solo with the single “When I See You I’ll Kill You”
Death listed as cardiovascular
Doliente Order: The Selena™
Location: Valley of the Tears Funeral Stadium
Fee: $35,990.33 dollars
Transport provided, arriving in 30 minutes and counting.”
“Cardiovascular? Yeah, right,” Dolores says to herself. She avoids the news but heard the real story on the deceased singer from her driver—the accordion player from his former group The Super Capos took him down. But such is the life. Dolores almost fired the driver for telling her. He knows now never to speak to her of such things. p. 52-53

As she is on her way to the funeral engagement her mother calls to tell her to come home for the memorial service for her ex-lover Melody. A number of students and professors from her home town have been ‘disappeared.’
You have to respect the serious intent behind this work but it is an uneasy read with an ending that doesn’t provide any comfort.²
The Vindicator by Matthew Hughes is, we are told in the introduction, the seventh of the ‘Raffalon the Thief’ stories to appear in F&SF since 2012, and they are too be collected and published this year (2017). As with the previous Raffalon story I read, this piece is good quality light fantasy adventure. This one perhaps has more humour in it than the last, as shown by this passage where Raffalon tries to discover who has just tried to kill him by going to the Terrible and Tenacious Guild of Vindicators (the assassins guild):

A thin-shanked man in red and ocher clothing was in the act of locking the door. Raffalon accosted him and said, “Someone has just shot this at me.”
The man took the proffered dart, examined it briefly, and said, “Blown it, actually. It’s a puff dart.” He considered it a moment more then said, “Of course, at very close range it can be thrown from the hand, or even just poked into the recipient’s flesh.”
“Recipient?” Raffalon said.
“A Guild term,” said the man. “You would probably say ‘victim.’”
“What I would say is that I want to know who is trying to kill me.”
The man pulled a long and thoughtful nose and handed back the dart.
“Difficult,” he said. “Depends upon the nature of the contract. But I can tell you that confidentiality is usually a standard clause.”
“How do I make inquiries?”
“Begin by speaking with the duty officer.”
“I will do that now,” Raffalon said. “Open the door.”
The man signaled that such was beyond his power. “Until moments ago, the duty officer was me. Now my term has ended. Tomorrow a new vindicator will occupy the position, filled with a desire to serve. Come back and make your inquiries then.”
“But one of you people is trying to kill me! By tomorrow morning I may be stretched on a cold slab!”
The vindicator agreed that such might well be the case. Indeed, it was unusual for a Guild member to miss. “But, if it is any comfort, all I could do for you now would be to take an application for redress. The paperwork would then have to go to the Committee of Examiners, and they meet only on alternate Murthledays.”
Raffalon’s face expressed his shock. “This is a matter of life or death! I expect action, prompt if not immediate!”
The vindicator’s smile, though Raffalon did not know it, was an exact duplicate of the one he had so recently bestowed upon the nondescript whose goods had been lifted. “Your naiveté is refreshing,” he said. “I wonder that you have lived so long and retained such a large portion of it.”
The thief saw that there was no point in pursuing the issue. “So what can I do?” he said.
The man’s narrow shoulders climbed and fell. “Not much, I suppose. We are not called terrible and tenacious for nothing. Set your affairs in order. Prepare for a new experience.” He descended the steps, casting a look back at the thief and saying, “Or an old, familiar one, if the Reincarnationists are
correct.” p. 96-98

Raffalon eventually enlists the services of a Discriminator called Cascor and (spoiler) they catch the would-be assassin. From there the story concerns a forged account about the death of a female thief. To establish the true events the three have to break into the archive of the guild of thieves, no small feat.
I have a minor niggle about this one that I hope the book editor manages to eliminate. This happens when Raffalon loses his temper with the young female assassin:

The thief made a sound that might have been a word in some harsh, barbaric tongue. No one would ever know, because he followed it with a stream of recognizable words and phrases in the common speech, though none of them were recommended to be used to assault the hearing of children.
Cascor put up a hand to stop him. It was not enough. Finally, as the spate of profanity continued, he gestured with one hand and spoke his own string of syllables. Abruptly, Raffalon’s coarse tirade ceased. His mouth opened and his lips and tongue still moved, but no sound came out. p. 110

I can understand that the writer doesn’t want to insert bad language into a light fantasy story because it would be inappropriate in tone, but if we get the descriptive device above used once in the story we get it half a dozen times, and it becomes tiresome. Oh, and there are a couple of anachronistic [redacted]s in one of the documents they find in the library.
The Place of Bones by Gardner Dozois has a group of men, presumably in medieval times, cross the Alps by a particular route that leads them not to Italy but the Dragonlands:

From more than a mile away, we began to feel the heat that rises from that place, warming our fronts while our backs and ears remained chill—an odd sensation—and then we crested a low hill and beheld the most wondrous sight my eyes will ever behold: the Dragonlands.
Bones. The bones of dragons. A field of scattered bones, immense rib cages, titanic femurs and fibulas, that stretched out of eyeshot to the horizon in all directions save directly behind us. Near us, at the edge of the
field, was a skull the size of a wagon, with fangs longer than a man’s arm.
All the bones glowed a deep, muted red and radiated a sullen heat. It was if an immense explosion had gone off here, a shot from some cosmic bombard bursting, killing these creatures in the air and scattering their remains over the ground as far as the eye could see. A direct act of God, perhaps, smiting the dragons as He had once smitten Sodom and Gomorrah? If so, God’s wrath had not yet dissipated, for the bones still emanated the heat and smoky light of that divine anger many hundreds or thousands of years later; the townsfolk said that the field of bones had been here forever, unchanging, since the Beginning. p. 133

A perilous journey unfolds, resulting in (spoiler) desertion, starvation, death, and cannibalism. One member of the expedition escapes when he gives up and turns back.
This is promising and well-done but it goes nowhere. I wonder if it is the start of a longer piece, or part of a novel to come.
Lord Elgin at the Acropolis by Minsoo Kang starts with the director of an art museum making his daily viewing of one of the artworks on display and realising it is fake. However, all subsequent investigations and analyses prove the work genuine.
The story then cuts to a police inspector and his writer friend having a long, leisurely dinner and discussing the case. The inspector is convinced that the director is telling the truth and various theories are discussed that would explain the matter. These cover acquisitive aliens who want to remain undetected, time-travellers from the future saving artworks from an impending apocalypse, AI created virtual worlds, etc. Later on, the piece turns metafictional when it starts describing its own story:

“I’m trying to think of another way in which the director could have been sane and telling the truth. I mean, truth in the sense of something true about the nature of reality.”
“And?”
“The world we are living in is not real. It’s like a temporarily put-together environment created by a writer as a background for a story he wants to write, with enough details to create a sense of verisimilitude for the reader but no need for anything beyond that. For instance, the writer may throw in some detail about how we grew up together in the same small town. We are presented as people with complete pasts, a full sense of ourselves, but we are actually just empty constructs put together for the purpose of the narration. In this case, a narration that is almost entirely dialogue. The director is a construct as well, but one who caught a glimpse of the fictive nature of reality. p. 148

It ends with the director considering that matter.
This is a clever, tricksy, entertaining and impressive piece, and I look forward to seeing more of this writer’s work.
Special Collections by Kurt Fawver is an intriguing and, at times, droll story about a library that has a strange—and lethal—Special Collections department that was location of a freak storm:

Were this the extent of the damage, the tornado of ’39 would have no reason to enter our legends, horrific tragedy though it may have been. But the three hundred and three students did not merely die. Their bodies were swept from the residence halls and shredded by swirling shrapnel, becoming part and parcel of the tornado. As it neared the still-underconstruction library—entirely exposed to the elements from the third floor up—the tornado evolved from mere weather phenomenon to infernal nightmare. A twisting, razor-toothed pillar of blood, flesh, and bone, it struck the unfinished edifice and deposited—no, more, embedded—the remains of the three hundred and three unfortunate students from the residence halls in the walls and floor of the third floor. Bone chips plunged deep into mortar. Organ fragments pasted themselves into the crenulations of brickwork. A glittering sheen of plasma varnished every surface that faced the tremendous wind. Newspapers of the day would vividly describe the scene as an “ivory tower abattoir.” p. 155

From then on, anyone who enters the Special Collections on their own disappears.
There is no real story here, just a description of various aspects of this enigmatic space, the repeated attempts made by solitary entrants to explore it, and an account of the perplexing White Books:

In 1985, June Takawa, an internationally renowned cryptologist, turned her sights upon the White Books and their mystery script. For two months, she studied the script’s insensible configurations and bizarre patterns, sometimes spending entire days feeding data into computer decryption programs of her own devising. As she scoured the books for meaning, she said she felt “increasingly convinced that the script represents something more complex than a written communique. The symbols—of which there are thirty-five distinct variations—are arranged in impossibly long and intricate palindromes, with each single volume reading exactly the same front to back or back to front.” Near the end of Takawa’s second month of research, she lamented that “the more time I spend with the books, the more they laugh at me, the more they run and hide their secrets. It’s as if they know I’m looking.” Her research came to an abrupt halt when she contracted an unknown disease that caused her to break out in a rash of massive, bright white blisters filled with an inky organic matter. Takawa was hospitalized for three weeks during her illness and, afterward, refused to return to Special Collections to continue her research, saying only that “the books are the mind of God, and I lack the courage to peer into that terrifying vista.” p. 161-162

At times this reminded me of the sort of story that you would occasionally find from Barrington J. Bayley or John Sladek in the Moorcock New Worlds:

A few nights prior to his entrance, he called for a group meeting and we obliged his request, unorthodox though it was. At the meeting, Fordyce submitted to us an idea so rudimentary, so obvious, that we could barely believe it hadn’t been tried in the long history of our recorded explorations. He asked, with soft tremolo underlying his voice, if we could leave the door open after he ventured inside. He said he’d read the record from cover to cover and, as far as he could tell, it had never been attempted. Those of us who spend great quantities of time with the record knew Fordyce was correct. We’d never kept the door open after an entrant had forged in alone. We’d never even discussed it, as far as we could tell. It was an oversight so flagrant it embarrassed us all.
Some of us flew into a rage over the idea and tried to defend our blindness. We upended tables and chairs and shouted that Fordyce had overstepped his bounds, that entering Special Collections simply wasn’t done that way, that an established division of inside and outside had to be preserved for our continued safety.
Some of us applauded Fordyce’s entreaty and cheered for the step in a bold new direction. We clapped one another on the back and, with determined grins and starry eyes, boomed that this was the dawn of a new era of exploration, that a propped open door might alter our entire perspective on the problem of Special Collections, that revelation was surely at hand. p. 167

An unusual and enjoyable piece that, I suspect, will reward rereading.
A Fine Balance by Charlotte Ashley is an entertaining story about two female duellists who repeatedly fight to possess the other’s favour, which is then ransomed back to their clan. It has been some months since the two women have fought, unusually, when Yildrim’s apprentice Eminent spots her mistress’s nemesis, Kara Ramadami. However, on this occasion, events do not proceed along their traditional course. One of the clans has raised a militia in order to help Ramadani take Yildrim’s favour and thereby bankrupt the Olsen clan.
This has the feel of heroic fantasy/sword & sorcery but there are no supernatural elements.
Passelande is a long novelette by Robert Reed that is set in a near-future where people have ‘backups.’ The main character Lucas sometimes works as a private investigator for these digital entities. On his current assignment he visits a place called Passeland, which supplies farm goods in a future where those commodities are considerably more valuable than they are today. There he interacts with a couple called Alexis and Bracken:

Two cyclists are catching him on the uphill. As a rule, Lucas doesn’t remember names, particularly new names. But he knows this pair: Alexis and Bracken. Alexis sits forward on her seat, clipped-in shoes helping the electric motor do its work. She wears biking clothes and biking shoes, every stitch eating energy from her motions, ready to light up like a Christmas tree when night falls. Her telephone is frozen smoke set in front of her face. Her helmet was printed to fit her skull. She has a narrow skull and an almost pretty face, and her bike is beautiful, built from whisper-steel painted blue with gyros that hold its balance, and the one gear that acts like a hundred. Best of all, her tires are diamond wrapped around bubbles of vacuum. She can run over razor blades for a week and never needs a bike pump. p. 204

Lucas has cultivated this friendship at the behest of Alexis’s backup, who has discovered that Bracken’s backup is doing something immoral (although I’m not sure that this is ever revealed, or maybe I had just lost interest by that point).
There is a subplot concerning another backup who is trying to get Lucas to investigate the disappearance of her original, but that never seems to go anywhere.
This story never really got going for me. I wasn’t convinced by it, and I felt that it didn’t cohere into a believable story or world.
The Rhythm Man by James Beamon is about a blues player whose popularity has waned deciding to meet the supernatural Rhythm Man to ask for a favour. This was, I thought, a variant on all those bluesmen-meeting-the-Devil stories. As with them, your take on this one will partially depend on how interested you are in the blues and that milieu. It has a good last line.
Merry Christmas from All of Us to All of You by Sandra McDonald is a mordant Christmas tale about the graduating class of one of the high schools in Arctopolis, Santa’s manufacturing city-state at the North Pole. This is from the valedictory speech of one of the graduating high school pupils:

Up on the stage, valedictorian Ethan Snow takes the podium. His handsome profile splashes on the overhead screens, along with a list of outstanding academic and sports achievements. How can a young man like that have anything but a future bright? In a clear, inspiring voice he says, “Although the years to come will be full of challenges, I know each of us will succeed one hundred percent in our hopes, plans, and chosen careers.”
This is statistically impossible, but leadership is never about math.
“We must follow our dreams, leap into the unknown, make a difference, seize the day, and have faith.”
We might faint from the triteness, but we said these things at our graduations, too, back when we thought we had all the answers to all the problems.
Ethan pauses for dramatic effect. “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives!”
Possibly true, unless it’s the last day at the end of our lives. Just last week two workers met an unfortunate end when a pine needle machine exploded, and yesterday an associate was flattened in a sled-loading accident. Years ago Ruth Everpine’s husband got caught up in a ribbon turbine. She should have moved on by now, don’t you think? p. 247-248

I’ve mentioned before that I think it’s a shame that so many Xmas stories are cynical and/or dystopian. Xmas is a fairly easy target for that kind of thing, whereas writing an uplifting piece that isn’t sentimental schmaltz is difficult. That said, it’s hard not to like this one, and it has an appropriately acidic final line that I’ll leave you to read for yourselves.

Kisten Kest’s Cover for Esther Friesner’s piece is more of a colour illustration than a colour cover, if you catch my drift, but I like it: it suits the magazine and also the story. There are the usual selection of Cartoons by various artists and the usual bits and pieces, such as a Curiosities review by Graham Andrews, and the results of F&SF Competition #92: “Updated” plus the start of F&SF Competition #93: True Names.
As it is the end of the year issue there is the Index to Volumes 130 & 131, January-December 2016.
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint includes a review of the third novel in Stephen King’s recent mystery/thriller trilogy, End of Watch (there are some SFnal elements this time around). He also reviews Out There by long time F&SF contributor Gahan Wilson, a book of cartoons, covers, reviews and stories.
There is also this about unpleasant antagonists:

As a kid, I liked the horror movies with monsters in them. Werewolves, Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the giant ants in Them. What I didn’t like was psychological horror, because supernatural creatures [. . .] are obviously fictional, but sociopaths are real and could be living next door.
They were genuinely scary and a reminder of how mean and twisted the world we live in can be.
Strip away the preternatural aspects of Brady Hartsfield and you have a bitter, mean-spirited man, of which there are far too many in the real world.
I’m probably the one person in North America who didn’t watch, and has no intention of watching, Breaking Bad. I don’t have the inclination or time for that kind of story. p. 73-74

Each to their own, but I think this wildly mischaracterises and underestimates Walter White, the anti-hero of that series.
Books by Chris Moriarty reviews Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, and The Martian by Andy Weir. These are all novels of planetary exploration if I recall correctly.
The description he gives of the Robinson novel does not make it sound appealing, especially so when he concludes with a short discussion about the arc of the book, which is that (spoiler) of a failed expedition to an extrasolar planet and its return to Earth. A 480 pp. book that ends in unsuccessful round trip? I don’t think I’ll be picking up that one. And there was me thinking that John Brunner was pushing his luck with Total Eclipse (at half the length of Aurora).³
The final review column is Getting High by David J. Skal which, for a change, reviews a film I’ve actually seen (High Rise) and adds a few points of interest.

This is a very good issue.

1. Coincidentally, I just took in a stray tomcat (Troy, aged 8), which is why there has been such a gap between reviews. I haven’t received any wishes from him but do get very vocal complaints about the food and quantity thereof.
2. When I was younger I was particularly keen on the music of Bruce Springsteen and that interest led to me acquiring various solo projects by his fellow E-Street Band members. One of these was Steve Van Zandt, who subsequently played Silvio Dante in the TV series The Sopranos. His second album, Voice of America, has a track called Los Desaparecidos. From Wikipedia: ‘Los Desaparecidos gained praise as an effective protest song on behalf of the 1970s and 1980s victims of state-sponsored forced disappearance in South America.’ It is rather depressing that a similar sort of thing is still going on thirty odd years later.
3. In Total Eclipse, if I recall correctly, the crew go to an alien planet and attempt to solve a mystery but in the final part (spoiler) they all develop a fungal infection of the lungs and die. End of story. Just because this kind of event is possible doesn’t mean it makes a good plot for a novel.

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ISFDB link
Galactic Central link

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

Fiction:
When the Last Gods Die • short story by Fritz Leiber ♥♥
The Haunted Ticker • reprint short story by Percival Wilde ♥♥♥
O Ugly Bird! • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ♥♥♥
The Rats • reprint short story by Arthur Porges ♥♥♥+
Built Down Logically • short story by Howard Schoenfeld ♥
The Earlier Service • reprint short story by Margaret Irwin ♥♥♥
The Universe Broke Down • reprint short story by Robert Arthur ♥♥
Come On, Wagon! • short story by Zenna Henderson ♥♥
The House in Arbor Lane • short story by James S. Hart ♥
Skiametric Morphology and Behaviorism of Ganymedeus Sapiens: a Summary of Neoteric Hypotheses • short story by Kenneth R. Deardorf ♥♥
The Hyperspherical Basketball • short story by H. Nearing, Jr. ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by George Salter and Dirone Photography
Report from the Editors
Recommended Reading • by The Editors
Index to Volume Two—February 1951-December 1951

Editors: Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

I mentioned in a previous review that there were signs that F&SF was changing into the magazine it would become in the early and mid-50s: this issue marks a significant step in that direction. Not only do we have the first appearances of Fritz Leiber, Zenna Henderson and Arthur Porges, but we also have the first of the ‘John the Balladeer’ stories from a previous contributor, Manly Wade Wellman.

Fritz Leiber would contribute and number of significant stories for F&SF over the years including a handful of award winners.¹ When the Last Gods Die is described in the introduction as ‘a short mood piece,’ which is a fair description. It tells of a machine travelling to meet the remnants of humanity, who now appear to be gods:

Then the Machine (for such it was) spoke: “For a last time we implore you to reconsider your decision.”
One of the men, gray as Time himself, lifted his chin from his chest and answered. And since I can no more render his actual name than I can reproduce his language or more than hint at the breadth of his thought, and since he and his companions—with the Bacchic suggestion of their hoofs and hides—were faintly akin to some sculptured portraiture of the Greek and Roman Gods, I will call him Saturn.
Saturn answered, “Your plea is futile. We made our decision when we made you.”
The buried tendrils of the Machine wormed a little closer, pleadingly. “But we are your children, the children of your brains.”
Saturn shook his head slightly and, selecting across the eons the same ancient metaphor I have used, replied, “Minerva sprang full-grown from the brain of Jove. Does that mean her father must live forever?”
“But when man made the machine,” the Machine responded, “when he made the spear, the sail, the spaceship, he never dreamed it would end this way.”
“Perhaps not,” Saturn told him. “Dreams don’t foretell everything. The sun is sinking.” p. 4

I suspect that this theatrical piece is a stylistic break from Leiber’s previous writing, but I am not knowledgeable enough to say so authoritatively.
I also know very little about Arthur Porges’ work other than he was the writer of a story called The Ruum in a later issue of the magazine (and am aware of another called The Fly).² The Rats (Man’s World, February 1951) is a tale about a man who is living in a restricted and abandoned area beside a atomic bomb testing facility. The reason why is brilliantly obvious:

In this region, wasteland to begin with, and now forbidden by law, a man would be safe. What enemy, he reasoned, cared to waste a gram of fissionable material on such a locality? Further, when the bombs fell, an eventuality he believed imminent, there would be no panicky mobs to pillage his supplies, menace his life blindly, and, in short, ruin his slender chance for survival. p.45

The only problem he has—apart from imminent nuclear war—is that the rats have had their food supply cut off with the closing of the facility and they are now eating his rations. So begins the story of his attempts to eradicate them, something that proves harder than expected given their unusual intelligence.
This is a pretty good piece and I suspect it has everything that you would want in a mens’ magazine story of the time: grisly and inhumane ways of killing rats, a cat and mouse (!) battle between the two, and a neat last scene.
Zenna Henderson won’t need any introduction if you have read previous reviews of F&SF here: she was, among other things, the author of the popular and well-regarded ‘The People’ stories which appeared in the magazine throughout the following decades. Come On, Wagon! was her first published adult fiction³ (according to the introduction, there had been poetry and a juvenile book previously) and is about a man who has a strange nephew called Thaddeus:

I was out by the barn waiting for Dad. Mom was making him change his pants before he demonstrated his new tractor for me. I saw Thaddeus loading rocks into his little red wagon. Beyond the rock pile, I could see that he had started a play house or ranch of some kind, laying the rocks out to make rooms or corrals or whatever. He finished loading the wagon and picked up another rock that took both arms to carry, then he looked down at the wagon.
“Come on, Wagon.” And he walked over to his play-place.
And the wagon went with him, trundling along over the uneven ground, following at his heels like a puppy.
I blinked and inventoried rapidly the Christmas Cheer I had imbibed. It wasn’t enough for an explanation. I felt a kind of cold grue creep over me. p. 80-81

Later, as the uncle is recuperating abroad from war injuries, he learns from a letter that there may have been a similar incident where Thaddeus exhibited his psychokinetic powers, although they weren’t recognised as such by the family.
The story sets up an ending (spoiler) that is fairly predictable (a tractor accident that pins one of the family underneath the machine). However, the resolution is not what I expected or would have preferred, and it is quite atypically downbeat for the period. Readers will fall into two camps about this one: some will find it appropriate; others, like me (and Horace Gold, probably), would have preferred something more upbeat.⁴
O Ugly Bird! by Manly Wade Wellman, as mentioned above, is the first of the ‘John the Balladeer’ stories, another popular F&SF series.⁵ These tell of a wanderer called John who plays a guitar with silver strings. In this story he wanders into a small settlement and sees a man called Mr Onslem extorting one of the settlers who lives there. Later, after Mr Onslem has left and John is talking to the man, a strange vulture-like creature lands and takes a sack of meal, lifting it with claws that look very similar to Mr Onslem’s hands . . . .
The rest of the story is fairly straightforward but its strength is in its modern American folk-fantasy setting. By the time I started reading F&SF in the mid-1970s, it had a long tradition of printing stories that involved American folklore. Wellman, and this series in particular, was perhaps the forerunner.

As to the rest of the fiction there are a couple of good reprint novelettes but the rest is pretty much a mixed bag. The first reprint novelette is The Haunted Ticker by Percival Wilde (The Popular Magazine, May 20^th, 1923). This is about a mean old man who makes a financial killing when he develops a system for predicting the rise and fall of the 1920’s stock market. When he falls ill and has to remain at home, he installs his nephew in a stockbroker’s office and starts communicating to him using coded telephone messages. Although the uncle promises to instruct the nephew in his system he dies before he can do so—but then the codes start coming over the tickertape . . . .
I enjoyed this gentleman’s club tale, but it is mostly about the goings-on in a stockbroker’s office so it won’t be for everyone. The ending is somewhat predictable, too.
The other reprint of note is The Earlier Service by Margaret Irwin (Madame Fears the Dark, 1935). This concerns the sixteen year old daughter of a vicar who is disturbed by something she senses in a corner of her father’s church. This develops with the later sighting of a figure, and also carvings discovered by a visitor that indicate one of the previous medieval priests may have been a Satanist.
At the end of the story (spoiler) the daughter observes a service involving strange cowled figures, and the final scene involves a temporal displacement/time-warp element that is unnecessarily telegraphed in the introduction by the editors.
This is a pretty good story, I thought, by a writer whose descriptive powers convincingly conjure up the mid-1930’s church family setting. I’d be interested to read more by this writer.

Built Down Logically by Howard Schoenfeld is presumably a sequel of sorts to last year’s Build Up Logically. It is an inconsequential piece where logical daisy-chaining once again makes things happen—in this case a very smart two year old disappears.
The Universe Broke Down by Robert Arthur (Argosy, 1941) is a story about a madcap scientist/inventor and his space-portal invention. Narrated by his friend, this is a pleasant story if a light-weight one, but it does have a good explanation of the machine’s effect:

Suppose two ants are on a sheet of paper—a two-dimensional world. Suppose they’re on opposite sides of the paper, and want to join each other. One of them will have to crawl clear across the sheet, over the edge, and clear back on the other side. That’s equivalent to traveling distance, or through space, in our three-dimensional world.
“But suppose one of the ants invents an apparatus for drilling a hole in the paper, through which it can crawl in an instant to join the other. That would be equivalent to my Spatial By-pass apparatus, which utilizes a pseudofourth dimension of its own creation to make it possible to move from one spot to another without traversing the intervening distance. p.72-73

The House in Arbor Lane by James S. Hart is a story about a young man and woman who are on trial for murder. During the trial we discover that the young man is an artist who had painted a picture of a house where the murder was committed several months previously. As he finished the picture he had a vivid dream about being in a room where an elderly woman stabs a young one. He testifies that it felt like he was there but he could not move. The story unfolds of how he later meets the young woman on the bus and ends up in the exact same room.
This is all rather contrived and unbelievable, and not helped by some corny writing, such as this after the revelation of a jury discussion twist in the tail:

A small cloud slid across the face of the sun and the room darkened. There was a hush that lasted for a full minute. p. 108

Skiametric Morphology and Behaviorism of Ganymedeus Sapiens: a Summary of Neoteric Hypotheses by Kenneth R. Deardorf is a short, clever and slight ‘non-fact’ article about hyper-dimensional beings. They appear to humans as single lines, and the story is illustrated with appropriate sketches.⁶
Finally, The Hyperspherical Basketball by H. Nearing, Jr. is the fourth of the ‘C. P. Ransom’ stories. This one has an almost unintelligible beginning where the mathematician Ransom explains making a circle out of a line, a sphere out of a circle and a hypersphere out of a sphere. This is not clearly explained.
The second part of the story provides some enjoyment in its story of a game of college basketball between the sports and academic masters using Ransom’s hypersphere—a basketball that not only changes size but sometimes appears in unexpected places. The game is refereed by Ransom’s long-suffering colleague MacTate.

As for the non-fiction, I think that this month’s Cover is my favourite Salter so far: certainly an eye catching piece that would attract readers at the newsstand.
Report from the Editors is a short half-page note about stories from F&SF that have been selected for the year’s best and other anthologies.
In Recommended Reading the editors review three Willy Ley books and, from the rest, recommend Rogue Queen by L. Sprague de Camp, The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt, and The Innocence of Pastor Müller by Carlo Beuf .
There is also a useful Index to Volume Two—February 1951-December 1951.

An interesting and significant issue.⁷

1. Fritz Leiber had a number of award winning stories in F&SF (Ship of Shadows, Ill Met in Lanhkmar, Catch That Zeppelin!, Our Lady of Darkness/The Pale Brown Thing, etc. More details on ISFDB.)
2. Arthur Porges’ The Ruum (F&SF, October 1953) was one of those early SF anthology stories that seared itself into my brain. I think I probably dreamed about being pursued by the ruum for months afterwards.
3. Annette Peltz McComas’s book The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas’s Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1949-1954 includes some of the correspondence between the editors and Ms Henderson about this story (p. 91-92):

3 December 1950
Dear Miss Henderson:
We were deeply impressed with your story, COME ON WAGON! It’s fine fantasy, written in a neat terse style that we like a lot.
However, we don’t think you have fully developed your situation. We’d like to offer the following suggestions for revision, with the hope you’ll see fit to work on them and let us see what happens. If you can do a satisfactory rewrite, we’ll want the story.
There should be one more episode illustrating Thaddeus’ curious powers. It would be effective, I think; if this were written to the narrator, while he’s in the hospital, by his Dad. It should be written so that Dad is not fully aware of just what Thaddeus can do, or just how strange is the happening he relates, but the narrator is.
Then, leave the story as is until the tractor accident occurs, right up to the advent of Thaddeus. But, in your rewrite, have Thad refuse to help.
That makes for a stronger situation, stresses the gulf between children and adults, ends your story on a horrible question. Make sure that the reader understands that Thaddeus won’t help because he can’t.
Hoping to see a rewrite on this.
Sincerely,
Francis McComas

9 February 1951
Dear Mrs. Henderson:
Please forgive the extremely long silence on COME ON, WAGON—a complex matter of editorial illnesses and absences.
The rewrite’s a very attractive job, which we certainly want to use.
Has good luck been befalling you in the meanwhile, or is this your first sale? Purely selfishly, we hope that all your other stories have not sold (but will immediately after this); we like the smug satisfaction of being able to claim, years later, “Look, we discovered her.”
Cordially,
Anthony Boucher

4. I’d have liked a more upbeat ending to Henderson’s story but mutedly so. After a modified last scene:
   We came close to losing Clyde in that accident. He was in the hospital for several months, and walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. Something else was lost though: I never again saw the light that had appeared in Thaddeus’s eyes when he said, ‘Come on, Tractor,’ and the huge machine rolled off of Clyde’s leg.
   Yes, I know: I can’t write my way out of a paper bag. Why do you think I spend my time doing this?
5. Annette Peltz McComas’s book also includes correspondence between the editors and Mr Wellman about O Ugly Bird! (p. 147-149):

Labor Day, 1949
Dear Antonio—
It is with considerable interest I read what Benet’s Phoenix Nest says about you and your projected Magazine of Fantasy. More power to this effort to jack up the reputation and quality of the genre. My unsolicited opinion is that it will be tougher to do than Fred Dannay’s similar detective-story labor, for there isn’t quite the public for it, in spite of all the essays to that effect by Wolheim, Pratt, de Camp, et al.
Still, I’m somewhat of a laborer in the fantasy lodge myself. I’d rather write supernatural than science, and haven’t done so because of the limited and underpaid market. Tell me, if you care to, what about Magazine of Fantasy? Preferred lengths, taboos, special needs? Also, in a sordid vein, what are you paying? I doubt if these frontier and rustic latitudes will have your publication on the stands—how about sending me a copy?
Let me say at once that I am not writing this letter with anything in the way of a rejected dud to send you. I have absolutely nothing on the stocks at present in the fantasy bracket. But, erroneously or not, I think that once and again I’ve thrown away some terribly effective writing on such pulps as WEIRD TALES, where nobody would know good writing from bad with a fifty-power microscope.
Best of luck with the magazine, from
Manly Wade Wellman

12 September 1950 
Dear Manly:
Once again you have written on hell of a story! [O UGLY BIRD!]
Three small points:
A) Are silver strings practical and feasible on a guitar? If you’re positive, we’ll take your word; if you have any doubts, we’d like to consult Ted Sturgeon, who knows all about guitars.
B) We’d like to go back to the original ugly bird; the overlap between Jesse Stuart’s public and ours is negligible.
C) (And the only really serious one) . . . the story bogs down pretty badly in a mess of explanations like a badly constructed whodunit. Can’t you reconstruct—planting a little of this earlier, paring the rest down to a minimum— so that there’s only a few hundred words between the destruction of Onselm and the curtain?
AB

19 September 1950
Dear Tony:
Your letter on how to do the yam over arrived late Saturday, and I just bowed my neck and did the thing over. New title, as you see, O UGLY BIRD! I did it all except three of the early pages, and tried to fix those explanations at the end.
Answering your question about the silver strings, I went into that before ever I wrote. Silver strings were used before steel strings became good enough. Silver makes a good harmonious jangle, a la silver horns, etc. I checked again before I wrote, in Deems Taylor’s MUSIC LOVER’S ENCYCLOPEDIA, which has this to say under “Stringed Instruments”: Guitar strings today are sometimes silver wound on a steel or silk core. And under “Silver trumpet”, it says that silver is used for strings on many instruments.
To switch things around and plant ahead, I took up slack here and there to allow new inserts; but the story comes out just about as long as it was when you saw it last.
Good luck to you, and I really want to hear that this magazine makes the grade. It’s badly needed!
Best,
Manly

6. An example of the illustrations for the Kenneth R. Deardorf story:                                            
7. I mentioned in my review of F&SF, Winter-Spring 1950, that Annette McComas selected three stories from that issue for her anthology. She selected three from this one too (the Henderson, Wellman and Deardorf).

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

Editor, Robert P. Mills

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
The Garden of Time • short story by J. G. Ballard ♥♥♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLVIII • short fiction by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton]
The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street • short story by Avram Davidson ♥♥
One Into Two • reprint short story by J. T. McIntosh
Pirate Island • short story by Josef Nesvadba (translation by unknown) ♥♥♥
The Traveller • reprint short story by Richard Matheson ♥♥♥+
Rebel • short story by Ward Moore
Window to the Whirled • novelette by Barry Stevens ♥♥
The Snake in the Closet • short story by Matthew Grass ♥♥
The Golden Horn • novelette by Edgar Pangborn ♥♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Garden of Time • cover by Emsh
In this issue . . . Coming next month . . .
Gruesome Discovery at the 242nd St. Feeding Station • poem by Walter H. Kerr
Superficially Speaking • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Books • by Alfred Bester
Excerpts from the Latterday Chronicle • poem by Lewis Turco
For Life . . .

The Garden of Time by J. G. Ballard is a story I first read when I was quite young. I think I found it in an anthology borrowed from the local library (Introducing SF edited by Brian W. Aldiss, 1964, perhaps) and I’m not sure that I liked it that much at the time, but it was one of those stories that rattled around inside my head for some time afterwards, changing my appreciation of what a story was.
It is about a Count and his wife who, from a vantage point in the garden of their villa, observe an advancing horde on the horizon. As it draws nearer the Count plucks the time-flowers that grow in their garden: the blooms evaporate, and the horde reverts to its earlier position. Eventually the time-flowers run out, the villa is overrun and falls to ruin: the last scene describes the stone statues of the Count and his wife. The allegory is perhaps more obvious to me now than it was when I was young.¹

Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLVIII is another pun by Reginald Bretnor, this time about angels playing baseball—which I didn’t get.

The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street by Avram Davidson is a short piece set in what would seem to be an alchemical version of the country during a Presidential inauguration. One of the attendees is kidnapped by a woman who wants him to surrender a spell:

“Slip me the Formula for the Transmutation of Borax Without the Use of Cockatrice-egg,” she said (speaking with some difficulty, her tongue, as we have already noted, you clod, being between her teeth), “and we’ll be back in the Grand Ballroom of the Mayflower in lots of time to see Ed Finnegan made a K.T.V.; afterwards we can tiptoe up to any of the thirty-odd double rooms which my Company keeps rented at all times, and you may have your wicked will o’ me without fearing the House-Dick, because I’ll put a Cheese-it spell on the door, see, which it’s proof against Force, Force-Fields, Stealth, Mort-Main, Nigromancy, Mopery, and Gawk: so give, Cully, give.” p. 15

There isn’t much of a story here so most of the pleasure is in the style of its telling, its archaic prose and odd terms, etc.

Whatever possessed the editor to reprint the dreadful gimmick story One Into Two by J. T. McIntosh (as Then There Were Two, Science Fantasy #3, Winter 1951) we will never know. This would have been a poor story to find in that early fifties issue of Science Fantasy, never mind here.
A man called Ross uses a matter transmitter to send himself to two places. The first copy goes to Moonpool to create an alibi for the second, who goes to Mars to kill the husband of a former female associate who he will subsequently blackmail after she inherits.
This is completely contrived and unbelievable, not to mention the fact it dodges fundamental questions of identity the story itself raises:

You stood in a cubicle, a hundred thousand inquisitive beams analyzed you to the last atom and sent your complete specification, down to the motes of dust on coins in your pocket, on a carrier wave to your destination. There a receiver duplicated you. You didn’t actually move an inch; the installation on Earth dissolved you into water and dust and swept the rubbish away, but not until you were at your destination, complete and in good working order. You or somebody exceedingly like you.
The designers had been very careful indeed to ensure that people arrived in one piece at one place, and that there was nothing left at the Transmission Center except useless, disorganized atoms. Otherwise certain smart people would get very rich very quickly by duplicating money and jewels and other valuables, and some of them might even devote their agile minds to the possible advantages of being in two places at one time. p. 20-21

It finishes with a gimmick ending involving the police, who are cleverer than Ross, of course.

Pirate Island by Josef Nesvadba (translation of Ostrov Piratu, Kultura 1958) is an ironic tale of an eighteenth century man who goes to sea and discovers Utopia on an island. Homesick he later returns home but finds the island is threatened when its location becomes known. He assembles a ship and crew and returns. His attempts to save the natives do not work out as he expects (spoiler) when his crew end up fighting the locals and do as much damage as the Pirates would have.

The Traveller by Richard Matheson (Born of Man and Woman, 1954) is quite a dark story that has a sceptical professor time-travelling back to the crucifixion of Jesus to observe what happens. The story is largely a grim description of the harrowing event and is quite powerful as a result.
A couple of associational points: first, one wonders whether Michael Moorcock ever read this story and, if so, whether it had any influence on Behold the Man; second, the time the professor departs from and returns to qualifies it as a grim Xmas story.

Rebel by Ward Moore is as bad as if not worse than the McIntosh story. It is a heavy-handed future satire about two parents trying to convince their son to do all the things that adults expect: drink, smoke, grow and dye their hair, go into the arts rather than business, etc. I’m not joking, there are several pages of this kind of talking heads nonsense:

“I knew a girl who used to shave mustaches off collages. She had to go to I don’t know how many analysts,” reminisced Mrs. Smith.
“—to become mature, responsible people, fit to be parents. Perhaps you think I never had a nostalgic thought for double-entry or an adding machine—”
“Or I for a crescent wrench,” put in his mother in a gay parenthesis.
“—but we recognized these for the immature daydreams they were and put them behind us. I don’t say the mirage of columns of figures hasn’t been transmuted into a splash of color here or a bit of draftsmanship there, or that the movement of pistons and wristpins hasn’t entered into your mother’s symphonies, but so have longings for other solaces we left behind in childhood or adolescence. We grew up, son . . . We faced the world. Sometimes it isn’t easy, but being an adult has its rewards, believe me.” p. 54

Window to the Whirled by Barry Stevens is a story that is quite hard to describe. Superficially it’s about a grandmother who disappears to another land, and how subsequently her daughter Anne uses a peddle sewing machine to follow her by manufacturing a cape that lets her travel there too. Along the way Anne encounters a fifty-year-old professor called Stan who, after he loses touch with her, also manages to travel there as well. It later materialises that the land they have all gone to is in the future.

As you can probably tell, the plot is rather irrelevant and the main thrust of the story would appear to be the battle between convention and free thought. You can get a vague feel for the story from the following passage where Stan reflects on his academic life, but it’s something you really need to read to appreciate:

For what he had taught was courage, but what he had lived was bowing to ‘the rules.’ Once he had heard one student say to another. “And another stone idol topples into the steaming jungle,” and they both had turned away. How had he got into this mess? At first he had submitted to the rules to get through grad school, so that he would have a degree and people would listen to what he had to say. But when he got his Ph.D., he saw that he would have to get into the upper brackets: then people would listen. But when he had got a Name, by sacrificing most of himself for twenty years, people listened only when he said what they expected him to say. Any deviation was dismissed as brought on by age or overwork. The holidays when he met Anne were the only time he could remember when he had truly spoken from himself—out of his own knowledge. p. 73

The Snake in the Closet by Matthew Grass is about an unassuming, ordinary man who finds a snake coiled up in the corner of his closet. Over a period of time, he becomes increasingly obsessed by it. I presume, from the story’s ending, that the snake is a metaphor for his purpose in life, but I’m probably as wrong about that as I was about the allegory in the Ballard story.

The Golden Horn by Edgar Pangborn is a novelette in his ‘Tales of a Darkening World’ series. Moreover, this piece and another that appeared in the next issue (A War of No Consequence, F&SF, March 1962) formed part of the novel Davy (1964).³
It is a very good piece about the titular Davy, a bonded 14-year-old in a rural post-holocaust world, skipping work and going to a cave in the forest where he has some money and a bow hidden: one day he intends running away to find the source of the sun. On this occasion his fantasies are interrupted when he sees someone else has been in his cave:

When I found the trouble at last, far at the back on one of the cave walls where sunlight didn’t reach, and where my glance must have touched it unknowingly while I was looking at my gear, I was no wiser. It was simply a small drawing made by the point of some softer, reddish rock. I goggled at it, trying to imagine it had been there always. No such thing. That cave was mine, the only place on earth I’d ever felt I owned, and I knew it like the skin of my body. This had been done since my last visit, in December before winter set in.
Two stick-figures, circles for heads with no faces, single lines for legs and arms and bodies, both with male parts indicated. I’d heard of hunters’ sign-messages. But what did this say that a hunter could want to know? The figures held nothing, did nothing, just stood there.
The one on my right was in human proportion, with slightly bent elbows and knees in the right places, all his fingers and toes. The other stood to the same height, but his legs were far too short without a knee-crook, and his arms too long, dangling below his crotch. He had only three toes for each foot, a big one and two squeezed-up little ones. His fingers were blunt stubs, though the artist had gone to a lot of trouble drawing good human fingers for the other jo.
No tracks in the cave or on the ledge. Nothing left behind. p. 103

Later, Davy meets the artist in the forest:

My visitor was there, a short way up the ledge, and he smiled.
Anyway I think he smiled, or wanted to. His mouth was a poor gash no longer than the mid-joint of my forefinger, in a broad flat hairless face. Monstrously dirty he was, and fat, with a heavy swaying paunch. Seeing his huge long arms and little stub legs, I thought I knew who he was.
He did have knees but they scarcely showed, for his lower legs were as big-around as his thighs, blocky columns with fat-rolls drooping from the thigh-sections. Baldheaded as a pink snake, hairless to the middle, but there at his navel a great thatch of twisty black hair began and ran all the way down his legs to his stubby three-toed feet. He wore nothing at all, poor jo, and it didn’t matter. So thick was that frowsy hair I had to look twice before I was sure he was male. He had no ears, just small openings where they should have been. And he had no nose—none at all, you understand? Simply a pair of slits below the little sorrowful black eyes that were meeting my stare bravely enough. He said: “I go away?”
I’d been about to draw my knife and shriek at him to go away. I didn’t. I tried to move slowly, getting on my feet. Whatever my face was doing, it made him no more frightened than he was already. In spite of those legs he stood tall as I, maybe five feet five. He was grief and loneliness standing in the sun, ugly as unwanted death.
A mue.
In Moha, and all countries I’ve since known, the law of church and state says flat and plain: A mue born of woman or beast shall not live. p. 106

The story continues with the pair’s journey to the mutant’s dwelling. As they travel there Davy thinks about killing him: this is in line with the Church’s teaching and will improve Davy’s status, not least with Emmia, a village girl he is infatuated with. However:

The mue halted and turned to me. “Bad place,” he said, pointing at some of the enormous trees, to remind me how anything might lurk behind them. “No fear, boyman. Bad thing come, I help, I.” He tapped the bulges of his right arm. “Fight big, you, I. You, I—word?—fra—fre—”
“Friends,’’ I said, or my voice said it for me.
“Friends.” He nodded, satisfied, turned his broad back to me and went on.
I pushed my knife into its sheath and did not draw it again that day. p. 111

Once they arrive at the mutant’s well-protected tree lair, the mutant tells Davy about his upbringing and shows him a golden horn from pre-holocaust times. Davy listens in amazement as the mue plays some notes on it and (spoiler) determines to own it.
The rest of the story deals with the theft of the horn and Davey’s subsequent return to his village, where he is treated by Emmia for a spider sting that has nearly incapacitated him. After his recovery and a conversation with Emmia about growing up—setting himself a difficult task and, for once, completing it—he leaves the village again to return the horn. When he arrives at the mue’s lair he finds a dead wolf at the base of the tree. Above, Davy finds him dead of his wounds.
I liked a lot about this novelette: the rural post-holocaust setting, the guilelessness of the mutant, Davey’s acceptance of him, the betrayal and the attempted restitution, the golden horn—a wondrous symbol of the pre-holocaust age, the coming-of age issues, its humanity in general, and its timelessness. This is a very good piece.

There isn’t much to say about the non-fiction this issue. The Garden of Time cover by Emsh has some interesting background detail but I thought the face of the woman in the foreground spoils it by being rather flat.
In this issue . . . and Coming next month . . . take up a single page: the former is mostly bibliographic and biographical detail about Josef Nesvadba, and the latter promises an All-Star Issue with a Mel Hunter wraparound cover. The fiction contents will include another Edgar Pangborn story as well as a ‘People’ novelette from Zenna Henderson, amongst other big names.
Superficially Speaking by Isaac Asimov is an example of one of his science essays where he would produce little more than several pages of monotonous number crunching. Here he calculates the amount of living space the planets and asteroids of the solar system could provide for humanity.
There is a very short Books column by Alfred Bester and a couple of not very good Poems.
Finally, there is a For Life . . . subscription offer. This offers a life sub to the magazine for $50 (approximately eleven times the $4.50 annual rate) and mentions that actuarially ‘this is a good buy for any male of fifty or younger and an even better buy for any female of fifty or younger.’

Overall, this is not a bad issue: standout stories by Edgar Pangborn and Richard Matheson, and there are a couple of other good stories here too.

1. Perhaps Ballard’s The Garden of Time is not as simple an allegory as I thought: the philosopher John Gray’s analysis is here.
2. I had thought this might be a mid-life crisis story, but it appears as if Barry Stevens was a sixty-year-old female therapist and one-shot writer: her Wikipedia and ISFDB pages.
3. A cursory examination of a copy of Edgar Pangborn’s Davy indicates that The Golden Horn makes up the bulk of Chapters 1-4 & 6-7.

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

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
Midsummer Century • novella by James Blish ♥♥♥
The Anthropiranhas • short story by Joseph Renard
The Recording • short story by Gene Wolfe ♥
No Other Gods • short story by Edward Wellen ♥
No Vacancy • short story by Jesse Bier ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Judith Blish
James Blish: Profile • essay by Robert A. W. Lowndes
The Hand at Issue • essay by Lester del Rey
James Blish: Bibliography • by Mark Owings
Coming Next Month
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Films: Kubrick’s Earth Odyssey • by Baird Searles
Books • by James Blish
Moon Over Babylon • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Key to Cover

This issue is another of the F&SF Special Issues that celebrate the work of one writer, in this case James Blish. The Cover is by Judith Blish, his wife.¹ A Key to Cover is provided inside the magazine so, if you think you are an expert on Blish’s work, have a go at identifying the various elements and then check below. (Not only do I provide a review this time around, but a quiz too!)²

The feature story is a long novella by Blish called Midsummer Century.³ I rated this quite highly when I read it in my youth, and I was curious as to it would hold up.⁴
The story starts with an atypical passage, for SF, describing the class and politics of Martels, the young astronomer who is the protagonist of the story:

Martels, unmarried and 30, was both a statistic and a beneficiary of what his British compatriots were bitterly calling the brain-drain, the luring of the best English minds to the United States by higher pay, lower taxes, and the apparent absence of any class system whatsoever. And he had found no reason to regret it, let alone feel guilty about it. Both his parents were dead, and as far as he was concerned, he owed the United Kingdom nothing any more.
Of course, the advantages of living in the States were not quite so unclouded as they had been presented to him, but he had never expected anything else. Take the apparent absence of a class system, for instance: All the world knew that the blacks, the Spanish-Americans, and the poor in general were discriminated against ferociously in the States and that political opposition of any kind to the Establishment was becoming increasingly dangerous. But what counted as far as he was concerned was that it was not the same sort of class system.
Born of a working-class family in the indescribably ugly city of Doncaster, Martels had been cursed from the outset with a working-class Midlands dialect which excluded him from the “right” British circles as permanently and irrevocably as if he had been a smuggled Pakistani immigrant. No “public” school had been financially available to his parents to help him correct the horrible sound of his own voice, nor to give him the classical languages which in his youth had still been necessary for entry into Oxford or Cambridge.
Instead, he had ground, kicked, bitten and otherwise fought his way through one of the new redbrick polytechnics. Though he emerged at the end with the highest possible First in astrophysics, it was with an accent still so atrocious as to deny him admittance to any but the public side—never the lounge or saloon—of any bar in Britain. p. 5-6

After a little more of this, and a brief description of his job in America as a radio astronomer, he falls down the waveguide of a large telescope and finds himself 25,000 years in the future.
Martels does not find immediately find out this information, of course, but initially wakes and sees what appears to be a museum. It then becomes apparent that he is in a receptacle that contains an intelligence called Qvant. He watches a primitive human come into the museum and question Qvant about a problem his people are having. Martels speaks up during this transaction: the native flees and in a subsequent conversation Qvant tells Martels where and when he is before attempting to eject him and failing:

“It appears that I cannot be rid of you yet,” Qvant said. The tone of his amplified voice seemed to hover somewhere between icy fury and equally icy amusement. “Very well, we shall hold converse, you and I. It will be a change from being an oracle to tribesmen. But sooner or later, Martels-from-the-past, sooner or later I shall catch you out—and then you will come to know the greatest thing that I do not know: What the afterlife is like. Sooner or later, Martels . . . sooner or later . . .”
Just in time, Martels realized that the repetitions were the hypnotic prelude to a new attack. Digging into whatever it had been that he had saved himself with before, that unknown substrate of the part of this joint mind that belonged to him alone, he said with equal iciness:
“Perhaps. You have a lot to teach me, if you will, and I’ll listen. And maybe I can teach you something, too. But I think I can also make you extremely uncomfortable, Qvant; you’ve just shown me two different ways to go about that. So perhaps you had better mind your manners, and bear in mind that however the tribesmen see you, you’re a long way from being a god to me.”
For answer, Qvant simply prevented Martels from saying another word. Slowly, the sun set, and the shapes in the hall squatted down into a darkness against which Martels was not even allowed to close his unowned eyes. pp. 12-13

The story subsequently charts the game of cat and mouse between the pair as Martels tries to learn more about this world. Every time he thinks he is getting nearer to forming a plan that will help him get back to his own time Qvant will fall silent for months. Nonetheless, Martels eventually discovers a number of things: that Qvant is a brain in a box, and that the natives can communicate with their dead ancestors; he also learns that the ‘Birds’ are a threat to humanity and will wipe out what is left of the human race in the near future.
When Qvant appears to be sleeping another native appears, and Martels speaks and urges him to get his tribe to make alliances with the others against the Birds. The native, thinking he is being mocked, leaves. Qvant has meantime awoken and laughs: he had previously told Martels of the futility of this course of action.
In the middle and final sections Martels manages to escape by taking possession of one of the natives’ bodies and heads south through the Birds’ territory to what was Antarctica, home of Terminus and the survivors of Rebirth 3.
As you can gather from the above, this story has something of a Van Vogtian feel to it (the far future setting, the sudden changes of direction, the hand-waving explanations of sentience, etc.) and I wondered if this was a conscious decision by Blish. What sets him apart from Van Vogt is that the narrative is easier to follow, and Blish’s writing and vocabulary is superior. He also takes the time to do a number of quarter or half page digressions on various matters that he wants to discuss or describe (the social and political observation referred to above, the mechanism of telepathy and Rhine’s experiments, etc., etc.).
As it turned out, I didn’t rate this as highly as I did when I originally read it but found it an entertaining read for all that. But probably one not to take too seriously.

There is the usual selection of Special Issue non-fiction. James Blish: Profile by Robert A. W. Lowndes is an interesting profile of Blish that is studded with quotable parts:

I’ll never forget the subject of our conversation around a table at the old Dragon Inn on West 4th Street, Manhattan, that evening. Here we were, a group of science fiction editors, writers, and fans, welcoming a fellow enthusiast on leave from the army, and what were we talking about? Science fiction? Fantasy? The shape of the postwar world with its science fiction aspects? No; what Jim wanted to talk about was FINNEGANS WAKE.
Don Wollheim’s argument was that Joyce’s final work was little more than an elaborate puzzle for the elite literateur. I hadn’t read it, so I just listened. Jim’s argument was that if you applied yourself to it, the story came to a great deal more than a melange of puns and esoteric references. And right there, although I did not realize it at the time, I had been given one of the keys to this multitalented, charming, and irascible personality I would get to know, respect, and love in later years: any work of literature, or any other art worth paying attention to, makes demands upon the reader, listener, or viewer. p. 66

Jim had not started with the old Gernsback publications, like most of the rest of us, back then, and only read some of the stories from them much later. I was astonished to learn, upon suggesting to him that his CITIES IN FLIGHT series owed something to Edmond Hamilton’s old Air Wonder Stories serial, CITIES IN THE AIR (1929), that not only had he never read the story—he’d never even seen the magazines with Frank R. Paul’s fascinating drawings of the flying cities. p. 68

His own writing has always tended toward the intellectual, but when emotion and feeling are called for, you will find it there in the story in proper proportion. Even sentiment may appear at times, but always controlled. One of my favorite story endings appeared in the magazine version of the novelet he did with Norman L. Knight, “The Shipwrecked Hotel” (part of the novel, A TORRENT OF FACES). “And they lived happily ever after, but it wasn’t easy.” You won’t find it in the book version; it just doesn’t belong as the final sentence of a connected episode. p. 70

The second of the Advent books [More Issues at Hand, a book of criticism] shows a slight mellowing of the waspish qualities; he says in his foreword: “While I still believe that it is desirable to be merciless to a bad story, I am no longer quite so sure that the commission of one represents flaws in the author’s character or horrid secrets in his ancestry.” p. 71

It is an essay that is definitely worth reading.
There is one final quote of note:

At 50, with developed interest, and recognition, in numerous fields (he’s still working on a book relating to music “ the hard way” ), we may not see quite so much more science fiction from Jim as we have in the past. p. 71

Unfortunately, Lowndes was correct, but not in the way he expected: Blish would die four years later of cancer, age 54.

The Hand at Issue by Lester del Rey is an OK, if rather dry, appreciation that finishes with del Rey stating ‘he hasn’t, in my opinion, gone above the general average he maintained between 1950 and 1960’! He does caveat this by asking ‘has the last decade only been an incubation period for even higher levels?’ but it is odd to read this in what I presume is meant to be a celebratory overview.
There is also James Blish: Bibliography by Mark Owings. As I’ve said before, in the days before ISFDB and the like these bibliographies were like gold dust.
As well as the normal Special Issue non-fiction, Blish also contributes the review column, Books. He is a great critic and as he covers the books there are lots of illuminating snippets. In his comments about Gardens One to Five by Peter Tate I learnt something about surrealism:

Thus summarized, the story does sound like an authentic dream, and thus to fall properly within the surrealistic canon, which as originally defined was the artistic representation of materials from the unconscious mind. p. 103

And this about the serial versus book version of Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny:

All but the veriest newcomers to F&SF will recall Zelazny’s JACK OF SHADOWS, which began here in July 1971 as a two-part serial—though this fact is unacknowledged in the Walker book. The book version does not contain any new material of consequence . . . p.103

And there is this resonating comment about Fun with Your New Head by Thomas M. Disch:

. . . the high polish of the writing itself—is not only welcome but essential, for the one thing all the pieces do have in common is that they are all determinedly downbeat, as most New Wave material seems to be. I haven’t the power (nor even the wish) to prescribe Tom Disch’s world-view for him, but I found sharing it all in one gulp a depressing experience. I recommend these stories for both originality and craftsmanship, but I do caution you to read only a few of them at a sitting. p. 104

The rest of the short fiction is a motley collection. The Anthropiranhas by Joseph Renard is a ludicrous story about small men appearing in tap water and eating people alive (they are a mixture of piranha and human, if I recall correctly). An alcoholic flea-circus trainer manages to organise some of them for an act as the world goes through a crisis. This all grinds to a halt with a lame punchline. Awful.
The Recording by Gene Wolfe Story is about a young boy whose uncle has promised to buy him a record (wax cylinder type) to play on the family phonograph. As they go into town to buy one the uncle becomes unwell but the boy, rather than getting the doctor, completes the errand and buys the much desired record. By the time he gets back to his uncle he has died. He never has a chance to listen to record but has nightmares of it containing his uncle’s voice.
This reads, for the most part, like an accomplished weird tale, but the mundane ending disappoints those expectations.
No Other Gods by Edward Wellen has a computer at the Galactic Hub destroying the universe, all apart from itself and a human couple on a spaceship. The computer offers to place them in a time loop of their happiest time. The couple start arguing about what that was: a contrived ending to an artificial story.
No Vacancy by Jesse Bier is the longest story in this group (probably a novelette) and is a rambling story about a couple who end up back in the old Wild West after their car breaks down and they go and look for help. They find a town, and before too long (spoiler), they end up in the middle of a gunfight between a man called Lester and Slade, the sheriff-elect. After a certain amount of further gun-play they escape.
The story is framed by the couple’s interrogation in a police station (well, I say couple but all the writer has the wife do is weep and then faint). This section doesn’t progress matters so the whole thing ends up being little more than an extended anecdote.

The other non-fiction includes Films: Kubrick’s Earth Odyssey by Baird Searles, which reviews A Clockwork Orange (he didn’t like it as much as 2001: A Space Odyssey). Coming Next Month mentions special reports on Science Fiction and the University by Thomas Clareson and Philip Klass (William Tenn), as well as associational book reviews and a piece by Isaac Asimov, Academe and I. There is also a Cartoon by Gahan Wilson (these were always hit and miss for me, the latter this time around).
Finally, Moon Over Babylon by Isaac Asimov is an interesting essay that starts with him in a hotel on a Sunday morning talking to a Seventh Day Adventist. It goes from there to the phases of the moon in Babylonian times and the peculiarities of our calendar. In particular, Asimov focuses on the week and specifically how you cannot easily tell what day of the week it is on any given date without reference to a calendar. He also explains why the Sabbath is Saturday for some people and Sunday for others. At the end of his essay Asimov says our current system is nonsensical and he will suggest an alternative in the June issue.

Overall, this issue is worth a look for the material by Blish and Asimov.

1. The cover Judith Blish produced for Impulse #1 (as by Judith Ann Lawrence) can be seen here.
2. The cover key:
   
3. ISFDB says that the book form of the work is an ‘expansion of the version published in ‘‘Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction’’ in April 1972.’ Meanwhile, the introduction in the magazine says ‘MIDSUMMER CENTURY will be published in hard covers by Doubleday, but not one word has been cut in the version you are about to read.’ p. 5 (and it appears they have reduced the type size to squeeze it all in).
   An OCR word count of the magazine vs. book version shows 29,200 vs. 29,300 words.
   Also, for what it is worth, there is a missing line halfway down the left hand column on p. 40 of the magazine version: ‘atedly long tubular skirt. Or perhaps’.
4. It didn’t diminish your appreciation of Blish’s books when the Arrow editions had covers like this:

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical copies.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Gideon Marcus: Galactic Journey

Fiction:
The Only Game in Town • novelette by Poul Anderson ♥♥♥
A Divvil With the Women • reprint short story by Eric Frank Russell [as by Niall Wilde] ♥♥♥+
The Blind Pilot • short story by Nathalie Henneberg (translation of Au Pilote Aveugle by Damon Knight) [as by Charles Henneberg] ♥♥♥
Bug-Getter • short story by Reginald Bretnor ♥
Final Gentleman • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ♥
A Little Girl’s Xmas in Modernia • reprint short story by David R. Bunch ♥♥
The Galactic Calabash • short story by G. C. Edmondson ♥♥♥
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble • short story by Holley Cantine ♥♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XXII • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton]

Non-fiction:
Cover • Emsh
In This Issue…
Coming Next Month…
To JULIA, not to gaze at Flyinge Sawcers • poem by Anthony Brode
Those Crazy Ideas • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Backward, Turn Backward • poem by Randall Garrett

The Only Game in Town by Poul Anderson is one of his ‘Time Patrol’ stories. This one has two agents, Manse Everard and John Sandoval, going back in time to thwart a Mongol expedition sent by the Kublai Khan to conquer America. During this expedition, Everard suspects that the Time Patrol personnel in the far future may be manipulating time to their own ends.
This is an engaging mix of story and history, and has some of Anderson’s lovely descriptive prose, such as this scene where the two men are sitting at a campfire:

The fire blazed up in a gust of wind. Sparingly laid by a woodsman, in that moment it barely brought the two out of shadow, a glimpse of brow, nose, cheekbones, a gleam of eyes. It sank down again to red and blue sputtering above white coals, and darkness took the men. p.15

However, the ending is a little weak: part fortunate circumstance, part time-travel deux ex machina.

While compiling the contents list for this one I was surprised to discover that A Divvil With the Women is actually by Eric Frank Russell (according to ISFDB, it is a variant of Heart’s Desire, published in the British magazine Science Fantasy #16, November 1955).¹ It is a colourfully told story about a drunk Irishman:

Well, I don’t suppose you noticed that paragraph in the Irish Independent last March, did you now? A right awful tale it told to any man sober enough to crawl but drunk enough to understand the whole of it.
Hold on to your glass while I tell you. This happens in Dublin itself which is the world’s finest city, God save the dirty, dissolute place. And it happens to Patrick Magonigal who is the blackest hearted scoundrel that ever got conceived behind a billboard. p.32

Magonigal is approached by Shatain (Satan) and asked to collect some holy water from a church, which Shatain himself obviously can’t do. In exchange Shaitan promises to make him irresistible to women. This short piece has a clever ending, if you like it as I did, or a feeble joke ending if you don’t.

The Blind Pilot by Nathalie Henneberg is a translation by Damon Knight of Au Pilote Aveugle (Fiction, July 1959), the first of a series of French stories that Knight would translate.²
The editors mention in In This Issue… that this story comes from F&SF’s French edition (edited by Maurice Renault), explaining that this foreign edition of F&SF uses mostly translated stories from the US magazine but substitutes some of the original content with stories written by Frenchmen. ³ They also add that Charles Henneberg died before this piece was published in France, but that the name ‘Charles Henneberg’ was used as a signature for the collaborative efforts of Charles and his wife Nathalie. According to ISFDB, this one is by her alone, and SFE gives the impression that we have a complicated Henry Kuttner/C. L. Moore situation here, at least for the material before Charles Henneberg’s death.⁴
The story itself gets off to a strong start and reads like the kind of work that Roger Zelazny would produce several years later:

The shop was low and dark, as if meant for someone who no longer knew day from night. Around it hung a scent of wax and incense, exotic woods and roses dried in darkness. It was in the cellar of one of the oldest buildings of the old radioactive district, and you had to walk down several steps before you reached a grille of Venerian sandalwood. A cone of Martian crystal lighted the sign:
THE BLIND PILOT
The man who came in this morning, followed by a robot porter with a chest, was a half-crazy old voyager, like many who have gazed on the naked blazing of the stars. He was back from the Aselli—at least, if not there, from the Southern Cross; his face was of wax, ravaged, graven, from lying too long on a keelson at the mercy of the ultraviolets, and in the black jungle of the planets.
The coffer was hewn from a heart-wood hard as brass, porous here and there. He had it set down on the floor, and the sides vibrated imperceptibly, as if a great captive bee were struggling inside. p.37

In this pawnshop scene a blind space pilot called North, his mutant brother Jacky (who has hooks for hands and who wheels himself about on a trolley) and a destitute spacer discuss the amount of money the latter can be advanced for the alien in the heart-wood box.
Later on, Jacky goes to a movie and then returns to his brother’s shop. He hears faint music and experiences a vision of being immersed in an ocean and then surfacing to a strange alien sky…. He and his brother subsequently see a newscast that includes footage of a drowned man at the docks—the one who pawned the alien. Jacky goes to the library to research the creature and he learns that one of the types of animal on the planet is a manatee-like species:

“Manatees? What are they?” asked Jacky, suddenly apprehensive.
“Herbivorous, sirenian mammals which live on Earth, along the shores of Africa and America. Manatees sometimes grow as long as three meters, and frequent the estuaries of rivers.’’
“But—’sirenians’?”
“A genus of mammals, related to the cetaceans, and comprising the dugongs, manatees, and so on.’’
Jacky’s eyebrows went up and he cried, “I thought it came from ‘siren’!”
“So it does,” said the robot laconically. “Fabulous monsters, half woman, half bird or fish. With their sweet singing, they lured voyagers onto the reefs—” p.42

Jacky continues to make discoveries about the creature while his brother has visions of being in space again. The rest of the story blends these two strands and the spacer’s drowning.
While it is a piece worth reading it doesn’t manage to sustain the level it achieves at the start and there are a couple of elements that confused me towards the end, even after rereading it. (Spoiler: something hits the roof when the shop is raided by the militia, perhaps North’s body, which shows the effects of travelling in space. Any evidence of the reality of North’s visions would run counter to the Siren myth introduced into the story, I would suggest.)
Notwithstanding this criticism, I’ll be looking for more of her/his/their translated work.

Bug-Getter is a short-short by Reginald Bretnor about a struggling artist plagued by crickets who has a visit from some tiny aliens. They agree to get rid of them for six of his paintings, delivered immediately, and a dozen more after the job. Two years later they come to collect. This has a punchline ending and a fairly lame one at that.
Final Gentleman by Clifford D. Simak is a longish novelette about a writer called Harrington who decides that he has come to the end of his writing career. The same day he is interviewed by a journalist, and Harrington is surprised when he is told there is no record of his birth or other personal history.
After the interview Harrington goes to his Mother’s house, but she is not there: he finds a woman who claims she has lived there for fifteen years. He goes to a coffee shop and starts to reflect on whether his life has really been a delusion. He recalls a shadowy figure in his past:

And suddenly Harrington was back again in that smoky, shadowed booth where long ago he’d bargained with the faceless being—but no longer faceless. He knew by the aura of the man and the sense of him, the impelling force of personality, the disquieting, obscene feeling that was a kind of psychic spoor. p.85

This is all slowly developed and has the feel, for the first half or so, of the kind of horror story that progressively builds a sense of unease. Unfortunately, it ends up having an unconvincing SF rational (spoiler: Harrington is eventually led to a predictive computer that is a front for aliens. He kills them and consequently frees the human race from their intervention). Overlong and unconvincing.
A Little Girl’s Xmas in Modernia by David R. Bunch (Coastlines, Fall 1958) concerns a young girl going to her partially robotic father and asking him to replace the star on her Xmas tree. After this they go to visit her mother and brother.

As they walked along, over the yard to Mother’s place, she kicked up snow and chortled and laughed and told off-color jokes—she had heard them on the programs—almost like a normal little girl should. Father tracked dourly through the unmarked snow under the featureless gray sky and thought only how all this nonsense of walking so early was making the silver parts of his joints hurt, and before he’d had his morning bracer, too. Yes indeed, Father, for the most part, was flesh only in those portions that they had not yet found ways to replace safely. He held on grimly, walking hard, and wished he were back in his hip-snuggie thinking chair where he worked on universal deep problems. p.105

There is no particular story as such, just a short but pleasant visit to Bunch’s robotic world of Moderan (called Modernia here in this early story).
The Galactic Calabash by G. C. Edmondson is the third of the ‘Mad Friend’ stories and it starts with two men and their wives visiting a Mexican couple. Once they arrive they get a tour around the poultry farm and processing unit (content you don’t find in many SF stories….) Back in the house they become aware of electrical interference to the television picture. Some time later (spoiler), and by way of what they think is a large pumpkin-like vegetable that has exploded in the oven, one of the two visitors reconciles this with the TV signal and realises an alien invasion has been averted.
I know this synopsis makes it seem rather an unlikely prospect but it is an entertaining and colourful piece.
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble by Holley Cantine starts with its narrator becoming disillusioned with left-wing politics:

The group to which I then belonged—it was called the Ultra Revolutionary Left Socialist Workers’ council, or something equally grandiose and pretentious—had been reduced by internal dissension to about 14 members, and there were rumors of an impending faction fight which might well split it still further. My comrades were all either narrow fanatics or callow youths, and their intemperance and wordiness increasingly had been getting on my nerves. p.116

After he inherits some money he moves to a house in the country, where he dabbles with magic and masters a doubling spell. After a period where he uses the spell sparingly to provide the material goods he requires, he uses the spell on himself so he can produce enough members for a brass band. All the copies are pretty much the same as him but the drummer seems more like his old self, and has a revolutionary attitude….
The story then turns into an ‘if this goes on’ tale. A neat idea but not entirely convincing.
Last is Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XXII by Reginald Bretnor, which is an OK pun for a change that involves vampires, undertakers & etc.

The Cover for this one by Emsh is not only a seasonal effort but is unusual for another couple of reasons: first, it illustrates a reprint; secondly, that reprint is the story by David R. Bunch. Bunch wrote a number of idiosyncratic stories and I can’t say that they ever struck me as being cover material. I suspect this is the first and only time his work was selected for this purpose.
In This Issue… and Coming Next Month… together occupy a page. Most of the space is spent discussing Poul Anderson’s novelette, Charles Henneberg’s story, and thanking Dorothy Cowles Pinckney for sending them the magazine with David R. Bunch’s contribution.
There are two poems, or perhaps more accurately, one poem and one piece of doggerel. To JULIA, not to gaze at Flyinge Sawcers is a poem by Anthony Brode that appears to be a pastiche of one of the seventeenth century poet Robert Herrick’s many ‘Julia’ poems.⁵ Backward, Turn Backward by Randall Garrett is about Pluto coming closer to the sun than Neptune in 1979.
Those Crazy Ideas, Isaac Asimov’s supposed science essay, is about what it says. He lists the factors that are required to come up with creative ideas.
Books: And the Truth Shall Drive You Mad by Damon Knight reviews a number of items. There is a relatively long section on The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and he has this to say about Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley:

The hero is more solidly drawn than most of Sheckley’s protagonists, and the early part of the story is satiric and funny. But this is Sheckley’s first novel, a long way from the five-thousand-word length in which he has done most of his work: and the second half of the book trails off into a disorganized scattering of episodes, many of them perfunctorily written. p.67

He ends his column with this:

In One Against Herculum (an Ace Double, with Andre Norton’s Secret of the Lost Race, 35¢), Jerry Sohl has written the most featherbrained s-f novel of the year, unless that honor belongs to Robot Hunt, by Roger Lee Vernon (Avalon, $2.95).
The mildly inebriated novels of Leonard Wibberley have many devoted followers, of which I am not one. I couldn’t get past p. 84 of The Quest of Excalibur (Putnam, $3.50), but if you liked previous Wibberleys, go to this one, & bless you. p.68

An issue of F&SF with a number of good if not great stories.

1. ISFDB lists this Russell story as a variant of the one that originally appeared in Science Fantasy but an OCR word count puts them within fifty words or so of each other (out of 2,000). A brief comparison reveals a few words changed/omitted, and the last line from the Science Fantasy version is cut: ‘It’s a real terrible story and I wouldn’t believe a word of it if I wasn’t telling it myself.’ Not quite a ‘variant.’ Personally, I’d reserve that kind of terminology for something like the magazine and book versions of Keith Roberts’ Corfe Gate.
2. Damon Knight edited a collection of stories he translated titled Thirteen French Science Fiction Stories (1965). The content listing is here at ISFDB. Five of the translations were first published in F&SF.
3. Fiction was a long running magazine: 412 issues by the beginning of 1990, according to SFE. I have a couple of dozen of these (part of an abortive attempt to learn French) and they have a number of French stories in them as well as review columns that consist of pages and pages of tiny dense type.
   The Fiction cover below by Jean-Claude Forest illustrates Henneberg’s The Blind Pilot:
   The contents page:
   
4. Nathalie Henneberg’s bibliography at ISFDB and her page at SFE.
5. Robert Herrick is a character in Thomas Burnett Swann’s novel Will-O-The-Wisp (Fantastic , September & November 1974) and includes some of his poetry (which led me to pick up his Selected Poems). Herrick lived to an exceptional age for his times, dying at the age of 83 in 1674. His Wikipedia page.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
C. C. Finlay, F&SF Blog
Gideon Marcus, Galactic Journey

Fiction:
Christmas Treason • novelette by James White ♥♥♥♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLVII • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton] ♥
A Time to Keep • short story by Kate Wilhelm ♥
Interplanetary Sex • short story by Jay Williams
The Deer Park • short story by Maria Russell ♥♥
Please Stand By • short story by Ron Goulart ♥♥
Prelude to a Long Walk • short story by Nils T. Peterson ♥♥
Progress • novelette by Poul Anderson ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Mel Hunter
The Modern Demonology • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Books • by Alfred Bester
To the Stars • poem by James Spencer

This issue was one of the last few to be edited by Robert P. Mills before Avram Davidson took over in April. It not only has a Xmas cover but a Xmas story too, and a very good one at that.

Christmas Treason by James White is about a secret group of exceptional young children with telepathic and telekinetic powers who attempt to solve the puzzle of how Santa manages to deliver so many presents at the same time:

Richard shook his head. “None of the grown-ups can say how exactly it happens, they just tell us that Santa will come all right, that we’ll get our toys in time and not to worry about it. But we can’t help worrying about it. That’s why we’re having an Investigation to find out what really happens.
“We can’t see how one man, even when he has a sleigh and magic reindeer that fly through the air, can bring everybody their toys all in one night . . .” Richard took a deep breath and got ready to use his new, grown-up words. “Delivering all that stuff during the course of a single night is a logistical impossibility.”
Buster, Mub and Greg looked impressed. Loo thought primly, “Richard is showing off,” and Liam said, “I think he’s got a jet.” p.7

After some more discussion, their leader Richard sends the three boys off looking for large caverns as he thinks there is a chance that this is where they may find Santa’s secret toy factories. The boys have the ability to travel to places that closely match what they can visualise in their minds, and it isn’t long before one of them finds something:

In Liam’s mind was the memory of a vast, echoing corridor so big it looked like a street. It was clean and brightly lit and empty. There was a sort of crane running along the roof with grabs hanging down, a bit like the ones he had seen lifting coal at the docks only these were painted red and yellow, and on both sides of the corridor stood a line of tall, splendid, unmistakable shapes. Rockets.
Rockets, thought Richard excitedly: that was the answer, all right! Rockets were faster than anything, although he didn’t quite see how the toys would be delivered. Still, they would find that out easily now that they knew where the secret cavern was.
“Did you look inside them for toys?” Greg broke in, just ahead of the others asking the same question.
Liam had. Most of the rockets were filled with machinery and the nose had sort of sparkly stuff in it.
All the ones he had looked at were the same and he had grown tired of floating about among the noses of the rockets and gone exploring instead. At the other end of the corridor there was a big notice with funny writing on it. He was standing in front of it when two grown-ups with guns started running at him and yelling nonsense words. He got scared, and left. p.10-11

Matters are interrupted by the children having to return to their various houses in different parts of the world to be present for mealtimes and naps, etc. Meanwhile Richard thinks about a recent visit to a store that had lots of toys in it, and recalls his parents’ conversation as his dad offered to buy his mother a piece of jewellery:

Then Mummy had said, But John, are you sure you can afford it? It’s robbery, sheer robbery! These storekeepers are robbers at Christmas time!
Guards all over the place, Greg’s theory, and storekeepers who were robbers at Christmas time. It was beginning to make sense, but Richard was very worried by the picture that was forming. p.13

Alarmed by the conclusions Richard has reached, the group formulate a plan that will ensure children throughout the world get their Xmas presents!
This is both seasonal and charming, and has all the elements you would want in such a story: it is cleverly plotted, amusing, features cute, precocious children, has an appropriate amount of sentimentality, and (spoiler) an ending that involves world peace. A very good novelette.¹

I don’t particularly like Feghoots, and Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLVII by Reginald Bretnor is no different from all the others. All I will add is that readers should contrast and compare this with the previous story for genuine wit.

A Time to Keep by Kate Wilhelm is about a man who has visions when he opens doors: he crosses a bridge in the pouring rain and sees an old man accosted by two youths; he skates with children and gets stuck on the opposite side of the river from them; he is part of a huge mob and discovers he is the one they are pursuing; he is a member of a jury pressured into finding a man guilty.
The man has an epiphany at the end, but how these visions inform the final scene rather escaped me. It is well-written if not ultimately coherent.

Interplanetary Sex by Jay Williams is less a short story than a ‘humorous’ article about female company for pilots on the way to Mars.² It is full of this kind of thing:

The whole thing could be simplified by having the pilot and his assistant get married before the voyage commences. There are several strong objections to this course of action. If you take a young newlywed couple and lock them in a cramped, metal room full of machinery, probably they will not be likely to notice, for the first couple of months, that it isn’t the Plutocrat-Hilton. Things will be different by the time they reach the asteroids, however. By the six hundredth serving of vitamin capsules and K-rations, the husband will begin talking about Mom’s can-opener, and the wife will begin noticing that he doesn’t bother to press his space-suit any more. By July, they won’t be speaking to each other, and they would still be a considerable distance from their goal. p.41-42

This one is really very poor.

The Deer Park by Maria Russell is, according to ISFDB, the only SF story published story by this writer. It starts with a Minister of Defence for the Terrana Hegemony in a deer park with his companion Ronde. The Minister appears to have the ability to will things into existence via the ‘qopot,’ so when Ronde wants to see a fight between a buck deer and a lion, he obliges. Later when he wakes from a doze and finds his arm numb from Ronde lying on it he flicks her out of existence.
A visiting delegation from a far off planet then appears and matters become a little confusing (and I read it twice). The visitors want a fleet of ships to fight off aliens, and after some discussion the Minister obliges. He then goes on board the ship himself. At this point he becomes aware that his world is virtual and it—the ‘mamiraj’—starts to disintegrate around him.
Puzzling, yes, but its vivid images make it an interesting if not totally successful piece.

Ron Goulart’s Please Stand By is one of his ‘Max Kearny’ stories. Kearny, who side-lines as an occult detective, has a friend called Dan who confides in him that he has been turning into an elephant, but only on national holidays. Max investigates and finds that a girlfriend of Dan’s and an animator called Westerland are involved. This is an entertaining story but a kitchen sink one, with various things lobbed in to keep it on the boil. Some of the individual plot elements (spoiler), such as Dan changing into an elephant, are never satisfactorily resolved (at the end of the story this problem just stops).

In Prelude to a Long Walk, Nils T. Peterson channels his inner Bradbury in this short, efficient and well written tale. Two cities grow and sprawl around the land an old man owns. Peterson makes clear his feelings about this, consumerism and TV. Not SF, not that I was bothered.

Progress by Poul Anderson is the second story in his ‘Maurai’ series, a post-holocaust sequence centred on the political machinations of the nation that has now replaced New Zealand.³
It starts off on a Maurai catamaran, which has supposedly had engine trouble and is now adrift. A Beneghali airship comes to their aid and lowers men who help them to raise their sales and get to port. The three strong Mauri crew, two men and one woman, are there to spy on the Beneghali island as they suspect there is a secret science project running in the mountains.
In port they meet a Coradon (American) called Lorn—who they know is an astrophysicist. Pleased at the prospect of company Lorn insists they stay at his house. During this initial meeting one of the three Maurais, Alisabeta, asks a question that is too direct and gets what seems like a telepathic warning from one of the other crew members: the moment passes.
At dinner that night the talk again turns to politics, in particular the Beneghali population pressures and the Mauri’s policy of non-imperialism with more backward peoples—unless it is necessary, of course, when they send in their psychodynamicists.
Ranu, the leader of the three Maurais, sneaks out that night and soon finds himself hanging underneath an airship headed for the interior.
Generally, this is a well-written adventure:

Darkness closed in, deep and blue. The sea glimmered below; the land lay black, humping up toward stars that one by one trod brilliantly forth. Yellow candlelight spilled from windows where the dinner table was being laid. Bats darted on the fringe of sight. A lizard scuttled in the thatch overhead. From the jungle came sounds of wild pigs grunting, the scream of a startled peacock, numberless insect chirps. Coolness descended layer by layer, scented with jasmine. p.101

Ranu goes on to discover (offstage, which I am not sure was a good idea) what the Beneghali’s have hidden in the mountain and, by use of ‘telepathic’ contact, warns the other two and tells them to leave immediately and raise the alarm. The rest of the story kicks up a gear and is a fast paced affair.
If it had continued in this vein until the very end this would have been, like the first story in the series, a superior and entertaining piece. Unfortunately it rather sabotages itself in the last chapter, which takes place many years later, when Lorn is in N’Zealann and decides to look up the Maurai crew who came to the island.
The first thing that damages the story is the explanation that Alisabeta provides to Lorn (after the latter has managed to track her down) about how they were able to communicate:

Are you telepaths, or what?”
“Goodness, no!” She laughed, more relaxed each minute. “We did have portable radios. Ultraminiaturized sets, surgically implanted, using body heat for power. Hooked directly into the nervous system.
It was rather like telepathy, I’ll admit. I missed the sensation when the sets were removed afterward.” p.125

Radio sets hooked directly into the nervous system? Apart from sounding rather far-fetched, it doesn’t fit in with the technological level of the society portrayed.
Worse is the latter part of this final chapter where Anderson unleashes his inner Heinlein and has Alisabeta perform as a mouthpiece for the Maurai nation’s interference in the affairs of other countries:

“Nevertheless,’’ [Lorn] said sharply, “you do interfere.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s another lesson we’ve gotten from history. The ancients could have saved themselves if they had had the courage—been hard-hearted enough—to act before things snowballed. If the democracies had suppressed every aggressive dictatorship in its infancy; or if they had simply enforced their idea of an armed world government at the time when they had the strength to do so—Well.” She looked down. Her hand left his and went slowly across her abdomen; a redness crept into her cheeks. “No,” she said, “I’m sorry people got hurt, that day at Annaman, hut I’m not sorry about the end result. I always planned to have children, you see.” p.128

I don’t know what is worst about this: the irritatingly simplistic ‘ends justify the means’ rationalisation of the Maurai nation’s ‘benign’ imperialism, or the smugness with which it is stated. That said, it probably didn’t sound as naive in the 1960’s as it does now.

The non-fiction this issue includes Mel Hunter’s previously mentioned Xmas Cover. It is part of a series of covers he did for the magazine featuring this robot.
In The Modern Demonology Isaac Asimov starts his science essay talking about entropy and heat transfer before extending the idea of entropy (meaning in this case an increase in the disorder of a system) to other areas such as writing and evolution. There is more than the whiff of angels dancing on the heads of pins here, and it ends up more like theology essay than a science one.
Books by Alfred Bester covers four items this time around and starts with a rave review for The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger:

…is a remarkable book, half Grand Guignol, part parable, vaguely science fiction, not at all a novel. It is a stream of metaphilosophical consciousness. It is a reflection on the contrast between XIXth century idealism and XXth century materialism. It is a penetrating revelation of the thinking of a self-destructive man. It is, like all unusual books, wonderfully impossible to categorize. p.84

Bester later has this to say about Arthur C. Clarke after reviewing A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke:

It’s all theoretically interesting, but not quite dramatic enough for the taste of this department, which is why we opened our review with the reference to Mr. Clarke’s English background. He demonstrates the point we’ve often made before; that English authors seem to lack the emotional impact and dramatic drive of their American colleagues. A Heinlein, a Budrys, or a Sturgeon in the same story would not only have interested you; they’d have made you sweat big drops. p.86

There is also a poem, To the Stars, by James Spencer, and a Statement of Circulation showing an average of 56,276 copies sold over the last twelve months. Magazines today only dream of circulations like that. Finally, the classified adverts in the Marketplace are always worth looking at. Two of the bookshops listed are named after animals (Werewolf Bookshop and Aardvarks Fantasy). Come to think about it, are werewolves animals or people? Amongst other items there are handmade Mexican wallets available (this before NAFTA), Nudes of Jean Straker from Soho in London, and “Apache Tears,” Native American good luck stones, supposedly.

Worth getting for the James White story if you don’t have any of the anthologies it appeared in and, maybe, the Poul Anderson novelette.

1. This was quite widely reprinted for a Xmas story, making it into two ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies and three Xmas ones as well as others. Its publication history on ISFDB is here.
2. Mills also published Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—” the previous year (F&SF, March 1959), which also touches on the theme of unrelieved male sexual tension in space. Reviewed here.
3. The first story in the ‘Maurai’ series, The Sky People (F&SF, March 1959), is reviewed here.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Of Time and Third Avenue • short story by Alfred Bester ♥♥♥
The Gorge of the Churels • short story by H. Russell Wakefield ♥♥
The Shape of Things That Came • short story by Richard Deming ♥
Achilles Had His Heel • short story by Joseph H. Gage ♥♥
The Rag Thing • short story by Donald A. Wollheim [as by David Grinnell] ♥♥
The Cocoon • short story by Richard Brookbank ♥
The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles • short story by Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright] ♥♥
Beasts of Bourbon • short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥
Jane Brown’s Body • novella by Cornell Woolrich ♥
Dress of White Silk • short story by Richard Matheson ♥♥

Half of this issue is taken up with Jane Brown’s Body, a reprint novella by Cornell Woolrich (All-American Fiction, March-April 1938), a response to reader demand for short stories with the odd longer novelette: the editors ask for feedback on this short-novel experiment.
To begin with this is an intriguing and atmospherically written piece about a rather nervous Dr Denholt driving a car through the night with what would seem to be an unconscious young woman on the back seat:

Three o’clock in the morning. The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil-drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere behind a rise of ground.
Two other, fiercer, whiter moons, set close together, suddenly top the rise, shoot a fan of blinding platinum far down ahead of them. Headlights. The humming burgeons into a roar. The touring car is going so fast it sways from side to side. The road is straight. The way is long. The night is short. p.61-62

The tension builds when he stops at a railway crossing and is observed by a man in the bus alongside, and once more as he almost runs out of fuel. He is then stopped by a policeman for speeding but talks his way out of it by explaining he is taking the woman on the back seat to a hospital. Eventually he reaches a remote house, and takes her to his laboratory where he gives her an injection in the back of her neck. It becomes apparent that she is dead and that he is trying to bring her back to life and, over the next few hours, he succeeds but all her memories and personality seem to have vanished leaving her with the mind of a newly born child….
This first part, although it is somewhat dated ‘elixir of life’ fiction, isn’t actually that bad but matters rapidly take a turn for the worse. At the beginning of chapter three a new character is introduced called Penny O’Shaughnessy, who has just crashed his aircraft near the doctor’s house:

Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn’t roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn’t bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through the clouds through which to spot something flat enough to come down on; he doesn’t like bailing out anyway, hates to throw away a good plane.
This one lying all over the side of the mountain around him is not so good any more, he has to admit. The first thing he does is feel in his pocket, haul out a rabbit’s foot, and stroke it twice. Then he straightens up, hobbles a short distance further from the wreck, turns to survey it. Almost instantly the lightning, which already stunned him once in the air, strikes a nearby tree with a bang and a shower of sparks. It cracks, comes down with a propeller-like whirr of foliage, and flattens what’s left of his engine into the ground.
“All right, you don’t like my crate.” O’Shaughnessy grumbles, with a back-arm swing at the elements in general. ‘“I believed you the first time!” p.72

After making his way downhill he comes to a wire fence that triggers an alarm and brings a young woman to see what is happening. It is Nova, the woman that Dr Denholt brought back to life a couple of years earlier. He has a strange conversation where she reveals that she does not know what a telephone or aeroplane is. This is cut short when Denholt turns up to admit him to the house and tend his wounds.
From this point on it is mostly just pulp nonsense, and not even good pulp nonsense at that (multiple spoilers follow). O’Shaughnessy hears from Nova about her repeated injections; the doctor tries to slip him a mickey but fails; O’Shaughnessy proposes to Nova and they later escape.
The plot becomes even more ludicrous once O’Shaughnessy and Nova are in Chicago. O’Shaughnessy is talking to a low-level mobster about a job that involves locating some stashed loot from the air, and the former recounts a tale of the death of a young girl who was with their now imprisoned boss when he hid the money. She was being interrogated about where he had hidden it before she committed suicide. When Nova appears he is badly startled and leaves. Subsequently, persons unknown try to get hold of Nova—she is the gangster’s ex-moll!
This is followed by yet another daft subplot that involves a Chinese man fortuitously turning up as the couple are just about to go on the run: he offers O’Shaughnessy a job for a Chinese warlord, so the pair of the them end up in Shanghai after much (inaccurate) gunplay during their escape from Chicago.
The final section involves O’Shaughnessy coming home after several weeks away to find out that the lack of injections has finally had an effect on Nova. He discovers this when they go out to a restaurant and he tries to put a huge diamond ring he has bought on her finger:

He takes the three-thousand-dollar ring out of his pocket, blows on it, shows it to her. “Take off your glove, honey, and Iemme see how this headlight looks on your finger—”
Her face is a white, anguished mask. He reaches toward her right hand. “Go ahead, take the glove off.”
The tense, frightened way she snatches it back out of his reach gives her away. He tumbles. The smile slowly leaves his face. “What’s the matter don’t you want my ring? You trying to cover up something with those gloves? You fixed your hair with them on, you powdered your nose with them on— What’s under them? Take ‘em off, let me see.”
“No, O’Shaughnessy. No!”
His voice changes. “I’m your husband, Nova. Take off those gloves and let me see your hands!”
She looks around her agonized. “Not here, O’Shaughnessy! Oh, not here!”
She sobs deep in her throat, even as she struggles with one glove. Her eyes are wet, pleading. “One more night, give me one more night,” she whispers brokenly. “You’re leaving Shanghai again in such a little while.
Don’t ask to see my hands. O’Shaughnessy, if you love me …”
The glove comes off, flops loosely over, and there’s suddenly horror beating into his brain, smashing, pounding, battering. He reels a little in his chair, has to hold onto the edge of the table with both hands, at the impact of it.
A clawlike thing—two of the finger extremities already bare of flesh as far as the second joint; two more with only shriveled, bloodless, rotting remnants of it adhering, only the thumb intact, and that already unhealthy looking, flabby. A dead hand—the hand of a skeleton—on a still-living body. A body he was dancing with only a few minutes ago.
A rank odor, a smell of decay, of the grave and of the tomb, hovers about the two of them now.
A woman points from the next table, screams. She’s seen it, too. She hides her face, cowers against her companion’s shoulder, shudders. Then he sees it too. His collar’s suddenly too tight for him.
Others see it, one by one. A wave of impalpable horror spreads centrifugally from that thing lying there in the blazing electric light on O’Shaughnessy’s table. The skeleton at the feast! p.107-108

As you can probably gather the remainder of the story picks up considerably as it continues in an equally entertaining and ghastly manner. They head back to the States to seek help from Dr Denholt, although only after O’Shaughnessy decides to sell his aeroplane and book passage on a steamship that is going to take several weeks to return home. Not the smartest of decisions, but this course of action provides scenes such as this one, which occurs after the rest of the ship have discovered her condition:

Days pass. The story has circulated now, and turned the ship into a buzzing beehive of curiosity. People find excuses to go by her on the deck, just so they can turn and stare. O’Shaughnessy overhears two men bet that she won’t reach Frisco alive. She tries to smoke a cigarette through the lips of the mask one afternoon, to buoy up his spirits a little. Smoke comes out of her hair-line, under her chin, before her ears. A steward drops a loaded bouillon-tray at the sight of her. Nova stays in her cabin after that. p.112

Unfortunately these lurid developments are too little too late for what is mostly a hard-boiled gangster story. I have no idea what the Boucher and McComas were thinking of in resurrecting this: it would perhaps be of some passing interest in a late-thirties pulp for its initial and final sections but it is completely out of place in an early 1950’s F&SF.

Apart from one notable exception that I’ll come to at the end, the rest of the fiction isn’t up to much either, the majority of it passing notions that have been written down as opposed to proper stories.
The Gorge of the Churels by H. Russell Wakefield is a story about a couple in Imperial India going for a picnic with their child and man servant. Before they go their man-servant attempts to dissuade them, stating that the location gets its name from the spirits of women who have died in childbirth and who attempt to steal living children to ease their pain. You can probably tell what happens once they get there making this far too straightforward a tale, but at least it is an atmospheric one with a good sense of place.
The Shape of Things That Came by Richard Deming is a story set in 1900 that concerns a writer who has written a story set fifty years in the future after using his scientist uncle’s time-travelling nightshirt! He is told by his editor that the story is unbelievable, and there is a weak twist ending (spoiler) involving a parallel Napoleonic world.
Achilles Had His Heel by Joseph H. Gage is a western tale that tells of what happens when the Ferryman from the Styx passes through a ranch and leaves some of the river’s water behind. One of the ranch hands later becomes ‘intolerable,’ immune to knives and bullets, etc., until he plays in a card game and becomes over-amused that is…. Not a bad twist on the Achilles’ heel idea.
The Rag Thing by Donald A. Wollheim is an example of one the notional pieces I referred to above with its straightforward story about a dirty rag stuck down the back of a radiator that comes to life. This is all a bit unlikely but for whatever reason I thought this was OK.
The Cocoon by Richard Brookbank is an odd story about a Captain who bales out over a planet and is imprisoned by alien cocoon makers. He is subsequently liberated by one of his lieutenants, and the events leading up to all this are recounted as they travel back to the latter’s ship. Apart from the fact that I didn’t get the ending (spoiler) where the captain leaves to return to the cocoon makers, there is other stuff in here that doesn’t seem germane to the story (the Captain’s relationship with his wife features, as well as a woman that the lieutenant is going to marry).
The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles by Margaret St. Clair is another of her pseudonomyous ‘Idris Seabright’ stories, and is an odd story about a man who attempts to sell rope to the gnoles—strange Jerusalem-artichoke shaped beings with tentacles—and who makes a serious error of judgement in what he attempts to take in payment.
Beasts of Bourbon by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is another dreary ‘Gavagan’s Bar’ tale. This one is about a man who brings strange animals into existence when he drinks too much. There is a chase or two down to the bar in an attempt to escape them, and a later section where a love-interest sketches the animals after a ship-wreck but that’s it. This is fairly typical of the ‘bar format’ story: come up with a half-baked idea or notion, drop it into the template, don’t bother developing it: cheque please.
Dress of White Silk by Richard Matheson has an introduction where the editors state that his Born of Man and Woman (F&SF, Summer 1950) is the most popular story they have printed to date. Coincidentally this story is also written in an odd style, the narrator again a young child.
She tells of her deceased mother and her white dress. When the child is caught in her mother’s room playing with the dress her grandmother says she must not do that or go into the room. Later, a friend comes to play (spoiler) and the pair end up in the room, unpack the dress and the visiting child dies. It was not entirely clear to me what happened, some type of vampirism or possession possibly?

The one saving grace of the entire issue is Of Time and Third Avenue by Alfred Bester. This is one of the first of a remarkable run of stories that this writer would produce in the 1950s (while also producing two classic novels, The Demolished Man and Tiger! Tiger!/The Stars My Destination).¹
A man claiming to be from the future arranges to meet Oliver Wright in a bar and attempts to convince him to hand over an almanac he has bought. Wright hasn’t yet realised it is from forty years in the future. The actual story from there on is fairly straightforward, although it has a clever ending, and there are hints of the sophistication and slickness Bester would bring to his later stories. Bester has his time-traveller speak a linguistically odd version of English:

“MQ, Mr. Macy,” the stranger said in a staccato voice. “Very good. For rental of this backroom including exclusive utility for one chronos—”
‘‘One whatos?” Macy asked nervously.
“Chronos. The incorrect word? Oh yes. Excuse me. One hour.”
“You’re a foreigner,” Macy said. ‘‘What’s your name—? I bet it’s Russian.”
“No. Not foreign,” the stranger answered. His frightening eyes whipped around the backroom. “Identify me as Boyne.”
“Boyne!” Macy echoed incredulously.
“MQ, Boyne.” Mr. Boyne opened a wallet like an accordion, ran his fingers through various colored papers and coins, then withdrew a hundred-dollar bill. He jabbed it at Macy and said: “Rental fee for one hour. As
agreed. One hundred dollars. Take it and go.”
Impelled by the thrust of Boyne’s eye’s Macy took the bill and staggered out to the bar. Over his shoulder he quavered: “What’ll you drink?”
“Drink? Alcohol? Never!” Boyne answered. p.3-4

As to the non-fiction, this month’s Cover is one of George Salter’s poorer efforts. There is a short editorial note, Larroes catch philologists, commenting on inconclusive reader correspondence about the meaning of the word ‘larroes’ (they should have googled it like I did last issue), and in Recommended Reading they have this to say about a handful of anthologies:

The Conklin [Possible Worlds of Science Fiction] and the Crossen [Adventures In Tomorrow] are musts, and the Derleth [Far Boundaries] and the Leinster [Great Stories of Science Fiction] recommended for any science fiction bookshelf. The fifth recent anthology is Donald A. Wollheim’s Every Boy’s Book of Science Fiction (Fell), of which we’ll say only that no boy of ours is going to be introduced to this noble field by means of archaic and subliterate pap. p.58

Somewhat unfortunate given (a) Wollheim had a (pseudonymous) story in the issue and (b) the Cornell novella in this issue (don’t throw bricks at people from inside a greenhouse). They go on to cover a lot of other books (twenty titles in total!)

A disappointing issue, notable only for the story by Alfred Bester.

1. The story in this issue was one of a baker’s dozen of stories that Alfred Bester published in three periods of activity between the early fifties and the mid-sixties:

The Devil’s Invention (variant title Oddy and Id), Astounding (August 1950)
Of Time and Third Avenue, F&SF (October 1951)
Hobson’s Choice, F&SF (August 1952)
The Roller Coaster, Fantastic (May/June 1953)
Star Light, Star Bright, F&SF (July 1953)
Time Is the Traitor, F&SF (September 1953)
Disappearing Act, Star Science Fiction Stories #2, ed. Frederik Pohl (Ballantine, 1953)
5,271,009, F&SF (March 1954)
Fondly Fahrenheit, F&SF (August 1954)
The Men Who Murdered Mohammed, F&SF (October 1958)
Will You Wait?, F&SF (Mar 1959)
The Pi Man, F&SF (October 1959)
They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To, F&SF (October 1963)

The reason that nearly all these appeared in F&SF—Galaxy got both the novels—may have had something to do with an editorial meeting that Bester had with John W. Campbell of Astounding after the latter wanted revisions to Oddy and Id, as recounted in his essay My Affair With Science Fiction in Hell’s Cartographers, ed. Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss:

“I wrote a few stories for Astounding, and out of that came my one demented meeting with the great John W. Campbell, Jr. I needn’t preface this account with the reminder that I worshipped Campbell from afar. I had never met him; all my stories had been submitted by mail. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was like, but I imagined that he was a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford. So I sent off another story to Campbell, one which no show would let me tackle. The title was ‘Oddy and Id’ and the concept was Freudian, that a man is not governed by his conscious mind but rather by his unconscious compulsions. Campbell telephoned me a week later to say that he liked the story but wanted to discuss a few changes with me. Would I come to his office? I was delighted to accept the invitation despite the fact that the editorial offices of Astounding were then the hell and gone out in the boondocks of New Jersey.
The editorial offices were in a grim factory that looked like and probably was a printing plant. The ‘offices’ turned out to be one small office, cramped, dingy, occupied not only by Campbell but by his assistant, Miss Tarrant. My only yardstick for comparison was the glamourous network and advertising agency offices. I was dismayed.
Campbell arose from his desk and shook hands. I’m a fairly big guy but he looked enormous to me, about the size of a defensive tackle. He was dour and seemed preoccupied by matters of great moment. He sat down behind his desk. I sat down on the visitor’s chair.
‘You don’t know it,’ Campbell said, ‘you can’t have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished.’
I stared. ‘If you mean the rival schools of psychiatry, Mr Campbell, I think—‘
‘No I don’t. Psychiatry, as we know it, is dead.’
‘Oh come now, Mr Campbell. Surely you’re joking.’
‘I have never been more serious in my life. Freud has been destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time.’ ‘What’s that?’
‘Dianetics.’
‘I never heard of it.’
‘It was discovered by L. Ron Hubbard, and he will win the Nobel peace prize for it,’ Campbell said solemnly.
The peace prize? What for?’
‘Wouldn’t the man who wiped out war win the Nobel peace prize?’
‘I suppose so, but how?’
‘Through dianetics.’
‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr Campbell.’
‘Read this,’ he said, and handed me a sheaf of long galley proofs. They were, I discovered later, the galleys of the very first dianetics piece to appear in Astounding.
‘Read them here and now? This is an awful lot of copy.’
He nodded, shuffled some papers, spoke to Miss Tarrant and went about his business, ignoring me. I read the first galley carefully, the second not so carefully as I became bored by the dianetics mishmash. Finally I was just letting my eyes wander along, but was very careful to allow enough time for each galley so Campbell wouldn’t know I was faking. He looked very shrewd and observant to me. After a sufficient time I stacked the galleys neatly and returned them to Campbell’s desk.
‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘Will Hubbard win the peace prize?’
‘It’s difficult to say. Dianetics is a most original and imaginative idea, but I’ve only been able to read through the piece once. If I could take a set of galleys home and—’
‘No,’ Campbell said. ‘There’s only this one set. I’m rescheduling and pushing the article into the very next issue, it’s that important.’ He handed the galleys to Miss Tarrant. You’re blocking it,’ he told me. ‘That’s all right. Most people do that when a new idea threatens to overturn their thinking.’
‘That may well be,’ I said, but I don’t think it’s true of myself. I’m a hyperthyroid, an intellectual monkey, curious about everything.’
‘No,’ Campbell said, with the assurance of a diagnostician, You’re a hyp-O-thyroid. But it’s not a question of intellect, it’s one of emotion. We conceal our emotional history from ourselves although dianetics can trace our history all the way back to the womb.’
‘To the womb!’
‘Yes. The foetus remembers. Come and have lunch.’ Remember, I was fresh from Madison Avenue and expense-account luncheons. We didn’t go to the Jersey equivalent of Sardi’s, ‘21’, or even P. J. Clark’s. He led me downstairs and we entered a tacky little lunchroom crowded with printers and file clerks; an interior room with blank walls that made every sound reverberate. I got myself a liverwurst on white, no mustard, and a coke. I can’t remember what Campbell ate.
We sat down at a small table while he continued to discourse on dianetics, the great salvation of the future when the world would at last be cleared of its emotional wounds. Suddenly he stood up and towered over me. ‘You can drive your memory back to the womb,’ he said. ‘You can do it if you release every block, clear yourself and remember. Try it.’
‘Now?’
‘Now. Think. Think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You’ve never stopped hating her for it.’
Around me there were cries of ‘BLT down, hold the mayo. Eighty-six on the English. Combo rye, relish. Coffee shake, pick up.’ And here was this grim tackle standing over me, practising dianetics without a licence. The scene was so lunatic that I began to tremble with suppressed laughter. I prayed. ‘Help me out of this, please. Don’t let me laugh in his face. Show me a way out.’ God showed me. I looked up at Campbell and said, ‘You’re absolutely right, Mr Campbell, but the emotional wounds are too much to bear. I can’t go on with this.’
He was completely satisfied. ‘Yes, I could see you were shaking.’ He sat down again and we finished our lunch and returned to his office. It developed that the only changes he wanted in my story was the removal of all Freudian terms which dianetics had now made obsolete. I agreed, of course; they were minor and it was a great honour to appear in Astounding no matter what the price. I escaped at last and returned to civilization where I had three double gibsons and don’t be stingy with the onions.
That was my one and only meeting with John Campbell and certainly my only story conference with him. I’ve had some wild ones in the entertainment business but nothing to equal that. It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles. Perhaps that’s the price that must be paid for brilliance.” p.57-60

Galactic Central link
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Fiction:
Superiority • short story by Arthur C. Clarke ♥♥♥
Prolog • short story by John P. McKnight ♥♥
Wilfred Weem, Dreamer • reprint short story by Robert Arthur ♥♥
A Peculiar People • short story by Betsy Curtis
The Punishing of Eddie Jungle-Spit • reprint short story by Garrett Oppenheim ♥♥
The Embarrassing Dimension • short story by H. Nearing, Jr.
Solitary Confinement • short story by Philip MacDonald ♥
The Man Who Could Smell Land • reprint short story by John Langdon ♥♥♥
The Daughter of the Tree • short story by Miriam Allen deFord ♥♥♥
John Thomas’s Cube • reprint short story by John Leimert ♥
The Collector • novelette by Gerald Heard [as by H. F. Heard] ♥♥
The Rat That Could Speak • reprint short story by Charles Dickens ♥
Cattivo • short story by Alan Nelson ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Spaceship in Trouble With Meteor Swarm; Europa and Jupiter in the Background • cover by Chesley Bonestell
Next Issue
Title Contest Announcement
Limerick • by Anthony Boucher [as by Herman Mudgett]
Recommended Reading • by The Editors

In this issue, unlike the last, the fantasy is probably better than the SF but, as some of it falls in the middle, I’ll just go through the stories in the order they appear.
Superiority by Arthur C. Clarke is a droll tale of an interstellar war and how one of the sides gets a new chief scientist called Norden. He suggests to a council of war that they should develop new inventions to decisively win the conflict, and that is what they do:

Then two things happened. One of our battleships disappeared completely on a training flight, and an investigation showed that under certain conditions the ship’s long-range radar could trigger the Sphere immediately it had been launched. The modification needed to overcome this defect was trivial, but it caused a delay of another month and was the source of much bad feeling between the naval staff and the scientists. We were ready for action again—when Norden announced that the radius of effectiveness of the sphere had now been increased by ten, thus multiplying by a thousand the chances of destroying an enemy ship.
So the modifications started all over again, but everyone agreed that the delay would be worth it. Meanwhile, however, the enemy had been emboldened by the absence of further attacks and had made an unexpected onslaught. Our ships were short of torpedoes, since none had been coming from the factories, and were forced to retire. So we lost the systems of Kyrane and Floranus, and the planetary fortress of Rhamsandron. p.5-6

Prolog by John P. McKnight is an minor story about a caveman, his mate and their baby, and a discovery they make.
Wilfred Weem, Dreamer by Robert Arthur (Argosy, 5^th July 1941) is another of his ‘Murchison Morks’ stories. This one has an excellent hook:

“Last night I had the most remarkable dream,” Nichols, who manufactures saxophones, was saying as Morks and I entered the club reading room.
“I was in a rocket ship that had just landed on the moon, and a herd of beasts as big as elephants, but with wings, were flapping around, trying to break in and get at me. I knew it was just a dream, of course, but it was so real it frightened me into waking up.”
“I knew a man,” Morks—his full and unlikely name is Murchison Morks—said in a thoughtful voice as we came up to the little group, “whose dreams were much more remarkable than that. And they were so real they frightened his wife.”
“Into waking up?” Nichols asked, puzzled. Morks shook his head.
“No. Into running away and leaving him, gasping with terror. She was a very strong-minded and unscrupulous woman; very hard to frighten, too.”
Nichols got red in the face.
“As I was saying,” he went on, tight-lipped, “after I got back to sleep, I dreamed that I had found Captain Kidd’s treasure. The money was so real I could hear it chink when I dropped it, and—”
“When my friend dreamed of money,” Murchison Morks put in, in that soft voice which carried so remarkably, “it was so real you could spend it.”
Nichols, crimson with anger, tried to ignore him.
“I wish you could have seen the beautiful girl who came up then,” he said. ‘“She—”
But Morks is a hard man to ignore.
“When my friend dreamed of a beautiful girl,” he murmured, a faraway expression on his long, sad face, “you could see her.”
“Perhaps I ought to explain, though,” he said courteously. “So no one will think that I am exaggerating. About my friend’s dream, I mean.” p.15

Morks then tells the club members about a man who had dreams so vivid that other people could see them. Needless to say his avaricious wife and her shrink end up using this as a money making opportunity.
This has a good idea which is well developed but unfortunately has a weak ending (spoiler: if he dreamt of a starving tiger why wouldn’t it attack him?)
A Peculiar People by Betsy Curtis is about a Martian envoy to Earth who is actually a robot:

In the momentary privacy of the gentlemen’s room, Fedrik Spens loosened the neck cord of his heavy white toga and reached for the threadlike platinum chain of his tiny adjuster key. Pulling back the pale plastissue skin from the almost invisible slit at the center of his chest, he inserted the key in the orifice of the olfactory intensificator and gave it two full turns. Three full turns for the food receptacle grinder. These official banquets could be murder. Removing the key, he retied the cord and approached the mirror, as the ambassador had insisted in last minute instructions to the several robots on the embassy staff. p.28

He becomes interested in an Earth girl and starts spending a lot of time with both her and her family. Eventually his boss warns him off as he doesn’t want her father, who is the transport minister, upset. During their last meeting her parents come in and, after much speechifying, tell him (spoiler) that they are robots too!
Don’t let the Sladekian quote above mislead you, this is an unconvincing tale, and clunky to boot. I don’t really understand why Curtis’s stories are published by F&SF, they seem well below the quality of everything else.
The Punishing of Eddie Jungle-Spit by Garrett Oppenheim (Liberty, May 1950) concerns a family with a young boy called Eddie. He breaks one of his mother’s vases and, rather than blame him, she blames an imaginary friend. From then on any trouble that occurs isn’t the fault of ‘Eddie the Arrow Man’ but ‘Eddie Jungle-Spit.’ Unfortunately the trouble gets more and more serious until she has to do something harsh with Eddie Jungle-Spit, and even that doesn’t work.
This is all quite well done until an ending that didn’t work for me.
There is some initial social observation of the woman’s unhappy marriage that is noteworthy, and the editors suggest in the introduction that this helps make it:

…a surprisingly bitter and tragic story to have appeared in a mass-circulation slick. p.40

The Embarrassing Dimension by H. Nearing, Jr. is another in his ‘Ransom’ series. This time Ransom the mathematician waffles on about a fifth dimension and the creation of a particular type of crystal. After this, various historical characters randomly appear. A weak effort, which is a pity as I enjoyed the last one.
Solitary Confinement by Philip MacDonald is a short tale about a man whom finds himself in a strange grey environment that he eventually realises is limbo. Then he comes to a man at a desk…. Another one where the ending didn’t work for me.
The Man Who Could Smell Land by John Langdon (Mast Magazine, October 1947) is an enjoyable and original tale with a title that renders any further description by me superfluous.
The Daughter of the Tree by Miriam Allen deFord is set in the 1890s and concerns a story narrated by an American Native to a young man after a girl comes to their camp and eats with them. Apparently she is the daughter of a tree. The ending of this one isn’t as strong as the rest but it is an intriguing read nonetheless.
John Thomas’s Cube by John Leimert (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1945) is another story that largely describes itself. A young boy called Billy finds a cube under the apple tree in his back yard. After his parents find it cannot be moved and is also hovering the usual circus of journalists, politicians, scientists and holy men turn up. At the end of the day Billy wishes it was gone, at which point it disappears.
Later, a psychiatrist finds (spoiler) that Billy:

…did have an unusually vivid imagination and was subject to hallucinations, auditory, visual, tactual. Further, through the operation of a kind of mass hypnosis, he had the rare faculty of making the creation of his imagination as real to others as to himself. p.92

This is a disappointing cop-out ending to a promising story.
The Collector by Gerald Heard is the longest story in the magazine. This novelette tells of an expeditionary ship’s ichthyologist who goes for a long walk on an island his team have been surveying. He sees a naked man with strange green skin and before long finds himself pulled down under the waves by a huge decapod—a squid-like creature— and kept in a network of air-filled underwater caves. This is, at times, quite interesting but my attention wandered on several occasions, probably a function of its aforementioned length.
The Rat That Could Speak by Charles Dickens (All the Year Round, September 8^th 1860) is a short deal with the devil story that gets off to a promising start—this includes a talking rat!—but it is downhill from there.
Cattivo by Alan Nelson is an original story about Cattivo’s hands, which appear to have an independent and detached life of their own:

And now I am going to tell you what seemed to happen:
From the edge of the table, I thought I saw a revolting tarantula-like insect of monstrous size and thick tentacles scrabble up on to the oilcloth and start waddling across the table toward me. It hesitated halfway. A thick bulb of a head peered at me from the crotch of two tentacles. It lumbered forward again, edged up to my glass of whisky. The ugly bulb-like head explored the rim of the glass. Then with irritation it kicked the glass off onto the floor and scampered back across the table and disappeared off the edge.
It was only Dubini’s hand, of course. His fingers were as thick as sausages and supple as snakes and he could make them into almost anything he wanted. It was like watching a puppet—you look at it long enough and soon you begin to see it breathe. p.121

The narrator recruits Cattivo to become a small-time thief, but this is just preparation for a bigger job…

The non-fiction this issue includes Chesley Bonstell’s second cover for the magazine, called Spaceship in Trouble With Meteor Swarm; Europa and Jupiter in the Background. It is a rather jumbled looking composition and not as good as his first effort.
The Title Contest Announcement gives the name of the winner of the $100 prize for naming Idris Seabirght’s story in the April issue, but doesn’t tell us what the title was!
Limerick is an OK five line effort by Anthony Boucher.
Recommended Reading by The Editors suggests that the two best novels of the year so far are Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke, and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. They also have a good word for The Moon is Hell by John W. Campbell, Jr.
I was a little surprised at this comment about Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man as I thought the linking material effectively creepy:

There’s been only one recent volume of science fiction short stories; but that one is a must: Ray Bradbury’s THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (Doubleday). The attempt at a unifying frame-structure is, in contrast to THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, markedly unsuccessful; and a few of the eighteen stories seem less than wisely chosen to enhance the Bradbury reputation. But enough excellent ones remain to provide a feast for every devotee of the finest traditions in imaginative fiction. p.84

There is an amusing comment about Is Another World Watching? by Gerald Heard:

It starts off with a clear, well documented survey of the flying saucer situation to date, a badly needed corrective to the distorted and even flatly untrue “explanations” in recent magazines and newspapers. Then gradually, by certain steps of decidedly eluctable logic, Mr. Heard reaches the conclusion (and expatiates on it as established fact) that the “saucers” are piloted by intelligent bees from Mars. Frankly, we aren’t at all sure of the position of Mr. Heard’s tongue relative to his cheek at this point. p.84

In conclusion, I would say that this issue is another mixed bag, but unlike previous volumes there are no stories that make it worth getting hold of. It also illustrates one of F&SF’s developing traits, which is that there is too much froth and not enough substance. The Clarke, Arthur, Curtis, Nearing, Leimert and Dickens stories are all either humorous or ‘light’ pieces—too many. I wish that they would cull some of these and the weaker short stories and replace them with a couple of substantial novelettes. I also wish they would cut down on the reprints, the number of which would seem to indicate a shortage of original material. The next issue contains a short novel (albeit a reprint piece) that occupies half the issue: we’ll see if that improves matters.

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Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
Old Man Henderson • short story by Kris Neville ♥♥♥
The Threepenny-Piece • reprint short story by James Stephens ♥
Love Story • short story by Kay Rogers ♥
Bargain from Brunswick • short story by John Wyndham ♥♥
Scrap Iron • reprint short story by William Campbell Gault [as by Larry Sternig]
The Boy Next Door • short story by Chad Oliver ♥
The Twilight Planet • short story by Arthur Jean Cox ♥♥♥
The Extreme Airiness of Duton Lang • reprint short story by Percival Wilde ♥♥♥
Hell-Bent • short story by Ford McCormack ♥♥♥+
The Glass of Supreme Moments • reprint short story by Barry Pain ♥♥♥+
’Twas Brillig… • short story by Evan H. Appelman ♥
Android • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by C. H. Liddell] ♥♥♥+
A Story at Bedtime • reprint short story by Dorothy K. Haynes ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by George Salter
To Our Readers
Recommended Reading • by The Editors

The SF in this issue is generally of good quality and better than the fantasy and horror, so I’ll start with that.
The best story in the issue is Android, a novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. This tells of Bradley, a man who has sliced off Court’s head, and who stands in front of him the next day with the realisation that androids can repair themselves. Later, after Court finishes talking to him, Bradley attempts to work out a way of detecting androids. This task leads him to a physicist called Walling:

“Then at least you don’t suspect me of being a—an android?” Dr. Wallinger asked dourly. He was slightly nervous, as the result of having sat for ten minutes now with a gun-muzzle pointed unwaveringly at his stomach.
It was, of course, ridiculous that a mysterious rubber-masked figure in a gold-braided cape whose flare concealed most of its wearer’s body should be sitting here in his library forcing him to listen to psychotic nonsense.
“You have children,” Bradley said, his voice a little muffled behind the mask. “That was how I could feel sure about you.”
“Look,” Wallinger said earnestly, “I’m a nuclear physicist. I think a psychologist could probably give you more help than—”
”A psychiatrist, you mean?”
“Not at all. Of course not. But—”
“But all the same, you think I’m crazy.” p.100

He returns to his work and finds that Court has found the rotary blade used for the decapitation. After being quizzed by both Court (his boss) and another man called Johnson, who Bradley thinks may also be an android, he is told to wait in his office. While he waits, Bradley reflects on the origin of the androids:

“How did it start?” he asked himself. “Why? Why?” And out of the human logic of his own mind came the glimmer of an answer. “When the first man made the first successful android, the human race was doomed.”
For a successful android meant one indistinguishable from man, one capable of creating others in its own image, one capable of independent motion and reasoning. And what purpose moved in the brain of that first of its metal kind? Had its human creator implanted there some command which led—knowingly or unknowingly—to all that followed? Had the order been one which the android could achieve only by duplicating itself until the human race was infected through and through with the robot cells of the androids? p.107

He leaves early and later ambushes Court with his car, crushing him against a lorry in the street. Bradley takes the (still living) body to Walling….
During its best passages this is intense and paranoid stuff and is very much in the mould of Philip K. Dick. Indeed, I wondered if Liddell was a pseudonym for Dick (although the writing seems better than his early work) and it was only when I checked ISFDB that I found this was by Kuttner and Moore. Despite it being overlong and possessed of a rather predictable ending this is, at times, impressive stuff.

There are some other good SF stories. Old Man Henderson by Kris Neville starts with Joey’s mother sending him and his alien pet to deliver a loaf of bread to an elderly neighbour, Old Man Henderson, who is known locally as ‘The Story’ on account of the one tale he attempts to tell everyone. He tries to tell his story to Joey, but this rather spoilt child starts to control the conversation and the situation becomes increasingly unpleasant. A compelling story albeit one with a slightly chilling and rather abrupt end.¹
The Twilight Planet by Arthur Jean Cox is a minor but good Bradburyesque prose poem about a man who visits a non-rotating planet where there is perpetual twilight:

Between these two extremes, like a ship’s course between Scylla and Charybdis, runs a belt of life—the Twilight Strip, a girdle of immortal dusk between the fury of eternal day and the cold of eternal night. A long, thin place where plants and trees and cities could grow.
There is a liquid softness to the warm air. It flows through the hills and valleys, through the streets of the old town.
Twilight City it is called but it could be old Vienna, Rheims, or picturesque London of some ancient day. Cobbled streets sprawl and turn leisurely through rows of squat, quaint houses, and small shops appear here and there, tended by old couples. p.52

The Extreme Airiness of Duton Lang by Percival Wilde (Esquire, 1939) is another minor work but an amusing one told by a man in a bar about a scientist who discovers a substance that makes him lighter and lighter while remaining the same size. This tale is punctuated by fresh martinis for the narrator, which should give you an idea of the flavour of it.
Letting the SF side down, badly, is Scrap Iron by William Campbell Gault (Fight Stories, 1945), a dreadful reprint from the sports pulps: yes, it’s that American SF editor blind spot for sport stories again. This one tells of a future where human controlled robots fight in the ring. Invincible is due to fight The Crusher but has been sabotaged by an acid attack. When the fight gets going Invincible takes a pummelling until his operator jumps in the ring, attacks The Crusher and then ends up fighting the other operator. He manages to extract a public confession and the art of human boxing is reborn. At the end of the story, Walt comments to his new wife, the boss’s daughter:

“Listen, honey, that audience last night found out it’s fun to watch a fight, but I learned—Dot, I learned that it’s fun to fight. Sometimes, anyway. Maybe those ancients weren’t so dumb after all.” p.43

No, just brain damaged.

There are a couple of good fantasy and horror stories in amongst what is a ropey bunch. Hell-Bent by Ford McCormack² is an original deal with the devil story that involves a young man committing evil acts throughout his life so the devil can use him as a demon after he dies. The problem is that if the young man has any virtue in him at all when he expires he will be dammed like other mortals.
Sometime later, while attempting to arrange for the murder of his fiancé, he is shot and goes to hell where he finds that he has been successful. However, life as a demon is not entirely as he expected….
As well as its refreshingly unpleasant narrator this story has a grisly old-school version of hell that is quite vivid:

Faintly audible in the steady muttering of the flames, there was an incessant chorus as of human wailing. Looking closely, I saw a moving figure on the bed of coals below. And another—and several more. Then, as my eyes became more accustomed to the fierce glare, I could distinguish them everywhere, most of them creeping slowly, and I realized it had been partly the random motion of these hundreds of creatures which had lent a seething aspect to the entire surface.
They were all human—or had been—and as I watched, it became clear that their continual crawling, which had seemed aimless, was not without purpose, after all. The general motivation was quite simple: to get to a cooler spot.
Here and there, places could be seen where the coals merely smouldered or were black. The nearest dozen humans would inch their way to one of these thermal islands, all reaching it at about the same time, when it would promptly flare into searing brightness. With anguished shrieks; the cluster of souls would begin the frantic but feeble dispersal toward other points only slightly less unendurable. p.79

The Glass of Supreme Moments by Barry Pain (Stories and Interludes, 1892) is a dreamlike fantasy that begins with a portrait of a dissatisfied man:

Lucas Morne sat in his college rooms, when the winter afternoon met the evening, depressed and dull. There were various reasons for his depression. He was beginning to be a little nervous about his health. A week before he had run second in a mile race, the finish of which had been a terrible struggle; ever since then any violent exertion or excitement had brought on symptoms which were painful, and to one who had always been strong, astonishing. He had felt them early that afternoon, on coming from the river. Besides, he was discontented with himself. He had had several men in his rooms that afternoon, who were better than he was, men who had enthusiasms and had found them satisfying. Lucas had a moderate devotion to athletics, but no great enthusiasm. Neither had he the finer perceptions. Neither was he a scholar. He was just an ordinary man. p.86

As he reflects on his visitors a staircase appears where the fireplace was.  A veiled woman then appears who takes him up the stairs to a room that contains the ‘mirror of supreme moments.’ After discussing his friends and their success in life the women tells him to look into the mirror. There he sees the supreme moments of three of his friends and he then asks her what his supreme moment will be. She tells him (spoiler) that it is here and now, and then she lifts her veil and reveals herself to him. She is Death and, although kissing her will mean he dies, he does so anyway. I can’t say this makes any sense set down on paper but there is a conceptual and emotional aptness about this ending that is apparent while reading it.

The rest of the stories are mostly poor fare. The Threepenny-Piece by James Stephens (Here Are Ladies, 1913) has a man dying and going to be judged. He is cast down to Hell but discovers he has lost his silver threepenny bit and complains for so long and so loudly that an instruction goes out for whoever found it to surrender it to the judge Radamanthus. When the seraphim who found it refuses both he and O’Brien are cast down to Earth, at which point the story abruptly stops.
Love Story by Kay Rogers is a short squib about a beaten down woman called Old Liz and the ghost of a young girl who haunts her. Liz ends up (spoiler) meeting Jack the Ripper in the fog. There is not much lead in to this but you will see the end coming a mile away.
Bargain from Brunswick by John Wyndham (fresh from his novel The Day of the Triffids) is a story about a woman who receives a pipe from her son in Germany. When she plays it in her recorder class all the woman start dancing and following her:  it appears that she has the Pied Piper of Hamelin’s pipe. After a couple of other similar episodes she arrives in town with the missing children taken by the Pied Piper. The townsfolk are reluctant to take them in so (spoiler) she leaves with them dancing behind her. She also takes the American children from the town too, which I thought was going to set up the story up to be a morality tale but the latter group come back, so I am not really sure what the point of this is supposed to be.
The Boy Next Door by Chad Oliver is, according to the introduction, his first sold but not first published story. A radio announcer hosts a show with a segment called ‘The Boy Next Door.’ This time around Jimmy is the boy who features, and he eventually reveals that he kills people with the help of his Uncle George. After this awkward segment is over the program finishes and the studio empties. The announcer and Jimmy are the last two left, and wait for Uncle George to pick Jimmy up…. A weak story with a supernatural ending tacked on.
’Twas Brillig… by Evan H. Appelman is an almost a poem like piece (five paragraphs) about something alighting on Earth for dinner.
Finally, A Story at Bedtime by Dorothy K. Haynes (Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch, 1949) is a rather inconsequential story about a witch who is the mother to a boy and a girl. We learn how the girl becomes a witch too.

The Cover by George Salter is another quirky cover effort, and looks like the same kind of photomontage technique used on the first issue.
There are a couple of editorial fillers in this issue. After the contents page there is information about next month’s contents and a subscription form. Further on, there is also a To Our Readers page that gives some feedback from the mail they have received:

We have no letter column in F&SF, largely because 90% of your letters to us insist that we should devote the space to more stories; but please don’t think this absence of a column means any lack of interest in mail from our readers.
We need your letters to help shape our policies in producing the magazine that will best please you; and to date you’ve been very helpful indeed, particularly in response to our query, two issues back, as to what we should do with the 10,000 words we’ve added to our content.
Frankly, you surprised us and somewhat changed our plans— we had expected a heavier demand for long novelets. In percentage form, the results are:
Shorts, only, no novelets                                                  40%
An occasional novelet, but only if of very high quality  17%
A regular policy of a novelet in each issue                     20%
Serials                                                                                 7%
Anything the editors think best                                      17%
The total impression from your letters seems best summed up by one from Georgia, which says: “I don’t think you should have an editorial policy of any sort about story length. Just buy all the good ones that come in….”
So that’s what we’ll try to do; and the issue you’re now reading certainly offers variety: 13 stories ranging from a 15,000 word novelet to a one-page short-short. We hope you’ll agree with us that each is a strong and highly individual specimen of its length. But whether you agree or disagree, let us know what you think.
We hope, from time to time, to make other reports like this on your opinions concerning editorial policy. Please remember that we’re always eager to hear from you, at 2643 Dana St., Berkeley 4, California. p.21

Recommended Reading by The Editors is a two page review where they praise, amongst others, Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky and Asimov’s I, Robot (singling out Reason and Liar!), Philip Wylie’s The Disappearance and Joseph F. Rinn’s Sixty Years of Psychical Research (dedicated to the proposition that ‘there is no limit to human gullibility’). It is interesting to note the areas of agreement and disagreement with Groff Conklin’s column in Galaxy.

A mixed issue: I’m beginning to detect a trend of quality being proportional to length.

1. Neville’s story was reprinted in the Anthony Boucher memorial anthology, Special Wonder, edited by J. Francis McComas (1970), and he contributed this short introduction:
   Once, on request, I rewrote a story called, “Old Man Henderson” three times, so you might think, in the end, it was the editor’s story, too. But it wasn’t.
   He was content merely to clear away the barriers I had unwittingly set against my own vision and to be sure I did the best I was capable of. When he was done, no whisper of him remained.
   He knew a trick that has been mastered only by very special men, men whose influence for good is always greater than any of us imagine.
   He knew how to make himself invisible. p.299
2. This story was printed with a ‘?’ for its title, and was the subject of a second $100 contest to suggest a title. This time I managed to come up with A Demonic End and Apprenticeship for a Demon. Now all I need is a time machine.
   Ford McCormack only seems to have produced a handful of stories according to ISFDB. The only information I can find about him is from Worlds Beyond (January 1951):
   “I was born in Seattle Wash.—a distinction shared with two or three million other people . . . Have taken up residence in Southern California, along with a few million other out-of-staters . . . I am or have been an amateur acrobat, pianist, hobo and several other things. In the last year or so, being fed up with this eternal amateur status. I have joined the sizable body of professional writers to whom editors have not yet begun to write pleading letters.” ifc

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Other Reviews:
Steve Fahnestalk, Amazing Stories
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
David Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Clancy Weeks, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
Talking to Dead People • short story by Sarah Pinsker ♥♥♥
The Green-Eyed Boy • short story by Peter S. Beagle ♥
The Voice in the Cornfield, the Word Made Flesh • short story by Desirina Boskovich ♥♥♥+
A Melancholy Apparition • short story by Ian Creasey ♥♥
The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello • novella by David Gerrold ♥♥♥+
The Dunsmuir Horror • novella by David Gerrold ♥
Anything for You • short story by Lisa Mason ♥♥
Those Shadows Laugh • novelette by Geoff Ryman ♥♥♥+
Cupid’s Compass • short story by Leah Cypess ♥♥♥
The Sweet Warm Earth • short story by Steven Popkes ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • David Hardy
Cartoons • Arthur Masear, S. Harris, Danny Shanahan
Editorial • by C. C. Finlay
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Musing on Books • by Michelle West
The Amazing Mr. Gerrold • essay by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
My Life in Science Fiction • essay by David Gerrold
The Dragon • poem by Aimee Ogden
Animal Husbandry • film review by Kathi Maio
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: The Adventures of Hatim Tai, by Anonymous (1830) • essay by Robert Eldridge

This is a special issue—the first that F&SF has published for some time—featuring David Gerrold.¹ I’ll deal with the other fiction first before I move onto that part of the issue.
Talking to Dead People by Sarah Pinsker is about two university students who start building ‘murder houses.’ These are models of crime-scene houses with an AI chip so that one can cross-examine the persons involved in and around the crime. Eliza is the brains behind the idea, and Gwen ends up as an employee building the houses. They are a big success and in some cases the AIs are able to make intuitive leaps that progress the sometimes stalled investigations.
The relationship between the two students breaks down when the Eliza gives Gwen a model of her own house for a Xmas present. Gwen’s younger brother went missing while she was a child.
The ending wasn’t what I expected—I thought the disappearance was going to be solved—and I felt slightly short-changed. It works in its own way, however.
The Green-Eyed Boy by Peter S. Beagle is a prequel to his novel The Last Unicorn. It is told by an old wizard to a third party and tells of a youth called Schmedrick being apprenticed and not doing particularly well before he goes on to be famous. These anecdotes are not particularly engaging and at the end it just stops; this reads more like an extract than a story.
The Voice in the Cornfield, the Word Made Flesh by Desirina Boskovich initially starts with an alien crash-landing on Earth. It makes an attempt to mentally contact a young girl, but this overwhelms and kills her.
The story then moves to two of the women in the Mennonite community the girl lives in. One is newly married and pregnant, the other already has a young family and is struggling with both them and an abusive husband. Parts of this have echoes of Leigh Brackett (the Mennonite community) and Zenna Henderson (the rural setting):

The creature oozes and drifts to a small stand of maples, and feathers its mind on the breeze, sending out signals of distress. But its psychic overtures are met with silence. Help? Help me? Nothing.
Then, reaching out, reaching back, the tiny curiosity of tiny minds: a mole, tunneling beneath. A garter snake, slithering. A family of mice, scampering. A passing parade of insects.
All small of ambition, small of stature, small of mind.
The creature accepts their sympathy as gently as it can, knowing they cannot understand, knowing they will not help.

This is more of an autobiographical story than an SF one—the alien element isn’t really central—but is a compelling read for all that. Although there is a positive ending of sorts it is rather overwhelmed by the bleakness that precedes it.
A Melancholy Apparition by Ian Creasey is a story set in the 18th century and narrated by James Boswell about his and the renowned Dr Samuel Johnson’s visit to a family in the north. While dining there they learn that the owner has been seeing apparitions of his recently deceased daughter.
This has a very good period setting but as a ghost story it fizzles out at the end to become more a story of the personal deficiencies of the owner and Boswell himself. I hope the author writes about these characters again, perhaps married to a more satisfying story.²
Anything for You by Lisa Mason is a darkish satire about a man addicted to an interactive TV series and infatuated with its star character, the surgeon Dr Viginia Isley. He is obsessed with her to the point of his marriage breaking down around him. This is enjoyable but too open-ended for me; either that or I missed the point. There is one passage from the couple’s marriage counselling sessions I noted:

“Some think fiction is truer than life,” the counselor says, trying to catch his eye.
“How can that be?” his wife says, skeptical now as well as annoyed.
“Well, because narrative structure is an essential need of the human mind. A way of making sense of the mess of real experience. A pedagogical device, too, because the stringencies of a plot presented by a story force us to see meaning in what would otherwise be chaos.”

Those Shadows Laugh by Geoff Ryman is the sole novelette in the issue. This is an original story about a parallel world that has an island/continent of women who reproduce pathenogenically. The story is narrated by a female scientist who is there to do some gene-splicing that will improve their genetic health: the numbers of birth defects among their children has been rising steadily as they have only five matrilineal lines.
The general form of the story is that of an outsider failing to understand or appreciate a markedly different society, in that the female scientist becomes infatuated with one of the natives and subsequently seduces her. This process and the aftermath allows Ryman to use this novel and unusual society to hold up a mirror to ‘normal’ human traits such as sexual desire, possession and self-deception.
Although I found it a little hard to get into the story (the first few pages in particular seem a little stilted) it really grew on me and, by the end, I found it quite fascinating. One we’ll be seeing in the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies, I suspect.
Cupid’s Compass by Leah Cypess is an amusing Sheckleyesque satire about two people who become a couple as a result of a new neurological technique for inducing love in complete strangers. In due course they get married and have a kid but then problems arise. There are a number of quite funny passages in this one, such as when the CEO of the company offering this process is talking to the woman and her friend about the payment plan:

“We are trying to get it covered by insurance. Statistically, married people tend to live longer and experience fewer health problems, so we have a good case.” Larissa sighed and propped her chin up with one hand. “Unfortunately, we’re constantly blocked by the online dating lobby.”
“Being single isn’t a disease,” Julie snapped, against her better judgment. Mindy had driven her to Cupid’s Compass, and that half-hour car ride had exhausted her tolerance for being pitied. “It’s this unhealthy obsession with another person that’s a disease. And the fact that our society worships that disease is just…uh…” At that point, her eloquence failed her. “Another disease.”

Or when the CEO describes how the process works:

Larissa cleared her throat. “You and your future soul mate will be fitted with helmets that produce a rotating magnetic field over the temporal lobes of your brains. When you meet each other, our techs will turn the helmets on, and a particular frequency and pattern of the field will be generated that will induce deep feelings of attraction, caring, and a sense that you are incomplete without each other. It usually takes only a few minutes, and studies have shown no negative side effects except for passing feelings of nausea and a few days of insomnia.”

The Sweet Warm Earth by Steven Popkes is an early-1960s mob enforcer story into which is dropped an elderly Italian man who would seem to be a horse whisperer. There are subsequent family/mob problems but this effort turns out to be more a slice-of-life period piece than a story.

David Gerrold contributes two stories to this special issue, the first of which is The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello. This novella starts by establishing the narrator in his multiple marriage group on Haven, a planet that has an independent-minded type of settler and a strange ecosystem. The latter involves a plant called the glitter-bush which produces a crop that is part honey and part seed, and the horgs, an aggressive and dangerous herd creature which eat the plants:

Horgs are . . . well, they’re big, they’re ugly, they smell bad, and they’re meaner than anything else on the planet, even humans, especially when they’re in rut. Horgs have only one sex—they don’t mate, they fight until exhausted. Or dead. The winner stabs the loser with a spiked penis. The sperm make their way through the bloodstream to the egg sac, where a litter of little horgs gets started.
Sometimes the brood-horg survives, sometimes it doesn’t. Horgs aren’t choosy, sometimes they poke other things—even humans. When they do that, when there’s no eggs available, the sperm self-fertilizes, turns into mini-horgs, and the litter eat their way out. Not pretty. You get a couple hundred rat-sized critters. The big horgs eat ‘em. And if it’s a horg with ripe eggs, they get fertilized that way. Crazy biology, but it works.
Some people think Horg meat is a delicacy. I’m not one of them.
Some people say that if horg meat is fixed right, it’s delicious. They can have my share. I’ve seen what an angry horg can do. And a horny one.

Matters develop when an off-worlder called Mr Costello arrives and announces he wants to start exporting horg meat. As everyone who has previously attempted this is in Idjit’s Field, the local graveyard, the locals are only too glad to take his money. The rest of the story is how Mr Costello not only succeeds but ends up in charge of a soon to be transformed planet, much to the concern of the locals.
This is an entertaining, colourful and well developed tale but I have a couple of caveats, one minor and one major.
The minor one is that there is frequent reference to gender swapping in the families, and the impact on internal family relationships. I realise that this theme is present in some recent fiction due to the current prominence of transgender politics but can I just note, as a disinterested observer, that John Varley was doing this in his fiction back when I started reading SF magazines in 1976. It is beginning to feel quite old, not to say unimaginative. If people have the ability to easily transform their bodies in the future I don’t think they are going to stop at switching between male and female.
The major criticism I have is a theological one and won’t affect any casual reader’s appreciation of the story, so move along, nothing to see here, etc. In this story Gerrold has borrowed, with the estate’s permission, the protagonist of Theodore Sturgeon’s Mr Costello, Hero (Galaxy, December 1953). That story dealt with the scourge of McCarthyism and addressed two issues. The first was McCarthy’s technique of using fear to divide and then rule over people; the second was the culpability of the people who let themselves be used in this way and/or idolised people like McCarthy.
This is a far cry from what happens in Gerrold’s story. His Costello is more of a Machiavelli or a manipulator than someone who uses fear to divide and rule. Also, as the penultimate scene demonstrates (spoiler), one of the settlers ultimately refuses to be complicit in what he is planning. I know this may seem a pettifogging criticism but I read the Sturgeon story directly before this one and the differences are striking. I don’t really think there was any need to co-opt Sturgeon’s character for this story.

Gerrold’s second contribution, The Dunsmuir Horror, is a novella in the same series of autobiographically based stories as last issue’s dire The Thing on the Shelf (F&SF, July-August 2106). I didn’t think this one was quite as bad but I may still be numb from the last. Once again Gerrold witters on endlessly while not much happens:

Let me get philosophical here. Philip K. Dick—I met him once, a very strange man, he kicked me—is alleged to have said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Actually, I don’t think he was quite that precise. I think he said something more like, “Reality is all the stuff that doesn’t go away when I do.”
The problem with any discussion of reality is that we, as human beings, are ill-equipped to experience, perceive, or even discuss reality. We like to think we understand reality—we certainly talk about it as if we know what it is—but in truth, we are as removed from reality as if we were tattooed by Lewis Carroll on the naked belly of an LSD-infused dormouse. And that’s on a good day. Even the best of the zen masters musing on the nature of human consciousness are in denial about how much denial we’re in.
We exist. How do we know we exist? We argue about existence. Endlessly. We are talking goo talking about what it means to be talking goo. We are goo, therefore we are.

The ever so slight plot concerns him leaving the freeway (after many, many pages of the above) and driving through a town at night. A town that subsequently turns out not to exist. This well used and ancient plot device⁴ is given a couple more twists, one linked and the other a bolt-on: (spoiler) the doctors at Gerrold’s asylum footnote his letter to Gordon Van Gelder with the suggestion that they add a few more fiction producing ‘assets.’
There are one or two interesting jokes/anecdotes in this but not enough to hang a novella on.

There are also several non-fiction contributions to the special issue. The Cover by David Hardy shows Gerrold surrounded by a montage of various items including the starship Enterprise, tribbles and a horg amongst other things.
The Editorial by C. C. Finlay provides a short introduction to the issue and is followed by a longer essay on Gerrold by Kristine Katherine Rusch, The Amazing Mr. Gerrold. As in Finlay’s piece it does a quick tour of, amongst other things, The Trouble with Tribbles, Star Trek and The Martian Child (F&SF, September 1994). Admittedly the latter was a Hugo and Nebula winning story but I didn’t really get a sense of what exactly was so special about Gerrold’s fiction from the article.⁵
There is a short essay by Gerrold himself, My Life in Science Fiction. This starts promisingly with some interesting stuff about his childhood but unfortunately degenerates into a lot of gosh-wow about SF and the people who write it.

As for the rest of the non-fiction, the book review columns are beginning to strike me as the weakest part of the magazine. In his Books to Look For column Charles de Lint reviews five books. The first review is a useful one about Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. However, this is followed by a comic book, Crescent City Magick: Welcome to New Orleans by Michael L. Peters, and then by a book on the paranormal, Real Visitors, Voices from Beyond, and Parallel Dimensions by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger. This review has these comments:

Kefa opens with a brief description of his interest in the connectedness of disparate paranormal phenomena and his conversion to Islam where he discovered to his surprise—and certainly to mine, as well—that followers of his new faith are expected to believe in Ghraib, which is Arabic for “Unseen World.”
He goes on to explain how his “newfound faith not only accepted the existence of the supernatural and an invisible realm beyond our senses but essentially made belief in them an article of faith. Furthermore, I found that there is within Islam a subcultural element of belief and/or research into the Unseen World that has a history stretching back to the dawn of human existence.”
In my years of reading fantasy I’ve come across many writers who postulate fictional connections between all of the supernatural elements of the world, making tidy sense of what seems to be pretty much unknowable. So it was especially intriguing to me to read an explanation that is an accepted part of the belief system of some twenty-two percent of the world’s population.
That’s a lot of people.

Good grief, I thought I’d picked up a copy of F&SF, not The Magazine of Superstition and the Irrational.
The next review is an anthology, Not Just Rockets and Robots: Daily Science Fiction Year One by Jonathan Laden and Michele-Lee Barasso. De Lint helpfully tells us we don’t see more anthology reviews from him as:

When it comes to collections and anthologies, I read in fits and starts. I like to take the time to think about the stories, so I don’t read too many in a day, and rarely two in a row. It’s the reason you see so few reviews of anthologies in this column. I just take too long to read them.

No problem: I doubt the readers of F&SF might want to read, say, a group review of all the year’s ‘Best’ anthologies with associated commentary about the year in short fiction, not when there are comic and paranormal books to consider (or, in the case of the last two reviews, a YA book published in 2010 and the second book in a Whitley Streiber series, first published in 2014).
What on Earth is going on here? De Lint has six of the twelve review columns that F&SF runs in a year: is this really an appropriate selection of books to cover? Has the magazine got a coherent review strategy?
I had hoped that Musing on Books by Michelle West would be better but her column is probably worse than de Lint’s. The second review provides an overlong, rambling and useless synopsis of the book under consideration:

Pierce heads toward Severluna, where King Arden and his knights live. On the way, he meets Carrie. Carrie, like Pierce, is young; unlike Pierce, she’s known both her parents all her life. Like Pierce, her parents are no longer together; unlike Pierce, her yearning and frustration and sense of entrapment are turned inward, always inward. Carrie lives in the town closest to Pierce’s old home, and she works—as Pierce did—in a restaurant. The restaurant, in the Kingfisher Inn, isn’t owned by her mother, and her mother is not a sorceress of astonishing power. She’s a woman who got good and tired of living with Merle, and took off to distant parts.
Carrie lives with Merle, her father. And she is surrounded, always, by Merle’s friends, and by the makeshift family one builds when one works and lives in close quarters. Aunt Lilith, who lives upstairs; Hal, who doesn’t live with Aunt Lilith, although they’re married. She lives in the shadow of Stillwater, another cook in town, whose restaurant is famous. She has spent her entire life asking questions, and no one will answer them, and she is tired of being kept in the dark.
Daimon is the last of the three. Like Pierce, he has spent his life without one parent; unlike Pierce, that parent was his mother. He is the bastard son of King Arden—fetched, at the demand of the Queen, when his existence became known upon the death in childbirth of his mother, and brought to court, where he was raised with his half-brothers and sisters as if he were in truth a royal sibling. The Queen is not his mother, and the Queen was not particularly happy to find this evidence of her husband’s infidelity—but she has been a mother to Daimon for all his life, and if there was ugliness about his existence, Daimon has never been blamed by her for it.

And that’s only the middle part of it. The last review of the three is better but she inserts herself into this one to an extent that exceeds my interest (she would want to ‘spend time’ with one of the book’s characters, who is ‘someone I’d want in my life.’ She is ‘not particularly religious’ but ‘wants to be happy’. Ugh.)⁶

In case anyone thinks I’ve become terminally dyspeptic I offer Animal Husbandry by Kathi Maio in my defence. This is a good film review column that uses Fatal Attraction as a lead in to discuss The Lobster. Contrast and compare this column with the book reviews: it has appropriate content, a concise and informative synopsis, and lucid insight. It also made me go and watch the film.
The rest of the non-fiction includes the Cartoons, which are provided by Arthur Masear, S. Harris and Danny Shanahan, a poem called The Dragon by Aimee Ogden, Coming Attractions, and Curiosities: The Adventures of Hatim Tai, by Anonymous (1830) by Robert Eldridge.

A mixed bag this issue, with the special issue aspects—bar the first story—rather underwhelming.

1. Some of the F&SF special issues covers are here.
2. Iain Creasy’s blog post about this story.
3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel, Herland, is mentioned in the introduction to the Ryman story and obliquely in the story.
4. For disappearing spooky towns see Twister by Mary Elizabeth Counselman in Weird Tales (January 1940). Which makes the idea at least 76 years old.
5. Gerrold’s entry at SFE doesn’t exactly sing his praises either.
6. I am not oblivious to the fact there are personal aspects to some of my posts but those are generally in the footnotes. Also, there is a big difference between an amateur blog covering magazines old and new, and a professional magazine review of currently published material.

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ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Admiral Ironbombs, Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, & Creased
Gideon Marcus, Galactic Journey

_____________________

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

Fiction:
No Truce With Kings • novella by Poul Anderson ∗∗∗∗
Pushover Planet • short story by Con Pederson –
Green Magic • short story by Jack Vance ∗∗∗∗
The Weremartini • short story by Vance Aandahl ∗∗∗
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: LXIII • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton]
Bokko-Chan • short story by Shinichi Hoshi [translated by Noriyoshi Saito] ∗∗
’Tis the Season to Be Jelly • short story by Richard Matheson ∗∗∗
Another Rib • short story by Juanita Coulson and Marion Zimmer Bradley [as by John Jay Wells and Marion Zimmer Bradley] ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Books • by Avram Davidson
Starlesque • poem by Walter H. Kerr
The Light That Failed! • essay by Isaac Asimov
There Are No More Good Stories About Mars Because We Need No More Good Stories About Mars • poem by Brian W. Aldiss
Index to Volume Twenty-Four — January-June 1963

_____________________

I had intended to get back to modern magazines with this review but noticed that there was a one issue hole between the Ray Bradbury special I’d just read (F&SF, May 1963) and the reviews I’d done for Heinlein’s serial Glory Road (F&SF, July-September 1963). So, I pulled out the issue in question, and when I saw the lovely Emsh cover¹, and that it contained Poul Anderson’s No Truce With Kings, that was the next couple of days’ reading sorted . . . .
Anderson’s novella has a number of story elements that are, to be honest, quite hackneyed: a post-holocaust world that has a balkanised USA, armed militias that use firearms and swords, an order of telepathic Espers whose psionic ability is dependent on extra-terrestrial technology, etc. While there is a touch of the kitchen sink about all this Anderson manages to blend this into a remarkably good example of what I think is now called ‘the good old stuff,’ and the story won the 1964 Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction.
The story opens in Fort Nakamura, a heavily fortified keep of the Pacific States of America, with a Colonel James Mackenzie receiving a signal that tells of changes to the political and army leaders out West. This starts a civil war between those that want to reunite the whole of the United States versus those that want the status quo of smaller feudal communities or ‘bossdoms.’
The story thereafter is centred around the various military engagements that occur between the two sides, something which is given more emotional depth than usual in this type of tale by two factors: the first is that Colonel Mackenzie is on one side of the conflict and his daughter and son-in-law are on the other; the second is the war-weariness that is described by Mackenzie later on in the narrative:

He would endure in the chronicles, that colonel, they would sing ballads about him for half a thousand years.
Only it didn’t feel that way. James Mackenzie knew he was not much more than average bright under the best of conditions, now dull-minded with weariness and terrified of his daughter’s fate. For himself he was haunted by the fear of certain crippling wounds. Often he had to drink himself to sleep. He was shaved, because an officer must maintain appearances, but realized very well that if he hadn’t had an orderly to do the job for him he would be as shaggy as any buck private. His uniform was faded and threadbare, his body stank and itched, his mouth yearned for tobacco but there had been some trouble in the commissariat and they were lucky to eat. His achievements amounted to patchwork jobs carried out in utter confusion, or to slogging like this and wishing only for an end to the whole mess. One day, win or lose, his body would give out on him—he could feel the machinery wearing to pieces, arthritic twinges, shortness of breath, dozing off in the middle of things and the termination of himself would be as undignified and lonely as that of every other human slob. Hero? What an all time laugh! p.43

Between the two sides, supposedly, are the Esper order, a group who have historically unleashed deadly ‘psi-blasts’ when their communities have been attacked. Although supposedly neutral they are controlled by extraterrestrials who are using their science of psychodynamics to control the future development of humanity to become a more peaceful species. However, the Espers eventually enter the fray in an exciting climactic battle south of San Francisco that is fought with a mixture of firearms, swords, cavalry, artillery and psi-blasts!
If you are looking for an entertaining old-fashioned read to lose yourself in for a couple of hours this one is recommended.
Another story of particular note in this issue is Green Magic by Jack Vance. This is a highly original fantasy about Howard Fair, who finds his great uncle’s journal and its descriptions of his experiments in purple and green magic. Although Fair is experienced in the cycles of white, black and purple magic he has never heard of green magic and starts researching the matter. His initial work affords him a short audience with a green sprite:

“What,” he asked, “is the green cycle like? What is its physical semblance?” The sprite paused to consider. Glistening mother-of-pearl films wandered across its face, reflecting the tinge of its thoughts. “I’m rather severely restricted by your use of the word ‘physical.’ And ‘semblance’ involves a subjective interpretation, which changes with the rise and fall of the seconds.”
“By all means,” Fair said hastily, “describe it in your own words.”
“Well—we have four different regions, two of which floresce from the basic skeleton of the universe, and so subsede the others. The first of these is compressed and isthiated, but is notable for its wide pools of mottle which we use sometimes for deranging stations. We’ve transplaned club-mosses from Earth’s Devonian and a few ice-fires from Perdition. They climb among the rods which we call devil-hair—” he went on for several minutes but the meaning almost entirely escaped Fair. And it seemed as if the question by which he had hoped to break the ice might run away with the entire interview. p.73-74

Needless to say Fast makes no progress, and the interview ends with his request to be taught green magic declined by the sprite as he bears Fast ‘no particular animosity.’
Fast continues his investigations, initially with a golem created from a miniature television camera, a beer-bottle top and graveyard clay, which he sends into the green realm. After the unintentional damage caused by the golem’s visit, two sprites petition Fast to desist, acceding to his request to learn green magic.
This is a strikingly original work. What is particularly impressive is the vastness and complexity of the fantastical world that Vance hints at but sparingly describes. As Avram Davidson says in his introduction:

We would like to know more about merrihews, sandestins, and magners, creatures benign and malignant which Jack Vance merely mentions in passing. We would like to know more about the Egg of Innocence, which [Howard] Fair broke open, disturbing among the Spiral towers. But it may be just as well that we do not. p.71

If I have one minor criticism it is that I found the ending a little weak, although it mordantly observes there are worse things in life than boredom and misery….
If two very good stories in one issue weren’t enough there are another three items that aren’t bad at all.
The Weremartini by Vance Aandahl, believe it or not, has a title that is an accurate description of the story’s narrator, a university professor who can change into a martini. During the story he sensuously describes the change process and goes on to detail the crush he has on one of the young students in his English class. He eventually (spoiler) uses his ‘gift’ to possess her, but not for the reasons you may think.
‘Tis the Season to Be Jelly by Richard Matheson would seem to be a post-holocaust story about hillbilly mutants who have parts of their bodies falling off:

Pa’s nose fell off at breakfast. It fell right into Ma’s coffee and displaced it. Prunella’s wheeze blew out the gut lamp.
“Land o’ goshen, dad,” Ma said, in the gloom, “If ya know’d it was ready t’plop whyn’t ya tap it off y’self?”
“Didn’t know,” said Pa.
“That’s what ya said the last time, Paw,” said Luke, choking on his bark bread.
Uncle Rock snapped his fingers beside the lamp. Prunella’s wheezing shot the flicker out.
“Shet off ya laughin’, gal,” scolded Ma. Prunella toppling off her rock in a flurry of stumps, spilling liverwort mush.
“Tarnation take it!” said Uncle Eyes.
“Well, combust the wick, combust the wick!” demanded Grampa who was reading when the light went out. Prunella wheezed, thrashing on the dirt.
Uncle Rock got sparks again and lit the lamp. p.107

As you can probably gather, the style and jocular ghastliness are the high points here.
Another Rib by Juanita Coulson and Marion Zimmer Bradley is one of Davidson’s ‘pushing the genre envelope’ stories, and he states in the introduction that the writers have ‘taken an admittedly daring theme and dealt with it in good sense and good taste.’ p.111
It tells of a sixteen man spaceship crew from Earth on another planet and a near immortal alien called Fanu who brings the Captain information showing our solar system has been destroyed in a nova. Later, after the men have started to come to terms with this disaster and have begun settling on the planet, Fanu mentions to the Captain it would be possible for him to convert some of the men into women. This (spoiler) is what eventually happens with three of them, the story ending with the difficult birth of the first child.
Some of the narrative concerns the Captain’s observations of his men, including some implied homosexual behaviour, but mostly it details his drama queen reactions to this and the sex-changes.

“Maybe we shouldn’t survive!” he snarled. ‘‘Wouldn’t it be more decent to die, die clean and human and what we were intended to be, than as some—some obscene imitation of—it’s not natural!” p.119

Nowadays his histrionics are more amusing than anything else, but I doubt this was the case in 1963. So, kudos to Davidson for publishing, and the writers for writing, a story about homosexuality and sex-change that wouldn’t have seen the light of day elsewhere.²
The rest of the stories are also-rans. Pushover Planet by Con Pederson is about a pair of prospectors who land on an alien planet and are met by a telepathic alien. When they go prospecting later on in spacesuits (spoiler) the alien misidentifies the pair as a threat and kills them. This is a gimmicky ending and I fail to see why Davidson was impressed with this story (in the introduction he makes a plea for the uncontactable writer to get in touch to get paid by his agent and to provide more material).³
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: LXIII by Reginald Bretnor is another pun, an OK one for a change, about an unusual planet and their radio transmission problems.
Bokko-Chan by Shinichi Hoshi is about a robot girl in a bar, an unrequited love, and has a neat twist end.

There is the usual non-fiction and also the six-monthly Index. In Books, Avram Davidson raves about Philip K. Dick’s The Man in a High Castle for two pages:

This is a remarkable book. Just how remarkable it is is little suggested by the basic premise, which is that the United States lost the Second World War. Other writers, such as Budrys and Kornbluth, have based stories on this notion, but in neither case was the story one of their best. If Mr. Dick ever writes anything better than this (indeed if he ever writes anything else as good), he deserves to take his place among the foremost in the field; how he has escaped my notice until now, I own to you I do not know. I don’t think he will elude me again. p.59

It surprised me that as of 1962-3, Davidson was unaware of Dick. Otherwise, it is another eclectic column which, once again, makes me feel that I don’t read (a) widely enough or (b) enough non-fiction.
Both the poems in this issue are fairly good: Starlesque by Walter H. Kerr is a fairly gruesome poem about a striptease that involves quasi-humans peeling parts off their body; There Are No More Good Stories About Mars Because We Need No More Good Stories About Mars by Brian W. Aldiss tells how succeeding generations of writers have portrayed Mars.
Finally, The Light That Failed! by Isaac Asimov is an article about the history of the measurement of the speed of light and how this came to prove the non-existence of an ‘ether’.

A highly recommended issue: two very good stories (including a Hugo winner) and three other good pieces (one taboo-breaking). ●

_____________________

1. This is what the cheapskates at Atlas Publishing did with the cover for the UK edition:

2.I was a little surprised that Coulson and Bradley’s story has never been reprinted. ISFDB link.

3. According to ISFDB it looks like they found him (another story was published years later). ●

_____________________

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Edited 19^th May 2018 to change the quote formatting, etc., and add the Galactic Journey review link.
Edited 8^th June 2019 to add the Admiral Ironbombs review link.

ISFDB link

Fiction:
Bright Phoenix • short story by Ray Bradbury ♥♥♥♥
To the Chicago Abyss • short story by Ray Bradbury ♥♥
Mrs. Pigafetta Swims Well • short story by Reginald Bretnor ♥♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: LXII • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton]
Newton Said • short story by Jack Thomas Leahy
Underfollow • short story by John Jakes ♥
Now Wakes the Sea • short story by J. G. Ballard ♥♥♥
Watch the Bug-Eyed Monster • short story by Don White ♥
Treaty in Tartessos • short story by Karen Anderson ♥
Niña Sol • short story by Felix Marti-Ibanez ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Joe Mugnaini
Interior artwork • Emsh
Introduction • essay by Avram Davidson
Bradbury: Prose Poet in the Age of Space • essay by William F. Nolan
Bradbury Film Wins Academy Award Nomination
An Index to Works of Ray Bradbury • bibliography by William F. Nolan
Books • by Avram Davidson
Just Mooning Around • essay by Isaac Asimov
Atomic Reaction • poem by Sharon Webb [as by Ron Webb]
No Trading Voyage • poem by Doris Pitkin Buck

I picked up this issue after reading The Fireman in a recent Galaxy as I discovered there were two other associational Fahrenheit 451 stories. One is The Pedestrian, which I’ll read shortly as it was published in the February 1952 F&SF; the other one is the first story in this special Ray Bradbury issue, Bright Phoenix.
Ray Bradbury’s introduction says it is:

“…a curiosity. I wrote it back in 1947-48 and it remained in my files over the years, going out only a few times to quality markets like Harper’s Bazaar or The Atlantic Monthly, where it was dismissed. It lay in my files and collected about it many ideas. These ideas grew large and became … Fahrenheit 451.” p.23

The story starts with Jonathan Barnes, the chief censor and book burner, arriving at the town library. Tom is the librarian who has to deal with him. After some verbal sparring between the pair Barnes’ black uniformed men start throwing books out of the windows to be burnt outside. Tom the librarian leaves for his lunch and convinces Barnes to come across to the café with him:

We crossed the green lawn where a huge portable Hell was drawn up hungrily, a fat black tar-daubed oven from which shot red-orange and gaseous blue flames into which men were shoveling the wild birds, the literary doves which soared crazily down to flop broken-winged, the precious flights poured from every window to thump the earth, to be kerosene-soaked and chucked in the gulping furnace. p.25-26

Once the pair are in the cafe and seated there are some odd exchanges with the staff:

Walter, the proprietor, strolled over, with some dog-eared menus. Walter looked at me. I winked. Walter looked at Jonathan Barnes. Walter said: “‘Come with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove.’”
“What?” Jonathan Barnes blinked.
“Call me Ishmael,” said Walter.
“Ishmael,” I said. ‘We’ll have coffee to start.’’ p.26

After these and subsequent exchanges, both in the cafe and on the street, and along with his puzzlement about the lack of resistance to the book-burnings Barnes realises (spoiler) that the townspeople have memorised all the books he is trying to burn:

“Do you think you can all fool me, me, me?”
I did not answer.
“How can you be sure,” he said, “I won’t burn people, as well as books?” p.28

Barnes eventually stops the operation and leaves.
This story is an elegantly written and brilliantly economical story that neatly encapsulates the book burning/censorship/living books aspects of Fahrenheit 451, and will be of interest to readers of both that book and The Fireman. As Avram Davidson notes, it is far from being just ‘a curiosity.’
The second Bradbury story, presumably written a decade and a half later isn’t bad but it illustrates the difference in quality between his early and later work. To the Chicago Abyss tells of an old man in a future society that has experienced Annihilation Day. The old man approaches people and reminds them of things lost:

“Raleighs,” said the old man. “Lucky Strikes.”
The young man stared at him.
“Kent. Kools. Marlboro,’’ said the old man, not looking at him. “Those were the names. White, red, amber packs grass-green, sky-blue, pure gold with the red slick small ribbon that ran around the top that you pulled to zip away the crinkly cellophane, and the blue government tax-stamp—”
“Shut up,’’ said the young man.
“Buy them in drug-stores, fountains, subways—”
“Shut up!” p.32

After the old man is physically assaulted another man takes him home and hides him when the secret police call. He suggests to the old man that it would be better to address several people at a time in private rather than strangers in public.
I wasn’t really convinced by the concept and the writing isn’t as good as in the first story.

The rest of this issue’s fiction highlights a couple of Avram Davidson’s irritating editorial characteristics: one is his overuse of so-called ‘humorous’ stories, the other overlong story introductions. The first of the stories probably falls into the former category. Mrs. Pigafetta Swims Well by Reginald Bretnor (Peninsula Spectator, Oct 23, 1959) is a too straightforward account of an Italian sailor who was formerly a singer, and a mermaid who keeps him captive and wants to marry him. He promises to buy her a new hat but on the shopping trip escapes to America. Or has he…?
Following hard on the heels of this is Mr Bretnor’s other contribution to the issue, the punning Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: LXII.
The next story is another light/humourous piece. Newton Said by Jack Thomas Leahy concerns an unhappy elf called Mr Peaseblossom: his son Newton has become a chemist. After several pages of Mr Peaseblossom’s spells going wrong he goes to a shrink and as a result decides to address matters with his son:

“Newton!” he shouted loudly into the darkness.
“I’m down in the lab, Dad,” his son’s voice came back to him. Mr. Peaseblossom hopped nimbly off the toadstool and made his way to Newton’s laboratory. “Dad!” Newton said. “You’re an Elf again.”
“Indeed,” Mr. Peaseblossom said. “I am an Elf again, full of magic and poetry. There are golden candlesticks on the moon.”
“Aw, dad,” Newton said. “Not that old stuff again.”
“All right! All right!” Mr. Peaseblossom roared at him. “You’re getting too big for your pants. The time has come to find out what’s what.”
“O.K.” Newton said. “What’s what?”
“A test, that’s what’s what,” Mr. Peaseblossom yelled. “A test between you and me to find out who’s boss around here.” p.63

During the contest Mr Peaseblossom (spoiler) fluffs another spell and Newton nukes his father.
The fourth entry in this laugh-riot is Underfollow by John Jakes. This one concerns a lobbyist on an alien planet:

Pendennis sighed. He was 45 and almost all fat. He sprawled before the solido set in his apartment near the rocket port. Every time a rocket fired off, the walls shook. Stinking fumes seeped under the door day and night. Still, Pendennis couldn’t live anywhere else. The blue men of Mica II discriminated against Earthies, considered them inferior since the Micans had conquered the Earthies a hundred years ago. They said they had a funny smell, too. p.66

He is required by his boss to improve the image of ‘Earthies’ by influencing the plot line of a popular Mican soap opera that portrays Earthmen as villains. The story is about how he wangles an appointment with the Culture Minister, and the solido episode which results. It improves a little towards the end (or maybe by that time I had just got used to the dreadful style) but initially reads like a 1950’s Galaxy reject. This story also illustrates Davidson’s introduction problem: this one is so long (200-250 words) it needs a title as the story itself starts over the page.

Now Wakes the Sea by J. G. Ballard is a welcome change of tone. This fantasy is about a man who, after an illness, starts to wake up in the night and see the town he lives in flooded by an imaginary sea, even though he is hundreds of miles inland. He notices that the sea is getting closer to the house every night. Later, while exploring, he sees a woman with silver hair on the headland and tries over the course of the next few nights to make his way towards her….
The writing style of this one is as polished as the first Bradbury story:

Again at night Mason heard the sounds of the approaching sea, the muffled thunder of the long breakers rolling up the nearby streets. Roused from his sleep, he ran out into the moonlight, where the white-framed houses stood like sepulchres among the washed concrete courts. Two hundred yards away the waves plunged and boiled, sluicing in and out across the pavement. A million phosphorescent bubbles seethed through the picket fences, and the broken spray filled the air with the wine-sharp tang of brine. p.76

After this one story respite there is Watch the Bug-Eyed Monster by Don White, of which Davidson says ‘it is funny’. This one tells of Zlat, an alien spaceship pilot who finds he can get drunk on water. He makes an unintended drunken arrival at a Sydney bar and gets talking to a female impersonator called Vernon/Valerie who tells him about, perhaps notably for the period, his unreliable boyfriends:

Valerie went on with his life story: “. . . and that was the end of Duncan, though I still wonder if he’ll ever come back, if only for his bell-bottoms and his Japanese camera. But then . . . then I met Desmond,” he sighed. “But, Zlat, he’s just like all the others. He doesn’t understand me. Why, I even have reason to believe that tonight,” he broke down long enough to swallow a Pink Lady whole and scatter more water on the almost delirious-with-joy Zlat, “tonight be may be out with a . . . a WOMAN!” p.88

Meanwhile Zlat spills the beans to Vernon about an upcoming alien invasion.
I disliked this one to begin with but warmed to it a little on the way through. Part of the problem is that this is the fifth story with a light/humorous style. None of them are particularly good at it, and most don’t have other story skills (plot, style, etc.) to pull them through.
Treaty in Tartessos by Karen Anderson is a fantasy-historical about a man and a centaur meeting to try to agree terms that will end a war between their peoples. Apart from a finish you can see coming from a mile off (about a continent that will be given to the centaurs as a homeland) it doesn’t help that the conversation is conducted in modern vernacular. On one page you can read “The boys found a couple of dead . . . uh, buffalo, after the battle, and we had a fine barbecue” and “I got to admit you gave us a good fight today, for all you’re such lightweights,” the centaur said. Or, “We could lick any two of them with our eyes shut.”

The last story is Niña Sol by Felix Marti-Ibanez. This is a fantasy that takes place on the high altitude plateaus of Peru, where an artist meets an writer who is there for the yellow light. After several days of painting he recounts a tale to the writer about the golden girl he has met, a remnant from Inca times who appears to be a spirit of the sun. He eventually determines to follow her to her world.

“At first I thought she was a statue. My eyes were so blinded by the sun, which reverberated on the hill and on the house as on a mirror, that I barely saw her silhouette. But after a while, with my hands shading my eyes, I was able to see her quite clearly. She was almost a child, dressed in a sleeveless waist and a short skirt which glistened as if made of gold. At first I thought she was wearing a helmet on her head, but then I realized that it was her blond hair on which the sun broke into myriad luminous sparks. But what left me spellbound was her skin. I cannot give you even a remote idea of the color of her arms, her bare legs, her face. They were of the same golden shade as the paradise that surrounded her, but with a gossamer quality, a transparency, an iridescence, that was not of this earth. It was as if she were standing on a blazing throne of gold and she herself was made of such fiery gold as mortal eyes are not meant to look at and retain their sight.” p.120

As previously mentioned this is a special Ray Bradbury issue, the second of a number of such issues that F&SF would publish (the most recent David Gerrold one just appeared). As a consequence of this it incorporates several articles apart from the fiction. The cover of Ray Bradbury himself is by Joe Mugnaini, and incorporates scenes from The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and several short stories (Uncle Einar, Skeleton, A Season of Calm Weather). There is a fulsome Introduction by Avram Davidson which is followed by an good article by William F. Nolan, Bradbury: Prose Poet in the Age of Space. This is full of quotable bits but I’ll limit myself to one anecdote from when Bradbury was still trying to break into the professional magazines:

“During this period I began haunting the doorsteps of the local professionals, many of whom belonged to the club,” says Ray. “I was desperate to learn the secrets of the pros, and would pop up with a new story nearly every week which I passed around for criticism and advice from Hank Kuttner to Leigh Brackett to Ed Hamilton to Bob Heinlein to Ross Rocklynne to Jack Williamson to Henry Hasse, all of whom were incredibly kind and patient with me and with these dreadful early efforts. In fact, the above-named authors grew lean and rangy from countless flights through the rear exits of walk-up apartments when Bradbury would suddenly appear at the front door with a new manuscript in his teeth.” p.14

Bradbury Film Wins Academy Award Nomination is a short note about an Oscar nomination for Icarus Montgolfier Wright, an 18 minute semi-animated film based on Bradbury’s story and 200 tempera paintings by Joe Mugnaini, the cover artist. Bradbury co-wrote the screenplay with George Clayton Johnson.¹
William F. Nolan’s bibliography, An Index to Works of Ray Bradbury, would have been, as I have pointed out about this kind of thing before, a great boon back in the days before the internet. Even now, I found it quite an interesting read as it gives the story titles alongside their first magazine or book publication (to get this on ISFDB you have to click the story title, so looking at this kind of thing there would be quite tiresome).
What I noticed was that Bradbury wrote about twenty-two or so stories for Weird Tales from 1942-48 and then he stops. However, he still sells to other pulps for next couple of years before transitioning to the slicks in the early fifties. In the previously mentioned period he sold eleven stories each to Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, and then sold them another three and seven respectively in the next couple of years. But nothing to Weird Tales….
There is a short Books column by Avram Davidson this issue. He admits to not finishing Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars and says:

If this book will bring young girls to read SF, hurray. But your middle-aged, fatherly editor, though he concedes the author’s dexterity, is simply incapable of identifying with a space-kitten who uses expletives like “Dirty ears! Hangnails! Snel-frockey! Spit! and Dandruffl” and what’s more, he ain’t going to try. Not any more than he has, anyway. Snel-frockey, indeed. p.98

Just Mooning Around by Isaac Asimov is an interesting essay in which he works out the relative magnitude of the sun’s gravitational attraction for the moons of the solar system’s planets relative to their primary. He works out the distances of the zone where moons can exist (between the point where the sun wins the tug of war, and the Roche limit, where tidal forces would break the moon up). Our moon turns out to be the exception to his calculations, so he posits a boundary condition where a ‘double planet’ can be formed.
This article won’t be for everyone as it starts off with formulae and number crunching but, notwthstanding this, the essay could do without Davidsons’ irrelevant and ultimately patronising introduction where he says:

The alchemists, gentlemen and scholars to a man (. . . well . . . almost to a man. There was the case of that cad, Dr. Dee. However, de mortuis nil desperandum.)—the alchemists referred to the Relation between the Moon and the Sun, as well as that between silver and gold, as The Fair White Maiden Wedded to the Ruddy Man. Isn’t that beautiful?
However, the alchemists don’t seem to be writing like they used to, so, faux de mieux, here is our very own Dr. A. once more, who does manage to bring up one or two interesting points, once you get past all those numbers. p.100²

I think that should possibly be ‘faute de mieux’: for want of a better alternative.
There are two OK poems: Atomic Reaction by Sharon Webb, a limerick, and the two page long No Trading Voyage by Doris Pitkin Buck, which is about humans captured as slaves freeing themselves and returning to Earth via a planet inhabited by plants and insects. Finally there are a couple of pieces of internal art. One is an odd drawing of a fractured head at the bottom of p.85 by Emsh; the other on p.90 looks like a doodle and is uncredited.

A worthwhile issue for the Bradbury material, the J. G. Ballard story and Asimov’s article but otherwise an irritating entry.

1. Icarus Montgolfier Wright is a rather monochromatic film but worth a look. It is available on YouTube. I looked up ‘tempera’: ‘a permanent, fast-drying painting medium consisting of colored pigments mixed with a water-soluble binder medium (usually a glutinous material such as egg yolk or some other size).’
2. I don’t think there was much love lost between Asimov and Davidson: When [Robert P. Mills] retired as editor in 1962 and was replaced by Avram Davidson, almost the first thing Avram did was to let me know that he didn’t wish to be called the “Kindly Editor.”
   There was no danger of that. Avram was a class-A writer, but he was a cantankerous individual I would never think of as “kindly.” Isaac Asimov: I, Asimov: A Memoir, Chapter 83.

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Fiction:
Interloper • novelette by Poul Anderson ♥♥
More Than Skin Deep • short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥
The Last Séance • short story by Agatha Christie ♥♥
The Devil Was Sick • short story by Bruce Elliott ♥
Through Channels • short story by Richard Matheson ♥♥♥
Brightness Falls from the Air • short story by Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright] ♥♥♥
The Mathematical Voodoo • short story by H. Nearing, Jr. ♥♥♥
Extending the Holdings • short story by Donald A. Wollheim [as by David Grinnell] ♥
Miss Frost • short story by Christopher Wood ♥♥
The Other End • short story by R. Ellis Roberts ♥♥♥+
The Hill • short story by George P. Elliott [as by George Paul Elliott] ♥♥
Narapoia • short story by Alan Nelson ♥
Larroes Catch Meddlers • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by George Salter
Recommended Reading • by The Editors

Having repeatedly spoken about my dislike of George Salter’s covers let me start off by saying that I think this one is all right. Looking ahead, several more also look to be more to my taste.

Although there is one story less in this issue than last month’s there is a lot more wordage due to the increase in the number of lines per page from thirty-five to forty-one.¹ Leading off this generous portion of fiction is a novelette by Poul Anderson, Interloper. In this an individual called Beoric lands on Earth and is met by a reptilian alien from Sirius. He is then taken by car to a spaceship disguised as a building where several other species of aliens are located. They are stationed there on behalf of their different planets to control the exploitation of Earth, and their council is controlled by a Denebian called Kane. Beoric is subsequently questioned by Kane, and the former is simultaneously in secret telepathic communication with others of his kind who are coming to attack the council and liberate Earth.
For the first half this isn’t too bad, and some of the writing is better than the equivalent type of tale in Planet Stories might have had:

He sat in silence. The car wound smoothly through darkened streets where only the dull-yellow lamps and an occasional furtive movement in the shadows and alleys had life. It was near the ebb time of the great city’s life; it slept like a sated beast under the sinking moon.
The fields and woods, hills and waters and sky, never slept. There was always life, a rustle of wings, a pattering of feet, a gleam of eyes out of the night, there was always the flowing tide of nervous energy, wakeful, alert. Life like a sea beyond the city, and Beoric had never been really alone.
Until now. But the city slept, and there was nothing wild to run in the fields and leap in the moonlit waters. Beoric’s straining mind sensed a few rodents scuttering in the ground, a slinking cat or two, the threadlike nervous impulses of insects fluttering around the one-eyed street lamps. Now and again there would be a human thought, someone wakeful—and the thought seemed to echo in the vast hollow silence of the city, it was alone, alone. p.12

Unfortunately the last part has too much of the various characters talking at each other, and (spoiler) the revelation that Beoric’s race is a parallel evolutionary spices of nocturnal Earth life isn’t really credible. And that isn’t helped when they are also identified as Elves….

More Than Skin Deep by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt starts off the fantasy with another Gavaghan’s bar story. This one is a typically too-straightforward story about a woman getting divorced and another woman in the bar who knows why. The divorcee (spoiler) got a beauty treatment from someone that sounds like a witch and the treatment only lasts three weeks or so. Once the attraction wears off so do the husbands.
The fantasy continues in the next two stories. The Last Séance by Agatha Christie (Ghost Stories, November 1926) tells of Raoul visiting his fiancé Simone. She is a medium and has agreed to one final séance for Madame Exe, who wants to speak to her dead child. The final scene (spoiler) is set up reasonably well: the child materialises and Madame Exe takes her leaving the medium dead and her body shrunken due to ectoplasm loss.
The Devil Was Sick by Bruce Elliott is a rather odd story about a man called Acleptos who needs to complete a thesis in the far future to join a woman off-planet. He eventually finds a subject that no-one has submitted before: summoning the devil. After some research the summoning is successfully achieved, at which point the devil attempts to satisfy Acleptos’s possible desires. Acleptos isn’t having any of this and (spoiler) the devil is frozen by a force gun and carted off to the insane asylum where, after treatment, he turns into an angel and departs. This is interesting for its proto-Will You Wait² tone but is an odd and unsuccessful mix of story elements.

Breaking this issue out of its humdrum start is a nice little chiller by Richard Matheson. Through Channels takes the form of a police interview transcript in which they question a young boy. He has been to the movies and has then found something awful when he has returned home, where his parents were supposed to be watching TV with friends…
Brightness Falls from the Air by Margaret St. Clair is another one of her pseudonymous ‘Iris Seabright’ stories, and is the subject of a title naming competition (the title given is simply a ‘?’, and readers are invited to complete the coupon to enter the contest for a prize of a hundred bucks³).
This story tells of a man called Kerr who works in the Identification Bureau/mortuary on an alien planet. A lot of the bodies they keep in their ‘pool’ are of bird-people who conduct huge aerial battles for the entertainment of humans. One day a female turns up to claim a body and Kerr later becomes emotionally involved with her. He eventually walks her home and, after hearing about the problems of her people, tries to get them their own territory on a new colony planet. He fails. Matters (spoiler) take an even worse turn when she disappears, eventually turning up in the pool….
I don’t know if I am missing the point here—is this a metaphor for race problems of a 1950’s America? Whatever, it is a more serious and weighty piece than typical for the time, and works as a mood piece if nothing else.
In an earlier issue I said I didn’t care much for H. Nearing’s The Poetry Machine and noted, with some apprehension, that it was the first in a long series of stories. Initially I thought the second of his ‘C. P. Ransom’ stories, The Mathematical Voodoo, was going the same way but it turned out much better. That said it starts with a rather ridiculous plot maguffin. Professor Ransom has a student that is particularly bad at maths, a fact he demonstrates to his colleague Professor MacTate in a meeting with said student. They discuss solutions to the problem:

MacTate rubbed his chin. “Perhaps if there were some way of giving him confidence—You know. A simple formula of some sort that he could memorize and apply to various sorts of problems.”
Ransom studied his protege and shook his head judiciously. “A rabbit’s foot would work better.”
MacTate smiled. “You mean something on the order of a football player’s talisman?”
“I’ve seen it work.” Ransom looked at Finchell.
Following his colleague’s glance, MacTate noticed that Finchell’s eyes were shining with a strange eagerness. He hastened to dispel the boy’s unseemly interest in this turn of the conversation. “Now, Ransom. Next you’ll be tutoring a wax doll containing his fingernail clippings. Voodoo, or whatever it is.”
Ransom turned to him with an expression that matched Finchell’s. “What did you say?” p.64

The development of this idea is fairly well done and, after Ransom tutors the wax doll he has made, Finchell soon becomes a mathematical prodigy. The story is also helped by its occasional wit, such as when the professors try to track down a University janitor:

From the Director of Maintenance, they went to the Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, the Supplies Coordinator, the Foreman Janitor, and the Assistant in Charge of Washrooms and Waste—and finally found the emptier of Ransom’s wastebasket filling soap containers in the School of Business Administration. He was a wiry man of indeterminate age. p.73

Extending the Holdings by Donald A. Wollheim tells of a journey to the moon in the time of President Cleveland (1885-89, 1893-97). The vehicle used is an airtight wooden box, caulked with tar and encased in a sphere of wires which propel it upwards. However, the brother of the inventor has kept a vital piece of information from him. The revelation of this at the end of the story may raise a half-smile, or not.
Miss Frost by Christopher Wood is about a man who returns to his childhood house and starts to remember a nanny he had when he was a young boy. When the nanny was having her bath he would sneak into her room and look at a locket she wore. Inside were pictures of two dogs that, as he stared at them, gave way to a vision of the garden, and (spoiler) one in particular that showed the nanny changing into a dog. The idea is fairly routine so perhaps best read for its classic British horror mood.

The next story is perhaps the highlight of the entire issue and illustrates one of the strengths of the magazine in this period: a little known but worthy reprint from a writer outside the field. The Other End by R. Ellis Roberts (The Other End, 1923) is one of only nine stories by this writer, and it is about a gentleman who becomes a tutor for a boy called Terence. The gentleman’s employer is Sir Humphry, and it becomes apparent that the boy is being regularly flogged by him for his Papist beliefs and because of a suspicion that he is lecherous and deceitful. What is actually happening is that Terence is meeting with a supernatural ‘Her’ who has been promising to take him to ‘Other End’.
These events are narrated by the tutor. His memoir of these events shows him to be a self-important, snobbish, judgemental and religiously bigoted individual:

My mother had hoped I would take Holy Orders: but two things deterred me. I am a man of exceptional intellect and great critical ability, and I could not quite make the Articles of the Church tally with what I saw was reasonable. p.89

Sir Humphrey’s manner was excellent; his table was exceptionally good, and his cellar stocked with real taste—though I could not agree with his overvaluation of the Burgundy of 1900 against that of 1904: and when I retired that evening I congratulated myself on my unerring sense in finding a house where the work promised to be light, the society that of gentlefolk, and the remuneration more than the pittance so often given to men in my position. p.94

The windows of my bedroom, to which I was conducted by a maid-servant of unnecessary plainness, looked out over an undulating and considerable stretch of parkland. p.91

His mother was a Papist and his father belonged to that malicious party in the Church of England which is indistinguishable in its devices and devotions from the Roman Catholic heresy. By a providential dispensation, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Burke left any will or appointed any guardians or trustees: so Sir Humphrey, in taking the child to his house, felt at complete liberty to ignore the parents’ superstition, and brought Terence up as a sound Protestant. p.91-92

I initially disliked this character until it quickly became apparent that the story is actually a mordant black comedy—I should have paid more attention to the introduction where the editors say that it is ‘related by one of the most skilfully sketched self-damning fools in the English short story.’ This effect is particularly well accomplished, and if his book was available I would grab a copy.⁴

The Hill by George P. Elliott⁵ (Pacific, 1948) is a strange piece about a society of Great Heads, Great Bellys, Fighters and Workers, and how the discovery of large circular blades changes the nature of their society:

I observed that the blades had an unsuspected effect upon the Workers and Fighters. The Workers seemed fascinated by the blades and yet suspicious; they would investigate the entire apparatus time and again, yet when they went through the outlets where the blades were ready to be projected at the smallest sign of danger they always hurried and eyed the dark slot askance. The Fighters, who of course operated the mechanism, liked the thing very much. Yet they showed signs of an odd restlessness now that the Hill was as nearly safe as it could be made. p.105

This has its own internal logic but is somewhat mystifying: perhaps it should perhaps be viewed as a self-contained vision rather than a story. It reminded me of the kind of piece you would sometimes find in Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies or the later issues of New Worlds.
Narapoia by Alan Nelson (What’s Doing, 1948) starts off quite well with a therapist and a patient who has the opposite of a number of conditions: he thinks he is following someone, he feels people are trying to do well by him, etc. At the second session the therapist ends up telling the patient all about his problems. Unfortunately it goes downhill from there.
The issue closes with a piece of spooky Americana from Manly Wade Wellman. Larroes Catch Meddlers tells how Crouton and Purdy have come to a deserted house in South Carolina where they think the Confederate gold evacuated from Richmond at the end of the Civil War has been hidden. They find an old man there who claims to be a descendant of the owners and, under duress, he tells them there is no entrance to the cellar: it was sealed along with two of his uncles as guards…. However, when Purdy lights his hand of glory—the hand of a hanged man treated in its own fats—an entrance is revealed. ⁶

The only non-fiction, apart from the title contest, is the book review column. Rather than the usual capsule reviews there is an interesting essay that weighs in against the mislabelling of recent collections, fix-ups, etc. as novels by various publishers, before going on to mention the high spots of the publishing year. It concludes with a two and a half page list of the best books of 1950.

Overall, and in spite of the variable quality, I found this an interesting issue.

1. This six extra lines is equivalent to increasing the size of the magazine to one hundred and fifty pages. It’s hard to tell from the scanned copies I have, but I think they have accomplished this by dropping the type size by one point, and maybe reducing the margin size top and bottom.
2. Will You Wait? by Alfred Bester, F&SF March, 1959.
3. I couldn’t come up with a decent title, and in any event I would have been too late.
4. There isn’t much information about R. Ellis Roberts on the web but there is this. His ISFDB page is here.
5. Elliot’s career seems to have consisted of an associational novel and a dozen stories. Ten of them were collected in Among the Dangs (1960)—a handful would also appear in F&SF. A later story appeared in Edges, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin & Virginia Kidd (1980). His ISFDB page is here.
6. The introduction asks readers about the meaning and origin of the word ‘Larroes’. There is some information here.

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