ISFDB link

Fiction:
John the Revelator • short story by Oliver La Farge ♥
One of the Family • short story by Reginald Bretnor ♥♥
Temporarily at Liberty • short story by Lawrence Goldman ♥
Journey • short story by Gene Hunter ♥♥
The One Who Waits • reprint short story by Ray Bradbury ♥♥♥
My Brother’s Wife • short story by Wilson Tucker ♥♥
The Friendly Demon • reprint short story by Daniel Defoe
The Roommate • short story by Graves Taylor ♥
No-Sided Professor • reprint short story by Martin Gardner ♥♥♥+
Barney • short story by Will Stanton ♥♥♥+
Fearsome Fable • short story by Bruce Elliott
The Railway Carriage • reprint short story by F. Tennyson Jesse ♥♥♥+
Time Tourist • short story by Thomas A. Meehan [as by Maurice Murphy] ♥
Episode of the Perilous Talisman • short story by C. Daly King [as by Jeremiah Phelan] ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by George Salter
Recommended Reading • by the Editors
The Kraken • poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson
More—And Still More! • by the Editors

After the brief respite of a Bonestell cover last month we are back to the peculiar offerings of George Salter. Moving swiftly on, this first bimonthly issue starts with a story from the 1930 Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Laughing Boy, a novel of Navajo life which the editors refer to as ‘an American Classic’ in their introduction. Contributors such as this from outside of the SF field would be a continuing characteristic of the magazine.
John the Revelator is a Cold War inspired story about rival supercomputers. One of the newest American computers is ‘sleeping’ while a chaplain prays nearby. Subsequently, it and the other supercomputers start inserting religious text in amongst the equation solutions they provide:

Luke added a contribution of his own to a problem looking to a vastly improved guided missile. At the end of his solutions he printed numbers which when decoded made another Greek sentence followed by four figures. Translated, the passage read, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. 23:34.” The numbers referred to the chapter and verse in St. Luke. p.9

Relations between the nations of the world improve for a period as the computers shame mankind into better behaviour. However (spoiler) it isn’t long before man is back to his old ways. The story’s initially somewhat naive view about the effect that computer preaching would have on world affairs makes it a little unconvincing, but this aspect probably appealed to Boucher’s devout Catholicism.¹
There are another half-dozen or so SF stories in this issue, the overall standard of which is probably higher than the fantasy. Journey by Gene Hunter has an introduction which states:

It took the fresh approach of Gene Hunter to reveal that the trip through time might, in a perfectly normal and convincing manner, occur on a streetcar. And with the same fresh realism, Mr. Hunter describes time travel in terms, not of tomorrow’s galaxies, but of today’s Suburbia, not of the lntertemporal Patrol, but of thirteen-year-old Bobby Holcomb. This is a story which brings you no time-travel marvels of another age, past or future —only the quietly perturbing realization of what an encounter with your self-at-another-time-point might mean. p.25

That pretty much summarises the story. A thirteen-year-old boy meets his future self who is doing a job he doesn’t like and has a wife he doesn’t want to be with. He tells the boy to remember the poor choices he made when he goes back to the past. It’s competently done but perhaps most noteworthy for being an attempt at using fantastical SF ideas on a personal level.
The One Who Waits by Ray Bradbury (The Arkham Sampler, Summer 1949) is an eerie tale set on Mars. An alien entity in a deep well senses a spaceship from Earth land nearby. When they come to the well it rises and possesses one of the men:

I nod my head and it is good to nod. It is good to do several things after ten thousand years. It is good to breathe the air and it is good to feel the sun in the flesh deep and going deeper and it is good to feel the structure of ivory, the fine skeleton hidden in the warming flesh, and it is good to hear sounds much clearer and more immediate than they were in the stone deepness of a well. I sit enchanted. p.36

I liked this but the final scene made me wonder about the rationale behind this creature’s behaviour.
In the next story I recognised the name of Martin Gardner from the puzzles he produced for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the 70s and 80s. I hadn’t realised that he also wrote fiction. No-Sided Professor (Esquire, January 1947) would seem to be an accomplished writing debut as well as the first of two ‘Dr Stanislav Slapernarski’ stories. It has an excellent opening hook:

Dolores—a tall, black-haired stripteaser at Chicago’s Purple Hat Club stood in the center of the dance floor and began the slow gyrations of her Cleopatra number, accompanied by soft Egyptian music from the Purple Hatters. The room was dark except for a shaft of emerald light that played over her filmy Egyptian costume and smooth, voluptuous limbs.
A veil draped about her head and shoulders was the first to be removed. Dolores was in the act of letting it drift gracefully to the floor when suddenly a sound like the firing of a shotgun came from somewhere above and the nude body of a large man dropped head first from the ceiling. He caught the veil in mid-air with his chin and pinned it to the floor with a dull thump.
Pandemonium reigned. p.74

It goes on to tell a superior story about a group of topologists who assemble at a meeting of the Moebius club to hear a talk on ‘non-lateral surfaces’ from a visiting Polish professor. This story is probably the highlight of the issue.
Once again, the editors’ introduction to Barney by Will Stanton provides a better description than I can:

The experimental biologist who overreaches himself belongs to the oldest traditions of science fiction, the documentary diary form to the oldest traditions of English fiction itself. P.84

The biologist and an animal subject called Barney—who has had his intelligence increased—are on an island and are engaged in a battle of wits that ends with a clever twist ending.
The final two SF pieces are slight, forgettable stuff. Fearsome Fable by Bruce Elliott is a forgettable three-paragraph squib that concerns fifteen apes in front of typewriters, each of who type out a single word.
Time Tourist by Thomas A. Meehan is more a notion than a story with its tale of a time traveller from 5050 who has a verbal sparring match with a young girl. The last short section seems to end quite abruptly.

The half-dozen fantasy pieces are all quite traditional stuff this time around with nothing like Howard Schoenfeld’s Build Up Logically from a couple of issues ago; two or three are ghost stories. One of the Family by Reginald Bretnor could be described as one of the latter although it is arguable that the ending makes it SF. A woman lives in fear of a mirror:

The mirror hung beyond the stairs, high on the wall above the spinet-desk, where it could not see Miss Graes, where she did not need to pass it to reach the echoing, empty rooms in which she lived. For a while, long after her father’s death, she had locked it away, face downward and closely hooded in many layers of brown paper, as though the woman who had cheated her might use it as an entrance-way. And might she not?—Miss Graes had asked herself—might guilt not rouse her in her stolen grave, send her across the gap of time and death, vengefully? p.15

As Miss Graes talks to a companion it appears that her father had adopted a girl who, after she died, was buried with the her father, using up the remaining space in the grave. The woman fears the adopted girl coming through the mirror for her.
The ending perplexed me until I reread a previous part and realised (spoiler) the final scene loops back to a couple of lines (in a page of rambling dialogue) referring to the time when the orphaned girl was found. I don’t think Bretnor helps the reader much here, so my advice is to pay attention when reading this one.
Temporarily at Liberty by Lawrence Goldman probably isn’t even fantasy. It is a slight story about a stage magician in hard times who turns to shoplifting from a large department store, and could probably be passed off as a mainstream piece.
My Brother’s Wife by Wilson Tucker is another entry for my ‘Sweary SF’ series due to the use of the word ‘bugger’ on p.45. It is a hard-boiled crime-type story about a gangster who has two brothers, the elder in a mental institution and the younger married to a far Eastern woman the gangster has never seen. As there seems to be a link between the brother’s insanity and the wife, the gangster investigates and discovers the woman had a different physical appearance in the three previous locations the couple lived.
The resolution (spoiler) reveals the obvious answer that she is a shape shifter, but it leaves various other questions unanswered: why was the brother driven to insanity; why did the woman refuse to ever meet the gangster; why would the gangster kill her when he finds out what she is; how did the younger brother become a similar kind of creature? It is OK up to the final scene but it ends up as one of those pieces that collapses under the weight of its set-up.
I have no idea why the editors thought it a good idea to reprint The Friendly Demon by Daniel Defoe (a chapter titled The Devil Frolics with a Butler from The Friendly Demon, 1726). The events in this story about a butler plagued by spirits seem to be completely arbitrary, and the story’s age and consequent style doesn’t make for an easy read:

The Lord Orrery, hearing of the strange passages, for his further satisfaction of the truth thereof, sent for the butler, with leave of his master, to come and continue some days and nights at his house, which, in obedience to his lordship, the servant did accordingly. Who after his first night’s bedding there, reported to the earl in the morning that his specter had again been with him and assured him that on that very day he should be spirited away, in spite of all the measures that could possibly be taken to prevent it. Upon which he was conducted into a large room, with a considerable number of holy persons to defend him from the assaults of Satan, among whom was the famous stroker of bewitched persons, Mr. Greatrix, who lived in the neighborhood, and knew, as may be presumed, how to deal with the devil as well as anybody. Besides, several eminent quality were present in the house; among the rest, two bishops, all waiting the wonderful event of this unaccountable prodigy. p.55

In the introduction to The Roommate by Graves Taylor the editors comment that the story:

…represents a tradition in American supernatural writing apart from either the Gothic overstatement of Poe and Lovecraft or the naturalistic understatement of O’Brien and Bierce. The true Jamesian fantasy is one of psychological indirection, a story in which hinted-at supernatural forces serve to illuminate the crannies of the protagonist’s mind. p.61

I’ve never really thought about this as I’m not a big reader of horror (bar Stephen King), but I recognise that latter category (which I presume would include the likes of Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell) as one that I’ve never really got on with, Ballardian inner space horror stories if you will. Unfortunately, that continues with this story.
In this piece a spinster starts to sense that the ambience of her bedroom has changed, and she subsequently finds an impression of a head in the pillow next to hers when she wakes in the morning. The story describes three areas of the woman’s life: her servant Dora and Dora’s husband Lamb; her dead sister and previous suitors; a physical change in her appearance and weight. While readable and atmospheric enough, the ending made no particular sense. There is a vague impression of repressed sexuality, but otherwise I have no idea what this one is about.
The Railway Carriage by F. Tennyson Jesse (The Strand, November 1931) is one of the writer’s ‘Solange’ stories. Solange is a lady detective who has ‘an extra spiritual sense that warns her of evil’, which sometimes aides and other times frustrates her in the elucidation of crimes. The first half of this story is set in a third class carriage of a train that she shares with two other people, a quiet old lady and a somewhat odd man. Solange notes a strange atmosphere in the carriage, one that became apparent when the man joined them at the second stop. Subsequently the three of them are joined by a few local farmers and a lawyer’s clerk, and an interesting conversation begins about a young man who has been hanged that morning for cutting the throat of a love-rival.
The original three passengers are left in the train after this group disembark, and the train continues on only to be involved in an accident. When Solange comes to consciousness, there is a young man above her saying she needs to get out of the carriage as the train is on fire.
The rest of the action neatly ties together all the elements that have been established. The young man (spoiler) tells her to wake the odd man and tell him they need a rope to get the old woman out of the carriage. The man, once roused and having climbed out of the carriage, tells Solange to look in his bag where she discovers a hangman’s noose. There are a couple of further wrinkles to this clever and engrossing story, and the editors also include an afterword:

In granting us permission to reprint this story, Miss Jesse wrote: “The only crab to it is this: I thought it was such a good idea that, although knowing it was incorrect and that in England hangmen don’t carry their ropes around with them in little over-night hags, I couldn’t resist writing it. It is the only time I have ever committed the crime of being incorrect and I got a long letter from a barrister and one from a prison governor informing me that the rope is always kept in the prison where executions take place and is laid up in vaseline to keep it supple. So I wrote back very humbly and said I knew I had been wrong, but it was such a good idea that I was afraid I had been unable to resist it. I do hope you don’t mind this lack of correctness.” If “the crime of being incorrect” could he regularly guaranteed to produce such results as this, we’d establish an editorial tabu against accuracy! p.101

I have to agree: it is an enjoyable story, to the point that I am curious as to whether The Solange Stories (Macmillan, 1931) are worth acquiring.
Episode of the Perilous Talisman by C. Daly King is, after an unnecessary page or so of previous series-story waffle, an interesting Egyptian artefact fantasy about a box that kills people when opened. A politician with nefarious motives brings the box to an expert called Tarrant. The latter is a Sherlock Holmes style character who understands most things and knows all the questions to ask if he doesn’t.
It eventually materialises (spoiler) that the politician wants to use the box as a cover for murdering his wife. When Tarrant opens it and survives, he lies to the politician to lure him into doing the same, which eventually leads to his death. What is actually inside the box is a special kind of mirror that gives the observer an elemental and traumatic reflection of themselves.

The non-fiction is minimal as per usual. The Recommended Reading column by The Editors starts with a quick stab at definitions:

Many anthologists and magazine editors, and even some readers, make quite a serious to-do about drawing a precise line between science fiction and the rest of imaginative literature. As you know, we’ve never felt the tremendous importance of the distinction; and only in this review department have we tried to draw any line of demarcation between science fiction and fantasy.
But if the line is to be drawn, we feel strongly that it should come at a different point than the usual one. Extrapolation of probable science, as practised notably by Heinlein and by a few other authors such as de Camp and Simak, can be legitimately called science fiction; space-warps, galactic drives, BEMs and time machines are as purely fantasy as werewolves or vampires. p.58

After praising Theodore Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels, they go onto cover a number of books including these two, which I have never heard of:

Elizabeth Cadell’s delightful Brimstone in the Garden (Morrow) is a charming (if faintly snobbish) picture of a tiny English village subjected to a summer’s haunting by two soul-catching demons and a wistful ghost.
These are really demons of good-will who manage, with just a touch of mild malice, to solve everyone’s problems and bring about a generally happy ending. Robert Coates’s Here Today (Macmillan) is an exasperating novel of current English life and time travel. The fantasy is weak and confused; the non-fantasy is, while undisciplined, profoundly moving. p.59

They weren’t as impressed as Groff Conklin (Galaxy, December 1950) with Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C41+, calling it ‘unreadable as a novel’.
There is also a poem, The Kraken by Lord Alfred Tennyson, and a short note about next issue’s contents, More—And Still More!:

Beginning with our next issue, we’re adding close to 10,000 words to our contents!
Our problem all along has been that of a small keg of dynamite looking for a place to explode. Right now we’re loaded with stories both rich and strange, and we’ve been wondering unhappily how we could possibly bring them all to you. This new extra space is the big solution! For one thing, it makes possible the use of longer novelets, possibly up to 20,000 words, such as we never thought we could run; or we could instead keep the contents much as they are and add a short novelet of around 10,000 words, or perhaps two extra short stories.
What do you think? We have an especially warm feeling for readers who speak up about their likes and dislikes, and we’d be enormously pleased to receive a flood of letters telling us how you would like to see us use our new space. We can be reached anytime at 2643 Dana St., Berkeley 4, California.

In conclusion I’d say that this issue seems to be a good example of what the magazine is at the moment: a dozen or so stories that are a good mix of reprint and new material, and of SF and fantasy and horror, with perhaps three of four of them particularly noteworthy.

1. Boucher’s religion is referred to here: Teller of Weird Tales.

Fiction:
Take Two Quiggies • novelette by Kris Neville ♥
The Better Mousetrap • short story by L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt ♥
The Listening Child • short story by Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright] ♥♥♥+
Process • short story by A. E. van Vogt ♥♥
The Wondersmith • reprint novelette by Fitz-James O’Brien ♥♥♥+
The Angel With Purple Hair • short story by Herb Paul ♥♥
The Well-Oiled Machine • short story by H. B. Fyfe ♥
Another Chance for Casey • reprint short story by Larry Siegel ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Chesley Bonestell
Review: Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard • review by C. Daly King, Ph.D.
Recommended Reading • by The Editors
Index to Volume One, Fall 1949–December 1950

This month’s fiction starts with Kris Neville’s rather rambling novelette, Take Two Quiggies. This story tells of an alien race that has a restricted trade arrangement with humanity due to an undescribed incident. One of the items the aliens are allowed to trade is an animal called a quiggi (or kwiggi) which is short, green, bipedal and attractively clumsy. They also (spoiler) have an eight day gestation period. After they have been sold to a number of people the inevitable happens: a proto The Trouble With Tribbles I guess.
This overlong tale is told from a number of viewpoints: diplomats, businessmen, reporters, military men, etc., but this does not disguise its essential slightness.
The other novelette in this issue is a reprint. The Wondersmith by Fitz-James O’Brien (Atlantic Monthly, October 1859) was also reprinted in Weird Tales (July 1935), but this worthwhile and interesting piece fits in fine right here, especially as it involves the giving of Christmas presents to children. That said, the plot involves gypsies using those presents to murder them, so perhaps not so festive.
It gets off to a leisurely start, and has passages of discursive description about the story’s location in a more disreputable part of town:

I like a dirty slum; not because I am naturally unclean, but because I generally find a certain sediment of philosophy precipitated in its gutters. A clean street is terribly prosaic. There is no food for thought in carefully swept pavements, barren kennels, and vulgarly spotless houses. But when I go down a street which has been left so long to itself that it has acquired a distinct outward character, I find plenty to think about. The scraps of sodden letters lying in the ash-barrel have their meaning: desperate appeals, perhaps, from Tom, the baker’s assistant, to Amelia, the daughter of the dry-goods retailer, who is always selling at a sacrifice in consequence of the late fire. That may be Tom himself who is now passing me in a white apron, and I look up at the windows of the house (which does not, however, give any signs of a recent conflagration) and almost hope to see Amelia wave a white pocket-handkerchief. The bit of orange-peel lying on the sidewalk inspires thought. Who will fall over it? who but the industrious mother of six children, the youngest of which is only nine months old, all of whom are dependent on her exertions for support? I see her slip and tumble. I see the pale face convulsed with agony, and the vain struggle to get up; the pitying crowd closing her off from all air; the anxious young doctor who happened to be passing by; the manipulation of the broken limb, the shake of the head, the moan of the victim, the litter borne on men’s shoulders, the gates of the New York Hospital unclosing, the subscription taken up on the spot. There is some food for speculation in that three-year-old, tattered child, masked with dirt, who is throwing a brick at another three-year-old, tattered child, masked with dirt. It is not difficult to perceive that he is destined to lurk, as it were, through life. His bad, flat face—or, at least, what can be seen of it—does not look as if it were made for the light of day. The mire in which he wallows now is but a type of the moral mire in which he will wallow hereafter. The feeble little hand lifted at this instant to smite his companion, half in earnest, half in jest, will be raised against his fellow-beings forevermore. p.53

After describing a few of the shopkeepers and vendors on the street the story focuses on Herr Hippe, who has opened a shop as a ‘Wondersmith’. No-one knows what it is he sells, and the shop turns out to be a front. He is planning, along with three other gypsies, a massacre of Christian children at Xmas by distributing lethal gifts. Herr Hippe has created vicious little wooden manikins, and Madame Filomel, the fortune teller, provides the souls to animate them. The foursome decides to test the tiny manikins’ lethal skills in a nearby bird shop during the night:

The gypsies stood in the centre of the shop, watching the proceedings eagerly, while the Liliputians made in a body towards the wall and commenced climbing from cage to cage. Then was heard a tremendous fluttering of wings, and faint, despairing “quirks” echoed on all sides. In almost every cage there was a fierce manikin thrusting his sword or dagger vigorously into the body of some unhappy bird. It recalled the antique legend of the battles of the Pygmies and the Cranes. The poor lovebirds lay with their emerald feathers dabbled in their heart’s blood, shoulder to shoulder in death as in life. Canaries gasped at the bottom of their cages, while the water in their little glass fountains ran red. The bullfinches wore an unnatural crimson on their breasts. The mocking-bird lay on his back, kicking spasmodically, in the last agonies, with a tiny sword-thrust cleaving his melodious throat in twain, so that from the instrument which used to gush with wondrous music only scarlet drops of blood now trickled. p.71/72

The sub-plot has a hunchbacked bookseller who is in love with Herr Hippe’s daughter. Hippe discovers them together and imprisons the hunchback. The ultimate scene is even more Grand Guignol-ish than the bird shop one.

The Better Mousetrap by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is the third of the ‘Gavagan’s Bar’ stories. This one relates the story of a man whose apartment is plagued by mice borrowing a small dragon from a magician. It is too straightforward and just stops at the end. When I first started reading F&SF during the seventies L. Sprague de Camp’s ‘W. Wilson Newbury’ stories¹ were similar: an under-developed fantasy theme dropped into a story using familiar characters or locations.

I haven’t checked back but I get the impression that the story introductions are becoming more considered. This is the introduction to The Listening Child by Margaret St. Clair:

We’ve mentioned before, but we cannot stress too often, the growing importance of women as writers both of science fiction and of pure fantasy; the best of them, from such old hands as Moore to such recent discoveries as Merril and Curtis, bring to the field a welcome warmth and sensitivity, a striking immediacy of impact, a realization that every type of fiction must essentially deal with people . . . in short, with you. We’re happy, therefore, to bring you the first of a group of distinguished stories by a new name in the profession: a delicate story of mood and emotion that will stay in your mind (and heart) long after you have forgotten the most sensational transgalactic epics. p.37

Now the ‘new name in the profession’ part is a bit naughty as ‘Idris Seabright’ had previously published over two dozen stories in the SF pulps under her own name Margaret St Clair. However, the Idris Seabright pseudonym would subsequently become better known than her own name for a time.²
The story starts with this:

It was not until after his first bad heart attack that Edwin Hoppler really noticed the child. He had long ago decided on the basis of his contacts with his married sister’s strident brood that he didn’t like children. But the doctor, after telling him roundly that he was lucky to be alive, had ordered at least a month’s rest in bed. Somebody had to bring the trays up from the boarding house dining room. Timmy was usually the one. p.37

Over time he develops a liking for the child, who is profoundly deaf and as a result cannot speak. Nonetheless, Hoppler starts to notice that Timmy occasionally tilts his head to one side as if he is listening intently to something. He subsequently realises that the boy does this in advance of death or near-death occurrences, e.g. a dog being run over in the street, Hoppler experiencing an angina attack, etc. After a particularly serious attack that almost kills him, Hoppler encourages Timmy to spend more time with him.
This is a superior story, and is certainly at some remove from normal genre work of this period in terms of characterisation, writing and general texture.

The A. E. van Vogt story Process also has an extended introduction:

Alfred E. van Vogt has become one of the acknowledged masters, first of the pulps and later of hard-cover science fiction, largely because of the sheer overwhelming vastness of his concepts, which casually embrace more universes than you can name planets. But a few heretics like us think that his strongest work has been his least all-embracing, that his astute mind has best displayed itself in the detailed convincing study of a limited situation, as in the classic early sections of Slan (which is what converted one of us to science fiction!) p.46

The story is about a sentient forest and a spaceship that lands in the middle of it. After a battle between the two that the forest loses, it supplies uranium dust to the ship which subsequently departs. Following an atomic explosion (presumably from the excess dust) it then uses the secret of this new technology to attack another forest….
I wasn’t aware that van Vogt had ever contributed to F&SF, and they only just managed to get a story from him. This was one of the last half dozen he wrote before he fell silent in the early fifties.
The Angel With Purple Hair by Herb Paul is an odd story about an angel turning up at a club where she is later joined by a test pilot. They exit the club to some commotion and set off to get her a room at a hotel. The test pilot subsequently goes out to the hangar and is inspecting his test aircraft when she joins him again. They discuss the problems he has been having with a new airplane and she suggests a solution. They also talk about their impossible love for each other. The next day the engineers have made the suggested changes to the aircraft and he takes it up for a test flight.
I’m not sure this story really works to be honest: although I found it interesting due to my aviation background I’m not sure others will feel the same way. The poignant last scene helps.
The Well-Oiled Machine by H. B. Fyfe is about the editor of Stupendous Stories and an office full of editorial robots:

Sinner was a secretarial robot, designed with four arms to facilitate simultaneous handling, correcting, and copying of manuscripts. Two of his hands had twenty-four fingers each, for typing. He was mounted on three small wheels, and gave Ed a chill on mornings after. p.105

There is also Arty is the art robot, etc. The story ploddingly introduces all the robots and their quirks before mixing in the trouble the editor is having with his wife. I did not find this as ‘hilarious’ as the editors did.
Another Chance for Casey by Larry Siegel (American Legion Magazine, 1950) is a baseball story about a player, Casey, briefly returning from heaven to Earth in an attempt to salvage his reputation. I’m not a fan of fantasy sports stories but this one is atmospherically done even if you don’t understand all the terminology.

The cover on this issue⁴ is the first the magazine has used that makes it look like a SF magazine, and starts a long tradition of astronomical paintings for the magazine by Chesley Bonestell. I think this view of Saturn would have been improved if the dated fifties spaceship had been removed.⁵
Although there have been no editorials in the magazine, just before the introduction to the first story, there is a short note which reads, in part:

We are happy to announce that, beginning with this issue, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION steps up from a quarterly to a bimonthly status. The circulation volume that has made this possible is due solely to the support given our venture by you, our readers, and we want each one of you to take this note as an expression of thanks. Rest assured that we will continue our attempts to give you—every other month, now—the best stories by the best authors on that wonderful subject, the-impossible-made-convincing. p.3

In lieu of part of this month’s Recommended Reading column (although there is still a short one covering Judith Meril’s Shadow on the Hearth amongst others) there is Review: Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard by C. Daly King, Ph.D. This member of the American Psychological Association does not pull his punches. His article starts with this:

This volume is full of assertions and claims, and frequent reference is made in it to “scientific evidence,” but your reviewer could find no item of such evidence in its 400-odd pages. Unsupported assertions are not evidence and, since the author presents every appearance of sincerity, one can conclude only that he is unfamiliar with the nature of scientific evidence. Diligent search has turned up the information that he is a Hollywood studio and radio writer, that he has contributed to 90 magazines, that he holds an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering and that he is an experienced explorer. No one would deny that all of these are legitimate activities but they are not the usual qualifications of an expert in psychology. p.99

The rest of the review continues in a similar vein to the extent that the editors add a postscript to the review:

Mr. King was, of course, given a free hand with his review; and the opinions expressed are his and not necessarily ours. Since his review has proved to be such a slashing attack on what one of his letters called “a sort of technocratic burlesque of psychiatry,” we feel it only just to say that our pages are open to any equally cogent and reasoned rebuttal from any equally competent and responsible authority.
Incidentally, some readers have expressed surprise at the reference in our last issue to “dianoetics.” That happened simply because our proofreader, who had never heard of the Hubbard book, checked the word in the dictionary and found the long-established, etymologically correct form. The one stand on the subject that we do feel ourselves competent to take is that Mr. Hubbard’s notions of spelling and etymology (and by no means in this word alone) are, to be polite, idiosyncratic. p.103

Last but not least is the start of another long running F&SF tradition: Index to Volume One, Fall 1949–December 1950.³ These indexes were very useful in the days before ISFDB and the internet.

A mixed issue but one with a number of items of note.

1. L. Sprague de Camp’s ‘W. Wilson Newbury’ stories at ISFDB.
2. According to SFE: ‘St Clair became temporarily better known for these than for the works published under her own name. They were smoother-textured than her pulp adventures and oriented more towards Fantasy, even Slick Fantasy’.
3. The first index:
   
4. The cover was also used on The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas (1952).
5. A more elegant cover without the spaceship?:

Fiction:
The Silly Season • short story by C. M. Kornbluth ♥♥♥
The Traitor • short story by James S. Hart ♥♥
Top Secret • (1948) • short story by Donald A. Wollheim [as by David Grinnell] ♥
Built Up Logically • (1949) • short story by Howard Schoenfeld ♥♥♥+
A Room in a House • short story by August Derleth ♥♥♥
The Poetry Machine • short story by H. Nearing, Jr. ♥
Pamela Pays the Piper • (1949) • short story by Phyllis Lee Peterson ♥♥♥
Just a Matter of Time • (1948) • short story by Roger Angell ♥♥
Second Meeting • (1948) • short story by A. Bertram Chandler [as by George Whitley] ♥♥♥
Heritage • novelette by Charles L. Harness ♥♥♥
The Star Ducks • short story by Bill Brown ♥♥

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

This fourth issue of F&SF has perhaps the widest range of styles yet. Although six out of the ten stories are SF the magazine doesn’t have that feel, probably because two of the SF stories use their subject matter for humorous effect and one gives a standard SF idea a New Yorker gloss.
The first of the two lighter pieces is The Silly Season by C. M. Kornbluth. This tells of a wire service journalist and ‘silly season’ stories of shining domes, black spheres and circular pits that occur in three successive years, and the public’s decreasing interest in such stories. However (spoiler), they end up being a ‘boy who cried wolf’ for a real alien invasion.
This story starts off with the action centred on a wire service and its associated journalists, and uses the dated language of that profession. I wonder what the twitterati will make of it.
The Kornbluth bookends the issue with, according to the editors, ‘a new kind of science fiction story, the homey interplanetary tale, written with quiet humor’. The Star Ducks by Bill Brown is another tale about a journalist, this time one who goes to a farm and finds a spaceship and two visiting aliens. After mentally communicating with the pair he realises that he is onto the story of a lifetime. However, they are just about to leave Earth and the journalist struggles to obtain proof that will substantiate his story….
I found this slighter than the Kornbluth piece, and both of them fairly lightweight. At the time of publication I suspect these would have been seen as novel and amusing takes on traditional SF tropes.
The third of these stories is Just a Matter of Time by Roger Angell (The New Yorker Magazine, February 7^th, 1948). This is about a man out on the town who seems to briefly slip back in time to the 1930s. The content is mostly New Yorker-type social chat about socialising and his girlfriend.

The other three SF stories are conventional and, in the case of the Harness novelette, strikingly so. Heritage would probably not have been out of place in Thrilling Wonder Stories or the like (where several of his other early stories appeared).¹
It is a space opera about a future race of umen on a spaceship and their unusual Captain:

He lifted the bottle of ethanol to his lips, and took a big swallow. He grimaced, both at the raw taste of the liquid and because it declared another of his abnormalities: he, Captain Lurain, was strangely influenced by the oral administration of ethanol. None of the other five thousand-odd umen under him, nay, not a single other uman in the galaxy, so far as he knew, was similarly defective.
Yes, he was an odd one. His physical responses were the slowest on the ship. In single combat with a Magellanic battleman he would have been burnt down before he could even make a motion toward the pistol that hung at his side. And every one of the five thousand under him was faster even than the Magellanics. p.94

Shortly after the story starts he is inspecting the spaceship, which is being converted for another mission under the supervision of a Proctor called Anthon, when he covertly observes another crew member who appears physically similar to him. Later, this person comes to his cabin:

The other’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t come here for that. Is it possible you haven’t guessed the nature of my aberration?”
“I know nothing about you.”
He was consumed by curiosity, but waited silently as his unbidden guest seemed to come to a vital decision.
The smaller figure seemed to grow in stature, to stand a little straighter. “I am a female aberrant—and probably fertile.”
“Impossible! All umen are pseudo-male, and sterile.”
The other grew perceptibly paler. “I am telling the truth.”
Lurain gazed at the creature with mingled horror and disgust. What monstrous gene defect in the vitaplasm had produced this … this animal, this atavistic echo of a forgotten, primordial day when even the highest species were reproduced in the bodies of the females? p.98/99

Both of them are subsequently involved in a power struggle between Anthon the Proctor, who wants to gather the female’s ova to further a bid for galactic domination, and the Undrud, the supreme leader of the umen, who requires all aberrants to be delivered to him for vivisection….
This is all fairly well done but it is a pulpier story than I would have expected F&SF to run and, from distant memory, not quite as good as the likes of Time Trap (Astounding, August 1948) and Stalemate in Space (Planet Stories, Summer 1949).

Top Secret by Donald A. Wollheim (Sir! Magazine, 1948) is a short squib about a man who bumps into some strange men in the State Department. I think the reveal at the end (spoiler) implies that they are aliens but I was not sure.
The Poetry Machine by H. Nearing, Jr. is about a mathematician that builds a computer to write poetry:

“Look,” said Ransom. “Suppose we want a poem, a great poem about, say, a man having trouble with his fiancée, which is what most poems are about. That’s an experience. You feed it to the tubes just like a problem, but instead of reducing it to factors they reduce it to words.” p.54

After the first poem is produced it stops working. A colleague suggests it may have been upset by a comment that Ransom made about the poem. I found the ending unconvincing and, as this is the first of eleven ‘C. P. Ransom’ stories that would appear in F&SF by end of 1953, hope they improve.

The fantasy stories in this issue do not have as wide a stylistic range as the SF ones. The most original is Built Up Logically by Howard Schoenfeld (Retort, Winter 1949). This is a clever, tricksy and entertaining piece about a writer who is a character in his own story and ends up fighting another character for control of the narrative:

“What is it?”
“The pulse beat of the universe. I can hear it.”
“My God,” I said.
He stood there listening to the pulse beat of the universe.
“Marvelous,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “But not for you.”
Frank tilted his head sideways, cupped his ear in his hand, and invented the universe. Getting the sound of its pulse beat, he built it up logically from the sound. It was the only universe that could have produced that particular pulse beat, and I was amazed at his blasphemy in creating it.
“Stop,” I demanded.
My demand went unheeded.
The universe and its contents appeared.
Frank’s face tautened. Beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead. Then he relaxed. His grin was ominous.
With a start of fear I realized my predicament. In inventing the universe and its contents Frank had also invented me.
I was in the unheard-of position of having been created by a figment of my own imagination.
“Our roles are reversed,” Frank said. “I’ve not only created you, but all your works, including this narrative. Following this paragraph I will assume my rightful role as author of the story and you will assume yours as a character in it.” p.41

The struggle continues.

There are no less than three ghost stories, two of which play it straight while the third takes a more light hearted approach.
A Room in a House by August Derleth is about two boys and the imaginary creature they create when they are sent to the store room by their parents as a punishment. It later starts doing their bidding when they want to get their own back. The narrative then skips forward a generation.
Second Meeting by A. Bertram Chandler (Town & Country, 1948) starts with two childhood gangs discussing a ghost who crosses a bridge and walks up the road towards a pub every night at ten fifteen. After much discussion and bravado about the likely truth of this tale, two individuals from each gang agree to stake out the area to see if the man really is a ghost.
The writing is quite atmospheric:

Once I ventured out of the mouth of the alley to peer up and down the road. The sky, over the buildings across the canal, was momentarily clear, and the moon, as Trant so aptly phrased it, seemed to be playing hide-and-seek among the roofs and chimneys of the ugly, jagged skyline. But it wasn’t the moon of the clean open spaces. Rather it was a white, polished skull, rolling in some devil’s game along the black, irregular ridge. p.88

After one of the boys lobs a brick at the ghost they all run away. The story then skips forward several years to a time when one of the boys returns to the town. Now grown up, Fido looks up one of his childhood friends and subsequently returns to the bar on his own. The twist ending is predictable perhaps but doesn’t detract from an entertaining tale.
Pamela Pays the Piper by Phyllis Lee Peterson (Canadian Home Journal, February 1949) is a light-hearted story about a Scotsman who is killed at Glencoe and becomes a ghost. After haunting an English family for a couple of hundred years, the last surviving daughter of the line emigrates to Canada with her army husband and the ghost decides to follow.
Finally, The Traitor by James S. Hart is an entertaining enough vampire tale until the conclusion, which baffled me. The protagonist (spoiler) somehow manages to cross running water.

The non-fiction in this issue includes the third cover on this theme by George Salter: they are not growing on me. The book review column covers an eclectic range of books: they really liked Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, but some of the other choices are surprising:

Stop press addendum: Despite all debates on dianoetics and colliding worlds, we feel that the year will not produce a factual book more important to science fiction enthusiasts (and possibly to all mankind) than Donald Keyhoe’s cogent, intelligent and persuasive THE FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL (Fawcett)—a two-bit pocketsize original deserving more serious attention than most four-dollar hardcover books. This is your must of the month. p.83

There is also a cartoon, the first in a very long F&SF tradition that lasts to this day.

In conclusion, there are some pleasant enough stories in this issue but nothing really notable bar, perhaps, Howard Schoenfield’s story.

1. Charles Harness at ISFDB.

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

Other Reviews:
Steve Fahnestalk, Amazing Stories
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Nicky Magus, Tangent Online
Patrick Mahon, SF Crowsnest
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Fiction:
The Vanishing Kind • novella by Lavie Tidhar ∗∗
The Desert of Vanished Dreams • novelette by Phyllis Eisenstein ∗∗∗
Vishnu Summer • novelette by David Prill ∗
The Thing on the Shelf • novelette by David Gerrold ∗
Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful • short story by Gregor Hartmann ∗∗∗
Spells Are Easy if You Have The Right Psychic Energy • short story by Dominica Phetteplace ∗∗∗
An Open Letter to the Person Who Took My Smoothie from the Break Room Fridge • short story by Oliver Buckram ∗∗∗+
Last One Out • short story by K. B. Rylander ∗∗∗+
Killer • short story by Bruce McAllister ∗∗
Jesus Has Forgiven Me. Why Can’t You? • short story by Betsy Phillips ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful • cover by Monolithic Studios
Cartoons • Arthur Masear, Nick Downes
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by James Sallis
Films: Bunker Mentality • by Kathi Maio
Science: Our Super Cool System • by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
Martian Garden • poem by John Philip Johnson
Coming Attractions
Plumage From Pegasus • Paul Di Filippo
Curiosities: Star of the Unborn, by Franz Werfel (1946) • review by Robert Eldridge

_____________________

I’ve always been a sucker for ‘Britain occupied by Nazi Germany’ stories¹ so Lavie Tidhar’s novella, The Vanishing Kind, gets off to a good start for me:

During the rebuilding of London in the 1950s, they had erected a large Ferris wheel on the south bank of the Thames. When it was opened, it cost two Reichsmarks for a ride, but it was seldom busy. London after the war wasn’t a place you went to on holiday.

Gunther Sloan comes over to the UK to help an old flame who has sent him a letter saying she fears for her life. He ends up in a web of intrigue that involves the Gestapo, drugs and Jews. For the most part this is an engaging and readable story but the problem I had with it is that it falls apart at the end. I was completely mystified by several aspects of the plot. Why did Ulla write the note to Gunther asking him to help in the first place? What was the connection between Ulla and Blucher and Pirelli? The plot doesn’t make any sense ultimately, and the last reveal is just one twist too far.
A lesser criticism of this is that the world-building is rather on the thin side. Except for the first paragraph there are not that many period details, and mentions of a number of London streets and bookshops don’t put much skin on the bones. There are some nice touches though:

“When the occupation is completed there I will go to America,” Janson said. “I have a great admiration for the Americans, for all that they lost their war.”
“What will you do?” Gunther said.
“I would become a writer for their pulps.”
“It’s a living,” Gunther allowed. “Not a very profitable one, though.”
“I write quickly and I have what it requires most,” Janson said.
“And what’s that?” Gunther said.
“Despair.”

Those stories will be for the Barry Malzberg edited Astounding Science Fiction of the alternate 1950s, then.²
Alaric the teleporting minstrel makes a welcome return in Phyllis Eisenstein’s The Desert of Vanished Dreams, the first of three novelettes in this issue. I remembered reading these stories from the 1970’s F&SF³ and half-remembered them as fantasy but (spoiler) this one has a definite science fictional vibe.
Alaric is part of a camel-train that is travelling across the desert and, short of water, their leader Piros decides to detour to a strange city. After they set up camp outside the walls, Piros tells Alaric of his previous visits and how he has never gone inside. During the night one of their men goes missing and Piros and Alaric go to find him. Deep inside the city they find a dead King on a throne wearing a crown. When Alaric subsequently tries on the crown he finds himself in control of the city, a technologically advanced one that seems to have travelled through space in the distant past. The hunt for the missing man continues….
Vishnu Summer by David Prill is another story in this issue whose ending I didn’t understand.
This one is about a one-armed girl in a mid-Western town and her odd, mural-painting mother:

Ma was up that durned rickety ladder, paints on the top step, her big brush working, more paint on her than the brush, her eyes shut, guided by another set of laws, muttering oaths, prayers, incantations, who knew, a laundry list of the strange. I tried to avert my eyes from the never-ending mural, partly because I was afraid Ma was gonna fall, mostly because the subject was me and my life. She started the mural right before my accident, painted my soon-to-be-ex-arm planted in a field, just one more stalk of corn waiting to be picked. Painted me falling off my bike before it happened, except it was a giant centipede instead of a bike. Lost a tooth chasing a fox out of the henhouse and she painted that, too, only instead of a fox it was a devil with horns and a butcher knife. My whole life, painted like a winding creek across the backside of a barn. Her paintings didn’t always make sense right away. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and bingo, I got it.

One day a motorcade carrying a three-armed man passes her farm. He is in town to be tried for the murder of a man and woman. The rest of the story concerns the interaction between the girl and the three-armed man—among other things he sings at the country fair and at the opera house as she spectates. The ending (spoiler) has her ‘falling’ into one of her mother’s murals and coming out again, but now she has two arms. She once again sees the motorcade carrying the three-armed man. As it passes the farm she takes off her arm… Answers on a postcard.
The Thing on the Shelf by David Gerrold is supposedly an account of a horror convention written for Gordon Van Gelder, the publisher of F&SF. It tells of Gerrold driving to Portland and being awarded the Stoker Award for one of his stories. Unusual things happen at the convention and the situation becomes even more peculiar when he takes his award home. It is a model of a haunted house and the door seems to keep on closing by itself, not to mention the lights that come on in the little windows.
Up to the midway point this is moderately entertaining but it then rambles on at far too great a length to an ending where the secret behind the award is revealed to him by Harlan Ellison, but is one he cannot put it in print.
A lot of the bloat is far too self-reverential:

[He] also says the way I ramble lazily through my narratives, dredging up memories like unplugging a clogged toilet, is a voice—I’m turning into the self-deprecating Marcel Proust of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

I wish.
At one point there is an irrelevant four page anecdote about ‘Chuck’ which basically ends with a lame ‘if I can believe in that I can believe in this’ prop for the story. And there is a seemingly endless amount of name-dropping as well, all of which is capped with the aforementioned cop-out ending.  I hope his two stories in the special issue next month show more restraint and discipline than this one.

After a disappointing group of longer stories, a handful of the shorter ones compensate.
Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful by Gregor Hartmann is an entertaining story about a tech start up that stumbles on a physical effect during manufacturing process. This results in a product that can make transient coloured mist out of air, and several devices are marketed. They diversify into making different colours and then try to improve the persistence of the mist….
Spells Are Easy if You Have the Right Psychic Energy by Dominica Phetteplace is slighter than her recent work in Asimov’s SF but I still enjoyed it. It tells of a woman and the various magic spells she knows, and has the characteristic Phettplace voice:

Healing magic can be pretty silly and it mostly doesn’t work, otherwise there’d be no cancer or eczema. It is somehow easier to manipulate a person’s mind than it is their body. My mother has some bullshit explanation for this. She’s a Professor of Witchcraft, which means she has a bullshit explanation for most of life’s mysteries.

The main thread here is her attempt to reverse several love spells she has cast over the years leaving her with several unwanted suitors. On another level it is really about her getting her head sorted out.
I particularly enjoyed An Open Letter to the Person Who Took My Smoothie from the Break Room Fridge by Oliver Buckram. It comprises of an exchange of emails/memos between a handful of supervillains in the Alliance of Doom, starting thus:

TO: ALLIANCE OF DOOM
From: Professor Nemesis
Subject: An Open Letter to the Person Who Took My Smoothie from the Break Room Fridge

Dear Thief,
I don’t know who you are, but this morning you stole my homemade avocado smoothie from the fridge in the break room. Your behavior was unprofessional, dishonest, and deeply hurtful.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but it is NOT COOL to steal stuff from the break room. Not. Cool.

It has a neat ending as well.
Last One Out by K. B. Rylander is about an AI who is looking after an old lady in Sweden called Ella. She is trapped on an island after a virus has killed off most if not nearly all of the human race. As well as generally looking after her the AI tries to get around the restrictions that a robot controlled and maintained world has imposed, e.g. quarantine movement restrictions, no prescriptions without a doctor’s authorisation, etc., but has had little success for the last five thousand or so days. The AI is also fighting a losing battle in trying to understand the music Ella plays to it. The story details the AI’s further efforts to help Ella. This one gets off to a very good start but tails off a little at the end.
Killer by Bruce McAllister is a standalone sequel to Kingdom Come (Omni, February 1987) and is set in a world where angels and demons tumbled out of a shining doorway in Central Park and battled until only the angels were left. This tells of an encounter between a bounty hunter and one of the angels he has been hunting. Rather fragmentary.
Jesus Has Forgiven Me. Why Can’t You? by Betsy Phillips is an entertaining story about a woman who finds out that her wrestler boyfriend is married. After this discovery she goes to Jesus’s apartment and they become a wrestling team so they can teach him a lesson. This is mostly quite good but the ending isn’t as strong as the rest. It is also rather too obviously a life experience that has been turned into fiction (and is acknowledged as such in the introduction).

There is nothing particularly noteworthy in the non-fiction department this issue. There is a poem about growing crops on Mars from John Philip Johnson, book reviews by Charles de Lint and James Sallis, reviews by Kathy Maio of three promising films, 18 Cloverfield Lane, Eye in the Sky and Zootopia, a science column about the various forms of ice by Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty, an amusing Plumage from Pegasus column from Paul Di Filippo about writing graduates and their lack of real life experience, and a Curiosities column by Robert Eldridge reviewing Star of the Unborn by Franz Werfel (1946):

[Its] 645 pages of dense first-person narrative is studded with discursive asides and provocative epigrams. Its philosophical heft will enrich patient and adventurous readers.

It sounds promising but that is four magazines’ worth of reading. Coming Attractions trails a Special Author issue, the first since 2007, celebrating David Gerrold’s work.
Finally, another moan about the cover image⁴ used in the Kindle version. Once again there is mesh-like filter over the image, and I noticed something else this time around as well. In the upper left hand corner there appears to be a chip out of the corner and there is also a small crease above the green bar, just above the ‘on’ in ‘Fiction’. Surely they are not scanning a physical copy for the Kindle cover image? If so, that would account for the moiré effect on the image.

In conclusion, the longer fiction makes this a poorer quality issue than normal.  ●

_____________________

1. See another Nazi-invaded Britain story: The Fall of Frenchy Steiner by Hilary Bailey, New Worlds SF #143.

2. Phyllis Eisenstein’s ‘Tales of Alaric the Minstrel’ at ISFDB.

3. Yes, I know Mr Malzberg would have been 11 in 1950.

4. The original unedited Kindle cover image with the areas referred to highlighted (note also what looks like the right hand edge of the physical copy):

Subscribe: F&SF subs/Amazon UK, USA /Weightless Books

Edited 3^rd October 2019: formatting changes.

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Kevin P. Hallett, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Mark Watson, Best SF (forthcoming)
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
More Heat Than Light • novelette by Charlotte Ashley ♥♥
Last of the Sharkspeakers • novelette by Brian Trent ♥♥♥+
The Nostaligia Calculatro • short story by Rich Larson ♥♥
Coyote Song • novella by Pat MacEwen ♥♥
The Great Silence • short story by Ted Chiang and Calzadilla and Allora ♥♥♥
Caribou: Documentary Fragments • short story by Joseph Tomaras ♥♥♥+
Steamboat Gothic • novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey ♥♥
Ash • short story by Susan Palwick ♥♥♥♥
The Secret Mirror of Moriyama House • short story by Yukimi Ogawa ♥♥
The Long Fall Up • novelette by William Ledbetter ♥♥♥+
The Stone War • novelette by Ted Kosmatka ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
The Stone War • cover by Max Bertolini
Cartoons • Bill Long, Arthur Masear, Nick Downes
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by Elizabeth Hand
F&SF Competition #91: “It’s All Relative”
Competition #92: Updated
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: Twilight Stories, by Rhona Broughton • essay by Paul Di Filippo

This month’s fiction leads off with More Heat Than Light by Charlotte Ashley. This novelette is set ‘in a parallel world where the French Revolution has come to Quebec and revolutionaries take up arms against the English in the monster-ridden wilderness’. After an initially promising start that involves the capture of an English officer by Davy, one of the revolutionaries who is a woman disguised as a man, she (spoiler) falls foul of internal revolutionary politics and leaves the camp to exchange him for ransom. This is interesting enough for the most part but the ‘monsters’ aren’t ever really explained or integrated into the piece: for instance, there are dire-wolves and huge bears—the latter of which seem impervious to rifle fire—but there is also a flying beast called a Culloo that is never sufficiently described. It is also rather open-ended, so no doubt we will find out more in due course.
The second of five novelettes is next. Last of the Sharkspeakers by Brian Trent is part of the author’s ‘War Hero’ series but is a self-contained story that tells of porcupine-like human mutants who are captured by ‘normal’ humans as they attempt to steal from one of the human ‘voidsharks’. These are organic flying creatures that can transport humans and cargo internally. The mutants are subsequently taken to the human city, at which point they find out they are living inside a vast asteroid, and they and the rest of their group are given food and medical treatment. In return the humans want the pod to communicate with an ‘icari’ voidshark. The icari are enemies of the humans and the icari voidsharks, unlike the human ones, can travel in space.
This is all narrated by the ‘alpha’ of the group, who subsequently finds that not only is communicating with the captured voidshark difficult, so is determining the humans’ true purpose.
This is a vivid and immersive adventure but I have two minor criticisms: first, the initial skirmish could be more clearly described; second, I could have done with a bit more detail about the internals, size and appearance of the voidsharks. I hope we see more of this series.

The Nostaligia Calculatro by Rich Larson is the first of the short stories and is about a man who monitors nostalgia and notices that waves of nostalgia are coming in exponentially decreasing waves….
For most readers the fun in this rather slight piece will probably be in the telling:

The nostalgia calculator was waiting for him, display thrown up on the wall, showing all the squiggling waves of low-rise jeans, Cheetos, neuro-linked iPods, beehives. The status lights blinked soft baby blue, like always. Noel pulled out his Slate, which was loaded with the hack-app he’d bought off Casey late last night, and plugged it in.
“Download, motherfucker,” Noel said, because it was jazzier to say it than tap the screen.
“Did you say, mother of her?” the voice-reco buzzed. Noel pursed his lips and tapped the screen.
It took all of thirty seconds to put the entire recorded history of nostalgia onto his phone, and all of thirty-five seconds for security to arrive. p.66

Coyote Song is a novella by Pat MacEwen that gets if to a pretty good start with a CSI-style investigation of the death of a young Vietnamese man:

The body lay in a shallow grave behind the garage. Someone had wrapped it in an old shower curtain with a tropical-island motif—clownfish, tangs, and dolphins swam among squid and translucent jellies. The contrast between the bright colors and the contents was stark, and a little bit weird. At the near end, the plastic was torn and a foot poked out. It was missing three toes on account of the neighbor’s pit bull, which had broken through the fence on my left when the body began generating enticing aromas. It was the dog’s owner, horrified by his pet’s grisly snack attack, who’d called it in. Otherwise who knows how long it might have taken to find the remains?
I was just happy it wasn’t high summer yet. In California, the Central Valley sunshine bakes everything to a crisp from late June into mid- September. That dry heat can mummify or skeletonize a body in a couple of weeks with the help of local wildlife, insects, and pit bulls. With this guy, it wasn’t that bad. The maggots hadn’t really gotten started.

It soon turns into something more sinister when another man in the family is found dead—and in the autopsy it appears as his heart has been cooked, as if it had been microwaved…. The narrator’s Native American ancestry and magical knowledge starts coming to the fore as does her colleague’s Voodoo skills. Their suspect would seem to be the Vietnamese grandmother but she insists the killer is the ‘Angel of Death’.
Up to this point the fusion of the three magical traditions works quite well but at the half way stage there is an incident which stretches credulity a little. The story still worked for me past this point but in the climactic scene the explanation of who did what and why doesn’t really convince. So, overall, this one is a bit of a mixed bag.
One minor point about that final scene is that there are too many people and/or entities talking to/at each other, and a related criticism is that the narrative style is sometimes too garrulous, which is particularly noticeable during action scenes:

Something—the droplets my tortured nose put out, or some herb or chemical in the powder, hell, maybe the pure power in the stuff—flew out of me along with that sneeze. When it hit her—well, it stuck. Like a million points of glitter, it sparkled, all colors, but mostly red, and the points made a picture. You ever seen that kind of Impressionist painting? All tiny dots and tidbits of color? No real lines at all? What’s his name did that. Seurat, maybe? Van Gogh, too, sometimes. I’ve seen ‘em in the museums my Irish gran used to haul me through, trying to civilize my ass.
Pointillist—yeah, that’s what they call it. p.128

I would suggest the second part of that needs some trimming. That said, this story has an interesting idea and some good sections of narrative, and other readers may find its deficits less problematic than me.

The Great Silence by Ted Chiang and Calzadilla and Allora is a short story that grew out of an art installation created by the second and third ‘authors’. Ted Chiang says:

One screen would show footage of the radio telescope in Arecibo, while another would show footage of the endangered Puerto Rican Parrot. They asked me if I would write text that would appear on the third screen. p.134

It is short, affecting piece—told from the viewpoint of the parrot—about communication, speech and extinction.

Caribou: Documentary Fragments by Joseph Tomaras is a gritty political story about the sexual torture of terrorist suspects and a biological memory wipe administered to those who have done the torturing:

The interrogation method was simple enough. Bring in a female MP, preferably big chested, wearing the tightest cut of uniform. You pop open the top two buttons of your shirt to show some cleavage, then rub yourself all over the detainee, talking dirty as hell. The detainees were fully clothed in their prison-issue. The point was not to fuck them, it was to fuck with them. None of us was hot for hajji. Even with the clothes on they were rank. By the time the interrogators brought us in they’d been denied showers for weeks, smelled like camel ass.
I don’t know exactly how many I did, but it was a few. After the wipe, what’s left runs together in my mind. p.139

The story plays out as a compelling series of interviews conducted for a documentary. I found it gripping.

The next of the novelettes is Steamboat Gothic by Albert E. Cowdrey and, as with Charlotte Ashley’s story, this also gets off to a good start but tails off later. It concerns a ‘pragmatic’ Louisiana sheriff who has to deal with the multiple murder of a visiting film development crew in a gothic mansion and it is told in a colourful and readable style. Unfortunately, (spoiler) the plot of Satan murdering the crew is developed in the most perfunctory way and not really explained at all, or not in a substantial way at any rate. At the end of the story the focus is on the Sheriff’s family ties, casual corruption and business arrangements. Also, although this is not the fault of the story, it was an editorial mistake having another CSI/supernatural-type tale in the same issue as the Pat McEwan novella.
It has one good amusing line though (if you are not from the state in question):

Louisiana was fortunate in possessing many more people who could write books than people who could read them. p.171

I hope the author owns a tin hat….

Ash by Susan Palwick is a lovely fantasy and the story of the issue. It starts with a woman, Penny, who has been forcibly decluttered by a house-fire. She decides to build a smaller replacement house and stay downsized. However, the autumn/fall after her new house has been built the nearby rowan tree not only produces berries but several items she lost in the fire:

Penny stared. She stood. Straining on tiptoe, she reached for the earring; she had to tug to free it, although it came away cleanly. And now she saw, among the red berries the tree always bore, other things that shouldn’t have been there: flashes of gold, the gleaming edge of a favorite coffee mug, a square of paper with blurry blotches she suspected would resolve into a photograph, like a Polaroid developing in the air. p.175

She rationalises that the tree is somehow recycling the ashes from the fire and the tale proceeds onward….
At times this felt as if the author had written this story for me personally, and I suspect many others will have a similar reaction: a pertinent and at times emotional read.
The Secret Mirror of Moriyama House by Yukimi Ogawa is another fantasy, this time about a young woman who becomes involved with an elderly lady neighbour. Over a period of time, the woman discovers that the neighbour patches up dead people who come through a mirror she owns before they finally move on. Unfortunately this is lightly developed and ends up feeling a bit anti-climactic.

The last two novelettes close out the issue. The Long Fall Up by William Ledbetter is about a woman called Veronica Perez who leaves Jinshan station, an L-5 habitat, to have a baby—illegally—in zero gravity. Jäger Jin, one of the asteroid defence picket-ship pilots, is sent by the Jinshan corporation to kill her.
Initially, Jin is keen to do his duty (spoiler) but his attitude changes, partially due to events and partially due to comments made by his onboard AI, Huizhu. Eventually he decides to attempt a rendezvous with Perez but, although the AI is sympathetic, she is bound to carry out orders sent from the Jinshan corporation. That said, Huizhu works around direct orders when she can, such as when Jin tries to gain control of the ship engines:

You would have to cut these eight wires,” Huizhu said, and the lines crisscrossing the screen flashed on and off rapidly. My hands shook and I tried to memorize that entire circuit, just in case. “Using just the replacement-part printer, could you build me a manual control adaptor?”
“No,” she said. My pulse slowed and I steeled myself for doing it the hard way. Then she spoke again. “I have already designed the module and fed the information into the printer, but I can’t actually send the command to make it.”
“So that means—”
“I can explain the logic behind that limitation, or you can just go press the button.” p.222

I didn’t entirely buy the evil corporation or the childbirth laws—although I suspect the basis for these is the Chinese ‘one child’ policy—but if you can swallow these points the rest of the story is suspenseful and touching.
The final story is The Stone War by Ted Kosmatka. This is about a stone man who crouches in the hills and who is immobile unless he is attacked, whereupon he stands and kills the aggressor. The story details the hundreds and thousands of years that pass with various groups of people passing by and camping at the stone man’s location. Every now and then someone strikes at the stone man and pays with their life. Matters only change significantly when a war-mongering king learns of the stone man and comes to see for himself. Eventually (spoiler) this turns into a clever tale of mutually assured destruction. A bit slow to get going but ultimately a pretty good fantasy and one that’ll probably be in the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.

There is also the usual selection of non-fiction in this issue with interesting book review columns by Charles de Lint, Books to Look For, and Elizabeth Hand, Books. De Lint reviews, amongst other things Bookburners Season One, a serially published book, and the Nebula Awards Showcase 2015 by Greg Bear. In the first review he mentions not trying a similar serial book from the same publisher because ‘I’m on a budget’, which I found rather strange as I would have thought that they would have been delighted to give him a review copy for free if he had asked. When he comes to the Nebula anthology he says of one story:

Kenneth Schneyer’s “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” is told entirely in program notes, as the title suggests. They describe each painting and are accompanied by suggested discussion sessions. I didn’t quite get the story—it seemed to flit just out of my reach—but it’s a fascinating and somewhat eerie narrative that made me wish I could both see the paintings and know more about the artist’s life. p.75

If he doesn’t get it, what chance do we amateurs have?
In Alternating Currents David J. Skal reviews Amazon Video’s new series The Man in the High Castle, which I have already seen. He does a good job of looking at some of the sometimes necessary differences between the book and the TV show. Curiosities by Paul Di Filippo looks at Twilight Stories by Rhona Broughton. I suppose I should also mention this issue’s cover by Max Bertolini, which I don’t like for a couple of reasons: first, it has a limited colour palette that makes for a rather bland offering; second, I am not a fan of the blurry figure, which ends up looking like a production mistake. The Kindle cover version of the magazine once again has what looks like a mesh filter overlaid on the low-resolution image.

In conclusion, this is a strong issue. Not only do you get a memorable fantasy from Susan Palwick but there are also four superior novelettes. I’d also add that the stories that didn’t entirely work for me are worth reading for the parts that do, something you cannot always say about the less favoured stories in any given issue of a SF magazine.

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Fiction:
Waiting For You, Maude-Ellen • short story by J. P. Dixon ♥
Miranda-Escobedo • short story by James Sallis
The Massahattan Snap Tube • short story by D. Thomas Bear ♥♥♥
B.K.A. The Master • short story by George Alec Effinger ♥♥
The Sitter • short story by Charles W. Runyon ♥
The Anvil of Jove • novella by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund ♥♥
The Ice Cream Golem • novelette by Mel Gilden ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Anvil of Jove • cover by Rick Sternbach
Books • by Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Films: The Greenwood at Sunset • by Baird Searles
Making It! • science essay by Isaac Asimov
F&SF Competition: Report on Competition 13

This month is an anniversary for me in that it was forty years ago that I bought my first digest-size US SF magazines.¹ Although I had previously purchased copies of the large-size British magazine SF Monthly² this was the first time I had seen the real deal. This was one of two magazines I bought on that day, the other being the July edition of Analog.
I remember that after reading both of the magazines I wasn’t particularly impressed. Perhaps, after having been served a diet of anthologies that contained the best work in the field, it needed some adjustment to get used to the more variable fiction quality found in the magazines. Having made that transition a long time ago I was curious to see what I would think this time around.

All of the short stories in this issue are at the beginning of the magazine punctuated with a couple of the non-fiction columns, a standard F&SF layout.
Waiting For You, Maude-Ellen by J. P. Dixon is about a woman who thinks she is being watched as she looks at her wishing star. She then hears a voice but is interrupted by her husband coming back to the house with another woman. The husband wants her to move out. The voice is subsequently revealed to be connected to her star in, literally, a wish-fulfilment ending.
Miranda-Escobedo by James Sallis is a story I’ve now read at least three times in the last four decades and I still don’t understand it: a cop goes to the scene of a motorbike accident and talks to the dead young man’s aura. He forgets to read him his rights and then a detective comes on the scene and takes charge.
The Massahattan Snap Tube by D. Thomas Bear is quite a well told and reasonably amusing story about a portal that opens between two store freezers, one in Massapequa and one in Manhattan—sixty miles apart. The two shop owners form the Massahattan Snap Tube Corporation and events proceed from there….
Although the mechanics and operation of the portal are never explained Bear gets away with this because (prospective writers take note) he only asks us to suspend disbelief about one thing before shifting the focus of the story to mass transit and big government.
Finally, Bear is an example of a writer who has only ever published one story in field. A pity: judging by this effort it is our loss.
B.K.A. The Master by George Alec Effinger is an odd urban fantasy about Roland and his flock of pigeons. As he goes through his day—down at the local pet shop and up on the roof with his flock—a voice speaks to him. Further, he finds himself having visions:

Roland stood in a huge cavern. Light spilled down in arrow-straight, arrow-sharp beams from a ceiling too far above his head to be seen. The walls of the chamber were likewise at a great distance and shrouded in darkness. There was a single shaft of light illuminating a kind of table about thirty yards away. Roland walked toward it. As he got closer, he saw that it was an altar, made of stone cut from the same rock that formed the rough floor. There was nothing on the altar but the light.
“No.” said the voice inside him. “You must avoid light. You must avoid anything that seems holy. You must learn these things quickly. Go into the shadows.” p.40

In later visions it appears he is being tested by the forces of evil and (spoiler) in the final one he fails. He and his brother subsequently burn down the pigeon coop of a rich guy who has stolen Roland’s flock. The voice subsequently berates him for having failed the test and for having chosen the path of evil. Roland is nihilistically indifferent. I’m not sure what point is being made here so it was an unsatisfying end to a story that I had been quite enjoying.
The Sitter by Charles W. Runyon is about a man who collects chairs sailing out to an island that has a house with a very special example. After he sits in it, and the man who transported him has left the island, he undergoes an alien experience. The last line seems rather arbitrarily tacked on and the whole thing doesn’t really make any narrative sense.

This mixed bag of short fiction is followed by a long novella by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund, The Anvil of Jove. This is a genuinely self-contained part of the novel The Stars Are Gods, and tells of a spaceship in orbit around Jupiter whose crew are trying to decode an alien transmission. The three main characters are: Mara, who is a ‘manip’ or ‘nipper’, gene manipulated, super intelligent and very annoying to the other crew members; Bradley Reynolds, an 127 year old former astronaut and chief of the station; Corey, another ‘manip’, but one who exists in a metal box.
The sub-plots that revolve around the main idea are: a couple of murder attempts on Mara; the manips on Earth having their citizenship revoked and their threat to nuke Tokyo unless this is rescinded; onboard friction from some of the crew towards Mara and Corey. Throughout all this Bradley Reynolds feels his age while dispassionately trying to manage the friction between the people under his command.
This all rumbles along quite well for the most part but by the time the climactic section arrives, involving Corey flying a glideship into Jupiter’s atmosphere, I had rather lost interest: at 64pp. it is about a dozen pages too long. There are also at least a couple of typoes and one truncated sentence, which is quite unusual for F&SF.

The last piece of fiction in this issue is a fantasy novelette by Mel Gilden about two Jewish brothers, The Ice Cream Golem. One of them, the doctor, creates a golem—an artificial man—to help his brother. Initially the golem is a great help in Irving’s ice cream business. However, Irving accidentally spills chicken soup on the golem’s head and it develops self-awareness….
The Jewish background is a characteristic of this story that I enjoyed, like the stories F&SF printed which had a background of American folklore: both seemed quite exotic to someone from the north-east of Scotland in the 1970s!

The non-fiction in F&SF was always pretty strong in this period due to the appearance of three regular columns. Books by Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin is an interesting review of three non-fiction books and an anthology, all with some historical perspective. After lukewarm coverage of Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction by James Gunn they express their dislike of Damon Knight’s 1930’s anthology Science Fiction of the 30’s, and Science-Fiction Handbook, Revised: A Guide to Writing Imaginative Literature by L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Crook de Camp.
They have better things to say about van Vogt’s autobiographical volume: Reflections of A. E. van Vogt, which provides an interesting quote:

Van Vogt is a problem that the new historians of SF like Gunn and Aldiss must surely come to terms with. Those like Aldiss who value literary excellence cannot approve of van Vogt. He is foggy, semi-literate, pulpish and dumb. Those like Gunn who value rationality must admit, as Gunn does, that “van Vogt’s stories did not attempt to present a rational picture of the world.” And yet, anyone with any sense of SF must acknowledge the true power of van Vogt’s work. A power that the present critical understanding of SF is totally inadequate to deal with. p.37

Films: The Greenwood at Sunset by Baird Searles is another interesting column that discusses the movies Robin and Marian, The Green Slime and Weird Women (1944). The latter is apparently an early film version of Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife, and apparently inferior to the later Burn, Witch, Burn (1961). He ends the column with mention of a film that he has seen some pre-production work for and thinks very promising: Star Wars.
The final column in this issue keeps the standard up. Isaac Asimov’s Making It!, is an interesting account of the American War of Independence and industrial supremacy, both British vs. American, and North vs. South.
There is also a Gahan Wilson Cartoon, which were always a bit hit and miss for me—miss this time around, and the F&SF Competition. I should also note Rick Sternbach’s lovely cover for this issue. Co-incidentally he also provided the cover for that July issue of Analog that I bought at the same time.

So, in conclusion, not a particularly good issue, which helps explain my initial comments about being somewhat underwhelmed.

1. Although both magazines were dated July it must have been June when I picked them up as it was still term time at school.
2. The first issue of Science Fiction Monthly I bought is reviewed here.

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

Other Reviews:
Steve Fahnestalk, Amazing Stories
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Jason McGrogor, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Mark Watson, Best SF
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Fiction:
The Ghost Penny Post • novelette by Marc Laidlaw ∗∗∗+
Red in Tooth and Cog • novelette by Cat Rambo ∗∗∗∗
Belief • short story by Nancy Kress ∗∗
The Liar • novella by John P. Murphy ∗∗∗
Nanabojou and the Race Question • short story by Justin Barbeau ∗∗
The Language of the Silent • novelette by Juliette Wade and Sheila Finch ∗∗
Diamond • short story by Chris DeVito ∗
The Silver Strands of Alpha Crucis-d • short story by N. J. Schrock ∗
A Mother’s Arms • novelette by Sarina Dorie ∗∗∗+
Golden Gate Blues • short story by James L. Cambias ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • Jason Van Hollander
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Musing on Books • by Michelle West
The Potato Farmer that Worked the Problem • film review by Kathi Maio
The Prince and the Pulpster • humour by Paul Di Filippo
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: Monk’s Magic, by Alexander De Comeau (1931) • review by Graham Andrews
Cartoons • by Danny Shanahan, Arthur Masear, Joseph Farris, S. Harris, Mark Heath

_____________________

The Ghost Penny Post by Marc Laidlaw is an entertaining light fantasy that gets the fiction off to a good start in this issue. Hewell, a Post Office inspector around the time of the Penny Black stamp, introduces himself to another passenger on the coach:

“I myself am free to come forward in my public capacity as an inspector of the Royal Mail. I am traveling only slightly farther along, to the village proper, Binderwood. You are aware, perhaps, of certain irregularities—one might even characterize them as abuses—in the local mail? London has grown alarmed. I am here to investigate.”  p. 9

During his investigations he sees for himself these irregularities in the mail:

The letters in Hewell’s left hand all bore the same peculiar stamp: it was engraved with care and craft, but printed in violet ink on a press whose plates were minutely out of register, such that the profile was ever so slightly blurred. This figure of royalty wore a fanciful three-tipped crown and was definitely not Victoria Regina. The profile’s most remarkable feature was a sharp dot of carmine red marking out the iris of the eye. As a work of art and amateur production, it was intriguing. However, it also bore the legend “One Penny,” which rendered it a competitor to the Royal Mail, a blatant forgery, and therefore intolerable.  p. 13

Matters develop when it becomes apparent that there is a supernatural kingdom running in parallel to the real world:

Spectralia’s courier was in a state of panic. He had never felt such dread, not through all the conflicts and quarrels that had beset the Kingdom during his tenure. The Dispute of the Seventeen Borders; the Deputation of Ghosts; the Battle of the Sea Stars—none of these events had involved him directly. Even the War of the Woods, in which he was conscripted, had been fought and finished quickly, resolved with several duels, one sword fight, and a formal armistice followed by cake. Although the Kingdom had certainly been in danger and dealt with its share of spies and subterfuges, the threat had never before come from beyond. Internal pressures were one thing. Civil wars flared up continually, but Her Ladyship, the Ghost Queen, had a strong and fair hand when it came to managing her subjects. This was a different matter. What bulwarks could she erect against the actions of external principalities? What chance had Spectralia against the far-off yet famously meddlesome influence of London? The people there obeyed no monarch but their own!  p. 18

Another one for the Best Fantasy of the Year collections.
Continuing and improving on the strong start to this issue is Red in Tooth and Cog, a novelette by Cat Rambo. It is not often I get a sense of wonder buzz from a modern story but I loved this one. It is set in a near-future park and is about a woman who has her phone stolen by a feral household appliance, a mobile can-opener/corkscrew/nutcracker combination. The rest of the story charts her observation of various appliances and how she starts to engage with both them and the park robot:

They both watched the newly swollen manticore, still ungainly with its acquisitions, trundle into the underbrush. It was quieter than she would’ve expected for a machine of that size. “It’s hard for those big machines to replicate,” the robot said. The flat black eyes slid toward her. “I’ve told you, you shouldn’t feed them so much. You’ve upset the ecosystem.”
“I don’t bring much,” she said. “A few batteries, some smaller parts.” It made a sound somewhere between a buzz and a glottal stop. “They will think all humans are tender-hearted like you,” it said. “Most people regard them as vermin. And there are more of them here than you imagine.”  p. 48

The only minor criticism I have of this (spoiler) is the slightly ambivalent/unclear last section which reads as if the writer didn’t quite have the courage to let the generally feel-good ending stand as is. Notwithstanding this, a story for the Best of the Year anthologies and awards shortlists.
The rest of the issue is more of a mixed bag although not without a few good stories. Belief by Nancy Kress is probably one of the more ‘serious’ stories in the issue—not that it is that serious but it occurred to me that quite a few of the other stories in this issue tend towards the other end of the spectrum.
This story follows twin but connected storylines about a mother and her fifteen year old daughter and starts with an argument about the latter wanting to attend an iarrthoir, or ‘seeker’, course and the emotionally-controlled, scientist mother objecting. The daughter storyline describes her attendance at the course and subsequent experiences, whereas the mother deals with a bipolar colleague who is struggling to come to terms with published ground-breaking research that has prempted his similar results. Both these strands are interesting and at times intriguing, which makes it even more of a pity when the story ends with no real resolution.
The Liar by John P. Murphy is the longest story in the issue, a 25,000 word, sixty page novella described as a cross between Garrison Keillor and Stephen King. It certainly has elements of both those writers in its story of Greg Kellogg, who is a New England small town handyman and also a special kind of liar:

I gave the rake a tug and there was a sharp crack. I plucked off my canvas gloves and knelt down—not a thing I do lightly on a cool fall day, but not anything I worry overmuch about yet, either—and inspected the broken bamboo spoke. It’d stuck in the ground, and the rake was old, and I hadn’t been any too gentle. The tine broke off in one piece, though: ought to be an easy lie. I brushed away the dirt and fitted it back together as tight as I could. “Looks solid to me,” I muttered. “Ayuh, must have been mistaken. That ain’t broke at all.” I waggled it carefully to illustrate my point. “Couldn’t do that if it were broke,” I continued, picturing it as one long, strong piece. “No, and I wouldn’t do it if it were cracked. Wouldn’t make sense, would it? Must be fine, seems to me.”   p. 96

After one of the elderly locals has a minor accident he ends up as the town’s sexton and is told he can expect a death on November the fifth: one or more youngsters in the area have died on that day every year since the forties.
After getting off to a pretty good start this becomes more of a curate’s egg: the good parts are the local colour and a nice turn of phrase:

New Hampshire natives are split on the subject of retiring to Florida. Some consider it a treason, a surrender to the cold and snow; they speak of retirees as of the dead or the disgraced. Others think of Florida as a kind of Yankee Valhalla, a just reward for a lifetime of early rising and snow shoveling and windshield scraping.  p. 100

The not so good include a female pastor’s (in whom Kellog has an emotional interest) stereotypical and problematic teenage daughter, and also the possible source of the trouble: (spoiler-ish) a crashed wartime B-17 Flying Fortress on a nearby hill:

Forty-odd accidental deaths, one a year on the same day. At least one, I corrected myself, remembering the car crash. Their graves in Stonewall Cemetery had been marked with the same bomb emblem as a WWII bomber that had crashed around the same time of year in 1943.  p. 119

What probably doesn’t help this story is its length as—once the maguffin started to seem a bit unlikely (about two-thirds of the way through)—I found it started dragging a little. Even if I hadn’t felt this way I suspect it could have done with some trimming and tightening in the middle and later stages. Not bad overall, for all my gripes.
The next few stories didn’t work for me for a variety of reasons. Given, as we shall see, the better finish to this issue, I wonder if the editors think this is the weaker stuff too: I believe the idea in magazine construction is put your strongest stories at the beginning and the end so that readers continue reading the magazine once started and then go away with pleasant memories!
Nanabojou and the Race Question by Justin Barbeau is a tale about a Native American called Nanabojou—who created the Americas—going to the 1920s Virginia Senate as they create their race laws. This is essentially an history lesson with a bit of magical realism/fantasy tossed into the mix, and is OK if you treat it as such I guess.
The Language of the Silent by Juliette Wade and Sheila Finch is about a linguist who is deafened in space accident shortly before the signing of a treaty on an alien planet. As she explores the world she discovers another species used as slaves. This is OK overall but fizzles out at the end. I also felt that the backstory about the linguist’s grandmother added little to the mix.
Diamond by Chris DeVito is one of those stories about American sports, baseball this time, which occasionally turn up in the magazine. This one has an underwhelming twist ending.
The Silver Strands of Alpha Crucis-d by N. J. Schrock is about sentient, silver, threadlike aliens on the planet Alpha Crucis-d and how the carbon dioxide the human explorers are producing is killing them. It reads like a 1500 word synopsis of a longer novelette and should have been sent back to the writer for plot and character expansion and the addition of a more can-do, problem-solving ending. A missed opportunity.
As previously mentioned matters improve with the last two offerings. A Mother’s Arms by Sarina Dorie is a pretty good story about an alien ‘octopillar’ mother:

I was what my people called eightblessed, one child for each of my arms. I rested in the immense boughs of the flowering nectar tree. Each of my outstretched tentacles tended to a baby octopillar. My babies tangled themselves in leafy twigs and experimentally suctioncupped their tentacles to themselves and me. I had never felt more full of pride and joy as I did when I birthed my litter.  p. 217

She subsequently loses all her children as a result of human aircraft/spaceships fighting aerial creatures above her colony. One of the human craft crash-lands nearby and she goes to it seeking revenge. Once there she finds what she thinks is a larvae/child in it, relents, and decides to adopt it… This is old-school SF—some might even say a little cutesy—but I thoroughly enjoyed it and will seek out an earlier story with the same background (The Day of the Nuptial Flight, F&SF, July/August 2014). I hope we see more of this series.
Golden Gate Blues by James L. Cambias is an amusing tale about Anthony Mace, a private detective commissioned by Dr Kraken the super-villain to investigate the death of a giant octopus that was captured after attacking the Golden Gate Bridge:

[Dr Kraken said,] “One of the cruelest restrictions of my parole is that I am to have no contact with any living cephalopods, or enter any facility containing them.”
“Kind of rough if the catch of the day is calamari,” I put in.
Kraken’s amiable expression became a glare of hate and fury. “That word,” he said, “is never uttered in my presence.”
“Sorry.”
He got himself under control and went on. “Despite those onerous conditions, I still maintain an active interest in the welfare of our tentacled cousins. One day, when the stars are right, they will inherit the Earth….”
His voice was taking on a “you-fools” tone, so I tried to drag him back on track.  p. 240-241

Mace investigates the octopus killing against a background of superhero ‘capes’, massive sharks and alien software that has been installed in the Golden Gate Bridge so it can protect itself from giant creature attacks. Good fun.

As to the non-fiction, The Potato Farmer that Worked the Problem by Kathi Maio is an interesting and positive film column about The Martian. The first part of the column gives a brief history of Mars movies which puts the current one in context. This is something that book review columns could badly do with. Books to Look For by Charles de Lint (four out of seven reviewed books are series ones about vampires/werewolves, etc.) and Musing on Books by Michelle West gave me no idea of where the books they cover sit in the field.
The Prince and the Pulpster by Paul Di Filippo is another of his amusing Plumage from Pegasus columns—you could call this one a story—about a Wall Street tycoon who swaps places with a writer and finds the life, ah, less idyllic than he was expecting . . . .
Coming Attractions trails a forthcoming ‘Alaric’ story by Phyllis Eisenstein as well as a ‘Special Author’ issue (David Gerrold?) to commemorate Star Trek’s 50^th birthday.  Curiosities by Graham Andrews reviews a book that doesn’t seem to be available for purchase anywhere. Oh well. I didn’t like the cartoons so much this issue as some of the punchlines didn’t work for me.

Overall, this is a worthwhile issue. It is probably too soon (after only two double issues) to go beyond that and come to any conclusions about what kind of editor C. C. Finlay is, but there seems to preponderance of more traditional and entertaining work—and perhaps more fantasy—than F&SF has published under some of its other editors. It certainly makes for an entertaining read.  ●

_____________________

Subscribe: F&SF subs/Amazon UK, USA /Weightless Books

Edited 4^th October 2019: formatting and minor textual changes.

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

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Nicky Magas, Tangent Online
Lois Tilton, Locus
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Mark Watson, Best SF (forthcoming)
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Fiction:
Vortex • short story by Gregory Benford ∗∗∗
Number Nine Moon • novelette by Alex Irvine ∗∗∗
Rockets Red • short story by Mary Robinette Kowal ∗∗
Smooth Stones and Empty Bones • short story by Bennett North ∗∗∗+
The White Piano • novelette by David Gerrold ∗∗∗
Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do? • short story by Nick Wolven ∗
Robot from the Future • short story by Terry Bisson ∗∗
Squidtown • short story by Leo Vladimirsky ∗∗∗
Touch Me All Over • short story by Betsy James ∗∗
Telltale • novelette by Matthew Hughes ∗∗∗+
The Visionaries • short story by Albert E. Cowdrey ∗∗∗
Braid of Days and Wake of Nights • short story by E. Lily Yu ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • Bob Eggleton
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by James Sallis
Welcome to Pleistocene Park • essay by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
The World, the Flesh, and the Apocalypse • essay by David J. Skal
Cartoons • Mark Heath, J. P. Rini, Arthur Masear
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: The Truth About Wilson, by W. S. K. Webb (1962) • essay by Graham Andrews

_____________________

This issue’s cover by Bob Eggleton has unfortunately been mutilated by the barcode and display date. I’ve commented on barcode problems before while reviewing an Asimov’s SF cover. If I were laying out the cover of this one I think I would have a strip at the bottom of the page with the barcode and the author names you want displayed. Also, I’d move the magazine title to the top of the page leaving non-overprinted artwork in the middle. Alternatively, if you can turn the barcode on its side then the Galaxy inverted L layout is a possibility. I know that publishers have to labour under various cover-design constraints but God only knows what the artists think when they see this sort of thing done to their artwork.

According to the introduction for the Benford story this Martian landscape cover has three stories ‘matched’ to it so I’ll deal with those first. Vortex by Gregory Benford is from the same series as his novels The Martian Race and The Sunborn. I suspect this one is probably going to be part of a third but it is self-contained. It tells of various research teams on Mars and of friction between, in particular, the Australian and Chinese teams as the US and Koreans fight on Earth. Under the Martian surface there is a planet wide alien organism called the ‘mat’ which is developing diseased grey patches the scientists cannot explain. The resolution of this problem is relatively straightforward but this is offset by some vivid writing describing this huge alien amongst other things:

Snottites gleamed in their handlamps, dangling in moist lances from the ceiling. She steered well clear of the shiny colonies of single-celled extremophilic bacteria—like small stalactites, but with the consistency of mucus. She waved the team back. “Those mean the Mat is moving a lot of fluid around.”
Snottites got their name from how they looked, and their energy from digesting the volcanic sulfur in the warm water dripping down from above. Brush one of those highly acidic rods and their battery acid would cut through a suit in moments. A sharp, short ouch, quite fatal. The Chinese nodded, backing away. Good; they’ve learned some of the many dangers here.
Meters above in the dim pearly glow she saw Mat sheets hanging in a vast cavern. Under their beams this grotto came alive with shimmering luminescence: burnt oranges, dapplings of vermilion, splashes of delicate turquoise. Another silence. Inside the beast.  p.12-13

If the novels weren’t 400-odd pages long I’d probably pick one up.
Number Nine Moon by Alex Irvine is a novelette about three people who go to Hellas basin at the end of a total Mars evacuation to see what they can ‘recover’. Shortly after their arrival there is an accident that forces them to attempt to use an old fashioned rocket to get into orbit. The fun in this one isn’t the straightforward and slightly unlikely story but the interplay of the characters and the colourful way the story is told:

Steuby was sixty-two years old, born in 2010, and had only ever seen one other person die in front of him.
That was back on the Moon, where he’d worked for almost fifteen years. A guy named Walter Navarro, looking the wrong way when someone swung a steel beam around at a construction site. The end of the beam smashed the faceplate of Walter’s helmet. The thing Steuby remembered most about it was the way Walter’s screams turned into ice fog pouring out and drifting down onto the regolith. By the time they got him inside he was dead, with frozen blood in his eyes from where the shards of the faceplate had cut him. Steuby had gotten out of the construction business as soon as he’d collected his next paycheck. After that he’d run tourist excursions, and seen some weird shit, but nothing weirder than Walter Navarro’s dying breaths making him sparkle in the vacuum.  p. 37
.
Together the compounds would fuel a rocket via a hypergolic reaction. One of Steuby’s favorite words, hypergolic. Like just being golic wasn’t enough.  p. 38

The third Mars story is Rockets Red by Mary Robinette Kowal, It is a pleasant enough if slight story about the interaction between a mother and son when a fireworks display looks like it may not happen due to a technical failure. This occurs on a parallel-world Mars that was first visited in the 1950s, and is a prequel to the author’s 2014 Hugo winner The Lady Astronaut of Mars (first published on Tor.com).²
After the three Mars SF stories there are a couple of fantasy stories. First up is a promising debut by Bennett North, Smooth Stones and Empty Bones. This is a pretty good tale that tells of a witch’s teenage daughter who has a box of stones that can bring dead things back to life:

There’s a skeleton in the chicken coop. It’s some bare collection of abandoned bones, maybe a former fox, and it’s slishing through the pine needles and bumping liplessly against the gate. The chickens, for their part, don’t look concerned.  p. 68

Her girlfriend’s young brother is missing in the woods, feared dead. This initially gives off the same kind of vibe as Stephen King’s Pet Sematary or Keith Roberts’ The Witch, but it is its own story and has a couple of interesting occurrences and clever developments up its sleeve.
At the other end of the writer experience range is David Gerrold with The White Piano. This novelette is a competent ghost story (more of a compliment than you may think) about two children who have lost their mother and the grandmother who has come to stay with them. The boy starts hearing scratching at night and fears it may be a ghost. After a few pages of this narrative arc the story veers onto another one. The grandmother tells them a long tale about when she was a child during the war, living in a large house in the north of England. The dead wife of the house’s owner was a pianist so a lot of classical and other piano music subsequently features.
The next three stories are back in the SF groove and the first is the only one in the issue I didn’t particularly care for. Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do? by Nick Wolven is an ‘if this goes on’ piece about a man who is subject to ‘media terrorism’. All his phones, TVs, computers, his work sound system, etc., blare out harrowing messages. This comes to a peak when his recently installed home ‘Ubervision’ system—TV screens on all home surfaces—is activated:

When I get home, the foyer is dark. But not for long. As soon as I enter, the door begins to weep. The ceiling fills with hurrying flame. Burning people run toward me from within the phantasmal walls. Even the floor is a field of carnage. As I walk to the kitchen, I tread on the faces of the maimed. The kitchen cabinets tell me that churches are burning, that dogs are starving, that a human-rights worker has been killed by forced detegumentation.  p. 126

Unfortunately by this point the relentlessness of all this had worn me out and I was thinking ‘turn off the TV, dummy.’
He gets free of it in the last chapter but this doesn’t seem to be explained, or maybe by then my attention had drifted. Also not explained (spoiler) is why he finally sends money to the people who were making his life a misery, but perhaps that is some moral point going way over my head.
Robot from the Future by Terry Bisson is about a young boy and his grandfather who try to obtain ‘gas-o-line’ in a ‘Greaned’ future for robots that have come back in time and are stranded. This has an offbeat and interesting voice:

Instead of attacking, the robot stretches out its arms. Then it starts talking. “Gas-o-line,” it says.
It has a voice like a lady.
I don’t say anything.
“Gas-o-line, Theodore,” it says. “Please help.”
“How do you know my name?”
“We just do,” it says. “You are eleven,” it says. “That’s a great age.”
I agree but don’t say anything. I’ve been eleven for almost three months. It means you can go places by yourself and make up your mind about things. It’s totally different from ten.  p. 134

Unfortunately that is all it has because the story doesn’t really go anywhere.
Squidtown by Leo Vladimirsky is an interesting mood piece set in the same series as Collar (F&SF, March/April 2014). A released Unionist prisoner in a future Islamic State of Texas is back home with his sister in a place called Squidtown. Their conversation takes up most of the piece, complicated by the fact he has had his tongue cut out in prison:

“You don’t have to type everything,” she says. “I understood your baby babbling. I’ll understand you now.”
THE WAY YOU’RE SLURRING MAYBE YOU SHOULD TYPE TOO
She yanks the phone out of my hand and starts tapping.
“How’s this?” she asks as she shows me the screen.
DON’T BE A DICK
She jabs me in the side—another reminder of home.
“Why don’t you just get a new one? I have money now,” she continues. “They can regrow it superquick. Like, two days.”
PRISON DOCTORS OFFERED IN D’ALLAHS
“So you’d rather suffer in silence?”
CAN TALK. PREFER THIS.  p. 149

An interesting if slightly unlikely background but I’ll dig out the other story.
Four fantasies close out the issue, although the third could probably be labelled as SF. Touch Me All Over by Betsy James is about a primitive-ish woman who is a ‘twiner’ or weaver. She finds a glass knife at a badger’s sett and from that point on everything man-made she touches falls apart. She leaves her village clothed only in a bearskin and (spoiler) is later discovered by two men, one of whom tries to rape her. All his clothes start disintegrating and the pack falls off his mule. The men flee. Subsequently she finds a bound man on top of the pack. The woman releases the man and they find shelter in a cave. Matters develop between them but ultimately this is a story with a good idea that doesn’t have an ending to match.
The other issue highlight, apart from the North story, is Telltale, Matthew Hughes’ novelette set in his ‘Archonate’ universe. I won’t say much about this so I don’t spoil it, but it is a well plotted story about a guild thief called Raffalon who ends up trapped in a cabin in an enchanted forest telling stories to a woman, or something that looks like a woman. A clever and inventive traditional fantasy adventure.
The Visionaries by Albert E. Cowdrey is the one that could be fantasy, SF or horror depending on how you squint. Jimmy and Morrie have a company called Paranormal Services and they need to clear an area of forest that is ‘haunted’—which results in workmen being injured when tree felling, spooked animals, etc. It has a convincing locale and characters and about three-quarters of the way through (spoiler) it pivots into a story about what is to come in the area rather than what might have happened in the past.
The close-out story is Braid of Days and Wake of Nights by E. Lily Yu. This story involves a young woman with Stage 4 cancer, an estranged husband, and a friend trying to track down a unicorn in Central Park. I suspect readers’ reactions to this cocktail will be wildly variable, from those that find it mawkish and contrived to those who find it enchanting and heart-wrenching/warming. Myself, I’m somewhere in the middle; I can see what the writer is trying to pull off in this story but don’t think it is completely successful, probably because (spoiler) of a wish-fulfilment element that made me increasingly restless as the tale developed. The final scene pivots to a bleaker ending, but too late for me.
While I’m discussing this story a word (no, let’s be honest, a fairly long moan) about the dedication in the introduction:

Our final story for this issue is dedicated in part to Jay Lake, one of the most prolific and promising young writers of the decade that stretched from 2004, when he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction, to 2014, when cancer cut his life prematurely short.  p. 236

I don’t think that short story dedications in a magazine are a good idea, and if you are going to have them then it would be better to put a line or two at the end of the story. If you have the dedication in the introduction it is going to colour readers’ reactions to the story before they even start it: with this one I found myself slowly getting into an emotional crash position and muttering ‘Brace, brace, brace’ under my breath. My other problem with dedications is this: think of the poor reviewer, writers. If you tell me your story is dedicated to your three god-children who were all wiped out in a terrorist outrage it makes it much harder for me to tell you that your story sucked . . . but not impossible.

The best of the non-fiction is an interesting science article (again, more of a compliment than you realise) from Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty. Welcome to Pleistocene Park is about melting permafrost increasing global warming, and a Russian scientist who is attempting to covert parts of the Russian steppe back to grassland to ameliorate this.
In Books to Look For, Charles de Lint reviews half a dozen fantasy books including the latest two by Stephen King. Sallis reviews collections by Dale Bailey and Tananarive Due in Books, and Graham Andrews contributes a Curiosities piece. David J. Skal reviews the movies Air and Z for Zachariah in The World, the Flesh, and the Apocalypse.
My other favourite non-fiction items after the science article were the cartoons, which are a distinctive part of F&SF.

This is the first modern issue of F&SF that I’ve read for a long time (and although I had both the paper and Kindle issues, I read the latter³). I was pleasantly surprised. The overall quality of this edition is uniformly high with a couple of quite good pieces. Recommended.  ●

_____________________

1. A couple of rough cover designs so you can see what I’m suggesting. The typeface at the bottom isn’t quite right, but it gives you an idea of what I mean by another letterbox at the bottom and what the art may look like:

This is the Galaxy one: the inverse L should probably be thinner:

2. Kowal’s The Lady Astronaut from Mars can be found at Tor.com

3. The Kindle edition of the magazine is not a patch on Asimov’s SF which lets you choose between two formats: one that looks like a PDF identical to the physical magazine, and the normal Kindle layout. F&SF only offers you the latter and it is a little broken. Apart from the odd formatting problem involving spaces at either side of a comma, this is what my contents page looks like on my iPad 3:

Subscribe: F&SF subs/Amazon UK, USA /Weightless Books

Edited 4^th October 2019: formatting changes.

Other reviews:
Anonymous: Galactic Journey Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

Fiction:
Flowers for Algernon • novelette by Daniel Keyes ♥♥♥♥♥
The Flying Islands • reprint short story by Anton Chekhov ♥♥
The Amulet • short story by Gordon R. Dickson ♥♥
The Lady in the Tower • novelette by Anne McCaffrey ♥♥♥+
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XIII • short fiction by Reginald Bretnor ♥♥♥
Unto the Fourth Generation • short story by Isaac Asimov ♥
The Martian Crown Jewels • reprint short story by Poul Anderson ♥♥
Nightmare • short story by Jane Roberts ♥
To See Another Mountain • short story by Frederik Pohl ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Flowers for Algernon • cover by Emsh¹
The Lady in the Tower • interior artwork by John Schoenherr
Life’s Bottleneck • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Chemical Persuasion • essay by Aldous Huxley
Half Loaves • book reviews by Damon Knight

This issue contains the brilliant Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, one of the best stories that F&SF has ever published. It tells the story of Charlie Gordon, whose IQ is 68: his diary begins with this:

progris riport 1-martch 5 1965
Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and every thing that happins to me from now on. I dont know why but he says its importint so they will see if they will use me. I hope they use me. Miss Kinnian says maybe they can make me smart. I want to be smart. My name is Charlie Gordon. I am 37 years old and 2 weeks ago was my brithday. I have nuthing more to rite now so I will close for today.

He becomes a test subject for an experimental program that will triple his IQ. Just over two months later:

May 18
I am very disturbed. I saw Miss Kinnian last night for the first time in over a week. I tried to avoid all discussions of intellectual concepts and to keep the conversation on a simple, everyday level, but she just stared at me blankly and asked me what I meant about the mathematical variance equivalent in Dorbermann’s Fifth Concerto.

This process is far from straightforward and the account of what happens makes it one of the best, and most heart-breaking, SF stories ever. And Keyes doesn’t even get his name on the cover!²

If Daniel Keyes’ story didn’t dominate this issue we might have all been talking about Anne McCaffrey’s ‘debut’ story The Lady in the Tower.³ This accomplished story tells of ‘The Rowan’ who is a Prime or T1 that works for Federal Telepath & Teleport on Callisto station in Jupiter orbit. Her job is flinging freight and people to other Earth colonies by mechanically aided teleportation. The normal routine of the day is interrupted when an unknown Prime, ‘Deneb’, comes ‘on the air’—telepathic communication between all the talents, from T1s to T12s—and requests serums and patrol ships as they are being attacked by aliens. An emotional frisson develops between them while they deal with this.⁴
Matters escalate when the aliens starts a missile attack and, eventually, Rowan and several other Primes form a gestalt to link up with ‘Deneb’ and fight them off. Part of this is described thus:

She abandoned her most guarded self to him and, with that surrender, the massed power she held flowed into him. The tired mind of the man grew, healed, strengthened and blossomed until she was only a small part of it, lost in the greater part of this immense mental whole.

This Mills & Boon stuff is one of the story’s minor weaknesses as is the fact it is populated with quite a lot of stock SF furniture, but it is hard to hold this against it when the story is told with such gusto. An impressive ‘debut’, and I’ll be digging out the sequel story that appeared a decade later.⁵

The Feghoot is wedged into the space at the end of the McCaffrey story. In the spirit of showing that even a broken clock is right twice a day it provides a pun about men communicating with fish that actually made me smile. Or maybe that was a grimace…

The rest of the fiction in this issue is a mixed bag. The Flying Islands by Anton Chekhov (Budilnik, 1883, translated by Frances H. Jones) is supposedly a parody of Jules Verne.  This gets off to quite a good start but tails off.
The Amulet by Gordon R. Dickson is a fantasy about a murderer jumping off a train and finding himself at a witch’s house. He is persuaded to perform an errand that involves another witch who lives over the ridge.
Isaac Asimov has a story as well as a science column is this issue. Unto the Fourth Generation is a fantasy about a man noticing certain odd Jewish names. Eventually he goes looking for someone and subsequently finds one of his ancestors. At this point in the story he then seems to go back to when he first recognised the strange names. Maybe I missed something but this didn’t work for me, and I have the vague memory that I felt the same way about the story the first time I read it.
The Martian Crown Jewels by Poul Anderson (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1958) is a detective story that involves the theft of the Martian Crown Jewels from an unmanned Earth-Mars spaceship. It is solved by a Martian detective who gives off a Sherlock Holmes vibe. Pleasant and original, but like a lot of mystery stories rather formulaic.
Nightmare by Jane Roberts is what it says. A woman dreams of catastrophe and her dead baby. Difficult to work out what is happening and it goes nowhere.
Finally, To See Another Mountain by Frederik Pohl goes on longer than it needs to with its story about a great scientist and his treatment in a medical centre. He has been insane in the past and the government have been expending a lot of time and money trying to cure him because of the importance of his work. The last image is striking but a standard SF trope.

There are three pieces of non-fiction in this month’s issue. Isaac Asimov’s Life’s Bottleneck is an interesting essay on the importance of phosphorus for life and how we may be flushing it all into the ocean… There is also an essay from Aldous Huxley, Chemical Persuasion. This is one of the chapters from Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited (1958) and looks at current and past drugs in relation to the soma of his Brave New World. Interesting piece (who knew there were a million speed addicts in the Japan of 1959?) The last piece of non-fiction brings with it the news that Damon Knight is replacing Tony Boucher as F&SF’s reviewer. Knight’s short column covers books by Murray Leinster and Edmund Cooper.
Also of note in this issue is the fact that Anne McCaffrey’s story has an interior illustration by John Schoenherr! I never knew that F&SF ever used interior illustrations, so this was a bit of a surprise.

To conclude, a must read issue for Flowers for Algernon with good support from Anne McCaffrey.

1. From Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer’s Journey by Daniel Keyes (F&SF, May 2000): “Five months later, he [Emsh] gave Aurea [Keyes’ wife] the original oil painting as a gift in honor of the birth of our first child, Hillary Ann. The painting still hangs in our living room.”
2. The story had a long, almost troubled, gestation and this is detailed in Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer’s Journey by Daniel Keyes (F&SF, May 2000). This article was five chapters from the book of the same name (out of twenty-three). There is a singular anecdote. At one point in the story’s development Keyes’ new agent Harry Altshuler has sent him over to Horace Gold’s flat. Gold [the editor of Galaxy] would read the manuscript while Keyes waits. Gold emerges some time later: “The ending is too depressing for our readers,” he said. “I want you to change it. Charlie doesn’t regress. He doesn’t lose his intelligence. Instead, he remains a super-genius, marries Alice Kinnian, and they live happily ever after. That would make it a great story.”
   I stared at him. How does a beginning writer respond to the editor who bought one story from him, and wants to buy a second? The years of labor over this story passed through my mind. What about my Wedge of Loneliness? My tragic vision of Book Mountain? My challenge to Aristotle’s theory of The Classic Fall?
   “I’ll have to think about it,” I mumbled. “I’ll need a little time.”
   “I’d like to buy it for one of the upcoming issues, but I’d need that revision. It shouldn’t take you long.”
   “I’ll work on it,” I said, knowing there was no way I’d change the ending.
   “Good,” he said, showing me to the door. “If not, I’m sure you’ll write other stories for Galaxy in the future.”
   I called Harry Altshuler from a pay phone and told him what had happened. There was a long pause. “You know,” he said, “Horace is a fine editor, with a strong sense of the market. I agree with him. It shouldn’t be too hard to make that change.”
   I wanted to shout: This story has a piece of my heart in it! But who was I to pit my judgment against professionals? The train ride back to Seagate was long and depressing.
   When I told Phil Klass [William Tenn] what had happened, he shook his head. “Horace and Harry are wrong. If you dare to change the ending, I’ll get a baseball bat and break both your legs.”
   “Thanks.”
   When I first read this account in 2000 the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
3. Not really her debut. A single page story, Freedom of the Race had appeared previously in Science Fiction Plus, October 1953.
4. Rather unusually for the time this story contains the line ‘The only male T-2 ever discovered in the Nine-Star League had been a confirmed homosexual.’
5. The sequel was A Meeting of Minds (F&SF, January 1969). There were also a series of ‘Talents’ novels starting with The Rowan in 1990.

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Fiction:
There Is Another Shore, You Know, Upon the Other Side • short story by Joanna Russ ♥♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: LXV • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton] ♥
Glory Road (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Robert A. Heinlein ♥
The Man Who Feared Robots • short story by Herbert W. Franke ♥
Collector’s Item • short story by Jack Sharkey ♥♥♥
Unholy Hybrid • short story by William Bankier ♥♥♥
Talking Statues, Etc. • short story by Fritz Leiber ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Books • reviews by Avram Davidson and Ward Moore
Attrition • poem by Walter H. Kerr
Who’s Out There? • science essay by Isaac Asimov

This issue’s fiction starts with Joanna Russ’s There Is Another Shore, You Know, Upon the Other Side. This is a fantasy about Jane, a ghost in Rome, and Giovanni, a man she meets. Quite good as far as it goes, well written and a nice sense of place, but the ending doesn’t measure up to the rest of it. At the end of this story the Feghoot pun, about nudity and tea, is wedged into the remaining space.

The last episode of Glory Road manages to wrap up the fantasy adventure part of things in the first two chapters. In these (spoiler), Oscar defeats the guardian of the Egg and Star is revealed to be ‘Empress of the Twenty Universes.’ Adventuring done, she now goes back to the day job with Oscar as her consort. Now Heinlein can do what he really wants to do, which is to spend the remaining six chapters (approximately sixty pages) talking about interplanetary and planetary politics, women and relationship problems (Oscar does not like his new role). So, on top of this novel’s other problems we can now add its broken-back anti-climactic structure.¹

The Books column is the usual mix: witchcraft, Atlantis, Korean folk tales, and fiction. The last review is by Ward Moore, a withering look at Philip Wylie’s nuclear holocaust novel, Triumph:

One would expect at least a minimum of craftsmanship from the author of Finnley Wren and 25 other books. None is perceptible in Triumph (the title is sarcastical), certainly not in the interminable, windy sermon which is evidently Mr. Wylie’s pride (and reason for the novel), but not the readers’ joy. Everything in this book has been said before, better, less verbosely, and more convincingly. If Triumph depicts the night of civilization it is an amateur night.

Isaac Asimov’s science column Who’s Out There? is an interesting discussion of Carl Sagan’s paper on the number of technological civilisations likely to be in existence in our Galaxy. It stretches credulity a little at the end when Asimov suggests that we may be being monitored by extra-terrestrials and that their base would probably be on the moon.
I have no idea what the poem Attrition is about.

Most of the remaining short fiction is quite good, with the weakest being Charlotte Franke-Winheller and Paul Ritchie’s translation of The Man Who Feared Robots by Herbert W. Franke (The Green Comet, 1960). A man is put under hypnosis and reveals that certain acquaintances are robots. Weak, so-what ending.
Collector’s Item by Jack Sharkey is quite a good fantasy about Nathan Crusk, who collects items that rebut popular sayings, e.g., an unhappy lark, white ink, a weak ox, etc. As his collection nears completion, he is stymied by “solid as the Rock of Gibraltar” until he meets a poor scientist who has created a machine that can liquefy granite. He is recruited to do this to the Rock of Gibraltar and exhibits few qualms at the prospect:

“I will do it,” Albert said hastily. “But only for the money, and not because it agrees with my basic principles.”

Although their adventure achieves its purpose there is one more saying the collector has forgotten. Nice last line.
Unholy Hybrid by William Bankier is an accomplished Halloween horror story about a successful farmer and what he reaps from a terrible act. I’d love to say more but I don’t want to spoil it.
Last up is Fritz Leiber’s worthwhile Talking Statues, Etc.This experimental fantasy, after a short introductory set-up, is told in the form of a father-son dialogue:

FATHER: (smiling compassionately from a painting of himself as Jesus of Nazareth): In short, you hate me.
SON: Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that. It’s more that you weary me. Seeing you around everywhere, all the time, I get bored.
FATHER (in dark colors, as Strindberg’s Captain): You get bored? You’ve only been here six weeks. Think of me having nothing to look at for ten whole years but your mother.

The situation is as odd as the structure in that the father is dead and is talking to his alcoholic failure of a son through numerous self-portraits or sculptures he made of himself before his death. We know Leiber was a painter and actor as well as a writer, and that he had a son. Beyond that we can only guess what the autobiographical elements are. Leiber, like Bradbury, travelled a considerable distance from his pulp origins, and this story illustrates that journey.

In conclusion, this is the third issue in a row that has been unbalanced by the Heinlein serial but there are a few short stories here worth catching.

1. I thought this was an unabridged version but at the end it states: “An expanded version of this novel will be published this fall by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, in a case-bound book priced at $3.95.”
   I am also aware that I have spent far too much time on this novel over these last few reviews. Look at the Consumer Guide at the bottom of the SF Digest #1, 1976 review: it tells you all you need to know. Out of the eight reviewers who rated it, one thought it a masterpiece, one thought it good, one average, two mediocre, one bad and two atrocious. Now I have finished you can make that three mediocres…

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Other reviews:
Rich Horton, Black Gate.

Fiction:
Turn Off the Sky • novelette by Ray Nelson ♥♥♥♥
Fred • short story by Calvin Demmon
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: LXIV • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton ] ♥
Glory Road (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Robert A. Heinlein ♥♥
The Censors: A Sad Allegory • short story by T. P. Caravan ♥♥
Sweets to the Sweet • short story by Paul Jay Robbins ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
In this issue… Coming Soon…
T-Formation • essay by Isaac Asimov
Ubi Sunt? • poem by Kathleen P. Reis and R. H. Reis
Books • by Avram Davidson
Letters

This issue has another Emsh cover this month, this time for Ray Nelson’s long novelette Turn Off The Sky. This stand out story tells of the hippyish future anarchist Abelard Rosenburg meeting the prostitute Reva on a high speed tube-train under the Atlantic. After some time together in London he loses her. Rosenberg immediately starts searching and eventually they are reunited and she falls pregnant. Although this seems a pretty straightforward story this is all done with some verve against a vivid future backdrop that reflects the beatnik scene of the late fifties and early sixties. There is a jaundiced, witty look at the counterculture movement, especially at how it is sliding towards violence:

“The State will never voluntarily give up its powers!” roared Little Brother. “Don’t you know any history? Social progress can only come through violent revolution! The old order must be washed away in a bath of blood.”
“Sometimes,” said George, “I think you are more interested in the bath of blood than in the social progress that is supposed to come out of it.” p.28

Along the way he also manages to make the story about as transgressive (or realistic, depending on your viewpoint) as a 1963 SF story could be, with mentions of homosexuality, frequent drug-use (including a heroin-using President), sex and menstruation. There is also is also some graphic, upsetting violence. I am surprised he managed to publish it at all, but it provides what must have been one of the best stories of the year.¹ Way ahead of its time.

Immediately after this we go to the opposite end of the fictional spectrum on pp.44-45. This contains an one page story Fred by Calvin Demmon and a Feghoot, neither of which I cared for. The story is about a genie trying to get two cents for a bottle he lives in and the pun is about time travel and Robert Burns.

Glory Road meanders on in this issue. There is the same amount of chatter as last issue and a number of mostly perfunctory fantasy adventures: the rat-infested wood, the Forest of Dragons, etc. In amongst all this Oscar proposes to Star, and after a short ceremony which involves jumping over their swords while pledging their vows they are married. Finally, they go through a ‘gate’ towards the Black Tower, to steal the Egg of the Phoenix which is defended by the Never-Born, the Eater of Souls. The episode finishes with Oscar in a tight tunnel with giant rats moving towards him, and a wounded Star and Rufo to his rear. As you can probably gather from the previous, one definitely gets the feeling that Heinlein is rather going through the motions with the fantasy adventure material and that his real interest is in the relationship between Star and Oscar.

Asimov’s article T-Formation is about large numbers, googols, Fibonacci sequence, prime numbers, etc. At the beginning of the article he says, “Freeze, every-one! No-one’s leaving till I’m through.” Quite.
I enjoyed the poem Ubi Sunt? by Kathleen P. Reis and R. H. Reis. It is about the discovery of very high temperatures on Venus and the loss of all those pulp cliches previously associated with the planet, the swamps and blue skinned women, etc. The non-fiction is rounded off by the Books column by Avram Davidson, who also helms an ‘experimental’ Letters column. This latter is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Some of the letters, like the one from R. D. Coleman, are worthwhile. This reads, in part:

It was all very well for Science Fiction to cry doom when doom wasn’t so conveniently at hand, but now it seems all too much like writing stories about the first man in orbit. The reality is too close. How about a little Science Fiction indicating a way out? p.128

This reader comment came less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis. Mr Davidson replies that he has already decided to stop using ‘doom’ stories. However, the publication of some letters is pointless. From E. Gary Gygax:

Lately I and my friends have been somewhat disappointed with F&SF. Mr. Davidson leaves something to be desired as an editor. Therefore, I am declining your kind offer to renew my subscription to your magazine. pp.127-128

To which the editor makes a facetious reply. Why bother printing a letter like this? We learn nothing.

The Censors: A Sad Allegory is a half-page short story by T. P. Caravan about an immortality serum. Short and sweet, and a better attempt at humour than the previous two short-shorts. The final piece of fiction is Sweets to the Sweet by Paul Jay Robbins. This is quite a good story about a man who is disillusioned with both work and wife and takes solace in being a part-time warlock. He eventually has a realisation that he has the potential to change into a were-creature. After being sexually rebuffed by his wife—a passage more adult than I expected from a sixties SF magazine—he decides to attempt the change. The payoff could have been quite a weak one but the author uses a repeated ‘you know the kind’ refrain throughout he story that buttresses the end in an effective and wry way.

A significant issue for the Ray Nelson story, if nothing else.

1. There is an unconfirmed rumour that the author went off his story and refused permission to reprint it which is why this probably never appeared in any ‘Year’s Bests’. It was eventually reprinted in the 1990s, in Asimov and Greenberg’s The Great SF Stories #25.

Fiction:
Glory Road (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Robert A. Heinlein ♥♥
Success • short story by Fritz Leiber ♥♥♥
With These Hands • short story by Kenneth Smith ♥
As Long as You’re Here • short story by Will Stanton ♥♥
McNamara’s Fish • short story by Ron Goulart ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Glory Road • cover by Emsh
In this issue… Coming next month…
The Respondents • poem by Doris Pitkin Buck
The Isaac Winners • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Books • by Avram Davidson

Emsh’s cover is for Robert Heinlein’s three-part serial Glory Road and shows three of the characters: Astar, Oscar and Rufo. Emsh would provide two covers for this serial.

The serial dominates this issue by reason of size if nothing else: its eighty or so pages are almost two-thirds of this 128pp. issue, which makes it quite unbalanced.¹ It would have been better, probably, to run it in four parts. It is mentioned in the In this issue section and there is also a lengthy introduction—a full page—that includes some material that does not augur well:

Among Heinlein’s attitudes and conjectures, his social and political tones have not been the least evocative of comment—“comment,” indeed, is perhaps too mild a word for the reaction to some of them—and he says of this new novel, “It will outrage all those who were outraged by STARSHIP SOLDIER [F&SF, Oct.-Nov. 1959], and will upset all those who were upset by STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND [G. P. Putnam’s, 1961]; therefore I have great hopes for it…” p.5

Glory Road tells of Evelyn Cyril Gordon, later Oscar, an ex-Vietnam veteran who ends up in a fantasy world with a stunningly beautiful woman called Astar and her companion Rufo in a quest for the Egg of the Phoenix. However it starts quite differently to what you would expect with a discursive, interesting and pacey three or four chapters where Gordon leaves the Army and travels in the south of France. In a parallel universe there is probably an interesting sixties mainstream novel that springs from this.
Whatever: he is a restless man in search of adventure, as the following, almost stream of consciousness passage, shows:

I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur—I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moonwhite arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be—instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled up mess it is. p.24

If only we had gotten that novel. What happens next is that he meets Astar, and they are soon transported—by what seems like magical means—to another world where they meet up with Rufo, who becomes his squire. Oscar would seem to be destined to be a Hero in this world. Unfortunately after this things slow down, and in chapters five to nine much less happens: a couple of fights, one with an ogre and another with strange animals beside a musical waterfall (The Singing Waters). Then Oscar has a misunderstanding about the sexual mores of this world when they stay over at an ally’s house which causes them to have to depart rapidly in the morning.

The main reason for the slowdown is that the characters endlessly talk to each other. The worst example of this is on p.76 where a long anecdote about Strong Muldoon goes on for a page and never comes to a conclusion. There are many other examples of endless chatter, and this is because Heinlein has now reached the stage in his career where he doesn’t want to tell a story, he wants to endlessly lecture the reader about myriad subjects.
Other problems are evident as well. There appears to be some sloppy editing (if, at this stage of his career, Heinlein was edited at all) when Rufo appears for the first time. There appears to be an altercation between him and Oscar but we only find out about this after they have had several verbal exchanges.
Further, some of the comments about and behaviour towards women are just irritating. I know that attitudes have changed in the last fifty years but, at one point, Oscar threatens to take down Astar’s tights and spank her when they start arguing, at which point she immediately becomes submissive.

You will always—always!—address me politely and with respect. One more word of your nasty rudeness and I’ll spank you until the tears fly.”
‘‘You wouldn’t dare!”
“Get your hand away from that sword or I’ll take it away from you, down your pants right here on the road, and spank you with it. Till your arse is red and you beg for mercy. Star, I do not fight females—but I do punish naughty children. Ladies I treat as ladies. Spoiled brats I treat as spoiled brats. Star, you could be the Queen of England and the Galactic Overlord all rolled into one but ONE MORE WORD out of line from you, and down come your tights and you won’t be able to sit for a week. Understand me?”
At last she said in a small voice, “I understand, milord.’’ p.79

I would have thought this risible when reading it for the first time as a teenager in the seventies, never mind now.

What makes this issue even more unbalanced is that all the remaining fiction is fantasy too. Success by Fritz Leiber is a fairly good allegory about a Hero trying to get past a huge Wall with an Eagle and a Bull. I’m not quite sure what to make of With These Hands by Kenneth Smith. With its account of an university student’s strange acquaintance, who turns out to be far stranger than expected, it seems to start off bemoaning the latter’s lack of artistic ability before veering off into a cry of pain about his alien home.  I am not sure this adds up to much really; it is also uneven and obviously the work of a new writer.

As Long as You’re Here by Will Stanton appears to be an intriguing modern fantasy to begin with. It tells of a couple who start building a fall-out shelter, but once they get started digging they just keep going… The hoary ending is disappointing. Finally, McNamara’s Fish  by Ron Goulart is the longest short story in the issue. This is one of his ‘Max Kearny’ series—an adman who freelances as a psychic investigator. He visits a couple who both suspect the other is having an affair. The significant difference is that the wife, Joan, thinks her husband is having an affair with a mermaid. This slick but unconvincing story resolves with water elementals and statues.

The non-fiction is as uninspiring as the fiction. Davidson contributes an eclectic book review column that has as many non-fiction reviews as fiction ones. Asimov contributes a sensationally boring science column in which he lists the top seventy eight scientists (he found creating a top ten too difficult)² and describes their achievements in three or four lines each. Half-way through this I had to stop and have a nap. The poem did nothing for me either.

All in all, quite a disappointing issue, especially after such a promising cover.

1. This first installment seems to run to about 36,000 words, which is a similar length to the same section in the book version. An unabridged serial for once?
2. He does eventually whittle them down to an upside-down list on the last page.

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Fiction:
Friday, the Nineteenth • short story by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding ♥♥♥
Huge Beast • short story by Cleve Cartmill ♥♥♥
The Hat in the Hall • short story by Jack Iams ♥♥♥
The War Against the Moon • reprint short story by André Maurois
Dumb Supper • short story by Kris Neville [as by Henderson Starke ] ♥♥♥
Ounce of Prevention • short story by Paul A. Carter [as by Philip Carter ] ♥♥
The Case of Summerfield • reprint novelette by W. H. Rhodes ♥♥♥
Divine Right • short story by Betsy Curtis ♥♥
Born of Man and Woman • short story by Richard Matheson ♥♥♥+
Professor Pownall’s Oversight • reprint short story by H. Russell Wakefield [as by H. R. Wakefield ] ♥♥♥
Haunt • short story by A. Bertram Chandler ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • George Salter
Death’s Jest-Book (excerpt) • reprint poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Recommended Reading • essay by The Editors

There is another cover by George Salter for this third issue of F&SF of the same type as the last issue: I am not sure that the addition of a disembodied grey head looking up at the crotch of one of the stick figures adds anything.

This fiction in this issue opens with Friday, the Nineteenth by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. In this a man and woman plan to have an affair but find themselves caught in a groundhog Friday the nineteenth. This turns out to have a mundane explanation in that (spoiler) the man appears to have had an accident and is in a coma. This probably makes it a mainstream story but I thought it fairly good in any event.

After this, the stories pretty much fall into three categories: there are some spooky stories, some SF ones, and the reprints.

Starting with the spooky stories, The Hat in the Hall by Jack Iams tells of the aftermath of a party and the woman next door saying they scared her dead husband away from visiting. The uncle of the husband provides some more information…
Kris Neville, writing under a pseudonym, serves Dumb Supper. This tells of a young woman who is new to the area at a social evening organised to welcome her. The other woman tell her a folk tale of ‘dumb suppers’ and convince her to make one so she can see the face of her husband to be. This is one of the things I like about F&SF: American folk tales turned into fiction.
The last of these is Haunt by A. Bertram Chandler. This is about a writer getting involved with a medium who (spoiler) channels a ghost from the future, the ghost of a machine, in this case a spaceship. Bit of a damp squib.

Chandler’s story leads neatly onto the SF content in this issue. First up is Cleve Cartmill, who makes a second appearance in F&SF with Huge Beast. I enjoyed this story of an alien ‘Golen’ that appears in a scientist’s lab and requests he fabricate a weapon to help them stun the Huge Beasts on his planet. Knowing that humanity is at risk the scientist gives the impression he is cooperating. This plays with the conventions of SF with lines like:

The human race would win out in the end, of course, it always did. p.23

Light in tone, smart, and a twist end.

The next two stories are not so accomplished. Ounce of Prevention by Paul A. Carter is quite good for the most part, but this tale of the last man of Earth being sent back in time to save mankind rather fizzles out. Divine Right by Betsy Curtis is about how a tyrant king of another planet is brought down by a young boy who thinks his bicycle must be given as a tribute.
The final SF story is the classic by Richard Matheson, Born of Man and Woman. It tells of a couple who have a child-monster they keep in the cellar and its curiosity about what happens upstairs: other normal children playing, etc. The novelty of this at the time was, I suspect, the crude first person narration by the child—probably less obvious to modern SF readers, Flowers for Algernon, etc.—which is intensified by the description of his abusive treatment.

This day when it had light mother called me a retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch. p.108

When I first read this years ago I didn’t particularly appreciate it—due to a perceived abrupt ending perhaps—but I find now that the more I read it the better I like it.

There are three reprints in this issue. They are led off by The War Against the Moon, a reprint by André Maurois (Forum, 1927) that takes the form of a supposed excerpt from a larger work: Fragment of a Universal History, published by the University of C-mb–e, 1992. In the future five newspaper proprietors agree to hoax the public that there is a threat to humanity from the moon to stop another world war on Earth. Needless to say, when they attack what they think is an uninhabited moon… This is full of words like ‘telephotophone,’ and reads like something from the early days of Amazing—and not in a good way. What possessed the editors to reprint this I do not know.
I was gearing up to vent about the editors’ poor taste in reprints generally at the beginning of The Case of Summerfield, a novelette by W. H. Rhodes (the first part of which was published in the The Sacramento Union in 1871!) This gets off to a slow start but improves as it goes along. A man called Summerfield has developed a substance that can start a chain reaction in water and threatens to ignite the world’s oceans unless a huge sum of money is paid to him. I particularly liked the way that it segues into letters, depositions, etc. at the end.
The final reprint is Professor Pownall’s Oversight by H. Russell Wakefield (They Return at Evening, 1928). This is a good fantasy story about the rivalry between two chess players that leads to murder and beyond. It has a very readable style for a story of that period, as compared to the Maurois above.¹

Other items in the magazine include the Recommended Reading column by the Editors, who cover about a dozen books. The layout is a bit weird though, with some book titles being used as section headings but others embedded in the various sections. There is a so-so poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, and a binder advertisement!²

An interesting issue, with several worthwhile stories.

1. This reprint seemed to have encouraged Wakefield to start contributing to genre magazines. He had another story in F&SF in 1951 and others in Fantastic Universe and Weird Tales subsequently. Hitherto all his stories seem to have been published in hardback collections (I’m sure the stories had previous magazine publications but I couldn’t find any information on this apart from finding out that a couple of them appeared in The Harpers Monthly in 1930).
2. I bought half-a-dozen or a dozen of these  cases years and years ago. Unfortunately, by the time I had enough spare money to order another set the company that manufactures them had changed the title design, which rather spoilt the effect. And then I decided I preferred looking at all the multicoloured spines anyway…

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Other reviews:
Anonymous: Galactic Journey Part 1 / Part 2
John D. Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Fiction:
“All You Zombies—” • short story by Robert A. Heinlein ♥♥♥♥
The Shoreline at Sunset • short story by Ray Bradbury ♥♥
Jordan • novelette by Zenna Henderson ♥♥♥♥
Of Time and Cats • short story by Howard Fast ♥
The Distant Sound of Engines • short story by Algis Budrys ♥♥♥
The Certificate • short story by Avram Davidson ♥♥♥
Three-Dimensional Valentine • short story by Stuart Palmer ♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XII • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton] ♥
The Sky People • novelette by Poul Anderson ♥♥♥
Will You Wait? • short story by Alfred Bester ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Sportsman’s Difficulty • poem by Doris Pitkin Buck
Nothing • essay by Isaac Asimov

This issue was published just before my birth and is an all-star issue that was done, presumably, to shore up sales after a recent price rise from 35 to 40 cents (there is an open letter in the magazine about this). My initial thoughts about the cover were not positive ones: it looked like an excellent cover by Emsh had had a block of solid colour dropped on it to prominently display the writer names. Further enquiry revealed that Emsh had actually delivered the cover like that to the publisher.¹ Pity, I would have liked to have seen the rest of it. I get the impression that it would have been pretty spectacular.

This issue leads off with the classic time travel story “All You Zombies—”  by Robert Heinlein. This has a great hook at the start:

2217 Time Zone V (EST) 7 Nov 1970 NYC—”Pop’s Place”: I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time—10:17 p.m. zone five, or eastern time, November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time & date; we must. The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty-five years old, no taller than I am, childish features and a touchy temper. p.5

It goes on to have a great twist on the go-back-in-time-and-be-your-own-grandfather theme.

Unfortunately there is an elephant in the room. Perhaps this creature started as a miniature, airborne, whiskey-drinking one that nests in a bar (see Gavagan’s Bar by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, F&SF Winter-Spring 1950) but over the passage of time it has grown into a full size pachyderm. It concerns the story’s notions about the sexual requirements of spacemen in the future:

He went on: “It was when they first admitted you can’t send men into space for months and years and not relieve the tension.” p.7

…and moves on to describe the service that recruits women to attend to these needs:

“I couldn’t compete. So I decided to join the W.E.N.C.H.E.S.”
“Eh?”
“Women’s Emergency National Corps, Hospitality & Entertainment Section, what they now call ‘Space Angels’—Auxiliary Nursing Group, Extraterrestrial Legions.”
I knew both terms, once I had them chronized. We use still a third name, it’s that elite military service corps: Women’s Hospitality Order Refortifying & Encouraging Spacemen. p.7

One of the female characters goes on to specify the training:

“A gal had to be respectable, preferably virgin (they liked to train them from scratch), above average mentally, and stable emotionally. But most volunteers were old hookers, or neurotics who would crack up ten days off Earth. So I didn’t need looks; if they accepted me, they would fix my buck teeth, put a wave in my hair, teach me to walk and dance and how to listen to a man pleasingly, and everything else—plus training for the prime duties. They would even use plastic surgery if it would help—nothing too good for Our Boys. “
“Best yet, they made sure you didn’t get pregnant during your enlistment-and you were almost certain to marry at the end of your hitch. Same way today, A.N.G.E.L.S. marry spacers—they talk the language. p.7-8

Believe me, I am not one for political correctness, or safe spaces, or virtue signalling or any of the other nonsense of modern society, and I know that when you read older material that you have to make allowances for the social mores of the time. But what disappoints here is that both writer and editor thought this was acceptable even in the late 1950s, appropriate for half the human race to be consigned to this degrading role because obviously they couldn’t do the other one. What on Earth did the many female contributors to F&SF think of this?
So, yes, a four star story, but you may have to hold your nose.

The other stand out story in the issue isn’t as flashy as the Heinlein but is a warm, mature and affecting story. Jordan is the sixth story in the popular ‘People’ series: the first five stories dealt with the catastrophic arrival of humanoid aliens on Earth following the destruction of their home planet and their efforts to regroup.
This story starts with one of the—restless—younger members, Bram, thinking that his dreams have been answered when a spaceship arrives from one of the other planets that refugees from Home have settled. There are only four on board as their mission is to take the People on Earth back there.
Bram’s determination to do this is reinforced when he meets and is attracted to Salla, a young woman from the spaceship crew. Or so he thinks until his belated realisation that he wants to stay on Earth.

Then again, I’d lie in the edge of the hot sun, my head in the shade of the cottonwoods, and feel the deep soaking warmth to my very bone, smell the waiting, dusty smell of the afternoon, feel sleep wrapping itself around my thoughts and hear the sudden creaking cries of the red-winged blackbirds in the far fields, and suddenly know that I couldn’t leave it. Couldn’t give up Earth for anything or any place. p.41

Another complication is his friend Obla, who lost her arms, legs and sight in an aircraft explosion, and with whom he communicates telepathically. Matters develop.
My complaint about a couple of the previous People stories was that Henderson was repeating herself but this one is quite different. Not only that, she is writing at the top of her form and produces in this work something that easily matches the best of Theodore Sturgeon. In fact, with Obla being trapped in her own body there is an echo of a More Than Human in this one. Recommended.²

As well as these two stand out works, there are, believe it or not another four stories that are solid work as well. The Distant Sound of Engines by Algis Budrys is an intriguing story about a trucker who is hospital after a truck accident double amputation. He has a patient in the next bed who tells him all sorts of information: the formula for exceeding the speed of light, for coordinating space-time, etc.
Avram Davidson’s The Certificate had a major impact when I first read this in my youth. It tells of a Dr Freeman on an Earth subjugated by aliens. He shuffles around an underground bunker going from one office to another in search of a Certificate. The payoff in this is the shock ending; second time around there is less of a payoff, but the setup has a certain grim verisimilitude to recommend it.
The longest story in the issue is a long novelette by Poul Anderson and the first in the ‘Mauri’ series. The Sky People is a fairly good post-apocalypse story that tells of armed conflict between three sides. Captain Ruori Rangi Lohannaso is the Mauri captain of a ship from a technologically developed society that is from N’Zealann (New Zealand) and is visiting a less developed, virtually agrarian Meyco (Mexico). After a diplomatic dinner, the city is attacked by sky pirates from the Corado (Colarado) Highlands in the north, led by Loklann sunna Holber.
The bulk of this story is taken up by the attack on the city and subsequent ship versus airship battles. If I have one criticism of this story it is that some of the detail of the latter is perhaps not as clear as it could be. An entertaining and colourful story nonetheless.
The last of this group of stories (some would put it along with the Heinlein and Henderson) is the well-known, witty, and very modern deal with the devil story by Alfred Bester, Will You Wait? It is pretty good, and a good representative of the more sophisticated of F&SF stories too.

The also-rans in this issue are the Ray Bradbury story, The Shoreline at Sunset, which is an OK mood piece about two men who live together on the beach and a mermaid that is washed up onshore. Of Time and Cats by Howard Fast has a man summoning his wife to a hotel room where warns her to avoid the many copies of him she may encounter. There is an implausible time loop explanation that didn’t work for me. Stuart Palmer’s Three-Dimensional Valentine has a lab assistant with the hots for the scientist running a  lab. The current experiment involves feeding spiders the blood of mental patients. Light in tone but a weak ending.

Other material includes a fairly lamentable Feghoot (pun story) about a Chinese man wishing laundry clean. I wonder if my dislike of these (and Probability Zero and various other feeble attempts at mirth) is a cultural one. I can’t recall much of this kind of stuff being published in British SF magazines. If any.
Doris Pitkin Buck contributes an OK unicorn poem, Sportsman’s Difficulty and Isaac Asimov’s essay Nothing is literally about that: it discusses the quantity and density of matter in the Universe by way of an initial discussion on the hardness of vacuums.

Overall, a very impressive issue. Two stand out stories and four contenders: you would be lucky to get that in some reprint anthologies, never mind one issue of a monthly magazine.

1. This cover was used on the endpapers of Emshwiller: Infinity x 2. Available as a book and a cheaper PDF.
2. Although I think that Jordan is the strongest story in the initial ‘People’ series (six stories from F&SF collected with linking material in Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, 1961) it was the previous story, Captivity (F&SF, June 1958) that was a Hugo Award finalist.

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Fiction:
The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out • short story by Reginald Bretnor ♥♥♥+
The Return of the Gods • reprint short story by Robert M. Coates ♥♥
Every Work Into Judgment • short story by Kris Neville ♥♥
A Rope for Lucifer • short story by Walt Sheldon ♥♥♥
The Last Generation? • reprint short story by Miriam Allen deFord ♥♥♥
Postpaid to Paradise • reprint short story by Robert Arthur ♥♥♥
The Exiles • reprint short story by Ray Bradbury ♥♥♥♥
My Astral Body • short story by Anthony Hope ♥
Gavagan’s Bar: Elphas Frumenti • short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥♥♥
Gavagan’s Bar: The Gift of God • short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥
World of Arlesia • short story by Margaret St. Clair ♥♥
The Volcanic Valve • reprint short story by W. L. Alden ♥♥♥
Not With a Bang • short story by Damon Knight ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Time, Real and Imaginary • poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Recommended Reading • essay by The Editors

With this second issue of the magazine it changes its title from The Magazine of Fantasy to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The cover is, to me, fairly unattractive. That said, and after criticising last issue’s cover for not suiting a magazine attempting to project a more literary feel, this one suits it better. It was pointed out to me that George Salter, the cover artist and the magazine’s art director, was well respected in the field, not least for the iconic masthead shown on the title page and on the cover above.¹

There are four notable and/or well-known stories in this issue by Bretnor, Bradbury, de Camp/Pratt and Knight.²
Bretnor’s The Gnurrs Come From the Woodwork Out is the first of the ‘Papa Schimmelhorn’ series in which the eccentric inventor uses his modified bassoon to summon the extra-dimensional Gnurrs, which are promptly used to defeat Bobovia, an enemy of the USA. When complications ensue, the US Cavalry saves the day. Light, witty, fun stuff. I suspect this combination of what I would presume to be the style and wit of the slick magazines with a SF plot was one of the kinds of fiction that Boucher and McComas were trying to bring to the field.³
Ray Bradbury’s The Exiles is one of five reprints (MacLeans, September 15^th, 1949), and is an of old favourite of mine from a Peter Haining anthology that I read in my teens.⁴ A spaceship from Earth approaches a Mars that is populated by all sorts of imaginary and supernatural creatures and characters, and the story tells of the defence that is mounted against this encroaching science and rationality.

The three hags shuddered and blinked up at the Emerald City by the edge of the dry Martian sea. In its highest window, a small man held a blood-red drape aside. He watched the wastelands where the three witches fed their cauldron and shaped the waxes. Further along, ten thousand other blue fires and laurel incenses, black tobacco smokes and fir-weeds, cinnamons and bone-dusts rose soft as moths through the Martian night. The man counted the angry, magical fires. Then, as the three witches stared, he turned. The crimson drape, released, fell, causing the distant portal to wink, like a yellow eye.
Mr. Edgar Allan Poe stood in the tower window, a faint vapor of spirits upon his breath. “Hecate’s friends are busy tonight,” he said, seeing the witches, far below.
A voice behind him said, “I saw Will Shakespeare at the shore, earlier, whipping them on. All along the sea, Shakespeare’s army alone, tonight, numbers thousands: the three Witches, Oberon, Hamlet’s father, Puck, all, all of them, thousands! Good Lord, a regular sea of people.” p.77-78

What originally struck me about this story was it was the first time I could remember reading fiction that was what I would call Science Fantasy, a genuine mix of the two genres.
L.Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt’s Gavagan’s Bar is actually the first two of this series of bar-based tall tales, a sub-genre that, hitherto, I have not been overly fond (I think Spider Robinson’s ‘Callahan’s Bar’ series put me off after a while). Sure enough, the second tale, The Gift of God is weak, but I found the first, Elphas Frumenti, about miniature, airborne, whiskey-drinking elephants that nest in bars rather charming, and look forward to reading more of the series is due course.
The last of the four is Not With A Bang by Damon Knight. When I first read this last man and woman on Earth story in an anniversary issue of F&SF (October, 1979) I did not much care for it. Obviously ironic in effect, but I thought the set-up overly contrived and the ending ludicrous: as if one woman’s prudishness would prevent her rescuing the only other person alive in a post-holocaust world.
This time around, with foreknowledge of ending, I found I could appreciate the work more and rather enjoyed it. Strange that: mostly I find reread works are never as good the second time around.
Note the abusive relationship between the couple:

Afterwards, he could do with her as he liked — beat her when he pleased, use her. Then it would not be too bad, being the last man on Earth — not bad at all. She might even have a daughter… p.127

Grimmer stuff than I expected for the times.

Apart from these four there are a few other stories worth catching in this issue. A Rope for Lucifer by Walt Sheldon is a tall tale that has good local colour. It is written in the form of a letter from an American ranch-hand to an English psychic investigator about a visiting Indian fakir. Wild West meets Enchanted East you could say.
The Volcanic Valve by W. L. Alden (Pall Mall, July 1897) is an entertaining story of Van Wegener and the Colonel⁵ and the former’s idea to install safety valves on volcanoes after a visit to Vesuvius. Suitably funded and equipped they trial a device on Krakatoa… Entertaining, but you will have to make allowances for the casual racism of the time:

There was the noise of a tremendous explosion, followed by the rush of steam out of the mouth of the gallery…beyond that we could see the machinery and thirty-eight coolies sailing through the air at about the speed of a cannonball. p.120

Another reprint (Argosy, June 15^th, 1940) is Postpaid to Paradise by Robert Arthur,⁶ a pleasant tale that concerns a number of stamps from a country called El Dorado, and what happens when the protagonist and friend experiment with their strange delivery properties.
The final item of note is The Last Generation, Miriam Allen DeFord’s first story and a reprint (Harpers, November 1946). This tells of an atomic accident in the desert that renders all mammals sterile, and the resulting chain of events, including the massive scientific effort undertaken to attempt to reverse the problem. Quite good, except for the graunching authorial intervention of the last two lines. I realize that this story had to be open-ended but there are better ways of doing it than this. I note from ISFDB that De Ford went on to write a number of SF stories after this which appeared in F&SF, and wonder to what extent the reprinting of this story started her career. From its original appearance four years previously to this one there were no other published stories.

The remainder of the stories includes Every Work Into Judgement by Kris Neville, a somewhat overwritten story that tells of the development of a machine AI which eventually has a religious epiphany. World of Arlesia by Margaret St. Clair, is a story about a couple visiting a future full immersion cinema which has the feel of a nightmare but, unfortunately, its remote moon tele-operator conspiracy plot has correspondingly as much logic. The Return of the Gods by Robert M. Coates is an unnecessary reprint (New Yorker, December 11th, 1948). A man disappears and on return states he has been with a mermaid. We go through this disappearance/explanation loop twice more (with the gods Mercury and Venus, and other abductees) but it is just repetition; there is no progression. The weakest story of the issue is the self-explanatory My Astral Body by Anthony Hope, which is not much developed or resolved.

There is also a reprint poem by Coleridge and a brief Recommended Reading column with capsule reviews rounding out the issue.

Overall, I would say that this is a more than worthwhile issue of F&SF, and a very high standard for a magazine only in its second number. I really enjoyed reading it (sixty-five years later!) and look forward to the next. If I have one final observation it is that the contents, for all their entertainment, style and wit, do tend to emphasize a lack of substance, excepting the DeFord, maybe. It will be interesting to see if future issues provide this or whether F&SF turns into a place that you might go for cocktails but not for dinner …as they might have said in the fifties.

1. Salter was also a book designer.
2. Three of these are reprinted in The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949 to1954 by Annette Peltz McComas. Three stories from one issue in an anthology of around two dozen!
3. Bretnor made this comment about the story in the anthology Special Wonder: The Anthony Boucher Memorial Anthology of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by J. Francis McComas, (1970), p. 35: “I had scarcely met Tony when I sold him this story, and I had not experience with his work as an editor, for he and Mick were just starting the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In its original version, “The Gnurrs . . .” has a considerably weaker, less amusing ending, which he spotted instantly. But, unlike those editors who cannot write themselves, he did no violence to it. Instead he told me what he thought should be done, and let me do it.”
   This would be a long running series. Papa Schimmelhorn made an appearance in the fourth copy of F&SF I ever bought, the October 1976 issue.
4. The Witchcraft Reader edited by Peter Haining
5. Another series, mostly appearing in Pall Mall and mostly collected in Van Wegener’s Ways.
6. This is the first of the ‘Murchison Monks’ series, all of which appeared in the early 1940s Argosy apart from the sixth which appeared in F&SF in 1958. You wouldn’t know from this story that it is part of a series.

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*Revised 15/07/2017 to add the Bretnor quote from Special Wonder to note 3*

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Zoe Kaplan, The Edwin Project

Editors, Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

Fiction:
Bells on His Toes • short story by Cleve Cartmill ♥♥
Thurnley Abbey • reprint short story by Perceval Landon ♥♥
Private—Keep Out! • short story by Philip MacDonald ♥♥
The Lost Room • reprint short story by Fitz-James O’Brien ♥♥
The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast • short story by Theodore Sturgeon♥
Review Copy • short story by Anthony Boucher [as by H. H. Holmes ] ♥♥
Men of Iron • reprint short story by Guy Endore ♥
A Bride for the Devil • short story by Stuart Palmer ♥
Rooum • reprint short story by Oliver Onions ♥
Perseus Had a Helmet • reprint short story by Richard Sale ♥♥
In the Days of Our Fathers • short story by Winona McClintic ♥

Non-fiction:
Introduction • essay by Lawrence E. Spivak
“On the way home from school…” • reprint cartoon by David Pascal

If I had to pick a favourite SF magazine it would probably be The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). Part of it probably goes back to it being one of the first two American digest magazines I picked up;¹ part of it is probably the mix of fiction (SF, fantasy and horror all appear). There is also the fact that it has probably been the most consistent magazine to ever appear in the field: over nearly seventy years it has looked and ‘felt’ the same,² and apart from one very early title change (this first issue was actually The Magazine of Fantasy) has called itself by the same name.³
So, because of its place in my heart, I always wanted to go back to the very first issue and read through the entire run (or at least until the early seventies). Here is the first instalment of that project.

For all the magazine’s elegance through the years this first front cover by Bill Stone is ghastly: it is a photo of some starlet with a monster sitting on her shoulders. The latter, presumably painted onto the photo, looks like it has escaped from a children’s book, and emphatically does not set the tone for a more literary SF magazine. Inside this digest-sized magazine the title page looks recognisable to any long time reader. Following this there is a general purpose introduction by the publisher Lawrence E. Spivak, in which he states there is ‘no formula’. There are also short introductions to the stories themselves by the editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas—a F&SF hallmark—but some of these are of the rather irritating ‘this is one of the best three horror stories ever’ type, which usually sets up a story to underwhelm.

Moving smartly on to the fiction, this comprises eleven stories and they can be broadly broken down into three groups.
First, there are those that can be loosely collected as modern fantasy. Cleve Cartmill’s Bells on His Toes⁴ has a police sergeant from the Bunco (fraud) squad investigate a strange cult and subsequently music plays around him. The music is appropriate to the situation, e.g. ‘Happy Days Are Here Again!’, and matters develop romantically from there. Pleasant enough light fantasy but the music referenced will now be largely unknown to most readers and the ending isn’t the strongest.
Phillip MacDonald’s Private—Keep Out! takes some time to get going with its story of a man investigating another who has ‘unbecome’. Predictable ending but notable for the volume of drinking done by the characters. I would wager this one was written shortly before Happy Hour. Review Copy by H. H. Holmes (Anthony Boucher) has a promising start to its story of a badly reviewed writer using blood witchcraft to wreak his revenge on the reviewer but has a weak ending.
A Bride for the Devil by Stuart Palmer is a well told but terminally straightforward story about a rich woman and acquaintances summoning the devil.
Finally, Perseus Had a Helmet (Argosy, February 5^th, 1938) by Richard Sale is a readable pulp whodunit about a man who finds he has a helmet of invisibility, like Persus in the Greek myth, and who decides to settle a score in an affair of the heart. This last is one of five reprints, the start of a rewarding tradition for F&SF that would print much good work in the future.

The second group are a number of older reprints, mostly horror. Perceval Landon’s Thurnley Abbey (McClure’s Magazine, 1907) is a tale of an apparition in a country house. The structure is one where the first few pages are used to set up the story as a tale told to the narrator, and then the supernatural encounter happens. This structure has always struck me as rather too straightforward and this is no exception.
Fitz-James O’Brien’s The Lost Room (Harper’s, September 1858) starts off with a man describing his rented room at some length, only to go down to the garden where he has a strange encounter with a guest. On returning he finds a fantastic feast in progress. Best read for the atmosphere and writing.
Guy Endore’s Men of Iron (The Black and White Press, 1940) is a rather unconvincing short tale about a man being replaced with new, efficient machine. It ends with the death of the former and the latter uprooting itself and going to his home.
Lastly, Oliver Onions’ Rooum (The Fortnightly Review, December 1910) is a well told tale of a man who appears to have a man from another reality who periodically ‘runs’ through him, but it has a confusing last half page that I did not understand.

The final group comprises two SF stories. Theodore Sturgeon contributes The Hurkle is a Happy Beast wherein an alien gets transported to Earth by a matter transmitter. No particular plot complications and a rather cutesy tone work against it.
Winona McClintic’s In the Days of Our Fathers is the first in a handful of F&SF stories by this writer/poet and a perplexing one about a young girl in the future discovering a strange manuscript authored by her uncle. I have no idea what this is about, even after a second reading. It vaguely reminded me of some of the more incomprehensible stories that could be found in Orbit or the late-sixties New Worlds, so ahead of its time at least. Joking apart, I have had people say to me that they liked the story when it first appeared because nothing was made clear but perhaps only hinted at—quite a change from the considerably more straightforward work appearing at that time.

Overall, a decidedly average bunch of stories and a disappointing start. The best thing is probably the reprint cartoon (another great F&SF tradition) on p.122.

1. The first SF mag I bought was Science Fiction Monthly (November, 1975), the large-size poster mag. The first digests I bought—picked up regularly from a newsagent between the bus stop I got off at and my school—were the July 1976 issues of F&SF and Analog, both wearing lovely Rick Sternbach covers. Eventually I came to prefer F&SF, although Analog ran it a close second for the first few issues with its Robert Silverberg serial Shadrach in the Furnace. Galaxy appeared from the local distributors, after a second request, in April ’77 by which time I’d missed Pohl’s Gateway and a lot of John Varley.
2. As the new editor C. C. Finlay noted, in his first editorial in 2015, F&SF has always looked pretty much the same through all its redesigns. At the very least you can spot the DNA.
3. Unlike Astounding (Analog), unlike Science Fantasy (Impulse/SF Impulse), unlike… you get the idea. The history of F&SF’s title change, the decision to include SF and much else about the gestation of the magazine can be found in The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949 to 1954 by Annette Peltz McComas p.6-26
4. Will Murray’s article The Unknown Unknown shows Cartmill’s story had been accepted by John Campbell for Unknown some years earlier but did not appear before that magazine folded.

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Fiction:
A Rose for Ecclesiastes • novelette by Roger Zelazny ♥♥♥♥
Mama • short story by Philip Winsor ♥
Wings of Song • short story by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. ♥♥
Winged Victory • short story by Sonya Dorman ♥
Eight O’Clock in the Morning • short story by Ray Nelson ♥♥♥+
The Eyes of Phorkos • novella reprint by L. E. Jones ♥♥♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: LXVI • short story by Reginald Bretnor

Non-Fiction:
A Rose for Ecclesiastes • cover by Hannes Bok
In this issue … Coming next month
Welcome, Stranger! • essay by Isaac Asimov
Books • essay by Avram Davidson
Letters

This issue is one of the Avram Davidson edited issues that comes from the year where F&SF had published Richard McKenna’s Hunter Come Home, Poul Anderson’s No Truce With Kings, Jack Vance’s Green Magic, Ray Nelson’s Turn Off The Sky and Alfred Bester’s They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To (titles that I recognize but may not have read) as well as a special Ray Bradbury issue and Robert Heinlein’s serial Glory Road.

The only critical comment on Davidson’s editorship I can remember is a negative one from New Worlds in the mid-60s.¹ However, Mike Ashley points to a dominance in award nominations and wins and also states that the Davidson-edited issues of F&SF were ‘the most personalized and idiosyncratic’ of that magazine.² This was the impression I was left with after reading this, my first Davidson issue. There was certainly more of the editor present than in the Edward L. Ferman edited ones from the seventies and eighties — although I thought ELF’s low-key editorial style worked fine. As well as some long introductions (the Jones introduction is nearly a full page) and a letter column with his replies, he is responsible for nearly the entire book review column.

Concerning the latter, if you like the grumpy old man style of book reviewing (as I do) this will be right up your street. He starts with:

I have not been altogether pleased that recently, so it seems, nonfiction has outnumbered fiction in this column, and that some of the latter has been only marginally SF or fantasy. However, complaints have been minimal, and I suppose that most of you would rather read a review of a good book on nematodes than a bad one on the Space-Raiders of Xilch. p.68

He then goes on to damn A. E. van Vogt’s The Beast. It is also pleasing that he doesn’t spend a dutiful two to three hundred words on books that don’t deserve it. One entire review³ is:

This is supposed to be a funny book about a dolphin. It seems, anyway, to be a book about a dolphin. Tom O’Sullivan’s jacket design is nice. p.71

This from another:

I quit reading when I discovered part of it was written by a cat, for pity’s sake. I do not review books written by cats. I would have mentioned this when I applied for the job, but I did not suppose the matter would ever come up. p.71

Entertaining stuff, and just as well, for as he mentions at the start, there is precious little SF or fantasy reviewed and a lot of non-fiction or associational material.

This harlequin covered issue is particularly unusual in that it has one of F&SF‘s few wrap around covers, and is doubly notable in that it is Hannes Bok’s last original for a magazine.⁴ It is for Roger Zelazny’s first F&SF story A Rose for Ecclesiastes.⁵ He had already served quite a long apprenticeship: a previous dozen and a half stories had appeared mostly in Fantastic, with a handful or so in Amazing. This well-known story of a poet-lingust on Mars translating the dying Martian race’s High Tongue texts, and his love affair with one of the temple dancers probably needs no further comment. A couple of things though: first, the hero is a slightly irritating arrogant genius, a type I remember from other Zelazny fiction; secondly, there is considerable reference to Christian, Buddhist and Hindu religion, something I also remember from his other work (Lord of Light). A superior story and obvious Hugo finalist.

Another notable story in this issue is Ray Nelson’s Eight O’Clock in the Morning, a variation on the ‘We’re Property’ theme — unnecessarily alluded to in the introduction. Admittedly, it is soon apparent what is occurring but nonetheless… On reading this it seemed very similar to a film I remembered, and a search revealed that it is, of course, the source material for the John Carpenter’s They Live.

Other fiction highlights include L. E. Jones’s short novel (a novella of 47pp.) The Eyes of Phorkos⁶ an almost ripping yarn type of story where an embittered archaeologist finds the eyes of Gorgon on a dig in the Greek islands after one of his labourers is accidentally petrified. There is a long, readable if slightly dated story that unfolds from this point.

Lloyd Biggle’s Wings of Song is set several hundred years in the future. A collector finds a damaged violin in a galaxy where, it seems, no trees exist nor is it immediately obvious how to restore the instrument into a usable state. He eventually finds a wood-carver on a distant planet but matters do not work out as he wishes although he receives a vision of what has been lost to the human race.

The remaining fiction is Philip Winsor’s Mama, a short unconvincing squib about a baby losing a fully formed consciousness on speaking his first word, and Sonya Dorman’s Winged Victory which would appear to be a surreal tale of a woman picking up a man and taking him home to the family told in avian metaphor. There is also a Feghoot which I didn’t get, and probably wouldn’t have liked if I had.

The other non-fiction apart from the book review and letters columns mentioned above are Isaac Asimov’s Welcome Stranger, a science essay purportedly about the element Xenon, but in fact a rather dull essay, mostly about covalent bonding. I was reminded why I generally gave these a miss when reading the magazine. Finally, there is a letters column with bouquets and brickbats for Robert Heinlein’s serial Glory Road and Ray Nelson’s Turn Off The Sky.

A worthwhile issue, and the quality and variety of contents coupled with what I read in Mike Ashley’s history will certainly make me dip into this period again.

1. “Heavy-handed, over-mannered humour seems a trade-mark of F&SF during this particular period.” Review of Best of F&SF #13, ed. Avram Davidson by James Colvin (Michael Moorcock) New Worlds #162 (1966-05) p.146. He has less flattering things to say about Davidson’s What Strange Stars and Skies.
2. Transformations, Mike Ashley (p217, 219).
3. Penelope by W. C. Anderson.
4. Transformations, Mike Ashley (p217).
5. The Eyes of Phorkos was first published as The Resentment of Jimsey Carew in The Bishop’s Aunt, and Other Stories. James wrote no other fantasy or science fiction according to the ISFDB. He also gave me quite the vocabulary workout: ‘postern’, ‘clou’, ‘marmoreal’, ‘poltroonery’, ‘alpaca’, ‘enceinte’. Despite looking them up at the time, I can remember about two of them. Unfortunately, I think I am now at the age where if something has to go in, something else has to go out… The Zelazny was almost as bad (or good, depending on your viewpoint): ‘terza-rima’, ‘Mahabharata’, ‘hybris’.

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