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Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 129-134

_____________________

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

Fiction:
Technical Error • novelette by Hal Clement ∗
As Never Was • short story by P. Schuyler Miller ∗∗
The Leech • novelette by Malcolm Jameson ∗
Far Centaurus • short story by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗
Alias the Living • short story by Frank Belknap Long –
Ogre • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗+
Probability Zero:
Sourdough • short story by George Holman ∗
Light Trap • short story by Jerry Shelton –
Picture from Tokyo • short story by H. O. Hoadley –
The Vacuumulator • short story by Malcolm Jameson –
Cash on the Dimension • short story by Ray Karden –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x9), A. Williams (x3), Olga Ley (x6), Frank Kramer (x4)
Soft-Boiled • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
A Matter of Taste • essay by Willy Ley
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: November 1943
“Quartz …” • essay by uncredited
Postwar Plan For Mars • essay by R. S. Richardson

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This issue is one of the weakest issues of Astounding I have read, so I’ll try to keep this short.

Technical Error by Hal Clement, initially gets off to an intriguing start:

Seven spacesuited human beings stood motionless, at the edge of the little valley. Around them was a bare, jagged plain of basalt, lit sharply by the distant sun and unwavering stars; a dozen miles behind, hidden by the abrupt curvature of the asteroid’s surface, was a half-fused heap of metal that had brought them here; and in front of them, almost at their feet, in the shallow groove scraped by a meteor ages before, was an object which caused more than one of those men to doubt his sanity.
Before them lay the ship whose heat-ruined wreckage had been left behind them only minutes ago—perfectly whole in every part. Seven pairs of eyes swept it from end to end, picking out and recognizing each line. Driving and steering jet pits at each end; six bulging observations ports around its middle; rows of smaller ports, their transparent panes gleaming, obviously intact, in the sunlight; the silvery, prolate hull itself—all forced themselves on the minds that sought desperately to reject them as impossibilities. The Giansar was gone—they had fled from the threat of its disordered atomic engines, watched it glow and melt and finally cool again, a nearly formless heap of slag. So what was this?  p. 7-8

After they get inside the ship they discover that it is different internally—and obviously the product of an alien civilization. Prospects of a wild Van Vogtian adventure quickly disappear though, and it soon becomes a story of scientist-types trying to figure out how this strange ship operates. Eventually (after a lot of trailing around) they find a partially repaired engine and manage to get it going (after the obligatory molecular binding/separation tech lectures).

This drive (spoiler) malfunctions too, and they melt down yet another spaceship (I hate to think what this will do to their insurance premiums). But at least the rescue ship sees the drive running and comes to pick them up.
The external similarity of the ship is never explained, and there are other unlikely occurrences (e. g. stumbling upon the vessel in the middle of nowhere) which make the story difficult to believe. It is boring in places as well.

As Never Was by P. Schuyler Miller begins with a passage where the narrator fantasises about killing his grandfather with a knife. It then pivots to become a piece about time travel, and archaeologists going into the future rather than the past (this latter is pointless as travellers end up creating another time line and can’t get back to their own).
Eventually the story focuses on the narrator’s grandfather, and his travels into the future. On his one and only trip he returned with an unusual knife:

He hadn’t washed it. There was dirt on the fine engraving of the dull-black hilt, and caked in the delicate filigree of the silver guard. But the blade was clean, and it was as you have seen it—cold, gleaming, metallic blue—razor-edged—and translucent.
Maybe you’ve had a chance to handle it, here in the museum. Where the blade thins down to that feather-edge you can read small print through it. Where it’s thicker, along the rib that reinforces the back of the blade, it’s cloudy—milky looking. There has been engraving on the blade, too, but it has been ground or worn down until it is illegible. That is odd, because the blade is harder than anything we know except diamond. There is no such metal in the System or the Galaxy, so far as we know, except in this one well-worn and apparently very ancient knife blade.  p. 35

The grandfather dies soon afterwards and many attempts are made over the years to find the period that the knife came from. The narrator eventually rebuilds his grandfather’s machine and travels as far forward in time as he can. He finds his grandfather’s dig site and (spoiler) discovers the knife was found in the ruins of the museum that was built for it in the narrator’s time—the knife only exists in an enclosed time loop.
The ending is pretty good, but the story has a clunky setup and takes some time to get going.

The Leech by Malcolm Jameson opens with a guard trying to shoot Cranborne (the narrator and the owner of a technology company) when he arrives for work one morning. After he disarms the guard, the latter says that something took control of him, a phenomenon reported elsewhere. Cranborne’s reaction to this is, essentially, “Forget it, there’s a lot of it going about”—confirmed when he goes to his office and finds his secretary burning papers in his office. Later, he sees a co-worker copying secret plans. Both were suffering from the same temporary possession.
Cranborne then discovers that many of the inventions in the company’s pipeline have been preemptively patented by someone else, and suspicion falls on a former disgruntled employee, Joaquin Jones. Jones has become, inexplicably, a big shot in town, and is President of the bank which later forecloses on Cranborne’s company.
Cranborne and his colleagues find out that Jones is also being controlled, just like the guard and secretary. The person behind this turns out to be Neville Bronsan, another previous employee, and an ‘ugly on the outside, ugly on the inside,’ megalomaniac:

The first impulse was to think of him as a madman, but he was not mad. Neurotic, yes, but not insane. His trouble was that he was undersized, ugly and deformed. One leg was shrunken and there was the hint of a back hump, and his long pendulous nose gave him a gnomish appearance that drew giggles or aversion from women. To offset this—or perhaps to heighten the effect of it—was a keen mind that leaped all technical obstacles at a rush. The resultant was a bitter psychic conflict, the sense of intellectual superiority on the one band and physical inadequacy on the other. It manifested itself in a quarrelsome and arrogant disposition that immediately estranged any rash enough to try and work alongside him. It was his obnoxious personality that was the real reason for his leaving the Labs. The other associates had voted him out.  p. 58

Cranborne and his team (spoiler) then build their own mind reading and controlling device after finding some old workbooks of Bronsan’s, a development that involves much pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. A few plot twists later, Bronsan gets his just deserts when they mentally connect him to a prisoner about to be executed by electric chair.
This is pretty poor, formulaic stuff, and it’s hard to believe it comes from the writer of Blind Alley (Unknown Worlds, June 1943).

Far Centaurus by A. E. van Vogt gets off to a rather good start (even if it does lash about like a broken-backed snake later on) with Bill waking up from deep sleep on a starship. After an extended period of rehabilitation (the automated massage lasts for almost an hour), he notes the time:

I leaned over the control chair, and glanced at the chronometer.
It said: 53 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 0 days, 0 hours and 27 minutes.
Fifty-three years! A little blindly, almost blankly: Back on Earth, the people we had known, the young men we’d gone to college with, that girl who had kissed me at the party given us the night we left—they were all dead. Or dying of old age.
I remembered the girl very vividly. She was pretty, vivacious, a complete stranger. She had laughed as she offered her red lips, and she had said “A kiss for the ugly one, too.” She’d be a grandmother now, or in her grave.
Tears came to my eyes. I brushed them away, and began to heat the can of concentrated liquid that was to be my first food. Slowly, my mind calmed.  p. 69

Bill then gets up and performs some routine tasks, during which he finds Pelham, one of the other three crewmembers, dead (the drug they take has a death rate of ten per cent). He checks on the other men, then suits up and disposes of Pelham’s body. Bill notes these events in the log, and then goes back to sleep.
The rest of the first third of so of the story details Bill’s waking periods on the long journey to Alpha Centauri: during one such episode he sees a spaceship on fire behind them; in another he reads a written note from Blake—the men take turns waking— about the third man’s, Renfrew’s, mental stability.

Eventually they arrive at Alpha Centauri, and (spoiler) the story becomes something else entirely when they are greeted by a future human civilization. It turns out that, after the four men left, humanity designed faster ships which arrived long before they did and colonised the system. The ambassador responsible for dealing with the men welcomes them, and tells them they have been financially provided for (there is money in the bank). He also notes that, as they smell particularly unpleasant to current day humans, his people would appreciate it if they could keep to themselves.
We later get a science lecture about star travel before Renfrew (now cured of his madness) buys a spaceship, whereupon they all leave. Renfrew later flies them into a star which, because of the future science gimmick, sends them back in time to just after they departed from Earth.
The first part of this is a good account of life on a suspended animation starship, but the rest does not convince or gel.

Alias the Living by Frank Belknap Long is the obligatory war story for the issue, and is about the use of image projectors by US Marines (which beam the soldiers’ likeness ahead of them as they patrol through the jungle). When one of the soldiers called Jimmy is later caught in an ambush, he rushes a Japanese machine gunner and bayonets him—but the man is unaffected, gets up, and runs away.
The denouement of the story reveals that (spoiler) early in the engagement Jimmy was injured and incapacitated, and what we saw was the actions of his image, which carried on without him . . . .
The story ends with unlikely—and unconvincing—talk of ghosts and “wild talents”.

Clifford D. Simak hit an early high spot in 1944, during which he published the first four of his ‘City’ stories (City, Huddle, Census, and Desertion in the May, July, September, and November issues of Astounding). Of almost equivalent quality (and the best of his early stories I’ve read so far) is Ogre, which gets off to an intriguing start:

The moss brought the news. Hundreds of miles the word had gossiped its way along, through many devious ways. For the moss did not grow everywhere. It grew only where the soil was sparse and niggardly, where the larger, lustier, more vicious plant things could not grow to rob it of light, or uproot it, or crowd it out, or do other harm.
The moss told the story to Nicodemus, life blanket of Don Mackenzie, and it all came about because Mackenzie took a bath.
Mackenzie took his time in the bathroom, wallowing around in the tub and braying out a song, while Nicodemus, feeling only half a thing, moped outside the door. Without Mackenzie, Nicodemus was, in fact, even less than half a thing. Accepted as intelligent life, Nicodemus and others of his tribe were intelligent only when they were wrapped about their humans. Their intelligence and emotions were borrowed from the things that wore them.  p. 123-124

Apart from Nicodemus there is more local colour: outside Mackenzie’s house is a rifle-tree that takes occasional—but luckily inaccurate—shots at Mac and Nicodemus. There is also Nellie, a book-keeping robot and nag who is the current companion of Encyclopaedia, a fully sentient plant. Encylopedia is also, unlike Nicodmeus, independently mobile.
The story gets going when Mackenzie goes to see Harper, the planetary factor, about the news the moss has brought: Alder, one of the planet’s insectoid aliens, has composed a new symphony at the musical tree grove. It turns out that a recording of this would be very profitable for the Earthmen—the music produced by the aliens is very addictive—so Harper tells Mackenzie to go to the grove with Nellie and Encyclopaedia to cut a deal.
Also mentioned in this conversation are a couple of other items: first, a man called Alexander, who previously became so addicted to the music that he was returned to Earth for treatment, is back on the planet and involved with another visiting alien race called the Groombridgians; secondly, Encyclopedia wants to go to Earth, so it can continue its obsession of accumulating ever more knowledge—at one point in their discussion the men wonder if Encyclopedia is acting for itself or for the planet, and what its real reasons for the trip are.

These latter two threads provide the minor and major plot arcs for the story. The first plays out when Mackenzie and his party arrive at the tree-grove to find that Taylor and the Groombridgians have dug up two of the trees (with plans to ship them off-planet), but are pinned down by a human composer called Wade who has been camping nearby and is now shooting at them:

The man who back on Earth had been known as J. Edgerton Wade, crouched on the low cliff that dropped away into Melody Bowl. The dull red sun was slipping toward the purple horizon and soon, Wade knew, the trees would play their regular evening concert. He hoped that once again it would be the wondrous new symphony Alder had composed. Thinking about it, he shuddered in ecstasy—shuddered again when he thought about the setting sun. The evening chill would be coming soon.
Wade had no life blanket. His food, cached back in the tiny cave in the cliff, was nearly gone. His ship, smashed in his inexpert landing on the planet almost a year before, was a rusty hulk. J. Edgerton Wade was near the end of his rope—and knew it. Strangely, he didn’t care. In that year since he’d come here to the cliffs, he’d lived in a world of beauty. Evening after evening he had listened to the concerts. That was enough, he told himself. After a year of music such as that any man could afford to die.  p. 130

Taylor and the Groombridgians are soon dealt with by Wade, Mackenzie and the others, and the rest of the story deals with Encyclopedia’s maneuvering. Before this plays out Alder, the insectoid composer, says the grove doesn’t want the two trees back as they are troublemakers. So Mackenzie and company arrange a deal where they will take them to Earth.
The last part of the story overcomplicates matters. It turns out (spoiler) that the idea to take the trees back to Earth was Encyclopedia’s, part of a plot to use the trees’ music to modify the way humans think, to change them into something better and less threatening. Nellie discovers this however (she managed to reverse the telepathic process that Encylopedia was using on her to extract her knowledge), and tells Mackenzie. He then plans to burn all the trees to save humankind, but then Wade intervenes to save them and nearly succeeds, only to have Nellie eventually overpower him. The story ends with the trees quarantined, and with Encylopedia getting a suspiciously Campbellian-sounding (it’s pretty jingoistic) lecture about human supremacy.

This is both an interesting and entertaining piece with lots of original or seemingly original ideas. That said, it is also uneven, and has far too much going on (the description above—believe it or not—leaves out several sub-plots and scenes). Well worth your time, though, and head and shoulders above anything else in the issue.

This issue’s fiction finishes with (alas) five Probability Zero pieces: Sourdough by George Holman has a down-on-his-luck Venusian prospector telling of various strikes that didn’t work out (artificial replacements were found for the gold, diamonds and oil he found)—until he finally bores down and finds black coffee, but even that doesn’t work out; Light Trap by Jerry Shelton is about a perpetual energy device that stops working when it is found to be theoretically impossible; Picture from Tokyo by H. O. Hoadley is one I didn’t understand about the enhancement of a pre-war photograph of part of Japan; The Vacuumulator by Malcolm Jameson is a piece of nonsense about light displacing air in a vacuum chamber; and Cash on the Dimension by Ray Karden has a writer use a dimensional machine to enable him to sell his novel in five hundred worlds similar to this one—there is no mention of the other five hundred versions of him who have written the same novel.
These five squibs are a complete waste of trees (and now pixels).

To accompany the indifferent fiction we have a dark and muddy Cover by William Timmins. The cover type—”Astounding” in dark grey and “Science Fiction” in bright yellow—is possibly early evidence of Campbell’s desire to change the name of the magazine.
The quality of the Interior artwork isn’t much better, and reproducing it as small spot illustrations doesn’t help (Orban’s illustration on p. 25, or Kramer’s on p. 132, would have been much better spread across the entire page). This meanness is a consequence of wartime paper shortages and the resultant space restrictions, and I don’t understand why Campbell didn’t lose half a dozen pages of text (preferably the Probability Zero pieces) and increased the size of the illustrations—the magazine would have looked a lot better for it.
Campbell’s editorial, Soft-Boiled, is a short science piece which compares cooking a soft-boiled egg with tempering steel.

The food theme continues in A Matter of Taste by Willy Ley, which is an article about all the strange things humans eat (various animals, insects, mushrooms, clay, etc.) What this is doing in Astounding I have no idea.

In Times to Come and The Analytical Laboratory: November 1943 both share the same page. The first part plugs a new ‘Venus Equilateral’ story (unnamed, but it is Off the Beam), and makes it sound as dull as ditch water (see above). The Anlab for this issue was discussed in the November review.²

“Quartz …” is a two page photo essay about the mineral’s uses.

Postwar Plan For Mars by R. S. Richardson is a long but quite interesting article about Mars (and, to a lesser extent, its “canals”). Richardson starts by saying that observing planets is an unfashionable occupation for astronomers (it is less productive in terms of new knowledge than star or nebula observations) before going on to expand on how the profession works, and the solar geometry of Earth and Mars (last in opposition—closest to each other—in 1941).
Throughout the essay he discusses various images of the planet (there are numerous interior illustrations), before recounting a night’s viewing of his own when he had the good fortune to start on the observatory’s six inch telescope before fortuitously progressing through a number of others to the one hundred inch one:

I left the sixty-inch thoroughly dejected. I was picking my way through the dark with some vague notion of trying another drawing, when a flashlight came bobbing down the path toward the one-hundred-inch. Coming closer it proved to be the observer himself. He had wandered out to smoke a pipe and relax a bit until his next object had risen high enough to start an exposure.
We strolled along, chatting of many things. I called his attention to the fine appearance of Mars, now rising to meet the meridian. He acknowledged its pleasing aspect and expressed pleasure at the remarkable seeing that night.
Other more mundane affairs seemed to weigh heavily on his mind, however. He was worried about the Russians who seemed unable to stem the Nazi tide. The income tax. His car was wearing out, too. Maybe he should get a new one. Yes, he admitted, knocking the ashes from his pipe, things were getting pretty tough. Then suddenly he made a proposal. There was still an hour yet before N. G. C. 1285 would be in position. Suppose we took a look at Mars in the meantime.
He gave me an eyepiece that magnified one thousand and brought Mars within an optical distance of thirty-eight thousand miles. Yet even under this power the image was painfully bright, so bright that all sensation of color was washed away. The pink deserts were turned into a yellowish white like the moon at full; the olive-green areas were dirty brown patches. The whole appearance was so contrary to that at the six-inch it was hard to believe the two were one and the same object. I recognized part of the outline of the Sabaeus Sinus but the other markings were like a strange map. Of course, Mars had rotated a few degrees since my original look but not enough to alter it that much.
And if detection of the canals before had been difficult, now it seemed absolutely hopeless. I could not discern so much as the shadow of the ghost of a canal. You got the impression very strongly that there never could be such a thing as a canal on that flat expanse of moonlike yellow disk.
It would have made a fitting climax to have told how each step upward in power had brought the canals closer and closer, until in the world’s largest telescope they burst into view, covering the planet with a mesh of great circle lines.
But like the old lady who searched in vain for the ice cubes, truth compels me to confess that after studying Mars under the most favourable seeing conditions through four instruments of widely different power, the detail grew progressively less linelike if anything with each increase in aperture. I do not attempt to account for this circumstance. I merely report what happened to me.  p. 169-170

Richardson suggests reasons why the Martian canals are only intermittently visible, and mentions an experiment that sheds light on how the human eye works:

The usual explanation is that the canals are merely subjective, an optical illusion arising from our process of visual perception. The eye is a marvelous natural integrating machine. It gathers everything together that it sees. We glance at the stars and immediately start grouping them into lines and clusters. We look at a tree and instead of analyzing it into leaves and branches, integrate the whole mass into clumps of foliage. Many experiments have been performed based upon this integrating power of the eye.
The most famous of these is the one by Evans and Maunder on some English schoolboys back in 1902. I confess that I once dallied with the idea of repeating their experiment, even going so far as to look up the original paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
It seemed they had used classes of twenty boys ranging in age from twelve to fourteen selected from the Royal Hospital School at Greenwich. The boys were seated at different distances from a circular disk upon which were drawn markings on a certain hemisphere of Mars, except the canals were omitted.
Each boy was told to draw as accurately as possible exactly what he saw upon the disk. All were supposedly ignorant of the appearance of Mars through a telescope. They were simply shown an odd looking figure and told to reproduce it as best they could.
It must be conceded that boys just on the limit of distinct visibility drew lines bearing a startling resemblance to the canals. Not only did they insert lines where none existed on the disk, but they drew lines where canals appear on the recognized maps of Mars. In all they drew twelve lines that could be attributed to well-known canals. Also, it was evident that on the average the boys who were the best draftsmen were the best at putting in canals. One lad named Allen was a whiz at inserting canals. (I wonder what he is doing now?) From which Evans and Maunder concluded that the numerous observers who had so painstakingly been charting canals for the last twenty-five years had indeed been drawing precisely what they saw, except that what they saw had no existence in reality.  p. 171

He finishes up by mentioning photos that supposedly show canals (although they had not got from France to the USA at the time of writing).³
The article finishes with a proposition for a multidisciplinary task force to constantly observe Mars in 1956, the next opposition.
An interesting article for its content and historical perspective.

Apart from the Simak story and the Richardson article, this is a very poor issue.  ●

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1. Alva Rogers doesn’t say anything about this issue in A Requiem for Astounding, but he says this about 1944:

Of all the years commonly considered Golden, 1944 was the least memorable; the outstanding stories that were published only pointed up the disappointing quality of the bulk of what was left. In some respects, 1944 can be regarded as a bridge between two peaks; the peak 1940 to 1943, and the peak 1945 to 1950. At any rate, the slump was short lived and things began to pick up considerably from 1945 on.  p. 134

2. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the March 1944 issue:

I have no idea why the Simak story didn’t top the poll: too much biological life and not enough rivets, I suspect.

3. According to Wikipedia, the Martian Canals were discounted much earlier than 1944:

The influential observer Eugène Antoniadi used the 83-cm (32.6 inch) aperture telescope at Meudon Observatory at the 1909 opposition of Mars and saw no canals, the outstanding photos of Mars taken at the new Baillaud dome at the Pic du Midi observatory also brought formal discredit to the Martian canals theory in 1909, and the notion of canals began to fall out of favor. Around this time spectroscopic analysis also began to show that no water was present in the Martian atmosphere. However, as of 1916 Waldemar Kaempffert (editor of Scientific American and later Popular Science Monthly) was still vigorously defending the Martian canals theory against skeptics.  ●