ISFDB link

_____________________

Technical Editor, H. J. Campbell

Fiction:
Martians in a Frozen World • novella by Rick Conroy ∗∗
Frontier Legion (Part 1 of 6) • novella serial by Sydney J. Bounds ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by John Pollack [as by uncredited]
Editorial: Fruition
Forrest J. Ackerman Writes from America • essay by Forrest J. Ackerman
Projectiles • letters
SF Handbook: Terms of Interest to the Science-Fictioneer • essay by Herbert J. Campbell [as by uncredited]
Book Reviews

_____________________

Authentic Science Fiction always struck me, for a variety of reasons, as a rather odd magazine. First of all it started as a series of novels, only adding short departments such as editorials and letters, etc., later.¹ It was some time before it changed significantly and became a ‘proper’ magazine, and the issue I’m reviewing here is the one that first added extra fiction (a serial) to the ‘novel’ and the departments. It changed even more radically with #29, which added short stories and artwork.
Secondly, there was the name of the magazine, which changed several times during its run. These were mostly variants of Authentic, but for a short period at the start it was called Science Fiction Fortnightly and then Science Fiction Monthly.²
Thirdly, the magazine appears to have published little of note (with the stellar exception of Charles L. Harness’s The Rose, Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, March 1953).
Finally, and on a more pragmatic note, I found it a difficult magazine to get hold of (my run is still incomplete). A lot of the issues that I have seen are in remarkably poor condition, and look like they spent part of their life in someone’s pocket (this was perhaps because of its small size: the smallest of the issues are around 117 x 179mm in size, or 4⁵/₈ x 7 inches in old money, slightly wider than Roberts & Vinter’s New Worlds and Science Fantasy but the same height, and with softer covers).
The magazine was published by Hamilton and Co. (they later launched the well-known Panther imprint), and its first editor was “L. G. Holmes” (whose real name was Gordon Landsborough). He was also the production editor in charge of Hamilton and Co.’s paperback lines. Holmes was last credited as the editor of the magazine in issue #12 (August 1951).³ The only editor listed in this issue is H. J Campbell (as its “Technical Editor”).⁴

As for the fiction in this issue, it largely consists of a 35,000 word novella by Rick Conroy, Martians in a Frozen World. This gets off to reasonable start:

The supply ship had landed them in Penguin Bay towards the end of the short Antarctic summer. Then it turned its bows towards the north, and began to push its way through the pack ice surrounding Antarctica, in the hope of getting into open water before winter set in.
The fifteen men—all with a scientific training, as geologists, meteorologists and so on—set to work on the piled-up stores with a deliberate frenzy. They had to fabricate a blizzard-proof shelter before the ferocious Antarctic blizzards came down. They erected the storm-hut, lashed its roof on with steel cables stretched from the rooftree and hammered into the ice, and surrounded it with wind-breaks of piled packing cases, roofed over to make little tunnels down which, on the calmer days, the dug-in men could burrow for supplies. p. 5

After they establish their base, three men set off to set up a met station a few days’ travel away. Initially they send regular radio reports—then one day there is nothing. A day later there is a garbled report of an “Octopus” and a “Beauty”, followed by a month’s silence. Once the blizzards stop, the camp doctor sets off to investigate. When he arrives at the station he finds a dead dog which appears to have been crushed by a huge tentacle. Doc then goes into the hut and reads a diary belonging to Sven, who has included references to a beautiful giant woman who is ten feet tall.
Later that night, Doc wakes up:

The alarm clock was ticking. Quite a loud tick.
And suddenly that loud tick was drowned as the wind roared up and then died down, as if in a brief wave.
The Doc had been hearing that noise for weeks and weeks, all through the winter. It was the noise made when someone opened the outer door of a storm-hut.
Every muscle went tense. He could feel his heart beating violently, almost deafening him by throbbing in his ears.
Maybe one of the boys had come back?
But how could they have survived out in the open, through the blizzards of the past fortnight?
Then the brief, faint noise of someone turning the handle of the inner door.
The Doc’s hand, automatically, reached out for his electric torch.
As the door opened, he had his hand on the actual button.
And when it was well open, he pressed it. A spreading stream of light flashed across the dark hut.
That door was seven feet high. High enough for the Doc to go through upright—and the Doc was no chicken.
But this creature, illumined for a second by the light of the torch, seemed almost bent double.
Her full height would be about ten feet. Yes, no doubt about her sex. She wore a garment made of a single piece of fabric, midway between an Indian sari and a Roman toga, but light as gossamer. Her hair was down across her shoulders. Her feet were bare. On one wrist was strapped something like a very large wrist-watch indeed.
No signs of frost-bite.
The Doc remembered thinking, in the way that strange thoughts do pop into the mind at moments like these, that her feet (30 cms. x 8 cms.) were quite proportional to her height. In fact, they looked rather dainty.
She looked straight across the hut, into the beam of the torch. Her eyes were large, dilated. A human’s eyes, Doc recalled thinking, would have blinked in such a glare. But those eyes merely stared.
She made a gesture with her hand. Something dropped on to the floor with a light plop. The Doc braced himself, as if for an explosion, but nothing happened, except that she backed out of the door, closing it behind her. p. 21

The giant woman has left a note from Sven: he reports that he is helping aliens in need, warns the doctor about going outside, and says he should come and join him at the Equilateral Mountains as soon as he can.
Up until this point this had been a not bad read: the setting is convincing, the characterisation better than normal, and the prose style refreshingly free of the usual SF jargon: I suspected that a mainstream writer was at work here. This is rather unfortunately spoiled by the ridiculous SF plot that starts unfolding.⁵ This tension between an able writer and a daft story continues to define the rest of the piece.
Later Doc radios the Captain at base camp, and asks for permission to go to the mountains. The Captain assents, and meanwhile contacts naval HQ in the Falkland Islands. They prepare to send an icebreaker and an aircraft carrier.
Doc’s journey involves a fight with an ‘Octopus’—we later learn it is actually a Martian creature called a cagora which looks similar but has an extra pair of pseudopods. He then encounters one of the giant women, who rescues him, carrying him the rest of the way to Sven.
When Doc awakens (he falls asleep on the way) he finds he is indoors. Sven and one of the giant women are there, and Sven explains the setup to Doc: the women are a mining expedition from Mars who have lost control of the cagora, animals that they use for labour. Also, the women and cagora no longer eat normal food (a scientific development) and receive pills and inoculations instead. The cagora have stolen these, and the women face possible starvation before their spaceship returns.
The remaining two-thirds of the story has a plot that involves Doc, Sven, Captain John (the leader of the expedition), the giant women, the cagora, the food supplies, and the aircraft carrier and its aircraft. The extent to which any prospective reader will enjoy this will depend on their general reaction to nonsense (I’ve noticed some reviewers just can’t shrug this off and plough on) and specifically, the giant, pill-eating women nonsense in this one. I managed to ignore it, so I thought it an okay adventure actually, mainly for the strengths mentioned earlier, but also for its occasional humour—this is from when Captain John (who arrives later at the women’s base) and Doc and are being individually shown around the mine:

She took [Captain John] to a place which for a moment looked like a torture chamber. It was warmed slightly—to a couple of degrees above freezing point.
As soon as she entered this chamber, the blond started to perspire like someone in a Turkish bath. And he reflected that, to these Martians, acclimatised to low temperatures, a degree or so above freezing was definitely hot.
To his horror, she started taking off her single shell-pink and diaphanous garment, which though not concealing her maidenly form in any respect, at least preserved decency.
To Doc, who was on his own tour of inspection, but with a slightly plump brunette, and had just reached the door of the Amazons’ gymnasium, it came as a surprise. “Beg your pardon,” he said, distinctly, and closed the door with an insulting gentleness.
The Captain blushed, though there was no one but his blonde to see. She saw the rise in his colour, and thought he must be overdressed, for such a warm room. She reached out a hand to help him off with his uppermost furs. He, misunderstanding, resisted. Her grip, however, was a strong one, and his struggles resulted in his being jerked peremptorily closer.
When the Doc, after a few tactful moments, opened the door for a second time, he decided to give the gymnasium a miss on this particular tour of inspection, and come back a whole lot later . . . p. 78

Notwithstanding the above, it has a rather bleak ending.
Frontier Legion by Sydney J. Bounds is the first part of a six part serial which has its hero regain consciousness and realise he has amnesia. Three men attend him and, as he comes round, he remembers his name is Jan Arrowsmith, that he is a member of the Security Service and has a mission that is vital to Earth’s future—but can’t remember what it is. He does remember that the twenty-second of March is significant. The two other men, apart from the doctor, are Commandant Raymond and Lieutenant Bauer of the Frontier Legion. They are all on the Pluto-bound spaceship Goliath.
After trying, and failing, to get Arrowsmith to answer his questions, Commandant Raymond’s irritation becomes clear, and this is exacerbated because he is apparently under Arrowsmith’s orders.
Arrowsmith’s wife arrives via a shuttle. The two Frontier Legion men leave them, and we later learn that Arrowsmith and his wife are estranged, as he left her when she became pregnant with their daughter. Arrowsmith remembers none of this either.
The last scene has them arriving at Pluto. Arrowsmith and Bauer don their spacesuits and descend into a cave system called The Deeps to see the Plutonians. While they are down there, Bauer’s spacesuit light goes out and Arrowsmith is left alone. He realises that aliens have surrounded him . . . .
This is a fairly fast paced and intriguing start, and the amnesiac hero trope, if not exactly original, is competently handled. We’ll see how it goes.

ISFDB credits the Cover to John Pollack but adds, not very helpfully, “Cover artist is not credited. No visible signature. Source of the credit is unknown.” At first I thought that it was painted by an artist who couldn’t handle perspective but, as I found out from reading the Conroy story, it is meant to be a giant woman.
The Editorial titled Fruition, leads off with news about a change to the contents of the magazine:

We’ve done it! A long time ago we made plans for Authentic, plans that were held up by all sorts of controls—one of the biggest being paper trouble. Well, that situation has now eased a bit. Not enough to allow us to go fortnightly again, but sufficiently to bring one of our plans to fruition—a piece of fiction in addition to the long novel. p. 2

The “paper trouble” referred to is post-war paper rationing.
The rest of the column is given over to blurbs for the two stories, and a tetchy reply to some of the letters received:

Some readers have written us again asking why we didn’t publish the criticisms in their first letters. This is because their criticisms were trivial and unimportant: to have published them would have been a waste of premium space. We only publish criticism when it has a strong basis and really affects the accuracy or the quality of the story. Such things as printing three light years instead of three and a half light years we believe to be an error of significance only to those people who simply must air their precious knowledge. They cannot air it in our columns. Even so, serious-minded criticism is welcomed by us. Readers need never be afraid of taking us to task over a story if they really feel something is wrong. We balance readers’ views against each other and shape our policy accordingly. So, let the brickbats fly, but keep the niggling to yourselves! p. 3

Forrest J. Ackerman Writes from America by Forrest J. Ackerman is a page of fluff which partly covers Forry’s adventures in Hollywood:

Wendayne (my wife) and I will dine with cinemactress Sally Forrest tonite. The stf “bug” has bitten her husband, and he wants to fill his den with the best books and decorate it with original art work. (I’ll bet he’d like a cover from ASFm. So would I. So would you!) p. 3

He provides other movie news, and manages to slip in some self-promotion:

The Great Book of Science Fiction will anthologize my Atomic Error, and I have been invited to write a cover story for Other Worlds. p. 3

Projectiles is the magazine’s letter column, which comprises of (to start at least) straightforward bouquets and brickbats. A previous story, Campbell’s Mice or Machines, gets one of the former and two of the latter, and gets this editorial reply:

Well, readers, that’s about the proportion of fors and againsts where Mice or Machines is concerned. It was an experiment on our part, but it pleased only a minority. Basing our policy as we do on your letters, we can say there will be no more stories like Mice or Machines. p. 125

SF Handbook: Terms of Interest to the Science-Fictioneer by Herbert J. Campbell is a page of scientific terms plus some star-gazing information for Jupiter.
Book Reviews is three-quarters of a page that covers five books. Two are science fact (Dragons in Amber by Willy Ley and Rockets, Jets, Guided Missiles and Space Ships by Jack Coggins and Fletcher Pratt), the others are fiction (two are anthologies, Possible Worlds of Science Fiction by Groff Conklin, and The Best Science Fiction Stories: Second Series by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, “These are reduced versions of the big American editions which sell at $2.95”; the other is The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, “It is a classic on the level of Bradbury’s previous Silver Locusts and represents some of the finest examples of this genre you could come across. [. . .] Please don’t miss it.”).

Overall, an okay issue, and not as bad as I had expected. ●

_____________________

1. The magazine added an editorial and letters from #3, and—in some, but not all, issues—had a page of book reviews from #5, a page of science news from #6, and a page of fanzine reviews from #11. This previous issue also has an editorial saying that the readers want long stories, not shorter ones with a “few fills”.

2. The magazine started as Authentic Science Fiction Series. Issues #3-#8 were called Science Fiction Fortnightly, then for issues #9-#12 it changed to Science Fiction Monthly. With issue #13 it became Authentic Science Fiction, and changed again with issue #29 to Authentic Science Fiction Monthly. The title was then stable for several years, becoming Authentic Science Fiction once more with #69, before returning to Authentic Science Fiction Monthly for the last few issues (#78-#84).

3. Wikipedia has this about Landsborough (who appears to have had a fascinating career in the publishing industry). As for the magazine itself there is more information at SFE, Wikipedia and Andrew Darlington’s blog Eight Miles Higher.

4. There is some confusion about who was the editor of Authentic for issues #13 to #28. Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines by Marshall B. Tymm and Mike Ashley (Greenwood, 1985) has, on p.127, “L. G. Holmes” listed as the editor for issues #1 to #27. However, Mike Ashley’s own Transformations (Liverpool University Press, 2005) states on p. 84, “The series was retitled Authentic Science Fiction Monthly from its thirteenth issue in September 1951, when Campbell took over as editor.” This latter statement would tie in with Wikipedia’s report of Holmes’s departure from Hamilton & Co. in the middle of that year (see the footnote above for a link).
Both of these statements, although seemingly contradictory, may both be partial versions of the truth. “Holmes” (if he didn’t leave Hamilton & Co. until later) may have had the title of editor, but Campbell was the one doing all the work (a not uncommon editorial situation). Indeed, Philip Harbottle’s Vampires From the Void: The Legacy (Cosmos Books, 2011) states on p. 138, “With that issue [#13] Bert Campbell took over most of the duties of editor . . .” (emphasis mine).
Further confusing matters is the appearance of Derrick Rowles on the magazine’s masthead as editor for issues #19-#22. I haven’t managed to find out who this person was but my hunch would be that, if Landsborough did leave Hamilton & Co. in 1951, Rowles was his replacement as production editor.

5. My suspicions about Conroy being a mainstream writer were substantiated by SFE. There is more detail about this writer at Steve Holland’s Bear Alley blog. ●