ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Editor, Alden H. Norton; Assistant Editor, Frederik Pohl¹

_____________________

Fiction:
The Halfling • novelette by Leigh Brackett ∗∗∗+
Earth, Farewell! • novelette by Frederik Pohl [as by James MacCreigh] ∗
It Happened Tomorrow • novelette by Robert Bloch ∗∗∗+
Come to Mars • short story by Walter Kubilius –
Soldiers of Space • novelette by Henry Kuttner ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • cover by Milton Luros
Interior artwork • Lawrence (x3), Frank R. Paul (x2), Dorothy Les Tina
The Mail Bag
Fan Mags • fanzine reviews
Viewpoints • author notes
Fantasy Circle • film reviews

_____________________

After reading the dreadful March issue of Super Science Stories I wasn’t expecting much from its sister magazine Astonishing Stories apart from some decent internal artwork, but I was pleasantly surprised: apart from the illustrations, there are also two pretty good, ‘Best of the Year’ quality stories from Leigh Brackett and Robert Bloch.

The Halfling by Leigh Brackett, appears to be the only one of her future history series (ISFDB² describes it a “Leigh Brackett’s Solar System”) set on Earth, and it concerns events that unfold in “Jade Green’s Interplanetary Carnival Show, The Wonders of the Seven Worlds Alive Before Your Eyes”.
The owner, John Greene (his nickname is Jade), is approached by a young woman called Laura Darrow who wants a job as a dancer. Initially she tells him she wants the job so she can afford to eat, but later in the conversation we also learn that she is on Earth illegally and needs to get back to Venus. As they walk towards the stage for her audition they are startled by Laska, a cat-man from Callisto, who is strung out on caffeine (Greene explains later that this is their “coke or hashish”):

Laska slunk in towards us. I didn’t blame her for yelping. Laska wasn’t pretty. He wasn’t much taller than the girl, and looked shorter because he was drooping. He wore a pair of tight dark trunks and nothing else except the cross-shaped mane of fine blue-gray fur that went across his shoulders and down his back, from the peak between his eyes to his long tail. He was dragging the tail, and the tip of it was twitching. There was more of the soft fur on his chest and forearms, and a fringe of it down his lank belly.
I grabbed him by the scruff and shook him. “I ought to boot your ribs in! We got a show in less than two hours.”
He looked up at me. The pupils of his yellow-green eyes were closed to thin hairlines, but they were flat and cold with hatred. The glaring lights showed me the wet whiteness of his pointed teeth and the raspy pinkness of his tongue.
“Let me go. Let me go, you human!”
His voice was hoarse and accented.
“I’ll let you go.” I cuffed him across the face. “I’ll let you go to the immigration authorities. You wouldn’t like that, would you? You wouldn’t even have coffee to hop up on when you died.”
The sharp claws came out of his fingers and toes, flexed hungrily and went back in again.
I dropped him.
“Go on back inside. Find the croaker and tell him to straighten you out. I don’t give a damn what you do on your own time, but you miss out on one more show and I’ll take your job and call the I-men. Get it?”
“I get it,” said Laska sullenly, and curled his red tongue over his teeth. He shot his flat, cold glance at the girl and went away, not making any sound at all.  p. 13

They encounter other problematic characters on the way to the audition:

Sindi was sitting cross-legged on the stage, sipping thil and listening to sad Martian music on the juke box behind the screen of faded Martian tapestry. She looked up and saw us, and she didn’t like what she saw.
She got up. She was a Low-Canaler, built light and wiry, and she moved like a cat. She had long emerald eyes and black hair with little bells braided in it, and clusters of tiny bells in her ears. She was wearing the skin of a Martian sandleopard, no more clothes than the law forced her to wear. She was something to look at, and she had a disposition like three yards of barbed wire.  p. 15

By the time Greene and Darrow get to the stage, word has spread:

I shrugged and went in and fiddled with the juke box. When I came out Laura Darrow was up on the stage and we had an audience. Sindi must have passed the high sign. I shoved my way through a bunch of Venusian lizard-men and sat down. There were three or four little moth-people from Phobos roosting up on the braces so their delicate wings wouldn’t get damaged in the crush.  p. 16

Darrow gives an extraordinary dance performance, and Greene hires her.
The rest of the story details the interplay between the four characters mentioned so far. Greene falls for Laura; the shows start selling out; (spoiler) Laska the cat-man goes crazy on Venusian coffee, kills Sindhi, and later attacks Greene and Laura; Greene kills Laska in self-defence.
Later, a young man hired around the same time as Laura is also found dead, and a Martian sand cat is missing from its cage. When Greene examines the corpse he notices the man’s eyes have contact lenses that make them the same colour as Laura’s. He confronts her, and we find she is a disguised cat-person assassin sent from Venus to kill Laska to avenge her tribe’s honour; the young man was killed because he was an immigration agent.
Laura escapes, but Greene knows she won’t get out of the carnival as he has stationed men at the exits. What he hasn’t bargained on is her going into the “brute” tent and not only releasing the animals but whipping them into a killing spree, which causes panic among the visiting crowds.
The final scene includes a pitched battle between the various species of men and the animals, with a final confrontation between Greene and Laura (which ends a little abruptly).
This is colourful and exotic stuff with a big action finish.

Earth, Farewell! by Frederik Pohl is about a future Earth ruled by the alien Others, and begins with the selection of Lyle, the narrator, as one of the “Four and the Four”. You can get an idea of the story’s style—a mixture of the ridiculous and portentous—from the scene where Lyle is told about his selection:

But there was an Other in President Gibbs’ mansion. I’d seen the Others before, one or two of them. But this one was the first I’d seen that had the wide orange circles around his irises to show he was a member of the king class. Tall, gray-skinned, looking as though he were constantly overbalanced by the weight of the flapping, ponderous fat-wings that grew out of his spindly back, he was an absorbing sight. They say that the Others used to swim around in the water of their home planet, long ago. I don’t know, but those fat-wings were not made to work in any atmosphere, even the thin one of their light, dying world. They look something like a seal’s flippers, but rigidly muscular and utterly boneless.
As a member of the king class, the Other had a name. It was Greg. He said, “You are Ralph Symes. You have been chosen as one of the Four and the Four. Come up before me.” p. 32-33

King class? Greg?
During the process to become one of the Four and the Four the men get chlorophyll skin, and a crown that gives anti-gravity/force field/etc. powers, while the “girls” are turned into data repositories or some such. After this they all fly through space to the Others’ home planet. This provides a rare moment of interest with a passage that presages the writer’s 1972 story The Gold from Starbow’s End:

The trip may have been long; I have no way of knowing, for the time was not like the passage of hours or days on a planet. Onward we fled, faster until even the stars were crawling about in space, and we could see them slide slowly behind us. Their colors changed and disappeared. Behind us the stars were red; ahead, deep, smoky violet. And then, quickly, all the stars were ahead of us, with different colors being the only thing that showed where they really were, as we caught up with and passed the light rays that came from behind. Faster than light—infinitely faster—we went, while the stars crept slowly around and winked from violet to red as we fled past them.  p. 36

On the Others’ home planet the girls, who have been inert throughout the story (presumably a side-effect of being a biological hard disk), go to a building that houses their predecessors (there have been several generations of Fours that have previously completed this journey):

Inside—there were rows upon rows of slabs, many empty and waiting. But most were in use. At the head of each of them there was a mind machine, like the mind machine the Others used to read and mold thoughts in the tests for the Four and the Four [. . .]. At the foot was a cylinder of crystal, and a box under each cylinder that droned and pulsed. And in the space between, on each slab, there lay the figure of a girl of the Four and the Four.
A hundred of them at least there were, in this one room. There are four each year, and the pick of Earth’s young girls for a quarter of a century lay somnolent on plastic, molded slabs there before us.
Many of them were no longer beautiful. Some were no longer human.
Each cylinder of crystal at the slabfoot was filled with a bluish red fluid that was blood, and each cylinder had two flexible crystal tubes running out from it, sinking themselves at the ends into the flesh of the girls. That was what gave life to the girls who had been of the Four and the Four. That and nothing else, for they were unmoving, rigid. The eyes of each girl were closed, and only slowly did their bosoms rise and fall; only slowly did the pale veins pulsate in their throats.  p. 37-38

After the four new girls are plumbed in, the men join the other male Fours and are given routine administration jobs. One of the them, Collard, disappears with four other men and later returns to stage a rebellion. This section of the story is an okay action sequence that (spoiler) culminates in the overthrow of the Others.
The piece is bookended with two short sections that have Symes telling the whole story from his prison cell. He has been an Other loyalist throughout and, at the end, Collard takes him to one of the Others’ machines to be deprogrammed.

It Happened Tomorrow by Robert Bloch starts with newspaperman Dick Sheldon unable to turn off his alarm one morning—and then he finds he can’t turn off the room light either, or the water tap. Matters take an even stranger turn on his way to work when the streetcar he is on won’t stop until the conductor smashes part of the trolley. There follows an equally eventful elevator ride to the newspaper offices and, when he finally arrives there, his boss Lou Avery shows him the wires:

Avery tapped the desk.
“Three planes due to land at the airport are still flying around somewhere over the Great Lakes. They won’t come down.
“The Albania didn’t dock this morning, either. It’s out off the Sound, heading south. Here’s the wires from the captain. He can’t stop it.
“The gas company reports it can’t turn power off. The electric company reports all lights burning. The waterworks has fifty calls of reported floods. Taps don’t turn off.”
Avery’s pencil emphasized each point with a little excited click against the desk.
“The street car company reports trouble on all lines. There’s been a subway smashup at 108th Street. Trains won’t stop. Elevators in office buildings are out of control.
“The Empire Theatre called—picture there’s been running all night and they can’t switch off the projector or the automatic rewinder.
“The whole gang is out covering the town—I’ve shut down on incoming calls. They’re all the same, understand? They say the world’s gone crazy.”  p. 52

Avery tells Sheldon to go and see a physicist called Andrew Krane to see if he can explain what is happening. When Sheldon finally manages to fight his way through the chaos to Krane’s house, the physicist theorises that the machines have come to life, and adds that their wilfulness may turn into independent action. . . .
The two return to Sheldon’s offices to meet with Avery. From this point on a slightly shaky story becomes more sure footed and increasingly engrossing.
As the three men are discussing matters, an agitated printer arrives with a copy of the latest edition, but it is mostly gibberish:

They read the first few lines.
“Today’s startling de down peril motorists advised grip of furnaces emergency pla pla London czaFortetttsten hahaDboootGla ezPlazazakl klkkkkk . 10 Ha prevallllha”
It was Hendricks who found his voice first—and not much of a voice, at that.
“We set it. The presses wouldn’t stop, but we set it. Set it right, too. Louie Fisher, he’s dead. They caught him. That’s when the loading vans charged. We locked ourselves in, then. They tried to break down the doors. Louie’s dead. We set it. They couldn’t stop us—but they print wrong. See—? They print wrong.
I won’t tell you what happened to Arch. The presses didn’t even stop then, just ground on, and the edition’s all red. It’s all red, I tell you!”  p. 58

The three later find one of the women dead in the office, strangled by a telephone cord: the machines have started killing people before they themselves are destroyed.
The next chapter or two of the story detail the battle between humanity and the machines. This involves, among other things, the three being sent by a police chief to destroy a garage full of trapped buses. There they organise some of the street mob to help them, but are then attacked by planes and tanks. Later, as they hide out in an apartment building, the three escape from machines that are searching door to door, but Avery falls to his death. The next set piece (spoiler) has Krane die after he sells out to the machines and attempts to betray Sheldon (they now realise that they will need human servants to service and refuel them, etc.).

This fight against the machines is a good tale in its own right (the same way that most man vs. technology stories are) but the story evolves into something superior in chapter seven, where the timeline telescopes into the future. Sheldon escapes the conflict and takes refuge in an abandoned farmhouse where he lies ill for several weeks. Later, he returns to a city where all human and machine life appears to have died out, but then meets a man he recognises as Piedmont, a millionaire who has apparently survived by locking himself and his supplies in one of his bank vaults. Piedmont tells Sheldon that the machines appeared to die off after humanity did, but that has seen smoke in the distance. After passing on this information, Piedmont shoots himself.
Sheldon investigates the source of the smoke and finds a factory of robots building more of their kind. He goes off to get a keg of nitroglycerine to blow the factory up, and there is a final confrontation with the machines.
There is a neat final passage that ties in with the machine motif:

Sheldon never heard the explosion. His last conscious thought—the last conscious thought of a human brain on Earth—was of his body turning over and over. Turning over and over, as the earth turned over and over amidst the stars like a tiny cog in the vast machinery of the illimitable cosmos.  p. 76

This is a rather odd piece—one that should probably be read as modern fantasy than SF—and it gets off to a shaky start, but it does get better as it goes on. It is also a fast paced and compelling read, slickly written, and it does not overburden itself with much of the usual pulp baggage. Atypically, there is a story introduction by Bloch that makes that point, among others:

I’d like to say a few words about this story. It’s a yarn I came very close to not writing at all. I wanted to do just such a tale for a long, long time. But upon consistent reading of current offerings in science-fiction, I became discouraged. I could picture an editor saying, “This sort of thing is out. Destruction of the world. Where’s your heroine, your twist in the plot?”
Opposed to this was my sincere desire to tackle the job.
So here is my story about the revolt of the machines. The idea is not new. The plot-structure is quite simple. But it represents an ambition of mine—to actually write a story which would show what happens to men when the machines revolt.
Dozens of such stories have been purportedly written around that idea—but always around it. The author attempted to tackle the theme, but it was too big. Invariably, he glossed over the actual details in a few paragraphs: “First New York and then London were engulfed by the machines.” Get what I mean? He would generalize. And then a plot would be dragged in by the heels—a villain, and a heroine would appear—and the hero would save the world at the last minute.
So I claim that the real revolt story, the daily account of what would happen to average people in a world gone mad, has never been told. And it’s that story I’m telling here. I know I’m presumptuous—the theme needs an H. G. Wells and that’s why most writers have been afraid of it—but the yarn had to be written. For a while I, too, toyed with a dozen devices to inject an artificial plot. Then I realized that the power lay in merely giving the true, detailed story. The inexorable unfolding of man’s doom. So I write it that way, simply. If it meets with editorial approval, fine. If not, chalk it up as a literary sin, but one I’m grateful for having committed.  p. 47-48

Well worth a look.

Come to Mars by Walter Kubilius starts with a scientist called Kwain talking about his two new inventions: the first is a time twister that can send the entire cosmos back in time, and the second is a visualophone for contacting life on Mars. It turns out that he has already used the latter to contact that planet, which turns out to have human life too. The Martian communicating with Earth, Hu-Lan, sends the plans for spaceships he wants the Earth to build and send to his planet. Despite his foreboding, Kwain is put in charge of the twenty-seven ship fleet and, when they get to Mars and land, they find only red dust on the planet—the city they saw on the visualophone does not exist.
On return to Earth (spoiler) the red dust they bring back kills all vegetation—the Martians are not human beings but dust motes, and they sent the plans for the spaceships so they could hitch a lift between the two planets. Man’s imminent extinction is undone by use of the time-twister.
This is a pretty awful story but there is an interesting passage that foreshadows John Christopher’s novel The Death Of Grass:

The dust that had collected in the jets of the rockets during their stay on Mars blew away with Earth’s winds. An insignificant amount, it meant nothing. So they thought. . . .
The apple trees of Oregon were ripe as luscious globules were ready for the picking in the grove. The farmer placed his ladder against the tree, stepped on it—and the tree crumbled. A puff of gray and red dust sprung outward and was carried away by the wind. The red dust motes separated themselves from the gray and spread apart until they infected other trees.
A young couple in Central Park leaned against a tree. It collapsed under their weight, crumbling like dust. A small flurry of red dust was blown from the debris by the wind. Surprised, the young couple looked at the wreck, then at each other. Laughing, they went their way.
There was drought on the Western plains, and the hungry cattle were turned loose to feed upon a carefully cultivated grange. Their hooves thundered as they reached the field. But when their hungry mouths reached for the rich food, they encountered dust—gray and red dust. Slowly, with each breath of wind, the red motes separated themselves from the gray and made their way to other fields.
The giant reapers were stationed in the great fields of the Ukraine, the bread basket of Europe. But when their metal arms reached for the staffs, they encountered masses of corruption. Dust rose like angry clouds over the wheat fields. With the dust came the dreaded horsemen—Famine and Pestilence.
Lumber regions of Canada, tobacco farms of Virginia, corn, rye, potatoes—wherever food was grown, wherever plant life existed, there the red dust was found.
There it grew and there it threatened the life of the Earth.  p. 82

Soldiers of Space by Henry Kuttner begins with ex-space pilot Gregory Lash living like a hobo—he has fallen on hard times—when a spaceship flies over his makeshift camp and crash lands nearby. When Lash arrives the pilot is unconscious, and the radio is calling from Denver, so Lash makes a few repairs to the ship and flies it and the unconscious pilot there. On his arrival the managers of the spaceport invite him for a meal, and quiz him about the ship: unbeknown to Lash they believe that the ship is unsafe and want to prevent a film director using it for a movie shoot flying it again. When one of the other director’s pilots arrives he tries to punch Lash for talking too much. At this point Bruce Vane, an old friend of Lash’s, turns up.
The rest of the story has Lash join the other stunt pilots on the movie. Added to the mix is his friend Vane’s PTSD, caused by a near terminal dive into an asteroid called Cerebus during the war—if Lash hadn’t been there to shake Vane out of his space shock he would have died. Needless to say, they are going to Cerebus to film the rest of the movie, and Vane is the only one who can fly the Martian ship. Much argy-bargy ensues between Lash and the director, who plans on making Vane recreate the dive.
Further complications arise when Lash finds that the Martians—his and Vane’s enemies during the last war—have taken over Gap Station and are planning a sneak attack on Earth. This is something that is clumsily telegraphed earlier in the story:

I haven’t mentioned the Gap. Spacemen know it. It’s one of the passes through the Asteroid Belt. It was fairly dangerous, and most transports and freighters used other openings, but it was one of the ways of getting through that vast, tumbling chaos of shattered worlds that ring the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The Belt is wide. That’s why ships prefer to use the passes, instead of making the long detour above or below the plane of the ecliptic.
On Gap Station was the giant radio powerful enough to communicate with all the planets. Remember that.  p. 96

Needless to say, the squabbling film crew pull together to fight off the Martians (fortunately they have munitions for their ex-space navy warships on hand—which would be like the movie production of Dunkirk having a huge stash of live ammunition for their Spitfires), and there is a (spoiler) climactic space battle where Vane dives towards Cerberus to rescue the director’s ship.
This is pretty hokum stuff, and obviously Kuttner writing to make that week’s rent, but it is readable enough and I can see why this may have been popular with readers of the time.

I didn’t start off as a huge fan of Milton Luros’s Cover for Pohl’s story showing the “Four plus Four”, but it slowly grew on me to the point I think that is okay. The Interior artwork again puts Astounding to shame. There are three uncredited illustrations for the Brackett, Pohl, and Kuttner that are obviously by Lawrence (his style, and the others are signed). The third of Lawrence’s illustrations would probably be the best of the issue if it wasn’t for Frank R. Paul’s second piece for the Bloch story. This (see above) is one of my favourite illustrations of the 1943 so far: a powerful diagonal; one robot climbing up the stairs using its tracks and the clamps at the end of its arms; the other robot lying flat and leaning over the ledge—what’s not to like? Dorothy Les Tina’s effort is rather amateurish by comparison with all the others.

The Mail Bag has a number of letters that comment in some detail about their artwork likes and dislikes—and nearly everyone raves about Leydenfrost (who I only just discovered in that issue of Super Science Stories I recently read).
The third letter is a joke one (I think) from Wilson Tucker about unnecessary clothing in space. Another is from the “One-man Gallup Poll”, future SF writer Chad Oliver, who precisely scores the stories from one to ten and adds a decimal place. With one story, he even adds a fraction as well:

“Night of Gods”: An excellent yarn, and Lawrence did it justice with his fine illustrations. Idle comment: Edmonds writes a great deal like Kuttner, doesn’t he? Hmmmm. 9.8.
“Taa the Terrible”: Jameson comes through with the third-place yarn this time. And the pic! Paul!! Need I say more? 9.6½.
“Destination Unknown”: 9.6.
“Mimic”: Nifty plot. 9.5.  p. 108

You sense a feeling of desperation in the letter from W. J. Mason, Franklin, NC, who ends with this:

I would like to correspond with any one. I am interested in almost everything.  p. 109

Fan Mags is a couple of pages of reviews of various fanzines. Some of the zines seem quite useful, such as Fantasy Fiction Field Newsweekly, published by Julius Unger:

Its previews of the forthcoming science-fiction magazines are valuable to those who want to keep on the lookout for the work of some particular author; its serially-published “Science-fiction Bibliography” is a handy list of several thousand fantasy stories in book form for the collector. Among its recent news scoops has been the story of the purchase of Famous Fantastic Mysteries by the publishers of this magazine.  p. 28

I also found out what FAPA is/does:

More fan magazines appear by way of the FAPA than are independent, and most of them compare in quality with the freelance jobs. The Association is composed of fifty fans who collaborate on writing and publishing several dozen magazines of all shapes and sizes, and who mail them out jointly two or three times a year.  p. 29

Viewpoints begins with an anecdote about one man’s flat Earth beliefs before giving a series of author notes:

Walter Kubilius, author of “Come to Mars” in this issue, may not be a “big-name” author as yet, though he certainly ranks among the up-and-coming ones. Big he is, though, in the physical sense. The six feet, eight
inches that stretch between Walt’s toes and the crown of his head make him truly outstanding in any crowd . . .  p. 113

Artists Frank R. Paul and Les Tina, both represented in this issue, have at least one thing in common besides their illustrating talents. Paul’s first job was to deliver food to the palace of the imperial Hapsburgs in his native Vienna, many years ago— where Les Tina’s grandmother was in charge of the kitchens!  p. 113

James MacCreigh, author of “Earth, Farewell!”, says, “I can’t write a sciencefiction short story—as those who have read my efforts at it well know. Each story I write demands a brand-new cosmos, and all the rules have to be carefully worked out. What breaks my heart—after I have painstakingly pared down a story to a mere ten or fifteen thousand words—is to look at the mass of notes I’ve meant to put into it, and to realize there just isn’t room!”

Thank God.

Fantasy Circle is an uncredited essay about foreign fantasy films mostly, although it refers to the odd SF title (Metropolis, Things to Come, etc.).³ I wonder if this is Forrest Ackerman’s work.

In conclusion, this is a better issue than I was expecting, and is worth getting hold of for the Brackett and Bloch stories, and most of the artwork.  ●

_____________________

1. As I’ve already mentioned in my review of Super Science Stories, March 1943, Pohl wasn’t credited as an assistant editor in the magazine, but there is this information from chapter six of Frederik Pohl’s The Way the Future Was:

Early in 1942 Alden H. Norton sent me a telegram, asking me to come back to Popular Publications as his assistant. To make it sweeter, he offered me more as an assistant than I had been paid as a full-fledged editor. I felt around my pride to see if it was injured, and when it did not seem to hurt anywhere, I accepted at once.
Al Norton was a boss editor, a department head. He had fifteen or sixteen pulp magazines to look after and four people to help him do it: a secretary and three assistant editors, including myself.

Pohl subsequently reports being inducted into the US Army on April Fool’s Day, 1943.

2. Leigh Brackett’s ISFDB page.

3. I looked up some of the movie titles from the article: Douglas Fairbanks’ 1924 The Thief of Bagdad looks promising.  ●