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Editor, Robert W. Lowndes¹

Fiction:
The Second Satellite • novelette by Donald A. Wollheim [as by Martin Pearson] –
Dusk on the Moon • novelette by Hannes Bok ∗
The Hands • short story by Venard McLaughlin ∗
Planet Alone • short story by Walter Kubilius ∗
When You Think That . . . Smile! • short story by Dorothy Les Tina ∗∗
Too Perfect • short story by Wilbur S. Peacock –
. . . Does Not Imply . . . • short story by Robert A. W. Lowndes [as by Wilfred Owen Morley] ∗
Full Circle • short story by John B. Michel [as by Hugh Raymond] –
Patriotism Plus • short story by Ray Cummings –
The Swift People • short story by Basil Wells –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Milton Luros
Interior artwork • by Damon Knight (x4), Hannes Bok, Matt Fox (x2), Dorothy Les Tina, John R. Forte, Jr.
Station X • letters

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It probably isn’t a good idea to start a review by cautioning prospective readers not to read it but this issue is so poor that it is tempting to do just that. It doesn’t help that I find it difficult to write a good review of a decent story, never mind one of a series of unremittingly bad examples. So, if you want the short version of this, I’d confine myself to the comments on the Les Tina, Michel, and Bok stories, and the non-fiction.

The Second Satellite by Donald A. Wollheim gets off to an unnecessarily slow beginning with details about a prize left in a wealthy man’s estate for the first person to complete an interplanetary journey. Various organisations decline to build a ship (even though travel to the Moon satisfies the conditions) as they calculate that the cost of the mission will equal or exceed the prize—as if the only reason you would do this is for the money.
The story proper starts with Sanders Mikkelsen, a garage owner cum amateur astronomer, going to a businessman for money. Mikkelsen explains that an unknown comet is approaching Earth and will come closer than the moon, so a smaller ship will suffice and less money be required. After looking at the plans the business man agrees to fund the trip.
Three months later, Sander goes to the new spaceship:

Sanders Mikkelsen packed his bag, left his garage in charge of an assistant and took a train. This time he did not get off until he reached a certain town in North Dakota. There he got in a car and was driven through rolling farm lands to a fairly deserted section. There an old farmhouse and a huge new barn stood. Mikkelsen got out and shook hands with Currey and several assistants.
Behind the barn rose a long runway like the start of a carnival roller-coaster. Running along the ground a bit, then rising sharply into the air, it ended abruptly pointing straight into the sky. Being rolled onto the tracks at the level was a long gleaming metal shell.
The rocket-craft was like an airplane with short stubby wings, or like a long racing automobile, or like a small submarine out of water. It resembled all three and yet was none of them. It had four wheels on which it rested. It had short wide wings. It had a glassed-in forward section and a flanged wide multi-barreled rear. Mikkelsen inspected it and signified his approval. His watch was checked against a chrone-meter set up in the barn.
An hour later Mikkelsen, togged in flying costume, heavily furred, with an oxygen hood completely covering his head, climbed into the cabin of the thing, closed and sealed the airtight door, buckled himself into the deep, heavily cushioned seat before the controls in the front of the ship. He glanced ahead along the runway, glanced at his dials and at the clock among them.
Then he threw a switch and opened his throttle. There was a roar from behind. Outside observers saw at first a puff of smoke from the tubes behind, then a cataract of blue-green flame roared forth. The rocket leaped forward, shot up the runway and flamed away into the sky with a suddenness and a roar that stunned and amazed everyone.  p. 14

This ‘kick the tyres and light the fires’ approach to spaceflight (there is no mention of training of any sort) does not bode well for the rest of the story, and the section describing the journey to the meteor is (predictably) full of scientific errors.²
After he arrives there, and is exploring the meteor’s surface, Mikkelson sees what he thinks is ice and walks towards that area. When he gets there he realises that the white colouration is actually frozen gas that has come from an open metal door in the cliff face. He then enters a chamber that contains unknown apparatus, and metal plaques with marks that may be an alien language, etc., but before he can explore further he hears a whistling sound and realises the meteor has started entering the Earth’s atmosphere. He quickly returns to his damaged ship.
Later, when the meteor starts breaking up, Mikkelson parachutes from the ship and lands in China. When he eventually finds someone who speaks English, he learns that the war is over—large parts of the meteor landed on Japan, causing catastrophic damage and wiping out three-quarters of that country’s population.
As you can probably guess from the synopsis, this is a terrible story, and possibly the worst thing I have read in months.

Dusk on the Moon by Hannes Bok takes place on a fantasy version of the Moon:

Protected from the wind, sheltered from the sun, a clump of lunar plants were blossoming in a shadowed corner. They were more like earthly cactus than anything else: bulbous grey-green stems equipped with wickedly talon-like thorns, the flowers starshaped and brilliantly red. Unmindful of the thorns a little spiderbeing was standing on the tips of all four feet, his pair of short arms with their delicately long digits—two fingers and a thumb—tugging at a bloom’s spice-laden stamens. Tearing some of them free, he relaxed balancing on two pairs of crossed legs, and crammed the stamens into his short elephant’s-trunk of a mouth, his protruding eyes rolling in ecstasy. Satisfied, he scrubbed his fingers meticulously clean with a little sand, then arose and brushed off the bright-green metallic globe of his torso. He scurried out of the enclosure into the sunlight, paused irresolutely a moment and then made his way to a gigantic squared block of stone—the pedestal of a prodigious statue.

A lifeboat from a spaceship lands nearby containing a couple called Bob and Loretta, who are fleeing a man called Caldwell. Bob notices the statue, and then the spider disappearing down a tunnel. The couple decide to follow it. Meanwhile, another spaceship lands with four of Cadwell’s men, who follow the pair into the sub-lunar depths.
The rest of the novelette mostly details the underground fight between the couple and the four men. Bob uses his entropy gun to kill two of them; the spiders, who become the couple’s allies, dispatch another.
The last of the four is eaten by a giant octopus creature in a huge cavern, the couple later discovering that this creature is under the control of Yssa, a humanoid woman in suspended animation. After they revive her they are vouchsafed a vision which explains that she is the last of a lunar race destroyed in an apocalyptic meteor storm on the moon.
Yssa proves a malevolent host: first she kills one of the spiders, and then takes the couple to the octopus with the intention of feeding Loretta to it. Bob uses his entropy ray to kill the creature, and Yssa then hypnotises the pair. She takes them to the surface, where she also subjects Caldwell and the rest of his men to her will. The couple, momentarily released from her power, make a break for their ship, but Yssa catches them whereupon they see another vision, this time of the three of them ruling New York, with their statues everywhere, etc. Shizek the spider stings Yssa while she is distracted, and the couple escape once again.
As you can tell from the synopsis this is a very pulp story, with writing and characterisation to match. That said, there is evidence of Bok’s exotic and colourful style, and I wondered if this was an early or trunk story (it doesn’t stand up to his recent novel in Unknown, but I haven’t read enough of his other shorter work to make a comparison).

The Hands by Venard McLaughlin³ is a strange fantasy that begins with a man woken up by his brother Kaven to be told that his mother is dead. We then learn that Kaven strangled her, as he did his father, and that the two brothers are the last people alive on Earth, or rather that the narrator is the “Last Beast” left on Earth, and that Karen is the first “Total Man”. The rest of the story details a mythical, perhaps allegorical, conflict between the “Beast” and the “Total Man” (with the Legion of the Banished on the narrator’s side, and the god Ahriman on Kaven’s).
This all gets a bit trippy at points, such as when Kaven’s wrists sprout wings, and his hands fly off—apparently they go to build a city—leaving the rest of his comatose body behind. Later, the narrator visits this city:

I leaped forward, then, and swam through space as the son of Ahriman had taught my father until I came to the turrets of the night-world of Kaven my brother. It was a high, unbelievable world of dark blue and its spires reached far beyond the Golden Cycle where the banished Legion lived and its streets were broad as life and paved with diamonds from the deepest mines and the power of this world was barely a whisper of turbines buried in the living rock, and it was a perfect world for no life was their but the hands of my brother.
Silent, invisible hands, building and building, rock upon rock, metal upon metal, higher and higher. I sat in the great central garden of this world and gazed in awe. Nothing like it had ever before been dreamed. Minarets and spires, lakes and castles, endless arches of marble and gold, flashing surface craft and silent air cars, spears of rainbow light and soft hidden music—all controlled by vast intricate mechanism subject to the lightest touch of the hands of my brother.  p. 45

This is a peculiar piece that compresses perhaps too much into too few pages.

Planet Alone by Walter Kubilius has a promising setup that has the sole remaining Earth spaceship from an earlier war with Venus running guns to that latter planet’s natives—much to the anger of the Earthmen who have colonised the planet.
When the Earth ship’s smuggling is discovered (a dropped container splits open, revealing armaments) fighting starts. The Chairman of the colonists is then told (spoiler) about dynamite charges set up around the field where the ship is berthed—a remnant of previous war defences—and they use the threat of this to try to make the Earth ship to surrender. It doesn’t, and is blown up.
After a competent start there is little development and a contrived ending.

When You Think That . . . Smile! by Dorothy Les Tina begins with a husband suddenly realising he can read his wife’s thoughts. When he later goes out he realises that he can read other people’s minds as well. By the time he returns home, having learnt more than he perhaps wants to about humanity, his wife, unhappy at his new abilities, has left him.
The final scene has him going out for some pipe tobacco. In the shop he learns that the proprietor mistakenly gave him a blend he shouldn’t have. . . .
This is a slight story but its domestic small-scale setting is a welcome change of pace, and it is perhaps notable for the mundane use of telepathic power—there are no megalomaniac scientists here, the entire story plays out in the everyday world. It may be stretching a point, but you could probably draw a very long and thin line between this and Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside. I’d be interested to know if there are other stories of the period that treat telepathy in a similar way.

Too Perfect by Wilbur S. Peacock starts with Paddy trying to get drunk in his basement when a voice tells him to stop making so much noise. One of the “little people” eventually materialises, and Paddy recalls the folk tales told by his grandfather. He claims his boon:

“I want the power to finish anything I start, and the further power to do it absolutely perfect,” he declared.  p. 63

The little man agrees but limits the boon to a day’s duration. The end of the story (spoiler) has Paddy saving a fellow tenant from suicide and later describing what the man was doing (with gun in hand) to the investigating policeman. Of course, he does this perfectly. . . .
In between the two scenes above there is a lot of flannel: the perfect drunk, perfect night’s sleep, hangover, hangover cure, investment, meal, etc.
Almost as bad as the Wollheim.

. . . Does Not Imply . . . by Robert A. W. Lowndes starts with a magazine editor talking to a slushpile reader called Harold about a story that has been submitted. Harold likes the piece and notes that, while it doesn’t have any story, the editor may want to look at it anyway. After reading the piece the editor then starts having dreams about the presumptive woman writer.
Later he finds out that Harold is also having these dreams, except the latter’s have changed to those where he a monster chases him. This trundles along for a bit longer (we find the editor’s secretary is having dreams about a male author) before it comes to an end where (spoiler) the editor and secretary are prematurely aged, for no particular reason other than, presumably, that Lowndes needed a creepy end to his story (Harold has moved away by this point, so we don’t know what happens to him).
This reads quite well to start with, and it is a pity it goes nowhere.

Full Circle by John B. Michel starts after a bloody, world-wide revolution that has resulted in hundreds of millions of executions—something we learn from an elderly World President who gives a speech before an assembled crowd:

He rubbed his gnarled and toil-worn hands together and smiled a very smug and unctuous smile. “It took us a long time but we did it. The smaller rats we’ve already disposed of, mainly by the firing squad. You don’t blame us, I hope. There were some hundred million or so, but they were garbage and they had to go. Civilization demanded it! What did you expect us to do with them, you buzzards? Feed ’em ice cream and tell ’em they were naughty boys, but we’d forgiven ’em? No!” The old man, trembling with rage, smacked his hand down on the lectern board. “You forced us into war against each other until the planet ran red with our blood, you tortured us until the skies rang with our agonies. You separated child from mother and wife from husband. The human decencies you trampled on and replaced with a law of your own out of the Dark Ages. Why? Was it necessary to drown the planet in ashes so that Mr. Johnson could be taxed for a large Navy instead of Herr Johansohn? You didn’t like peace. You wanted war, war, WAR! Always killing and murder. None of you were happy unless our bones stuck out of our skins.  p. 85

He finishes by telling twenty ultra-rich capitalists assembled in front of him that they are going to be useful for once, and are going into space on an elderly spaceship called The Finger of God for the benefit of science. The group get on the ship and it sets off. When the occupants regain consciousness after the launch, they take stock of their brutal predicament:

Slowly the two men awakened the rest of the crew and tabulated injuries. Mrs. Skeffington, they knew, was dying. Her husband was dead, his whole body crushed into a pulp from the force of the ascent. Curtis had suffered a fractured right humerus which somehow hung together. Spyrus, though badly shaken up, was unhurt. The other dead numbered three, Adele Taylor, daughter of the great British munitions magnate; Samuel Marx, influential newspaper publisher, and old Margaret Moresby, owner of immense sections of Australia and holder of innumerable patents bought up and suppressed before and during the last war. None of the others were badly injured, though both John Barstow and his wife had had their lungs partially torn and breathed with horrible gasping noises.  p. 87

Eventually, and after experiencing more hardship, they work out how to control the ship and make their way to Mercury. On approach they are going too fast to land safely but that doesn’t matter as (spoiler) a giant hand plucks them out of space and puts them down on the surface. We find there are two telepathic giants already on Mercury, exiles from Jupiter, where a similar revolution to Earth’s failed.
The spacesuited survivors leave the ship and, when one of the giants picks the group up, they open fire with their submachine guns (this is the scene on the cover of this issue). The giant promptly crushes them and their spaceship to a bloody pulp, saying “Justice” while he does so.
There is perhaps a fleeting point made in the story about the intersection between capitalism and war, but this would seem to be largely a psychopathic revenge/hate fantasy written by a rabid anti-capitalist.⁴ As a story it’s pretty bad, but it is perhaps noteworthy for its grimness and political viewpoint, and, who knows, perhaps for giving fellow Futurian Cyril Kornbluth the idea of firing the so-called “Marching Morons” into space in his equally misanthropic story.

Patriotism Plus by Ray Cummings gives you an instant feel for the incontinent chatter that is coming with its opening paragraphs:

On account of what happened to Georgie Peters and me. I’m supposed to be a hero now. The U. S. Army, or the War Department or something, is going to decorate me with a lot of medals, or a citation, or whatever you call it. That’s all right with me if they insist. But maybe it’s my conscience that makes me write this. They may read it, but they won’t believe it, of course. I wouldn’t blame them, but, honestly folks, here’s the real dope on what happened.
It began a hot afternoon last summer when I ran into Georgie Peters on Broadway. I hadn’t seen him in several months. I’m a fight manager— Spike Henessey. That is, I used to be; what with the war taking all my likely boys, my business was more theory than anything else. George Peters wasn’t in my racket at all. He was a thin, delicate little fellow, with pale blond hair and pale blue eyes—one of those mouselike, meek chaps who you never would notice at all, but after you got to know him he was mighty likable. I understand he worked in a department store, bookkeeper or something. But, queerly enough, Georgie was a rabid fight fan, which is how I happened to meet him in the first place.  p. 91-92

I would suggest the “or somethings” is only one example of the egregious padding to be found in the above.
Anyway, fight promoter Spike has a friend called Georgie who can summon objects that he can imagine into reality, and who first demonstrates this by conjuring a pack of cigarettes into existence. This gimmick is developed a little after one of the promoter’s more knowledgeable friends, Red, gets involved (Georgie can vanish the things he brings into existence; the better an idea he has of something, the better the quality of object produced; etc.) . They eventually decide to contact the War department and put Georgie’s gift at the nation’s service.
The story ends when Georgie is told to summon hundreds of soldiers and associated equipment by a government agent at an isolated beach location—the twist is that the agent is really the head of a Nazi spy ring (the copy of Mein Kampf that the narrator discovers is part of the giveaway). Georgie then imagines two hundred G-men into existence.
This is not only padded but very tired work.

The Swift People by Basil Wells may be a Burroughs pastiche (or what I imagine a Burroughs pastiche is):

“I have slept long,” cried Joln Dar,” springing up from his worn blanket of thulkskin. “The wild gelts will have moved from their feeding grounds by now.”
Quickly he flung the doubled blanket upon his nervous green-hided gelt and clinched it in place with two broad straps of purplish hide from the back of a wild thulk. Without a lost motion he flung his lean gray body into the improvised saddle and swung away at a swift gallop down a steep trail that wound ever downward among the weird lifeless maze of barren rocks and sand toward a dry river-bed.  p. 100-101

There then follows a lot of fighting and romantic intrigue. Joln wants the gelts so he can go home and get Yrmo, the bride of his choice (no doubt so desired because of the paucity of vowels in her name). First though, he has to fight one of his tribe who has the same idea (they eventually beat seven shades out of each other before agreeing a truce and agreeing to split the herd). Then they are both taken captive by a wild tribe, and have to fight their way free. During his captivity Joln meets another woman called Aryk.
As if all this random and entirely uninteresting fighting isn’t bad enough, the story takes place in modern-day Earth, but Joln’s people (who crash-landed in 1942) live at a massively speeded up rate compared with humans (forty-five of their generations, or nine hundred years of their time, pass in a single Earth day). This gimmick has little or nothing to do with the so-called story, and sits in the background like some random piece of SFnal furniture.
It would have been a better story if he had dealt with the time acceleration idea and dumped all the fighting.

The striking Cover by Milton Luros (according to the title page credits) is supposedly for The Second Satellite by Martin Pearson (Wollheim) but that story only has one or two characters and no giants. It is actually for John B. Michel’s story Full Circle, and illustrates its climactic scene. Perhaps, he said charitably, they were trying to avoid a spoiler cover.
Damon Knight’s Interior artwork in this issue shows the obvious influence of Bok and Dolgov, and is not a bad emulation of those artists’ style. Hannes Bok and John R. Forte Jr. also contribute good work but Matt Fox and Dorothy Les Tina’s work looks a bit amateurish.

Station X is a letter column that starts off with the ratings for the October issue, before Lowndes offers highlights from a number of letters on various subjects: Bok’s cover for the October issue⁵ draws a lot of praise, and there are comments about the new layout, and poor printing, etc.
After “generalities have been dispensed with”, Lowndes prints a long solicited letter from Norman L. Knight. I skimmed most of this (it would make more sense to read it after having looked at the issue in question) but Lowndes gives this reply to an adverse comment from Knight about cover background colours “being chosen for the artists” (he criticises the yellow background for Bok’s “Beauty” cover):

This is the sort of thing which used to plague us sadly back when our only connection with stf magazines was through letters to the editor, readers’ departments, etc. We could do lots better on covers, we would remark, were we editor. However, came the break, and we learned of the abyss of ignorance in which we had been living—in regards to cover designs on popular magazines, for one thing. First and foremost, they have to be display posters, things to attract attention, out of all the other titles on the stands, also presumably doing the same thing. They have to attract attention and hold it long enough to make the looker want to pick up a copy of the magazine. Thus, says our art department, the colors must be bright; the backgrounds must be bright, flat color; any human figures on cover should be large and attractive, and the cover positively must tell a story in itself—or a substantial part of a story. We’ve managed to get some things [. . .] which didn’t exactly fit, and, quite frankly, we’ve regretted it; they just didn’t look so hot after being engraved with a three-color process such as we use. And one thing we try to avoid is using the same background color for two issues in a row. Red, yellow, and blue are best—in that order. Which is the why[,] in the case of the cover for your [story, blue] would have been best for the sake of the yarn itself, but red is a better color. We’d experimented a bit on the last one, and wanted this one to be on the safe side.  p. 75

In conclusion, there is some passable artwork in this issue, but the fiction is very weak—perhaps even worse than in a recent issue of Super Science Stories I read. I note in passing the poor proofreading, all which occurs after p. 50 (I clocked at least two repeated lines and half a dozen typos, and I wasn’t even reading that attentively). ●

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1. “Doc” Lowndes took over the editorship of Future, and a companion magazine Science Fiction (both published by Columbia Publications), in April 1941. This was the first of three issues that would appear in 1943 before wartime paper shortages killed the magazine (the next two issues were, confusingly, titled Science Fiction Stories). Future was later resurrected in 1950.
The magazine has a complicated publication history that is comprehensively described in its Science Fiction Encyclopaedia entry.

2. “Mikkelsen cut the throttle and stopped accelerating. The roar of the rocket died down until only a steady hissing and flare swept from behind, just enough to keep the speed constant.” p. 15
(In space an object will continue at a constant velocity as there is no, or exceptionally little, friction to slow it down—so no thrust is required to keep the “speed” constant. Newton’s First Law.)
“Inside the cabin the temperature was still warm. The friction of the extremely thin air outside was still quite sufficient to keep up heat at that speed. Inside his furs Mikkelsen perspired profusely.” p. 15
(Wollheim seems to think the atmosphere extends further out from the Earth than it does.)
“Mikkelsen cut the engines and the plane dropped.” p. 16
(The meteor would have to be massive to exert this immediate and substantial gravitational effect. If it was this big its later impact on Earth would be an extinction event.)
“He had often descended in elevators in Chicago and New York skyscrapers. Descent in an elevator is also a lessening of gravity.” p. 16
(The force of gravity is—substantially—unchanged throughout an elevator trip. However, if you were to stand on a set of weighing scales throughout the descent you would notice that your “weight”—actually the measure of the force exerted by the scales on the person standing on them (Newton’s Third Law)—would temporarily decrease as you are initially accelerated to your downward velocity, return to normal for the middle part of the journey when you are travelling at a constant velocity, and then increase as you are decelerated to having zero downward velocity again.)

3. ISFDB lists only two stories for Venard McLaughlin. The other one, The Silence (Stirring Science Stories, June 1941), was reprinted by Damon Knight in his anthology The Golden Road (Simon & Schuster, 1974).

4. John B. Michel was a member of the Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s (he eventually got kicked out for poor attendance), and tried to introduce politics into SF in the form of “Michelism”. Fancyclopedia 3 explains what this idea involved:

Michelism held that “science-fiction should by nature stand for all forces working for a more unified world, a more Utopian existence, the application of science to human happiness, and a saner outlook on life.” In short, Michelism saw science fiction as a form of civic engagement and social criticism, and not merely a means of entertainment. In it, he petitioned fandom to work toward a unified world utopia state. Many fans took this as a synonym for communism, while many others opposed the interjection of politics into fandom.

5. Hannes Bok’s cover for the October issue:

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