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_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Three Thousand Years! (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Thomas Calvert McClary ∗∗∗+
Matter Is Conserved • short story by Raymond A. Palmer ∗
Hyperpilosity • short story by L. Sprague de Camp ∗∗∗
Negative Space • novelette by Nat Schachner
The Faithful • short story by Lester del Rey ∗∗∗+
Iszt—Earthman • novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun
Jason Sows Again (Part 2 of 2) • serial by Arthur J. Burks ∗∗

Cover • Howard V. Brown
Interior artwork • Howard V. Brown (2), Jack Binder, Elliott Dold (4), Charles Schneeman (4), H. W. Wesso (3)
In Times to Come
Of the 500 Known Elements • science filler
Detail—But Immensely Important to Engineering • science filler
Radiation in Uniform • essay by Herbert C. McKay
Democracy • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Ignition Point • science essay by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Arthur McCann]
Science Discussions • letters
Brass Tacks • letters

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This issue sees incremental progress by Campbell in his quest to change the magazine into what he wants it to become. The most notable evidence of that here is the début of Lester del Rey and a second appearance by L. Sprague de Camp.

The first part of Three Thousand Years! by Thomas Calvert McClary gets off to a rather dull start with an argument between Drega, a wealthy industrialist, and Gamble, a scientist. The latter wants to release a number of his discoveries and inventions, which will provide cheap food for the masses, etc., but the businessman disagrees:

Heaven knew, their vaults were loaded with secret formulas Drega did not dare release because of the economic chaos which would ensue. Certainly they were progress! One would wipe out the Bessemer steel industry overnight. Another would crash the wool, cotton and pulp wood industries in weeks. p. 9

The story then leaps forward ten years, and picks up with a journalist called Lucky, who is discussing an end of the world story with his copy-editor when he suddenly thinks he is made of mud. Before this inexplicable event is explained there are a number of other bizarre episodes described:

A psychiatrist sat with a “client” overlooking a green inland valley. His client was under the delusion that there was no world except the imagination.
“If your theory were correct,” the psychiatrist explained simply, “we could imagine that the ocean rolled up to the foot of this cliff and it would be there.”
“Well,” insisted the client simply, “it is.”
The psychiatrist smiled tolerantly. His smile froze. From the foot of the cliff came the hollow thunder of surf. A sea broke in mottled spume.

At a famed university a renowned scientist held indignantly, “Prophecies are rubbish!” and led the way into another room. He stopped, batting his eyes rapidly. The other room had somehow become a field of rampant violets. A brook ran at his feet.

The Reverend Percival Tweedy stepped forward to the cement parapet of the stage. “I would like to give a graphic illustration of the shockingness of modern dress.”
There was a burst of applause from hatchet-faced dowagers. The applause broke into startled gasps. Mrs. Hildebran said sharply, “Really, Reverend, it is highly unnecessary to be so graphic!”
But Reverend Tweedy could not bring his mind to dwell on that statement. Mrs. Hildebran was staring at him indignantly through lorgnettes. She was wholly unclad! Even in his amazement he thought, “Skinny old wretch!” p. 11-12

Lucky the reporter he finds that he isn’t actually made of mud but encased in it:

He moved his body slowly. Joints popped and creaked. Muscles cramped. He went through a series of simple exercises, but his motions were very limited and uncertain. Gradually, they became easier. Then, for a long time, his body was afire with prickling sensations and infinite small cramps. He knew that he should be in agony, but the sensations seemed very far away—as if they might be in another body.
He turned to careful inspection of himself. He found he was naked. There were numberless questions about how he got that way, but for the time being he simply accepted the fact. His nostrils were completely caked and closed, but only at the tips. He cleared them of chunks of rock-hard dirt. He found his whole body covered by a coating of peculiar mud, varying from one-eighth inch to two-inch thickness.
The hair on his legs was eight to twelve inches long. But it was brittle and broke off. His skin was peculiarly white and colorless and dry, so dry that he peeled off a three inch strip of flesh before realizing it. Blood began to ooze through the raw gash. The blood of a dead man might look like that, just before it turned to water.
[. . .]
A lock of hair fell across his chest. It was fully three feet long, and broke off in a bunch with a slight yank. It was gnarled and filthy and lifeless. It made him think of cadavers he had seen. Systematically, he pulled off all his hair. He kept scratching himself by accident, and suddenly noticed his finger nails were three inches long. His toe nails had been long, too, but most of them had broken off while he shambled about. He bent his finger nails and they snapped. Dry—brittle—dead. It was unpleasant, this deadness of a living body. p. 14

Although these events are not explained at the time, it becomes clear that all life has been in suspended animation for three thousand years (later, Gamble the scientist takes responsibility for this), hence the people encased in dirt with long hair and nails, and the changed landscape. There are myriad other environmental changes: buried buildings, steel and clothing has rotted away, etc.
The rest of this far-fetched but intriguing instalment follows Lucky’s subsequent adventures in this new world which include, at one point, a hand coming out of the soil and grabbing his leg! After digging the man out, Lucky swims across the bay (sunken city buildings can be seen at the bottom) to find Drega the businessman.

Once Lucky finds Drega, he describes what he has seen. Drega takes charge:

Drega clapped Lucky on the shoulder. “It’s marvelous, my boy!” he boomed lustily.
“What?” asked Lucky.
“The opportunity to build!” Drega said glowingly. “Look at it. A whole city, maybe a whole world, to rebuild. And this time we’ll build it right.” p. 23

Drega organises a team of workers he comes upon and leads them all back to the city.
The beginning of this installment could have been better structured but, if an unlikely start to the novel, it is also an intriguing, original, and enjoyable one.

Matter Is Conserved by Raymond A. Palmer¹ starts with a data dump (albeit a well done one involving a talking parrot) about the gravitational lensing of light proving the existence of aether. A lone scientist has developed a machine to see into the past, but when used he finds himself in the future, materialising in an alien body. When he returns to his own time he still that form.
Subsequently his friends burst into the laboratory and find the ‘alien’ there but their friend missing. They think the ‘alien’ has stolen the machine and left their friend in the future, so they force it to take them there.
This is a poor pulp potboiler but it has (spoiler) a neat twist ending (the pair take some of the dust from the floor of the machine during their search for the scientist—the remains of Byrne’s body upon him taking alien form—and when they reverse the process he is left dead of a chest wound—the missing dust).

Hyperpilosity by L. Sprague de Camp is de Camp’s second story for the magazine.² It has a man at a poker game telling of The Great Change, a historical account of a flu virus which had the side effect of causing permanent body hair growth on all humanity. De Camp uses this maguffin for occasional comedic and political purposes:

“In July Natasha, the gorilla in the Bronx Zoo, escaped from her cage and wandered around the park for hours before anyone noticed her. The zoo visitors all thought she was merely an unusually ugly member of their own species.” p. 43

“The destitution in the South intensified the ever-present race problem, and led eventually to the Negro revolt in Alabama and Mississippi, which was put down only after some pretty savage fighting. Under the agreement that ended that little civil war the Negroes were given the present Pale, a sort of reservation with considerable local autonomy. They haven’t done as well as they claimed they were going to under that arrangement, but they’ve done better than the Southern whites said they would. Which I suppose is about what you’d expect. But, boy, just let a white man visiting their territory get uppity, and see what happens to him! They won’t take any lip. p. 43

When the narrator and his boss finally create a cure (there is talk about alpha, beta and gamma proteins) there is no interest in returning to the status quo ante.
A smart if minor story told in a breezy style.

Negative Space by Nat Schachner has Space Commander Dan Garin getting things off to a fairly dire start:

“By the Beard of the Comet,” he roared suddenly, “I’m getting fed up with this silly patrol duty and sillier transportation of distinguished space tourists from one end of the Solar System to the other. I’m a fighting man, and the Arethusa’s a fighting ship. It ain’t natural for us to shuttle back and forth like brood hens clucking over blasted little chicks. I think I’ll ground me and spend my declining days in the Martian pulque-caves, mumbling over my drink and telling tall tales to the gaping tourists.” p. 50

Two other characters are quickly introduced, Jerry, a young scientist en route to a new job on Callisto, and his girlfriend Sandra. As the three are talking on the bridge, they watch a freighter fly towards what looks like a cloud of fireflies. Jerry tells Greer to issue a warning. He does so but the freighter ignores it (the freighter captain responds on the radio like a truculent fourteen-year-old) and it flies into the cloud and perishes. Greer, thinking this a new pirate weapon, attempts to attack but Jerry fires the rockets and they avoid the same fate.
Jerry’s research reveals that the sparkles are a huge negative energy space (there is another Dirac positron mini-lecture here, similar to the one inserted by Campbell into Kent Casey’s story last issue). If the cloud continues on the same course the Earth will be annihilated.
The Planetary Council ignore Jerry when he warns them. Thereafter it is just a matter of waiting until the Council’s science expedition gets fried before they give him dictatorial powers to sort the problem out. The rest of the story describes the seemingly losing battle they fight firing massive rockets into the cloud to annihilate the positrons. When no more suicide volunteers are available (spoiler), Space Commander Dan Garin forsakes his boozy retirement in the pulque-caves to make the Final Sacrifice.
The last part is marginally better than the beginning but, overall, it is pretty bad.

The Faithful by Lester del Rey is his first published story, and it is a pretty impressive début. Written in response to Manly Wade Wellman’s Pithecanthropus Rejectus in the January issue,³ it is narrated by an intelligent dog called Hungor in a future where mankind—after a nuclear war, plague and poison gas attacks—appears to have died off.
After the fighting stops, Hungor becomes the leader of his people. They eventually meet another group and, when they hear that the poison gas covering Chicago has dissipated, Hungor leads an expedition to the city. Once the wild dog packs are dealt with they set it in motion again.
While engaged on this project—problematical because of the dogs’ lack of proper hands—a man called Paul Kenyon arrives: he has survived because of the biological experiments he performed on himself before the war. He suggests to Hungor that the hands they want are in Africa: men were creating intelligent apes there, although they had not gone as far as they had with dogs. Hungor agrees that they should send an expedition and, after they have trained pilots and repaired aircraft, Kenyon and a team leave.
In Africa they search for the apes and eventually meet their leader, Tolemy. Nine hundred or so of the thousand apes eventually agree come to Chicago (attracted in part, no doubt, by the coffee and cigarettes they are given!)
Time passes, and matters progress successfully. In the last few pages Hungor talks of changing the apes to become more like men:

Today I have come back from the bed of Paul Kenyon. We are often together now—perhaps I should include the faithful Tolemy—when he can talk, and among us there has grown a great friendship. I laid certain plans before him today for adapting the apes mentally and physically until they are men.
Nature did it with an ape-like brute once; why can we not do it with the Ape-People now? The Earth would be peopled again, science would rediscover the stars, and Man would have a foster child in his own likeness.
And—we of the Dog-People have followed Man for two hundred thousand years. That is too long to change. Of all Earth’s creatures, the Dog-People alone have followed Man thus. My people cannot lead now. No dog was ever complete without the companionship of Man. The Ape-People will be Men.
It is a pleasant dream, surely not an impossible one. p. 84

A mature, sober, and affecting work.

Iszt—Earthman by Raymond Z. Gallun starts with the alien Iszt climbing into a human-like robot and going to Earth—the planet is going to be used by his race to prevent two suns crashing into each other and imperilling the galaxy. The rest of the first half has him driving a car to his base. Sitting next to him is ‘his’ girlfriend Anne (Iszt has previously put the original Curt Shelby, who the robot was built to replace, in suspended animation). A farmer takes a pot shot at the car as they are driving along (don’t ask) and Iszt’s robot shell is damaged. They only just make it to the underground lair, where Anne learns that her boyfriend is an alien-controlled robot. She is given an amnesia drug.

The second half starts with descriptions of a variety of natural catastrophes that Earth is undergoing. Iszt has caused these so humanity will appoint him world dictator (that’s two world dictators in this issue so far). When he is successful he starts his plan to save the Galaxy, although by now he has decided to protect the cities and give Earth a second chance.
The final act has Earth and two hundred worlds being moved through space to stop the suns colliding (this requires burning off the top two hundred feet of the surface of the Earth). Iszt threatens to wreck the plan unless the rest of his kind help him give Earth a second chance after the collision is averted.
There is a glimmer of some super-science sense of wonder in the last part, but it is smothered by all the badly written and unconvincing pulp nonsense that precedes it. This story is even worse than the Schachner.

The second and last part of Jason Sows Again by Arthur J. Burks actually improves somewhat in quality (from the preceding dismal level) about a chapter in, by which time Jarl Strang has made ten copies of himself. They all depart by aircraft with the plan of photographing the newly arrived Emperor with the replication machine atom-cameras. The next part has some interesting, and prescient, comment about the enemy they are facing (and some boilerplate ‘Yellow Peril’ material, it must be said):

Hopelessness hung over the fortifications of the American army, as Jarl Harvey and Daryl Strang faced each other behind locked, soundproof doors, in a room off Strang’s headquarters office. The arrival on American shores of His Majesty Hetira had turned every Yellow Girdle soldier into a starry-eyed, invincible fanatic. To die for his Emperor was the greatest glory a member of the Yellow Girdle could attain. Thousands, receiving the word that their God-Emperor had landed, raced to die on American bayonet points, before American bullets, in the midst of bomb-bursts, from sheer exuberation—from sheer exaltation.
Their God-Emperor had landed! The Godhead under whose inspiration Japan, China, all the races of color in the Orient, had been welded together into one vast whole, that whole the Empire of the Yellow Girdle.
Napoleon, long ago, had fired men to great deeds with a little piece of red ribbon on their left breasts. Hetira, copying everything that conquerors before him had used to inspire men and make themselves great in history, caused his followers to wear belts of yellow. And thousands went into battle and died, because they believed that while they wore the yellow girdles they would not die.
And those who wore them saw men die all around them, and still believed in the efficacy of the yellow girdle. Those men died, perhaps, because their hearts were weak, or evil, or their faith in the yellow girdle faltered. If a man died, sure of his faith, and his belief in the girdle, he could not tell the living that the girdle had betrayed him.
If the girdle itself, a mere yellow strip of cloth, could inspire men to such deeds, all America realized what the actual physical presence of His Majesty Hetira would do to them.
Nothing could stop those soldiers! p. 129-130

Harvey thought, as he flew, how the chickens of many white powers were coming home to roost.While Japan had been fighting China, white nations had furnished China with their best scientific brains, in a vain effort to keep Japan from winning. Japan had won over and subdued China, and with her had conquered the fruits of white man’s teachings. And while Japan almost never created or invented anything, she could take anything invented by others, and adapt it, or advance it, to a state of marvelous perfection.
Give Japan a plane, and she would develop that same plane into one of her own that could fly twice as fast and far, twice as high, and on half the fuel the original would have needed. Then she could further develop her own plane—
Well, there seemed no end to it. And after conquering China, Japan had taken all other nations of color in her stride, because her Chinese vassal had the manpower she had always lacked. And so—the army of fifty millions which Hetira could expend without thought p. 132-33

Bombs burst, and where they burst clouds of mist came forth, to creep along the ground. It caught at those who fled, and they were gone. So that everywhere were the thousands and millions, fleeing from the creeping mist.
And the Yellow Girdle varied its attack. In many places, especially in cities, where “regional strongholds” had been more carefully constructed, and so withstood assault for longer periods, the Yellow Girdle released bombs which exploded—and freed in the crisp air the horror of disease!
Disease which was worse than any gas. Disease of which medical authorities knew nothing. Disease bred in Oriental tarns and swamps, in eastern slime, from the bodies of eastern carrion. Disease which mottled bodies of babies and women, and ate them slowly away— p. 136

While Jarl Harvey and his copies fly towards the Emperor, the war continues around them, and the men eventually parachute down on to enemy soil. Shortly after they land, and when the Yellow Girdle soldiers realise they all look the same, the Emperor arrives. The surviving Jarl Harveys are granted an audience, and manage to convince him to let them build replicator machines to produce gold.
What they actually do, of course, is (spoiler) make four copies of the Emperor who, with the original, descend into civil war. Nonsense, but quite a clever ending.
This isn’t a good story, but there are parts of this instalment that are interesting, compelling, and clever, and I came away with an inkling of why Burks was such a popular writer.

At first glance, the Cover by Howard V. Brown for Three Thousand Years! didn’t really appeal, but when you look at a larger cleaned-up image it is striking to say the least. It depicts the ‘resurrection’ scene: look at those apparently elongated fingers, which look that way due to three-thousand-year old nails!
The Interior artwork is by Howard V. Brown (uncredited, but the illustrations for the serial are presumably his as he did the cover—and the figure in the ‘drowned city’ scene matches), Jack Binder (again uncredited but it looks like his work for the Palmer), Elliott Dold, Charles Schneeman, and H. W. Wesso. Hard to pick a favourite this issue but probably Brown (for the previously mentioned underwater scene) followed close behind by Wesso/Schneeman/Dold.
In Times to Come trails a new three-part serial starting next issue, Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Probability (retitled The Legion of Time on publication). Campbell says it will be “our first mutant, new-concept story,” and that Williamson’s story embodies “a completely new fundamental idea, an idea that permits of dozens of other plots.” He also mentions a science article from ‘Doc’ Smith. The closing section has Campbell reiterate that the ‘mutant’ tag is only used for new concepts and ideas, and that he thinks it may be as long as six months before the next one.
Of the 500 Known Elements is a chemistry filler which states that isotopes are “different physical elements”.
Detail—But Immensely Important to Engineering is the second science filler, which is about new electrical motors and their glass tape insulation.
Radiation in Uniform by Herbert C. McKay is a science article on polarised light. I gave up on it after a few pages: it is unintelligible (and I say that as someone with a degree in physics and chemistry).
In this month’s editorial, Democracy, John W. Campbell, Jr. states “a magazine is not an autocracy” but a “democracy by the readers’ votes”. Mmmm . . . for now, maybe. He adds that, while he can’t print all the letters he receives, he will publish a representative selection, and that the letters received are helpful in “forming and directing” the magazine’s expansion.
Ignition Point is another short pseudonymous science filler by Campbell which examines the energies required to produce atomic reactions.
A pseudonymous Campbell also contributes a ridiculous letter about the evolutionary pressures of modern living on man to Science Discussions:

Man had prehensile toes once, and he probably had a nice prehensile tail. I’ve seen worker in a steel-mill who worked controls on a special open-hearth furnace loading machine by using both hands, both feet, and by pushing controls with the side of his head. Just think how darned handy a man with prehensile, individually controllable toes, and a really useable monkeylike tail would be!
And eyes! Not a few creatures have eyes capable of individual operation. Give a man eyes that could at will, operate either as two separate units of vision or in stereoscopic cooperation, and you’d have something. A little development of brain tissue already available, and he’d be watching indicating meters, and the operations he was performing at the same time.
That is, if a change does occur in Man so that a slightly variant type arises, he’s apt to get his chance pretty quickly. That little thing like the two-way eyes, for instance. A workman who developed that knack would get a pretty good salary, because his efficiency would be higher.

A man with two-way eyes would probably not do that well on Tinder, and thus fail to reproduce and pass on his mutation.
After another letter about evolution, there is a request for an astronomical cover of Earth as seen from the Moon. The final letter is about escape velocity.
Brass Tacks has letters from a couple of names I recognise (Robert A. Madle, the long-time bookseller, and Langley Searles, the future editor of Fantasy Commentator). As well as the usual comments about the stories⁴ there are quite a few that mention the artwork, and their like or dislike of various artists.

An interesting issue, with the appearance of del Rey the highlight. ●

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1. Ray Palmer was just about to start, or had just started, at Ziff Davis, taking over the editorship of Amazing Stories from T. O’Conor Sloane (Palmer’s first issue was the June 1938 issue).

2. De Camp’s first story for the magazine was The Isolinguals (Astounding, September 1937). He would become an important contributor to the magazine.
Alexi & Cory Panshin’s The World Beyond the Hill (Chapter 12) (Amazon UK; ebook on iTunes) has three or so pages about Campbell meeting de Camp and their early relationship. It includes this:

It didn’t take Campbell long to see that de Camp had a highly developed sense of a universe of interconnection, a universe in which all things hang together. And Campbell was able to recognize this as the same in essence as the universe of his own vision—the universe of underlying operating principles.
De Camp became Campbell’s right-hand man. In 1938, Campbell would publish only three short stories and one article by de Camp. But in 1939, the figures would be two two-part articles, two novels, and six stories, and Campbell would also use de Camp as a script doctor to do a complete revision of another author’s not-quite acceptable novel.
It would be hard to overstate the value de Camp held for Campbell in those early years. It was a complex and interrelated program of change that Campbell was attempting to engineer in Astounding through 1938 and 1939, and the writing that best exemplified the modern science fiction that Campbell was striving to bring into being was the work of L. Sprague de Camp. Until other writers finally showed up with their own versions of the new Atomic Age vision, it was de Camp who served as Campbell’s corroboration and proof.

3. Del Rey describes how his first story came to be written in The Early Del Rey by Lester Del Rey, Doubleday, 1975:

I was busy reading [Astounding] a few days before Christmas [1937] when my girlfriend dropped by to see me. She lived a couple of blocks away, and the landlady knew her and liked her enough to let her go up to my room unannounced. So she appeared just as I was throwing the magazine rather forcibly onto the floor. I still do that sometimes when a story irritates me, though I’m somewhat more tolerant now.
I can’t remember why I was so disgusted. The story was one by Manly Wade Wellman, “Pithecanthropus Rejectus,” in the January 1938 issue of Astounding Stories, in which normal human beings were unsuccessfully imitated by an ape; I suspect my dislike was at the unsuccessful part of the idea.
[. . .]
Anyhow, my girlfriend wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and I responded with a long and overly impassioned diatribe against the story. In return, I got the most irritating question a critic can receive: “What makes you think you have the right to judge writers when you can’t write a story yourself?”
My expostulations on the great critics who couldn’t write fiction got nowhere.
“So what makes you think I can’t write?” I wanted to know.
“Prove it,” she answered.
That was something of a stopper. But I couldn’t back down at that stage. So eventually, I talked her down to admitting that maybe even successful writers couldn’t sell every story, and that if I could get a personal letter from the editor, rather than a standard rejection slip, I would win the bet.
When she left, I sat down to do a little hard thinking. I was pretty sure I could win, partly because I knew that John W. Campbell had just been made editor of the magazine; I’d written some very nice things about his stories in my letters to the editor, and I was sure he’d remember my name, which would help. That was cheating, a bit, but I still didn’t think the challenge was fair, either. Anyhow, I’d stuck my lip out, and now I had to make good: I have always enjoyed challenges, and I meant to enjoy this one.
Well, I’d read an amazing number of articles on how to write fiction in the old Writers’ Digest—splendid articles by many of my favorite pulp writers. I’d read them because it helped me to enjoy their fiction even more, but I must have learned something out of them. And I’d also come up with a number of ideas for stories during the years of reading. I hadn’t written any of them down, even in notes, but I remembered the best of them.
In the end, however, I decided that the best idea was to rebut the story I’d disliked by writing one in which man failed and some other animal took over. Wellman had used an ape, so I chose dogs as my hopefuls. So far as I could remember, few science fiction stories had used dogs, though a lot had messed around with the apes.
During that evening and the next day, I figured out what I hoped was a plot. Then I sat down at my old three-row Oliver and began writing steadily. It took me about three hours to finish. And looking at the results, I wasn’t at all happy. It was too wordy in style, and too long. I knew that editors get too many long stories and are usually most interested in fiction that is under five thousand words in length. Mine ran to eight thousand. So I sat down with a pencil and began slashing out and shortening. When I finished, I had only four thousand words left, but the results were much better. I’d also learned a tremendous amount about the art of writing fiction—so much that I never had to resort to that business of slashing again; thereafter, I slashed mentally as I went along.
So I shoved the old 1909 Oliver under the bed and dragged out my modern four-row Woodstock. (There was something about the old machine that suited it for composing; but the Woodstock made much neater copy.) I retyped the story neatly in approved form, put it in an envelope with the required stamped, return-address envelope, and mailed it off to John W. Campbell the day before Christmas, 1937.
The story was entitled “The Faithful,” and I thought it a little too simple to sell, but good enough to get a personal letter.
[. . .]
I’d read enough about manuscripts from unknown writers to expect a long delay before I received any notice of my story. But to my surprise, there was an envelope from Astounding Stories in the mail of January 8. And it was a small envelope, instead of the large return one I had sent to hold my manuscript. There was no personal letter from the editor—but there was a check for $40.
It’s a little hard to find the right word to describe my reaction. Perhaps ecstatic delight is the best description; and from other writers, I’ve heard that this is a sort of standard, normal feeling. There seems to be something about having one’s first work of fiction accepted for publication that is not equaled by any other success on earth!
Naturally, I called the girl friend, who agreed that I’d won the bet—and who never again questioned my right to throw a magazine across the room! Then I called my uncle, who had sold a lot of pulp fiction himself; I think his reaction was fully the equal to mine when he finally figured out what I was saying.
But I was far too practical to frame the check; that got cashed at once, leaving me with more money in one lump than I’d had for several months. And then the second reaction began. How long had all this been going on? Forty dollars was a lot of money in those days; and I’d earned it for only a couple of days of fairly easy work that had been fun. Aha! Mr. World, here I come!

I’ve read very little of Del Rey’s work, but the early stories of his that are always mentioned are Helen O’Loy (Astounding, December 1938) and Nerves (Astounding, September 1942). That said, The Faithful placed fifth in the 1939 Retro Hugo short story awards (Helen O’Loy placed second behind Arthur C. Clarke’s How We Went to Mars).

4. The Analytical Laboratory (a story-rating feature that begins next month) in the June issue reveals what readers thought of the stories in this one:

The pecking order is close to my own: I would swap the del Rey/McLeary and the de Camp/Burks. It is interesting to note that the readers of 1938 also clocked the Palmer, Schachner and Gallun stories as the weak material in this issue. ●

Edited 15th November 2019: formatting, archive.org link.

ISFDB link

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Something from Jupiter • novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun [as by Dow Elstar] ∗∗
Flight of the Dawn Star • short story by Robert Moore Williams ∗∗∗
The Master Shall Not Die! • novelette by R. DeWitt Miller ∗
Duel in the Space Lanes • short story by William C. Beckett –
Jason Sows Again (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by Arthur J. Burks –
Wings of the Storm • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗∗
Martyrs Don’t Mind Dying • short story by John Victor Peterson –
Vibratory • short story by Nelson Tremaine [as by Warner Van Lorne] ∗
Flareback • short story by Kent Casey ∗
Eye of the Past • novelette by Otto Binder [as by Eando Binder] –

Cover • by H. W. Wesso
Interior artwork • by H. W. Wesso (4), Charles Schneeman (4), Jack Binder (3), Elliott Dold, Jr. (3)
In Times to Come
Science-Fiction • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Power Plants of Tomorrow: Putting the Moon on the Job • science essay by Willy Ley
Science Discussions
Brass Tacks • letters
Heavy Elements are not Necessarily Inert • science filler

The major change this issue is a significant change of title, from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction.¹ There is an accompanying editorial, Science-Fiction, where Campbell gives his reasons for the change, before continuing with missionary zeal:

Something from Jupiter by Raymond Z. Gallun has a lot happening in its first few pages. Gregory Cross lives on an Earth suffering from an overactive sun and, meantime, has been communicating by Morse code with aliens on Jupiter, hoping to get their help. A spherical spaceship arrives and splits open to receive him. He feels compelled to enter, and is soon on his way.

After his arrival on Jupiter Cross wakes up in different chamber, and rubs the frost on the inside of the window—his skin has changed colour and the frost feels hot—and sees an alien outside. They communicate by Morse and Cross learns the Jovians have changed the biochemistry of his body so he can survive on the planet. He is taken out of the chamber and through a transparent tunnel to another part of their city:

Confronted thus by the vivid reality of the giant planet’s eternal, raging holocaust, Greg almost forgot his present position. He could see little through that blinding maelstrom, it was true; but from that little, one could still construct a mental picture that was more complete.
Wind. Lightning. Rain. Rain of liquefied ammonia, it must be. Greg could not smell its acrid pungence; but this, he decided, was natural. The sensitivity of his olfactory nerves had been changed, along with his flesh. On Earth, the water vapor in the air is almost odorless, too, as a result of human conditioning to its constant presence.
The rain thumped against the clear roof of the tunnel with the maddening roar of an avalanche. It was reddish, mucky rain, filled, no doubt, with the powdered ejecta of volcanoes. Not hot volcanoes such as existed on Earth, for Jupiter must be cold almost to the core. This vast world was composed largely of gases. The great cloud from which it had been formed, torn from the Sun by the passage of another star, had contracted slowly because of its low density.
Cold, however, does not deny the possibility of violent physical and chemical changes. On Jupiter there was still heat enough to produce tremendous explosive forces. Differences of high pressure in the vast atmosphere still could create winds that hurtled along at speeds of hundreds, even thousands of miles an hour. And deep in this planet’s solid core there was still warmth enough to change liquid ammonia to gas, creating pressure that could move masses of rock huger than the Earth. Thus Jupiter must still have belching volcanoes, erupting not molten lava and steam, but cold, speeding vapors, and the muck of silicious dust. p. 12-13

Cross doesn’t have time to contemplate the Jovian landscape for much longer, or the huge chamber the tunnel debouches into. He is taken to a spherical room, and watches a screen which shows the chamber he is in (as well as two others) take off and go to Ganymede.
When they get to the satellite, Cross sees a transformed Jovian disembark. Cross learns that Ganymede was the Jovians’ original home but, when the sun cooled ages ago, they had to change their form and go to Jupiter. When the sun resumed its former activity they could not return as they had lost the secret of the change technology—hence Cross’s presence: the study of his biology taught them what they needed to know. Cross asks if they will help Earth and, when he does not receive an answer, plots to steal their ship.
Later, Cross is taken by a Jovian for conversion back to his original form so he can disembark on Ganymede, but he escapes and hides on the ship. He destroys a robot and gains access to the control room.
He learns to fly the ship, and sets off for Earth. En route there are various struggles with another robot onboard until he is converted back to human form and put on a smaller vessel. It leaves the mother ship, which is moving too fast to land on Earth and crashes into the moon and blows it to smithereens. The rubble will end up orbit around Earth and shelter it from the sun’s heat. The story ends with a message of friendship from the Jovians.
This story is, as you can probably tell from the synopsis, a bit unlikely, but it moves along with a certain superscience verve and the aliens and the descriptions of Jupiter are quite well done.

The highlight of the issue is Flight of the Dawn Star by Robert Moore Williams.² In this one a pair of spacemen land on a planet after accidentally passing through a warp. They leave their spaceship and see a deserted futuristic city. Later they hear voices, a find a group of people who seem like teenage youths but are in fact near-immortals.
The two spacemen try to adjust to their hosts’ pastoral existence but, when they find out one of the immortals can help them, they decide they want to return to Earth. They go to a room with a machine that simulates all the planets in the universe. After synchronizing the machine to the Earthman’s time, Nard searches for Earth but is unsuccessful. He quizzes the pair again as to the characteristics of Earth. After making an adjustment he eventually finds the Earthmen’s solar system. He then breaks the news that (spoiler) they can never go home as they are already on Earth, but a million years in the future. They have passed through a time warp, not a spatial one.
The synopsis of this probably makes it sound rather ho-hum, but it is a well-written mood piece.

The Master Shall Not Die! by R. DeWitt Miller³ starts with the eponymous Master contemplating his longevity (he has lived a thousand years), and the ennui that has begun to afflict him. We then find out that he is in charge of the world, assisted by the body of scientists under him (although limited political autonomy allowed to the populace). The reason he has to serve as the world’s Master is because a normal lifespan is too short to absorb the amount of knowledge required to run the system.
We later discover he has extended his life is by receiving complete blood transfusions from a young donor every thirty years (there is a lot of waffle about new and old blood, and associated ageing processes which was most likely nonsense at the time). The Master rejuvenates after the new blood; if the young donor receives the old blood they die.
The rest of the story concerns his interaction with Barrett Norgard, his prospective donor. The Master reveals to Norgard that, unknown to anyone else, all the other donors are in suspended animation along with jars of his old blood. The Master also reveals that he believes that he has discovered how to turn old blood into new (more gobbledygook).
Complications arise when the Master finds that the rat he has experimented on has died, and he decides he has had enough; Norgard tells him he must go on for the sake of humanity. A scuffle ensues, and the Master is knocked unconscious.

For all that the politics and science of this one are ridiculous, Miller does a good, if sometimes ponderous job of telling the story, and produces quite a good ending (spoiler: Norbert completes the Master’s rejuvenation process, potentially sacrificing himself. When the Master wakes he nonetheless decides to kill himself, but his mind is changed by a note left by Norbert telling him that he owes it to humanity to continue his search for a cure, referring to an earlier conversation about the “focal length of his mental lens”: a reference to taking the longer view. If it wasn’t for the dodgy science I would have rated this one higher.

Duel in the Space Lanes by one-shot wonder William C. Beckett is an awful story about one spaceman betraying another to aliens, and “emanations” from Jupiter. It is full of writing like this:

Thorp grasped a heavily armored cable, inserted its triple-pronged plug into a receptacle on a shining new panel above the instrument board. Plunging shut a switch, he watched as the frequency poured into the outer shell built up.
“If the equations are correct,” he mused, “the electromagnetic wave of the seventeenth octave should neutralize the emanation by interference. If it doesn’t—good-by, Theodore!” p. 62

One that escaped from the slushpile.

Next is the first half of a novella by Arthur J. Burks, Jason Sows Again.⁴ This story has America attacked by the “Yellow Girdle”, an unnamed Asian country. Fifty million soldiers launch a surprise attack in the American continent:

They struck like thunderbolts of doom on a certain morning never to be forgotten. Monsters rose from the deep off the West Coast of North America, over against San Diego, and San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver—nor did the enemy care for a single instant that the attack on Vancouver automatically forced Great Britain into the holocaust. They gave no thought to Great Britain at all, for world conquest was their goal, and they would swallow all nations as they declared war, or whether they did or not.
Great shells smashed into the coast cities. Sounds so great and dreadful the mind of man could not believe them—sounds which drove the hearers instantly mad, so that they turned on one another and fought like dogs in the streets, until the vast projectiles fell among them, leaving only piles of bloody human clay where the mad ones had fought. p. 65-66

There are several pages of this generalised destruction to start (and many more throughout the story, all described in a portentous and distant third person voice) before a twenty-five-year-old becomes a four star general and asks for a miracle from his Rockies redoubt.
The miracle appears in the form of Jarl Harvey:

Yet there would be a miracle, at that. It was even now moving up the mountainside, in the shape of a man with a small black box in his arms—a thing that looked like a camera.
But his hand, both of his hands, were hideous, for they had no fingers. And he must have been a man of great courage, for he tottered along on the stubs of his ankles, because his feet were gone.
And he couldn’t see where he was going, because his eye-sockets were empty.
Yet this caricature, this horror of a man, was the miracle for which a nation prayed— p. 70

This unlikely figure eventually manages to get to the Rockies stronghold (even more unlikely) with his superweapon. When they arrive the soldiers who rescued him leave him with his box—although they haven’t ascertained what the device is—and happily send for the General to speak with him. Jarl writes out his messages in the sand using his stump (his tongue is missing as well).

“The box must be guarded with all our lives until I have done my work! It is our salvation! It means defeat for the enemy!”
[. . .]
Maybe I am your miracle. There is a way to find out. I must have a room to myself, immediately. I must have a box of any size, so long as it is bigger than six by three, and deeper than two feet, inside that room. The box must contain ration components—300 pounds in all—in any form obtainable—meats, metals, condiments—and must be made radioactive. Your chemists will know. And hold the enemy at all costs until I am ready. p. 76-77

The General tells his men to hop to it. To cut a long story short, the box creates a healthy copy of Jarl, who then organises a demonstration for the General—just as the Yellow Girdle launch an attack on the Rockies. The General points out the flaw in Jarl’s plan: to make a million equipped men would take 300 million pounds of raw material! Which they don’t have.
This is pretty awful, but is of minor interest for its depiction of total war. I assume at the time there was a fear of something much worse than WWI occurring if the world fell into conflict again (due to technological developments, and what was seen in the Spanish Civil War, etc.).

Wings of the Storm by Manly Wade Wellman⁵ starts with an elderly science teacher reading something in a child’s essay that catches his attention:

“Many scientists believe that the smallest of the insects, such as the ants, are not aware of human beings near them. Human beings appear too big for ants to see or understand; they are like big shadows on the sky. When we step on an ant hill, it is like a hurricane to them, only harder for them to understand than for us to understand a hurricane.” p.88

He initially dismisses this out of hand, but later the thought returns and he speculates that there may be a huge creature that causes storms and hurricanes. Before much longer he is experimenting with a substance that will increase his size (both H. G. Wells and Ray Cummings are explicitly referenced at this point) and he transforms himself into a two hundred mile high being:

He gazed down at himself, and saw his naked body as it had always been, but misty, as though glimpsed through a light cloud of smoke. His hand, for instance, was recognizable in every crook and knob—but its nails had no clarity of outline. When he touched his face, the tag of moustache felt artificial and amorphous, like a single piece of fabric instead of a close-grown strip of separate hairs. p. 93

When he nears the hurricane he sees the massive creature:

What hovered between him and South America?
Mogollon’s first sensation was of looking an elephant in the face. There was a gray expanse that might have been the front of a smooth skull, with an earlike flap stirring gently to either side and a trailing proboscis at the bottom. Patently it was three-dimensional, and patently it was alive. Its bulk was as great as his own or even greater and—relatively speaking—it was as close as though on the opposite side of a wideish street. Mogollon narrowed his faulty eyes for a better view, and made out that the head had no body, was in fact a body in itself. What he had seen as ears were wings, or served as such. Wings of the storm—the hymn had been right about it! And the trunk was rather a neck or throat, as thick at the base as his calf and rather smaller at the tip than his wrist. p. 94

Battle commences.
If you can swallow both these unlikely ideas—the science teacher’s size change and the hurricane monster—there is some entertainment here.
A year or so later a story of this type would have appeared in Unknown.

Martyrs Don’t Mind Dying by John Victor Peterson is a breathless melodrama about a time-traveller called Duhamel, who vanishes in front of the worldwide viewing public and never returns. Several imitators come to grisly ends and further experimentation is banned.
The story picks up with one of the students of Duhamel, Bara Lowndi (and sister of one of the failed travellers who died a particularly grisly death, legs left behind, etc.), who has built another machine. She and her boyfriend Russ are arguing about the risk to her life when he is called by an assistant who tells him a metal capsule has been found among fossils near the site of Duhamel’s first attempt.
Russ jets over and telepathically receives the combination (never explained) to the capsule. Inside there is a note written in blood stating (spoiler) that he will return to Bara’s lab, argue with her, lose his mind, and shoot her in the head. He will then go back in time, meet Duhamel, and bash in his skull while being shot in the lung.
Russ jets back to Bara’s lab and it looks like this scenario will melodramatically play out:

But the madness—the stark, chilling insanity—had conquered whatever there was of culture, refinement, and decency within him. He thrust her savagely from him. She struck against a sharp edge of the helix and he laughed jerkily at the cry of pain that came from her lips.
“You can’t!” he screamed. “Can’t—wrong, utterly wrong! Time message—must kill—kill—” His pupils were dilated; he clawed the gun from its holster, aimed it at her white, terrified face—“KILL!” p. 195

The assistant who discovered the capsule intervenes, however. He is the aged Duhamel and provides a ‘many worlds’ explanation as to how he managed to change the course of history in this one timestream.
Another slush pile effort.

Vibratory by Nelson Tremaine⁶ starts with yet another loner scientist, this one a professor who has created what appears a technologically advanced organ capable of producing very specific frequencies. Having discovered how to “duplicate the vibrational chord of any object by mechanical means” he moves it to a deserted factory to experiment further and, during one of the testing sessions, one of the supporting beams of the factory disappears. He goes to inspect the area:

There was a hole in the foundation, as well as in the ceiling overhead. It was curved like a bowl and sunk about six feet below the surrounding level. The vibration in the pillar affected everything around it for a certain distance. The size of both openings were identical.
As his gaze wandered up through the opening, he saw the blunt end of the hissing steel beam hanging from the second-story ceiling. It appeared as if it had been sheared off about the same distance above the top of the pillar in the first story as the depth of the opening in the foundation. There was vague unreality about the missing section, almost as if the empty space between the two openings was cloudy. As Ernest bent forward to peer closer at the hole in the floor, his head hit something solid!
It threw him off his feet, as if he had been shoved back by some fast-moving object! His forehead was burned where it had made contact, and for a moment he couldn’t see. p. 126

When his vision clears he can see that the beam is beginning to rematerialise and he sees there is a living creature in the pillar. He falls into unconsciousness. When he comes to he sees the creature is trapped:

In the vibrational state the creature must have been more solid than the steel of the support. When the steel returned to the present form, by the elimination of vibration, the creature had come with it—and was alive in the pillar!
It was covered with thick hair, of a bronze hue, and wore no sign of clothing. He might have been an ape of the jungle, except that his hands were enormous—with twelve fingers on the one which was free of the pillar. His foot had nine digits.
His arm and leg seemed to be of about the same length, and were both long in proportion to his body. But his general proportions were similar to those of a man. He would stand about nine feet tall, and weigh about three hundred and fifty pounds.
The light was poor, but Ernest was able to see that his face was smooth and very pink. Suddenly he realized that he was watching an intelligent creature. The thing was motioning for aid to escape from the imprisoning metal! p. 127-8

The last section (spoiler) has the professor bond with the creature (he builds a structure to support it while he works out how to release it, feeds it, etc.). He then fires up the machine again after leaving notes to say that he is off to the creature’s world to support it in its recovery, and that his machine should not be used again until he returns, etc.
The last half of this is the best of what is still a pretty creaky story (this is largely due to the dated ‘lone inventor’ and ‘weird made-up science’ vibes) and it takes a long time getting there.

Flareback by Kent Casey⁷ is the first of four ‘Dr von Theil and Sgt John West’ stories. This origin story does not get off to a promising start with West, a college graduate and spaceman doing some pulp grumbling to himself:

“Just a space bum, that’s what I am. And now that the lanes are closed for duration of the war even bums like me can’t roam around. Free lance, huh! ‘Aye, aye, Sir! Sergeant West reporting for orderly duty, Sir!’ Phooey! I can’t even get to the front, but have to stick around here running errands for Colonel Brumby, the old Miss Nancy! Sit here twiddling my thumbs and opening doors for whiskery little goats like that Dutchman who just came in. I’ll bet I have to convoy him safe home and make sure no big, bad Uranians bite him after he’s through chewing the fat with the Colonel. Wotta life, wotta life!” p. 133

The Dutchman turns out to be Professor von Thiel, and West’s colonel tells him to take him out in a ship and to obey his orders. The rest of the story (spoiler) has them vaporise an asteroid with an experimental device, and then go to a station on Mars to repair some minor damage to their ship. While they are on the planet a Uranian ship lands and steals the professor’s device. West is knocked out during the first skirmish with the Uranians and, when he comes to, Von Theil freely admits that he knew the Uranians followed them to Mars. Just as West is about to rough him up, the Uranians attempt to use the weapon on the pair but destroy their own ship instead—as the professor expected.
This isn’t a particularly good story, but there are promising signs: there are passages of this that are quite lucid and concise (the explanation of how the device works mentions Dirac, and the creation of electron-positron pairs from space—but see footnote 7) and there is an attempt at some complexity of plot. The ‘buddy’ relationship works reasonably well, too.

Eye of the Past by Otto Binder is the sixth or seventh story in the issue that has a lone inventor or scientist at the centre of it. This one starts with a prologue that details a twenty year war on Earth that is so devastating that Earth becomes a pacifist world. Then, of course, the aliens arrive and start razing all the major cities of Earth to the ground.
Cut to our inventor, who is working on a machine to examine the insides of atoms to see into the past:

The young scientist’s voice became a sharp hiss. “Within the atoms of all the matter around us lie the records of the past, in the form of ether vibrations. An instrument that can reach down within the atom and translate those vibrations into visible light waves would make the past an open book. In plain words—television of the past!”
Tanya, womanlike, tried to hide the deep admiration in her eyes as she looked at the man she loved.

He eventually tracks down the inventor of an atomic ray device that was destroyed, along with the creator’s notes, after the twenty year war. Earth is saved.
This is very poor, and I was surprised that this came from the writer who would produce I, Robot (Amazing Stories, January 1939) less than a year later.

The Cover by H. W. Wesso, illustrates Gallun’s story Something from Jupiter. He also provides some of the Interior artwork along with Schneeman, Binder and Dold. Schneeman and Dold provide the best of the illustrations for my money; Binder’s aren’t of the same quality as the other three and look quite dated.
In Times to Come is, initially, In Times Present, as it starts by mentioning that the Burks’ serial in this issue arrived so late they couldn’t announce it last issue. After that there is mention of a couple of science articles before the big news:

Jack Williamson has submitted an outline for a story to be called “The Legion of Probability.” It isn’t finished, and I can’t be certain until it is— but I think Williamson is going to be the author of our first new-concept mutant story. He’s a corking good author under any circumstances, but he has a completely new concept to work on, and I’m expecting another, really great serial from him. p. 4

Power Plants of Tomorrow: Putting the Moon on the Job by Willy Ley is a fairly dull piece about using the seas as an alternative power source (tidal, temperature differential, etc.). It could do with more illustrations.
Science Discussions⁸ leads off with a letter from ‘Arthur McCann’ (Campbell’s science writer pseudonym) about lightweight magnesium alloys. The others are a decidedly cranky bunch (cranky-eccentric rather than the usual cranky-irritable) that includes stuff like this from George Trott, Bronx, NYC:

Anthropologists do know that homo-sapiens have advanced very little if at all in the past five or six thousand years. So you can imagine how long it must have taken to evolve up to then. I am of the opinion that the Bible was not so far wrong in its story of the creation of man, that is, in so far as the length of time it took to form mankind. Let me explain myself; today, scientists are experimenting with the mutation of species, which mostly consists of subjecting the eggs or female lower forms of life to X-rays, ultraviolet rays, radium rays, etc. The offspring of the parents in many cases are totally different species. p. 114

In Brass Tacks a number of the letters address Campbell by name, including one from Mark Reinsberg, Chicago, Illinois, who says this about the January issue in the first of his two letters:

The magazine shows the influence of its new editor a mile away.

With this kind of comment, and various other mentions of the new editor, it’s hard to see how you could say, as some do, that this is Campbell’s ‘first’ issue. There are various story comments: Fearn’s Red Heritage gets a number of positive mentions, likewise Van Lorne’s (Nelson Tremain’s) Ormoly of Roonerion.
Heavy Elements are not Necessarily Inert⁹ is a half-page filler that starts off with some facts about uranium (denser than lead, reacts with water, etc.) before mentioning other metallic elements.

A mediocre issue with a lot of pulp filler. ●

_____________________

1. Alexi & Cory Panshin’s The World Beyond the Hill (Chapter 12) (Amazon UK; ebook on iTunes) has this comment about the title change:

It was Campbell’s intention to gradually shift the name of the magazine from Astounding (which he didn’t much care for, perhaps thinking it imitative of Amazing—which, we may remember, it had been) to the generic Science Fiction. He would be forestalled when, early in 1939, one of the many new SF pulps then springing up was named Science Fiction first.
And still, Campbell had established a point. The first magazine to specifically present itself as science fiction—using those words as part of its title—was the Campbell Astounding.

In late 1946 the cover design changed (there had been previous alterations) to one that minimized the “Astounding” part of the title (and would until early 1953). This is the July 1949 cover:

The above (original image from Siren in the Night) is also an example of one of the magazine’s sober and occasional ‘fact’ covers.

2. As ever, Fantasy Commentator #59/60 by A. Langley Searles and Sam Moskowitz (recommended, and available at Lulu.com) has a number of letters from Campbell containing comments about these stories (with additional commentary from Sam Moskowitz). This is from his letter to Swisher of 11^th November 1937:

“Robert Moore and Robert Moore Williams (‘Beyond That Curtain’, Thrilling Wonder Stories. December. 1937) are the same guy—and he’s sent in one that I’m taking that’s a definite try at a Don A. Stuart style. The sunuvagun positively cribbed—but did it delicately and very nicely. ‘Flight of the Dawn Star’, scheduled for February [. . .] Well told, but not new even for 1938.” p. 68

Now you know what Campbell and I thought about the stories, here is the reader vote from the first Analytical Laboratory in the May issue (bottom of page):

3. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 11^th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“We—Astounding—are announcing to authors a new policy. Actually, strengthening an old one. Tremaine started, about 14 months ago, using more of the human interest type, definitely slanting toward human stories. The latest circulation figures show that we upped 30% in 12 months.
“We want more stories of the type of ‘The Master Shall Not Die!’ (by R. DeWitt Miller, March, 1938. This author [Moskowitz], while visiting Campbell in the Spring of 1938 was challenged to name one story in the entire history of science fiction better than Millers, so sold was Campbell on that story)— which I thought was darned good. I know you like heavy science, but you’ll have to part with it this time, because the readers don’t. I did notice you said it was an ‘impressive’ story, but gave it a blue rather than a gold. What was your reaction to the yarn? Why did it not merit a gold? (Despite Campbell’s personal promotion of that story it was never anthologized. Its scientific premise, that a complete change of the blood from a young man to that of an old man could renew youth was known to be false at the time the story was written, but possibly not to Campbell.) p. 81

The novelette was later expanded, in collaboration with Anna Hunger, to a 38,000 word novella that was half of Ace Double D-162 (the other half was Jerry Sohl’s The Mars Monopoly):

P. Schyuler Miller had this to say about it in Astounding (November 1956):

This is about the low point in the series of double novels that have been coming from Ace recently. “The Mars Monopoly” is a western transplanted to the future and to Mars, with villainous industrialists, heroic asteroid miners, misunderstood natives, and a least-suspected bad man. The Miller-Hunger effort is just another story about someone who keeps on living for the good of mankind, even though he has to slaughter a long series of young stalwarts to do it. I’m growing allergic to books in which the chief character is The Master. I’ll have to write one myself, to take the curse off and get a fresh point of view . . .

Anthony Boucher had this in F&SF (August 1955):

D-162 is easy to skip: THE MAN WHO LIVED FOREVER, by R. DeWitt Miller and Anna Hunger, is a mildly amusing romantic melodrama of 3097 with no relation to science fiction, and Jerry Sohl’s THE MARS MONOPOLY IS the ultimate example of labeling a routine western as s.f. because it is set on Mars. p. 108

The novella is available on Amazon. I’m not sure how many they are likely to have sold given the sample they send out has the complete text.

4. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 16^th December 1937 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“A week ago Friday, I gave Arthur Burks the idea of a duplicator machine to duplicate the enemy General and so cause confusion. Told him we needed a two-part serial. Monday morning—three days—or daze—later, he brought in ‘Jason Sows Again’, a very acceptable action story based on that, 30,000 words long. He hadn’t fixed it so it’d divide and hold interest, as I told him, in a letter sent Monday. Tuesday afternoon he showed up, said he’d rewrite parts. Wednesday, he brought it in. Thursday, we paid him $450 for the finished, nicely-done yarn. He sorta pounds ‘em out, kinda. But it’s a good enough yarn, with at least a different slant on the duplication idea. And—Arthur Burks’ name on the magazine means something to the regular readers—because they’ve praised him quite a bit—and it means a lot to people who never read Astounding. Furthermore, for those readers it (the story) will be satisfying, because it is almost wholly straight adventure, with a rather weird twist, and a logical solution to a problem raised at the end of the first half. p. 75

5. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 7^th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“Personally, I’d give ‘Wings of the Storm’ a blue for being nicely handled, and considered as a pure fantasy.

6. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 7^th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“‘Vibratory’ was, I agree, very pinkish (by Warner Van Lorne, March, 1938). But ye Gods, they just don’t send in enough blue stuff. It just makes me blue. We accept about one in 10 to 15—but we gotta fill the mag. I’d like to make the issues all outa stuff like ‘The Master Shall Not Die,’ ‘Flareback,’ etc., but there isn’t that much. If I culled the stuff submitted for six months, picking all the blues submitted for one issue. I’d have one super issue, and a bunch of tripe issues. I was lucky this time to get near half a point above average.

7. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 7^th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“I hadn’t thought of the positron aspect for ‘Flareback’ and the [Nat Schachner] announcement. It (Kent Casey) is NOT Nat, however. The author is actually Capt. Kenneth Casey McIntosh, USN. retired of New Orleans. We have four yarns on hand—bought two—and they’re all blues. He’s got style, and his latest one, ‘Good Old Brig!’ shows definitely that Nat could never have been the author. He’s got a space-navy scene that could have been written only by a military man. McIntosh has been writing for Atlantic. North American Review, and similar mags, plus some for the Navy magazine. He’s got a son at Michigan who’s supplying the science background. Son slips sometimes; he did in ‘Flareback,’ wherefore I went over it with some changes and modifications. Agreed that other energy forms could have done the same. I still think positrons make it somewhat more interesting.”

. . . and more from a letter dated 28^th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“You might be interested to know how the check chart (March, 1938 issue) stands. ‘Flashback’ by Kent Casey stands two points in the lead of ‘The Master Shall Not Die!’ which leads its nearest competitor, ‘Wings of the Storm’ by five checks. “But ‘Flashback’ fascinates me. That’s a first story of an absolute unknown, and everybody is piling on the bandwagon. ‘Duel in the Space Lanes’ (by William C. Beckett, March, 1938) which is almost the same plot, when you come to it, is getting as many goose-eggs as checks. But Casey’s yarn is going over stronger than any other first-time story we’ve published in 18 months.”
[. . .]
(The positron material, taken from Swisher’s article, was actually written in by Campbell, which probably influenced his enthusiasm for the story.) p. 82

I think the writer’s name is actually Kenneth Chafee McIntosh. There is a list of other (non-fiction) work at unz.com. His ISFDB page is here.

8. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 7^th February 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“The letter department got shifted to the middle of the mag (March, 1938) because the advertising section was too darn long. I couldn’t get enough material to fill all those half-pages, and I had to run a story back
there. Thus, I had to put the letters in the middle. The front wouldn’t do— that’s much too valuable for display purposes (though Thrilling Wonder Stories used to break up the front of their book with reader’s columns).

9. Letter from Campbell to Swisher dated 14^th January 1938 (Fantasy Commentator #59/60):

“Due to the impositions of the advertising department. I had a swell time making the March (1938) issue fit together. I had to do some trickiness, which may be noticeable to the practiced reader. Including the writing of a filler (“Heavy Elements are not Necessarily Inert’). Astounding hadn’t used fillers for a long time, but I had to this time. I may go so far as to reinstitute them. You know, brief paragraphs of supposed-to-be-interesting material.
[. . .]
The present example of the ‘genus fillersis’ concerns the non-inertness of heavy metals. Witnesses called: uranium, radium, tungsten, etc. Also iridium is much more inert than the familiarly inert platinum. These facts introduced in the hope that authors will cease from pulling the unnecessary type of boner indulged in by (Jack) Williamson in ‘Galactic Circle’, (Astounding Stories, August, 1935), where they ate off of U plates.” p. 76

Edited 15^th March 2018 to add Analytical Laboratory results (footnote 2). ●

ISFDB
Archive.org

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
The Degenerates • novelette by John Russell Fearn [as by Polton Cross]
Anachronistic Optics • short story by Moses Schere ∗∗+
The Fatal Quadrant • novelette by Arthur J. Burks –
Galactic Patrol (Part 6 of 6) • serial by E. E. Smith, Ph.D. ∗∗∗
Mercutian Adventure • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun ∗
Wayward World • novelette by Otto Binder [as by Gordon A. Giles] ∗∗
The Anti-Weapon • novelette by Otto Binder [as by Eando Binder] ∗∗
Thunder Voice • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun [as by Dow Elstar] ∗

Non-fiction:
Mercutian Adventure • cover by Howard V. Brown
Interior artwork • by H. W. Wesso (6), Charles Schneeman, Elliott Dold, Jr. (3), Jack Binder
In Times to Come
The Rainbow Bridge • essay by Herbert C. Mackay
Mercury • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Power Plants of Tomorrow: Harnessing Earth’s Heat • essay by Willy Ley
Science Discussions and Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

The main event this issue¹ is the cover, Mercutian Adventure, by Howard V. Brown. Although not that attractive an effort, it was an attempt at a more sober and scientific cover than that used on some of the other SF pulps of the time. Campbell discusses it in his editorial, Mercury:

The fiction leads off with The Degenerates by John Russell Fearn.² It concerns Cambridge, a space pilot who is hired for an expedition to Jupiter’s moon Io, the purpose of which is to retrieve a type of tree that can produce a particularly tough form of iltuion, a material used for spacesuits.

The team includes the businessman funding the trip and his daughter Ada (businessmen in stories like this are always accompanied by their attractive daughters); Ludwig Reid, the expedition leader; Charteris, the co-pilot; Hu Ling, the Chinese cook (!); and, finally, the Ionian alien who made the discovery in the first place, Kiol. Cambridge takes an instant dislike to Reid and, sure enough, he turns out to be a rum ’un.
The ridiculous plot (so much so that I cannot be bothered going through its multiple idiocies) involves (spoiler) a lot of them getting killed on Io before a city full of degenerate Martians are wheeled out at the end.
I believe this was Fearn’s last story in Astounding, to which I can only say “good riddance” (although I should add there is evidence of this author’s inexplicable popularity in Campbell’s letters and in the letter column).
Anachronistic Optics by Moses Schere³ is about a town handyman who is digging a hole for a local builder when he comes upon a strange set of bones and an assortment of metal parts. The handyman takes the material home. Later, he and a retired college head put the metal parts together and realise they have a time-machine.
After they make a couple of short trips in it (which takes them four years into the future), the belligerent builder interrupts, demanding the return of the metal. The builder is a nasty piece of work, and manages to send himself into the future during an altercation—apart from his eyes that is, which stay in the present day, floating in mid-air. All the handyman and the college head can do is wait for his eyes to eventually catch up with his body.
The operation of the time machine is rather unconvincing but the story raises a smile or two, and its subtitle, ‘An unusually well-told light science fiction story,’ is an accurate description.⁴

The Fatal Quadrant by Arthur J. Burks⁵ is similar to the Fearn story in that the narrator (this time a newspaper editor) signs up for an expedition to the Antarctic with a millionaire inventor (this guy is younger so there is a sister that comes along and not a daughter). Once they arrive at the base, the inventor reveals his plans, which involve using robots to map the continent, but there is also talk about weather control, and melting the ice to reveal whatever is thousands of feet below.
The robots go off in due course on a radial survey, illuminating their path with eye headlights (a striking scene which Wesso chose to illustrate).

They send video back to the lab where two robots compile maps and charts. When the mapping robots get to a wide valley that looks like it was excavated by mechanical means, the sister suddenly gets the vapours :

Beside me Zora was breathing audibly. I glanced at her. Her eyes were wide. Her bosom was heaving. She couldn’t be afraid of what might happen to the robots, surely, for there were extras we hadn’t yet unpacked, and they were merely pieces of machinery, after all. No. it wasn’t that. I thought, and a moment later I knew I had been right.
For Zora whirled on her brother and screamed: “Bring them back, Sherm! Bring them back, for my sake. I can’t stand it any longer! I’m terribly afraid that—”
“Afraid?” said Geddes softly. “Of what? Nothing that might possibly trouble our robots can reach us here!”
“I’m afraid of— Please, Sherman, let’s call a halt. You can stop them, leave them right where they are! Do it for me. Let their eyes die, so that they can hide from—”
“Hide from what?” yelled Geddes. “Zora, you’re nuts! What can there possibly be to hide from? Rocks? Hills? Glaciers? Crevasses? I’ve never known you to be so childish, so imaginative.”
“I ought to be ashamed of myself, Sherm, I know. But I can’t help it. The feeling keeps growing on me that soon in those—at least of the nine robots in the plain, maybe even in all the others—we’re going to see things that may be so tremendous—so maddening—”
“Nothing in this world can drive you mad.” said Geddes. “You’re my sister!”
“Jud! Jud!” said Zora, flinging herself into my arms. “Say something to him! You feel it, too; I can see it in your eyes—in the sweat on your cheeks and in your hair. Ask him to delay his investigations, even for an hour.”
“I agree with her, Sherm,” I said. “Let’s call a halt for a little while.”
“Nothing doing!” In his two words of refusal there was finality that I couldn’t gainsay. Well, there might be some other way. I put Zora aside, rose, stepped toward Sherman Geddes. “Sherman,” I said, “stop it, right now. Give the command, or so help me—”
“Sit down, Mr. Draper,” said a cold voice to my right rear, “or it will be my duty to force you to!”
I whirled, stared. Standing within two feet of me, radiating power against which I knew I’d be less than a babe in arms, was [Robot] Thirteen. p. 52

Up until this point it wasn’t too bad—the remoteness and the then mystery of Antarctica is quite well done—but from this point on it all goes a bit megalomaniac super-scientist, and not in a good way.
The robots come to an ice wall and Geddes has the other machines join them. When they look down they see a perfectly ordered city buried deep in the ice. Geddes sees that the inhabitants are perfectly preserved, and uses some hand-wavey science to speculate that they are alive. The robots evaporate all the water and sink to the level of the city. Number twenty-one ignores an order to go into one of the buildings and his video relay screen goes white.
From this point on the story just becomes dafter and dafter: the ice that has melted starts causing floods and hailstones and worldwide climactic change; the three destroy the lab and head south to avert further catastrophe but, when they get to the city, it is even deeper in ice than before, an event that is unexplained (that, or I’d started skimming). Finally, Geddes kills himself on the ship home. The problem with all of this is that it isn’t a story, just an arbitrary succession of unlikely wonders.
I liked the last part of Doc Smith’s Galactic Patrol, even if it sometimes appears as if it is written in another language:

 “Um-m-m.” Crandall stared at Kinnison, new respect in his eyes. “I knew that unattached Lensmen were good, but I had no idea they were that good. No wonder Helmuth has been getting his wind up about you. I’ll string along with any one who can take a whole base, single-handed, and make such a bally ass to boot out of such a keen old bird as Helmuth is. But I’m in a bit of a dither, not to say a funk, about what is going to happen when we pop into Prime Base without you. Every man jack of us, you know, is slated for the lethal chamber without trial. Miss MacDougall will do her bit, of course, but what I mean is, has she enough jets to swing it?” p. 78

Not even the problems with child health and safety put me off:

In his hidden retreat so far from the galaxy’s crowded suns and worlds, Helmuth was in no enviable or easy frame of mind. Four times he had declared that that accursed Lensman, whoever he might be, must be destroyed, and had mustered his every available force to that end, only to have his intended prey slip from his grasp as effortlessly as a droplet of mercury eludes the clutching fingers of a child. p. 80

In this final instalment Kinnison goes to Helmuth’s base, only to discover that the latter has meanwhile worked out what Kinnison’s powers are, and has ordered thought shields for all personnel. Kinnison, stymied, goes back to Tellus and consults Admiral Haynes, who plans a huge attack to take place in ten weeks’ time. Meanwhile, Kinnison has an armoured suit constructed and has twenty thousand bullets fired at him to learn how to operate it under attack!

Kinnison then goes to Trenco, where he telepathically communicates with a ‘flat,’ a local turtle-like alien, and manages get them to agree to harvest and manufacture thionite, a powerful drug, in exchange for sugar.
Kinnison returns to the pirate base and hides in a cave. He gets a dog to disconnect a battery pack and takes control of an operative who lets him in. He releases the thionite into the air and then starts taking control of others, using them to disconnect others’ thought shields:

Thionite, as has been intimated, is perhaps the worst of all known habitforming drugs. In almost infinitesimal doses it gives rise to a State in which the victim seems actually to experience the gratification of his every desire, whatever that desire may be. The larger the dose, the more intense the sensation, until—and very quickly—the dosage is reached at which he passes into such an ecstatic stupor that not a single nerve can force a stimulus into his frenzied brain. In this stage he dies.
Thus there was no alarm, no outcry, no warning. Each observer sat or stood entranced, holding exactly the pose he had been in at the instant of opening his face plate. But now, instead of paying attention to his duty, he was plunging deeper and deeper into the paroxysmally ecstatic profundity of a thionite debauch from which there was to be no awakening. p. 92

The Galactic Patrol attack the dome. Kinnison has a climactic superscience battle with Helmuth, who dies in the line of fire. This scene has a rather abrupt ending, but the instalment is a good end to an entertaining novel.

Raymond Z. Gallun has two stories in this issue. The first is Mercutian Adventure, this issue’s cover story. A newlywed couple buy a spaceship and head for Mercury, planning to run a business that sells photographs of the planet. While they are on the surface their fuel becomes unstable, but before it explodes they escape with oxygen bottles and a canvas sheet. They burrow into the topsoil and wait.
The science in this one is a mixture of (a) out of date (Mercury’s thin atmosphere) and (b) wonky (the canvas initially stops oxygen getting out but later allows it to diffuse in). At least the story is an honest attempt to put some science into science fiction and not the usual procession of unexplained pulp wonders.

The other Gallun story is Thunder Voice. This is a gimmick piece where a far-future Earth and Moon need to simultaneously activate their gravity beams to avoid collision, but cannot communicate due to etheric interference or some such. The chief scientist (spoiler) connects a telephone handset to one of the beams and points it at the moon, using variable gravity waves to vibrate their walls and send an audio message. Contrived, but it is a clever solution.
Otto Binder⁶ also has two stories in this issue. The first (under his Gordon A. Giles pseudonym) is Wayward World. This has a two-man spaceship whose drive malfunctions, causing a forced landing on a newly discovered planet between Saturn and Uranus. On the planet they discover metal based life, some of who attempt to drag their ship away. One of the crew enters a cataleptic trance to try and communicate with them, although that doesn’t work as expected.

The plot and the science are weak but it is written in an entertaining way, with some banter between the two pilots, Wade Welton and Archibald Quinsley Osgood, enlivening the story, such as when they first set foot on the planet and Welton exits the ship to do a recce:

Welton jumped the five feet to the ground and landed with enough of a jar to realize surface gravity was at least Earth’s equal. The gravity gauge in the ship had not been awry then. He swept his flash around. The ground was of a loamy texture, dark purple in color. He moved a few steps forward in his micro-mesh garment, to get out of the shadow of the Thunderbolt. He winced a little at the pain in his bruised hip. Then he glanced around. It looked much the same through his glassite helmet as it had from the ship’s ports—an endless, flat stretch of barrenness, without detail in the light of the somber stars.
Welton caught movement in the corner of his eye and turned swiftly. A tall figure loomed up in the dark. Welton limelighted it with his flash, then gasped and staggered back a step.
“Howdy, Columbus!” greeted Osgood cheerily. He was dressed in a Ganymedian parka, only the circle of his face exposed, but with his nose free to the atmosphere. He took a deep breath of air and thumped his chest while exhaling.
“Jumping Jupiter!” said Welton, gagging.
“Glorious to breathe fresh air for a change, Wade old stuff. Stuff is right, in that vac-suit. Why the devil are you wearing it?” Osgood doubled up in pantomime mirth.

It turns out that Osgood has spent the morning analysing the air, and it is breathable . . . .
The second of the two is The Anti-Weapon,⁷ which takes place during a future war on Earth. Elson is a pilot who has his plane damaged in a dogfight, but manages to land it behind enemy lines:

An hour later he felt better, though bruised and shaken. He looked around. The ruined city all about seemed utterly deserted; not a sound came from its battered environs. Alpha-charges, proton-blasts, neutron-beams, deuteron-flames and other agents of demolition had done a thorough job. Undoubtedly, electron-rays had swept the streets and byways to heap up the electrocuted dead.
Elson knew the city—knew where he was. This had been an enemy city, razed by His Side. But they had not succeeded in capturing this salient. He was about thirty miles back from the lines, in enemy territory. He would be shot on sight, when discovered. The Atom War was one stripped of all humaneness; a struggle to the finish between the world divided into two great camps, with fighting going on interminably on a dozen fronts.
Elson’s only chance of life was to get back to his own lines. A thirty-mile jaunt through the thickest of enemy forces was unthinkable. He must repair his ship. p. 129

During his search for food he comes across a young woman called Lorna and, even though she is one of the enemy, he gives her some of the provisions he has found. He then accompanies her back to her father, Professor Davidson, who has perfected an anti-weapon in his basement laboratory.
Later, after some food and conversation, the Professor powers up the weapon, a wire globe that forms a sphere of ebony ultraspace which absorbs all forms of energy. After a demonstration showing the uselessness of Elson’s raygun, he agrees to fly the plans for the device to the Pacifist League in the north, before going to one of the conflict zones to demonstrate its power.

The science in this is rather fanciful, as is Elson’s readiness to commit treason, but it is an interesting story for its descriptions of the ravaged city and the resulting brutality, not to mention it contains what I suspect was then a widespread hope that another global conflict could be avoided.
The final scene (spoiler) has Elson attempting to land his plane while watched by the professor and his daughter, but he sinks below ground level before climbing up and away into the night: Elson has realised what the professor is explaining to his daughter—the anti-weapon has drained most of his substance, and he is now stranded in ultraspace.

The Interior artwork is mostly by Wesso and Jack Binder (Otto Binder’s brother) in this issue, although there are also illustrations from Charles Schneeman and Elliott Dold, Jr.
In Times to Come mentions that putting a magazine together is like working on a jig-saw puzzle—the reason why promised stories are sometimes left out of an issue after being promised. He then goes on to list the stories that will definitely appear in the next issue and those that may.

There are two short science articles: The Rainbow Bridge by Herbert C. Mackay is about the increasingly widespread use of spectroscopy, and Power Plants of Tomorrow: Harnessing Earth’s Heat by Willy Ley is about geothermal power.
I actually found parts of  Science Discussions quite interesting this time around. There is a letter on evolution from John D. Clark, Philadelphia, which has this at the end:

So here’s the final result of my cogitation—partly probabilities, partly wishful-thinking. In a million years or so Man will be larger, averaging perhaps six and a half or seven feet tall. He will be much more intelligent, making mental solutions of the three body problem. He will be able to see ultraviolet and infrared, and to see with much more detail than at present, due to an increased number of cells in the retina. His fingers will be perhaps twice as long as the present ones, with infinitely flexible joints. He will be quite capable physically, cleaned out as he will be. of the vestigial remains such as the appendix that clutter up our internal economy. And finally, he will be able to communicate telepathically with his fellows at will, and will be able to know the universe around him without the intervention of his other senses. But, he will still be a man, recognizable as one. Control over human heredity will very probably accelerate evolution to a considerable degree. As for the direction, as I said before—all bets are off.
If anybody has any ideas on the subject, let him bring them forth. Destructive criticism will be available in unlimited quantities. p. 148

There are also interesting letters from John James Logue from New York, upbraiding Eando Binder for the science in The Time Contractor among other things, and D. C. Beere, a cadet at West Point, about nuclear particles and scientific theory in general.
Brass Tacks has a letter from Sam Youd (the real name of the well-known writer John Christopher) from Eastleigh in Hampshire. He starts by criticising Wesso’s artwork, while praising Brown, Dold and Binder (Jack). After praising Smith’s serial and lambasting Schachner (‘Can’t you get rid of him, or is he under contract?’) he includes his top ten for the year:

1. “Forgetfulness”. [Campbell] Ranks with the superb “Twilight”. A grand plot.
2. “Galactic Patrol”. [Smith] Far and away better than ‘‘Valeron” or “Triplanetary”.
3. “Seeker of Tomorrow”. [Russell/Johnson] Entertaining, original and exceedingly well-written.
4. “Sands of Time”. P. S. Miller at his best.
5. “The Endless Chain”. [Macfadyen] An old plot, but I like the strain of mysticism.
6. “Fires of Genesis”. Gallun is now consistently good.
7. “Out of Night”. Stuart can do much better, nevertheless, good.
8. “Great Radio Peril”. [Russell] Good humorous satire.
9. “Saga of Pelican West”. [Russell] Blood and thunder, but reminiscent of Weinbaum.
10. “Frontier of the Unknown”. [Knight] Rather slow. Boring in places. p. 155

The other letters includes plaudits for some stories and brickbats for others. Some of the comments are as blunt as Youd’s, such as the final one from Arthur B. Dawson from Plano, Illinois:

In closing let me repeat my appreciation of the improvement you have wrought, but you will be the first to admit that there is room for more. Please deliver us from the “one man whips the universe at the last minute” stuff. Williamson take notice for one. Get your authors to take a good course in English composition somewhere, and we will all be happier. p. 159

An interesting issue that illustrates the gulf between those writers who look likely to survive under Campbell’s editorship and those who won’t.⁸

_____________________

1. I intended for this review to appear on the 70^th anniversary of publication but it took me longer than I expected to write. The copyright dates for this and other issues of Astounding are here.

2. In Fantasy Commentator #59/60 (Lulu.com), Moskowitz mentions the Polton Cross story:

On the same date [27^th January 1938] Campbell sent out a letter which concerned ‘The Degenerates’ by Polton Cross (Astounding Stories, February, 1938). He did not appear to know at the time that Polton Cross was a pen name for John Russell Fearn.
[. . .]
Campbell receives a letter from a reader claiming that he had read the identical plot some years past. Campbell writes to Swisher the following description for possible identification: “Tribulations of ye Ed. Remember “The Degenerates” by Polton Cross? Somebody says Argosy published a yarn some years back—four or six parts about an amphibian plane expedition to upper Amazon for untearable rubber. Hero hated villain on sight. Expedition of hero, villain, backer, daughter, cook and native. Hero and girl shot at. villain locks up weapons, backer gets fever and daughter kidnapped. Degenerates here descendants of Atlantians. Science-secret was statue of Poseidon and chariot with horses which had anti-gravity secret. Daughter to be sacrificed under hooves of horses.
“You may remember it, you may have a tear sheet of that yarn. If you kept it. I’d like to see it. At any rate, can you remember anything about it, or did you miss it completely too?” Underneath the letter Swisher had jotted The Lost Land of Atzlan by Fred Maclsaac, Argosy, six parts, beginning August 2, 1933.
Campbell responded February 2, 1938: “The research department [Swisher]—and the system—slipped a bit that time. I got hold of all six copies of the Argosy containing the Maclsaac’s yarn. ‘The Lost Land of Atzlan’, and it wasn’t the one.
“That story’s about a gang, bound for a Mexican city. Fog comes in, they’re lost, and sit down where they can in a valley, where Aztecs have maintained a slight civilization. “But not our gang at all. I want one that takes place in the Amazon country. Any more suggestions? If it is what our informant in California claims, take an outline of the plot of ‘Degenerates’, transform it to the Amazon country and Atlantians instead of Martians, and you’ve got the exact same story.”
[. . .]
That Campbell’s informant was able to so precisely remember the plot and not the title of the story, its author or place of publication is indicative of an entirely false lead. There is no question that the plot of the story could easily have been transferred to South America. Campbell never discovered the alleged ‘original’ but he did not use the name of Polton Cross again. He continued to appear in a variety of science fiction magazines until 1948. It is also a fact that John Russell Fearn was not a copyist. He had an immensely fertile mind when it came to plots, writing and selling literally hundreds of works of science fiction without once being accused of plagiarism.
Campbell was still searching for that elusive story February 7, 1938, when in response to a query by Swisher asking if he had read Maclsaac’s story he responded: “No, I didn’t read ‘Atzlan’, just the synopsis. We called in Julius Schwartz, and he didn’t remember the story referred to, either. So it wouldn’t have been in his Fantasy column. I read ‘Balata’ myself, and I do not believe that that was the story. Right now, it’s vague and I can’t remember the details. Just an action story in the jungles and about a guy that had found a whole grove of balata trees. I’m gonna try to find one issue of the yarn—preferably one of the last issues—and see what the synopsis has to say.” p. 78-79

3. Schere sold another few stories to Astounding before ending his short career in a number of minor, late 1950s SF magazines. His page at ISFDB.
4. In Fantasy Commentator #59/60, Campbell had this to say about Schere’s story in a letter to Robert D. Swisher dated 11^th November 1937:

We got a real nice little yarn from one Moses Schere—and it was titled ‘A Hot Time in the Old Barn’! Despite that handicap we bought it rejoicing, because it was good. We’re retitleing it ‘Anachronistic Optics’ p. 68

5. There is evidence that Burks (and Hubbard) were foisted on Campbell by the management at Street & Smith. Sam Moskowitz says this in Fantasy Commentator #59/60:

Some months before he had been discharged, Tremaine had taken Campbell aside and told him he thought the fiction in the magazine was getting to heavy. He ordered him to buy some fiction from L. Ron Hubbard, an author who had contributed to several of his other magazines, because he had a light touch. Campbell gritted his teeth at the order, but when he met Hubbard he rather liked him. He purchased from him ‘The Dangerous Dimension’ which appeared in the July, 1938 issue. p. 89

Hubbard describes what happened in greater detail in the introduction to Battlefield Earth:

It will probably be best to return to the day in 1938 when I first entered this field, the day I met John W. Campbell, Jr., a day in the very dawn of what has come to be known as The Golden Age of science fiction. I was quite ignorant of the field and regarded it, in fact, a bit diffidently. I was not there of my own choice. I had been summoned to the vast old building on Seventh Avenue in dusty, dirty, old New York by the very top brass of Street and Smith publishing company—an executive named Black and another, F. Orlin Tremaine. Ordered there with me was another writer, Arthur J. Burks. In those days when the top brass of a publishing company—particularly one as old and prestigious as Street and Smith—”invited” a writer to visit, it was like being commanded to appear before the king or receiving a court summons. You arrived, you sat there obediently, and you spoke when you were spoken to.
We were both, Arthur J. Burks and I, top-line professionals in other writing fields. By the actual tabulation of A.B. Dick, which set advertising rates for publishing firms, either of our names appearing on a magazine cover would send the circulation rate skyrocketing, something like modern TV ratings.
The top brass came quickly to the point. They had recently started or acquired a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Other magazines were published by other houses, but Street and Smith was unhappy because its magazine was mainly publishing stories about machines and machinery. As publishers, its executives knew you had to have people in stories. They had called us in because, aside from our A.B. Dick rating as writers, we could write about real people. They knew we were busy and had other commitments. But would we be so kind as to write science fiction? We indicated we would.
They called in John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of the magazine. He found himself looking at two adventure-story writers, and though adventure writers might be the aristocrats of the whole field and might have vast followings of their own, they were not science fiction writers. He resisted. In the first place, calling in topliners would ruin his story budget due to their word rates. And in the second place, he had his own ideas of what science fiction was.
Campbell, who dominated the whole field of sf as its virtual czar until his death in 1971, was a huge man who had majored in physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Sciences degree. His idea of getting a story was to have some professor or scientist write it and then doctor it up and publish it. Perhaps that is a bit unkind, but it really was what he was doing. To fill his pages even he, who had considerable skill as a writer, was writing stories for the magazine.
The top brass had to directly order Campbell to buy and to publish what we wrote for him. He was going to get people into his stories and get something going besides machines.

Hubbard would become a prolific contributor to both Astounding and Unknown.
6. From ISFDB:

Eando Binder stood for “Earl and Otto Binder” until Earl stopped contributing in late 1935-early 1936. See Otto’s letter to Earl “on Earl’s decision to no longer participate in the “Eando” pseudonym”, 20 January 1936.

Otto Binder would only contribute another few stories to Astounding.
7. In Fantasy Commentator #59/60, Campbell had this to say about Binder’s The Anti-Weapon in a letter to Robert D. Swisher dated 30^th October 1937:

Binder’s new story ‘The Anti-Weapon’ [. . .] happens to have an inconsistent, but actually unimportant explanation—as motivation for an interesting story [. . .] I think you’ll find [it] a pretty decent yarn. p. 65

8.  As previously mentioned, Fearn would contribute nothing more to Astounding. Burks would contribute another half-dozen stories, and Otto Binder three. All of these appeared before the end of 1939. Gallun survived the longest, albeit at a reduced rate, contributing seven more stories to the end of 1939, and four more from then until 1952 (and he even appeared in Analog three times between 1977 and 1983).

ISFDB
Archive.org

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
Ormoly of Roonerion • novelette by Nelson Tremaine [as by Warner Van Lorne] –
The Voice out of Space • short story by Clifton B. Kruse –
Dead Knowledge • novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Don A. Stuart] ∗∗∗
Pithecanthropus Rejectus • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗∗∗+
Red Heritage • novelette by John Russell Fearn ∗∗
Whispering Satellite • short story by John Russell Fearn [as by Thornton Ayre] –
Galactic Patrol (Part 5 of 6) • serial by Edward E. Smith ∗∗
The Mental Ultimate • short story by John Russell Fearn [as by Polton Cross] –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by H. W. Wesso
Interior artwork • by Jack Binder (7), H. W. Wesso (4), Elliott Dold, Jr. (2)
In Times to Come
Power Plants of Tomorrow: Harnessing the Sun’s Rays • essay by Willy Ley
Rocket Flight • essay by Leo Vernon
Mutation • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by The Editor]
Science Discussions and Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

When I recently wrote a review of the October 1937 Astounding, it was with a “70^th anniversary of the beginning of John W. Campbell’s editorship” fanfare, only to discover that Alva Rogers’ claim that it was Campbell’s first issue was incorrect.¹
With this issue, however, Campbell is a visible presence—one of the letters in Brass Tacks is addressed to him by name, and the writer, Louis Kuslan, mentions that he heard of the new editor’s appointment in The Science Fiction Fan.
On p. 4 there is also a new feature started by Campbell (and one that still runs in the magazine today), In Times to Come:

There is also an editorial by Campbell, Mutation:

Normally an editor’s first issue is described as the one that has their name on the masthead of the magazine (the part that lists the editors, publishers, etc.), regardless of whether they acquired the stories or prepared that issue for publication.² However, at that time Street & Smith did not print a masthead on their magazines. My contention is that—given the above—Campbell’s name would also have been on the masthead of this issue if there was one. Your view may vary.³

The fiction leads off with Ormoly of Roonerion by Nelson Tremaine, who presumably used the Warner Van Lorne pseudonym as he was the brother of the previous editor, and the then new Editorial Director at Street & Smith, F. Orlin Tremaine.⁴ The story’s protagonist, Jack, sees a strange light in the sea and he is repeatedly drawn back to search for it over the next few days. When he eventually spots it again he realises that it is coming from a tiny cigar-shaped vessel:

Slowly the water receded until the bright spot lay on the sand — and it was growing larger! It expanded as the man watched until it was several inches long. It seemed to draw slowly away at the same time, and Jack took several hurried steps forward.
He almost fell and discovered he was standing on rocks larger than his feet! He could not understand; there was little room for anything in his mind, but that he must absorb as much of the strange light as he could.
When the object had grown in size, so that he looked straight ahead, he stepped forward again. It appeared to be metal now, and almost cigar-shaped. The light came from many small openings in the silvery material.
Once more Jack started forward, but now he had to climb over boulders so huge that the ship was almost out of sight when he dropped into the hollows between. A few feet from the ship he stopped on top of the highest. The strange hull was enormous now. It stood fully sixty feet high and several times that length.
Port holes, a foot in diameter, were visible, with rays coming from several. As the ship ceased to expand, the lights faded until they gave only a faint glow.  p. 9

What is really happening here is that Jack (spoiler) is shrinking. This is eventually revealed as a surprise twist at the end but is obvious from the detail here and further on in the story.
When Jack finally goes on board he meets two green-skinned, golden-haired people (an older man and attractive woman). There is then a long undersea journey where Jack learns their odd customs and language and, later, how to run the ship.

When the ship reaches its home port they find war has broken out with the neighbouring Salikans. Jack plays a pivotal role in defeating them before he is told that he is the Ormoly, the man chosen for the woman on board the ship (apparently their ‘vibrations’ match).
This is relatively clearly written but uninspired, formulaic stuff.⁵

The Voice out of Space by Clifton B. Kruse is another clunker, although it starts quite well with two scientists in a high-altitude balloon taking photographs of the stars. Then they hear an odd sound shortly before they are hit by a meteorite and lose one of their ‘helium-radiants’ (balloons).
The rest of the story is about their return to Earth and the discovery of an electrostatic alien life form in the recovered meteorite.

Dead Knowledge by John W. Campbell, Jr. is about three spacemen who come upon an abandoned city on an alien planet.⁶ When they start exploring they find that the humanoid inhabitants have committed suicide by poisoning themselves. They fly to another two cities and find a similar situation.

They retreat back into their spaceship and lift into orbit, where they discuss the situation, and agree that they should spend three months exploring and investigating the planet before returning to Earth. However, just as they are away to eat a long overdue meal, two of them find the third dead. He has used the same poison that the aliens used in the cities . . . . Later, another of the two also kills himself.
The climax comes when the last crew member realises (spoiler) he is being taken over by an alien intelligence. There is no poison left for him, but we find out at the end that (a) he had booby-trapped the ship to explode when the FTL drive shut down on arrival at Earth and (b) he has left a message about the alien menace in a heat proof container.
On the plus side this is an atmospheric and at times eerie story; the negatives are that it is a bit slow-moving to start, and the last couple of pages are a little unclear.
Note that this idea of an almost undetectable alien menace taking possession of humans would reappear a few months later in Campbell’s classic story Who Goes There? (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1938).

Pithecanthropus Rejectus is by Manly Wade Wellman, whose work of this period was standard pulp fare, or at least that was what I thought from both the little I’ve read and what I’ve gleaned from Science Fiction Encyclopedia. This story belies that assumption with a work that is not only the stand out of the issue, but which is also an early example (possibly one of the earliest) of an ‘Uplift’ story (Science Fiction Encyclopaedia: “[Uplift] tends to denote an assisted leap of Evolution – specifically, the raising of nonsentient or otherwise handicapped beings to a level of Intelligence or technological capability comparable to or exceeding humanity’s.”)⁷
The narrator in this story is a surgically altered ape called Congo, who is raised in a human family by the doctor who performed the changes. The doctor is an unsympathetic character, but his wife isn’t:

Once or twice Doctor scowled, and once I overheard him talking to Mother just beyond the nursery door. I understood pretty well even then, and since that time I have filled in details of the conversation.
“I tell you, I don’t like it,” he snapped. “Showering attentions on that creature.”
She gave him a ready laugh. “Poor little Congo!”
“Congo’s an ape, for all my surgery,” he replied coldly. “Sidney is your son, and Sidney alone. The other is an experiment—like a shake-up of chemicals in a tube, or a grafting of twigs on a tree.”
“Let me remind you,” said Mother, still good-natured, “that when you brought him from the zoo, you said he must live here as a human child, on equal terms with Sidney. That, remember, was part of the experiment. And so are affection and companionship.”
“Ah, the little beast!” Doctor almost snarled. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t begun these observations.”
“But you have. You increased his brain powers and made it possible for him to speak. He’s brighter than any human child his age.”
“Apes mature quickly. He’ll come to the peak of development and Sidney will forge ahead. That always happens in these experiments.”
“These experiments have always been performed with ordinary ape-children before,” said Mother. “With your operations you’ve given him something, at least, of human character. So give him something of human consideration as well.”
“I’m like Prospero, going out of my way to lift up Caliban from the brute.”
“Caliban meant well,” Mother responded, reminding him of something I knew nothing about. “Meanwhile, I don’t do things by halves, dear. As long as Congo remains in this house, he shall have kindness and help from me. And he shall look to me as his mother.”  p. 68-70

Nevertheless Congo is eventually sold to the world of show business and tours the world as an exhibit. At one point he escapes into the African bush and finds his own kind:

After more days, I found my people, the Kulakambas.
They were as they had been in the dream, swinging in treetops, playing and gathering food. Some of the younger ones scampered through the branches, shrilling joyfully over their game of tag. They talked, young and old—they had a language, with inflections and words and probably grammar, I could see a little village of nests, in the forks of the big trees; well-made shelters, with roofs over them. Those must have been quickly and easily made. Nothing troubled the Kulakambas. They lived without thought or worry for the next moment. When the next moment came they lived that, too.
I thought I would approach. I would make friends, learn their ways and their speech. Then I might teach them useful things, and in turn they would teach me games. Already the old dream was a reality and the civilization I had known was slipping away—like a garment that had fitted too loosely.
I approached and came into view. They saw, and began to chatter at me. I tried to imitate their sounds, and I failed.
Then they grew excited and climbed along in the trees above me. They began dropping branches and fruits and such things. I ran, and they followed, shrieking in a rage that had come upon them from nowhere and for no reason I could think of. They chased me all that day, until nightfall. A leopard frightened them then, and me as well.
I returned, after many days, to the town by the sea.  p. 73

The climactic scene occurs when Congo is playing the part of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Before one of the performances the Doctor visits, and he tells Congo of his plan to repeat his experiment with many more subjects. Congo (spoiler) kills the doctor and the police take him away. The fact that he is only an animal and not subject to, or protected by, human law leads to his tragic end.
This is an impressive piece, and holds up quite well. Apart from the mature treatment of the theme, and a repeated reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the prose is a definite cut above the usual pulp product.

The second half of the magazine has no less than three stories by John Russell Fearn, two under pseudonyms. They are all pretty awful so I will try to be brief.⁸ The first, Red Heritage, is under his own name, and starts with two chapters where an alien scientist on Venus speaks to an assembled group about the environmental disaster they are experiencing. Rather than move to Mars (which may involve fighting the locals), the plan is to steal their water and air instead:

At length Kil-Dio spoke: “Gravity, as we well know, is as much a force as cosmic rays, light or heat. It has definable limits and its power can be increased or decreased at will—that we know from our levitators, which lift easily against the pull of gravitation. Also, we know it from our space machines which shield gravity and hurl us away from any gravitational field. We know that, even as ordinary radio waves can be heterodyned, so can a correct force operate to ‘heterodyne’ gravitational fields and render the part in question entirely free of gravitation. This, then, is our plan:
“Across space, directly to [Mars], we shall project a heterodyning beam, which, when it strikes [Mars], will encompass some one thousand miles of surface area. This heterodyning beam will be the exact center of what we might call a sudden uprushing vortex of water and funnel of force. That is to say, this funnel will be a beam having walls of vibration solid enough to withstand the sudden uprushing vortex of water and air. Obviously, with part of [Mars] degravitated and this force funnel immediately over that part, the air and oceans will be sucked up our force tunnel by the normal process of following the line of least resistance. But for our force tunnel they would spew Sunward, hence the presence of the tunnel to hold them in one fixed path, until they deluge down on the surface of this world.”  p. 80-82

Fortunately, this turgid data-dumping stops when the third chapter switches to the viewpoint of a Martian called Petlo, who is underground when the force tube strikes. He gets home to find his wife and son sheltering in the cellar.
After the attack ends, Petlo organises the survivors. In time he works out what has happened, and plots his revenge. A rocket is sent to Venus’s moon to blow it up, and send the spore infested debris to Venus. Meanwhile, Petlo puts huge anodes and cathodes into the poles of the planet and sends a pair of survivors to Earth with a racial memory that will enable them to trigger the device many generations later.
The last part of the story has one of the descendants recover those implanted memories. He watches Venus, and then, conveniently, sees the post-spore survivors of Venus head for Mars, where they aim to settle and this time hoover off the atmosphere of Earth. The Earthman sends a radio signal to turn on the polar battery: the remaining Venusian survivors fry.
The Martian section is more readable than the beginning and has a certain narrative verve, but the ridiculous plot has more holes than a colander.

Whispering Satellite is the second offering by Fearn and appears under his Thornton Ayre pseudonym. This actually has a good hook:

“Rocked in the cradle of the deep, I lay me down in peace to sleep—”
The flawless, basso-profundo voice ceased. Clark Mitchell stopped humming the tune that had prompted those notes and looked up across the crude table toward the great, heavy-stemmed flower standing in the Saturnshine streaming through the window.
Sometimes he rather regretted the time two earth-years before when he had taught this particular product of Titan’s Whispering Forest to sing. He knew it did it by air suction through its broad yellow face, vibrating in turn on hairlike vocal cords, but he’d never quite gotten over the uncanny effect of it.  p. 97-98

It then goes downhill with one of Fearn’s characteristic opening astronomical data-dumps (there is one in the previous story, too: “Venus, revolving once in 720 hours, was a world without clouds, without protection from a Sun only 63,000,000 miles away”):

Two years on Titan had done much to orient Clark into the strangeness of this little satellite flying round its primary in 15 days, 22 odd hours—a little desert island of a world, bathed in the torrid heat of Saturn 770,000 miles distant. Unlike Jupiter, the ringed world has cooled less swiftly and pours its warmth on its whole retinue of moons.  p. 98

The potboiler plot involves Clark’s crashed spaceship, his having been framed for murder on Earth by a woman he still loves, her appearance on the planet with her drunken father, and their perilous journey to the latter’s spaceship before the native ‘blue-biters’ nibble them to death.

The last Fearn story, this one as by Polton Cross, is The Mental Ultimate. This is another potboiler with a lot of makey-up super science, this time about a man with a massive intelligence who works his way through all the sciences, making various profound discoveries. Later, the narrator finds he can kill with a thought and manipulate matter. He then time-travels before eventually ending up in the far-future where he meets the last man on Earth, who proceeds to drone on about the narrator’s intelligence before telling him why he is shrinking—oh yes, I should have mentioned that daftness earlier.

This penultimate part of Galactic Patrol by Edward E. Smith has a mixture of good and bad parts, but mostly the latter. Kinnison passes out when he gets back to his ship after fighting the wheel-like aliens, but manages to contact the Admiral who organises a rescue. When Kinnison wakes up he finds himself in hospital, where he is a terrible patient (and, it would seem, a fourteen old one at that):

In a few days Kinnison was fully and alertly conscious. In a week most of the pain had left him, and he was beginning to chafe under restraint. In ten days he was “fit to be tied,” and his acquaintance with his head nurse, so inauspiciously begun, developed even more inauspiciously as time went on. For, as Haynes and Lacy had each more than anticipated, the Lensman was by no means an ideal patient. In fact, he was most decidedly the opposite.
Nothing that could be done would satisfy him. Ail doctors were fatheads, even Lacy, the man who had put him together. All nurses were dumb-bells, even—or specially?—Mac, who with almost superhuman skill, tact and patience had been holding him together. Why, even fatheads and dumb-bells, even highgrade morons, ought to know that a man needed food!
Accustomed to eating everything that he could reach, three or four or five times a day, he did not realize—nor did his stomach—that his now quiescent body could no longer use the five thousand or more calories that it had been wont to burn up, each twenty-four hours, in intense effort. He was always hungry, and he was forever demanding food. And food, to him, did not mean orange juice or grape juice or tomato juice or milk. Nor did it mean weak tea and hard, dry toast and an occasional softboiled egg. If he ate eggs at all he wanted them fried—three or four of them, accompanied by two or three thick slices of ham.
He wanted—and demanded in no uncertain terms, argumentatively and persistently—a big, thick, rare beefsteak. He wanted baked beans, with plenty of fat pork. He wanted bread in thick slices, piled high with butter, and not this quadruply-and-unmentionably-qualified toast. He wanted roast beef, rare, in great chunks. He wanted potatoes and thick brown gravy. He wanted corned beef and cabbage. He wanted pie—any kind of pie—in large, thick quarters. He wanted peas and corn and asparagus and cucumbers, and also various other worldly staples of diet which he often and insistently mentioned by name.
But above all, he wanted beefsteak. He thought about it days and dreamed about it nights. One night in particular he dreamed about it— an especially luscious porterhouse, fried in butter and smothered in mushrooms—only to wake up, mouth watering, literally starved, to face again the weak tea, dry toast, and, horror of horrors, this time a flabby, pallid, flaccid poached egg! It was the last straw.
“Take it away,” he said, weakly; then, when the nurse did not obey, he reached out and pushed the breakfast, tray and all, off the table. As it crashed to the floor, he turned away, and, in spite of all his efforts, two hot tears forced themselves between his eyelids.

It’s hard to know what to make of this ridiculous (but highly entertaining) passage, and I don’t know if I was more struck by (a) that hundreds of years in the future humans are still eating exactly what they did in the late 1930s, or (b) the image of a Lensman lying in a hospital bed blubbing because they bring him a poached egg on toast for breakfast and not something more to his taste. That said, I would wager this food fantasy passage read very differently to Astounding’s post-depression era audience.
After Kinnison recovers he goes to speak to Admiral Haynes:

“Well, sir, I am feeling a trifle low, but if you and the rest of them still think—”
“We do so think. Cheer up and get on with the story.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and before I go around sticking out my neck again I’m going to—”
“You don’t need to tell me, you know.”
“No, sir, but I think I’d better. I’m going to Arisia to see if I can get me a few treatments for swelled head and lame brain. I still think that I know how to use the Lens to good advantage, but I simply haven’t got enough jets to do it. You see, I—” He stopped. He would not offer anything that might sound like an alibi; but his thoughts were plain as print to the old Lensman.
“Go ahead, son. We know you wouldn’t.”
“If I thought at all, I assumed that I was tackling men, since those on the ship were men, and men were the only known inhabitants of the Aldebaranian system. But when those Wheelmen took me so easily and so completely, it became very evident that I didn’t have enough stuff. I ran like a scared pup, and I was lucky to get home at all. It wouldn’t have happened if— “He paused.
“If what? Reason it out, son,” Haynes advised, pointedly. “You are wrong, dead wrong. You made no mistake, either in judgment or in execution. You have been blaming yourself for assuming that they were men. Let us suppose that you had assumed that they were the Arisians themselves. Then what? After close scrutiny, even in the light of after-knowledge, we do not see how you could have changed the outcome.”
It did not occur, even to the sagacious old admiral, that Kinnison need not have gone in. Lensmen always went in.
“Well, anyway, they licked me, and that hurts,” Kinnison admitted, frankly. “So I’m going back to Arisia for more training, if they’ll give it to me. I may be gone quite a while, as it may take even them a long time to increase the permeability of my skull enough so that an idea can filter through it in something under a century.”
“Um-m-m.” Haynes pondered. “It has never been done. They are a peculiar race, incomprehensible—but not vindictive. They may refuse you, but nothing worse—that is, if you do not cross the barrier without invitation. It’s a splendid idea, I think; but be very careful to strike that barrier free and at almost zero power—or else don’t strike it at all.”  p. 126-127

When Kinnison gets to the planet, the Arisians let him through the barrier and he then undergoes a period of mental gladiatorial training, until such time as he can block his Arisian sponsor’s mental attacks. This section is the best part of the instalment as we find out more about the enigmatic Arisians.
Kinnison then goes and tries out his expanded powers on a nearby pirate base, as well as back home, where he mind-wrestles four other Lensmen and wins. Later, he tries two other men for murder, reading their minds and executing the guilty one. This latter is another example of the almost casual brutality of the so-called good guys in this novel, a trait I’ve mentioned before in a review of an earlier instalment.

The last chapter has Kinnison back at the pirate base, where he overhears that a hospital ship has been captured. He discovers, by mentally taking over the comms guy, that Mac the head nurse is on it. He rescues her from the captain while letting Mac know it’s him. He then foments a fight between the base commander and the comms guy.
One of the weaker of the six instalments.

The crude Cover is by Wesso, who also contributes Interior artwork along with Jack Binder (brother of Eando Binder), and Elliott Dold, Jr. Wesso’s illustrations look the best to me but I also liked a couple of Binder’s.

Power Plants of Tomorrow: Harnessing the Sun’s Rays by Willy Ley is an interesting science article looking at, believe it or not, alternative power sources, and for the usual reasons:

Professor Bernard Dubos had studied the problem of harnessing solar energy for many years before he delivered his famous lecture. He had studied the steadily increasing energy demands of civilization. He knew that the natural resources were dwindling rapidly. At the World Congress of Geologists, in 1913, it had been estimated that there would be no coal left in about a thousand years. In England and in Germany the resources would last only for about 200 years; in America for a little over 1500 years; in other countries for even shorter periods of time. This statement had been called pessimistic by others, because there are certainly still large unknown coal deposits in Africa, Asia and possibly on the Antarctic Continent. On the other hand, the demand for power had increased much more rapidly than it had been thought. It appeared probable that the World Congress of Geologists had even been optimistic.  p. 64

An estimate which has to be called conservative says that 1,000,000,000 h.p. will yell for fuel in 1970. Another 1,000,000,000 h.p. in automobiles, airplanes and ships is to be added to this figure. In 1970 there will be hardly any natural oil left and the coal deposits will probably be reserved for the chemical industries that need them much more badly than anybody else. In short, the situation is serious. New sources of power will have to be found and exploited to the utmost.  p. 65

The article concentrates on two proposed solar power projects, one of which is a direct application:

His power plant utilizes the fact that air on a hot plain, say an African desert, is hotter and denser than that one or two miles above the plain.
Actual measurements show that there is a difference of pressure of not less than 6.5 inches of mercury between sea level and 6500 feet altitude. If it were possible to build a large chimney, 6000 feet high, on such a plain, the “compressed” air at set level would try to escape through it. It would rise upward in the chimney with a speed about three times as fast as that of the strongest natural cyclones.
Such a chimney is a technical impossibility, if one thinks of it as standing free. But Dubos does not propose a free-standing chimney, even though his demonstration before the French Academy of Sciences may suggest the thought. He thinks of a long tube leaning against a steep mountain slope. The wind tube is to have a diameter of about 35 feet. At its bottom it is to flare out into a glass roof like that of a large hothouse, so that additional heat is built up. Since it is essential that the air, while rushing upward in the tube, does not lose much of its heat, the tube should not be constructed of metal. Light concrete suggests itself, therefore, because it has all the features desired: heat insulating properties, low price, light weight and sufficient resistance.
Dubos’ invention is not only amazingly simple, it also has the advantage of being easy to construct. There are no technical difficulties at all involved in the construction of wind tube and glass roof. One might only say that wind turbines of the size and of the capacity needed have not been built before. Unfortunately, the invention is not generally applicable. It assumes a mountain of medium height in the immediate vicinity of a deep-lying hot plain.
But these conditions prevail on many parts of the Earth where electric power would be welcome; Dubos himself thought principally of the Atlas Mountains in North Africa.
The session of the French Academy of Sciences ended with unanimous approval of Dubos’ ideas and a recommendation of his plans as a feasible means to harness solar power.  p. 65-66

The other project involves pumping water from the Mediterranean over the mountains to the Sea of Galilee (208 meters lower) or the Dead Sea (394 metres lower), producing hydroelectric power on the way down, with the water finally evaporating from the Dead Sea, or being used for irrigation.

Rocket Flight by Leo Vernon is another interesting article, this time on the mathematics of space flight. I didn’t follow all the algebra (my differential calculus days are long behind me) but it is fascinating to see this pre-spaceflight number-crunching, and the practical conclusions the author manages to deduce from the math:

First we might try putting more fuel in the rocket, but probably everybody will agree that it would be unreasonable to have more than the original weight made up of fuel. The second is that it will be best to try to increase the exhaust velocity. The third is the observation that it is advisable to get up and away as quickly as possible. The slower the rocket starts, the better chance gravity has to act on it and pull it back—with the consequence that still more fuel will be needed to build up to a high velocity.
It really looks as if the vital factor is exhaust velocity. With the present experimental values given by Ley, it would be possible to get a rocket up at fair velocity. But it couldn’t go very far out and have enough fuel left to make a decent landing. That won’t prevent us, though, from using our imaginations. It is always possible that in the not-too-distant future experimenters will find that higher exhaust velocity.  p. 112

A practical conclusion drawn by the author is that for actual flight into space, with a chance of getting back safely to Earth, he would want to be guaranteed an exhaust velocity of at least 160,000 feet per second before entering the rocket. p. 114

I looked to see if I could find an exhaust velocity figure for Vostok 1, but the data provided uses different measures. In any event the author’s calculations are challenged in later letter columns.

In Science Discussions there is a letter about time-travel, followed by Campbell’s reply (as Arthur McCann) to his own article on atomic power plants. He discusses the economics of power supply before philosophically musing about the benefits of research:

Research is not wasted human effort, because it can never be truly called unsuccessful. Though the desired goal may not be attained, the knowledge that the attempted course is a blind alley is valuable wisdom; it may, for instance, prevent the building of that unsuccessful atomic power plant that would stand a useless monument to human effort honestly expended, and forever lost to Man’s advancement.
Capital is concentrated human effort: interest the measure of its return in lightened labor. That is the only way to determine whether a thing is an advancement or a retrogression in Man’s evolution.  p. 153

Brass Tacks has a number of letters welcoming the return of the column (which has not appeared recently), and there are comments about the fiction and artwork. Galactic Patrol, and Arthur Burke’s novella, The Golden Horseshoe (November 1937), draw praise; de Camp’s The Isolinguals (September 1937) gets a couple of pans.

In conclusion, not a particularly good issue but an interesting one.
P.S. The reason there is a seasonal advert below is that I had originally planned this post on the 21^st of December, which I thought was the magazine’s 70th anniversary until I noticed that I’d looked up the copyright date for the January 1939 issue and not the January 1938 one (the 15^th December 1937). There is nothing like a missed deadline to take the wind out of your sails. . . .

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers states in A Requiem for Astounding:

The September, 1937 issue of Astounding was to be Tremaine’s last as editor.
[. . .]
At first there was nothing to intimate to the average reader that a change in editors had taken place: the magazine in those days did not list the name of the editor on the contents page as it was to do later. The “flavour” of the magazine in the last three issues of 1937 was still that of Tremaine, and remained so, substantially, until Tremaine left Street & Smith in May of 1938 and his backlog of stories was used up.  p. 48-49

There is much more specific information about Campbell’s early editorship in Fantasy Commentator #59/60, Spring 2011, by Sam Moskowitz and A. Langley Searles (available at Lulu.com and highly recommended). It has one article, Inside John W. Campbell, which uses his letters to Searles between 1936 and 1952, ‘as interpreted and annotated by Sam Moskowitz’:

For the sake of history, Campbell establishes beyond rebuttal the date he became editor of Astounding Stories. On Astounding Stories stationary, labeled “Editorial Department”, dated October 5, 1937, a letter was received by Swisher which said simply: “Dear Mr. Swisher; Hiya, Bob!” and signed “Sincerely, John W. Campbell, Jr., Editor.”
Swisher, his closest friend, had no indication that Campbell had been negotiating for the position. Tremaine, promoted out of the editorial capacity, needed a replacement in a hurry. Campbell was always under foot, and having been tutored by Mort Weisinger in some of the technical aspects of editing, as well as known to be on an almost desperate search for a job, was a likely candidate. Later information indicated that his starting salary was $30 a week.  p. 60-61

2. Avram Davidson’s first issue as editor of F&SF (April 1962) used stories bought by the previous editor Robert P. Mills. See footnote 4 here.

3. Fantasy Commentator #59/60 has this on what Campbell was doing in his first weeks in the job:

[Oct. 24] “I’m working on the editorial for the January, 1938 issue (apparently the first that Campbell had any editorial involvement with) and I’m announcing that the next issue, February, 1938, will be a ‘mutant’ issue, and the first of others to come. Watch for it! Ballyhoo! Hey-hey! And so forth…The change in this case is going to be the cover: For some months, I’m going to try to run a series of covers that will be genuine art-work, first-class work with none of the lurid-color idea that mags have been using. The subject of the first cover will be, for instance, Saturn as seen from Mimas (a moon) in accurate, astronomically calculated representation. It will illustrate a story, too (That cover was actually the Sun as seen from Mercury illustrating ‘Mercutian Adventure’ by Raymond Z. Gallun).”  p. 61-62

[Oct. 24] “I have finished Galactic Patrol.
[. . .]
“You know, one of the problems of editing is correction of the author’s manuscript. Now, what should one do with ‘space ship’? Should it be spaceship, space ship, or space-ship? And rocket tube? And rocket ship? And should “Earth” be capitalized? And can you have an earthquake on Mars? And do Martian plants grow in rich, black earth? And is Kinnison Kimball a gray Lensman, or a Gray Lensman?
“For awhile, I’m tied down by editing policy used in Galactic Patrol, which must be consistent, and with which the mag has to be consistent. But after February (1938). I’m going to cut loose and do some high and mighty deciding.”  p. 62

[Oct. 24] “We’re running a Fearn novelette in the January (1938) Astounding (‘Red Heritage’). It isn’t perfect, we know— I’ve tried to eliminate most of the utterly cracked ideas—but remember, we have to fill the mag, and that a lot of birds who pay two solid silver dimes for it like Fearn’s stuff.”  p. 62-63

[Oct. 30] “Re Fearn: I delighted in bouncing one of his wilder maunderings, “Wanderers of Ray” in which he had a super-science race build the solar system as a matter of convenience, then gave them space-ships so weak they had a helluva time pulling out of the gravity of Saturn. I took one of his, ‘Red Heritage,’ (Astounding Stories, January 1938), that really wasn’t too bad.
[. . .]
“I’m going to pass some. I know now I’ll have to. For instance: Binder’s new story, ‘The Anti-Weapon’. Actually, I’m allowing his anti-weapon—which happens to have an inconsistent, but actually unimportant explanation—as motivation for an interesting story.”  p. 65

Moskowitz’s observation about the January issue being the first that Campbell had any editorial involvement with is contradicted earlier in the same letter:

[Oct 30] “That ‘Time Contractor’ thing was purchased, edited, and set in type before I came along (by Eando Binder, Astounding Stories, December, 1937). Tremaine didn’t realize that (Dr. Ernest Orlando) Lawrence was a genuine, living character (the inventor of the cyclotron, 1931). I went over the pages and did some drastic and expensive rearranging on that thing as it was. What came out was real mild to the little honey Binder originally had (the entire incredibly dull story read like one of Campbell’s scientific explanations in one of his super science epics). Binder had his character discovering radio-elements, positrons, and various other things several years before Lawrence, and beat the Englishman to the neutron (the Englishman was named— I’ve forgotten it) . . .”  p. 65

So there is also an argument for the December issue being Campbell’s ‘first’. Other people point to the March 1938 issue—when the magazine changes its name from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction (see also Campbell’s comments from October 24^th about his intention to ‘cut loose and do some high and mighty deciding’ after the February issue). You could also point to later in 1938:

[May 18] “Street & Smith got a new president. The new president tired Mr. Blackwell, ex-Editor-in-Chief and Mr. Tremaine, ex-assistant-Editor-in-Chief. Rearrangements and changes followed, naturally, with the result that I am now all of Astounding. There isn’t any more. No assistants, no readers, no nobody. For a week or so me and the cat with flypaper on all four paws were about equally busy.
“Anyhow, that began to simmer down and quiet, when I found it necessary to stir it up a little more and wish some work on the ‘staff.” (That meant that until October, 1938 the strong influence of Tremaine’s direction would continue to be felt, after that it would be predominantly Campbell. His letters confirm what I wrote in my article ‘The Face of Facts,’ in Redd Bogg’s magazine. Skyhook, for Summer, 1952. At the time it was believed that Tremaine had left Astounding when Campbell was brought aboard in October, 1937. Tremaine extended his stay until May, 1938. This was also supported by an interview included in the above-cited article. Until Tremaine left, Campbell was acting as first reader on the choice of stories, submitting those he thought best to Tremaine who made the final decision. Of course, if Campbell slipped up on a good story and rejected it without ever showing it to Tremaine, a competitor got it. Tremaine’s reasons for leaving were exactly those stated in Campbell’s letters.)  p. 87

4. According to ISFDB F. Orlin Tremaine also used the Warner Van Lorne pseudonym on one occasion.

5. Whether it was the quality of his work or other factors, Nelson Tremaine’s short career as an Astounding writer was coming to an end: he would appear once more in the magazine with The Blue-Men of Yrano in the January 1939 issue. There were a few appearances in other magazines and that was it.

6. Fantasy Commentator #59/60 has Campbell explaining to Swisher the genesis of his story in this issue:

[Oct 04] Tremaine, when I last called on him, suggested that he needed a 12,000 word story within six days—would I please oblige. Ye Gods! I hadn’t an idea on tap—having just finished ‘Cloak of Aesir’, and having it home waiting, I felt all caught up. Stewed for three of the six days trying to get an acceptable idea to start with. A Don A. Stuart story plot wanted—in a hurry. Try it sometime. The harder you want ideas, the blanker your mind gets. Finally I got one, and set to work. High pressure work, but working kinda latish. Of course, to add to the fun Dona rejected the first five starts, by which time we were both groggy with words.  p.59

7. The ‘Uplift’ page at SFE is here. Wellman’s story doesn’t get a mention but last issue’s Mana by Eric Frank Russell does, even though the Uplift theme only surfaces at the end of what is essentially a last-man-on Earth piece. I’d also reference Wellman’s story ahead of de Camp’s soon to appear (and also mentioned at SFE) ‘Johnny Black’ stories too.

8. Fearn has three stories in this issue and one in the next, then, as far as I can see, never appears in Astounding again. Initially, I thought this was Campbell dumping all the pulp writers he didn’t like (as mentioned before Van Lorne was another who would contribute only one more story) but Campbell’s comments above would seem to belie this idea.  ●

Edited 18th November 2019, added artwork and links, and changed formatting.

ISFDB link

Editor, F. Orlin Tremaine

Fiction:
Out of Night • novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Don A. Stuart] ∗∗
Mr. Ellerbee Transplanted • short story by Jan Forman ∗∗
Rule of the Bee • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗
Galactic Patrol (Part 2 of 6) • serial by Edward E. Smith ∗∗
A Menace in Miniature • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun
Penal World • short story by John Russell Fearn [as by Thornton Ayre]
Stardust Gods • novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun and Robert S. McCready [as by Dow Elstar and Robert S. McCready] ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Howard V. Brown
Interior artwork • by uncredited (x2), Elliott Dold, Jr. (x3), H. W. Wesso (x3),
Into the Future • editorial by F. Orlin Tremaine
Ra, the Inscrutable • science essay by R. DeWitt Miller
Sleet Storm • science essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Science Discussions • letters

With this issue of Astounding Stories the magazine started to change. F. Orlin Tremaine¹, who had been the editor for five years and had made it the leading SF magazine of its day, was promoted to become an editorial director at Street & Smith, the publisher of the magazine. Between this issue and the November one John W. Campbell² took over the editorial reins. At the time Campbell was one of SF’s major writers, and he would go on to become probably the most important editor that the science fiction field would ever have. That said, the changes he made at Astounding were gradual, and the next few issues saw only minor alterations.³ The Golden Age period that started in July 1939 was still some way off.

The Cover by Howard V. Brown is a fairly garish, crude affair that was, for the time, a fairly typical Astounding cover. It would be a year or so before Campbell managed to improve the quality of the magazine’s cover and interior art.⁴
On opening this issue I was struck by the amount of advertising—apart from the contents page there are eight pages of adverts before you get to the first story, and for the usual stuff, ‘Train for a Good Job in Radio,’ correspondence schools, medication for your prostate, fistula, kidney, ‘glands,’ and so on.

The fiction leads off with Out of Night by John W. Campbell, Jr., writing under his Don A. Stuart pseudonym, a story presumably bought (like the contents of the rest of the issue) by outgoing editor F. Orlin Tremaine. It takes place on a far-future Earth dominated by the alien Sarn. It opens with Grayth, the representative of humanity, being told by the alien Sarn-mother that, to limit the future population of humanity, from now on there is to be a five to one ratio of women to men. There are two pages of talking head data-dumping done during this meeting, and I initially missed a key part, which is Grayth’s warning to the Sarn-mother about the ‘Aesir:’

Grayth looked at her steadily, deep-set iron-gray eyes unwavering on jewel-flecked golden ones. He sighed softly. “Your race does not know of the ancient powers of man; you are a race of people knowing and recognizing only the might of the atomic generator, the flare of the atomic blast as power. The power of the mind is great.
[. . .]
“But a crystallization has taken place during these forty centuries, a slow uniformity has built up. The mighty, chaotic thought wills of five hundred million men during three thousand generations were striving, building toward a mighty reservoir of powers, but their very disordered strivings prevented ordered formation.
“During a hundred centuries of chaotic thought, turbulent desire, those vast reservoirs of eternal, indestructible thought energies have circled space, unable to unite. During these last four millenniums those age-old forces have slowly united on a single, common thought that men destroyed by your race during the conquest have sent out.
“We of our race have felt that thing in these last years, that slowly accreting oneness of age-old will and thought, developing reality and power by the gathering of forces generated by minds released by death during ten thousand years. He is growing, a one from many, the combined thought and wisdom and power of the fifteen hundred billions of men who have lived on Earth. Aesir, he is, black as the spaces in which he formed. p. 12

Grayth returns to the human settlement, sets up a jamming device to prevent the Sarn-mother from listening in, and meets with the other leaders. After some discussion they conclude that she hopes to foment a civil war that will decimate humanity, and will then intervene to impose her will. Grayth knows that the other side will be led by Drunnel, an old rival in politics and love, and realises the only way to stop the Sarn-mother is to develop a device that will augment humanity’s developing telepathic powers.
In due course Drunnel gets various weapons from the Sarn, and discovers that the headbands they have received project a force-field that will protect the user not only from other humans but from the aliens as well. Civil war breaks out between the two sides, and this is engagingly described in a good fight scene where glow wands and force shields are repelled by a hail of bricks and rocks, and water, which short circuits the headbands providing the force shield. The fight continues but Grayth’s side cannot win. He agrees to surrender and stand trial if his men are freed.
Needless to say, at Grayth’s trial, Aesir finally turns up. Despite all the energy weapons the Sarn have, Aesir prevails. The Sarn mother changes her mind; all ends well.
Overall, this is a bit of a mess: the Aesir idea isn’t placed in the story particularly adroitly, and his appearance at the end couldn’t be more of a deux ex machina. Also, why is the Sarn mother allowed to survive? For the sequel? On the other hand, these shortcomings are offset by some good action, and the appearance of the Aesir at the end is quite dramatic. This was more of an action tale than I had expected from Campbell’s ‘Don A. Stuart’ pseudonym.

Mr. Ellerbee Transplanted by Jan Forman⁵ has a Mr Ellerbee at an exposition with his wife when he decides to slip off on his own:

Not only was he tired, not only was it hot, not only did his feet ache, but he thought that he was ill, and angry, too. Perhaps the last batch of hateful rollercoaster rides?, accompanying his flushed and shrilly screaming wife—she had a passion for roller coasters—had indeed upset his stomach. Or perhaps it had been the stifling heat at the dress parade his wife had made him sit through, possibly pleasant enough if he had been nearer to the models. Or perhaps he was irked at his wife’s attitude toward his suggestion that they go and visit Mlle. Sonia, who danced sensationally in the midway.
But now there was respite. For a brief and all too fleeting moment his wife was nonexistent, having retired to fix a shoe buckle which had given way under her enthusiastic promenading. Mr. Ellerbee stood ruminating, holding his hat in his hand and wiping the sweat from his nearly bald head with a large crimson handkerchief. And now, suddenly, his mind was made up. Very well, then, he would go and see this Mile. Sonia. And he sincerely hoped this dereliction would goad his wife. Frightened by this last thought he hurriedly put his hat back on his head and ducked into the crowd.
As he headed in the general direction of the midway, his spirit slowly ebbed. True, there was the midway, with its glamour, the raucous voices of its barkers, and the shrill confusion of its music; but afterward there would be questions, cross-examinations, there would be anger and recriminations, and, above all, his tearful wife in agonies of martyrdom and deep self-pity. Better to return, better to put temptation far away. But already in his mind’s eye he could see her sweeping out of the rest room, looking for him, and finding not a trace of him ; he could see her mouth harden into the familiar thin line, and the cold, glittering look come into her eyes; and he knew it was much too late to retrace his steps. In for a penny, in for a pound, thought Mr. Ellerbee, furtively advancing in the direction of Mile. Sonia. p. 40

He ends up not at Mlle. Sonia’s, but in the Future City exhibit next to it. He ends up at the top of the Power Tower in a room marked ‘Private,’ where his nosiness takes him to the actual future.
Here he runs in to varying degrees of trouble, and his strange behaviour eventually gets him taken to a ‘Euthanatkin,’ before he is arrested and put on trial. The interrogation he undergoes from the judges has one or two interesting aspects—they are disgusted by his claim to have been born naturally—and they eventually send him away to be used for experiments:

So much had happened to Mr. Ellerbee during the last forty-eight hours that he was numb. Nothing mattered any more, neither the pain nor the fear. Even his memory was slowly fading from his consciousness. He barely remembered being dragged out of the courtroom, the terrifying journey in the rocket plane, halfway round the earth it seemed, the cold wastes that surrounded the tall towers of the First City, the grim buildings of the First College of Science, the humiliating tests, the countless pricks of hypodermics, the strange rays that made him reel and faint. Even the incredible sight of seeing all his entrails spread out along a table was fading into the growing haze of his subconscious. p. 48

At the end he somewhat arbitrarily ends up back in the present, where he learns that a madman placed what he claimed was a time machine in the Power Tower. His wife is not impressed by his absence.
This is a fairly standard plot but it’s a well told and very well written story with a some nice touches, and it reminded me of the little H. G. Wells I’ve read.
Rule of the Bee by Manly Wade Wellman is a reminder (to me anyway) that this writer was writing pulp SF long before he became better known for the likes of his ‘Silver John’ folklore fantasy in F&SF.
Unfortunately this story shows little if any of his later prowess—it is mostly a load of nonsense about a Dr Geiger and an experiment to increase the size of a honeybee to that of a horse. Geiger does this with a ray device:

The ray burned for another hour. Twice during this hour Geiger went to a bench stacked with bottles and there mixed carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other materials. Carefully weighing and checking them, he poured them into the great tank just above the glowing lens. In proportion as the bee grew to kitten-size, cat-size, dog-size, the mixture in the tank dwindled. When the doctor again switched off the power, the prisoner had increased to fill its soap box. p. 52

The enlargement takes place in stages, and Luther (Geiger’s black assistant) suggests to the doctor three times that they remove the creature’s sting. Needless to say, the Good Doctor pooh-poohs this suggestion, stating bees are ‘social animals,’ ‘easily domesticated,’ etc., etc. After this it is just a matter of waiting to see who gets shanked first, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying it isn’t the Good Doctor . . . .
There is a moderately interesting twist at the end where the bee hypnotises Shimada (Geiger’s other, Japanese, assistant) with its big multifaceted eyes, and it later brings back a beehive so the occupants can receive the same treatment. An acid attack by Geiger stymies its plans.
This is written in a readable enough style even if it does ignore the inverse-square law and, initially at least, have an idiot plot.

The undoubted highlight of the issue for fans of the time would have been the start of the new ‘Lensman’ series by ‘Doc’ Smith. Galactic Patrol began in the previous issue, and recounts the graduation and further adventures of Kimball Kinnison, a Lensman and member of the Galactic Patrol. He is implanted with a Lens, a pseudo-living telepathic jewel matched to its wearer by the enigmatic Arisians. Lensmen (eventually) have unlimited authority and scope to combat crime in a galaxy overrun with pirate ships that are controlled by the evil Boskone.
I was curious to see how I would get on with this as in my teens I picked up a copy of Triplanetary and made no progress. When I recently started reading some of the Golden Age Astoundings I deliberately started not with the July 1939 issue but the February 1940 one, so that I wouldn’t have to read the sequel to this, Gray Lensman. Now I am sort of looking forward to it: I was pleasantly surprised with this one; not only did I find it a reasonably easy read (it probably helped that I only read one of the half-dozen twenty to thirty page instalments every few days), but some parts are quite entertaining. You can actually lose yourself in some of it—the story can be quite breathless and exciting—and I also found out where a lot of those fan expressions came from (‘Clear Aether,’ ‘have the jets for it,’ ‘Boskone,’ etc., etc.). On the other hand Smith has a multitude of bad habits: excessive violence, squirm inducing banter between Kinnison and his allies, a habit of describing things as ‘undescribable’ so he doesn’t have to bother, etc., etc.

This episode places Kinnison on the planet Delgon after he and his sidekick VanBuskirk have managed to get vital information about the new power source that the pirate spaceships have, and which is causing problems for law enforcement. The pair are pursued by many pirate ships and are trying to hide on the planet. However, they are attacked by Catlats, before being unexpectedly saved by Worsel, a dragon-like alien. He is a scout for his species, who live on the neighbouring planet of Valentia, and who the sadistic Delgonians prey upon. Worsel soon teams up with Kinnison and VanBuskirk.
The pair listen to Worsel’s account of how all of the earlier scouts from Valentia have disappeared, and Kinnison uses his Lens enabled telepathic power to find out what happened to them. This passage shows the degree of violence in the novel, which sometimes tends towards the sadistic:

In a dull and gloomy cavern there lay, sat, and stood hordes of things. These beings—the “ nobility” of Delgon—had reptilian bodies, somewhat similar to Worsel’s, but they had no wings and their heads were distinctly apish rather than crocodilian. Every greedy eye in the vast throng was fixed upon an enormous screen which, like that in a motion-picture theater, walled off one end of the stupendous cavern.
Slowly, shudderingly, Kinnison’s mind began to take in what was happening upon that screen. And it was really happening, Kinnison was sure of that. This was not a picture any more than this whole scene was an illusion. It was all an actuality—somewhere.
Upon that screen there were stretched out victims. Hundreds of these were Velantians, more hundreds were winged Delgonians, and scores were creatures whose like Kinnison had never seen. And all these were being tortured; tortured to death both in fashions known to the Inquisitors of old and ways of which even those experts had never an inkling.
Some were being twisted outrageously in three-dimensional frames. Others were being stretched upon racks. Many were being pulled horribly apart, chains intermittently but relentlessly extending each helpless member. Still others were being lowered into pits of constantly increasing temperatures or were being attacked by gradually increasing concentrations of some foully corrosive vapor which ate away their tissues, little by little. And, apparently the piece de resistance of the hellish exhibition, one luckless Velantian, in a spot of hard, cold light, was being pressed out flat against the screen, as an insect might be pressed between two panes of glass. Thinner and thinner he became, under the influence of some awful, invisible force, in spite of every exertion of inhumanely powerful muscles driving body, tail, wings, arms, legs, and head in every frantic maneuver which grim and imminent death could call forth. p. 65

The three of them subsequently go to the city and, as a result of various pitched battles (which are nearly all fights to the death), they manage to destroy the Delgon overlords. Then they take their ship to Valentia. On arrival they set work building a communications jammer (a device that didn’t exist before they dreamt it up), capture half a dozen pirate ships (more fights to the death), and set off for Earth.
This section isn’t the best part of the novel⁶ (the episode on Delgon is little more than an unnecessary subplot) but, overall, it is okay.

I’ve never been that impressed by the little I’ve read of Raymond Z. Gallun (too crude, too pulp), and the two contributions he has in this issue didn’t change my mind. His solo effort is A Menace in Miniature, which starts with an overwrought data-dump from one of the members of a spaceship crew who are exploring a rogue planet that has entered the solar system:

“Paxtonia is just another name for hell!” he whined into his ether phone, addressing his two companions. “It’s just a broken piece of an inhabited world that exploded maybe ten billion years ago! It was shot away from that world’s parent star! Why did it have to wander into our solar system, and establish itself in an orbit around our sun? Nothing could live on it except the spirit of death!
“That’s what it must be—the spirit of death! Those ships that blew up when they got too close to Paxtonia— Some smart people think that maybe there’s an intelligent agent here who did that by exploding the old-type rocket fuel. But there’s nothing here that anybody can find, except the ruins of buildings and machines, and a lot of empty silence! Still, a week ago there were twelve men in this expedition—and now there are only three of us left alive. Please! There isn’t any sense in our staying on Paxtonia! We’ve got to get out of this devil’s paradise—at once!” p. 88

His forebodings prove prescient as he is almost immediately killed, leaving two crewmembers alive, the pilot and a scientist. As the atmospheric pressure is dropping they deduce they must be under attack from tiny projectiles, so they retreat to the war turret with the Scarab, their mini-probe. They use this to build a tiny, sand grain size probe to hunt for the invaders. They release this into the spaceship and find, and partly destroy, them. This, of course, completely overlooks the fact that a tiny probe looking for similar objects in a spaceship would be nigh-on impossible to find given the vast relative volume to be searched.
The pair then follow the few surviving projectiles back to the tiny alien operators, at which point the scientist trots out some eugenics nonsense about how they bred themselves to their diminutive size. Pretty awful.
Penal World by John Russell Fearn is almost as bad. A prisoner on Jupiter sees a small ship land some miles off and decides to make for it and escape the planet. The rest of the story details his journey to the ship. He meets the governor’s daughter along the way—who also has plans to leave the planet—and saves her from the local wildlife. Later, they meet an intelligent telepathic Jovian who helps them on their way: his payment is the smelling salt crystals that the prisoner used to revive the daughter.
Stardust Gods by Raymond Z. Gallun and Robert S. McCready starts with a meteorite, a ‘green star’ landing beside a small town. It knocks out the power, suspends all life and movement, and makes a ‘copy’ of the town which it then takes into deepest space. There it meets up with three other green stars that have been to Venus, Mars and Jupiter.
Meanwhile, Bill, who lives outside the town, wakes up to the whiff of phosgene, something he recognises from his time in the Great War. He goes outside and sees a changed environment:

Now Bill surveyed what lay beyond the smeary window. The mountains were there beyond doubt, even though, to the best of his knowledge, they must have sprouted overnight. At their bases, visible through a greenish-yellow murk, was a jagged plain of gray, pumicelike stone. Nearer, the plain ended in an abrupt drop, forming a sort of cliff, the face of which was glassy and smooth, as if fused by terrific heat.
[. . .]
Then he saw a sun, huge and red, rising in the gap between two monster mountain peaks. A little higher up, and apparently smaller, though this latter condition was probably due to a greater distance, was a second orb, quite like the first. Both were fuzzy and blurred; nor was this entirely an atmospheric phenomenon, caused locally by the murk in the air. These twin, or binary, suns were not ruddy because they had passed the hot glory of their prime; rather, as the age of stars is measured, they were very new, having just contracted from the tenuous nebular stage. Wispy rings of nebulous matter still belted the equators of both. In ages to come, these suns would contract farther and grow hotter. p. 128

The rest of the story falls into two sections. The first has Bill teaming up with a neighbourhood inventor to solve the phosgene problem. After this they go to organise shelters for the townspeople.
The second section forms the bulk of the story and has Bill, the scientist and his female assistant travelling by car to a nearby airfield (fortunately the inventor is also a pilot). At this point a swarm of flying crystal like aliens appear and one breaks a window and enters the car. During this contact, and a later one, we learn that the aliens have brought the townsfolk here to torment them for a bit of ‘fun.’
As they explore the other domes they have various adventures until, eventually, their gas mask filters become contaminated. Fortunately Bill’s dog turns up wearing a gasmask (!) with a bottle of chemicals to refresh their filters. How the dog manages to smell anything in a mask, or cover the distance and terrain so quickly, is not explained.
Finally, the aliens get bored and leave—which was pretty much how I was feeling by this point.
Despite the description above, the first three-quarters of this is an okay read, but when the dog turns up any remaining credibility vanishes.

The Interior artwork, like the cover, is primitive stuff although I thought there were a few illustrations by Wesso⁷ that have a certain charm, and maybe one of Dold’s. (The illustrations here are all Wesso’s apart from the uncredited illustration for Campbell’s own story.)
Into the Future by F. Orlin Tremaine is a rather high flown editorial:

Ra, the Inscrutable by R. DeWitt Miller is a science article on Radium that is full of hyperbole but not much detail. There is some interesting information on the uses of Radium to treat cancer, but some of it is just mad:

Atomic bombs are not yet a reality in warfare of man against man, but they are already in use in the struggle of man against cancer. Strangest of all, patients who have had within their bodies the ultimate force—subatomic power—feel no pain. In fact, some patients seem to feel a strange exhilaration. One woman in whose body four grams of radium had been placed overnight, refused to sleep. “I didn’t want to lose a moment of that strange feeling of joy and exhilaration,” she explained. p. 105-106

Sleet Storm by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an interesting science article about meteorites and whether they will be a threat to spaceships during their voyages.
Science Discussions hasn’t yet become Brass Tacks, and is exactly what it says. It is subtitled ‘An Open Forum of Controversial Opinion.’ The letters begin with discussion about Atlantis, pro and con. Other subjects include déjà vu, magnetic pole location, and lightning. There is a lot of amateur theorising going on.

Overall, reading this essentially Tremaine-period issue⁷ was an educational as much as a pleasurable experience. If the Golden Age of SF interests you then it is probably worth reading a few of these transitional issues to see the changes that occur between Campbell’s first issue and the acknowledged beginning of that period, the July 1939 issue of Astounding.

1. F. Orlin Tremaine at SFE.
2. John W. Campbell Jr. at SFE.
3. As Alva Rogers notes in A Requiem for Astounding, p. 49:
   At first there was nothing to intimate to the average reader that a change in editors had taken place: the magazine in those days did not list the name of the editor on the contents page as it was to do later. The “flavour” of the magazine in the last three issues of 1937 was still that of Tremaine, and remained so, substantially, until Tremaine left Street & Smith in May of 1938 and his backlog of stories was used up.
   Mike Ashley offers more details in The Time Machines, p. 107:
   Campbell began at Street & Smith in October 1937, which meant that he started to have an editorial impact from the December issue, although he did not take over the full editorial reins until March 1938. Nevertheless his presence was rapidly noticeable in a variety of changes. In the January 1938 issue Campbell instigated ‘In Times to Come’, whetting readers’ appetites for the next issue. With the March issue he began ‘The Analytical Laboratory’, reporting back on the popularity of stories in previous issues.
   There are other changes that have been pointed out to me. The January editorial mentions that the February issue will be the first of a series of occasional ‘mutant’ ones, an example of evolution in practice. These issues will test out ‘genuinely new’ ideas, the Brass Tacks letter column will be used to validate them, and any successful ideas will be retained. More significantly perhaps, the magazine changes its name from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction with the March issue.
4. If you look at the ISFDB galleries of covers for 1937, 1937, 1938 and 1939, you will see a huge improvement in quality at the end of 1938, helped by a more modern cover redesign on the December issue of that year.
5. A cursory search revealed no further information about Jan Forman. It is hard to believe that this is the only story from this writer.
6. For the record (as I’ll probably never read the all of these mags) the sections of the serial I liked the best were the first (an almost Leni Reifenstahl-ish graduation ceremony followed by space battles with pirates), part three (this one has a couple of chapters that are from Boskone’s henchman Helmuth’s point of view, and has an interesting part where he meets the Arisians), part four (more space battles) and part six (more interesting aliens on the way to a satisfying conclusion. The ending is rather abrupt though).
7. According to SFE, Campbell eventually replaced Wesso with other artists. According to ISFDB, after a short spell illustrating elsewhere he appears to have stopped altogether. This may have been partly to do with a 1940-onwards staff artist job at the New York Times, which is mentioned in his Pulpartists page. Just over a decade after these illustrations appeared he died, age 53.

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Revised 17/09/2017 to remove the references about this issue being Campbell’s first as editor.