Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Andrew Porter

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
Midsummer Century • novella by James Blish ♥♥♥
The Anthropiranhas • short story by Joseph Renard
The Recording • short story by Gene Wolfe ♥
No Other Gods • short story by Edward Wellen ♥
No Vacancy • short story by Jesse Bier ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Judith Blish
James Blish: Profile • essay by Robert A. W. Lowndes
The Hand at Issue • essay by Lester del Rey
James Blish: Bibliography • by Mark Owings
Coming Next Month
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Films: Kubrick’s Earth Odyssey • by Baird Searles
Books • by James Blish
Moon Over Babylon • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Key to Cover

This issue is another of the F&SF Special Issues that celebrate the work of one writer, in this case James Blish. The Cover is by Judith Blish, his wife.¹ A Key to Cover is provided inside the magazine so, if you think you are an expert on Blish’s work, have a go at identifying the various elements and then check below. (Not only do I provide a review this time around, but a quiz too!)²

The feature story is a long novella by Blish called Midsummer Century.³ I rated this quite highly when I read it in my youth, and I was curious as to it would hold up.⁴
The story starts with an atypical passage, for SF, describing the class and politics of Martels, the young astronomer who is the protagonist of the story:

Martels, unmarried and 30, was both a statistic and a beneficiary of what his British compatriots were bitterly calling the brain-drain, the luring of the best English minds to the United States by higher pay, lower taxes, and the apparent absence of any class system whatsoever. And he had found no reason to regret it, let alone feel guilty about it. Both his parents were dead, and as far as he was concerned, he owed the United Kingdom nothing any more.
Of course, the advantages of living in the States were not quite so unclouded as they had been presented to him, but he had never expected anything else. Take the apparent absence of a class system, for instance: All the world knew that the blacks, the Spanish-Americans, and the poor in general were discriminated against ferociously in the States and that political opposition of any kind to the Establishment was becoming increasingly dangerous. But what counted as far as he was concerned was that it was not the same sort of class system.
Born of a working-class family in the indescribably ugly city of Doncaster, Martels had been cursed from the outset with a working-class Midlands dialect which excluded him from the “right” British circles as permanently and irrevocably as if he had been a smuggled Pakistani immigrant. No “public” school had been financially available to his parents to help him correct the horrible sound of his own voice, nor to give him the classical languages which in his youth had still been necessary for entry into Oxford or Cambridge.
Instead, he had ground, kicked, bitten and otherwise fought his way through one of the new redbrick polytechnics. Though he emerged at the end with the highest possible First in astrophysics, it was with an accent still so atrocious as to deny him admittance to any but the public side—never the lounge or saloon—of any bar in Britain. p. 5-6

After a little more of this, and a brief description of his job in America as a radio astronomer, he falls down the waveguide of a large telescope and finds himself 25,000 years in the future.
Martels does not find immediately find out this information, of course, but initially wakes and sees what appears to be a museum. It then becomes apparent that he is in a receptacle that contains an intelligence called Qvant. He watches a primitive human come into the museum and question Qvant about a problem his people are having. Martels speaks up during this transaction: the native flees and in a subsequent conversation Qvant tells Martels where and when he is before attempting to eject him and failing:

“It appears that I cannot be rid of you yet,” Qvant said. The tone of his amplified voice seemed to hover somewhere between icy fury and equally icy amusement. “Very well, we shall hold converse, you and I. It will be a change from being an oracle to tribesmen. But sooner or later, Martels-from-the-past, sooner or later I shall catch you out—and then you will come to know the greatest thing that I do not know: What the afterlife is like. Sooner or later, Martels . . . sooner or later . . .”
Just in time, Martels realized that the repetitions were the hypnotic prelude to a new attack. Digging into whatever it had been that he had saved himself with before, that unknown substrate of the part of this joint mind that belonged to him alone, he said with equal iciness:
“Perhaps. You have a lot to teach me, if you will, and I’ll listen. And maybe I can teach you something, too. But I think I can also make you extremely uncomfortable, Qvant; you’ve just shown me two different ways to go about that. So perhaps you had better mind your manners, and bear in mind that however the tribesmen see you, you’re a long way from being a god to me.”
For answer, Qvant simply prevented Martels from saying another word. Slowly, the sun set, and the shapes in the hall squatted down into a darkness against which Martels was not even allowed to close his unowned eyes. pp. 12-13

The story subsequently charts the game of cat and mouse between the pair as Martels tries to learn more about this world. Every time he thinks he is getting nearer to forming a plan that will help him get back to his own time Qvant will fall silent for months. Nonetheless, Martels eventually discovers a number of things: that Qvant is a brain in a box, and that the natives can communicate with their dead ancestors; he also learns that the ‘Birds’ are a threat to humanity and will wipe out what is left of the human race in the near future.
When Qvant appears to be sleeping another native appears, and Martels speaks and urges him to get his tribe to make alliances with the others against the Birds. The native, thinking he is being mocked, leaves. Qvant has meantime awoken and laughs: he had previously told Martels of the futility of this course of action.
In the middle and final sections Martels manages to escape by taking possession of one of the natives’ bodies and heads south through the Birds’ territory to what was Antarctica, home of Terminus and the survivors of Rebirth 3.
As you can gather from the above, this story has something of a Van Vogtian feel to it (the far future setting, the sudden changes of direction, the hand-waving explanations of sentience, etc.) and I wondered if this was a conscious decision by Blish. What sets him apart from Van Vogt is that the narrative is easier to follow, and Blish’s writing and vocabulary is superior. He also takes the time to do a number of quarter or half page digressions on various matters that he wants to discuss or describe (the social and political observation referred to above, the mechanism of telepathy and Rhine’s experiments, etc., etc.).
As it turned out, I didn’t rate this as highly as I did when I originally read it but found it an entertaining read for all that. But probably one not to take too seriously.

There is the usual selection of Special Issue non-fiction. James Blish: Profile by Robert A. W. Lowndes is an interesting profile of Blish that is studded with quotable parts:

I’ll never forget the subject of our conversation around a table at the old Dragon Inn on West 4th Street, Manhattan, that evening. Here we were, a group of science fiction editors, writers, and fans, welcoming a fellow enthusiast on leave from the army, and what were we talking about? Science fiction? Fantasy? The shape of the postwar world with its science fiction aspects? No; what Jim wanted to talk about was FINNEGANS WAKE.
Don Wollheim’s argument was that Joyce’s final work was little more than an elaborate puzzle for the elite literateur. I hadn’t read it, so I just listened. Jim’s argument was that if you applied yourself to it, the story came to a great deal more than a melange of puns and esoteric references. And right there, although I did not realize it at the time, I had been given one of the keys to this multitalented, charming, and irascible personality I would get to know, respect, and love in later years: any work of literature, or any other art worth paying attention to, makes demands upon the reader, listener, or viewer. p. 66

Jim had not started with the old Gernsback publications, like most of the rest of us, back then, and only read some of the stories from them much later. I was astonished to learn, upon suggesting to him that his CITIES IN FLIGHT series owed something to Edmond Hamilton’s old Air Wonder Stories serial, CITIES IN THE AIR (1929), that not only had he never read the story—he’d never even seen the magazines with Frank R. Paul’s fascinating drawings of the flying cities. p. 68

His own writing has always tended toward the intellectual, but when emotion and feeling are called for, you will find it there in the story in proper proportion. Even sentiment may appear at times, but always controlled. One of my favorite story endings appeared in the magazine version of the novelet he did with Norman L. Knight, “The Shipwrecked Hotel” (part of the novel, A TORRENT OF FACES). “And they lived happily ever after, but it wasn’t easy.” You won’t find it in the book version; it just doesn’t belong as the final sentence of a connected episode. p. 70

The second of the Advent books [More Issues at Hand, a book of criticism] shows a slight mellowing of the waspish qualities; he says in his foreword: “While I still believe that it is desirable to be merciless to a bad story, I am no longer quite so sure that the commission of one represents flaws in the author’s character or horrid secrets in his ancestry.” p. 71

It is an essay that is definitely worth reading.
There is one final quote of note:

At 50, with developed interest, and recognition, in numerous fields (he’s still working on a book relating to music “ the hard way” ), we may not see quite so much more science fiction from Jim as we have in the past. p. 71

Unfortunately, Lowndes was correct, but not in the way he expected: Blish would die four years later of cancer, age 54.

The Hand at Issue by Lester del Rey is an OK, if rather dry, appreciation that finishes with del Rey stating ‘he hasn’t, in my opinion, gone above the general average he maintained between 1950 and 1960’! He does caveat this by asking ‘has the last decade only been an incubation period for even higher levels?’ but it is odd to read this in what I presume is meant to be a celebratory overview.
There is also James Blish: Bibliography by Mark Owings. As I’ve said before, in the days before ISFDB and the like these bibliographies were like gold dust.
As well as the normal Special Issue non-fiction, Blish also contributes the review column, Books. He is a great critic and as he covers the books there are lots of illuminating snippets. In his comments about Gardens One to Five by Peter Tate I learnt something about surrealism:

Thus summarized, the story does sound like an authentic dream, and thus to fall properly within the surrealistic canon, which as originally defined was the artistic representation of materials from the unconscious mind. p. 103

And this about the serial versus book version of Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny:

All but the veriest newcomers to F&SF will recall Zelazny’s JACK OF SHADOWS, which began here in July 1971 as a two-part serial—though this fact is unacknowledged in the Walker book. The book version does not contain any new material of consequence . . . p.103

And there is this resonating comment about Fun with Your New Head by Thomas M. Disch:

. . . the high polish of the writing itself—is not only welcome but essential, for the one thing all the pieces do have in common is that they are all determinedly downbeat, as most New Wave material seems to be. I haven’t the power (nor even the wish) to prescribe Tom Disch’s world-view for him, but I found sharing it all in one gulp a depressing experience. I recommend these stories for both originality and craftsmanship, but I do caution you to read only a few of them at a sitting. p. 104

The rest of the short fiction is a motley collection. The Anthropiranhas by Joseph Renard is a ludicrous story about small men appearing in tap water and eating people alive (they are a mixture of piranha and human, if I recall correctly). An alcoholic flea-circus trainer manages to organise some of them for an act as the world goes through a crisis. This all grinds to a halt with a lame punchline. Awful.
The Recording by Gene Wolfe Story is about a young boy whose uncle has promised to buy him a record (wax cylinder type) to play on the family phonograph. As they go into town to buy one the uncle becomes unwell but the boy, rather than getting the doctor, completes the errand and buys the much desired record. By the time he gets back to his uncle he has died. He never has a chance to listen to record but has nightmares of it containing his uncle’s voice.
This reads, for the most part, like an accomplished weird tale, but the mundane ending disappoints those expectations.
No Other Gods by Edward Wellen has a computer at the Galactic Hub destroying the universe, all apart from itself and a human couple on a spaceship. The computer offers to place them in a time loop of their happiest time. The couple start arguing about what that was: a contrived ending to an artificial story.
No Vacancy by Jesse Bier is the longest story in this group (probably a novelette) and is a rambling story about a couple who end up back in the old Wild West after their car breaks down and they go and look for help. They find a town, and before too long (spoiler), they end up in the middle of a gunfight between a man called Lester and Slade, the sheriff-elect. After a certain amount of further gun-play they escape.
The story is framed by the couple’s interrogation in a police station (well, I say couple but all the writer has the wife do is weep and then faint). This section doesn’t progress matters so the whole thing ends up being little more than an extended anecdote.

The other non-fiction includes Films: Kubrick’s Earth Odyssey by Baird Searles, which reviews A Clockwork Orange (he didn’t like it as much as 2001: A Space Odyssey). Coming Next Month mentions special reports on Science Fiction and the University by Thomas Clareson and Philip Klass (William Tenn), as well as associational book reviews and a piece by Isaac Asimov, Academe and I. There is also a Cartoon by Gahan Wilson (these were always hit and miss for me, the latter this time around).
Finally, Moon Over Babylon by Isaac Asimov is an interesting essay that starts with him in a hotel on a Sunday morning talking to a Seventh Day Adventist. It goes from there to the phases of the moon in Babylonian times and the peculiarities of our calendar. In particular, Asimov focuses on the week and specifically how you cannot easily tell what day of the week it is on any given date without reference to a calendar. He also explains why the Sabbath is Saturday for some people and Sunday for others. At the end of his essay Asimov says our current system is nonsensical and he will suggest an alternative in the June issue.

Overall, this issue is worth a look for the material by Blish and Asimov.

1. The cover Judith Blish produced for Impulse #1 (as by Judith Ann Lawrence) can be seen here.
2. The cover key:
   
3. ISFDB says that the book form of the work is an ‘expansion of the version published in ‘‘Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction’’ in April 1972.’ Meanwhile, the introduction in the magazine says ‘MIDSUMMER CENTURY will be published in hard covers by Doubleday, but not one word has been cut in the version you are about to read.’ p. 5 (and it appears they have reduced the type size to squeeze it all in).
   An OCR word count of the magazine vs. book version shows 29,200 vs. 29,300 words.
   Also, for what it is worth, there is a missing line halfway down the left hand column on p. 40 of the magazine version: ‘atedly long tubular skirt. Or perhaps’.
4. It didn’t diminish your appreciation of Blish’s books when the Arrow editions had covers like this:

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical copies.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Gideon Marcus: Galactic Journey

Fiction:
The Only Game in Town • novelette by Poul Anderson ♥♥♥
A Divvil With the Women • reprint short story by Eric Frank Russell [as by Niall Wilde] ♥♥♥+
The Blind Pilot • short story by Nathalie Henneberg (translation of Au Pilote Aveugle by Damon Knight) [as by Charles Henneberg] ♥♥♥
Bug-Getter • short story by Reginald Bretnor ♥
Final Gentleman • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ♥
A Little Girl’s Xmas in Modernia • reprint short story by David R. Bunch ♥♥
The Galactic Calabash • short story by G. C. Edmondson ♥♥♥
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble • short story by Holley Cantine ♥♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XXII • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton]

Non-fiction:
Cover • Emsh
In This Issue…
Coming Next Month…
To JULIA, not to gaze at Flyinge Sawcers • poem by Anthony Brode
Those Crazy Ideas • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Backward, Turn Backward • poem by Randall Garrett

The Only Game in Town by Poul Anderson is one of his ‘Time Patrol’ stories. This one has two agents, Manse Everard and John Sandoval, going back in time to thwart a Mongol expedition sent by the Kublai Khan to conquer America. During this expedition, Everard suspects that the Time Patrol personnel in the far future may be manipulating time to their own ends.
This is an engaging mix of story and history, and has some of Anderson’s lovely descriptive prose, such as this scene where the two men are sitting at a campfire:

The fire blazed up in a gust of wind. Sparingly laid by a woodsman, in that moment it barely brought the two out of shadow, a glimpse of brow, nose, cheekbones, a gleam of eyes. It sank down again to red and blue sputtering above white coals, and darkness took the men. p.15

However, the ending is a little weak: part fortunate circumstance, part time-travel deux ex machina.

While compiling the contents list for this one I was surprised to discover that A Divvil With the Women is actually by Eric Frank Russell (according to ISFDB, it is a variant of Heart’s Desire, published in the British magazine Science Fantasy #16, November 1955).¹ It is a colourfully told story about a drunk Irishman:

Well, I don’t suppose you noticed that paragraph in the Irish Independent last March, did you now? A right awful tale it told to any man sober enough to crawl but drunk enough to understand the whole of it.
Hold on to your glass while I tell you. This happens in Dublin itself which is the world’s finest city, God save the dirty, dissolute place. And it happens to Patrick Magonigal who is the blackest hearted scoundrel that ever got conceived behind a billboard. p.32

Magonigal is approached by Shatain (Satan) and asked to collect some holy water from a church, which Shatain himself obviously can’t do. In exchange Shaitan promises to make him irresistible to women. This short piece has a clever ending, if you like it as I did, or a feeble joke ending if you don’t.

The Blind Pilot by Nathalie Henneberg is a translation by Damon Knight of Au Pilote Aveugle (Fiction, July 1959), the first of a series of French stories that Knight would translate.²
The editors mention in In This Issue… that this story comes from F&SF’s French edition (edited by Maurice Renault), explaining that this foreign edition of F&SF uses mostly translated stories from the US magazine but substitutes some of the original content with stories written by Frenchmen. ³ They also add that Charles Henneberg died before this piece was published in France, but that the name ‘Charles Henneberg’ was used as a signature for the collaborative efforts of Charles and his wife Nathalie. According to ISFDB, this one is by her alone, and SFE gives the impression that we have a complicated Henry Kuttner/C. L. Moore situation here, at least for the material before Charles Henneberg’s death.⁴
The story itself gets off to a strong start and reads like the kind of work that Roger Zelazny would produce several years later:

The shop was low and dark, as if meant for someone who no longer knew day from night. Around it hung a scent of wax and incense, exotic woods and roses dried in darkness. It was in the cellar of one of the oldest buildings of the old radioactive district, and you had to walk down several steps before you reached a grille of Venerian sandalwood. A cone of Martian crystal lighted the sign:
THE BLIND PILOT
The man who came in this morning, followed by a robot porter with a chest, was a half-crazy old voyager, like many who have gazed on the naked blazing of the stars. He was back from the Aselli—at least, if not there, from the Southern Cross; his face was of wax, ravaged, graven, from lying too long on a keelson at the mercy of the ultraviolets, and in the black jungle of the planets.
The coffer was hewn from a heart-wood hard as brass, porous here and there. He had it set down on the floor, and the sides vibrated imperceptibly, as if a great captive bee were struggling inside. p.37

In this pawnshop scene a blind space pilot called North, his mutant brother Jacky (who has hooks for hands and who wheels himself about on a trolley) and a destitute spacer discuss the amount of money the latter can be advanced for the alien in the heart-wood box.
Later on, Jacky goes to a movie and then returns to his brother’s shop. He hears faint music and experiences a vision of being immersed in an ocean and then surfacing to a strange alien sky…. He and his brother subsequently see a newscast that includes footage of a drowned man at the docks—the one who pawned the alien. Jacky goes to the library to research the creature and he learns that one of the types of animal on the planet is a manatee-like species:

“Manatees? What are they?” asked Jacky, suddenly apprehensive.
“Herbivorous, sirenian mammals which live on Earth, along the shores of Africa and America. Manatees sometimes grow as long as three meters, and frequent the estuaries of rivers.’’
“But—’sirenians’?”
“A genus of mammals, related to the cetaceans, and comprising the dugongs, manatees, and so on.’’
Jacky’s eyebrows went up and he cried, “I thought it came from ‘siren’!”
“So it does,” said the robot laconically. “Fabulous monsters, half woman, half bird or fish. With their sweet singing, they lured voyagers onto the reefs—” p.42

Jacky continues to make discoveries about the creature while his brother has visions of being in space again. The rest of the story blends these two strands and the spacer’s drowning.
While it is a piece worth reading it doesn’t manage to sustain the level it achieves at the start and there are a couple of elements that confused me towards the end, even after rereading it. (Spoiler: something hits the roof when the shop is raided by the militia, perhaps North’s body, which shows the effects of travelling in space. Any evidence of the reality of North’s visions would run counter to the Siren myth introduced into the story, I would suggest.)
Notwithstanding this criticism, I’ll be looking for more of her/his/their translated work.

Bug-Getter is a short-short by Reginald Bretnor about a struggling artist plagued by crickets who has a visit from some tiny aliens. They agree to get rid of them for six of his paintings, delivered immediately, and a dozen more after the job. Two years later they come to collect. This has a punchline ending and a fairly lame one at that.
Final Gentleman by Clifford D. Simak is a longish novelette about a writer called Harrington who decides that he has come to the end of his writing career. The same day he is interviewed by a journalist, and Harrington is surprised when he is told there is no record of his birth or other personal history.
After the interview Harrington goes to his Mother’s house, but she is not there: he finds a woman who claims she has lived there for fifteen years. He goes to a coffee shop and starts to reflect on whether his life has really been a delusion. He recalls a shadowy figure in his past:

And suddenly Harrington was back again in that smoky, shadowed booth where long ago he’d bargained with the faceless being—but no longer faceless. He knew by the aura of the man and the sense of him, the impelling force of personality, the disquieting, obscene feeling that was a kind of psychic spoor. p.85

This is all slowly developed and has the feel, for the first half or so, of the kind of horror story that progressively builds a sense of unease. Unfortunately, it ends up having an unconvincing SF rational (spoiler: Harrington is eventually led to a predictive computer that is a front for aliens. He kills them and consequently frees the human race from their intervention). Overlong and unconvincing.
A Little Girl’s Xmas in Modernia by David R. Bunch (Coastlines, Fall 1958) concerns a young girl going to her partially robotic father and asking him to replace the star on her Xmas tree. After this they go to visit her mother and brother.

As they walked along, over the yard to Mother’s place, she kicked up snow and chortled and laughed and told off-color jokes—she had heard them on the programs—almost like a normal little girl should. Father tracked dourly through the unmarked snow under the featureless gray sky and thought only how all this nonsense of walking so early was making the silver parts of his joints hurt, and before he’d had his morning bracer, too. Yes indeed, Father, for the most part, was flesh only in those portions that they had not yet found ways to replace safely. He held on grimly, walking hard, and wished he were back in his hip-snuggie thinking chair where he worked on universal deep problems. p.105

There is no particular story as such, just a short but pleasant visit to Bunch’s robotic world of Moderan (called Modernia here in this early story).
The Galactic Calabash by G. C. Edmondson is the third of the ‘Mad Friend’ stories and it starts with two men and their wives visiting a Mexican couple. Once they arrive they get a tour around the poultry farm and processing unit (content you don’t find in many SF stories….) Back in the house they become aware of electrical interference to the television picture. Some time later (spoiler), and by way of what they think is a large pumpkin-like vegetable that has exploded in the oven, one of the two visitors reconciles this with the TV signal and realises an alien invasion has been averted.
I know this synopsis makes it seem rather an unlikely prospect but it is an entertaining and colourful piece.
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble by Holley Cantine starts with its narrator becoming disillusioned with left-wing politics:

The group to which I then belonged—it was called the Ultra Revolutionary Left Socialist Workers’ council, or something equally grandiose and pretentious—had been reduced by internal dissension to about 14 members, and there were rumors of an impending faction fight which might well split it still further. My comrades were all either narrow fanatics or callow youths, and their intemperance and wordiness increasingly had been getting on my nerves. p.116

After he inherits some money he moves to a house in the country, where he dabbles with magic and masters a doubling spell. After a period where he uses the spell sparingly to provide the material goods he requires, he uses the spell on himself so he can produce enough members for a brass band. All the copies are pretty much the same as him but the drummer seems more like his old self, and has a revolutionary attitude….
The story then turns into an ‘if this goes on’ tale. A neat idea but not entirely convincing.
Last is Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XXII by Reginald Bretnor, which is an OK pun for a change that involves vampires, undertakers & etc.

The Cover for this one by Emsh is not only a seasonal effort but is unusual for another couple of reasons: first, it illustrates a reprint; secondly, that reprint is the story by David R. Bunch. Bunch wrote a number of idiosyncratic stories and I can’t say that they ever struck me as being cover material. I suspect this is the first and only time his work was selected for this purpose.
In This Issue… and Coming Next Month… together occupy a page. Most of the space is spent discussing Poul Anderson’s novelette, Charles Henneberg’s story, and thanking Dorothy Cowles Pinckney for sending them the magazine with David R. Bunch’s contribution.
There are two poems, or perhaps more accurately, one poem and one piece of doggerel. To JULIA, not to gaze at Flyinge Sawcers is a poem by Anthony Brode that appears to be a pastiche of one of the seventeenth century poet Robert Herrick’s many ‘Julia’ poems.⁵ Backward, Turn Backward by Randall Garrett is about Pluto coming closer to the sun than Neptune in 1979.
Those Crazy Ideas, Isaac Asimov’s supposed science essay, is about what it says. He lists the factors that are required to come up with creative ideas.
Books: And the Truth Shall Drive You Mad by Damon Knight reviews a number of items. There is a relatively long section on The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and he has this to say about Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley:

The hero is more solidly drawn than most of Sheckley’s protagonists, and the early part of the story is satiric and funny. But this is Sheckley’s first novel, a long way from the five-thousand-word length in which he has done most of his work: and the second half of the book trails off into a disorganized scattering of episodes, many of them perfunctorily written. p.67

He ends his column with this:

In One Against Herculum (an Ace Double, with Andre Norton’s Secret of the Lost Race, 35¢), Jerry Sohl has written the most featherbrained s-f novel of the year, unless that honor belongs to Robot Hunt, by Roger Lee Vernon (Avalon, $2.95).
The mildly inebriated novels of Leonard Wibberley have many devoted followers, of which I am not one. I couldn’t get past p. 84 of The Quest of Excalibur (Putnam, $3.50), but if you liked previous Wibberleys, go to this one, & bless you. p.68

An issue of F&SF with a number of good if not great stories.

1. ISFDB lists this Russell story as a variant of the one that originally appeared in Science Fantasy but an OCR word count puts them within fifty words or so of each other (out of 2,000). A brief comparison reveals a few words changed/omitted, and the last line from the Science Fantasy version is cut: ‘It’s a real terrible story and I wouldn’t believe a word of it if I wasn’t telling it myself.’ Not quite a ‘variant.’ Personally, I’d reserve that kind of terminology for something like the magazine and book versions of Keith Roberts’ Corfe Gate.
2. Damon Knight edited a collection of stories he translated titled Thirteen French Science Fiction Stories (1965). The content listing is here at ISFDB. Five of the translations were first published in F&SF.
3. Fiction was a long running magazine: 412 issues by the beginning of 1990, according to SFE. I have a couple of dozen of these (part of an abortive attempt to learn French) and they have a number of French stories in them as well as review columns that consist of pages and pages of tiny dense type.
   The Fiction cover below by Jean-Claude Forest illustrates Henneberg’s The Blind Pilot:
   The contents page:
   
4. Nathalie Henneberg’s bibliography at ISFDB and her page at SFE.
5. Robert Herrick is a character in Thomas Burnett Swann’s novel Will-O-The-Wisp (Fantastic , September & November 1974) and includes some of his poetry (which led me to pick up his Selected Poems). Herrick lived to an exceptional age for his times, dying at the age of 83 in 1674. His Wikipedia page.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
C. C. Finlay, F&SF Blog
Gideon Marcus, Galactic Journey

Fiction:
Christmas Treason • novelette by James White ♥♥♥♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLVII • short story by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton] ♥
A Time to Keep • short story by Kate Wilhelm ♥
Interplanetary Sex • short story by Jay Williams
The Deer Park • short story by Maria Russell ♥♥
Please Stand By • short story by Ron Goulart ♥♥
Prelude to a Long Walk • short story by Nils T. Peterson ♥♥
Progress • novelette by Poul Anderson ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Mel Hunter
The Modern Demonology • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Books • by Alfred Bester
To the Stars • poem by James Spencer

This issue was one of the last few to be edited by Robert P. Mills before Avram Davidson took over in April. It not only has a Xmas cover but a Xmas story too, and a very good one at that.

Christmas Treason by James White is about a secret group of exceptional young children with telepathic and telekinetic powers who attempt to solve the puzzle of how Santa manages to deliver so many presents at the same time:

Richard shook his head. “None of the grown-ups can say how exactly it happens, they just tell us that Santa will come all right, that we’ll get our toys in time and not to worry about it. But we can’t help worrying about it. That’s why we’re having an Investigation to find out what really happens.
“We can’t see how one man, even when he has a sleigh and magic reindeer that fly through the air, can bring everybody their toys all in one night . . .” Richard took a deep breath and got ready to use his new, grown-up words. “Delivering all that stuff during the course of a single night is a logistical impossibility.”
Buster, Mub and Greg looked impressed. Loo thought primly, “Richard is showing off,” and Liam said, “I think he’s got a jet.” p.7

After some more discussion, their leader Richard sends the three boys off looking for large caverns as he thinks there is a chance that this is where they may find Santa’s secret toy factories. The boys have the ability to travel to places that closely match what they can visualise in their minds, and it isn’t long before one of them finds something:

In Liam’s mind was the memory of a vast, echoing corridor so big it looked like a street. It was clean and brightly lit and empty. There was a sort of crane running along the roof with grabs hanging down, a bit like the ones he had seen lifting coal at the docks only these were painted red and yellow, and on both sides of the corridor stood a line of tall, splendid, unmistakable shapes. Rockets.
Rockets, thought Richard excitedly: that was the answer, all right! Rockets were faster than anything, although he didn’t quite see how the toys would be delivered. Still, they would find that out easily now that they knew where the secret cavern was.
“Did you look inside them for toys?” Greg broke in, just ahead of the others asking the same question.
Liam had. Most of the rockets were filled with machinery and the nose had sort of sparkly stuff in it.
All the ones he had looked at were the same and he had grown tired of floating about among the noses of the rockets and gone exploring instead. At the other end of the corridor there was a big notice with funny writing on it. He was standing in front of it when two grown-ups with guns started running at him and yelling nonsense words. He got scared, and left. p.10-11

Matters are interrupted by the children having to return to their various houses in different parts of the world to be present for mealtimes and naps, etc. Meanwhile Richard thinks about a recent visit to a store that had lots of toys in it, and recalls his parents’ conversation as his dad offered to buy his mother a piece of jewellery:

Then Mummy had said, But John, are you sure you can afford it? It’s robbery, sheer robbery! These storekeepers are robbers at Christmas time!
Guards all over the place, Greg’s theory, and storekeepers who were robbers at Christmas time. It was beginning to make sense, but Richard was very worried by the picture that was forming. p.13

Alarmed by the conclusions Richard has reached, the group formulate a plan that will ensure children throughout the world get their Xmas presents!
This is both seasonal and charming, and has all the elements you would want in such a story: it is cleverly plotted, amusing, features cute, precocious children, has an appropriate amount of sentimentality, and (spoiler) an ending that involves world peace. A very good novelette.¹

I don’t particularly like Feghoots, and Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLVII by Reginald Bretnor is no different from all the others. All I will add is that readers should contrast and compare this with the previous story for genuine wit.

A Time to Keep by Kate Wilhelm is about a man who has visions when he opens doors: he crosses a bridge in the pouring rain and sees an old man accosted by two youths; he skates with children and gets stuck on the opposite side of the river from them; he is part of a huge mob and discovers he is the one they are pursuing; he is a member of a jury pressured into finding a man guilty.
The man has an epiphany at the end, but how these visions inform the final scene rather escaped me. It is well-written if not ultimately coherent.

Interplanetary Sex by Jay Williams is less a short story than a ‘humorous’ article about female company for pilots on the way to Mars.² It is full of this kind of thing:

The whole thing could be simplified by having the pilot and his assistant get married before the voyage commences. There are several strong objections to this course of action. If you take a young newlywed couple and lock them in a cramped, metal room full of machinery, probably they will not be likely to notice, for the first couple of months, that it isn’t the Plutocrat-Hilton. Things will be different by the time they reach the asteroids, however. By the six hundredth serving of vitamin capsules and K-rations, the husband will begin talking about Mom’s can-opener, and the wife will begin noticing that he doesn’t bother to press his space-suit any more. By July, they won’t be speaking to each other, and they would still be a considerable distance from their goal. p.41-42

This one is really very poor.

The Deer Park by Maria Russell is, according to ISFDB, the only SF story published story by this writer. It starts with a Minister of Defence for the Terrana Hegemony in a deer park with his companion Ronde. The Minister appears to have the ability to will things into existence via the ‘qopot,’ so when Ronde wants to see a fight between a buck deer and a lion, he obliges. Later when he wakes from a doze and finds his arm numb from Ronde lying on it he flicks her out of existence.
A visiting delegation from a far off planet then appears and matters become a little confusing (and I read it twice). The visitors want a fleet of ships to fight off aliens, and after some discussion the Minister obliges. He then goes on board the ship himself. At this point he becomes aware that his world is virtual and it—the ‘mamiraj’—starts to disintegrate around him.
Puzzling, yes, but its vivid images make it an interesting if not totally successful piece.

Ron Goulart’s Please Stand By is one of his ‘Max Kearny’ stories. Kearny, who side-lines as an occult detective, has a friend called Dan who confides in him that he has been turning into an elephant, but only on national holidays. Max investigates and finds that a girlfriend of Dan’s and an animator called Westerland are involved. This is an entertaining story but a kitchen sink one, with various things lobbed in to keep it on the boil. Some of the individual plot elements (spoiler), such as Dan changing into an elephant, are never satisfactorily resolved (at the end of the story this problem just stops).

In Prelude to a Long Walk, Nils T. Peterson channels his inner Bradbury in this short, efficient and well written tale. Two cities grow and sprawl around the land an old man owns. Peterson makes clear his feelings about this, consumerism and TV. Not SF, not that I was bothered.

Progress by Poul Anderson is the second story in his ‘Maurai’ series, a post-holocaust sequence centred on the political machinations of the nation that has now replaced New Zealand.³
It starts off on a Maurai catamaran, which has supposedly had engine trouble and is now adrift. A Beneghali airship comes to their aid and lowers men who help them to raise their sales and get to port. The three strong Mauri crew, two men and one woman, are there to spy on the Beneghali island as they suspect there is a secret science project running in the mountains.
In port they meet a Coradon (American) called Lorn—who they know is an astrophysicist. Pleased at the prospect of company Lorn insists they stay at his house. During this initial meeting one of the three Maurais, Alisabeta, asks a question that is too direct and gets what seems like a telepathic warning from one of the other crew members: the moment passes.
At dinner that night the talk again turns to politics, in particular the Beneghali population pressures and the Mauri’s policy of non-imperialism with more backward peoples—unless it is necessary, of course, when they send in their psychodynamicists.
Ranu, the leader of the three Maurais, sneaks out that night and soon finds himself hanging underneath an airship headed for the interior.
Generally, this is a well-written adventure:

Darkness closed in, deep and blue. The sea glimmered below; the land lay black, humping up toward stars that one by one trod brilliantly forth. Yellow candlelight spilled from windows where the dinner table was being laid. Bats darted on the fringe of sight. A lizard scuttled in the thatch overhead. From the jungle came sounds of wild pigs grunting, the scream of a startled peacock, numberless insect chirps. Coolness descended layer by layer, scented with jasmine. p.101

Ranu goes on to discover (offstage, which I am not sure was a good idea) what the Beneghali’s have hidden in the mountain and, by use of ‘telepathic’ contact, warns the other two and tells them to leave immediately and raise the alarm. The rest of the story kicks up a gear and is a fast paced affair.
If it had continued in this vein until the very end this would have been, like the first story in the series, a superior and entertaining piece. Unfortunately it rather sabotages itself in the last chapter, which takes place many years later, when Lorn is in N’Zealann and decides to look up the Maurai crew who came to the island.
The first thing that damages the story is the explanation that Alisabeta provides to Lorn (after the latter has managed to track her down) about how they were able to communicate:

Are you telepaths, or what?”
“Goodness, no!” She laughed, more relaxed each minute. “We did have portable radios. Ultraminiaturized sets, surgically implanted, using body heat for power. Hooked directly into the nervous system.
It was rather like telepathy, I’ll admit. I missed the sensation when the sets were removed afterward.” p.125

Radio sets hooked directly into the nervous system? Apart from sounding rather far-fetched, it doesn’t fit in with the technological level of the society portrayed.
Worse is the latter part of this final chapter where Anderson unleashes his inner Heinlein and has Alisabeta perform as a mouthpiece for the Maurai nation’s interference in the affairs of other countries:

“Nevertheless,’’ [Lorn] said sharply, “you do interfere.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “That’s another lesson we’ve gotten from history. The ancients could have saved themselves if they had had the courage—been hard-hearted enough—to act before things snowballed. If the democracies had suppressed every aggressive dictatorship in its infancy; or if they had simply enforced their idea of an armed world government at the time when they had the strength to do so—Well.” She looked down. Her hand left his and went slowly across her abdomen; a redness crept into her cheeks. “No,” she said, “I’m sorry people got hurt, that day at Annaman, hut I’m not sorry about the end result. I always planned to have children, you see.” p.128

I don’t know what is worst about this: the irritatingly simplistic ‘ends justify the means’ rationalisation of the Maurai nation’s ‘benign’ imperialism, or the smugness with which it is stated. That said, it probably didn’t sound as naive in the 1960’s as it does now.

The non-fiction this issue includes Mel Hunter’s previously mentioned Xmas Cover. It is part of a series of covers he did for the magazine featuring this robot.
In The Modern Demonology Isaac Asimov starts his science essay talking about entropy and heat transfer before extending the idea of entropy (meaning in this case an increase in the disorder of a system) to other areas such as writing and evolution. There is more than the whiff of angels dancing on the heads of pins here, and it ends up more like theology essay than a science one.
Books by Alfred Bester covers four items this time around and starts with a rave review for The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger:

…is a remarkable book, half Grand Guignol, part parable, vaguely science fiction, not at all a novel. It is a stream of metaphilosophical consciousness. It is a reflection on the contrast between XIXth century idealism and XXth century materialism. It is a penetrating revelation of the thinking of a self-destructive man. It is, like all unusual books, wonderfully impossible to categorize. p.84

Bester later has this to say about Arthur C. Clarke after reviewing A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke:

It’s all theoretically interesting, but not quite dramatic enough for the taste of this department, which is why we opened our review with the reference to Mr. Clarke’s English background. He demonstrates the point we’ve often made before; that English authors seem to lack the emotional impact and dramatic drive of their American colleagues. A Heinlein, a Budrys, or a Sturgeon in the same story would not only have interested you; they’d have made you sweat big drops. p.86

There is also a poem, To the Stars, by James Spencer, and a Statement of Circulation showing an average of 56,276 copies sold over the last twelve months. Magazines today only dream of circulations like that. Finally, the classified adverts in the Marketplace are always worth looking at. Two of the bookshops listed are named after animals (Werewolf Bookshop and Aardvarks Fantasy). Come to think about it, are werewolves animals or people? Amongst other items there are handmade Mexican wallets available (this before NAFTA), Nudes of Jean Straker from Soho in London, and “Apache Tears,” Native American good luck stones, supposedly.

Worth getting for the James White story if you don’t have any of the anthologies it appeared in and, maybe, the Poul Anderson novelette.

1. This was quite widely reprinted for a Xmas story, making it into two ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies and three Xmas ones as well as others. Its publication history on ISFDB is here.
2. Mills also published Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—” the previous year (F&SF, March 1959), which also touches on the theme of unrelieved male sexual tension in space. Reviewed here.
3. The first story in the ‘Maurai’ series, The Sky People (F&SF, March 1959), is reviewed here.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Of Time and Third Avenue • short story by Alfred Bester ♥♥♥
The Gorge of the Churels • short story by H. Russell Wakefield ♥♥
The Shape of Things That Came • short story by Richard Deming ♥
Achilles Had His Heel • short story by Joseph H. Gage ♥♥
The Rag Thing • short story by Donald A. Wollheim [as by David Grinnell] ♥♥
The Cocoon • short story by Richard Brookbank ♥
The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles • short story by Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright] ♥♥
Beasts of Bourbon • short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥
Jane Brown’s Body • novella by Cornell Woolrich ♥
Dress of White Silk • short story by Richard Matheson ♥♥

Half of this issue is taken up with Jane Brown’s Body, a reprint novella by Cornell Woolrich (All-American Fiction, March-April 1938), a response to reader demand for short stories with the odd longer novelette: the editors ask for feedback on this short-novel experiment.
To begin with this is an intriguing and atmospherically written piece about a rather nervous Dr Denholt driving a car through the night with what would seem to be an unconscious young woman on the back seat:

Three o’clock in the morning. The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil-drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere behind a rise of ground.
Two other, fiercer, whiter moons, set close together, suddenly top the rise, shoot a fan of blinding platinum far down ahead of them. Headlights. The humming burgeons into a roar. The touring car is going so fast it sways from side to side. The road is straight. The way is long. The night is short. p.61-62

The tension builds when he stops at a railway crossing and is observed by a man in the bus alongside, and once more as he almost runs out of fuel. He is then stopped by a policeman for speeding but talks his way out of it by explaining he is taking the woman on the back seat to a hospital. Eventually he reaches a remote house, and takes her to his laboratory where he gives her an injection in the back of her neck. It becomes apparent that she is dead and that he is trying to bring her back to life and, over the next few hours, he succeeds but all her memories and personality seem to have vanished leaving her with the mind of a newly born child….
This first part, although it is somewhat dated ‘elixir of life’ fiction, isn’t actually that bad but matters rapidly take a turn for the worse. At the beginning of chapter three a new character is introduced called Penny O’Shaughnessy, who has just crashed his aircraft near the doctor’s house:

Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn’t roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn’t bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through the clouds through which to spot something flat enough to come down on; he doesn’t like bailing out anyway, hates to throw away a good plane.
This one lying all over the side of the mountain around him is not so good any more, he has to admit. The first thing he does is feel in his pocket, haul out a rabbit’s foot, and stroke it twice. Then he straightens up, hobbles a short distance further from the wreck, turns to survey it. Almost instantly the lightning, which already stunned him once in the air, strikes a nearby tree with a bang and a shower of sparks. It cracks, comes down with a propeller-like whirr of foliage, and flattens what’s left of his engine into the ground.
“All right, you don’t like my crate.” O’Shaughnessy grumbles, with a back-arm swing at the elements in general. ‘“I believed you the first time!” p.72

After making his way downhill he comes to a wire fence that triggers an alarm and brings a young woman to see what is happening. It is Nova, the woman that Dr Denholt brought back to life a couple of years earlier. He has a strange conversation where she reveals that she does not know what a telephone or aeroplane is. This is cut short when Denholt turns up to admit him to the house and tend his wounds.
From this point on it is mostly just pulp nonsense, and not even good pulp nonsense at that (multiple spoilers follow). O’Shaughnessy hears from Nova about her repeated injections; the doctor tries to slip him a mickey but fails; O’Shaughnessy proposes to Nova and they later escape.
The plot becomes even more ludicrous once O’Shaughnessy and Nova are in Chicago. O’Shaughnessy is talking to a low-level mobster about a job that involves locating some stashed loot from the air, and the former recounts a tale of the death of a young girl who was with their now imprisoned boss when he hid the money. She was being interrogated about where he had hidden it before she committed suicide. When Nova appears he is badly startled and leaves. Subsequently, persons unknown try to get hold of Nova—she is the gangster’s ex-moll!
This is followed by yet another daft subplot that involves a Chinese man fortuitously turning up as the couple are just about to go on the run: he offers O’Shaughnessy a job for a Chinese warlord, so the pair of the them end up in Shanghai after much (inaccurate) gunplay during their escape from Chicago.
The final section involves O’Shaughnessy coming home after several weeks away to find out that the lack of injections has finally had an effect on Nova. He discovers this when they go out to a restaurant and he tries to put a huge diamond ring he has bought on her finger:

He takes the three-thousand-dollar ring out of his pocket, blows on it, shows it to her. “Take off your glove, honey, and Iemme see how this headlight looks on your finger—”
Her face is a white, anguished mask. He reaches toward her right hand. “Go ahead, take the glove off.”
The tense, frightened way she snatches it back out of his reach gives her away. He tumbles. The smile slowly leaves his face. “What’s the matter don’t you want my ring? You trying to cover up something with those gloves? You fixed your hair with them on, you powdered your nose with them on— What’s under them? Take ‘em off, let me see.”
“No, O’Shaughnessy. No!”
His voice changes. “I’m your husband, Nova. Take off those gloves and let me see your hands!”
She looks around her agonized. “Not here, O’Shaughnessy! Oh, not here!”
She sobs deep in her throat, even as she struggles with one glove. Her eyes are wet, pleading. “One more night, give me one more night,” she whispers brokenly. “You’re leaving Shanghai again in such a little while.
Don’t ask to see my hands. O’Shaughnessy, if you love me …”
The glove comes off, flops loosely over, and there’s suddenly horror beating into his brain, smashing, pounding, battering. He reels a little in his chair, has to hold onto the edge of the table with both hands, at the impact of it.
A clawlike thing—two of the finger extremities already bare of flesh as far as the second joint; two more with only shriveled, bloodless, rotting remnants of it adhering, only the thumb intact, and that already unhealthy looking, flabby. A dead hand—the hand of a skeleton—on a still-living body. A body he was dancing with only a few minutes ago.
A rank odor, a smell of decay, of the grave and of the tomb, hovers about the two of them now.
A woman points from the next table, screams. She’s seen it, too. She hides her face, cowers against her companion’s shoulder, shudders. Then he sees it too. His collar’s suddenly too tight for him.
Others see it, one by one. A wave of impalpable horror spreads centrifugally from that thing lying there in the blazing electric light on O’Shaughnessy’s table. The skeleton at the feast! p.107-108

As you can probably gather the remainder of the story picks up considerably as it continues in an equally entertaining and ghastly manner. They head back to the States to seek help from Dr Denholt, although only after O’Shaughnessy decides to sell his aeroplane and book passage on a steamship that is going to take several weeks to return home. Not the smartest of decisions, but this course of action provides scenes such as this one, which occurs after the rest of the ship have discovered her condition:

Days pass. The story has circulated now, and turned the ship into a buzzing beehive of curiosity. People find excuses to go by her on the deck, just so they can turn and stare. O’Shaughnessy overhears two men bet that she won’t reach Frisco alive. She tries to smoke a cigarette through the lips of the mask one afternoon, to buoy up his spirits a little. Smoke comes out of her hair-line, under her chin, before her ears. A steward drops a loaded bouillon-tray at the sight of her. Nova stays in her cabin after that. p.112

Unfortunately these lurid developments are too little too late for what is mostly a hard-boiled gangster story. I have no idea what the Boucher and McComas were thinking of in resurrecting this: it would perhaps be of some passing interest in a late-thirties pulp for its initial and final sections but it is completely out of place in an early 1950’s F&SF.

Apart from one notable exception that I’ll come to at the end, the rest of the fiction isn’t up to much either, the majority of it passing notions that have been written down as opposed to proper stories.
The Gorge of the Churels by H. Russell Wakefield is a story about a couple in Imperial India going for a picnic with their child and man servant. Before they go their man-servant attempts to dissuade them, stating that the location gets its name from the spirits of women who have died in childbirth and who attempt to steal living children to ease their pain. You can probably tell what happens once they get there making this far too straightforward a tale, but at least it is an atmospheric one with a good sense of place.
The Shape of Things That Came by Richard Deming is a story set in 1900 that concerns a writer who has written a story set fifty years in the future after using his scientist uncle’s time-travelling nightshirt! He is told by his editor that the story is unbelievable, and there is a weak twist ending (spoiler) involving a parallel Napoleonic world.
Achilles Had His Heel by Joseph H. Gage is a western tale that tells of what happens when the Ferryman from the Styx passes through a ranch and leaves some of the river’s water behind. One of the ranch hands later becomes ‘intolerable,’ immune to knives and bullets, etc., until he plays in a card game and becomes over-amused that is…. Not a bad twist on the Achilles’ heel idea.
The Rag Thing by Donald A. Wollheim is an example of one the notional pieces I referred to above with its straightforward story about a dirty rag stuck down the back of a radiator that comes to life. This is all a bit unlikely but for whatever reason I thought this was OK.
The Cocoon by Richard Brookbank is an odd story about a Captain who bales out over a planet and is imprisoned by alien cocoon makers. He is subsequently liberated by one of his lieutenants, and the events leading up to all this are recounted as they travel back to the latter’s ship. Apart from the fact that I didn’t get the ending (spoiler) where the captain leaves to return to the cocoon makers, there is other stuff in here that doesn’t seem germane to the story (the Captain’s relationship with his wife features, as well as a woman that the lieutenant is going to marry).
The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles by Margaret St. Clair is another of her pseudonomyous ‘Idris Seabright’ stories, and is an odd story about a man who attempts to sell rope to the gnoles—strange Jerusalem-artichoke shaped beings with tentacles—and who makes a serious error of judgement in what he attempts to take in payment.
Beasts of Bourbon by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is another dreary ‘Gavagan’s Bar’ tale. This one is about a man who brings strange animals into existence when he drinks too much. There is a chase or two down to the bar in an attempt to escape them, and a later section where a love-interest sketches the animals after a ship-wreck but that’s it. This is fairly typical of the ‘bar format’ story: come up with a half-baked idea or notion, drop it into the template, don’t bother developing it: cheque please.
Dress of White Silk by Richard Matheson has an introduction where the editors state that his Born of Man and Woman (F&SF, Summer 1950) is the most popular story they have printed to date. Coincidentally this story is also written in an odd style, the narrator again a young child.
She tells of her deceased mother and her white dress. When the child is caught in her mother’s room playing with the dress her grandmother says she must not do that or go into the room. Later, a friend comes to play (spoiler) and the pair end up in the room, unpack the dress and the visiting child dies. It was not entirely clear to me what happened, some type of vampirism or possession possibly?

The one saving grace of the entire issue is Of Time and Third Avenue by Alfred Bester. This is one of the first of a remarkable run of stories that this writer would produce in the 1950s (while also producing two classic novels, The Demolished Man and Tiger! Tiger!/The Stars My Destination).¹
A man claiming to be from the future arranges to meet Oliver Wright in a bar and attempts to convince him to hand over an almanac he has bought. Wright hasn’t yet realised it is from forty years in the future. The actual story from there on is fairly straightforward, although it has a clever ending, and there are hints of the sophistication and slickness Bester would bring to his later stories. Bester has his time-traveller speak a linguistically odd version of English:

“MQ, Mr. Macy,” the stranger said in a staccato voice. “Very good. For rental of this backroom including exclusive utility for one chronos—”
‘‘One whatos?” Macy asked nervously.
“Chronos. The incorrect word? Oh yes. Excuse me. One hour.”
“You’re a foreigner,” Macy said. ‘‘What’s your name—? I bet it’s Russian.”
“No. Not foreign,” the stranger answered. His frightening eyes whipped around the backroom. “Identify me as Boyne.”
“Boyne!” Macy echoed incredulously.
“MQ, Boyne.” Mr. Boyne opened a wallet like an accordion, ran his fingers through various colored papers and coins, then withdrew a hundred-dollar bill. He jabbed it at Macy and said: “Rental fee for one hour. As
agreed. One hundred dollars. Take it and go.”
Impelled by the thrust of Boyne’s eye’s Macy took the bill and staggered out to the bar. Over his shoulder he quavered: “What’ll you drink?”
“Drink? Alcohol? Never!” Boyne answered. p.3-4

As to the non-fiction, this month’s Cover is one of George Salter’s poorer efforts. There is a short editorial note, Larroes catch philologists, commenting on inconclusive reader correspondence about the meaning of the word ‘larroes’ (they should have googled it like I did last issue), and in Recommended Reading they have this to say about a handful of anthologies:

The Conklin [Possible Worlds of Science Fiction] and the Crossen [Adventures In Tomorrow] are musts, and the Derleth [Far Boundaries] and the Leinster [Great Stories of Science Fiction] recommended for any science fiction bookshelf. The fifth recent anthology is Donald A. Wollheim’s Every Boy’s Book of Science Fiction (Fell), of which we’ll say only that no boy of ours is going to be introduced to this noble field by means of archaic and subliterate pap. p.58

Somewhat unfortunate given (a) Wollheim had a (pseudonymous) story in the issue and (b) the Cornell novella in this issue (don’t throw bricks at people from inside a greenhouse). They go on to cover a lot of other books (twenty titles in total!)

A disappointing issue, notable only for the story by Alfred Bester.

1. The story in this issue was one of a baker’s dozen of stories that Alfred Bester published in three periods of activity between the early fifties and the mid-sixties:

The Devil’s Invention (variant title Oddy and Id), Astounding (August 1950)
Of Time and Third Avenue, F&SF (October 1951)
Hobson’s Choice, F&SF (August 1952)
The Roller Coaster, Fantastic (May/June 1953)
Star Light, Star Bright, F&SF (July 1953)
Time Is the Traitor, F&SF (September 1953)
Disappearing Act, Star Science Fiction Stories #2, ed. Frederik Pohl (Ballantine, 1953)
5,271,009, F&SF (March 1954)
Fondly Fahrenheit, F&SF (August 1954)
The Men Who Murdered Mohammed, F&SF (October 1958)
Will You Wait?, F&SF (Mar 1959)
The Pi Man, F&SF (October 1959)
They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To, F&SF (October 1963)

The reason that nearly all these appeared in F&SF—Galaxy got both the novels—may have had something to do with an editorial meeting that Bester had with John W. Campbell of Astounding after the latter wanted revisions to Oddy and Id, as recounted in his essay My Affair With Science Fiction in Hell’s Cartographers, ed. Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss:

“I wrote a few stories for Astounding, and out of that came my one demented meeting with the great John W. Campbell, Jr. I needn’t preface this account with the reminder that I worshipped Campbell from afar. I had never met him; all my stories had been submitted by mail. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was like, but I imagined that he was a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford. So I sent off another story to Campbell, one which no show would let me tackle. The title was ‘Oddy and Id’ and the concept was Freudian, that a man is not governed by his conscious mind but rather by his unconscious compulsions. Campbell telephoned me a week later to say that he liked the story but wanted to discuss a few changes with me. Would I come to his office? I was delighted to accept the invitation despite the fact that the editorial offices of Astounding were then the hell and gone out in the boondocks of New Jersey.
The editorial offices were in a grim factory that looked like and probably was a printing plant. The ‘offices’ turned out to be one small office, cramped, dingy, occupied not only by Campbell but by his assistant, Miss Tarrant. My only yardstick for comparison was the glamourous network and advertising agency offices. I was dismayed.
Campbell arose from his desk and shook hands. I’m a fairly big guy but he looked enormous to me, about the size of a defensive tackle. He was dour and seemed preoccupied by matters of great moment. He sat down behind his desk. I sat down on the visitor’s chair.
‘You don’t know it,’ Campbell said, ‘you can’t have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished.’
I stared. ‘If you mean the rival schools of psychiatry, Mr Campbell, I think—‘
‘No I don’t. Psychiatry, as we know it, is dead.’
‘Oh come now, Mr Campbell. Surely you’re joking.’
‘I have never been more serious in my life. Freud has been destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time.’ ‘What’s that?’
‘Dianetics.’
‘I never heard of it.’
‘It was discovered by L. Ron Hubbard, and he will win the Nobel peace prize for it,’ Campbell said solemnly.
The peace prize? What for?’
‘Wouldn’t the man who wiped out war win the Nobel peace prize?’
‘I suppose so, but how?’
‘Through dianetics.’
‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr Campbell.’
‘Read this,’ he said, and handed me a sheaf of long galley proofs. They were, I discovered later, the galleys of the very first dianetics piece to appear in Astounding.
‘Read them here and now? This is an awful lot of copy.’
He nodded, shuffled some papers, spoke to Miss Tarrant and went about his business, ignoring me. I read the first galley carefully, the second not so carefully as I became bored by the dianetics mishmash. Finally I was just letting my eyes wander along, but was very careful to allow enough time for each galley so Campbell wouldn’t know I was faking. He looked very shrewd and observant to me. After a sufficient time I stacked the galleys neatly and returned them to Campbell’s desk.
‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘Will Hubbard win the peace prize?’
‘It’s difficult to say. Dianetics is a most original and imaginative idea, but I’ve only been able to read through the piece once. If I could take a set of galleys home and—’
‘No,’ Campbell said. ‘There’s only this one set. I’m rescheduling and pushing the article into the very next issue, it’s that important.’ He handed the galleys to Miss Tarrant. You’re blocking it,’ he told me. ‘That’s all right. Most people do that when a new idea threatens to overturn their thinking.’
‘That may well be,’ I said, but I don’t think it’s true of myself. I’m a hyperthyroid, an intellectual monkey, curious about everything.’
‘No,’ Campbell said, with the assurance of a diagnostician, You’re a hyp-O-thyroid. But it’s not a question of intellect, it’s one of emotion. We conceal our emotional history from ourselves although dianetics can trace our history all the way back to the womb.’
‘To the womb!’
‘Yes. The foetus remembers. Come and have lunch.’ Remember, I was fresh from Madison Avenue and expense-account luncheons. We didn’t go to the Jersey equivalent of Sardi’s, ‘21’, or even P. J. Clark’s. He led me downstairs and we entered a tacky little lunchroom crowded with printers and file clerks; an interior room with blank walls that made every sound reverberate. I got myself a liverwurst on white, no mustard, and a coke. I can’t remember what Campbell ate.
We sat down at a small table while he continued to discourse on dianetics, the great salvation of the future when the world would at last be cleared of its emotional wounds. Suddenly he stood up and towered over me. ‘You can drive your memory back to the womb,’ he said. ‘You can do it if you release every block, clear yourself and remember. Try it.’
‘Now?’
‘Now. Think. Think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You’ve never stopped hating her for it.’
Around me there were cries of ‘BLT down, hold the mayo. Eighty-six on the English. Combo rye, relish. Coffee shake, pick up.’ And here was this grim tackle standing over me, practising dianetics without a licence. The scene was so lunatic that I began to tremble with suppressed laughter. I prayed. ‘Help me out of this, please. Don’t let me laugh in his face. Show me a way out.’ God showed me. I looked up at Campbell and said, ‘You’re absolutely right, Mr Campbell, but the emotional wounds are too much to bear. I can’t go on with this.’
He was completely satisfied. ‘Yes, I could see you were shaking.’ He sat down again and we finished our lunch and returned to his office. It developed that the only changes he wanted in my story was the removal of all Freudian terms which dianetics had now made obsolete. I agreed, of course; they were minor and it was a great honour to appear in Astounding no matter what the price. I escaped at last and returned to civilization where I had three double gibsons and don’t be stingy with the onions.
That was my one and only meeting with John Campbell and certainly my only story conference with him. I’ve had some wild ones in the entertainment business but nothing to equal that. It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles. Perhaps that’s the price that must be paid for brilliance.” p.57-60

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Fiction:
Superiority • short story by Arthur C. Clarke ♥♥♥
Prolog • short story by John P. McKnight ♥♥
Wilfred Weem, Dreamer • reprint short story by Robert Arthur ♥♥
A Peculiar People • short story by Betsy Curtis
The Punishing of Eddie Jungle-Spit • reprint short story by Garrett Oppenheim ♥♥
The Embarrassing Dimension • short story by H. Nearing, Jr.
Solitary Confinement • short story by Philip MacDonald ♥
The Man Who Could Smell Land • reprint short story by John Langdon ♥♥♥
The Daughter of the Tree • short story by Miriam Allen deFord ♥♥♥
John Thomas’s Cube • reprint short story by John Leimert ♥
The Collector • novelette by Gerald Heard [as by H. F. Heard] ♥♥
The Rat That Could Speak • reprint short story by Charles Dickens ♥
Cattivo • short story by Alan Nelson ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Spaceship in Trouble With Meteor Swarm; Europa and Jupiter in the Background • cover by Chesley Bonestell
Next Issue
Title Contest Announcement
Limerick • by Anthony Boucher [as by Herman Mudgett]
Recommended Reading • by The Editors

In this issue, unlike the last, the fantasy is probably better than the SF but, as some of it falls in the middle, I’ll just go through the stories in the order they appear.
Superiority by Arthur C. Clarke is a droll tale of an interstellar war and how one of the sides gets a new chief scientist called Norden. He suggests to a council of war that they should develop new inventions to decisively win the conflict, and that is what they do:

Then two things happened. One of our battleships disappeared completely on a training flight, and an investigation showed that under certain conditions the ship’s long-range radar could trigger the Sphere immediately it had been launched. The modification needed to overcome this defect was trivial, but it caused a delay of another month and was the source of much bad feeling between the naval staff and the scientists. We were ready for action again—when Norden announced that the radius of effectiveness of the sphere had now been increased by ten, thus multiplying by a thousand the chances of destroying an enemy ship.
So the modifications started all over again, but everyone agreed that the delay would be worth it. Meanwhile, however, the enemy had been emboldened by the absence of further attacks and had made an unexpected onslaught. Our ships were short of torpedoes, since none had been coming from the factories, and were forced to retire. So we lost the systems of Kyrane and Floranus, and the planetary fortress of Rhamsandron. p.5-6

Prolog by John P. McKnight is an minor story about a caveman, his mate and their baby, and a discovery they make.
Wilfred Weem, Dreamer by Robert Arthur (Argosy, 5^th July 1941) is another of his ‘Murchison Morks’ stories. This one has an excellent hook:

“Last night I had the most remarkable dream,” Nichols, who manufactures saxophones, was saying as Morks and I entered the club reading room.
“I was in a rocket ship that had just landed on the moon, and a herd of beasts as big as elephants, but with wings, were flapping around, trying to break in and get at me. I knew it was just a dream, of course, but it was so real it frightened me into waking up.”
“I knew a man,” Morks—his full and unlikely name is Murchison Morks—said in a thoughtful voice as we came up to the little group, “whose dreams were much more remarkable than that. And they were so real they frightened his wife.”
“Into waking up?” Nichols asked, puzzled. Morks shook his head.
“No. Into running away and leaving him, gasping with terror. She was a very strong-minded and unscrupulous woman; very hard to frighten, too.”
Nichols got red in the face.
“As I was saying,” he went on, tight-lipped, “after I got back to sleep, I dreamed that I had found Captain Kidd’s treasure. The money was so real I could hear it chink when I dropped it, and—”
“When my friend dreamed of money,” Murchison Morks put in, in that soft voice which carried so remarkably, “it was so real you could spend it.”
Nichols, crimson with anger, tried to ignore him.
“I wish you could have seen the beautiful girl who came up then,” he said. ‘“She—”
But Morks is a hard man to ignore.
“When my friend dreamed of a beautiful girl,” he murmured, a faraway expression on his long, sad face, “you could see her.”
“Perhaps I ought to explain, though,” he said courteously. “So no one will think that I am exaggerating. About my friend’s dream, I mean.” p.15

Morks then tells the club members about a man who had dreams so vivid that other people could see them. Needless to say his avaricious wife and her shrink end up using this as a money making opportunity.
This has a good idea which is well developed but unfortunately has a weak ending (spoiler: if he dreamt of a starving tiger why wouldn’t it attack him?)
A Peculiar People by Betsy Curtis is about a Martian envoy to Earth who is actually a robot:

In the momentary privacy of the gentlemen’s room, Fedrik Spens loosened the neck cord of his heavy white toga and reached for the threadlike platinum chain of his tiny adjuster key. Pulling back the pale plastissue skin from the almost invisible slit at the center of his chest, he inserted the key in the orifice of the olfactory intensificator and gave it two full turns. Three full turns for the food receptacle grinder. These official banquets could be murder. Removing the key, he retied the cord and approached the mirror, as the ambassador had insisted in last minute instructions to the several robots on the embassy staff. p.28

He becomes interested in an Earth girl and starts spending a lot of time with both her and her family. Eventually his boss warns him off as he doesn’t want her father, who is the transport minister, upset. During their last meeting her parents come in and, after much speechifying, tell him (spoiler) that they are robots too!
Don’t let the Sladekian quote above mislead you, this is an unconvincing tale, and clunky to boot. I don’t really understand why Curtis’s stories are published by F&SF, they seem well below the quality of everything else.
The Punishing of Eddie Jungle-Spit by Garrett Oppenheim (Liberty, May 1950) concerns a family with a young boy called Eddie. He breaks one of his mother’s vases and, rather than blame him, she blames an imaginary friend. From then on any trouble that occurs isn’t the fault of ‘Eddie the Arrow Man’ but ‘Eddie Jungle-Spit.’ Unfortunately the trouble gets more and more serious until she has to do something harsh with Eddie Jungle-Spit, and even that doesn’t work.
This is all quite well done until an ending that didn’t work for me.
There is some initial social observation of the woman’s unhappy marriage that is noteworthy, and the editors suggest in the introduction that this helps make it:

…a surprisingly bitter and tragic story to have appeared in a mass-circulation slick. p.40

The Embarrassing Dimension by H. Nearing, Jr. is another in his ‘Ransom’ series. This time Ransom the mathematician waffles on about a fifth dimension and the creation of a particular type of crystal. After this, various historical characters randomly appear. A weak effort, which is a pity as I enjoyed the last one.
Solitary Confinement by Philip MacDonald is a short tale about a man whom finds himself in a strange grey environment that he eventually realises is limbo. Then he comes to a man at a desk…. Another one where the ending didn’t work for me.
The Man Who Could Smell Land by John Langdon (Mast Magazine, October 1947) is an enjoyable and original tale with a title that renders any further description by me superfluous.
The Daughter of the Tree by Miriam Allen deFord is set in the 1890s and concerns a story narrated by an American Native to a young man after a girl comes to their camp and eats with them. Apparently she is the daughter of a tree. The ending of this one isn’t as strong as the rest but it is an intriguing read nonetheless.
John Thomas’s Cube by John Leimert (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1945) is another story that largely describes itself. A young boy called Billy finds a cube under the apple tree in his back yard. After his parents find it cannot be moved and is also hovering the usual circus of journalists, politicians, scientists and holy men turn up. At the end of the day Billy wishes it was gone, at which point it disappears.
Later, a psychiatrist finds (spoiler) that Billy:

…did have an unusually vivid imagination and was subject to hallucinations, auditory, visual, tactual. Further, through the operation of a kind of mass hypnosis, he had the rare faculty of making the creation of his imagination as real to others as to himself. p.92

This is a disappointing cop-out ending to a promising story.
The Collector by Gerald Heard is the longest story in the magazine. This novelette tells of an expeditionary ship’s ichthyologist who goes for a long walk on an island his team have been surveying. He sees a naked man with strange green skin and before long finds himself pulled down under the waves by a huge decapod—a squid-like creature— and kept in a network of air-filled underwater caves. This is, at times, quite interesting but my attention wandered on several occasions, probably a function of its aforementioned length.
The Rat That Could Speak by Charles Dickens (All the Year Round, September 8^th 1860) is a short deal with the devil story that gets off to a promising start—this includes a talking rat!—but it is downhill from there.
Cattivo by Alan Nelson is an original story about Cattivo’s hands, which appear to have an independent and detached life of their own:

And now I am going to tell you what seemed to happen:
From the edge of the table, I thought I saw a revolting tarantula-like insect of monstrous size and thick tentacles scrabble up on to the oilcloth and start waddling across the table toward me. It hesitated halfway. A thick bulb of a head peered at me from the crotch of two tentacles. It lumbered forward again, edged up to my glass of whisky. The ugly bulb-like head explored the rim of the glass. Then with irritation it kicked the glass off onto the floor and scampered back across the table and disappeared off the edge.
It was only Dubini’s hand, of course. His fingers were as thick as sausages and supple as snakes and he could make them into almost anything he wanted. It was like watching a puppet—you look at it long enough and soon you begin to see it breathe. p.121

The narrator recruits Cattivo to become a small-time thief, but this is just preparation for a bigger job…

The non-fiction this issue includes Chesley Bonstell’s second cover for the magazine, called Spaceship in Trouble With Meteor Swarm; Europa and Jupiter in the Background. It is a rather jumbled looking composition and not as good as his first effort.
The Title Contest Announcement gives the name of the winner of the $100 prize for naming Idris Seabirght’s story in the April issue, but doesn’t tell us what the title was!
Limerick is an OK five line effort by Anthony Boucher.
Recommended Reading by The Editors suggests that the two best novels of the year so far are Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke, and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. They also have a good word for The Moon is Hell by John W. Campbell, Jr.
I was a little surprised at this comment about Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man as I thought the linking material effectively creepy:

There’s been only one recent volume of science fiction short stories; but that one is a must: Ray Bradbury’s THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (Doubleday). The attempt at a unifying frame-structure is, in contrast to THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, markedly unsuccessful; and a few of the eighteen stories seem less than wisely chosen to enhance the Bradbury reputation. But enough excellent ones remain to provide a feast for every devotee of the finest traditions in imaginative fiction. p.84

There is an amusing comment about Is Another World Watching? by Gerald Heard:

It starts off with a clear, well documented survey of the flying saucer situation to date, a badly needed corrective to the distorted and even flatly untrue “explanations” in recent magazines and newspapers. Then gradually, by certain steps of decidedly eluctable logic, Mr. Heard reaches the conclusion (and expatiates on it as established fact) that the “saucers” are piloted by intelligent bees from Mars. Frankly, we aren’t at all sure of the position of Mr. Heard’s tongue relative to his cheek at this point. p.84

In conclusion, I would say that this issue is another mixed bag, but unlike previous volumes there are no stories that make it worth getting hold of. It also illustrates one of F&SF’s developing traits, which is that there is too much froth and not enough substance. The Clarke, Arthur, Curtis, Nearing, Leimert and Dickens stories are all either humorous or ‘light’ pieces—too many. I wish that they would cull some of these and the weaker short stories and replace them with a couple of substantial novelettes. I also wish they would cut down on the reprints, the number of which would seem to indicate a shortage of original material. The next issue contains a short novel (albeit a reprint piece) that occupies half the issue: we’ll see if that improves matters.

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