ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:
Jamie Rubin, Vacation in the Golden Age

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr., Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
The Barrier • novella by Anthony Boucher ∗∗∗
The Twonky • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗
Nerves • novella by Lester del Rey ∗∗∗
Pride • short story by Malcolm Jameson ∗
Starvation • short story by Fredric Brown ∗∗
With Flaming Swords • novella by Cleve Cartmill ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Kolliker (x3), Willy Ley (x4), Paul Orban (x7), Charles Schneeman, Frank Kramer (x4)
Weapons and War • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Death Under the Sea • essay by Willy Ley
The Analytical Laboratory: July 1942
In Times to Come
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

This issue of Astounding contains two of this year’s Retro-Hugo nominees, The Twonky by “Lewis Padgett”, and Nerves by Lester del Rey, hence this review (more or less—I’ve also read Boucher’s story for something else I’m reading, the retrospective ‘Best of the Year’ anthology for 1942, The Great SF Stories #4, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Isaac Asimov).¹
Before I get to the fiction I’d like to mention the cover artist, William Timmins, who appears for the first time (with a scene from Boucher’s story) as a result of Hubert Rogers joining the war effort. Timmins would reappear in the December 1942 issue, and would then provide every cover of Astounding until January 1947, except the July 1944 (Fred Haucke) and December 1946 (Alejandro) issues—a run of 48 covers out of 50 (and he would reappear a handful of times over the next few years). Much of Timmins’ work is unexceptional but he nevertheless produced some of Astounding’s best covers.²

The fiction leads off with Anthony Boucher’s debut in Astounding (although he’d previously appeared in Unknown), The Barrier, an ambitious time travel story that makes much of future linguistic drift:

The first difficulty was with language.
That is only to be expected when you jump five hundred years; but it is nonetheless perplexing to have your first casual query of: “What city is this?” answered by the sentence: “Stappers will get you. Or be you Slanduch?”
It was significant that the first word John Brent heard in the State was “Stappers.” But Brent could not know that then. It was only some hours later and fifty years earlier that he learned the details of the Stapper system. At the moment all that concerned him was food and plausibility.
[. . .]
He pondered the alternatives presented by the stranger. The Stappers would get him, unless he was a Slanduch. Whatever the Stappers were, things that Get You sound menacing. “Slanduch,” he replied.
The stranger nodded. “That bees O. K.,” he said, and Brent wondered what he had committed himself to. “So what city is this?” he repeated.
“Bees,” the stranger chided. “Stappers be more severe now since Edict of 2470. Before they doed pardon some irregularities, but now none even from Slanduch.”
“I be sorry,” said Brent humbly, making a mental note that irregular verbs were for some reason perilous.  p. 9-10

Almost immediately after this exchange three Stappers appear through a wall and challenge Brent’s interlocutor for “speaking against Barrier”. The man shows them his identity bracelet. When they stun him, Brent does not waste any time in making his escape up onto a balcony.
He then hides in a nearby room, and an older woman arrives who perplexingly recognises him, as does her brother Stephen who joins them later. When he arrives there is a data dump explaining how this static, and therefore anti-time travel, society came into being. This is not entirely convincing. There is also discussion about the “Barrier”, which is supposed to prevent time travel. As Brent has somehow managed to penetrate it they go to see his time machine. The Stappers (a corruption of “Gestapo”) find them; Brent and Martha escape in the machine, and go fifty years into the past.
The rest of the story involves a small group of people (including younger versions of Martha and Stephen) repairing his time machine and plotting to return to prevent the activation of a second Barrier (the reason they only go fifty years into the past is that Brent’s machine destroys the first one—how he got through it on the first occasion without this happening is, if I recall correctly, wobbily explained).
When they arrive back in the future they infiltrate the Barrier activation ceremony only to see the machine generating it explode, an event caused by an attack of future time travellers. These are quickly subdued by the Stappers and arrested.

Most writers would probably wrap up the story here by sending Brent away on his time machine—Boucher, however, is only about two-thirds of the way through and in the rest of it he tries to outdo van Vogt.
Brent becomes a government interpreter, and interrogates three of the time traveller prisoners (Kruj speaks in an Elizabethan English variant, Mimi the Amazonian in a future-slang type speech, and the Venusian Nikobat in a language that is a meld of all Earth ones) :

Brent picked Tiny Beard as the easiest-looking start. “O. K. You!” He pointed, and the man stepped forward. “What part of time do you come from?”
“A pox o’ thee, sirrah, and the goodyears take thee! An thou wouldst but hearken to me, thou might’st learn all.”
The State linguist moaned. “You hear, young man? How can one interpret such jargon?”
Brent smiled. “It bees O. K. This bees simply English as it beed speaked thousand years ago. This man must have beed aiming at earlier time and prepared himself. . . . Thy pardon, sir. These kerns deem all speech barbaric save that which their own conceit hath evolved. Bear with me, and all will be well.”
“Spoken like a true knight!” the traveler exclaimed. “Forgive my rash words, sir. Surely my good daemon hath led thee hither. Thou wouldst know—”
“Whence comest thou?”
“From many years hence. Thousands upon thousands of summers have yet to run their course ere I—”
“Forgive me, sir; but of that much we are aware. Let us be precise.”
“When then, marry, sir, ’tis from the fifth century.”  p. 23-24

Brent beckoned forward the woman. She strode forth so vigorously that both Stappers bared their rods.
“Madam,” Brent ventured tentatively, “what part of time do you come from?”
“Evybuy taws so fuy,” she growled. “Bu I unnasta. Wy cachoo unnasta me?”
Brent laughed. “Is that all that’s the trouble? You don’t mind if I go on talking like this, do you?”
“Naw. You taw howeh you wanna, slonsoo donna like I dih taw stray.”
Fascinating, Brent thought. All final consonants lost, and many others. Vowels corrupted along lines indicated in twentieth-century colloquial speech. Consonants sometimes restored in liaison as in French.  p. 24

He beckoned to the green-skinned biped, who advanced with a curious lurching motion like a deep-sea diver.
“And you, sir. When do you come from?”
“Ya studier langue earthly. Vyerit todo langue isos. Ou comprendo wie govorit people.”
Brent was on the ropes and groggy. The familiarity of some of the words made the entire speech even more incomprehensible. “Says which?” he gasped.
The green man exploded. “Ou existier nada but dolts, cochons, duraki v this terre? Nikovo parla langue earthly? Potztausend Sapperment en la leche de tu madre and I do mean you!”
Brent reeled. But even reeling he saw the disapproving frown of the State linguist and the itching fingers of the Stappers. He faced the green man calmly and said with utmost courtesy, “‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble over the rivering waters of the hitherandthithering waters of pigeons on the grass alas. Thank you, sir.” He turned to the linguist. “He says he won’t talk.”  p. 24

Added to the mix is a Stapper called Boko, who proves he can time-travel by mind control when he closes his eyes for a second and a copy of him appears at the door. Later, a bodiless time-traveller reveals herself (she is initially resident in Martha’s brain but jumps around).
The climatic insurrection scene (spoiler) has Martha’s brother Stephen possessed by this bodiless time traveller, who convinces him to kill himself to end the war. He does so, and all the future time travellers disappear—there is a third Barrier.
This ambitious and novel piece has some interesting ideas but it goes on for too long, and some parts of it are either a bit of a mess or are not entirely convincing.

The Twonky by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore also starts with a time traveller, this one with amnesia, unintentionally arriving in a radio-phonograph³ factory. His job in the future is building ‘Twonkies’ so he uses the material at hand to build one, and then has a nap. His amnesia clears shortly after he wakes up, and he disappears on his time machine, leaving behind the modified phonogram/Twonky behind.
The phonogram is bought by a university lecturer and his wife and, after the latter leaves to visit her sister, things start to get weird: the phonograph starts acting like a robot, lighting the man’s cigarettes, doing the dishes, etc. However, (spoiler) matters take an ominous turn when it stops him reading certain books, listening to certain music, and generally prevents him from doing things it does not approve of.
The couple eventually try to destroy it but come off worse.
Despite its ‘classic’ status⁴ I found this, at best, an okay gimmick story, and thought it read like a rehearsal for the superior Mimsy Were the Borogroves (Astounding, February 1943).

Nerves by Lester del Rey is a prescient story which tells of an accident at a “National Atomic Products Co. Inc.” plant which, in parts, is eerily similar to some of the real events that occurred at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (or Fukushima if you are younger). This story is pre-atomic bomb, of course, and the knowledge we now have about nuclear power is considerably different from then—as can be gathered from this early conversation that Doc Ferrel, the folksy head physician of the atomic plant (and narrator), has with one of the other doctors:

“What was it, anyway?”
“Same old story— simple radiation burns. No matter how much we tell the men when they first come in, most of them can’t see why they should wear three ninety-five percent efficient shields when the main converter shield cuts off all but one-tenth percent of the radiation. Somehow, this fellow managed to leave off his two inner shields and pick up a year’s burn in six hours. Now he’s probably back on No. 1 [reactor], still running through the hundred liturgies I gave him to say and hoping we won’t get him sacked.”  p. 55

There’s quite a bit of this ‘slap a bit of salve on your radiation burns and get back to work’ stuff in the story, as well as a fairly cavalier attitude to the catastrophic results of things going wrong, or possibly going wrong:

And besides, once the blow-up happened, with the resultant damage to an unknown area, the pressure groups in Congress would be in, shouting for the final abolition of all atomic work; now they were reasonably quiet, only waiting an opportunity—or, more probably, at the moment were already seizing on the rumors spreading to turn this into their coup. If, by some streak of luck, Palmer could save the plant with no greater loss of life and property than already existed, their words would soon be forgotten, and the benefits from the products of National would again outweigh all risks.  p. 78

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story begins with Doc Ferrel talking to his junior, Dr Jenkins, about a new process the company is running in reactors 3 and 4 that evening. During this they are informed about an accident—the account of what has happened is rather vague and, when the first casualties come in, they are found to be people that were outside the reactors, injured by exploding debris. Ferrell calls in another doctor.

An exciting second chapter follows, during which Ferrel learns that Palmer, the plant boss, has blocked access to the outside phone lines. More injured men arrive, and they may be contaminated:

Jenkins joined Ferrel on the last patient, replacing Dodd at handing instruments. Doc would have preferred the nurse, who was used to his little signals, but he said nothing, and was surprised to note the efficiency of the boy’s co-operation. “How about the breakdown products?” he asked.
“I-713? Harmless enough, mostly, and what isn’t harmless isn’t concentrated enough to worry about. That is, if it’s still I-713. Otherwise—”
Otherwise, Doc finished mentally, the boy meant there’d be no danger from poisoning, at least. Isotope R, with an uncertain degeneration period, turned into Mahler’s Isotope, with a complete breakdown in a billionth of a second. He had a fleeting vision of men, filled with a fine dispersion of that, suddenly erupting over their body with a violence that could never be described; Jenkins must have been thinking the same thing. For a few seconds, they stood there, looking at each other silently, but neither chose to speak of it.
Ferrel reached for the probe, Jenkins shrugged, and they went on with their work and their thoughts.  p. 62

Jenkins’ wife (a nurse turned newly qualified doctor) makes it into the medical section with reports of the military being mobilised and the city possibly being evacuated. She goes to triage the injured near to the reactor, treating the radiation burn casualties there and sending the shrapnel cases back to Ferrel and his surgical team.
Throughout all this del Rey creates a remarkably convincing and tense narrative, drip feeding bits of his made up nuclear physics in between the medical procedures that are taking place, against a background of an escalating serious accident.
As well as being better informed about nuclear physics than the writer, we also expect our physicians to behave differently nowadays: Ferrel and Blake have a snifter of brandy after several hours of work, and the doctors later resort to shooting up morphine to keep awake! Meanwhile, their ambulance driver gets drunk to cope with the traumatic stress he endures ferrying all those casualties around, and crashes his ambulance.

Matters become even more tense in the next chapter when Palmer (the plant manager) and Ferrel go to one of the atomic converters and organise the men to search through the molten slag for Jorgensen, the only one who understands the process that was running in the plant before the explosion (as well as its risk assessment, the plant may want to review its ‘key man’ and data retention policy).

They find him in an armoured suit in a locker, but he is badly contaminated and stops breathing. Ferrel cracks open Jorgennson’s chest and starts manual heart massage.
Unfortunately, after a cracking start to the story, these events signal a rather padded, potboilerish middle section during which there is much running about and threatening of guards so Ferrel can phone a nearby hospital for an experimental heart and lung machine. There is also a lot of guff about Jenkins thinking he has “cracked” under the strain, Ferrel’s heart to heart with him, and chunks of both men’s backstories.
The last part of the story is a partial return to form: Jorgennson is saved but is of no use to them as his vocal nerves are compromised by widespread radioactive contamination (which, as we have seen previously in this world, affect the nervous system and cause convulsions); Palmer arrives saying the whole place will explode in ten hours and they must evacuate, but Ferrel points to the problem of the contaminated (and also soon to be exploding) men; Hok, the Japanese plant scientist (this in a post-Pearl Harbour America), comes up with a process to transmute the material in their body into something harmless, but it must be done at the plant as it requires I-713. Finally, the underconfident Jenkins comes up with a theoretical solution that will stop the converters exploding, and reveals he is the step-son of a great, and dead, theoretical atomicist.

This has a cracking start but the middle section is padded and the story drags from then on (albeit to a much lesser extent in the final part). This piece should have considerably shortened. That said, you can see why it was so popular at the time.

Pride by Malcolm Jameson is about Tom, a beaten up robot who works in a heavy industry factory:

Everybody, both his fellow workers and the men who operated the great Alberta plant, said Old Tom was slipping—that it was a shame to see a creature let himself go so completely. And it must be admitted that there was something to the gossip. For he never bothered with body oils any more or went to the burnishers. He would go the whole ten-day working period without so much as giving himself a wirebrushing, and on Repair Day he would usually sit quietly on the veranda of the club and take the sun, heedless of the fact that he dripped rust at every move and that wisps of gasket often trailed from the places where his plates were joined.  p. 92

The reason he skips on maintenance is because he is saving all his money and, in the second part of the story, he uses this wealth to have a new robot built. However, Tom will need to donate his own brainbox for use in the new model, which will mean his end. As the story closes Tom refers to this replacement as his son.
This crystallises the story’s problem, which is that Tom behaves like an old man and not a robot. Asimov’s decidedly non-human robots would soon make this type of story seem quite outdated.

Starvation by Fredric Brown (reprinted in his collections as Runaround) isn’t really SF, but is an okay mood piece about the last T. Rex trying to catch something to eat, failing (everything is too fast), and ultimately dying.

With Flaming Swords by Cleve Cartmill is actually my favourite piece in the issue. I know this will cause howls of outrage but I liked it more than the Boucher and del Rey: it is a well done if minor story rather than an uneven but ambitious one.
It starts with this:

You could shock men, I thought, and suffer no consequences. Men were merely slaves. Slaves allowed to serve us, to bring their produce to Eden, to give us their arms and backs and brains.
But these were Saints, here in the big hall. Their massed auras were a blaze of blue against which I narrowed my eyes. We were Saints, with three hundred years of traditional conduct behind us.
And what I had said was not condoned by tradition. I had called them men.
They took it in silence for a few seconds and stared at me, beside the throne of the Patriarch. Then they began to yell, and I felt a sick shame for them. They lost their dignity.
I yelled into their hubbub.
“I invoke the rule of silence!”
The Patriarch raised his glowing arms. Quiet fell. “Against my will,” the Patriarch said, “I command silence. We will hear the rest of Saint Hanson’s heresy.”  p. 109-110

This future world is ruled by the Saints, an oppressive order of men who use humanity as serfs and a source of wives. They are held in religious awe and feared by the rest of humanity, partly because of their blue auras, and partly because they have the power to make men drop dead by the power of their will. As to that latter ability, Hanson knows that what really happens when they raise their hands to the turbans they wear is that they are firing ray guns concealed within. Hanson also knows that a larger version of that ray gun is responsible for the Saints’ altered germ plasm and blue aura:

Here is the truth. Nearly three hundred years ago, a new weapon was introduced into warfare. It was fired only once. The destruction was so great and terrible that nations by common consent outlawed it, for it destroyed friend and foe indiscriminately. Thousands were killed within the radius of its effect. It was silent death, for the gun was a ray gun. But listen. On the edge of that area of destruction, people were affected by that ray. Their germ plasm was affected so that male children born of those individuals were born with an aura.  p. 111

We learn the above later in the story as Hanson is prevented from continuing his speech by another Saint called Wakefield, who suggests that the council shunt the matter into committee because of the febrile atmosphere in the Temple. Hanson feels ostracised and leaves to go home. During the journey he reflects on the advice his human partner Jennings would give him, which is to turn the modulator he has developed on the council (we learn from this passage that, during his research, Hanson has made a device which neutralises the blue aura). We discover more about this world and its history when he arrives home a gives his fiancée, Ellen, a mini-lecture about the situation.
The next part of the plot is not entirely credible: Wakefield visits Hanson, who shows him not only his research but the modulator, and its aura nullifying effect on Hanson’s blood. Needless to say, Wakefield turns the modulator on Hanson, which destroys his aura, and Wakefield then destroys the modulator.
The next day Hanson goes to the council and, as he arrives aura-less, is denounced by Wakefield. Hanson is later excommunicated in a ceremony televised world-wide, and driven from the temple. Outside the common people stone him and he only just escapes.
The rest of the story involves Hanson’s escape to the desert with Jennings and his wife, his involvement with the resistance, and his development of a device that will provide protection against the Saints’ ray guns (and which produces a blue aura around the wearer). They test this on a giant desert terrapin that had previously wandered into their cave:

We placed the box on Methuselah’s broad back. Jennings brought the turban gun.
“Wait!” Magda cried. “Are you certain it’ll work, Bob?”
“No,” I said. “I think maybe, though.”
She got a leaf of lettuce for Methuselah. “Here, fella. If you die, you’ll be happy. He loves it,” she said to me, “if it has a touch of salt.”
Jennings added his farewells. He patted the patterned shell. “So long, mascot.”
I hadn’t seen much of the ugly and somehow awesome creature. I’d been busy. But the Jenningses had made a friend of him.
I touched the button of the little box, and joined in the exclamations. For Methuselah had an aura, bright and blue like a Saint’s.
“There’s a bona fide Patriarch,” Jennings said.  p. 121

After this they plan to confront the Saints at an upcoming ceremony at the Temple, which is going to be televised to the world. The climax at the Temple (spoiler) involves Jennings and Hanson proving immune to Wakefield’s ray gun. Wakefield then dies in a fight with Jennings, and the Patriarch’s aura is neutralised. A hundred men of the resistance arrive and switch on their auras, and the end comes when Magda and the terrapin enter the Temple, also with auras, thus disproving the Saint’s God-given powers. The Patriarch laughs. The conflict is over.

I can understand that the synopsis above is unlikely to convince anyone of the story’s merits and I would not expect it too—the setup and plot are the parts I would label as ‘minor’. What they don’t convey is that I found the strange religious order of supermen intriguing, and that the story is very readable—I was reminded in parts of the slick delivery of Heinlein. The character detail is pretty good for the time as well, particularly the exchanges between Jennings and his wife Magda, and there are a number of observations from Hanson about love and life that ground the story. There are these one-liners, for example, on Hanson’s troubled relationship with his fiancée:

You can take an emotional blow. It won’t kill you. But sometimes you wish it would.
[. . .]
You can be sick with emotion, too. But you don’t die. It just seems that way.  p. 121

And his envy of the Jennings’ relationship:

As this blond giant and his wife bickered in this friendly fashion, I forgot that I was being hunted. Nobody had ever spoken to me like that, and I missed it suddenly. All those years of being set apart rushed over me again. I wanted to be on terms of tender contempt with someone. Perhaps that would be possible with Ellen, now.  p. 118

And, yes, I liked the Terrapin, especially when it glows blue at the end!

I’ve already mentioned Timmins above: this is a Cover of his that puts me neither up nor down. As to the Interior artwork in this issue, my favourites are the Schneeman (for the Jameson) and the Kramer (for the Brown), although I also liked a few of Orban’s for the del Rey.
Weapons and War by John W. Campbell, Jr. is another rambling editorial, this time starting with the topic of shared scientific knowledge and then going on to discuss the problems of scaling up certain industrial processes. I am beginning to get the feeling that when Campbell wrote his editorials he just started typing about whatever was on his mind at the time.

Death Under the Sea by Willy Ley is a science history essay (accompanied by four illustrations/diagrams by the author) which looks at underwater naval warfare, specifically the development and use of mines, torpedoes and submarines through the ages. There is some interesting historical information in this (a lot of the development appears to have taken place during the American Civil War), and I learned where the torpedo got its name from:

The man who coined a name for underwater charges was Robert Fulton. His term was “torpedo” which then did not mean a weapon of naval warfare but simply the electric eel of South American rivers.  p. 45

The Analytical Laboratory: July 1942 puts Simak’s Tools ahead of Will Stewart’s (Jack Williamson) first ‘Seetee’ story Collison Orbit.⁵
In Times to Come starts by correcting a cover attribution error for the July cover:

A number of kind friends pointed out our slight slip on the crediting of the July cover. Quite right; it was not done by Rogers—but we all make mistakes, and “Cover by Rogers” has been a pretty steady thing for Astounding now. But Rogers is no longer doing covers—he’s in the Canadian army.

It is correctly attributed to Charles de Feo in Brass Tacks.
The rest of the column promises an astronomical cover by von Munchhausen, and stories by Lester del Rey, George O. Smith (the first of the ‘Venus Equilateral’ stories), Murray Leinster, and A.E. van Vogt.

Brass Tacks opens with a letter from Rosella Rands, Washington, D. C., prophesising another war in twenty years, and that they will get all their new ideas for weapons from SF magazines.
Earl C. Smith, Corpus Christi, TX, claims he is a veteran of the SF field, and has a couple of things to get off his chest:

FIRST: Every time an author dreams up a theory on sunspots, cosmic rays, or why, in the final analysis, there is no solidarity—including their theory—does he have to contaminate good reading material by filling page after page with DETAILED EXPLANATIONS? Not that I haven’t an imagination, or that I don’t want an explanation, but, PLEASE, does the author have to convince himself by going to such an extent?
SECOND: Why not give us something different occasionally? The best story I’ve read in any of the current issues was Van Vogt’s “Asylum.” Perhaps I’m contradicting myself on a point here, by liking his story, but I feel the general make-up, the atmosphere, the not bringing out of so many technical details, were points raising his story far above any I’ve read recently.  p. 105

There are also letters from Milton A. Rothman (about a ‘Probability Zero’ story), and Anthony Boucher (about van Vogt’s Secret Unobtainable and the assassination of Reinhart Heydrich). Edward C. Connor, Peoria, IL, didn’t like the van Vogt as because it is set in Germany and concerned the Nazi Party. James Dial, Chicago, IL, ends the comments (on what seems a mixed July issue) with a letter containing this more general observation:

There seems to be one flaw which has grown worse rather than better as time goes on. I speak of the feeble endings of most of your serials and many of your shorts. My idea of a perfect ending is certainly inadequate, but I think that the best I have seen is the one from “Uncertainty.” The suspicion has been growing that perhaps you have been getting work on assignments, and the endings have had to be rushed through. The ending of “Beyond This Horizon” is a case in point. This story has a structure worthy of three serial installments, possibly four, but it ends abruptly, unsatisfyingly, just when the full background has been painted in and the story has attained momentum.  p. 107

This is a pretty good issue, with three good or better novelettes.  ●

_____________________

1. The Great SF Stories #4, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW, 1980) contains:

7 • Introduction (The Great Science Fiction Stories Volume 4, 1942) • (1980) • essay by Martin H. Greenberg
11 • The Star Mouse • [Mitkey • 1] • (1942) • novelette by Fredric Brown
32 • The Wings of Night • (1942) • short story by Lester del Rey
50 • Cooperate – Or Else! • [Rull] • novelette by A. E. van Vogt (variant of Co-Operate – Or Else! 1942)
77 • Foundation • [Foundation (Original Stories) • 1] • (1942) • novelette by Isaac Asimov
110 • The Push of a Finger • (1942) • novella by Alfred Bester
150 • Asylum • (1942) • novella by A. E. van Vogt
205 • Proof • (1942) • short story by Hal Clement
222 • Nerves • (1942) • novella by Lester del Rey
295 • Barrier • (1942) • novella by Anthony Boucher
347 • The Twonky • (1942) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
369 • QRM – Interplanetary • [Venus Equilateral] • (1942) • novelette by George O. Smith
403 • The Weapon Shop • [Weapon Shops of Isher] • (1942) • novelette by A. E. van Vogt
442 • Mimic • (1942) • short story by Donald A. Wollheim

Apart from the Brown (from Planet Stories) and the Wollheim (from Astonishing Stories), all the rest are Astounding stories.
I’ll review this volume in due course. By the way, there is a groups.io newsgroup that has been set up to discuss these volumes at The-Great-SF-Stories-1939-1963@groups.io. There are only a handful of active commenters, so it won’t wear you out.

2. There isn’t much information about Timmins on the web but there is a page at Pulpartists.com, and links to his covers on his ISFDB page.
Here are two of my favourites taken from Siren in the Night’s Flickr page for Astounding (very slightly touched up to remove the odd crease, scratch, etc., and resized). This is the best of his conventional work:

And this one is the best of his impressionistic covers:

Also worth a look is the Through a Shattered Lens page, especially the last image, which is a striking cover for The Shadow magazine. An occasionally brilliant artist.

3. A radio-phonograph was a wooden box that combined a radio, record player, and speakers. Here is a page of them on Pinterest.

4. The Twonky’s ISFDB page is here. Note its early reprint appearance in Adventures in Time and Space by Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas in 1946.

5. The Analytical Laboratory with the results for this issue appeared in November:

The score of 1.00 for del Rey’s story is extraordinary (and, I originally thought, probably unprecedented and unrepeated, but see Walker’s comment below). Every reader who voted marked it first or joint-first!  ●

This magazine is still being published as Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA or physical & digital copies.

ISFDB
Archive.org

_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
Men Against the Stars • novelette by Manly Wade Wellman –
Below—Absolute! • short story by Harry Walton ∗∗
The Legion of Time (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson ∗∗∗+
Philosophers of Stone • short story by D. L. James –
Seeds of the Dusk • novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun ∗∗∗
Isle of the Golden Swarm • short story by Norman L. Knight ∗∗
Three Thousand Years! (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Thomas Calvert McClary ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Men Against the Stars • cover by H. W. Wesso
Interior artwork • H. W. Wesso, uncredited, Charles Schneeman (x2), Jack Binder (x2), Eliot Dold (x3), uncredited (x2), Howard Brown (x2), Olga Ley (x4)
Fantastic Fiction • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Great Eye • science essay by R. DeWitt Miller
Monstrous Twin • science filler
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1938
Witnesses of the Past • science essay by Willy Ley
Mars • cover artwork essay
Science Discussions • letters
Brass Tacks • letters

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This issue has the second astronomical cover that Campbell commissioned, produced by Wesso for the Manly Wade Wellman story Men Against the Stars. The top and bottom colour bars that were missing on last issue’s cover are back. John Campbell provides an accompanying essay to go with the cover:

As for the story itself, Men Against the Stars by Manly Wade Wellman¹ starts with spaceship fifty-one on its way from the Moon to Mars. However, the atomic hydrogen fuel they are using is not stable and, as the crew are discussing their chances of surviving the trip, the ship explodes.

The story then switches its point of view to Tallentyre, the lunar base’s second in command, who has watched the ship explode and is now arguing with his hysterical superior. The latter is trying to deal with the mutinous crew of ship sixty-one, who are refusing to leave and, in any event, he doesn’t want to send another crew to their deaths. After some speechifying from Tallentyre about the sacrifice required to travel in space (I note that when this subject comes up it is usually someone else’s sacrifice), and the problems with atomic hydrogen and jet tubes, he knocks his boss out and goes to deal with the mutineers. Things do not go well:

Tallentyre’s right hand rested easily in the pocket of his tunic. The cold, gray eyes watched the big spaceman steadily. “You think you could get away with violence?”
The big man took a step forward with a hamlike fist clenched before him. “Think, brother? Hu-uh. I know I can,” he said softly. “You tried it yourself inside there.” Without turning his head, he spoke to the men behind him. “Come on, boys. Grab this guy. And one of you tail for the ship and that gun.”
Without relaxing his moveless, wooden face, Tallentyre drew his hand from his tunic pocket. Space volunteers have to have a queer, reckless courage. With a bull roar, the giant captain dove forward with outstretched hands, his face twisted with sudden hate. Tallentyre shot him between the eyes. The big body fell with exaggerated slowness under Lunar pull. p. 10-11

The other four crewmen, appropriately motivated, go on their flight: their spaceship blows up.
A female assistant, Noel, appears and tells Tallentyre she did love him but doesn’t anymore (he never knew that she did). Police arrive from Earth to arrest him for the killing but he escapes outside the base, giving Noel a chance to relent—she called the cops—and tell them what really happened with the mutineers. Tallentyre comes back and finds he is no longer being pursued for the killing, and that a ship is returning. He orders the police to arrest the returning mutineers—Tallentyre is nothing if not single-minded.
The last scene (spoiler) reveals that the arriving crew have actually returned from a base on Mars and, not only that, they have discovered what the problem with the spaceship jet tubes is (this is analogous to the properties of Prince Rupert’s Drop,² a hard/brittle glass phenomenon mentioned briefly at the start of the story).
This is pretty dreadful fare, and it’s hard to believe that it comes from the author of Pithecanthropus Rejectus (Astounding, January 1938).

Below—Absolute! by Harry Walton starts with two spacemen providing a short data-dump about a dark spot between Alpha Centauri and Earth that they are going to investigate.
As they approach the anomaly there is an interesting description that is similar to the one you would expect for a black hole:

For space before them was empty, with an emptiness not of space. A black meteor, or a swarm of particles, they were ready to face, but sight recoiled from the sheer vacuum of non-spatial darkness which gaped ahead of the ship. This was nothingness made tangible, a canyon of blackness in which the stars were lost, incredibly empty and hostile in its very negation of all things normal.
[. . .]
This was no dark body blotting out the stellar field beyond, no long-dead sun hurtling its cold way unseen through the burial place of the stars, no obscuring cloud of cosmic dust. Of that they presently felt certain. Its outline against the tapestry of the stars was that of an enormous, perfectly circular disk, and—although neither man would have admitted it—both felt it possessed of motion within itself. It crossed Holm’s thought that this was an all-absorbing funnel draining into unknown space and tune, a sucking vacuum of nothingness alien to space as they knew it. p. 24-25

As they approach they discover that the disc is sucking heat out of the universe, and the pair only just avoid freezing to death.
Aliens later take control of their subconscious and start talking to them with their own voices. The aliens are in another universe on the other side of the disc, one that has a lower energy state than ours, and which is dying. The reason that they have opened a passage between the two is to let energy flow from our universe to theirs: as a result of this Earth and the solar system are doomed.
The rest of the story (spoiler) concerns the two men’s struggle to fly their spacecraft into the Passage to destroy the link between the two universes. During this the aliens attempt to physically control them.
This is fairly standard pulp stuff, but there are one or two interesting ideas.

The middle part of The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson continues the story of the battle between the two possible timelines of Jonbar and Gyronchi, and it starts with the time ship Chronion struggling to reach Jonbar—the Gyrane have somehow reduced the probability of its future existence. The ship finally arrives at Jonbar two weeks later.

Lanning finally meets Lethonee, and they have dinner that evening on an outdoor balcony. She tells Lanning that Jonbar has only one night of existence left, but before they can discuss this further, Sorainya and Glarath, high Priest of the Gyrane, arrive to witness the end of the city. Lanning runs to the Chronion as Lethonee fades out of existence.
On the ship, McLan tells Lanning the reason Jonbar has flickered out of existence is that the Gyrane have managed to build a time ship too. With it they have gone back in time and taken someone or something, thus altering the future and assuring their existence. McLan also states that whatever they have taken will be kept under guard in Sorainya’s castle. The Chronion heads for Gyronchi. En route the Gyrane ship appears beside them in the time stream and they find themselves heavily outgunned. One of their crew is killed and two wounded before they manage to escape (the serial is notable for the large number of casualties).

In the next chapter they climb up a cliff to Sorainya’s citadel and gain entry. They move through the dungeons and come upon the guards, who raise the alarm.
This section (the climb up the cliff and the fight through the dungeon) is a great boy’s own adventure, fast-moving, bloody, and with lots of atmospheric description. One of the scenes shows Williamson’s Weird Tales licks:

A dreadful silence filled most of the prison. But from one cell came an agonized screaming, paper-thin from a raw throat, repeated with a maddening monotony. Glancing through a barred door, as he passed, Lanning saw a woman stretched out in chains on the floor. A crystal vessel swung back and forth, above her, pendulumlike. And drops of cold green fire fell from it, one by one, upon her naked flesh. With each spattering, corrosive drop, she writhed against the chains, and shrieked again.
The half-consumed body, Lanning thought, might once have been beautiful. Could this have been some rival of Sorainya’s? A cold hate turned him rigid, and quickened his step. A muffled shot echoed behind him, and the screaming stopped.
“Mon coeur!” whispered little Jean Querard. “She shall suffer no more.”
In another cell was a great squeaking and thumping commotion. And Lanning glimpsed huge, sleek rats battling over a body in chains, newly dead, or dying.
Once, beyond, that situation was reversed. A sightless, famished wretch had bitten his own wrist, to let a few drops of blood flow upon the floor. He crouched there, listening, and snatched again and again, blindly, with fettered hands, at the great wary rats that came to his bait. p. 46-47

The instalment finishes with another bloody fight in the great hall, which only Lanning and his old friend Halloran survive. They make their way to the trapdoor in Sorainya’s chambers, and in the vault below they find her embalmed ancestors, treasure beyond measure, and the object (a black brick) they are looking for.
On their way out they find Sorainya and her insect-like kothrin guards waiting. . . .
This serial continues to be a lot of fun and, given its age, a surprising page-turner.

Philosophers of Stone by D. L. James is a pretty awful story that has an inventor called Voorland regain consciousness to find that his transportation machine has malfunctioned and stranded him on an alien planet. The large crystal rock he had previously gathered as a specimen starts talking to him telepathically, and he learns that he will be taken to the Sigarians. On the way (the journey is by means of pseudopods that come out of the ground) the crystal chats away.
Voorland later discovers (spoiler) that the rock is actually using him to gain access to a spaceship that has crash-landed and is buried underground. He manages to escape, and finds that the spaceship crew are humanoid. They need “red metal” to refuel their ship before they can escape—which is conveniently provided by the copper cable of Voorland’s machine.

Seeds of the Dusk by Raymond Z. Gallun^{1, 3} starts off in third-person omniscient, and describes a spore drifting between the orbits of Mars and Earth in the far future. The spore eventually lands on Earth and starts growing:

The spore had become a plant now. First, it was no bigger than a pinhead. Then it increased its size to the dimensions of a small marble, its fuzzy, greenbrown shape firmly anchored to the soil itself by its long, fibrous roots. Like any terrestrial growth, it was an intricate chemical laboratory, where transformations took place that were not easy to comprehend completely.
And now, perhaps, the thing was beginning to feel the first glimmerings of a consciousness, like a human child rising out of the blurred, unremembering fog of birth. Strange, oily nodules, scattered throughout its tissues, connected by means of a complex network of delicate, white threads, which had the functions of a nervous system, were developing and growing—giving to the sporeplant from Mars the equivalent of a brain. Here was a sentient vegetable in the formative stage. p. 78-79

The point of view then switches to Kaw, an intelligent crow. As the bird is flying overhead the plant he sees it begin to spore and goes down to investigate. There are dead ants all around the plant, and Kaw receives an electric shock from one of its spines. As the plant sends out more spores Kaw realises the threat to life on Earth and flies to the Iterloo, the descendants of humanity. After he tells Zar, one of their irritable representatives, he gets shot for his trouble.

Zar goes to see the plant for himself. When it shocks him, he promptly flames it to the ground with his pistol. He returns to his underground home where the remnants of humanity are preparing to leave the dying Earth for Venus. Despite this, and after discussions among the Iterloo, they decide to build generators to irradiate the surface and kill the plants (and all other life as well).
Meanwhile, we find out that Kaw isn’t dead but only injured. He slowly makes his way back home and, one night when he goes into a ravine to sleep, he does not notice the alien plants that are there and ends up under their hypnotic power. The plants then use Kaw to lure Zar to them, and the Iterloo in turn comes under their hypnotic power. After being encircled by vines for days he eventually escapes, and goes back to the city where the preparations for a move to Venus continue, as do the plans to irradiate the surface.

The story ends (spoiler) some time in the future, with Kaw and all the other surface life still alive: the plants infected Zar with a plague that subsequently wiped out humanity.
This is quite a good piece, and one that I enjoyed for the detailed writing and the far-future Earth setting. However, I wondered why the humans were bothering to make the effort to wipe out the plants when they were planning on going to Venus anyway.

Isle of the Golden Swarm by Norman L. Knight starts with a passenger on a ship watching two natives help a badly injured man aboard:

McGrath came aboard the ship at Port Said, in the middle of an afternoon of withering heat. Two swarthy, white-turbaned men carried him up the gangplank and into his cabin; his legs dangled inertly as if paralyzed. They passed within a few feet of my deck-chair, where I lay baking and sweltering in the shade of an awning. McGrath’s appearance shocked me out of a semi-stupor and into a state of observant wakefulness.
He seemed a youngish man, and yet he was extraordinarily emaciated. His hands were bony talons resting on the shoulders of the two porters. His clothes hung and flapped loosely upon him. Half of one ear was missing, and the tip of his nose had been sliced oft obliquely. The scars were dark red, and obviously recent. His face was the thinly masked face of a skull, the eyes retracted into cavernous sockets and haunted by the shadow of some abysmal fear. p. 97-98

The narrator later meets McGrath on deck and they talk. He listens to a story about the injured man’s adventures in a remote part of the jungle, where he had gone to study apes. After his tribal guides left him (with a warning to keep out of a nearby part of the jungle called the “haunted forest”) he had set up camp in a cave, and later established a relationship with a young male gorilla, “Gunga Din”. They spent a lot of time together and, strangely, the creature forcibly prevents McGrath from entering the “haunted forest”.

Needless to say, the gorilla finds a mate and spends an increasing amount of time away. At this point, McGrath makes another attempt at entering the forbidden area. He is successful, but there is a strange atmosphere there, and a number of animal skeletons with a spiral hole bored in their skulls. The story comes to a climax (spoiler) when he stumbles on a lake with bone-littered shores, and an islet covered in tiny alien buildings. As he watches, a swarm of golden insect-like beings take flight towards him. They shoot tiny, paralysing darts at him when they arrive:

“They were insects! They were giant hornets, the size of humming birds, and their bodies and limbs seemed wrought of burnished gold. They walked upon their two hinder pairs of limbs, but held the fore part of their bodies upright, in the manner of a praying mantis, and were very dexterous with their third and forward pair of limbs. The first squadron to arrive was armed with little crossbows of silvery metal.
[. . .]
A half-dozen of them trotted over me in an exploratory fashion, seemed to confer, then amputated a bit of my nose. The operation was painless; the venom of their darts must have been an efficient local anesthetic as well. They immediately applied a styptic paste to the wound. Then they retired with the fragment to a point just on the edge of my range of vision, where I could not see exactly what they were doing. But my impression was that they—devoured it! p. 106

The insects spend the rest of the day examining McGrath then, when night comes, they go back to their nest. Gunga Din the gorilla arrives to rescue him. The final paragraphs have McGrath display a number of small hypodermic needles, and a miniature cutlass and crossbow.
The first part of this is quite well written, and it reads like a good Weird Tales story, but the ending is a little unconvincing, and too straightforward.

The third and concluding part of Three Thousand Years! by Thomas Calvert McClary gets off to an entertaining start as Gamble the scientist discovers that his ideals conflict with the realities of human nature:

Gamble delivered his promised feast to the clan—fourteen cases of food. Three thousand people looked at the small pile with astonishment.
Gamble smiled. “Concentrated. I assure you, it is sufficient.”
His four assistants prepared the lavish feast in a special catalytic stove. Twenty-three hors d’oeuvres occupied a space about one inch square!
But—the course was delicious. So was the half gill of soup. At the end came a striped pill about the size of a peanut.
“What’s this ?” Prescott grunted skeptically.
Gamble smiled. “A complete banana split. Twelve trimmings.”
The copper man leaned over to Lucky. “I’m not hungry, but I’ll be damned if I et yet! A dinner just don’t seem right unless you got something to wade into.”
Later Lucky found him nibbling joyously on a piece of dried fish. p. 112-113

After this the novel meanders somewhat. There is a grisly chapter where they start making glass, and one of the glass makers has to sacrifice himself by going under the mould, which is full of molten material, to crack it open. There are also critical problems trying to get into a bank vault:

Gamble did not know how men had first built their weary way through ten thousand years to civilization. Gamble could not find that road again, nor could his experts. If that gold vault defied them—if that slim chain of vast science his laboratory preserved should break—Gamble would be broken. He had no second string. Drega could work with raw rock and brute power, could build again. Gamble could not. He knew it. p. 120

Later there are sections detailing other production problems, and attempts to trade with Drega and steel makers in Pittsburgh. There are cannibals and the outside world to contend with as well. Ultimately, a malaise starts to affect Gamble’s society. People defect to Drega, and Gamble is eventually put on trial for putting the human race into suspended animation. Drega acts as the judge, and he ultimately frees Gamble: the two reconcile.
In conclusion, this is a rather uneven piece, and it overdoes the detail of the various industrial processes required by a modern society (although I did go away with a greater realisation of the problems of restarting civilization after an apocalyptic event). Also, McCleary’s premise about the human need for work isn’t convincing (I suspect many people who are in jobs they don’t like would feel the same). Overall though this is an interesting and, at times, highly entertaining novel.

I’ve already mentioned Wesso’s cover above, but he also contributes Interior artwork for the Wellman piece and, I think, the Walton story on p. 23 (it is uncredited but it looks like his work). There is other credited work by Charles Schneeman, Jack Binder, Eliot Dold, and Olga Ley. This leaves Brown and Coughlin from the list of artists on the title page to claim the illustrations for the McClary and Knight stories. Howard Brown did the cover for the McClary in the April issue, and the interior illustrations for all three issues look like that, therefore Coughlin is presumably the artist for the Knight story on p. 97.
I like a number of the illustrations in this issue, the Wesso, Schneeman, Coughlin, Ley, and the first of the Dold pieces for Gallun’s story.
Fantastic Fiction by John W. Campbell is an interesting editorial about how technological changes creep up slowly on society as they are perfected. The last couple paragraphs are prescient in their observation that spaceships and atomic power will “come together” and that their discoverers are “here today”.

The Great Eye by R. DeWitt Miller (who contributed March’s novelette The Master Shall Not Die!) is an interesting science article about the intended uses of the new Mount Palomar 200” telescope, and the problems that will need to be overcome in operating it.
Monstrous Twin is a short filler about the similarities between the “twin elelments” sulphur and selenium. It grimly outlines the problem in certain agricultural situations:

In certain regions of the West, the ground is poor in sulphur. Plants growing there, unable to get the “badly-needed sulphur, take the near-twin element, selenium, instead.
Then the deadliness of the element begins. Cattle and horses, chickens and similar animals eat those plants. Their growing cells require sulphur, and the selenium slips in instead. Hair-cells, trying to manufacture that sulphur-containing protein, first find that the substitute won’t work. The hair-cells are poisoned, die, and ulcerous sores appear. The hair drops out in ugly patches. Sores, cuts, bruises fail to heal, as the growth-stimulating functions of the tissues fail for lack of sulphur. The wounds spread and fester. The animal’s brain is affected.
But selenium-fed hens laying eggs somehow manage to get the selenium into the proteins that should contain sulphur. And it works—somewhat. The things that hatch out live, for a while at least. But they aren’t chickens. They are monstrous things. Growth of young, new cells—where sulphur is most vitally needed—goes on somehow—but it goes wrong. Calves and colts born to cattle and horses fed on that poisoned fodder are monstrous, the degree of wrongness increasing with the proportion of selenium the mother animal ate. p. 96

In Times to Come plugs next issue’s new novelette by Ray Cummings and the associated cover, as well as heralding the return of Clifford D. Simak.
The Analytical Laboratory: April 1938 presents the story-ratings for the April issue, which I commented on in that review.⁴

Witnesses of the Past by Willy Ley is a fascinating article about “living fossils”, biological oddities such as the duck-billed platypus and the lungfish, etc., and the consternation these animals caused scientists at the time of their discovery.

The accomplished illustrations for this article are, according to the issue’s ISFDB page, “by Olga Ley, per editor response to Isaac Asimov, Astounding, Aug. 1938.”
I’d be interested to know what corrections or additions, if any, a modern biologist would make to this article.
Science Discussions has the usual half-baked and semi-incoherent contributions punctuated by a couple of letters of interest. D. R. Cummins, of Sacramento, CA, comments on favourably on the astronomical covers that the magazine has started using, and has suggestions about others he would like to see:

[How] about some lunar scenery in its probable real colors? The Moon is one of the most-pictured extra-terrestrial objects, but after all, it is the closest and the easiest to examine and will be the first landing place for space travelers. My impression is that the apparent uniformity of color on the Moon is due to the conditions under which we see it. Yesterday it was cloudy here but we could see the snow-covered Sierra Nevada Range sixty miles away illuminated with bright sunlight. It had a silvery brightness curiously like a lunar landscape as seen through a telescope. There was the same lack of variety in coloring, yet in the mountains there is great contrast between the snow and light-gray granite and the green of the trees (pine, fir, cedar, etc.) and the dark, volcanic rock. p. 149

There are a couple of letters that should probably be in Brass Tacks, including one by A. S. McEckron, Galvaston, KA, who provides an amusing description of that column:

It was with considerable surprise and some apprehension that I noted the rather uproarious emergence of Brass Tacks from its well merited banishment to the limbo of obsolescence. Such a department could and should be of inestimable value as a symposium of the opinions and preferences of your readers—if all readers could be persuaded to present their mental reactions as opinions rather than pearls of wisdom from the treasure house of omniscience. Brass Tacks, for some time previous to its banishment contained more stridence than science, more concussion than discussion. It was about as interesting and instructive as a cacophonous wrangle between a covey of quail and a flock of crows; the quail perpetually interrogating “But why? But why? But why?”: and the crows raucously “Because! Because! Because!” And its short sojourn in the editorial hoosegow appears to have improved neither its temperament nor its technique. p. 151

Brass Tacks starts with a couple of correspondents expressing a preference for Dold’s artwork over Wesso’s, which I find rather baffling (Dold has another admirer towards the end of the column). Elsewhere, there are positive comments about the beginning of McClary’s serial Three Thousand Years!
There is one particularly negative letter from James S. Avery, Skowhegan, MA:

In the few short months that you have been editor, you have destroyed practically all of the marvelous work that Tremaine had done for several years before you. You have broken up and disfigured every point that he strove to uphold. The magazine has now absolutely no tradition to look up to. From the first of your issues, the magazine has had a rushed, slapped-together air about it. Even the printers seem to sense it.
My last few issues have been loosely bound, raggedy cut, covers set up unevenly— all in all a general slovenly appearance.
Truthfully, I can say the mag is not one quarter as good as in 1934, and not a fifth as good as in 1937—certainly not very complimentary to you. Its stories have declined in quality—each issue is just a bit poorer than the preceeding. Its art work has gone down frightfully. Brass Tacks has been neglected, heavy science articles have increased. All these signs point to a slow but sure break-down of the old policy. Worst of all— or perhaps it seems the worst to me—is the disgracing placement of Brass Tacks. In the March issue its position was excellent. Why couldn’t it have been left there, instead of being shoved among columns of advertising? Science Discussions is good and should be kept, but in moderation. Why is it today we rarely see any more of the highly enjoyable letters of the type once printed in the old Wonder Stories? That was a department to be proud of! p. 156

I suspect this may be a solitary outlier—but Campbell liked an argument.
With two good serials and a novelette, and a couple of okay short stories (not to mention an unprecedented three science articles I liked!), this issue is probably the best of the early Campbell Astoundings I’ve read so far. ●

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1. In Campbell’s letter of 28^th February 1938 to his friend and correspondent Robert Swisher (in Fantasy Commentator #59/60—recommended, and available at Lulu.com), he talks about Wellman’s and Gallun’s stories, and the changing publication date of the magazine:

“In June we’ll have another astronomical cover—Mars. I’ll have to show it as seen from Diemos, the outer moon, because Phobos is so close you can’t see the whole planet from there. It illustrates ‘Men Against the Stars’ by Manly Wade Wellman, who, incidentally, is coming along damn well. ‘Pithecanthropus Rejectus’ and ‘Wings of the Storm’ both received a way-above-average reception. ‘Men Against The Stars’ had a fine idea, but needed some rewriting. Wellman took a crack at it, and still unsatisfied, I took a hand. See if you can tell, when it appears, where the joinery was done. I rewrote about one third of the story.” p. 82

“Gallun’s a funny one. Once in a while he hits a high-spot like ‘Old Faithful’ and deserves a lot. Most of the time he rides along. He’s gotten three accepts in the last three weeks. One weak, hut not too weak. One medium good. One that almost reaches ‘Old Faithful’ ‘Seeds of Dusk’ is the latter. p. 83

“They’re playing hide-and-seek with Astounding’s publication date,” Campbell complained. “You noticed the nice banner line about ‘second-Wednesday-of-the-month’? But the June issue actually comes out the third Friday. The July issue will come out the fourth Friday. And the fourth Friday thereafter. Don’t ask me why—they, not I, conceived the shift.” p. 83

2. Prince Rupert’s Drop at Wikipedia.

3. It’s not only me (and Campbell) who thought that Gallun’s story was a good one—it was anthologised in (among others) Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas, 1946, and in The Astounding-Analog Reader Volume 1, edited by Harry Harrison, Brian W. Aldiss, 1972.
The story has a sequel, When Earth Is Old, written in the same period but rejected by Campbell according to a note for the story on ISFDB (it quotes p. 86 of Gallun’s Starclimber: The Literary Adventures and Autobiography of Raymond Z. Gallun). It eventually appeared in Super Science Stories, August 1951.

4. The Analytical Laboratory for this issue appeared in the August one:

The success of the Wellman novelette and the poor showing for the two serials, especially Williamson’s, perplexes me. At least the Gallun novelette was appreciated. For the record: the Walton, James and Knight stories were never reprinted. ●

Edited 15th November 2019: Archive.org link added.

ISFDB
Archive.org

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Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
The Legion of Time (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson ∗∗∗+
The Incredible Visitor • short story by Clifton B. Kruse ∗
Island of the Individualists • novelette by Nat Schachner
Procession of Suns • short story by R. R. Winterbotham
Three Thousand Years! (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Thomas Calvert McClary ∗∗∗
Static • novelette by Kent Casey
Ra for the Rajah • short story by John Victor Peterson ∗∗
Niedbalski’s Mutant • short story by Clifton B. Kruse [as by Spencer Lane] ∗
The Brain-Storm Vibration • short story by Moses Schere

Non-fiction:
Cover • Charles Schneeman
Interior artwork • Charles Schneeman (3), Jack Binder, Elliott Dold, Jr. (5), C. R. Thomson (2), H. W. Wesso, uncredited (4)
Not ‘The’ But ‘A’ • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Catastrophe! • science essay by Edward E. Smith
Science Discussions • letters
Brass Tacks • letters
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: March 1938

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The first part of Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time leads off this issue.¹ It starts with Lanning, a college student, reading a paper on space and time in his shared undergraduate flat when a woman appears in his room:

A clear silvery voice had spoken his name. Dropping the book, he sat upright in his chair. He blinked, swallowed. A queer little shudder went up and down his spine. The door was still closed, and there had been no other sound. But a woman was standing before him on the rug.
A plain white robe swept long to her feet. Her hair, a glowing mahogany-red, was held back with a blue, brilliant band like a halo. The composure of her perfect, classic face was almost stern. But, behind it, Lanning felt agony.
Before her, in two small hands, she held a thing about the size and shape of a football—but shimmering with splendid prismatic flame, like a colossal, many-faceted diamond. p. 6
[. . .]
“I am Lethonee,” she said. Her voice, Lanning noticed, had an unfamiliar musical rhythm. “And I am not really in your room, but in my own city of Jonbar. It is only in your mind that we meet, through the chronotron,”—her eyes dropped briefly to the immense flashing gem—“and only your study of Time made possible this complete rapport.” p. 6

She shows him a vision of Jonbar, her city:

The lofty, graceful pylons of it would have dwarfed the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Of shimmering, silvery metal, they were set immensely far apart, among green park-lands and broad, many-leveled roadways. Great white ships, teardrop-shaped, slipped through the air above them. p. 7

Lethonee explains to Lanning that he will have a pivotal role in ensuring the future existence of the city, and that he should guard himself against other forces:

“There is the dark, resistless power of the gyrane, and black Glarath, the priest of its murderous horror. There are the monstrous hordes of the kothrin, and their savage commander, Sorainya.”
The white beauty of Lethonee had become almost stern. A sorrow darkened her eyes, yet they flashed with a deathless hatred.
“She is the greatest peril.” It was a battle-chant. “Sorainya, the Woman of War! She is the evil flower of Gyronchi. And she must be destroyed.”
[. . .]
“Or,” she finished, “she will destroy you. Denny.”
Lanning looked at her a long time. At last, hoarse with wonder, he said: “Whatever is going to happen, I’m willing to help—if I can. Because you are—beautiful.” p. 7-8

Before she leaves him she warns him not to go to the flying club the next day with Halloran, his friend and flatmate: the latter is killed in an accident.
The second chapter continues at an equally brisk pace. Lanning graduates and takes a job reporting in Nicaragua. He travels to his new post by ship and, while on deck one night, he receives another visit:

Velvet night had fallen on the tropical Pacific. The watch had just changed, and now the decks were deserted. Lanning, the only passenger, was leaning on the foredeck rail, watching the minute diamonds of phosphorescence that winged endlessly from the prow.
[. . .]
And it startled him strangely when a ringing golden voice [. . .] called: “Denny Lanning!”
His heart leapt and paused. He looked up eagerly, and hope gave way to awed wonderment. For, flying beside the rail, was a long golden shell, shaped like an immense shallow platter. Silken cushions made a couch of it, and lying amid them was a woman.
Sorainya—Woman of War!
Lethonee’s warning came back. For the long-limbed woman in the shell was dad in a gleaming, sleeveless crimson tunic of woven mail that yielded to her full lissom curves. A long, thin sword, in a jeweled sheath, lay beside her. She had put aside a black-plumed, crimson helmet, and thick masses of golden hair streamed down across her strong, bare arms.
The white, tapered fingers, scarlet-nailed, touched some control on the shell’s low rim, and it floated nearer the rail. Upraised on the pillows and one smooth elbow, the woman looked up at Lanning, smiling. Her eyes were long and brilliantly greenish. Across the white beauty of her face, her mocking lips were a long scarlet wound, voluptuous, malicious.
Flower of Evil—Lethonee’s words again. Lanning stood gripping the rail, and a trembling weakness shook him. Swift, unbidden desire overcame incredulity, and he strove desperately to be its master. p. 9-10

If Lethonee is Good Girlfriend then Sorainya quickly reveals herself to be Bad Girlfriend. Sorainya tries to lure him on to the craft but Lethonee arrives just as he moves towards Sorainya and tells him to look below: there is a shark is in the water, and as his hand passes through Sorainya’s he realises that she is a projection too, and that he would have fallen to his death in the water. With a final warning Sorainya departs.
Lethonee tells Lanning that if he ever yields to Sorainya then Jonbar will never exist, and explains why:

“The World is a long corridor, from the Beginning of existence to the End. Events are groups in a sculptured frieze that runs endlessly along the walls. And Time is a lantern carried steadily through the hall, to illuminate the groups one by one. It is the light of awareness, the subjective reality of consciousness.
“Again and again the corridor branches, for it is the museum of all that is possible. The bearer of the lantern may take one turning, or another. And so, many halls that might have been illuminated with reality are left forever in the darkness.
“My world of Jonbar is one such possible way. It leads through splendid halls, bright vistas that have no limit. Gyronchi is another. But it is a barren track, through narrowing, ugly passages, that comes to a dead and useless end.”
The wide solemn eyes of Lethonee looked at him, over the slumberous flame of the jewel. Lanning tensed and caught his breath, as if a light, cold hand, from nowhere, had touched his shoulder.
“And you, Denny Lanning,” came the silver rhythmic voice, “are destined, for a little time, to carry the lantern. And—yours is the choice of reality.”

It’s a breath of fresh air to find a story that explains the maguffin in such a concise and elegant way—most other stories of this period would have a lone inventor banging on about etheric potentialities for a page and a half. This part is the cherry on the top of two crackingly paced chapters.
After this eventful beginning, Williamson uses the next section to rearrange the furniture. Years pass. He is visited once more by Sorainya, who tries to make him kill himself. He receives another treatise on time from his old college roommate McLan, and then one from Chan, the fourth of his roommates, after which he leaves to join him in China.
There, Lanning and Chan work as pilots in an unspecified war. During one raid they get their aircraft airborne but it is badly damaged. As they plummet towards the surface a spectral ship—with the dead Barry Halloran aboard—materialises beside them. They are plucked from the aircraft and Lanning later wakes on board to find Halloran watching over him.
Lanning finds out he is on the Chronion, a time-ship, and meets other military men plucked from various years to fight Sorainya. He then meets the ship’s captain, who is his old friend Will McLan, but finds him much changed:

Lanning climbed metal steps. Standing behind a bright wheel, under the flawless shell of crystal, he came upon a slight, strange little man—or the shattered wreck of a man. His breath sucked in to the shock of sympathetic pain. For the stranger was hideous with the manifold print of unspeakable agony.
The hands—restlessly fumbling with an odd little tube of bright-worn silver that hung by a thin chain about his neck—were yellow, bloodless claws, trembling, twisted with pain. The whole thin body was grotesquely stooped and gnarled, as if every bone had been broken on a torture wheel.
But it was the haggard, livid face, cross-hatched with a white net of ridged scars that chilled Lanning with its horror. Beneath a tangled abundance of loose white hair, that face was a stiff, pain-graven mask, terrible to see. Dark, deep-sunken, the eyes were somber wells of agony—and of a deathless, brooding hatred.
Strangely, those dreadful orbs lit with recognition.
“Denny!” It was an eager whisper, but queerly dry and voiceless.
The little man limped quickly to meet him, thrust out a trembling hand that was thin and twisted and broken, hideous with a web of scars. His breath was a swift, whistling gasp.
Lanning tried to put down the wondering dread that shook him. He took that frail dry claw of a hand, and tried to smile.
“Wil?” he whispered. “You are Wil McLan?”
He choked back the other, fearful question: What frightful thing has happened to you, Wil?
“Yes, Denny,” hissed that voiceless voice. “But—I’ve lived forty years more than you have. And ten of them in Sorainya’s torture vault.”

The rest of this section details McLan’s torture at the hands on the Gyronchi. Lanning is also shown their brutal world, and the civil war that has destroyed humanity leaving the Gyronchi and their ant warriors in control.

McLan also tells a Lanning of his temporal work (undoing the earlier elegant explanation a little), and how atomic power eventually let him build the Chronion and travel in time. At the end, Lanning goes and swears the rest of the men to the service of Jonbar.
A pretty good start to the novel.

Most of the rest of the fiction is, sadly, not up to the standard of the Williamson. The Incredible Visitor by Clifton B. Kruse, the first of two stories from this writer in this issue, is about a tiny, incredibly dense spaceship which comes to Earth from Sirius and causes a certain amount of turmoil, including the capture of two humans. The aliens, after their observations, decide they want to communicate with us.
One of the human scientists tries to tell the military that this is what the aliens are attempting, but (spoiler) he is overruled and, when the aliens attempt to return the two captives, they are attacked with a neutron ray. The ship is unaffected, but the humans (spoiler) are only saved by being recreated with alien bodies. They will be brought back to consciousness after the long journey back to Sirius.

Island of the Individualists by Nat Schachner is the third (of five stories) in the ‘Past, Present and Future’ series. I was going to read the first two but, after reading this one, I was glad I didn’t bother. This has three characters in a rocket ship running out of fuel over the Pacific. Fortunately, there is a data dump that brings us up to date:

“How far is it to land?” asked Beltan.
“As near as I can calculate,” said Sam, “almost a thousand miles. Too far to swim, as friend Kleon has justly remarked.”
The Greek shrugged. “I never did like the sea,” he declared. “I prefer solid ground underfoot, where I can brace myself and charge the enemy with my good sword flashing. It is my fault. Had I not remarked about the sleeping Gymnosophists in the mountains of Tibet, this would never have happened.”
“No more your fault than mine,” Sam Ward told him warmly. “They were our last chance. We ranged over most of North America seeking evidences of other cities, other civilizations. Aside from Hispan we could find nothing. And always behind us, hemming us in, hunting us like rabbits, were the rocket hordes of Harg, headed by Vardu. Our only chance lay in escape across the Pacific, to find the sleepers who had given you the life-immobilizing formula.”
“It is a pity that there was a leak in the tank,” observed the Olgarch with calm indifference. “Otherwise we could have made it. As it is, I regret nothing. I have lived more completely this past six months with you two as comrades, than in all the prior years of purposeless luxury within the neutron walls of Hispan.” He smiled reflectively. “A strange thing, our association. A Greek from the time of Alexander—an American from the twentieth century—and I, an Olgarch of Hispan, who once thought myself the proud apex of the ninety-eighth century.” p. 44

They see a strange island in the distance, and are scanned as they come into land. They find a race of men with really big heads who spend their time in contemplation.

One of the Heads talks to the three but, bored, retreats behind his force screen. Another Head talks to them, and feeds them before doing the same. A third speaks but then disappears. This one returns with the pursuing forces of Harg. There is a climactic battle on the island.
A poor pulp potboiler.

In Procession of Suns by R. R. Winterbotham a female pilot lands in an isolated mountain valley where a man is hiding from the rest of the world. After he destroys her plane (to stop her escaping and revealing his whereabouts) they become engrossed in an astronomical puzzle.

“I fled to these mountains and made my home in this crater of an extinct volcano. It was here that I found among some old books I had rescued in your land, certain vague references to a science called astronomy—the study of stars.”
Banna nodded. “I know,” said she. “It was the stars and astronomy that caused the latest upheaval—the stars that promised the end of the world.”
“You mean those twenty flaming suns up there?” asked Fao with a smile, pointing to the sky. Although the sun had not set, a long streamer of stars was visible, trailing across the heavens behind the Earth’s primary—twenty flashing stars of more than first magnitude. p. 65-66

The rest of the story is little more than a lecture, ending with Fao’s deduction that the Earth is acting like an ion in a capacitor—or some such scientific nonsense, I forget. This is an awful non-story.

The second part (there are overlapping serials in this issue) of Three Thousand Years! by Thomas Calvert McClary provides a temporary respite from the dross.
This section details the first attempts by Drega’s group at organising themselves in the post-apocalyptic world into which they have awakened. Food is short, and an attempt by the mob to eat a horse is stopped when a sailor turns up with a three-pound fish. Drega starts organising the men:

The fish pools had been stretched for two miles, with lengthy necks reaching into the river. At high tide the necks were bottled up. Birch and some sugar maple had been found. A poor grade of clay yielded a few pots which did not leak too badly. Birch and maple tea were the camp drink, both made by steaming twigs. There was no way to boil as yet. The inferior clay pots couldn’t stand it. A little coal had been discovered buried beneath hard packed mud. It was dug out with sticks and broken laboriously with heavy stones.
Drega’s clan had grown to two thousand, but increasing deaths from colds and infection threatened to reduce the number. The meager diet of fish and roots and dandelion greens was not sufficient to build up starved bodies. There had been an attempt to eat green berries which proved almost fatal. Some oysters and clams had been discovered. For the first time, a bird had been caught with enough meat on its bones to eat.
No dogs had come to this camp, but five cats were protected by Drega’s order. An onslaught of rats had threatened the camp’s very existence, and not until the arrival of the cats had this menace been curbed. p. 77-78

Some of the men go out to scout, and they later return on two elephants, with grim tales of colleagues lost in accidents and to huge bands of savages. There are also reports of widespread cannibalism, including one episode among their own expedition when they were desperate.

Some of the scouts do not return and Llewelyn goes out to find them, discovering Steve trapped in an underground tunnel with a group are living there. Steve and the eight hundred survivors go back to the camp.
Drega meantime has organised food for the winter, and the defence of the camp. Lead tokens are made by a smelting pit process for use as currency. For all his planning food starts to run short as winter approaches, and riots are only just supressed.
At the end of this instalment, Gamble (who caused the three thousand-year ‘sleep’) turns up with the offer of a better life:

Passionately, [Gamble] gave them a picture of the world science could create for them—corn high as their wall in five days from planting. Clothing in such quantity they could throw it into refabrication when it grew shoddy. Cars and private baths for every member of the family, luxuries for all and poverty for none. It was a beautiful picture. It left them silent and stunned.
“It will take a little time,” Gamble said. “But not long. There is only one condition. You all work and there is no money. At least money of the kind you know. In return, you get everything you can wish for. There will be no need for money.”
A cheer rose and fell dead into stunned silence. There could be no doubt Gamble spoke at least some truth. Look at his shining boots and the presents he had brought! Even bolts of silk and woolens!
“Mr. Drega,” Gamble went on, “does not agree with my views. He will probably wish to withdraw from any part of them.”
If Gamble had expected Drega to capitulate, he was disappointed. Drega was white but firm. He said to his people, “A world cannot exist without money! There must be trade.”
His clan was silent. p. 93

Most go with Gamble but a few decide instead to go with Drega to set up their own society.
This part doesn’t have the startling events of the first instalment and is a more traditional post-apocalypse piece with some interesting parts.

Static by Kent Casey is the second of the ‘Dr. von Theil and Sgt. John West’ stories. I had hopes for this one as I liked aspects of the previous tale, but this just recycles it in another conflict with the Uranians. This time the latter’s spaceships are impenetrable to the weapons used by Earth, so the General summons von Theil to find out how their shields work. Von Theil picks up the now Lieutenant West (promoted for valour after the opening space battle scene), and they head off for Mars with one of von Thiel’s inventions. This is a very long setup for a weak and unconvincing ending that involves (spoiler) a thought scrambler. The story doesn’t really make any sense (how did Von Thiel’s thought scrambler work away from Mars?), and it has an uncomplicated and straightforward ending. The cornball humour is very weak.

Ra for the Rajah by John Victor Peterson² is narrated by Ward Jetland, the Freshman President at Royal Astrotech College in 2039 A. D. When he is introduced to a new student who is Martian royalty, his Royal Highness Ianay Fonay, it does not go well:

I was Freshman President by virtue of what was termed brilliance in prep school polo when the exclusive Coloe Palus prep Godsped the Rajah across to Royal.
His knee bent in homage, a Sophomore Martian introduced us: “Frosh prexy Ward Jetland, this is his Royal Highness Ianay Fonay, eldest son of Lanay Fonay, Over-Rajah of Syrtis Ma—”
“I-am-a-phoney!” I punned softly and chuckled. Consciousness was concurrent with the discovery that my aching mouth tasted of Martian knuckles and the realization that even a Martian can be insulted.
Tradition went smash! For a common frosh can’t sock the prexy, even if he is a Rajah’s heir-apparent. It’s worse than mutiny on a space-trajectory; it’s worse than a privately tutored youngster prancing innocently into the Blaster’s Dive on Ganymede and asking for milk!
Naturally, I promptly recovered my pugilistic prestige, and for three years afterward we had secret rendezvous behind the polo hangars and nurtured black eyes, skinned knuckles, acid burns and whatnot. We rounded the final pylon sound-limbed and going strong. Then radium, atomic energy, rockets, thrust-dispersion, polo, and—last and most important—Rosalie Ames, came cometing into our bittersweet lives and things really got serious! p. 110

The last sentence telegraphs the arc of the story. While they are working in the same lab on a rocket thrust dispersion problem they are both introduced to Rosalie Ames, a beautiful heiress:

She swept in like a queen, surveyed the Rajah and me haughtily and then swooped to our level with an even, white smile that made my heart surge like a hypoed jet-blast and keep going faster than a Perseid. I ogled at the Rajah; he ogled at me.
“Canal frogs peeping on a June night!” he sighed, which, if you’ve been to Mars, is a beautiful thing, “a vision!”
Of course, he said it just loud enough to hear—
She dimpled prettily and I decided that those telepix didn’t do the darling justice; then Widdlemere introduced us. Simultaneously something short-circuited in the unattended cyclotron—atoms disrupted in a hot, white, snapping flash—the durite vacuum tank cracked in twain.
“Damnation!” I yelped. “Voila: my next month’s allowance gone with the proverbial wind!”
“I will pay all,” sighed the Rajah ecstatically. “It is as nothing compared with meeting the famous and beauteous Rosalie—”
Shakespeare really had nothing on Fonay! p. 110-111

After she leaves, their truce ends:

“Listen, Rajah Phoney,” I growled, “all hands clear. The deck’s mine and you’re just a third-grade blaster. She gave me the orbs first, so just arc for Callisto and keep your unlovely proboscis clear of the heart-shiverin’ until I slap an I-do around the pretty’s fin—
“Listen, Vacuity Jetland,” he snapped back, “the dame’s mine. But if you must fight over everything, I’ll make you a bargain. Seeing that you’re Captain of the Royal American Varsity and I’m Cap of the Martian Varsity—well, when the annual Commencement Game comes off, the winner takes the spoils. In other words, the beauteous Rosalie is to be escorted to the Reception by the winning Captain, and the age-old custom of the engagement announcement will be preserved, all parties willing. Okel-dokel ?” p. 111

The rest of the story is about their rivalry, and concludes with a game of rocket polo.
The story is enjoyable but a little unclear at times due to its unusual and colourful style: one wonders what readers of the time thought of passages such as those above.

Niedbalski’s Mutant by Clifton B. Kruse is his second (and pseudonymous) story in the issue, and it is narrated by a sentient plant that can ‘hear’ the thoughts of its scientist creator and later matches this to his speech. The plant teaches itself to speak and attempts to communicate, only for the scientist to react with horror and leave, never to reappear. This plot loop is repeated with a woman who comes into possession of the plant. With its third owner, a botanist, the plant remains silent until it comes into bud, at which point it needs a viola tricolour for pollination. Once again the owner disappears but this time the plant learns that its attempts at communication are blanking the minds of the recipients.
There are some interesting aspects to this story, but its tragic arc is overlong and a bit pointless.

The Brain-Storm Vibration by Moses Schere occurs after the events of his earlier story Anachronistic Optics (Astounding, February 1938), but is independent of it. This one has Joshua the handyman becoming the subject of an experiment to increase intelligence (or “ratiocinative ability” as the story puts it). After they retire to the library a burglar breaks into the house; he is subdued and later used as a test subject which, of course, turns him into a criminal mastermind. There is a lot of explanatory dialogue and hand waving science explanation in the final act of this weak piece.

The Cover by Charles Schneeman (it is uncredited but is a colour mirror image of the first internal illustration) is for Williamson’s serial and is okay, I suppose, but not as good as his internal work which is probably the best in the issue. I note in passing that the coloured banners at the top and bottom of the previous covers are absent in this issue but will be back in the next. The rest of the Interior artwork is by Jack Binder, Elliott Dold, Jr., C. R. Thomson, and H. W. Wesso. A few are uncredited (I suspect the illustrations for McClary’s serial are by Brown, as they are similar to last issue’s, which were in turn similar to the credited cover). After Schneeman’s illustrations I like Wesso’s best. They look old-fashioned but are nicely detailed. The longer I look at all the different parts of the picture (look at those immaculately drawn skyscrapers in the background, the arches under the far stand) the more I think it is the best illustration in the issue. I have a grudging appreciation of Dold’s work (who illustrates three of the stories) even though it is rather crude.
John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Not ‘The’ But ‘A’ is an editorial that focusses mainly on the time-travel plot variant in Jack Williamson’s serial:

Jack Williamson has opened up another field for time-travel plots. The Legion of Time is itself a memorable story. It has a new plot. But more than that—it has a new concept—a mutant plot. If the future can follow either of many paths—and that, I feel, must be so, if our modern science is reasonably sound—then there is a new possibility. In the year 5938, for instance, either of two civilizations might exist. A time-traveler going down the paths to Tomorrow might reach either one or the other.
But, as Williamson points out, those two cannot be real to each other. If either can exist, and if they have the power, the knowledge to see through Time—then they may struggle for existence! But they cannot attack each other! p. 107

I don’t see why the latter should necessarily pertain, or why Campbell is getting so excited about Williamson’s twist; he goes on to say that this “completely new idea” “can give rise to a hundred plots.” I hope not, I don’t want to read the same story a hundred times. ³

Catastrophe! is a science article by Edward E. (‘Doc’) Smith about the formation of our solar system. As with most of these pieces it is outdated—the nebular theory it discounts (because of angular momentum concerns) is the one that is now supported.⁴ Smith finishes with a lively description of another theory—a wandering star striking or coming very close to a binary system, where one of the two stars was our sun.
Science Discussions has three letters, the first from Arthur C. Clarke (Hon. Treasurer of the British Interplanetary Society) which takes issue with the rocket flight equations in Leo Vernon’s article in the January issue.
Brass Tacks has letters defending ‘Doc’ Smith’s Galactic Patrol against comments made in an earlier issue, including a letter from Doc Smith himself:

What broke through my customary lethargy is not the mere fact that these sprightly and courteous gentlemen did not like “Galactic Patrol”—I cannot even hope, and certainly do not expect, to please everybody; and their tastes are their own. Nor is it the tone of the communication, the weapons they have chosen—I have been bawled out before, by experts, without undue or unseemly urges to violence.
What got my dander up to writing pitch is the accusation—by inference, it is true, but none the less clearly connoted—that I am sailing under false colors by using the Ph. D. Since Edward E. Smith is my real name, the thing is of course on record.

He goes on to give details, and challenges the original correspondents to state which passages of this novel show scientific knowledge incompatible with holding a Ph. D.
As for the other letters, there a couple who thought (as I did) that the ending to Galactic Patrol was abrupt, and there are the usual comments about the artwork. One of the readers, Mary Rogers of Muskogee, OK, compliments Smith’s novel and the new mutant cover, and finishes with “Keep up the good work and next time I’ll send orchids.”
Campbell’s reply is, “We’ll expect orchids when the May Astounding appears.”
In Times to Come announces a new feature, the Analytical Laboratory,⁵ and goes into matters in some detail—I’m not entirely sure what all the symbols mean:

Once again we have an issue that has a few items of note, and a lot of what can only be described as dross. ●

_____________________

1. In Campbell’s letter of 28^th February 1938 to his friend and correspondent Robert Swisher (in Fantasy Commentator #59/60—recommended, and available at Lulu.com), he talks about the writers and material of this period:

“You know. I swear….we ought to get an appreciable and real circulation increase during the next three months. I think we’ve gotten some damn good stories, along with the ones that are just a bit weak. ‘Three Thousand Years and ‘Legion of Time’ are good yarns. Those Kent Casey shorts are good and (Clifton B.) Kruse has dropped his lousy W62 series (space adventure stories) for some rather nicely handled pieces. The competition from the author’s viewpoint, is getting fierce. I’m betting a number of those who appeared begin to drop out. Eando Binder has been in a bit of a slump, and his beat was never too strong. He may be retired gradually. (R.R.) Winterbotham is improving gradually and just fast enough to keep up. But he may not.
“Gallun’s a funny one. Once in a while he hits a high-spot like ‘Old Faithful’ and deserves a lot. Most of the time he rides along. He’s gotten three accepts in the last three weeks. One weak, hut not too weak. One medium good. One that almost reaches ‘Old Faithful’, ‘Seeds of Dusk’ is the latter. p. 82-83

Later on in the same letter Campbell has this to say about the artwork the magazine uses:

“By the way, any originals (covers and interior drawings) you’d like? We pass ’em out fairly liberally because they just get thrown out. You can even get a cover original after it’s about three months old—provided you don’t ask for an astronomical cover. Schneeman’s work is really neat in the originals. Binder’s originals aren’t as good as the reproduction—because he draws for the reproduction, not the original. The April cover is already bespoke—by Tom McClary. He can have it when we have the June cover to hang in the office. Wesso is doing that original astronomical plate. p. 82

2. I couldn’t find out much about John Victor Peterson. According to his ISFDB page, he wrote eight stories (one a collaboration) in the late-1930s/early-1940s and was then out of the field for over a decade, returning in the mid-1950s with another eleven works. There was a final novel in 1970, Rock the Big Rock.
I did find one snippet in Space, Time, and Infinity: Essays on Fantastic Literature by Brian M. Stableford, Borgo Press 2007, (Amazon) which has this:

I have before me as I write a battered copy of the first-ever issue of New Worlds—not the one which Ted Carnell and Frank Arnold persuaded Stephen Frances (alias Hank Janson) to launch under the Pendulum Publications imprint in 1946, but the March 1939 issue, the first of what turned out to be a run of four produced by means of a primitive duplicator. It contains a story by John Victor Peterson, a British writer who had already made five appearances in the American SF pulps, and a discussion of his writing methods by one “Thornton Ayre.” p. 94

3. Sam Moskowitz mentions one story that may have been inspired by Williamson’s in Fantasy Commentator #59/60:

The identical plot would be used with great effectiveness and poignancy in C.L. Moore’s ‘Greater Than Gods’ (Astounding Science Fiction, January, 1939), possibly urged upon her by Campbell. It was the ‘Branches of Time’ plot used several times previously, even as early as Edward Everett Hale and Mark Twain (‘Hands Off, Harper’s, March, 1881 and ‘The Mysterious Stranger’, Harper’s, 1922, respectively). p. 68-69

4. Wikipedia’s Formation and evolution of the Solar System page.

5. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in July:

I agree with the top two, but the next three are among the four worst stories in this issue; the Kruse stories are better, and Peterson’s definitely so, but I can see how the latter split opinion. ●

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