Other Reviews:
Jamie Rubin: Vacation in the Golden Age, Episode 9

Fiction:
Cold • novelette by Nat Schachner
In the Good Old Summertime • short story by P. Schuyler Miller ♥
The Emancipated • novelette by L. Sprague de Camp ♥♥♥
A Chapter from the Beginning • short story by A. M. Phillips ♥♥
The Dwindling Sphere • short story by Willard E. Hawkins ♥♥
If This Goes On … (Part 2 of 2) • novella serial by Robert A. Heinlein ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cold • cover by Gilmore
Interior Artwork • Frank Kramer, R. Isip, E. Hatcher, W. Kolliker, Hubert Rogers
Not-So-Dangerous Experiment • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: January 1940 • story ratings
Fuel for the Future • essay by Jack Hatcher
Atomic Ringmaster • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Brass Tacks • letters
Science Discussions • letters

This month’s cover¹ is by Gilmore, and I now understand the negative comments in last issue’s Brass Tacks about his work. While this isn’t a bad painting it is a rather crudely executed vision of an eclipse on Uranus. Of the interior art the best is from Kramer, who does a number of illustrations for the Schachner novelette.

The fiction leads off with Cold by Nat Schachner. This is fairly dire pulp fare set at an armorium mine on Ariel, one of the moons of Uranus. There is a data dump at the start that describes the miners, three Earthmen and two Martians, and the political situation that pertains between Earth and Mars. They mine this element by the use of what seems like slave-labour, ‘Troglos’ from Venus. This is all told in very homey and slangy prose with plenty of ‘swells’ and the odd ‘muchly’. This is from when they discuss possible Earth-Martian tensions:

“You suppose so!” echoed Sar indignantly. “Why, you blithering idiot, look at me. Could you even dream of hating me, of blasting me down with a needle ray just because I’m a Martian and you’re an Earthman?”
I jarred out of my abstraction. “You old son,” I told him affectionately. “I’d cut off my own right arm first. You’re more to me than a blood brother. Sure, patriotism is the bunk, an outmoded irrationality.”

When the story eventually gets going the main armorium seam suddenly and unexpectedly appears to be exhausted. This potential catastrophe—Earth and Mars are dependent on armorium for all their energy—leads Earth and Mars to send war fleets to secure what is left of the supply. There is also a breakdown of trust at the station. Later, the Troglos revolt and in the ensuing skirmish the Earthmen and Martians unite and manage to erect a force screen that will protect the mine from both fleets:

We both squinted upward. The black sky, in which a dark, ominous Uranus hung like a huge black disk, with the Sun completely hid, began to shimmer. Flashing colors chased each other over the vast expanse, thin and pearly opalescent. Like a faint, jeweled haze an arching shimmer of force spread over the darkling planet.
“The impermo-screen!” we said simultaneously.

Unsurprisingly (spoiler) a new seam of armorium is also exposed by an explosion during the Troglo conflict, so all ends well. This story is another example of the on-going pulp filler that Campbell was still reliant on.

The Emancipated by L. Sprague de Camp is the other novelette in this issue, and is the third of the ‘Johnny Black’ series of stories.² Johnny is a black bear who has been injected with a substance that has changed the structure of his brain and increased his intelligence to that of a human’s. In this story Johnny takes up residence in a zoo as the modification program is extended to other animals:

His den already contained two female American blacks, Susie and Nokomis, and a male, Ink. They looked at him warily as he toddled into the enclosure with his mattress rolled up and slung over his shoulder. Their smell excited him. They were the first members of his own species whom he had had an opportunity to know personally.
“Herro,” he said. “My name is Johnny Black.”
The three bears looked a trifle startled. Of course, he thought, they couldn’t understand him, yet. So, with his claws, he cut the strings that held his mattress, unrolled it, and spread himself out on the mattress in a sunny spot. He took the spectacles out of the case around his neck and opened the book he had brought along.
A spectator explained to his small boy: “Sure, that’s a grizzly beh. No, behs can’t read. He’s just trained to do like he was reading. To make people laugh. No, I dunno why the other behs don’t read. Sure, they eat people.”
Johnny looked up sharply at this canard, and was tempted to contradict it. But, he thought, if he started an argument with the spectators he’d never get time to read his book. So he said nothing.

Unfortunately, after their treatment the apes and chimpanzees develop revolutionary tendencies and start trying to radicalise the other animals. A few inter-species skirmishes later they kidnap the mayor. Johnny Black starts doing some primate research with a view to rescuing him…
The difference between this and the Schachner could not be more marked. De Camp’s novelette is smart, well written and amusing.

In the Good Old Summertime by P. Schuyler Miller is from the same pulp paradigm as the Schachner novelette. An unpleasant man called Joe Guilder sets himself up on hot and swampy Venus and determines to be King of the amphibian like natives. When two other men come to complain about a matter they recognise him as a fugitive from Earth. Guilder has them shot by one of the natives as they depart.
As summer arrives the planet heats up and this, and the native biology plus other factors, turn out to be his undoing. For what it is worth, the xenobiology used isn’t really alien but Earth-analogue.
You could also say that A Chapter from the Beginning by A. M. Phillips is a pulp story, and it is, but I found this an engrossing if uncomplicated read. Once you get past its clunky introduction about early species of man you get a story about a pre-human called Nwug being pursued through the jungle by another early form of man and his semi-domesticated dogs/wolves. After a long and brutal pursuit (spoiler) Nwug manages to mount a pony and evade pursuit on the plains (there is also a spoiler illustration in the magazine to this effect before the event in the story).  As well as earlier work, Phillips had another story in Astounding years later, as well as a couple in Unknown: it’ll be interesting to check them out.
The Dwindling Sphere by Willard E. Hawkins is an ‘if this goes on’ story told in diary form about a scientist who discovers a way to make an infinitely variable substance called plastocene. As this can be used to replace all sorts of materials it quickly changes society and the role of work for the majority of the population. The problem is that less matter comes out of the process than is put in—where the remaining energy goes is uncertain—and soon large excavation pits appear all over Earth. The story then telescopes through time. Well enough worked out but not really convincing.

The fiction is rounded out by the conclusion to If This Goes On … the novella serial by Robert A. Heinlein. This is a disappointing end to what had been quite a promising piece and there are several things that don’t work, or don’t work particularly well.
Too start with, the first couple of chapters where Lyle is on the run are a little flat, with quite a lot of travel and action achieving very little. Eventually he lands beside Phoenix where the resistance is headquartered and is reunited with Zeb. In fairly short order Lyle is made the General’s ADC and there is a meeting where it is decided to start the revolution. However one Colonel dissents, arguing that matters would disintegrate into a civil war as the population is not psychologically conditioned. They subsequently hijack the news feeds on Prophet’s day with a fake message and the revolution begins:

They had tried out the technique during the weeks before the miracle. Usually it had worked, and the subjects were semantically readjusted to a modern nondogmatic viewpoint, but if the subject was too old mentally, if his thought processes were too thoroughly canalized, it sometimes destroyed one set of evaluations without providing him with a new set. The subject might come out of the hypnosis with an overpowering sense of insecurity which usually degenerated into schizophrenia, involute melancholia, or other psychoses involving loss of cortical control and consequent thalamic and subthalamic anarchy.

After taking most of the country only New Jerusalem is left. There is then a titanic battle scene that is the climax of the whole novella but it is quite a boring one. Partly this is due to a lack of realism­—compare the action here with any real war novel—partly it is due to various gobbets of military theory or over-described and unrealistic technology:

In an ordinary single-explosion gun the propelling gas pressure is highest when the shell is near the breech, and falls off rapidly as the shell approaches the muzzle. The booster gun has a series of firing chambers located along the side of the barrel in addition to the main firing chamber at the breech. The charge in each of these is fired through an electrical timing gear by the passage of the shell itself so that they fire in order as the shell passes them. Thus these booster charges maintain maximum pressure on the base of the shell right up to the time it leaves the muzzle, giving it an enormous muzzle velocity and terrific striking power—and a terrific recoil as well!

Even after the sonics failed, we were well enough off. The dead reckoners of a tread-driven cruiser are surprisingly accurate. It’s like this—every time the tread lays down it measures the ground it passes over. A little differential gadget to compare the speeds of the port and starboard treads, another gadget to do vector sums, and a gyro compass hook-in, to check and correct the vector addition, and you have a dead reckoner that will trace your course over fifteen miles of rough terrain and tell within a yard where you have ended up.

Doctrine called for two different types of telepathic hookup; relay, in which each craft relays messages down the line; and full mesh, in which there is direct hookup down the full chain of command plus hookup between adjacent units in the battle line. In the first case, each sensitive carries just one circuit; that is to say, he is in rapport with just one other sensitive. In the second case, my sensitives would have to handle as many as four circuits each; I didn’t want to put such an overload on them until I had to.

There is quite a lot of this.
Finally, at the very end of the story we have a page or two of ‘prologue’ with  Heinlein in full-blown political didacticism mode. What this has to do with the rest of the novella I’m not really sure, but if it is about what has been happening over the last two episodes then I’ve totally missed the point:

“There isn’t anything wrong with the minds of the American people; they just suffer from a tendency to sell their birthright of freedom for a mess of pottage. Each one values liberty for himself but he is naively certain that his poor benighted brother needs protection. So we pass a lot of sumptuary legislation intended to protect the moral and spiritual welfare of our poor weak brethren. When it is too late, we find that in so doing we have surrendered our ancient liberties to a bureaucracy which tyrannizes us under the guise of protecting our souls.

I haven’t read a huge amount of Heinlein but rather wonder if this story illustrates all his virtues and vices in one compact package.³ Quite a disappointing end after such a promising start.

The non-fiction this issue is unremarkable. Campbell’s editorial, Not-So-Dangerous Experiment , is a partially prescient one about Uranium-235 and ends:

Once a U235 atom is primed with a neutron, it lets go almost instantly, they now believe. The reaction is some millions of times more violent, and some hundreds of thousands of times more sudden that the breakdown of a molecule of TNT. If you could once get all the atoms in a few pounds of U235 primed at the same time, the results would represent one of those very rare instances where the word “awful” genuinely applies. Fortunately, there is no co-operation between the atoms; those first primed go off before the rest have any opportunity to collect neutrons. The neutrons released are moving with terrific velocity, and must be slowed down by collisions before they can be captured. Under such conditions, it will burn, but can’t blow up.
Which, considering Man’s psychology, seems to be an example of foolproof engineering on the part of the Creator.

In Times to Come trails L. Ron Hubbard’s new serial, which has echoes the newly begun World War II:

“Final Blackout” is the story of a lieutenant and his brigade and the rotting remains of Europe—a Europe in which 30,000,000 fighting men and 300,000,000 civilians have died.

There are two science articles. Fuel for the Future by Jack Hatcher is an article about human nutrition and how this will need to be addressed on other planets and in space. It is overlong and should have been put on a diet.  Atomic Ringmaster by John W. Campbell, Jr. is at the U-235 again in its discussion of mass spectrographs before moving on to describe a molecular separator developed by Dr Rabi of Columbia University. Campbell doesn’t really explain why the radio field alters the behaviour of the atoms or molecules in a magnetic field but I think he is describing the early NMR experiments which would get Rabi his 1944 Nobel Prize.
Brass Tacks is rather dull this issue, even with letters from a few well-known names. Arthur C. Clarke features (the British Interplanetary Society is shutting down as they have all been called up for military service), as does Manly Wade Wellman (should he keep a consistent future for his SF stories?) and Milton A. Rothman. Campbell turns up again in Science Discussions as Arthur McCann (his science article pseudonym) with a letter about a visit to a cyclotron. I wonder if ‘701 Scotland Road, Orange, New Jersey’ was Campbell’s real address.

A rather disappointing issue.

1. Another edited image originally from Siren in the Night.
2. There were four ‘Johnny Black’ stories published in Astounding: The Command (October 1938), The Incorrigible (January 1939), The Emancipated (March 1940), The Exalted (November 1940). The first two are essentially well written stories but with standard pulp plots that make little of Johnny’s modification, although he saves the day in both. The final story is played slightly more for laughs. The first two were anthologised by Moskowitz and the latter by a couple of different editors. Strangely, the one in this issue has never been reprinted.
3. I have been told that the magazine version of this is quite different from the one that finally appeared in book form, so perhaps that version is better. More on these differences from Heinlein’s biographer, William H. Patterson Jr.’s, website.

Other Reviews:
Jamie Rubin: Vacation in the Golden Age, Episode 8: February 1940

Fiction:
If This Goes On… (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by Robert A. Heinlein ♥♥♥+
Locked Out • short story by H. B. Fyfe ♥
And Then There Was One • novelette by Ross Rocklynne ♥♥♥
Martian Quest • short story by Leigh Brackett ♥
High-Frequency War • short story by Harl Vincent
Bombardment in Reverse • short story by Norman L. Knight ♥♥
The Professor Was a Thief • novelette by L. Ron Hubbard ♥

Non-fiction:
If This Goes On… • cover by Hubert Rogers
Internal artwork • Hubert Rogers, Frank Kramer, W. Kolliker, M. Isip, Charles Schneeman, Willy Ley
It Isn’t a Science, Yet! • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Brass Tacks • letters
In Times to Come
The Analytical Laboratory: November 1939/ December 1939
Botanical Invasion • essay by Willy Ley
Tough Guy • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Arthur McCann]
Luna Observatory No. 1 • essay by R. S. Richardson
Lubrication • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Arthur McCann]
Science Discussions • letters

In my doomed attempt to try and read some of the 1940 issues for the upcoming Retro Hugo awards I thought I had better get started on Astounding, which I should probably read anyway. I started with this issue as the January one has the last part of an E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith serial that I didn’t want to read, or at least not now.

Roger’s cover¹ is fine but somewhat old fashioned: futuristic ‘bigger must be better’ versions of WWI tanks that look like they are going to get their tracks blown off every time they rear up. None of the interior artwork was of note, all of it being quite perfunctory stuff.

Campbell’s editorial It Isn’t a Science, Yet! introduces the Heinlein story—which is given the ‘Nova’ designation²—and discusses how it touches on psychology and propaganda. Even in these early days we can see glimmerings of the man who would be so drawn to Dianetics a decade later:

Psychology isn’t a science, so long as a trained psychologist does—and must—say “there’s no telling how an individual man will react to a given stimulus.” Properly developed, psychology could determine that; the corollary is that it could then select the precisely correct stimulus to bring forth any desired reaction. This would, unquestionably, make for a far more orderly world, this ability to select the right push-button in a man’s mind, and make him react as dependably as any other machine. p.5

Robert Heinlein’s If This Goes On…  is set in a future theocratic USA ruled by dictatorship. The story opens on a cold night with John Lyle, one of the Angels of the Lord, on guard for The Prophet at the palace in New Jerusalem. He encounters one of the Virgins, Sister Judith, before she attends The Prophet. Later, he rushes to a commotion that involves her. Subsequently he discusses this with his friend Zebadiah as they watch a pariah, a possible member of the Cabal which is a resistance movement, being pursued and stoned outside the palace.
Much of the subsequent story involves Lyle, Zebadiah, Judith and a fourth sister Magdalene. Judith was upset by the fact that the prophet wasn’t the great man she expected and matters quickly turn to helping her escape from the palace to Mexico.
Before long, Magdalene has stabbed and killed a spy with a vibroblade and revealed herself as a member of the Cabal. John and Zebadiah are soon inducted into the organisation after a long drug-induced interrogation.
Much adventure follows.
Later on, the Cabal give Lyle a different and immersive identity (plastic surgery and psychological conditioning) and he is sent on a rocket to the east. He realises the man sitting beside him is an state agent after they watch footage of riots—fomented by Cabal produced proproganda—on the TV. He has a blood sample taken for identification purposes after being detained on landing and subsequently overhears a conversation identifying him as an imposter. He jumps out of the window and steals a rocket.
As you can tell from this synopsis, at the beginning this develops rather quickly and not entirely believably, but it soon captures you, and at points, e.g. during the rescue of Judith by Lyle, it is all quite exciting. I look forward to the next part.

One other story worth mentioning in this issue is And Then There Was One by Ross Rocklynne. Although not up to the standard of the Heinlein it is quite an engrossing tale about a strange Voice that sends six men—who are trying to set up a world food monopoly—to a hollow world. Here they are told that all the food and water they have between them will only keep one person alive for the five week trial they are being subjected to. As well as these inadequate provisions the men have a sword and a pistol and are in radio contact. They start at equidistant positions along the equator of the world and the rest of the story has them jumping across the void trying to form alliances or murder each other. This doesn’t really make any sense—the framing sections of a man being told this story in particular—but it is a surprisingly engrossing read for the most part.

Bombardment in Reverse by Norman L. Knight is the best of the remainder as it doesn’t take itself particularly seriously, and if you treat this story as a tallish tale you’ll derive some enjoyment out of it. Two mollusc-like alien nations start hostilities over a territorial dispute. As the war escalates one side rediscovers artillery, explosives and, it materialises, something far more significant. After an investigation by the shelled side,³ they find that the enemy artillery are operating in the middle of next week…

All of the rest of the stories are quite poor fare, and I imagine that they were standard pulp stuff that could have appeared in any SF pulp magazine of the time. The Professor Was a Thief by L. Ron Hubbard has Pop, an old hand in a newsroom, at the centre of its story about a spate of objects in the city vanishing. What is actually happening is that a scientist has worked out how to miniaturise objects as part of a plan to improve freight transport efficiency. This is well enough told but it does not achieve any suspension of disbelief. What also doesn’t help is that it is pretty obvious from the very beginning what is going on and you wonder why everyone is taking so long to work it out. Finally, this kind of ‘fantasy’ science fiction would have been better suited to Unknown, I think.
Martian Quest by Leigh Brackett tells of a man called Drake arriving on Mars as a colonist. He ends up with a Venusian called Tel and a woman called Terra, who he later falls for. Their problem is the marauding Khom, huge lizard like beasts that eat nearly everything in sight. Drake is eventually shamed by Terra into using his chemistry skills to work out how to destroy the Khom. Towards the end of the story their settlement is surrounded by large numbers of them and they try to escape… This is fairly limp stuff, and isn’t a million miles from standard ‘settlers being menaced by Injuns’ pulp fare, unfortunately.
Locked Out by H. B. Fyfe has a spaceman locked outside his craft on the Mars-asteroid run. He then acts like a prize idiot trying to get back in, e.g. brute force attempt on partially jammed door, ripping the wires out of the control panel, managing to separate himself from the spaceship due to various gyrations:

“Oh, hell!” swore Keith as the metal of the hull receded. He knew he would float back, given time, since the ship was the only matter hereabouts to attract him. p.44

Not sure anyone worked out the actual gravitational maths in the last of those…
He also avoids attracting the attention of passing spacecraft due to embarrassment, although having one ‘passing spaceship’ is a stretch never mind several. The resolution of the story is unlikely but, frankly, by that point I hoped he would die as punishment for his arrant stupidity.
Last and worst is High-Frequency War by Harl Vincent. Actually, the first few pages or so of this one aren’t too bad in its tale of Pinky, a drifter who is trying to enlist to fight in a future American war but can’t because of his poor health. He ends up seeking refuge in the warm basement of a large building. He is challenged on entry and passes out. When he comes too he is fed by the caretaker, Slim, who works on the machines.
From this point forward it turns into the direst of pulp stories. The caretaker Slim mentions a Dr Buckley who works upstairs and, national security measures seemingly absent, Pinky not only knows of him but that he is working on inventions to end the war:

The soup smelled great and Pinky began ladling it in. “Let’s see,” he said, “Buckley’s the one’s been working on a new weapon or something, isn’t he?” p.105

Pinky sleeps, wakes, and after searching upstairs finds Slim the caretaker tied up. Buckley subsequently turns out to be an enemy agent who is disabling American defences as the allies attack by air. As they watch this traitorous behaviour Pinky is ‘rejuvenated’ by the rays from the transformer they hide behind:

He hugged the humming transformer case. It was the very transformer that hid them, the one supplying this energy. Its radiations were restoring memories. Of course. He grabbed Slim’s arm with fingers that were suddenly of steel. Slim winced and his eyes widened, looking into those of his companion. “Why… why, what the hell?” he gasped. “You’re a different guy.” p.109

A fight ensues, and Pinky and Slim prevail. All of this is topped off with a two-page super-science explanation discussing the weapon ‘Buckley’ developed, the fact that ‘Buckley’ is really his assistant Vardo and that ‘Pinky’ is really Buckley!
Absolutely dreadful but I’ve spent some time on this one and the last few to show that even with the likes of Heinlein and Van Vogt as contributors, Campbell was still buying more material like this than I had been expecting. The Golden Age may have started months earlier, but appears to still have been a work in progress.

There is a fair amount of non-fiction in this issue. For some reason Brass Tacks has a couple of pages after the editorial and is then continued at the end of the magazine. I don’t understand the point of splitting this feature, and why it is the only one in the magazine to suffer.
As for the letters, it is hard to make sense of some of the comments on issues you haven’t read but the artists Gladney and Orban take a pasting while there is praise for Van Vogt’s Discord in Scarlet and Sturgeon’s Ether Breather amongst other work. Rather unusually there is a short editorial comment at the beginning of each letter answering one of the points or questions following, which is a little disconcerting: by the end of the letter you have completely forgotten what the editorial comment was.
Lawrence Miller of Norfolk, Virginia makes a comment about The Analytical Laboratory that made me smile:

Analytical Laboratory— good for a laugh any time. I don’t see how you manage to give us such a good mag when the majority of readers are half-witted. p.6

As was pointed out years later when Analog eventually binned it completely, the serial or the longest novelette invariably won the bonus money.⁴ Science Discussions are a couple of letters of that nature at the end of Brass Tacks.

There are two science articles and a couple of science shorts. Botanical Invasion by Willy Ley is about Earth plants that look like they have an alien origin: I’m a relatively keen gardener but I found this fairly dry, so I am not sure how others will find it. Luna Observatory No. 1, by the astronomer R. S. Richardson, is about building an astronomical telescope on the moon. It reads rather like a reject from Astronomy Today given some of the detail about focal lengths, etc. but parts of it are interesting. No mention of orbital satellites like Hubble at all.
The two science squibs are Tough Guy, about the difficulties in isolating the element fluorine, and Lubrication, the use of various lubricants in different circumstances. Both are by Campbell and both interesting.

Overall, the standard of fiction was not, as previously discussed, up to the standards I anticipated for a Golden Age Astounding, but the Heinlein and the Rocklynne save the day.

1. Another edited image originally from Siren in the Night.
2. For more on the Nova label, have a look at the responses to Jamie Rubin’s review Vacation in the Golden Age, Episode 8: February 1940.
3. This is not a mollusc related joke 🙂
4. Good News, Bad News by Ben Bova, Analog, February 1977: ‘Inevitably, the longest story of each issue won the first-place vote, and the extra penny a word bonus that went with it. With almost equal regularity the next-longest story took second place and the half-cent bonus. Short stories were hardly ever in the money; even short stories that eventually won Hugo and Nebula nominations and awards.’ p.6