Other reviews:1
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 44-45 (Beccon Publications, 2002)
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 144-146, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991)
_____________________
Editors, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Kay Tarrant
Fiction:
Wheesht! • novelette by Cleve Cartmill ∗
The Wishes We Make • short story by E. Mayne Hull ∗∗
Blind Alley • novelette by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗∗+
A Bargain in Bodies • short story by Moses Schere ∗∗
Sriberdegibit • novelette by Anthony Boucher ∗
The Rabbit and the Rat • short story by Robert Arthur ∗
The Devil Is Not Mocked • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗
Eight Ball • short story by John B. Michel [as by Hugh Raymond] ∗
The Green-Eyed Monster • short story by Theodore Sturgeon ∗
The Hounds of Kalimar • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller ∗
Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x6), Hall (x4), Frank Kramer (x5), Manuel Isip (x4), Newton Alfred , William Kolliker
Of Things Beyond: Gremlins Breed Fast • editorial
Book Reviews • by Anthony Boucher
____________________
This issue sees Unknown Worlds, like Astounding, revert to pulp format because of wartime rationing. The Cover design also changes, and probably for the worse with an untidy scroll design.
Wheesht! by Cleve Cartmill gets off to a pretty good start when an American counter-intelligence agent called Mike (who is impersonating a man called Hineman) arrives home with a fifth columnist contact called Gartz to find potatoes on the floor. Mike recognises this as the calling card of a leprechaun called Seag who is bound to the oldest member of his family. Mike also realises that his uncle must have died and, while he is getting a drink for Gartz, he finds the leprechaun asleep, coiled round a bottle of booze. When Hineman returns to the living room, Gartz cross-examines Mike and recruits him as a Nazi spy.
This is a quite involved but economical start, and it demonstrates that Cartmill can write concise and engaging material when he wants to. Unfortunately, the rest of the story eventually turns into one of his standard pulp plots (with Nazi spies rather than mobsters this time around). The tale is also not credible, best illustrated by the fact that, because Mike refuses to tell Seag he is working for the American government, the leprechaun thinks that Mike is a Nazi. This eventually leads to Mike arriving in Hell with a group of co-conspirators thanks to one of the leprechaun’s spells (that said, this scene actually starts off well before descending into bureaucratic shenanigans about Mike’s false identity which secures his—again unlikely—release):
They told me later I was in the Abandon Ye ward. Bokar was a couple of spiked beds away, and beyond him were Brown, Jones, and Professor Gartz: each held flat on the pointed spikes with glowing iron bands, as I was.
Smocked attendants came and went, along the aisles of beds. One was tall and lean, with nothing but a pair of ears where his head ought to be. This one wandered about, the long pointed ears twitching.
I shifted a shoulder blade off the point of a spike, and one of the ears pointed like a hunting dog, though the creature was twenty yards away. It snapped its fingers and a small Thing with fur scurried to my bed with a tray of instruments in one of its sets of hands.
The instruments were curiously shaped and gleaming—save one which was brown with rust. Rust? It jabbed me with a long shining fork and I twitched. That was about all I could do. My vocal cords seemed inoperative, and the bands were so tight that I couldn’t jump. But I twitched.
The Thing, which was mainly a large blue eye mounted on a nightmarish body, took a reading from the dial of the fork and did things to the band across my shoulders.
I shrieked. Not audibly, for I couldn’t make a sound. I shrieked, though. I could tell by the feeling inside that it was a shriek. It jabbed me again, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t. The bands were so tight I couldn’t even flex a muscle. I could roil my eyes across the mirrored surface of the ceiling and thus see the whole ward, but nothing else.
The fact that I could see reflections in that ceiling was somehow, worse than if my eyes had been taped shut. I had to look, and almost cried because I didn’t own enough will power to shut my eyes against the horrors that scurried from bed to bed with sadistic speed. p. 20
After his release there is a scene where he returns to the restaurant he was in before going to Hell. His dining companions are still in the Bad Place so he has to pay for the meal (he does so using a magic purse that only produces a dime at a time—if you want a stellar example of Cartmill’s padding, this is the scene for you).
Needless to say (spoiler) all ends well: the spy ring is disrupted, and Mike gets the girl (yes, there is one in there at the start).
Noted in passing is the fifth columnist fear-mongering in a scene where Mike has found Gartz’s notebook and a list of names:
I opened the book and skimmed the couple of hundred names and addresses.
No classification indicated that these might be anything but names of personal friends. The addresses were scattered over the entire country, and were innocuous enough. Some were business addresses, others private.
But a surging emotion told me that here was the information the department had been seeking for several years. Here were the innocent-appearing agents, a widespread system of sharp eyes and ears. And clever mouths spreading rumor and dissension here and sending facts to their fatherland, for a highly important part of such an agent’s work is to spread disunity among the people.
America was now solidly all out in the war effort. But war is somewhat undramatic—away from home. For the vast majority of the population, war was a series of daily headlines. And, as time and the war dragged, on, little seeds of doubt, planted by solid citizens such as these agents must appear to be, would grow and propagate. Then, come the day when war was in our own front yards, it would find a less solid defense line than if the seeds had never been sown. p. 30
The Wishes We Make by E. Mayne Hull starts with a man called Kennijahn on death row inadvertently summoning a demon called Drdr. Kennijahn gets six wishes from the demon, but the latter tells Kennijahn he cannot escape his fate which is to eventually die from hanging.
The rest of the story runs through Kennijahn’s various wishes and (spoiler) their failure to save him. His first wish transports him to South America—but when he sends a telegram to his girlfriend the American police intercept it, and the locals later turn up to arrest him.
The ending could have been relatively ingenious in that Kennijahn plans to inhabit the body of a man who attempts suicide by hanging but erroneously escapes his fate. Kennijahn possesses his body at the point of hanging, but he cannot get himself out of the noose. He then finds he has no wishes left as, apparently, unsaid wishes count as well as expressed ones.
This is, for the most part, an enjoyable enough read but the ending plainly doesn’t work.
Blind Alley by Malcolm Jameson is the highlight of the issue, and it begins with this:
Nothing was further from Mr. Feathersmith’s mind that dealings with streamlined, mid-twentieth-century witches or dickerings with the Devil. But something had to be done. The world was fast going to the bowwows, and he suffered from an overwhelming nostalgia for the days of his youth. His thoughts constantly turned to Cliffordsville and the good old days when men were men and God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. He hated modern women, the blatancy of the radio, That Man in the White House, the war— p. 48
After this we learn more about Feathersmith’s dissatisfaction with the modern world, and the way he treats those who work for him. Then he has a mini-stroke, which he only just survives (after examining him in his office the doctor says he can go with him to hospital, or go with an undertaker). Feathersmith’s examination results make him realise that he has grown old and unhealthy, so he resolves to contact an acquaintance called Forfin, an unusual character who has alluded to The Fountain of Youth in previous conversations. While Feathersmith waits for Forfin to get in touch, he liquidates all his assets. The pair eventually meet for lunch:
“I want,” Mr. Feathersmith said, baldly, “to turn the hand of the clock back forty years. I want to go to the town of Cliffordsville, where I was born and raised, and find it just as I left it. I propose to start life all over again. Can you contact the right people for the job?”
“Phew!” commented Mr. Forfin, mopping his head. “That’s a big order. It scares me. That’ll involve Old Nick himself—”
He looked uneasily about, as if the utterance of the name was a sort of inverted blasphemy.
“Why not?’’ snapped the financier, bristling. “I always deal with principals. They can act. Skip the hirelings, demons, or whatever they are.”
“I know” said Forfin, shaking his head disapprovingly, “but he’s a slick bargainer. Oh, he keeps his pacts—to the dot. But he’ll slip a fast one over just the same. It’s his habit. He gets a kick out of it—outsmarting people. And it’ll cost. Cost like hell.”
“I’ll be the judge of the cost,” said the old man, stiffly, thinking of the scant term of suffering, circumscribed years that was the best hope the doctor had held out to him, “and as to bargaining, I’m not a pure sucker. How do you think I got where I am?”
“O. K.,” said Forfin, with a shrug. “It’s your funeral. But it’ll take some doing. When do we start?”
“Now.”
“He sees mortals only by appointment, and I can’t make ’em. I’ll arrange for you to meet Madame Hecate. You’ll have to build yourself up with her. After that you’re on your own. You’d better have plenty of ready dough. You’ll need it.”
“I’ve got it,” said Mr. Feathersmith shortly. “And yours?”
“Forget it. I get my cut from them.” p. 53-54
Feathersmith waits to hear from Forfin, and meanwhile recalls the days of his youth:
He slept. He dreamed. He dreamed of old Cliffordsville, with its tree-lined streets and sturdy houses sitting way back, each in its own yard and behind its own picket, fence. He remembered the soft clay streets and how good the dust felt between the toes when he ran barefoot in the summertime. Memories of good things to eat came to him—the old spring house and watermelons, hung in bags in the well, chickens running the yard, and eggs an hour old. There was Sarah, the cow, and old Aunt Anna, the cook. And then there were the wide open business opportunities of those days. A man could start a bank or float a stock company and there were no snooping inspectors to tell him what he could and couldn’t do. There were no blaring radios, or rumbling, stinking trucks or raucous auto horns. People stayed healthy because they led the good life. Mr. Feathersmith rolled over in bed and smiled. It wouldn’t be long now! p. 54
Forfin contacts Feathersmith and tells him where to find Madame Hectate. Feathersmith phones for an appointment, and then goes to the 13th floor of a city tower block (initially he can’t find the floor, but eventually a sign and separate elevator appear). He has to see the credit controller first, and then meets Madame Hectate who, unexpectedly, is a vivacious brunette. She gives him a guided tour of the organisation while they wait for the Devil to arrive.
All of this ‘Hell as a modern organisation’ material foreshadows Alfred Bester’s later story Will You Wait? (F&SF, March 1959),2 and it is no surprise that when Satan later appears he doesn’t want Feathersmith’s soul (“Dear me, no. We’ve owned that for years”) but all his money. Madame Hectate rolls up Feathersmith’s sleeve, rubs his arm with an alcohol swab, and uses a syringe to get the blood required for his signature. After the contract is signed, the Devil tells him to catch an evening train at Grand Central Station.
The final section describes Feathersmith’s train journey back to the Cliffordsville of his youth, and telegraphs the arc of the rest of the story:
He had undressed automatically and climbed into his berth. He let his feverish anticipations run on, getting dozier all the time. He suddenly recalled that he really should have seen the doctor before leaving, but dismissed it with a happy smile. By the time he had hit his upper twenties he was done with whooping cough, measles and mumps.
[. . .]
The Limited slid on through the night, silently and jarless. Thanks to its air conditioning, good springs, well turned wheels, smooth traction, rockballasted roadbed and heavy rails, it went like the wind. For hundreds of miles the green lights of block signals flickered by, but now and again another train would thunder by on an eastbound track. Mr. Feathersmith gave no thought to those things as he pillowed deeper into the soft blankets, or worried about the howling blizzard raging outside. The Limited would get there on time and with the minimum of fuss. That particular Limited went fast and far that night—mysteriously it must have covered in excess of a thousand miles and got well off its usual route.
For when Mr. Feathersmith did wake, along toward dawn, things were uncannily different. To begin with, the train was lurching and rocking violently from side to side, and there was a persistent slapping of a flat wheel underneath. The blizzard had abated somewhat, but the car was cold. He lifted the curtain a bit and looked out on a snow-streaked, hilly landscape that strongly suggested Arkansas. Then the train stopped suddenly in the middle of a field and men came running alongside with lanterns. A hotbox, he heard one call, which struck him as odd, for he had not heard of hotboxes for a long time.
After about an hour, and after prolonged whistling, the train slowly gathered way again. By that time Mr. Feathersmith noticed that his berth had changed during the night. It was an old-fashioned fore-and-aft berth with an upper pressing down upon it. He discovered he was wearing a flannel nightgown, too—another item of his past he had failed to remember, it had been so long since he had changed to silk pajamas. But by then the porter was going through the car rousing all the passengers.
“Gooch Junction in half a’ hour, folks,” he was saying. “Gotta get up now—dey drop the sleeper dere.”
Mr. Feather smith groaned and got up. Yes, yes, of course. Through sleepers were the exception, not the rule, forty years ago. p. 61-62
As the journey progresses his environment becomes more and more primitive. The ablutions on the train are very basic and, as he has not yet been rejuvenated, he cannot eat the rough and ready food. He also notices that the other passengers smell. Matters do not improve when, after completing an uncomfortable two-mile journey by rig from the station to the town, he finds the hotel a “shattering disappointment”.
He then experiences almost permanent dismay—his boyhood house is not a vast mansion he remembered but is a rundown building in the middle of nowhere with no telephone or running water; he visits a girl he was sweet on in his youth but finds her “an empty-headed little doll”; on the way back to town he sees a number of yellow flags hung out of houses, a sign of smallpox.
He has other problems too as nearly all the ideas he has for making money will not work in that time period—the oil field he knows of would require wells six thousand feet deep, beyond the technology of the time; a suggestion to develop and market a starter motor for cars garners little more than a sarcastic comment about inventing perpetual motion from a garage mechanic.
The last part of the story finds Feathersmith still not rejuvenated, and with his health failing: because of the limitations of the time he has not been able to follow the doctor’s instructions as to diet and drugs, etc. Just before he dies a copy of the contract he signed with the Devil flutters down from above—it states he didn’t complain so “that lets us out.” This is an disappointingly weak ending to what is an otherwise superior story about how the past isn’t how we fondly remember it (and, perhaps, that you can never recapture your youth). What makes Jameson’s story even more poignant is that he died less than two years later in April 1945 (he had started writing in 1938 when complications due to throat cancer ruled out a non-writing career).3
A Bargain in Bodies by Moses Schere has quite a complicated setup that begins with two men arriving at a village store, one of whom is in a terrible state:
The man who stumbled into the Paleyville general store was hunched far over, his long lean body a bow of fatigue. Sweat had caked the dust on his face. His lips worked in a gray dirty film. His eyes were slits of hunted agony. Another man, slim, cool and elegantly dressed, came up behind him, waited with an air of amused patience for him to pass through the doorway.
Miss Thomkin, the store’s proprietress stared from her rocking chair in growing horror. For the stooped man obviously carried something—carried it with one hand wrenched around to hold the burden on his back—and it was the burden which stooped him, the burden which had worn illimitable tiredness into his gray-stubbled face.
But the burden was invisible. p. 72
After the hunched over man has something to drink he identifies himself as Mr Oliver, and organises a wagon to the house the pair are going to. He later discreetly slips the woman who owns the store a note. As the two men leave Mr Oliver’s dapper companion shows off his horns and tail.
After the wagon goes Miss Tomkin reads the note. In it Mr Oliver asks for help to escape from the other man, a demon, and says the only way this can be done is by stealing the silvery half-egg object that it possesses.
The penultimate scene has the demon come down to see the townspeople and explain how Oliver got himself in into his predicament in the first place (a black magic experiment to transfer Oliver’s partner Ames into his body backfired, and Ames is now an invisible load connected to Oliver by ectoplasm, which the latter has to carry around).
Although this is an rather involved setup, the story actually works reasonably well to this point. However, it is more forced going forward when (spoiler) a tom cat the demon has been tormenting knocks the egg out of the latter’s hand. Miss Tomkins gets hold of it and she forces the demon to let Oliver finish his experiment to change Ames back to human form. The demon complies but the twist ending is that Ames now carries an ectoplasmic Oliver around.
There are a couple of good ideas here but it is unconvincing as well as structurally awkward (the demon’s visit to the town seems to be entirely for data-dump and plot pivot reasons).
Sriberdegibit by Anthony Boucher starts with a drunk lawyer called Gilbert Isles drinking with a magician in bar. After some chit-chat the magician tells him about “wimps,” wish-imps, and how there is one flying round the bar at that moment that can make Isles’ wish come true. Iles unadvisedly says “may I be cursed” and finds his wish granted. When the magician summons the demon in charge of his curse Iles discovers he must commit a sin every day or be strangled by the demon at midnight.
This is a pretty good setup but the rest of the story is bulked out with Isles’ various sins (the first few require little effort as he is, after all, a lawyer). As matters become increasingly problematical his wife becomes involved (more padding).
The last section involves Isles’ “abduction” of a young woman who gets angry when he doesn’t do anything else to her, instead releasing her a few blocks away (it’s hard to believe this wasn’t considered poor taste “humour”at the time of publication, never mind now). She gets her brother to avenge her honour.
The story ends (spoiler) with a piece of legal sophistry that gets Isles off the hook (if he doesn’t sin he’s committing suicide, which is a sin).
After a good beginning this becomes a padded, contrived affair.
The Rabbit and the Rat by Robert Arthur begins with an awkward, info-dump sentence:
Dr. Nicholas Dete, late professor of the psychology of Westate University, recently retired to do research work in his own home following the tragic kidnaping and murder of his only child and the subsequent suicide of his wife, looked up as Jose, his clever Filipino assistant, entered the little office. In his pale-blue watery eyes there was a question which the other answered by nodding. p. 102
Jose then tells the professor about a man called Banning, and his brutality to a pigeon that flew into his house (wing broken by a thrown book) and a dog that ran up to him (kicked and ribs broken).
The story’s point of view then changes to Banning, and we find him thinking about the professor:
Dr. Nicholas Dete! It had been funny enough to see the little man squawking around after they had snatched the kid. As if anyone could have loved a kid like that! A slobbering, hare-faced nuisance that yelled continually and would have grown up to look exactly like its father. Why, it was practically a public service to put the brat out of its misery.
Not that it had been as dumb as it looked, though. In spite of being only five, it had recognized him the one time he slipped into the hide-out and it had somehow wriggled its blindfold off. Recognized him from just seeing him that once, the day its old man had had it out walking; and Chuck Banning had stopped to talk to Dete. Sometimes kids were bright that way. Anyway, it had recognized him.
So after they’d collected from Dete, Chuck Banning had had to slap it silly with the butt end of a gun. Funny that anybody’s skull, even a kid’s, could be so thin a gun butt would go right in and the brains splash out like so much butter—
Never mind that. It was the kid’s own fault, wasn’t it? Nobody had meant to hurt it But that was how it turned out. Not that he gave a damn. And if the little roach’s mother wanted to go jump in the river afterward, that was her own business. p. 103
After this unpleasant and brutal start Monk, one of Banning’s men, arrives with the news that another of their gang has disappeared. While they are talking a box arrives in the mail and Banning’s servant is told to go away and open it. Meanwhile, a frog hops into the room and meets the same fate as the pigeon and the dog. The servant returns with the opened box, which has three dead rats inside. Banning checks the postmark and realises that Professor Dete has sent the package.
The rest of this plays out as a mad scientist/mesmerism/soul transfer story (the three animals killed so far contained the souls of the missing gang members), and it all reads like a not particularly good Weird Tales story.
Another tale that could join Arthur’s piece in Weird Tales is The Devil Is Not Mocked by Manly Wade Wellman. This has a German general and a detachment of soldiers travelling to a castle in Transylvania with entirely predictable and bitey consequences.
Eight Ball by John B. Michel4 begins with a drunk American professor taken home by a colleague. When the pair enters the professor’s home, the colleague sees a rubber ball come bouncing towards him as if it is alive. The professor then recounts a story about visit to China where he saw a demonstration of how they put carved balls inside other carved balls. This leads on to a related anecdote about how a Russo-Chinese acquaintance learning how to do this accidentally turned himself into a rubber ball.
This has some good local colour but it doesn’t hold up as a story.
The Green-Eyed Monster by Theodore Sturgeon starts with Gus trying to help a white-haired woman pursued by somebody (or something). When Gus catches her she slaps his face. He sees her again a few days later in a bar, and this time it all goes wrong when he drags her out from under a giant sunflower, which then breaks and falls on a waiter with a tray full of drinks. Gus gets thrown out of the bar.
Gus later talks about both these events to Henry Gade, a psychologist friend who turns out to have treated the woman, called Iona; Gade later gives Gus her address (so much for patient confidentiality!)
When Gus goes to see Iona she invites him in, and the story’s gimmick is revealed:
“It started about two years ago. I had a slight crush on a fellow at a summer camp. He took me to a dance one night—one of those country square dances. It was a lot of fun and we danced ourselves tired. Then we went out onto the lakeshore—and he—well, the moon and all, you, know—he put his arms around me. And just then, a voice spoke to me. It said, ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep away from this fellow.’ I started back and asked the boy if he had said something. He hadn’t.’ I was scared and ran all the way home. He tried to catch me, but he couldn’t. I saw him the next day and I tried to apologize, but there wasn’t very much I could say. I tried to be nice to him, but as time went on he got more and more irritable. And he lost weight. He wound up in the hospital. Almost—died. You see, he couldn’t sleep. He was afraid to sleep. He had the most terrible dreams. I heard about one of them. It was awful.” p. 130
She adds that, as soon as she stopped seeing him, he recovered, and she tells Gus about other men who have had similar experiences. She points at the cloves of garlic around the window and door, and concludes with the revelation that she is haunted by a jealous ghost.
Gus then suffers the same persecution as all the other men, and writes to a gossip columnist for advice: he learns that the ghost will only stop tormenting him when it is no longer attracted to Iona or finds someone else. Meanwhile, Iona decides not to see Gus to spare him the terrible ordeal the ghost is putting him through. Gus goes on a ten-day drinking binge.
For the first half or so this is a pretty good piece of quirky light fantasy, but it starts to fade after the midway point and has an exceptionally lame ending (spoiler): Gus takes her to get her white hair dyed as it, and her pale skin and dark eyes, make her look like a ghost—hence the real ghost’s attraction to her!
The Hounds of Kalimar by P. Schuyler Miller opens with the narrator and his Indian friend out on a hunting trip. They discover an unexplored valley and later make camp there:
We had an hour or two of daylight left, but our camp site was a good one and we stayed there. We sat with our backs against a huge fallen hemlock, a good four feet through the trunk. I had my pipe and Jim, who doesn’t smoke, was repairing the rim of his pack basket. His fingers were busy with the splints, but his eyes were on the forest, and pretty soon I found myself watching too.
His face gave no sign, but I knew he had seen something. I followed the direction of his gaze, and began methodically to study the face of the forest. Finally I saw it: a blue jay, its crested head cocked a little, one black eye fixed on us. It might have been carved out of painted wood, so still it was. A flick of motion caught the corner of my eye, and I saw a fox crouching in the shadows. And then I began to see them all. A lump near the top of a small balsam was a porcupine. A dead leaf caught in a fork was another squirrel. Little round shadows among the higher branches were chickadees and kinglets. The sinuous shadow of a hemlock root on the stream bank became a weasel. And their eyes were on us. p. 139
A short time later two strange-looking (“monkey”) men turn up and force them to go to see the ruler of the valley, another odd-looking man called Kallimar, who seems to be some sort of human missing link. The animals that were watching them follow the narrator and his friend into the hall and, after some back and forth, Kallimar tells the pair that they will compete in a hunt against an otter, wolf, and eagle. They will have to win if they want to survive.
The rest of the story is pretty much an unpleasant slaughter-fest, with the pair eventually killing more than the other three animals, and capturing a couple of them as well. An albino puma helps them out in the latter stages.
This is readable enough stuff but it’s all a bit arbitrary and pointless (and as for Kallimar’s amphibious aircraft parked on the lake, completely anachronistic).
I’ve spoken briefly about the change of Cover design above. The Interior artwork in this issue is by Paul Orban, Hall, Frank Kramer, Manuel Isip, Newton Alfred , and William Kolliker, and I’ll withhold comment at the moment as I’m reading this one from an Unz.org scan, and some of the art work is very badly reproduced.
Of Things Beyond: Gremlins Breed Fast is a short editorial about gremlins that ends with this:
It looks as though the spread of gremlins was not only unopposed, but in some manner greatly aided by a universal, highly effective fifth column organization. As a matter of fact, there is every indication that the Ancient and Universal Order of Buck Passers is the organization behind their wide and rapid spread. It is a well-established fact that this truly Ancient and Universal Order assisted the spread and nurtured the growth of the brownie, the troll, leprechaun, goblin, cobald, nickel, jinx, and unnumbered other species of such invisible and omnipresent trouble causers. The equally Ancient and Honorable Order of Tall Tale Tellers has assisted in this work as innocent and unconscious agents in the spread of the trouble-makers, but has to some extent modified them under an uplift program designed to make them useful and-helpful citizens.
But the real reason for their wide and rapid conquest is the wholly conscious and malevolent fifth column work of the Buck Passers, beyond question. The Order can well claim to be Ancient and Universal, if not honorable. They claim, and rightly, we understand, that Adam was the originator of the Order, as well as of other things. p. 6
Book Reviews by Anthony Boucher starts off with an examination of three books on prophecy. One these books, Prophets and Portents, Seven Seers Foretell Hitler’s Doom by Rolf Boswell (Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1942) has an interesting account of one seer’s predictions:
Boriska Silbiger, a Hungarian, who employed none of the paraphernalia of occultism but simply issued a forecast each year from 1933 until 1939, when she was imprisoned in a concentration camp. One sample of her work will indicate her quality; in 1935 she said: “In January of the ensuing year, the king of a great empire will die suddenly. He will be succeeded by his eldest son, but the reign of his successor will not last twelve months, whereafter he will renounce the throne.”
The ensuing year, 1936, brought the death of George V and the brief reign and abdication of Edward VIII.
This is not an isolated example. There are a half dozen others as good. And the last Silbiger utterance, the prophecy that brought down upon her the wrath of the Gestapo, reads: “The war will end with Hitler’s death and the collapse of Nazism. The world after the peace comes will be so different and-there will be such national and social upheavals that it impossible to describe it.”
Unfortunately in this, his most, impressive subject, Mr. Boswell’s documentation is even scantier than usual.
He mentions only that her forecasts were printed “in thirty-odd newspapers in various parts of the globe.” The New York Times Index, The Official Index to the London Times, The International Index to Periodicals, and The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature have never heard of her. p. 159
The actual prophecy she made was, “The war will end in 1942 with Hitler’s death and the collapse of Nazism. But the belligerent Powers will be so exhausted that there will be no victor and no defeated in the common sense of the word. Whoever survives it will live to see a new and better world.”5
The last part of the column discusses The Magus by Comte de L’Avre, an encyclopaedia of magic—more mumbo-jumbo. I don’t understand why editors of fantasy magazines assume that readers of such material are interested in this kind of thing.
With the singular exception of the Jameson this is a very poor issue. ●
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1. Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 44-45 (Beccon Publications, 2002), notes the changes to the magazine and the front cover design before commenting on the fiction. “Best of the lot, by a narrow margin,” he says, “was Anthony Boucher’s novelette Sriberdegibit.” He notes that the story reintroduces the magician Ozymandias the Great from The Compleat Werewolf.
Blind Alley “was another winner for Jameson”, and he notes the same could be said for Cartmill’s Wheesht! Miller’s The Hounds of Kalimar was “a fairly average adventure story which would not have been out of place in the old Argosy.”
He thought the short stories a “mixed bag”, with Sturgeon’s the best, followed by Hull’s and Arthur’s.
Smith finishes by noting new artists Alfred and Hall, the latter “producing a couple of excellent full page illustrations for Sriberdegibit.”
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 144-146, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991) says that Cartmill’s Wheest! is “a quaint story, with some subtle digs at Hitler and the myth of Aryanism.”
He found the Arthur story “dreadful”, and the Miller story “terrible”. He adds that both of these pieces were in inventory for almost two years, and that “stories like this, combined with the lack of long fiction in this issue, give the impression he was trying to get rid of a lot of material from the inventory backlog in one fell swoop.”
He notes that A Bargain in Bodies by Moses Schere “was the only [Unknown story] that was ever optioned for a light opera”, and that Sriberdegibit by Anthony Boucher “is one of the few Unknown stories in which a man wins out against his demon through a loophole that is a natural part of the curse.”
2. One wonders to what extent Jameson’s story influenced Alfred Bester. Will You Wait? also has a ‘Hell as a modern business’ theme (that said, this may have been a relatively common trope in the magazine, but Jameson’s version is the first I can remember having come across). The other Bester story that was perhaps influenced by Jameson’s story is Hobson’s Choice (F&SF, August 1952), which has as its theme the pointlessness of yearning for other times.
Bester mentions Jameson in his Hell’s Catographers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975) essay, My Affair with Science Fiction:
Mort Weisinger introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties. I met Henry Kuttner (who later became Lewis Padgett), Ed Hamilton, and Otto Binder, the writing half of Eando Binder. Eando was a sort of acronym of the brothers Earl and Otto Binder. E. and O. Earl died but Otto continued to use the well-known nom de plume. Malcolm Jameson, author of navy-orientated space stories, was there, tall, gaunt, prematurely grey, speaking in slow, heavy tones. Now and then he brought along his pretty daughter who turned everybody’s head.
The vivacious compere of those luncheons was Manley Wade Wellman, a professional Southerner full of regional anecdotes. It’s my recollection that one of his hands was slightly shrivelled, which may have been why he came on so strong for the Confederate cause. We were all very patient with that; after all, our side won the war. Wellman was quite the man-of-the-world for the innocent thirties; he always ordered wine with his lunch.
Henry Kuttner and Otto Binder were medium sized young men, very quiet and courteous, and entirely without outstanding features. Once I broke Kuttner up quite unintentionally. I said to Weisinger, ‘I’ve just finished a wild story that takes place in a spaceless, timeless locale where there’s no objective reality. It’s awfully long, 20,000 words, but I can cut the first 5,000.’ Kuttner burst out laughing. I do too when I think of the dumb kid I was. Once I said most earnestly to Jameson, ‘I’ve discovered a remarkable thing. If you combine two story-lines into one the result can be tremendously exciting.’ He stared at me with incredulity. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of plot and counterplot?’ he growled. I hadn’t. I discovered it all by myself. p. 50-51
3. Jameson’s great-granddaughter Wendy McClure has a website about him that provides a short biography.
Blind Alley became a Twilight Zone episode, Of Late I Think of Cliffordville, which aired in April 1963.
4. This was one of John B. Michel’s last stories. Only three more would appear before his death in 1968 according to ISFDB.
5. The Silbiger prophecies appear in a couple of wartime papers, such as this New Zealand one. ●
