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Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant
Fiction:
Judgment Night (Part 1 of 2) • serial by C. L. Moore ∗∗∗+
The Mutant’s Brother • short story by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗
One-Way Trip • novella by Anthony Boucher –
Endowment Policy • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗
M 33 in Andromeda • short story by A. E. van Vogt ∗
When Is When? • short story by Malcolm Jameson ∗
Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by A. Williams (x6), Frank Kramer (x4), William Kolliker (x3), Hall (x2)
Noncommunication Radio • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The End of the Rocket Society (Part 1 of 2) • essay by Willy Ley
In Times to Come
Brass Tacks • letters
Book Review • by Anthony Boucher
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This issue leads off with the first part of Judgment Night by C. L. Moore. Her debut novel is set on the planet of Ericon, not only the seat of the Lyonese galactic empire but also the home of an enigmatic race of aliens called the Ancients. The opening scene introduces us to Juille, the Amazonian daughter of the Emperor, and one of the novel’s two main characters. She and her father discuss the H’vani insurgency at the periphery of their empire before she leaves for Cyrille, an orbiting pleasure planetoid. She is accompanied by her personal servant Helia, and a strange alien pet called a llar.
Arriving incognito on Cyrille she meets and becomes involved with the novel’s other main character, a young man called Egide. He, unknown to her, is the leader of the H’vani rebellion, knows who she is, and is there to kill her. However, after several days together their relationship develops and, even though at one point he has his hands gently round her throat, he refrains from killing her, and later tells his companion Jair that she is not the Emperor’s daughter but someone else. Juille does not learn of Egide’s identity at this point but she knows something is not quite right.
When Juille returns to the palace on Egide she goes to a council meeting where recent losses to the H’vani are discussed. She learns that one of the scientists on the recently overrun planet of Dunnar has developed a weapon that will turn the tide of the war, and is en route to the palace. When his ship arrives shortly afterwards it is pursued by three H’vani ships—the latter fly over the forbidden territory of the Ancients, and they are destroyed in a flash of light, the first defensive action seen in living memory.
The Dunnarian, a strange-looking man, arrives and tells them the weapon takes a “photograph” of an enemy, which can be used to kill them at any point afterwards.
The final part of this instalment has Juille organising assassins to kill the H’vani envoys invited to a peace conference by the Emperor. When they arrive Juille is shocked to see that Egide is their leader.
The assassins fail to strike, and Egide arrives safely at the palace where, at the meeting, Juille tries to kill him with a needle gun but fails (he is wearing a new type of body armour). Egide and Jair capture her and escape into a secret passageway. As Juille is taken down into the remains of the ancient city below the modern one, she learns that her servant Helia is part of an ancient Andarean resistance and has betrayed her, and that the latter organisation has also promised ancient advanced weapons to the H’vani to help them in their war against the Empire. They descend deep into the underground levels.
Synoptically, this may all seem like a standard Planet Stories type potboiler, but it is atypical for its time in a number of ways. First of all, the main protagonist is a strong woman (unusual if not unknown for Astounding):
There had been many tremendous changes in the Lyonese culture even in her own lifetime, but perhaps none greater than the one which made it possible for her to take the part a son might have taken, had the emperor produced a son. Women for the past several generations had been turning more and more to men’s professions, but Juille did not think of herself as filling a prince’s shoes, playing a substitute role because no man of the proper heritage was available. In her the cool, unswerving principles of the amazon had fallen upon fertile ground, and she knew her self better fitted and better trained for the part she played than any man was likely to be.
Juille had earned her military dress as a man might have earned it, through lifelong training in warfare. To her mind, indeed, a woman was much more suited to uniform than a man, so easily can she throw off all hampering civilian ideas once she gives her full loyalty to a cause. She can discard virtues as well as vices and live faithfully by a new set of laws in which ruthless devotion to duty leads all the rest.
For those women who still clung to the old standards, Juille felt a sort of tolerant contempt. But they made her uneasy, too. They lived their own lives, full of subtle nuances she had never let herself recognize until lately. Particularly, their relationship with men. More and more often of late, she had been wondering about certain aspects of life that her training had made her miss. The sureness and the subtlety with which other women behaved in matters not associated with war or politics both annoyed and fascinated Juille. She was, after all, a woman, and the uniform can be discarded as well as donned. Whether the state of mind can be discarded, too—what lay beneath that—was a matter that had been goading her for a long while. p. 11-12
Secondly, the story is told in a lush visual style that would not be out of place in a work from the 1960s, and it has some startling images—here Juille first sees Egide on Cyrille:
Presently a flash of scarlet seen through the leaves of a passing platform caught her eye. She remembered then that she had noticed that same shocking cloak upon a young man on the stairs.
It was a garment so startling that she felt more than a passing wonder about the personality of the man who would wear it. The garment had been deliberately designed to look like a waterfall of gushing blood, bright arterial scarlet that rippled from the shoulders in a cascading deluge, its colors constantly moving and changing so that one instinctively looked downward to see the scarlet stream go pouring away behind its wearer down the stairs. p. 20She nodded the newcomer to a crystal chair across from her, studying him coolly from under the cobwebby veil. He was smiling at her out of very blue eyes, his teeth flashing in the short curly beard. He looked foppish, but he was a big young man, and she noticed that the cloak of running blood swung from very fine shoulders indeed. She felt a faint contempt for him— music, composing, when the man had shoulders like that! Lolling here in that outrageous cape, his beard combed to the last careful curl, oblivious to the holocaust that was rising all through the Galaxy.
She had a moment’s vision of that holocaust breaking upon Cyrille, as it was sure to break very soon even this close to the sacred world of Ericon. She thought of H’vani bombs crashing through this twilight sphere in which she floated. She saw the vast tree trunk crumbling on its foundation, crashing down in ruins, its great arms combing all these drifting crystal bowers out of the green perfumed air. She thought of the power failing, the lights going out, the cries of the suddenly stricken echoing among the shattered Edens. She saw the darkness of outer space with cold stars twinkling, and the vast luminous bulk of Ericon looming up outside through the riven walls of Cyrille. p. 21
Third, there is subject matter that, one presumes, may not have been of peak interest for the typical teenage male reader of the 1940s—not only is there a leisurely development of the romantic relationship between Juille and Egide, but there are scenes that are even more atypical:
“With permission, I shall compose that gown,” the soft voice drawled, and Juille nodded coldly.
The dresser laid both hands on a section of wall near the alcove and slid back a long panel to disclose her working apparatus. Juille stared in frank enchantment and even Helia’s feminine instincts, smothered behind a military lifetime, made her eyes gleam as she looked. The dresser’s equipment had evidently been moved into place behind the sliding panel just before her entrance, for the tall rack at one end of the opening still presented what must have been the color-selection of the last patron.
Through a series of level slits the ends, of almost countless fabrics in every conceivable shade of pink showed untidily. Shelves and drawers spilled more untidiness. Obviously this artist was great enough to indulge her whims even at the expense of neatness.
She pressed a button now and the pink rainbow slid sidewise and vanished. Into its place snapped a panel exuding ends of blackness in level parallels—satin that gleamed like dark water, the black smoke of gauzes, velvet so soft it looked charred, like black ash.
The dresser moved so swiftly and deftly that her work looked like child’s play, or magic. She chose an end of dull silk and reeled out yard after billowing yard through the slot, slashed it off recklessly with a razor-sharp blade, and like a sculptor modeling in clay, molded the soft, thick stuff directly upon Juille’s body, fitting it with quick, nervous snips of her scissors and sealing the edges into one another. In less than a minute Juille was sheathed from shoulder to ankle in a gown that fitted perfectly and elastically as her skin, outlining every curve of her body and falling in soft, rich folds about her feet. The dresser kicked away the fragments of discarded silk and was pulling out now such clouds and billows of pure shadow as seemed to engulf her in fog.
Juille almost gasped as the cloud descended upon herself. It was something too sheer for cloth, certainly not a woven fabric. The dresser’s deft hands touched lightly here and there, sealing the folds of cloud in place. In a moment or two she stepped back and gestured toward the mirror.
Juille turned. This tall unknown was certainly not herself. The hard, impersonal, perfect body had suddenly taken on soft, velvety curves beneath the thick soft fabric. All about her, floating out when she moved, the shadowy billows of dimness smoked away in drapery so adroitly composed that it seemed an arrogance in itself.
“And now, one thing more,” smiled the dresser, pulling open an untidy drawer. “This—” She brought out a double handful of sequins like flashing silver dust and strewed them lavishly in the folds of floating gauze. “Turn,” she said, and Juille was enchanted to see the tiny star points cling magnetically to the cloth except for a thin, fine film of them that floated out behind her and twinkled away to nothing in midair whenever she moved. p. 18
One suspects that any 1940’s reader experiencing a sense-of-wonder buzz from the above may also have been suffering a degree of cognitive dissonance as well!
There are other plus points too, such as the innovative use of virtual reality in Cyrille’s many rooms, something else that makes it seem ahead of its time. On the other hand, the novel is rather too slow-moving to start with, possibly a structural inevitability given the need to have the relationship section at the beginning of the story. Overall though, this is a promising beginning, and I’ll be interested to see if Moore can maintain this high standard in the second half.
If Moore’s story feels like something from the sixties, then The Mutant’s Brother by Fritz Leiber is like a claustrophobic and paranoid story from a 1950’s issue of Galaxy. It is set in a near future world that has Greer Canarvon on a flight to see a twin brother who he has never met. We learn a number if things during the journey: (a) the pair are probably mutants; (b) they were separated at birth, and Greer has only recently found out where his brother lives.
When Greer lands at Steelton, he buys cigarettes and sees a newscast which refers to the “Carstairs business” he heard other passengers discussing on the plane. He learns that this refers to Robert Carstairs—a dangerous criminal who the police are looking for—and then sees a photograph of himself or, more accurately, someone who looks like him on the huge screen in the terminal. He is recognised, and there then follows an exciting sequence where Greer has to mentally control several people to effect his escape.
After commandeering a taxi, and with the driver under his control, Greer learns about the nefarious deeds committed by the man on the screen—his twin brother—and sets out to track him down. The story comes to an exciting climax inside a police station.
This is quite a good piece, and was better than I had expected (it hasn’t been much collected or anthologized since it first appeared).1
Most of the rest of the fiction is not up to the standard of the previous two entries, and that is particularly the case with One-Way Trip by Anthony Boucher. It is the worst thing I have seen from this writer so far, and it reads like one of Cleve Cartmill’s poorer efforts (i.e., an unlikely story unbearably padded). It is not helped by its confusing two page prologue which is about an artist, an accidental invention, and the artist’s subsequent murder.
The main story starts with the protagonist of the piece, a WBI (World instead of Federal) agent called Gan Garrett, who is on a rocket flight to Sollywood to investigate the increased use of a material called lovestoneite (one of the story’s gimmicks, previously touched on in the prologue). He is going undercover as a historian to advise a film project on the life of Depavura, a prophet who is responsible for this peaceful future world which emerged from the War of the Twentieth Century. Some of this information comes from a conversation he has on the flight with a woman passenger. After they land and disembark someone throws a knife at Garrett, but misses.
He goes to his new job and has five minutes with the boss S. B. (Sacheverell Breakstone) before meeting the scriptwriter of the Depavura epic, Hesketh Uranov. We learn more about this future Sollywood:
A red light glowed in front of one of the studios. Their plaques admitted them to the soundproof observers’ gallery. “This is an interior, of course,” Uranov explained. “Exteriors are all shot outside under dome, some of them here at the main plant, most of them on the various locations. You probably saw them from the ship?”
Garrett nodded.
“California’s amazing enough naturally, and after our landscaper’s went to work— It’s really extraordinary. We can shoot any possible aspect of the world’s surface, and we have a condensed replica of every city of any importance, from Novosibirsk to Luna City. Southern California is the world in miniature; destroy the rest of civilization, and an archaeologist could re-create it all from our locations.” There was a certain possessive pride in his voice, despite his avowed contempt for Sollywood. p. 89
Cue Alfred Bester’s The Flowered Thundermug.
The rest of the story meanders endlessly through various events: Garrett is attacked again in a nightclub when out drinking with Uranov; the agent gets a lecture from a Dr Wojeck about lovestoneite’s optical properties (it can release absorbed light at varying rates); Garrett and Uranov go to see the painter mentioned in the prologue, where Garrett is ambushed yet again; finally, he is then framed for the murder of one of the ambushers and send on a one-way rocket trip (this peaceful society’s replacement for capital punishment).
All of this is not in the slightest bit convincing and it takes forever to get to this point (all this is about twenty pages worth). Worse, we then get a data dump about how this world’s society evolved on the rocket trip out.
Garrett then ends up landing (unknown to him) on the Moon. Here (spoiler) we find out that the lovestonite is being used by S. B. to make weapons to take over the world. Puzzlingly, the story morphs at this point into what can only be described as a farcical piece on megalomania:
“All Sollywood,” Sacheverell Breakstone began, “acknowledged my creative-executive supremacy. The Little Hitler, they called me. And I remember reading in a biography of that great man how he could have been a magnificent painter had he chosen to follow that line instead of creating in terms of meters and men. Even so, I could have been a great musician, but I instinctively turned away from the sterility of such purely artistic creation. I found my metier in Sollywood; but even there I was cramped, strangled by the limitations of peace. The man who would create with men needs weapons. The man who would create life must be able to mete out death.” p. 110
The story finishes with Garrett managing to divert these violent extremist to Mars to colonise the planet.
A bizarre piece, and not in a good way.2
Endowment Policy by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore has a taxi driver called Holt sent to pick up a fare that has asked for him by name. After picking up a man called Smith, Holt is asked if he would like to make a thousand bucks. When Holt accepts, Smith then explains that he wants Holt to take him to the home of a particular physicist. At eleven o’clock they will be an explosion at the scientist’s lab, and Holt’s job will be to take a formula out of the safe and give it to the War department.
The bulk of the rest of the piece is a chase story that involves Holt and his (obviously time-traveller) passenger avoiding a group of men looking for them. When they finally arrive at the house, Holt (spoiler) attempts to retrieve the formula but fails.
There is a coda set in 2016 where Smith (his pursuers catch him and take him back to the future) is tried for attempted time-crime, and the story has a clever twist where we find out that Smith is the older Holt, and had gone back in time to deliver himself from his humdrum life. There is a pleasingly ironic last paragraph where the 1943 Holt contemplates the bright future that his thousand dollars will provide. . . .
M 33 in Andromeda by A. E. van Vogt is the second ‘Space Beagle/Nexialist’ series, and starts with a spaceship picking up vibrations and murmurings as it transits a volume of space. When a voice tells the captain the ship should turn back it becomes apparent that no-one else in the crew has heard it. The captain then asks them whether they should continue. Near the end of this process, metal-like beasts appear in the control room and a firefight breaks out. During the skirmish a Nexialist called Grosvenor (a generalist who has not really been accepted by the ship’s crew of specialists) saves the captain’s life.
After further discussion among the crew the ship continues exploring, eventually finding a buried city on one of several primeval planets they discover: the populations of these planets have been wiped out by an unknown attacker.
Grosvenor eventually discovers (spoiler) that this has been caused by a galaxy spanning creature that feeds on the energy given off by dying creatures. We get some back story about the evolution of this creature before the humans shoot iron projectiles into space to injure the creature and force it to a distant Galaxy. It ends with the Nexialist’s acceptance by the rest of the crew.
This is all very unconvincing, verging on ridiculous, and reads like something from the thirties. It is also written in similar quality prose. Here are a few random sentences:
But he found himself waiting for others of the score of men in the control room, to echo the empirical statement of him who had already spoken. p. 129
There was no reply; and, after a little, that was astounding. p. 130
“I am glad to see that no one is even looking as if we ought to turn back.” p. 130
“That’s a large order, commander.” [this last in reply to what the speaker thinks of the environment that they are headed into] p. 130
And so on. It reads like an badly written and uncorrected first draft.
When Is When? by Malcolm Jameson is the third and last of the ‘Anachron’ time travel series. This one starts off with Kilmer finding out that several of his time teams have gone missing. Barry turns up shortly afterwards, having emerged unscathed from a just completed disciplinary hearing. He looks at the dates the teams are in, and says he can sort the problem. He sets off for the America of Phillip I of Spain’s time.
Once he arrives he arranges a deal with a developed American nation (time travellers have altered the history of this timeline) to provide him an Armada of advanced warships. The (eventually revealed) reason for this is that Barry wants to (spoiler) apply pressure on the Pope, who changed the Gregorian calendar at this point. The Pope’s alteration of the calendar during this period caused missing dates, and some of the changes occurred at different times across the planet—this is what has caused the missing time teams.
This is a completely unconvincing ending: the idea that mankind’s artificial system of measuring time would lead to crews getting lost in “time holes” or whatever is completely nonsensical. Best read for its semi-historical adventure story.3
The Cover is, as usual, by William Timmins (I can stop saying repeating this sometime late in 1944 if I recall correctly). My favourites among this issue’s Interior artwork are probably by Williams (although the lizard illustration on p. 136 is rather amateurish). Kolliker’s are okay, and Kramer and Hall are a mixed bag (Kramer’s illustrations for the Jameson are okay but his first one for the Leiber features one of his standard “1940’s man in hat and raincoat”).
Noncommunication Radio by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial that speculates on the amount of scientific knowledge that will become known to the public after the war before it spirals off into prediction—some accurate, some not.
The End of the Rocket Society by Willy Ley is the first part of a fascinating article about the beginnings and history of the German Rocket Society (it started in 1927) and their early publications and experiments. Ley was a founder member and, in his account, the organisation sometimes appears like something out of a farce:
So Oberth had to build a rocket in a hurry. He knew that he was no engineer and that he needed one. He could have asked any one of innumerable people he knew for an able assistant, he could have phoned one of the specialized employment agencies—but he put a classified ad into one or several newspapers. Several men responded, capable men, no doubt, and Oberth had to make a choice. There was one of the applicants whose appearance struck him like lightning. This was the man he had seen in that meteorite-inspired vision. He even bore that scar on his forehead, Oberth did not know that it was a result of reckless driving.
That individual was a small man with a hard face, a Hitler-voiced unemployed engineer, carefully dressed and with military posture. “Name is Rudolf Nebel, diploma-ed engineer, member of the oldest Bavarian student corps, World War combat pilot, with pilot’s license and rank of lieutenant, with eleven enemy planes to my credit.”
He was hired immediately.
I may add right here that Nebel told me himself later on that he had been graduated in a hurry during the war because he had volunteered for the air force and that after the war he had never worked as an engineer but as a kind of salesman for mechanical kitchen gadgets. Since jobs were almost impossible to find, all this was probably not his fault, but I often discovered later that I knew more about problems in his field than he did.
Oberth found himself another assistant whose name had come to his attention because it had been the by-line to a brilliant article in an aviation magazine. Via the editor of the magazine Oberth got hold of the writer, a Russian aviation student by the name of Alexander Borissovitch Shershevsky. Shershevsky had been sent to Germany to study gliders, but overstayed his kommandirovka and dared not go home again. But he was genuinely in favour of the Soviet government, not a “White Russian”—he was a refugee by accident.
Those three, the theorist who longed for the fresh mountain air of Mediash, the professed militarist Nebel and the Bolshevist Shershevsky worked together, or tried to. Shershevsky did not adore work overly much, Nebel was willing to work and waited for orders, and Oberth was not quite certain where he should start. p. 73Then I met Nebel accidentally one day. He knew me and, assuming that I did not know him, told me who he was and what he was going to do. It was: He was going to found a society in order to continue the rocket experiments, he was going to get somebody to write a book to attract public attention. After he had lectured for half an hour I managed to tell him that there were at last half a dozen books and that there was a society which would be able to do something if it could only get hold of its president. Who? Hermann Oberth! It is still hard to believe, but Oberth had never informed his assistant either about the society nor about the literature on the subject, save for his own book which Nebel had not read, after finding it too highfalutin. (He used an equivalent Bavarian term.) After this revelation Nebel said that he would do something with the society that existed. He did. p. 75
In Times to Come Campbell trails Hal Clement’s 30,000 word novella, Attitude, and has this to say about the rest of Moore’s Judgement Night:
When I read it first myself, I felt the last half was the best of it—and the last single page carries an impact equal to all the rest of the story! It’ll stay with you for several days—I’ll guarantee. p. 128
Brass Tacks has a letter from Hugh R. Wahlin of Madison, WI, that gives his opinions on the new size and artwork:
I have just seen a copy of the beloved mag in its “new” size, and believe me, nothing has done my poor old soul so much good for many a month. I never did like the large size because it was too clumsy for reading in bed, and besides the covers always got torn around the edges, and who wants to file away a messy copy? Seems to me that if you want to break into the slick field, the way to do it is by printing the mag on slick paper, not by making it of such size that it won’t fit into the racks reserved for pulps.
I’ve got some opinions on the new cover, too: Why, if you are going back to the old size, don’t you bleed the cover pic on three sides again? It makes the mag seem about five percent smaller as it is now. Another thing, why don’t you get rid of that obnoxious square box sticking up into the cover? It may be a good idea to have the story connected with the cover, but I ‘d rather have it up at the top where it used to be, and not
depriving me of any of the pleasure I get out of a really top-notch cover. This Timmins is turning out some stuff that stacks up pretty well beside Rogers’.
Why, oh, why, do you insist on letting Kramer illustrate your lead story? Maybe he gives you two for the price of one or something, but I certainly can’t see anything in his work. He is weak on composition, his interpretations are indefinite, and every face he draws looks like it needed a shave. I don’t mind it on the men so much, but even his heroines— or am I being too romantic for STF?—look like the bearded lady. p. 156
Elsewhere, there are (as well as a letter from Chad Oliver) positive mentions for Mimsy Were the Borogoves and Timmins’ covers. The column ends with a long letter that uses Smith’s ‘Venus Equilateral’ stories as a springboard for a mini-lecture on how scientific development really works. This latter is from a “Caleb Northrup”—is this Campbell?4
The issue closes with a Book Review by Anthony Boucher of Moon Up—Moon Down by John Alden Knight. This latter is about solunar theory, the idea that the position of the sun, moon and tides affect fish feeding times, etc.5
There is no Analytical Laboratory in this issue.6 ●
It is worth getting this issue for the Moore, Leiber, Moore & Kuttner, and for Ley’s article.
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1. The ISFDB page for The Mutant’s Brother by Fritz Leiber shows one 1953 anthologisation before it appeared in a Leiber collection in 2002.
2. The ISFDB page for One-Way Trip by Anthony Boucher unsurprisingly shows it has only ever been reprinted in The Compleat Boucher, 1999. No surprise there.
3. From the University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections website:
In 1582 Pope Gregory ruled that this new calendar – thereafter called the Gregorian Calendar—should be brought into use. By that stage, the Julian Calendar had added ten days too many to the calendar, so Pope Gregory decreed that the day after the 4th of October 1582 should be the 15th of October 1582, thus correcting the error.
[. . .]
In Great Britain, the new calendar was adopted in September 1752. In order to deal with the discrepancy of days, which by now had grown to eleven, it was ordered that 2nd September 1752 would be immediately followed by 14th September 1752. This led to crowds of people on the streets demanding, ‘Give us back our 11 days!’ It also explains why our financial year begins on 6th April. The official start of the year used to be Lady Day (25th March), but the loss of eleven days in 1752 pushed this back to 5th April. Another skipped day in 1800 pushed it back again to 6th April.
It’s worth reading the whole page.
4. The Northrup letter sounds like Campbell’s “McCann” missives, and has no address. By the by, there is a “Sara Northrup Hubbard” mentioned in Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding.
5. Wikipedia’s page on Solunar Theory is here.
6. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the October issue:
Putting the Boucher in second place is just ridiculous, and once again shows that the readership is essentially ordering the stories by length, not quality. ●
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