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Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 126-127

_____________________

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

Fiction:
The Debt • novelette by E. Mayne Hull ∗
Lost Art • novelette by George O. Smith ∗∗
Fricassee in Four Dimensions • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller ∗
The Iron Standard • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗
We Print the Truth • novella by Anthony Boucher ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x12), Frank Kramer (x3)
Insects Now • by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: October 1943
In Times to Come
Elementary, of Course— • science essay
Master Chemist • science essay by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Arthur McCann]
Extraterrestrial Bacteria • science essay by Willy Ley
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

The Debt by E. Mayne Hull is the third of her ‘Artur Blord’ series, and sees the return of the alien Skal from the previous story. This one starts with Blord coming upon a ravaged spaceship, where all the men are dead and there is only one hidden survivor, Ellen Reith. All the other women have been taken by the Skal’s henchmen to the Castle of Pleasure. Blord realises that they will soon deduce from the manifest that Reith is missing, and that they will return for her. He calls his office to organise a cover up.
Blord and Reith then travel to a night club on Fassor III, one of the Skal’s business fronts, to track down the missing women. During the journey Blord learns about previous unsuccessful attacks on the Castle of Pleasure by the authorities, and the green ray used to defend it. He is then told by his office that the wreck has been found along with the decoy body put on board by his men.

When Blord and Reith arrive at the nightclub they identify one of the attackers, and Blord kidnaps him in an invisible spaceship. Shortly after this the Skal contacts Blord—he has penetrated Blord’s deceptions—and negotiates for the release of his man.
The rest of the story continues this—rather unlikely—game of move and countermove, climaxing with (spoiler) Blord arranging for a corrupt employee to pass information to the Skal which will enable it to target Blord’s ship. The Skal mindspeaks to Blord shortly before attacking with the green ray—which Blord reflects back to the Castle of Pleasure with a mirror. The story finishes with a raid on the Skal’s underlings where, to avoid a battle, Blord negotiates a financial deal with them. The story then cuts to Blord and Reith having breakfast (!) where he cheerfully tells her that he has had them executed!
This is a readable enough piece but it has a rather ramshackle plot and weak ending. I suspect that Hull is emulating her husband A. E. van Vogt’s work in these ‘Blord’ stories, but the problem is that, while they feel like his work on the surface, they don’t have the underlying wild and complex plot structure which makes some of van Vogt’s word so good. The best story I’ve read by Hull so far is one written in her ‘own’ voice, The Ultimate Wish (Unknown Worlds, February 1943).

Lost Art² by George O. Smith gets off to a confusing start, lashing about between Sargon of Akkad on Earth six thousand years ago, to near future mankind (who know about a dead Martian civilization from Sargon’s era), to a Martian contemporary of the latter called Atlas. As you can see, it is a struggle to coherently synopsise it—the story doesn’t do much better.
Anyway, after an unnecessary page of this, the story gets going with Atlas the Martian and his son setting up a machine. Although the son has read the manual, Atlas suggests that there is more to it than that . . . .
The story then cuts to present day Mars, where Barney Carroll and James Baler are flying across Mars when they see a glint below: they land, and uncover an ancient Martian tower. After salvaging the device they take it back to base with them, where they start repairing and experimenting with it. As well as the device they also find an instruction manual, which they translate. This doesn’t turn out to be as much help as they hoped, and during testing they find the device exhibits several anomalous properties, which include setting a wall on fire, and later fracturing it with a transmitted hammer blow.

The men’s experimentation alternates with short excerpts where Atlas and his son set up the device and, for the most part, this is moderately entertaining—Smith balances the tech talk with banter like this:

“Yeah, and it’s about as lethal as a sun lamp. D’ye suppose the Martians used to artificially assist their crops by synthetic sunshine?”
[. . .]
“I’d believe anything if this darned gadget were found in a populated district,” said Jim. “But we know that the desert was here when the Martians were here, and that it was just as arid as it is now. They wouldn’t try farming in a place where iron oxide abounds.”
“Spinach?”
“You don’t know a lot about farming, do you?” asked Jim.
“I saw a cow once.”
“That does not qualify you as an expert on farming.”
“I know one about the farmer’s daughter, and—”
“Not even an expert on dirt farming,” continued Jim. “Nope, Barney, we aren’t even close.”  p. 41

Eventually, they learn their experiments have caused electrical grid disruption all over Mars and, at the end of the story, find that the tower (spoiler) is a broadcast power station which served the whole planet. The final joke is that a later human instruction manual for the device wouldn’t be any clearer to the Martians then theirs is to humans.
The story is okay overall but it drags on too long, and it is not entirely lucid (Smith, as in his last story, overdoes the technical detail).

Fricassee in Four Dimensions by P. Schuyler Miller³ has the narrator fishing near a “hobo jungle” when he comes across a tramp. After he gives the tramp one of the fish he has caught, he is amazed by the man’s culinary skills:

I handed him the fish. What he did I still don’t know. There was a sort of twist of his wrist, and the trout was inside out. He flicked here and there with a shining little knife and deposited its plumbing in a hole he had dug beside the fire, with a neat stopper of turf beside it. Then twist—zip—and the trout was inside out again. He hung it on a bush, saw that I was watching him bug-eyed, and turned bright red.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Little trick I picked up from a feller in Yuma. Indian. It—bothers people.”  p. 56

The narrator then hires the man—Smitty—and he takes him home. When the narrator’s son and daughter—Mike and Pat—arrive, Smitty magics up some cookies straight away, even though the oven is off. This won’t be the first occasion where Smitty appears to conjure meals out of thin air, and the children later tell their father that he can empty eggs and cans without opening them.
The next phase of the story has Smitty phoning the narrator to tell him that his daughter Pat has gone missing, but that he knows where she has gone. Mike greets his father when the latter quickly returns to the house, and he also seems to know where she has gone:

“She’s all right,” he insisted. “Smitty knows. He’ll get her.” He tried to squirm out of my grip.
“Look here, pal,” I told him. “This is no game. Pat’s only three, and a lot can happen to her before anyone catches up with her, I want to know where she is.”
He could tell I meant it, but it came hard for him. He wouldn’t lie and he didn’t want to tell me. “Well.” he finally admitted, “I guess she went over there.”
“Over where?” It meant nothing to me. “Over to the woods?” We’d been on a picnic the Sunday before, across the river in a grove of pines.
Now the ice was broken, Mike was willing enough to talk. “Gee, no,” he scoffed. “Over there—where Smitty goes.” He waved his arm vaguely. “Like this—”
He hitched up his pants and began to count. Then, in time to the count, he began to sway back and forth from one foot to the other. Back and forth, back, and forth—then suddenly he twisted queerly on his heel—and vanished.  p. 62

So far, so Mimsy Were the Borogoves. However, in this story Mike returns from “over there” to teach his father how to do the trick. When they both arrive in the other world they see two tracks going through the grass, and they follow them to find Pat and Smitty. When they all try to go back home the narrator can’t manage the trick (conveniently), so they camp out over the weekend and explore this unusual world.

On one of these nights away the narrator finds his daughter Pat cuddled up with a “wabbit”, which turns out to be part of a 4-dimensional animal. Smitty subsequently provides a related explanation about his own dimensional/time-travelling abilities, with the obligatory tesseract analogy thrown in.
Once they arrive home (Smitty picks up the narrator and carries him back) they find that Pat has a wabbit with her. Her mother Eleanor takes it away and tells Smitty to get rid of it.
At this point the story becomes a different piece altogether: Eleanor gets involved in catering for visiting dignitaries, but the four chickens they plan to have for dinner are killed and spoiled by the dog. Smitty manages to save the day by cooking a splendid meal using part of the wabbit but, after they have eaten, digestive problems ensue as other-dimensional parts of the wabbit are still alive.
The time-travel/4D gimmick isn’t convincing, and the two different parts do not splice together well.

The Iron Standard by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is another of their stories that gets off to a rather confused start (you get the impression the writer started this before the morning coffee had kicked in). This time we have a spaceship crew (which includes, among others, a Native American called Mike Soaring Eagle⁴) on an inaugural trip to Venus, where they are short of food due to difficulties with the natives. If they had money (the planet is on the “iron standard”) they could buy what they require—but they don’t, so cannot. Moreover, they cannot get jobs as the tarkomars (the native guilds/unions) require a joining fee.
The story tells of the various schemes the Earthmen try to make some money, and the numerous setbacks they experience because of the natives’ ultra-conservative attitude towards change:

Bronson described how watersheds worked. “Suppose you imported Earth plants and trees and forested the mountains. And built dams to retain your water. You’d have power all the time, and you’d need only a few big stations. And they’d be permanent”
Skottery thought that over. “We have all the power we need.”
“But look at the expense!”
“Our rates cover that.”
“You could make more money—difals and sofals—”
“We have made exactly the same profits for three hundred years,” Skottery explained. “Our net remains constant. It works perfectly. You fail to understand our economic system, I see. Since we have everything we need, there’s no use making more money—not even a fal more.”
“Your competitors—”
“We have only three, and they are satisfied with their profits.”
“Suppose I interest them in my plan?”
“But you couldn’t,” Skottery said patiently. “They wouldn’t be interested any more than I am. I’m glad you dropped in. May you be worthy of your father’s name.”
“Ye soulless fish!” Bronson yelled, losing his temper. “Is there no red blood in your green-skinned carcass? Does no one on this world know what fight means?” He hammered a fist into his palm. “I wouldn’t be worthy of the old Seumas Bronson’s name unless I took a poke at that ugly phiz of yours right now—”
Skottery had pressed a button. Two large Venusians appeared. The head of Water Power pointed to Bronson.
“Remove it,” he said.  p. 85-86

Eventually (spoiler) the Earthmen prevail by disrupting the Venusians’ monetary system by selling pep pills, and the takomars are forced to pay them to stop.

This is one of those stories that is probably more interesting for its economic ideas and social attitudes than it is for the story but, while reading it, I found it hard to ignore the implicit assumptions about human exceptionalism and the superiority of the capitalist system. Normally I don’t have much truck with political or social analysis of seventy-odd year old stories through a contemporary lens, but I suspect that current day readers are unlikely to have a sanguine attitude towards the Earthmen’s disruption of a successful non-capitalist system (it’s hard to see how the status quo would persist after the story’s end). How ironic that nowadays we would fall over ourselves to investigate how they make their balanced society work.
For those that don’t want to think about the politics of the story, it is an entertaining enough read.

Completing the issue’s fiction is We Print the Truth by Anthony Boucher, which has this blurb from Campbell:

WARNING—Pure Fantasy. This is a tale of pure fantasy, run as an experiment. If you don’t like an occasional fantasy, the experiment ends right here. But this is a story of a newspaper that always printed the truth—for anything it printed became truth!  p. 125

After Unknown (Astounding’s sister fantasy magazine) folded with the October 1943 issue, Campbell was left with a considerable inventory of unused stories. In an attempt to use this already paid-for work, and perhaps to keep the magazine’s spirit alive until it could be revived after the war, Campbell would slip suitable stories from its inventory into Astounding over the following months, and requested reader feedback. This practice eventually stopped, and I’ll discuss the whys and wherefores in the issues to come.
The story itself starts in newspaper editor John MacVeagh’s office, where he and the local undertaker, chief of police, priest, alcoholic, etc., are having their regular weekly bull session. Their conversations always end in a discussion about God (Jake the undertaker is an atheist), but tonight Phil Rogers bursts in to tell them that his aunt has been murdered. They all quickly disperse to do their jobs, and Molly, MacVeagh’s Girl Friday at the newspaper, manages to convince him to let her get the story as, we find out later, MacVeagh is romantically interested in the murdered woman’s niece, Laura.
After they leave, MacVeagh goes to see his printer to tell him that the weekly paper will produce an extra edition to cover the murder:

“I’m sorry, John,” Whalen said gravely. His voice was the deepest MacVeagh had ever heard in ordinary speech. “I’m leaving tonight.”
“Leaving—” MacVeagh was almost speechless. Granted that tramp printers were unpredictable, still after an announcement such as he’d just made—
“I must, John. No man is master of his own movements. I must go, and tonight. That is why I wished to see you. I want to know your wish.”
“My wish? But look, Whalen: We’ve got work to do. We’ve got to—”
[. . .]
“You never did get my name straight, John,” Whalen went on.
“It was understandable in all that confusion the day you hired me after Luke Sellers had retired. But Whalen is only my first name. I’m really Whalen Smith. And it isn’t quite Whalen—”
“What difference does that make?”
“You still don’t understand? You don’t see how some of us had to take up other trades with the times? When horses went and you still wanted to work with metal, as an individual worker and not an ant on an assembly line— So you don’t believe I can grant your wish, John?”
“Of course not. Wishes—”
“Look at the book, John.”
MacVeagh looked. He read:
.
At this point in the debate his majesty waxed exceeding wroth and smote the great oaken table with a mighty oath. “Nay,” he swore, “all of our powers they shall not take from us. We will sign the compact, but we will not relinquish all. For unto us and our loyal servitors must remain—’’
.
“So what?” he said. “Fairy tales?”
Whalen Smith smiled. “Exactly. The annals of the court of His Majesty King Oberon.”
“Which proves what?”
“You read it, didn’t you? I gave you the eyes to read—”
John MacVeagh looked back at the book. He had no great oaken table to smite, but he swore a mighty oath. For the characters were again strange and illegible.
“I can grant your wish, John,” said Whalen Smith with quiet assurance.  p. 130-131

After this strange encounter, MacVeagh goes back to the office, where Mr Hitchcock, an influential local businessman who is a relative of the murdered woman, confronts MacVeagh, and attempts to pressure mim into soft-peddling the story. MacVeagh is having none of it, and his attitude hardens when he finds out that Hitchcock, Phil Rogers and Laura (Hitchcock’s daughter) were alone in the house when, supposedly, a tramp broke in and killed the aunt. The pair depart on bad terms, and MacVeagh goes back to see Whalen. He know what he wants to wish for:

“Did you ever look at our masthead? Sometimes you can see things so often that you never really see them. But look at that masthead. It’s got a slogan on it, under where it says ‘Grover Sentinel.’ Old Jonathan Minter put that slogan there, and that slogan was the first words he ever spoke to me when he took me on here.
[. . .]
“The Sentinel’s battle cry: We print the truth. So this is my wish, and if anybody had a stack of Bibles handy I’d swear to it on them: May the Sentinel never depart from that slogan. May that slogan itself be true, in the fullest meaning of truth. May there never be lies or suppression or evasions in the Sentinel because always and forever we print the truth.”
It was impossible to see what Whalen Smith did with his hands. They moved too nimbly. For a moment it seemed as though their intricate pattern remained glowing in the air. Then it was gone, and Whalen said, “I have never granted a nobler wish. Nor,” he added, “a more dangerous one.”
He was gone before MacVeagh could ask what he meant.  p. 134

MacVeagh soon realizes the consequences of his wish when he has a testy encounter with Phil and Laura on the way to see the chief of police. Phil makes fun of a typo in the paper saying Old Man Herkimer, who has just died, was 17 (instead of 77). Soon after this Jake the undertaker arrives at the chief’s office raving about Old Man Herkimer’s body. MacVeagh goes with him to the funeral parlour, and sees that the old man looks like a 17-year-old.
MacVeagh tests his theory that this is because of the news story by rehiring Luke, his retired printer, and placing a piece in the next edition about a freak storm and damage to a local statue. When these events come to pass MacVeagh decides to use his power for good. Initially he makes the murderer confess (it was the butler who did it!), and then sorts out a simmering local conflict between Hitchcock and his workers at the local plant. Then there is “news” of a benefactor giving the paper a huge donation so it can go from weekly to daily publication . . . .

At this point the story accelerates through MacVeagh’s subsequent successes in improving the life of the town, before Molly (who is the only other one apart from Luke who knows what is happening at the paper) sounds a note of caution, referencing a E. Nesbit book, and pointing out that wishes always have a catch. This falls on deaf ears as MacVeagh has been seduced by the positive comments he has heard in town (“this burg is just about perfect”).
Things start falling apart when Hitchcock invites MacVeagh to dinner. He attends, hoping to see Laura, and he eventually manages to slip outside with her. They talk about his improved position in the town, and she mentions that he’ll need to think about settling down. Taking his cue from her, MacVeagh says that marriage is a wonderful thing but, before he can profess his love to her, she tells him that she is soon to be married. MacVeagh can’t control himself and blurts out how he feels, but she makes it clear she isn’t interested in him. MacVeagh goes to a local bar and gets drunk, and then goes to the office to set the type for the social notes column: he announces his and Laura’s engagement.
Later on MacVeagh learns that he has stolen Laura from Johannsen, the likeable plant manager, and he also finds out about another problem caused by a review of a local theatre play (the headline is “Rio Rhythm stinks”). Rather than learning the obvious lesson from these two events, MacVeagh doubles down, and decides to use his power to end the war.

The rest of the story develops in a way that is both expected and unexpected. Although the war stops in Grover, it doesn’t elsewhere, and the story later cuts to a distant FBI office where an agent is tasked to investigate the town and why it is not meeting its war commitments. This epistolary (diary) section has the FBI agent travelling to Grover and, on his way there, stopping at a garage where he meets a strange old man working as a blacksmith (although the man adds that he works at “all kind of metal trades, printing mostly”). At one point they talk about the power of the press:

He had a lot of strange ideas, that old boy. Mostly about truth. How truth was relative, which there’s nothing new in that idea, though he dressed it up fancy. And something about truth and spheres of influence—how a newspaper, for instance, aimed at printing The Truth, which there is no such thing as, but actually tried, if it was honest, to print the truth (lower case) for its own sphere of influence. Outside the radius of its circulation, truth might, for another editor, be something quite else again. And then he said, to himself like. “I’d like to hear sometime how that wish came out,” which didn’t mean anything but sort of ended that discussion.  p. 159

This is Whalen, of course, who appears in the story on three or four occasions. During one of these, he grants a wish to a man who wants a jar of beer that never empties. Later we find out that the man dies from this. By the time “Whaling” (as he is now called) makes his final appearance, we realise that he is at best an ambivalent actor, and possibly an evil one.
Meantime MacVeagh feels the strain of writing news that keeps the world at peace (at least inside Grover), and finds out that Johannsen and Laura are seeing each other behind his back. Phil Rogers then turns up at the office to kill him: he has learned what is happening from Luke the printer—who has relapsed into alcoholism—and MacVeagh is only saved when Johannsen arrives unexpectedly.
Things continue to deteriorate until Molly (who has just attempted suicide) convinces MacVeagh to take a break away from the town. When he leaves he finds out the rest of the world is still at war, and is picked up by an FBI man who wants to know what is happening in the town. MacVeagh only just escapes, and eventually arrives back at the office looking like a tramp, having been on the run for some time. He tells Molly he knows what he has to do . . . .
This is an impressive piece, and one that becomes more complex as it progresses: initially it appears to be a linearly told, single point-of-view wish-fulfillment story, but develops into a piece where portions of the story are omitted (“If it’s all right with you, we’ll skip pretty fast over the next part of the story. The days of triumph never make interesting reading”); different points of views emerge; and the story gets much darker. It also addresses a number of issues: the downside of magic wishes; how absolute power corrupts; the limits of free will; and the power of the press/fake news! Interweaved with the latter are numerous biblical quotations, and at least a couple of conversations with the local priest about the power of God.
The story is Boucher’s best since The Compleat Werewolf, and I hope that this time around he gets the Retro-Hugo. (I commend those who nominated this work—I hadn’t read it at the time.)

The Cover by William Timmins attempts to show the invisible spaceship from the Hull story (the black border makes this a very dark cover).
The Interior artwork in this issue is nearly all by Paul Orban (he contributes a dozen illustrations to Frank Kramer’s three) and they all look pretty mundane—there are too many drawings that could have come from any contemporary magazine (see the ones above for the Boucher story), and those that look interesting are squashed into quarter of a page to save space. Kramer’s are better.
Noted in passing: the title page illustration is reduced in size and positioned away from the page edge.⁵
Insects Now by John W. Campbell, Jr. is a weird editorial that starts with the description of an aircraft bombsight and then over-analogises both:

Save for [the bombardier’s eyes]—the whole system closely resembles a stupendous stinging insect, guiding itself, controlling, leveling, directing its own flight, sighting its prey, and accurately delivering the sting.
The nerves are copper wires, the ganglia electron tubes and the sense-organ gyroscopes, variable capacitors, sensitive metal membranes, the muscles—of two sorts—are motors. There are the great flying muscles, the four main engines, and the more delicate trimming muscles, the electric motors that control the tail surfaces, the wing tabs and ailerons—and release the deadly sting.  p. 6

Campbell goes on to say that systems like this may have their own eyes in the future—he seems to edge towards a description of robotic weapons—but then finishes with this, which telegraphs the appearance of Simak’s forthcoming ‘City’ stories:

Still they’ll be insects, unknowing, stupid things, for all their size. Bees to gather honey or hornets to sting.
But—how long till men make a dog-thing that knows of its own existence, and of its builder, and helps him consciously?  p. 6

The Analytical Laboratory: October 1943 was discussed in the review of that issue.⁶
In Times to Come trails a new story by Hal Clement called Technical Error, which, intriguingly, will feature elliptical bolts tightened in elliptical holes (well, intriguing if you are engineering/science inclined!) Maybe the magazine should now be described as “the one with elliptical bolts” rather than “the one with rivets”.

Elementary, of Course— is a single page filler that lists all the elements used in aircraft manufacture.

Master Chemist by John W. Campbell, Jr. is a science essay about microbiological production techniques including the use of yeast, which is discussed in some detail. I was surprised to read this:

Recently, a yeast strain has been developed which produces proteins—regular animal-food proteins. This strain has been subdivided, and sub-bred for further specializations, till strains producing a high concentration of protein—higher percentage, in fact, than animal tissues—have been produced which also produce flavor compounds very closely akin to those of beef. The resultant washed, dried yeast tastes like beef, and nourishes like beef! The texture is wrong, naturally—but a yeast-beef stew strongly resembles the true beef stew in flavor, texture and nourishment value. The great difference is that the yeast can be grown in vats in one-ton lots in twelve hours from molasses and ammonia, almost without human labor, while the cow takes months, acres, and much labor.
Since beef flavor has been produced, presumably there is no need of monotony. And, of course, no particular reason why the flavorstrains should be held down to imitations of known meat flavors!  p. 107

There is also discussion of penicillin, which was replacing inferior contemporary drugs like sulfa, but was problematical to produce:

At present, penicillin is produced by an extremely expensive, laborious and slow method, involving the culture of the penicillium mold in separate one-gallon culture bottles, followed by extraction of the active substance from the resultant culture liquor. The production per colony is small, and the mold is sensitive to temperature changes and variations of the culture medium.
The work is being pressed because of the very great value of the penicillin as a therapeutic agent.
There are two lines of attack on the problem of greater production, and both are being followed up vigorously. Efforts to analyze the structure of the penicillin are being made, so that synthesis can be attempted. There is always the possibility that it will turn out to be a substance which, like quinine, cannot be practically assembled chemically. (On the other hand, it may turn out to be actually identical with some, long-known substance, synthesized years ago, but never considered a drug. Nicotinic acid, described by chemists years ago, turned out to be one of the B-complex vitamins.)  p. 194-195

Extraterrestrial Bacteria by Willy Ley is an interesting but short account about (ultimately negative) attempts to find bacteria in meteorites.⁷

Brass Tacks leads off with a letter from Malcolm Jameson, the writer, about the inaccurate description of the Ainu people in Anthony Boucher’s story, One-Way Trip.
There are a couple of other letters in this short column—the most interesting is Robert Silburn’s (he writes from Aberystwyth in Wales, and we are probably lucky a U-boat didn’t get it). He comments on a number of matters, including the number of new names appearing in the magazine (unlike the bad old days), and that the interior artwork could be better:

Orban is the only artist I really like; Kramer’s originality seems to be running dry, while Fax doesn’t seem ever to have had any. Your new chap, Williams, is indistinguishable from Kolliker, but might come to something. I forgot to mention the Isips. Their slick, streamlined style is a joy to the eye.  p. 124

The beginning of his letter is about Leiber’s Gather, Darkness!:

I want to say it’s one of your best yet. It has the same theme of a scientific-religious feudalism that has cropped up in one or two recent stories, but the idea has never been as fully exploited before. And its a perfect example of the constant mutation that ASF has undergone continually under the “Campbell Regime.” Two years ago, “Gather Darkness” would have gone automatically into Unknown. Nowadays the tales in Astounding are almost all of the “wacky” variety, with a maximum of miracles and a minimum of explanation.  p. 123

An issue worth getting for Boucher’s novella, and to a lesser extent, the Kuttner/Moore.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers has this to say in A Requiem for Astounding:

December rounded out the tenth full year of Astounding under the Street & Smith label and also marked the end of the most notable years of the so-called Golden Age. The issue, as such, contained nothing outstanding with the possible exception of a long novelette by Anthony Boucher which had been originally intended for the recently deceased and universally mourned Unknown Worlds, “We Print the Truth.”  p. 127

He adds that Miller’s tale is “amusing”, before going on to discuss the “Golden Age” comment above:

Tradition and nostalgia have ineradicably fixed upon the years currently under discussion the designation of the Golden Age, but if we must chop the time-line of Astounding into eras, or ages, or whatever, for the sake of accuracy this period should rightfully be labeled the Second Golden Age. To mark the demarcation line between a Golden Age and the preceeding and following years is an extremely difficult task; actually, almost impossible. A magazine doesn’t change radically from one month to the next in the ordinary course of events. One exception to this is where one publisher or editor takes over from another.
When Street & Smith took over Astounding from the Clayton chain and installed F. Orlin Tremaine as editor, the policy and appearance of the magazine were completely changed from the Clayton Astounding, and the ensuing three or four years constitute what is essentially the first Golden Age of Astounding. Where it ended and the interregnum commenced is hard to say. The last couple of years of Tremaine’s tenure fell off somewhat from the high level at which he had held the magazine during the first two years of his editorship, and John W. Campbell, Jr. took roughly a year and a half to really get a solid grip on things when he became editor. When he finally did get things going the way he wanted them to, the second Golden Age came into being.
It is easy enough to ascribe the beginning of this second Golden Age to the July, 1939 issue; the hazard sets in when you attempt to pinpoint the ending. I’m going to meet this problem head on, and pinpoint it at December, 1943. This brought the richest years of the Golden Age to a close. But to satisfy those who are unwilling to restrict the Golden Age to these few short years, I will concede that the next two years could be considered a Final Phase of the Golden Age, with the magazine settled on a moderately high plateau of competence, from which the outstanding and classic stories reared like isolated mountain peaks.
The features that distinguished the years 1939-1943 were exciting new ideas, talented new authors, refurbished old authors, and a deluge of exceptional stories from their typewriters. This phenomenon was the unique property of these few short years, but the momentum begun then carried the main aspects of the Golden Age onward for a few more years.
There is another aspect of science fiction, particularly the science fiction found in Astounding from 1934 through the middle forties, that will be briefly discussed here; an aspect that materially contributed to both the Golden Ages and the years between. This is the much misunderstood Sense of Wonder. It is true that most of the stories of this period lack the literary polish and sophistication of the contemporary output, but, oh! the Sense of Wonder, the breathless adventure and the boundless imagination they had instead. This was what made so much of the older science fiction so intensely memorable and classic. Today it is virtually impossible to generate the same enthusiasm for a story that could be generated ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago.
In the final analysis a Sense of Wonder is the priceless possession of the youthful discoverer of science fiction; it may last but for a short fleeting instant, or it may stay with him for a number of years. At any rate, it is sooner or later lost, seldom to be recovered.  p. 128

2. This is listed by ISFDB as a ‘Venus Equilateral’ story but the only connection to the main series is a one-line reference to Don Channing, the station director. According to ISFDB it was not included in the original collection, Venus Equilateral, but was added into The Complete Venus Equilateral in the mid-70s, along with two other stories, The External Triangle and Identity.

3. Although Miller’s and “Padgett’s” pieces are listed as short stories, they are approximately 9500 and 9800 words long (by OCR), so we would now consider them novelettes (the Smith story is 9800 words long: I assume that Campbell listed fiction less than 10,000 words long as a short stories—and presume that the Smith rounded up above this by his counting methods).

4. Mike Soaring Eagle is called “Redskin” by the other crew members, but is one of the more prominent characters. It is interesting to note that, at one point in the story, he is the one who describes the Venusians’ ancestor worship and ultra-conservative resistance to change, and explains how minor alterations to a culture can have a major effect. He does this without any reference to what happened to his own people.

5. This issue’s contents page (top) compared with last issue’s (bottom):

6. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the February 1944 issue:

Campbell does not give a coherent account of what the readers have said: his initial comments indicate that the majority don’t want fantasy, but he finishes by saying they do if it is well written. He seems unable to disambiguate that the readers may like Boucher’s story but don’t want fantasy in the magazine.
In The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont House, 1991), p. 154, Stefan Dziemianowicz states that the Boucher story got the highest AnLab score of all the fantasies that were subsequently transferred from Unknown’s inventory to Astounding.

7. The Wikipedia article on Panspermia is here.  ●