The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #42, November 1954

ISFDB
Luminist

_____________________

Editor, Anthony Boucher

Fiction:
Dead Center • novelette by Judith Merril ∗∗∗
Dead-Eye Daniel • short story by Larry Siegel
The Grom • short story by Arthur Porges
Lease on Life • short story by Lee Grimes
The Test • short story by Richard Matheson
Transformer • short story by Chad Oliver
A Matter of Ethics • short story by Clifton Dance [as by J. R. Shango]
Sacrifice Hit • novelette by Edmond Hamilton +
The Weissenbroch Spectacles • short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Non-Fiction:
Cover • Chesley Bonestell
Coming Next
Recommended Reading
• by Anthony Boucher

_____________________

This issue of F&SF comes from the period where Anthony Boucher was in sole charge of the magazine,1 and the reason I’m reading it is because it contains Dead Center by Judith Merril.2 This story is one of two in this month’s magazine that focus on the domestic circumstances of the characters.

The story concerns the impending departure of husband/father/astronaut Jock Kruger into space, and is largely seen through the eyes his wife, Ruth Kruger, and their four year old son, Toby:

They took him up in an elevator, and showed him all around the inside of the rocket, where Daddy would sit, and where all the food was stored, for emergency, they said, and the radio and everything. Then it was time to say goodbye.
Daddy was laughing at first, and Toby tried to laugh, too, but he didn’t really want Daddy to go away. Daddy kissed him, and he felt like crying because it was scratchy against Daddy’s cheek, and the strong fingers were hurting him now. Then Daddy stopped laughing and looked at him very seriously. “You take care of your mother, now,” Daddy told him. “You’re a big boy this time.”
“Okay,” Toby said. Last time Daddy went away in a rocket, he was not-quite-four, and they teased him with the poem in the book that said, James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, Took great care of his mother, though he was only three . . . . So Toby didn’t much like Daddy saying that now, because he knew they didn’t really mean it.
“Okay,” he said, and then because he was angry, he said, “Only she’s supposed to take care of me, isn’t she?”
Daddy and Mommy both laughed, and so did the two men who were standing there waiting for Daddy to get done saying goodbye to him. He wriggled, and Daddy put him down.
“I’ll bring you a piece of the moon, son,” Daddy said, and Toby said, “All right, fine.” He reached for his mother’s hand, but he found himself hanging onto Grandma instead, because Mommy and Daddy were kissing each other, and both of them had forgotten all about him.
He thought they were never going to get done kissing.  p. 6

After the launch takes place, matters take an adverse turn when Jock comes around to find he has been blacked out for an abnormally long period, over twenty minutes. Ruth discusses the episode with one of the team:

“Wasn’t it . . . an awfully long time?” [Ruth] asked. She hadn’t been watching the clock, on purpose, but she was sure it was longer than it should have been.
Allie stopped smiling. “Twenty-three,” she said.
Ruth gasped. “What . . . ?”
“You figure it. I can’t.”
“There’s nothing in the ship. I mean nothing was changed that would account for it.” She shook her head slowly. This time she didn’t know the ship well enough to talk like that. There could be something. Oh, Jock! “I don’t know,” she said. “Too many people worked on that thing. I . . .”
“Mrs. Kruger’” It was the redheaded reporter, the obnoxious one. “We just got the report on the blackout. I’d like a statement from you, if you don’t mind, as designer of the ship—”
“I am not the designer of this ship,” she said coldly.
“You worked on the design, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, to the best of your knowledge . . . ?”
“To the best of my knowledge, there is no change in design to account for Mr. Kruger’s prolonged unconsciousness. Had there been any such prognosis, the press would have been informed.”
“Mrs. Kruger, I’d like to ask you whether you feel that the innovations made by Mr. Argent could—”  p. 9-10

The situation worsens when Jock is stranded on the Moon after using more fuel than necessary to land. After this the military takes over the rescue mission, and Ruth becomes involved when they decide to use the older KIM-III model she designed.
This convincingly described section is followed by more material about Ruth and Toby, which also covers further politicking at the spaceflight bureau. Eventually Ruth and Toby attend the launch of the rescue vehicle and (spoiler), when Toby is shown around the craft before launch, he stows away. The ship crashes after take-off.
In the coda of the story we find that Ruth later commits suicide, and that Jock’s starved body is eventually brought back from the moon. The family are buried together.
This bare bones description doesn’t convey the kind of story this is—it feels like a mainstream novel about the NASA program that, although it has an underlying plot structure, develops naturally (well, at least until the last couple of pages). I particularly liked the group interactions, the organisational politics, and the press intrusion material, as well as the sections from Toby’s point of view. That said, the ending overdoes the bleakness and tragedy, and I couldn’t help but think that it would be a more effective (and realistic) story if Ruth lived—in its current form it’s like one of those Greek tragedies where the Gods turn up at the end and kill all the mortals. If Merril had kept Ruth alive but grief-struck the story would have continued developing organically, and avoided the omnisciently told and distancing coda (which reads like something from a different story).
If this is not an entirely successful piece, it is an ambitious and noteworthy one.3
The other story in this issue that focuses on the characters’ domestic circumstances is less successful. The Test by Richard Matheson starts with Les helping his eighty year old father Tom revise for a test he has to attend the next day. As Tom becomes exasperated at his inability to complete the cognitive and co-ordination tests Les gives him, we learn that, in this world, old people have to pass assessments to keep living. If they fail, they get a month to sort out their affairs before receiving a lethal injection.
It soon becomes clear that Tom will not pass the test, and this is the subject of an ensuing conversation between Tom and his wife Terry. This is an ambivalent exchange as there are domestic tensions in the household including, among other matters, the fact that Terry doesn’t want Tom with them for another five years (there is reference here to a letter couples can submit to have their elderly relatives removed).
Les gets up the next morning and sees his father away. When the father returns that night he goes straight to his room and, when Les later quizzes his father, Les learns (spoiler) that he did not attend but instead went to the pharmacist to purchase suicide pills. The story ends with the implication that Tom has taken his own life.
This is competently executed, but it is hard to take the central premise seriously.
If the amount of time that people spend on their mobile devices concerns you, Dead-Eye Daniel by Larry Siegel may be of interest, as it shows similar 1950’s anxieties about television:

TV, in case you didn’t know it, first came out in the mid ’40’s. You probably won’t believe it, but before television was around, people used to visit places called libraries (they were nothing but big halls that held books), parks (large sections set aside so that people could—of all things—sit on the grass, lie under trees, and row on lakes), and other nonsense like that.
Other folks (and so help me, this is true!) used to spend hours visiting friends and relatives—and get this—doing absolutely nothing but talk!
Of course, after TV really set in, things became normal. By 1957, husbands were paying little attention to wives, mothers were ignoring kids, and kids rarely left their living rooms—except in emergencies, like fires and stuff. You know, the way it is now. We take care of our basic needs, and spend all the rest of the time watching TV or talking about it.  p. 26-27

This story proceeds to give an account of a competitive (non-stop) TV viewing contest, which starts when two men encounter “Dead-Eye Daniel,” who watches TV in an apparently catatonic state. Seeing their chance to make some money they set up a match against the Russians (this takes place in the Cold War 1950s after all), who field a UN envoy who has a habit of walking out during votes on the accession of “Grubonia” to the UN. This latter fact (spoiler) is used to trick the Russian into walking out of the contest and losing. A weak ending to an unlikely and overlong story.
The Grom by Arthur Porges is told from the point of view of a cat called Tamberlane, who follows a grom (an invisible, malevolent spirit) around town while it causes trouble for humans. The Grom’s trouble-making peaks when it almost manages to incite a mob to hang a man (the police intervene).
The ending (where the grom meets a black hobo coming off a train) concludes with the line (spoiler): “He knew that the grom would not be frustrated again.”
The first time I read this story the point entirely escaped me. Part of this was undoubtedly me, but I think that the ending, and its implication that the grom will incite a lynch-mob, could have a sharper focus.
It is interesting to see this grim subject appear in the magazine (I can’t remember reading another fantasy or science fiction story from this period about these dreadful events).4
Lease on Life by Lee Grimes is a time travel story where two doctoral students and their professor develop a time machine. Baxter, one of the students and also the narrator, prepares to go forward in time, while the other, Casselton, controls the equipment. Professor Durward acts as Baxter’s temporal “anchor”:

[Casselton] checked the helmet [Doc] Durward would wear. One mind had to be both lever and anchor, and that was Doc’s function. Next Casselton checked the cables from the helmet to the power pack and to the cage. The latter was a skeleton of vertical tubes, spaced two feet apart around a circular base, and supporting the activating mechanism. The whole device was just tall enough for a man to stand inside. Finally he checked the cutoff timer. Since the mental effort to send me into the future would throw Doc into a trance, the timer was set to cut off power at the proper moment. Doc and I would be linked by an elastic, immaterial bond that would snap me back to “base time” when the field collapsed.
“It’s set for one hundred years ahead,” Casselton said. “Five minutes to get there, ten minutes to make observations, and five minutes to get back.” He gave me a speculative look, much as if I were some lower organism about to be plunged into a test tube.
“I’m ready,” I answered.  p. 43-44

The narrator, Baxter, finds himself in the near future, not a hundred years ahead as they planned, and on his return they deduce that the period a traveller can visit is limited to the lifetime of the anchor (the professor says, “My heart, I suppose.”) Casselton switches places with the professor and acts as the anchor for the next trip: Baxter goes forward a hundred years—only to find himself arrested by a totalitarian theocracy. This turns out to be ruled by Casselton, who, once he discovered he was going to live for a further hundred years, took many risks to become world dictator.
This clever piece is written in the form of a long letter to the future resistance.

Transformer by Chad Oliver is a fantasy about a toy town in a model railroad setup, and the residents’ trials at the hand of the thirteen year old owner:

The only rest room in town is in the gas station, and that’s all the place is used for. It’s ridiculous. They only know how to serve one dish at the diner, because that’s all that was on the counter. Bacon and fried eggs and coffee. You think about it, Clyde. Two meals a day every day for seven years. That’s a lot of bacon and eggs. You lose your taste for them after awhile.
The train runs right by the side of the hotel, only two inches away. It rattles the whole thing until it’s ready to fall apart, and every time it goes by it pours black smoke in through the upstairs window. There’s a tenant up there, name of Martin. He looks like he’s made out of soot.
The whole town is knee-deep in dust. Did you ever see a kid clean anything that belongs to him? And there’s no water, either. That cellophane in the Ohio River may look good from where you stand, but it’s about as wet as the gold in Fort Knox. Not only that, but it crinkles all the time where it flows under the bridges. It’s enough to drive you bats.  p. 75

Eventually the occupants of the toy town tamper with the transformer to try and electrocute the kid, but (spoiler) they fail, and then the kid sells off all the parts of the train set to various buyers. The narrator finds herself out of the frying pan and in the fire.
This is an entertaining piece for the most part, but the first page is confusing and unnecessary, and the story peters out a bit at the end.

A Matter of Ethics by Clifton Dance gets off to a cracking start when Colby, a junior doctor, has to treat a cardiac surgeon called Mendez for a heart attack after their spaceship comes out of “transition”. The initial paragraphs crackle with energy and information:

It was certainly a coronary. Mendez wasn’t too old, but he was in a position of wealth and authority. He no longer needed to worry about pleasing other people so he’d let his body go. A common enough situation with specialists; no inherent sense of artistry except in connection with one thing. They could be perfectionists in fire sculpture, hypothalamic surgery, or Venusian phonetics, but they didn’t carryover their perfectionism to the care of their bodies and this was what happened. The coronary vessels of the heart wall had lost their resiliency—perhaps foolish or capricious eating habits had thickened the vessel walls—and now, a sudden stress, the cushioned acceleration of the space drive, and a slight alarm reaction, the coronary vessels constrict stopping the flow of blood to the heart wall, pain in the heart, more alarm, more constriction, more pain. A vicious circle, and if it lasts over a minute, clots start forming ill the vessels, and cells in the heart wall begin to die from lack of blood. If the lack is long enough a large area of the heart wall will die. If it is large enough, nothing can save the victim except immediate intervention by a skilled mural cardiosurgeon, like Mendez.
Colby sighed. Yes, like Mendez. Not like Colby. He’d only had five years residency in surgery, then five years in cardiology, then three years in mural cardiosurgery. Thirteen years in labs, autopsy rooms, surgical amphitheaters.
Thirteen years of emergency call, interrupted sleep, hasty meals, and class four subsistence level pay. Thirteen years and then he’d taken his examination for the Intergalactic Board of Mural Cardiosurgery.
And what had Mendez said? Mendez, the president of that august body!
“It would be criminal for you to operate on humans at this stage in your development.” Criminal! And what had the Board recommended? Five more years of special supervised training under a Board man!
Five more years of crap from Harkaway!  p. 83

After Mendez is stabilised, and Colby has spoken with the ship’s doctor about the possibility of operating (illegal for Colby as, per above, he is not qualified/Board approved), Colby brings Mendez round. There is an extended conversation between the two men as Mendez tries to convince Colby to operate; Colby says that if Mendez wants him to operate he needs to put Colby on the board, otherwise Colby will suffer severe legal and professional penalties. Mendez says he can’t do that without fellow board members. Eventually (spoiler), when Mendez realises that without an operation he will die during the next transition, he tells Colby that the Board is a closed shop, set up to ensure that the only successful operations are ones conducted by Board members using a special healing scalpel that makes the operation a routine one.
Colby agrees to operate on Mendez but then, during the anaesthesia stage, gives him a massive overdose of ephedrine and kills him. Once Colby arrives at his destination he demands an examination from the Board, during which he not only gets his own back on Hathaway, his supervisor, but blackmails the Board over the secret of the scalpel.
Colby later becomes famous for “discovering” the scalpel, and breaks the Board’s stranglehold on cardiac surgery.
This is an interesting look at the restrictive practices of the (pseudonymous) writer’s profession, and its jaundiced view is one of its strengths, as is its generally engrossing and energetic narrative. The story’s weaknesses are its baggy and not entirely convincing middle section, and the omniscient viewpoint ending (another one). Overall though, it’s a pretty good piece, and it is a shame that this obviously talented writer didn’t contribute any further tales to the field.5

I hadn’t read Sacrifice Hit by Edmond Hamilton before I started writing this review otherwise I may have opened this post with comments about “three stories that focus on interpersonal relationships” rather than “two [which] focus on the domestic circumstances of the characters”.
In Hamilton’s story events focus on three characters: General Weiler, the commander in charge of a UN Interplanetary Service Base in Colorado which controls a number of exploration colonies scattered throughout the solar system; Secretary Ebbutt, the politician in charge, and the one responsible for funding; and Colonel Alsop, the commander of the Europan expedition, and a man who Weiler regards as a potentially reckless, “fame-happy” character (Alsop never appears onstage although he is frequently referred to, and is heard from in a number of time-lagged radio communications).
The story itself starts with a message coming into the base that an expedition on Europa has suffered quake damage to their domes and rocket, with one fatality so far. General Weiler thinks that he will need to send rescue rockets from Ganymede, but in a phonecall Ebbutt asks him to wait for further information so as not to jeopardise upcoming appropriations. While General Weiler waits for Ebbutt to fly in, he reflects on what the expedition might be going through:

Weiler sat in his office and thought about 32 men in prison.
They had been in prison for a long time, those men. First, in the iron guts of a rocket, lying in their bunks, telling dirty stories, eating, getting sick, smearing salve on their radiation-itch, sleeping, and waking, and sleeping again. Then strapping in, and praying, and getting bumped, and yelling to each other that they’d made it.
Made it to where? To another prison, a whole little chain of them. Four interconnected metal domes that you helped put up, and that were going to be your world from then on. The same blank metal walls, the same air that always smelled of hot metal and machine oil, the same food and faces, and always the grabbing drag of your weight-shoes that were supposed to make you feel your normal weight but never did.
You went out, to help run the parties testing for uranium, and that was when you were in the worst prison of all. Your suit was your prison then, pressing you close on every side, hanging wrong on you and trying to topple you over, smothering your every movement, never feeding oxygen quite right, making you want hysterically to move the way you used to move.
You saw everything wrong and distorted through your face-plate, and through the cold and bitter fumes that swathed it all. It always looked like a bad copy of a Bonestell painting, the rocks and ridges uncertain because your perspective and horizons were all wrong, the sky all wrong too with nothing in it but that enormous white mass that was supposed to be a planet but only looked like a vague, big brightness. You hated it, you hated all your prisons, but when they began to open up, when the ground heaved and the domes began to split and the cold poisonous murk of atmosphere began to seep in, you were scared, you wanted them back . . . .  p. 105

The situation deteriorates when Ebbutt arrives at the UN base, and he and Weiler hear Alsop’s optimistic but unrealistic report about the damage. Weiler and Ebbutt argue about what to do, and Weiler’s job is threatened.
Ebbutt sleeps for a couple of hours (he had a boozy night with two Senators the night before), and when he wakes he visits the control room to find that (spoiler) there is a new message from the deputy commander of the Europa colony stating that the quakes have got worse and there is more dome damage. Ebbutt also learns that Weiler has ordered the launch of the rockets from Ganymede.
The two men argue some more, and Ebbutt says he will sack Weiler and replace him with his compliant deputy. Weiler, who suspected that this may be the Secretary’s play, tells him he has already summoned the press. Then they are interrupted by a message about another quake:

“General, an Urgent-and-Immediate from Fifteen! General—”
Weiler moved fast. By the time he reached the door, Vaughn had switched over and it was Gresznik’s voice coming out of a roar of static. The Pole sounded excited, and scared.
“—sixty six-oh-one plus, causing ridge-slips northwest of us. Dome One split wide open, personnel evacuated into Three but two men caught under collapsing rocket-cranes. Afraid this is it. I am afraid this—”
Weiler heard the voice break off as they ran down the corridor and there was only the roar of static as they entered the Communications Room. Vaughn, pale and scared, turned from the panel briefly. He said, “I’m still getting their wave but Colonel Gresznik just stopped talking,”
“If their wave is coming in, they must still be all right,” Ebbutt said.
But Weiler, his first startled excitement all washed out of him, went over to the wall and sat down heavily in the chair there.
“Hell, they’ve had it,” he said harshly. “Three was their last dome.”
“But if we’re still getting their wave, they must—”
Weiler wouldn’t listen. He was through arguing. He felt that he was through with a lot of things.
He thought, “I was too late, [. . .] I was too late [. . .]. I should have sent that order twelve hours ago and told Ebbutt to go to hell”
Suddenly Vaughn exclaimed, “Fifteen! Listen—”
He switched over as he spoke. Out of the loudspeaker came not only the dull surge and roar of space static but other, irregular sounds—sounds like cannonadings and crackings and distant voices.
Then from the loudspeaker a hoarse voice that rose almost to a shout.
“Alsop speaking! I tried to stick it out but we’re done for, dome collapsing under ridge-slip, no use—” The roar drowned him for a moment as they listened, no one moving at all, then Alsop’s hoarse shout again. “—tell them I did my best! I—”
There was nothing more. There was nothing at all, except the static, nothing until Vaughn said tightly, “Their wave’s gone.”
“They’re all gone,” said Ebbutt.  p. 115-116

The story ends with Ebbutt giving a press conference where he plays Alsop’s message to make sure he gets his appropriation through.
This is a pretty good story (quite different, I suspect, from the sort of pulp that Hamilton produced for most of his career), and I enjoyed the wrangling between Weiler, whose prime concern was the welfare and safety of his men, and Ebbutt, who is more interested in the survival of the program.
This story could have easily have appeared in Astounding (if Hamilton hadn’t got fed up with Campbell’s rewrite requests6 earlier in his career).

There used to be an advertisement that you would see in the comic books of my youth which advertised “X-ray Specs”.7 I always wondered who would buy these glasses (unlikely to work, and illegal if they had) but this device has provided de Camp and Pratt with the gimmick for The Weissenbroch Spectacles, another episode in their ‘Gavagan’s Bar’ series. This opens, after some obligatory bar and character scene setting with the sale of a painting to a visitor called Bache, who buys it after viewing it through his glasses:

The painting was one of a wood nymph of extreme, not to say flagrant, nudity. She sat on her curled-up right leg, which in turn rested upon a tree stump. Her left leg was thrust out to the side and rear. Her body was upright, with her head tipped back and her hands clasped behind her neck beneath a coiffure of approximately 1880. She was gazing at a painted sunbeam with a smile of ineffable idiocy, and a pair of gauzy wings, though absurdly small by aerodynamic standards, testified to her supernatural origin. They failed to balance a pair of mammae of transcendental size and salience.  p. 127

Bache then buys a round and tells the tale of how his glasses were made from rock quartz owned by the kobolds, and how he can see through things when he uses them. The story wanders on (spoiler) to an ending as vaguely puerile as the quote above: a pair of women Bache is due to meet enter the bar (one of them film star gorgeous) but he goes off with someone else who is less attractive. This sets up the punch line “I wonder what he sees in her.” Okay, I suppose, but Boucher should have ended the issue with the stronger Hamilton story.

The Cover for this issue is by Chesley Bonestell, and is described on the contents page as, “Planet lit by Antares and companion star.”
There isn’t really any Interior artwork in the F&SF of this period (or most of them) but there is a solitary spot illustration by Emsh on p. 118, opposite the de Camp and Pratt story, which itself has a hand lettered title (see above). I’ve decided to start including the odd title page because some of the introductions provide useful information or context.
Coming Next trails a number of interesting sounding writers for the next issue: Robert Abernathy (whose name I recognise but who I know little about), Saki (ditto), Philip Jose Farmer, William Morrison (just after Country Doctor), and Philip K. Dick.
Recommended Reading by Anthony Boucher starts with mention of the 1954 International Fantasy Awards:

It seemed rash to single one novel out of so rich a year as 1953—a much brighter period than 1954 has been so far; but apparently the experts are in full agreement with us, for More Than Human has just received the International Fantasy Award, bestowed by a panel of thirteen distinguished judges from the United States, England and France. And now, having been quite unable to get this beautifully written and sensitively conceived story of human symbiosis out of my mind for almost a year, I’ll be even more rash and say that this is the finest novel yet to receive the IFA.
The runners-up are very nearly as impressive in quality of writing and thinking. Second place went to Alfred Bester’s pyrotechnic ESP-detective story, The Demolished Man (Shasta, $3; Signet, 25¢), and third to the
bitter satire on an advertising-agency future, The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (Ballantine, hardcover $1,50, paper 35¢). Both of these novels were serialized in Galaxy, and a large portion of the Sturgeon novel first appeared as the Galaxy novella, Baby is Three. My warm congratulations, not unmixed with envy, to Galaxy editor Horace Gold for publishing such notable stories.
Note of consolation: F&SF’s Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore (Farrar, Straus & Young, $2; Ballantine, 35¢) very nearly ran in the money, and wound up in an unofficial fourth place, which is reasonably gratifying for the only F&SF-originated book eligible in the contest.  p. 96

After this, Boucher looks at a few spaceflight books, a few that he likes, and a few that he doesn’t:

Martin Caidin’s Worlds in Space (Holt, $4.95) is the most expensive and least necessary of this current crop; its material is readily available elsewhere more clearly organized and written in sentences more nearly resembling English prose. Spaceflight is one of the countless subjects treated in Alfred Gordon Bennett’s Focus on the Unknown (Library Publishers, $3.95), an inordinately ambitious book which tries to embrace almost every scientific or parascientific theme which might come under the fantasy-fact heading. The writing is characterized by prosaic stuffiness, a powerful will to believe, and a careless disregard for the nature of evidence.  p. 98

He then reviews some reprints before coming to a new novel:

Most rewarding of 1954’s new novels this month is Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (Gold Medal, 25¢), an extraordinary book which manages to do for vampirism what Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think did for lycanthropy: investigate an ancient legend in terms of modern knowledge of psychology and physiology, and turn to be stuff of supernatural terror into strict (and still terrifying!) science fiction. Matheson has added a new variant on the Last Man theme, too, in this tale of the last normal human survivor in a world of bloodsucking nightmares, and has given striking vigor to his invention by a forceful style of storytelling which derives from the best hard-boiled crime novels. As a hard-hitting thriller or as fresh imaginative speculation, this-is a book you can’t miss.  p. 99

I read the Matheson a year or so ago and thought it pretty good, and wondered why it hadn’t been a serial in F&SF (probably because the magazine hadn’t started using them at that time).

In conclusion, a worthwhile issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Founding co-editor J. Francis McComas took a back seat in 1952, and finally resigned in September 1954.

2. There was a discussion in the Great SF Stories group about Merril’s Dead Center and So Proudly We Hail, and whether they were stories that should have made the ‘Year’s Best’ collections. (Actually, Dead Center did make a year’s best—it is in The Best American Short Stories 1955. There is a letter from Andy Duncan in Locus about the handful of SF magazine stories that have made it into that anthology series and the O. Henry one.)

3. Dead Center can perhaps be described as an anti-Astounding story. In that magazine, they would have more likely Solved the Problem and rescued the astronaut (if it was possible to do so within the physical constraints of the Universe that is—see The Cold Equations). In any event, I don’t think that Campbell would have gone for an ending where (like the recently reviewed So Proudly We Hail in Star Science Fiction Stories) a major plot point depends upon inadequate spaceport security (one suspects that the security company in both these stories will not be invited to retender).

4. Wikipedia has a page on Lynching. Note that the year after this story appeared, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was kidnapped, beaten, mutilated, and murdered for allegedly having wolf-whistled at, or flirted with, a white woman in Mississippi.

5. Dance’s first published story was The Brothers (reviewed here), a promising piece which appeared in the June 1952 issue. This also indicated a bright future.

6. Hamilton has this specific comment in an interview on Tangent:

I never sent [Campbell] a story after 1938 because I had to revise that one. First, to suit John’s idea, and then to suit John’s wife’s idea. That was a little hard to do, so I never sent John any more stories.

7. The Wikipedia page for X-ray Specs, believe it or not.  ●

F&SF is still published: F&SF subs/Amazon UKUSA/Weightless Books

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2 thoughts on “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #42, November 1954

  1. Rich Horton

    Well, Campbell DID accept a story in which a major plot point turns on (unforegrounded) terrible security … one of Astounding’s most famous stories, “The Cold Equations”.

    A story which turns on lynching-like events from a couple of years later is “All the Colors of the Rainbow” by Leigh Brackett, from F&SF’s companion magazine, Venture.

    Reply

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