Summary:
This is a lacklustre issue whose only highlight is the first part of E. Mayne Hull & A. E. van Vogt’s serial, The Winged Man, an entertaining adventure that features a US military submarine and crew transported one million years into the future!
Noteworthy is the first of Clifford Simak’s ‘City’ series, City and the debut of A. Bertram Chandler. There is also a second ‘Plutonian Ring’ story by George O. Smith, Latent Image, and stories by Frederic Brown and P. Schuyler Miller among others.
The science article by Campbell is about a discovery that wasn’t: Ehrenhaft’s magnetic monopoles. There is no Analytical Laboratory in this issue due to lack of room and of letters (Campbell states he will change the publication schedule of this department to allow time for more letters to arrive).
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding  p. 129-134

_____________________

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

Fiction:
“Latent Image” • novelette by George O. Smith [as by Wesley Long] ∗
“This Means War!” • short story by A. Bertram Chandler ∗∗
The Winged Man (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by E. Mayne Hull and A. E. van Vogt [as by E. Mayne Hull] ∗∗∗+
The Yehudi Principle • short story by Fredric Brown ∗∗
Cuckoo • novelette by P. Schuyler Miller ∗
House of Tomorrow • short story by Roby Wentz ∗∗+
City • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗
Environment • short story by Chester S. Geier ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x12), A. Williams (x13), Alfred (x2)
Sandwich for Nazis • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
Power • science essay
Beachhead for Science • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

“Latent Image” by George O. Smith is a sequel to March’s Circle of Confusion, and starts with McBride on Mars getting the news that his pregnant wife Enid (who is back home on the Plutonian Lens) has had a fall. Unfortunately for McBride the regular ship has just left and the next one isn’t due in for five days. After making enquiries he finds there is an experimental ship, Haywire Queen, that will take him to the Lens if he helps them finish their repairs. This leads to vast quantities of explainium:

But look, Hammond, have you tried the magnetogravitic spectrum yet?”
“No. That was our next program.”
“I’d have tried that first,” mused McBride. “Knowing that the drive depends upon the action of a cupraluin bar under high magnetic density plus an electrogravitic warp, I should think that the close relationship between the magnetic and electronic phenomena would lead you to try the mag-grav first.”
“I didn’t want to start at the top,” said Hammond dryly. “In spite of the fact that Dr. Ellson claimed to have discovered a region in the mag-grav spectrum that produced a faint success.”
“Well, what I’m thinking is that we can rip up the E-grav generator and use the field coil for the alphatron. It’ll carry electrons as well as it carries alphons, you know.”
“Better,” said Hammond. “But what do we use for an E-grav?”
“First we’ll hunt up through the spectrum of the magnetogravitic spectrum. If that doesn’t work, we can add the warp produced by your mech-grav, run from the lifeship’s little alphatron. Right?”
“It’s an idea. Seems to me that I’ve heard somewhere that the combined warps of magneto- and mechanogravitic produces some vectors in the electrogravitic spectrum.”  p. 11

It never fails to amaze me how Campbell lets Smith gets away with pages and pages of this unreadable drivel in his stories.
Anyway, the rest of the tale sees McBride meet the crew, and they figure out a plan to repair the ship. Then McBride learns that Hammond, the captain, has hired a pilot called Sandra Drake—the reckless, headstrong, and gobby young woman who crashed through the lens in the first story. When she arrives there is much shouty arguing with the equally gobby McBride before she eventually agrees to fly the ship to get her licence back.

The trip itself is beset with unexplained acceleration changes caused by the repaired drive—this increases up to seven gee before returning to normal and repeating the cycle again. After more explanium they fix the problem and, after a modification suggested by Drake, find themselves travelling at trans-light speeds.
Drake arrives at the Lens station to save the day (the mere sight of him is enough to pull his wife through her pregnancy crisis), and the story ends with him arguing with Drake about who should pilot the ship to Earth (“I’m not going to let any idiot male handle the Haywire Queen, and don’t you forget it!”)
Not so much a story as a collection of bad habits.

“This Means War!” by A. Bertram Chandler is the debut of a long term contributor to the SF magazines, and tells of an amphibious alien submariner’s visit to the oceans of Earth with his fleet. This largely consists of his account of the hostilities unleashed on them by WWII surface fleets, submarines, and aircraft. The story ends with the alien council which is receiving his report (spoiler) declaring war on Earth.
This is a readable enough, if rather too straightforward story, and shows some promise for the future.

The best thing in this decidedly middling issue is the first part of The Winged Man by E. Mayne Hull and A. E. van Vogt. This opens on the a US submarine on its way to the battle with Japan, with the first officer, Kenlon, on duty in the coning tower. He sees a large bird in the night sky, and phones the third officer, Tedder, to quiz him about it. After the call Kenlon sees this:

A shadow darkened the face of the moon. Kenlon, on the verge of turning away, glanced up again. Then he gasped. And caught the railing and glared like a madman.
Plainly silhouetted against the moon was the figure of a tall man with wings. The wings were only partly spread; and they were not moving. He seemed to be poised there like a creature out of a nightmare, black as only a shadowed outline could be. Intently he stared down towards Kenlon.
For a long instant, that was the picture, like a “still” taken at night. And then, the legs drew up, the body lost its manlike resemblance. A great bird swooped out of the path of the moon into the covering darkness.  p. 39

Events develop quickly in the next part of the story: Tedder comes up to see Kenlon and, as they are speaking, the Quartermaster arrives and points to a winged man on the deck. The creature attaches what looks like a metal plate to the hull, and the men rush down in an effort to capture him but, after a brief struggle, he escapes into the sky.
At this point the sub’s commander, Jones-Gordon, gets involved, and he and Kenlon discuss the “bomb” attached to the deck and how to get rid of it. On closer examination the metal disc appears to be an electronic device but, no matter what the crew try, it remains attached to the boat. Then the winged man lands again, and attaches a device at the opposite end; this time they capture him (or, as we later find out, he allows himself to be captured).
During the interrogation of the winged man Kenlon discovers that he speaks no known language, but draws a picture of the submarine with its hatches battened down. After some more back and forth Kenlon realises that the sub may be in danger, and rushes up to the deck crew, ordering the hatches shut behind him. There is a bright light, and he finds himself underwater for a time, before surfacing in a roiling sea alongside three of the four other men. The submarine appears shortly afterwards and takes them on board.

The second part of this instalment involves further interrogation of the prisoner, who communicates to them that the submarine is now a million years in the future. There are also drawings of a city floating in the air above the sea, whose winged occupants are fighting something underneath. At this point the lookout sights land, and a boat is sent to investigate. This reveals, when the team lose a man, that the mud near the shore is like quicksand, and that the ground is the same.
A month later, by which time they have taught the birdman—who is called Nemmo—to speak English, they learn this quicksand effect is due to a strange rain that came from space. This robbed solid material of its ability to stick together (and also raised the sea-level, which is why the submarine and deck crew arrived here underwater).
The rest of the Q&A session has Nemmo explain that the groundmen (who are now dead) made the birdmen and the fishmen to ensure the survival of humanity, but that these two races are now at war. Nemmo states that if the submarine destroys the fishmen’s metal underwater city for the birdmen, they can return to their own time.

The installment finishes with the submarine arriving at the birdmen’s eyrie. As they arrive the fishmen come out of the sea and take Jones-Gordon overboard.
If this all seems like a typical fast-paced van Vogtian adventure, it is, but it is much more than that too. For one thing the plotting is more considered and less wild than in some of van Vogt’s stories, and it is also more smoothly written (van Vogt’s prose is sometimes notably crude and ungainly). There is also an atypical amount of character observation: throughout the piece Kenlon frequently assesses his commander Jones-Gordon to see how he is coping with the strange events they are experiencing and, in the early part of the story, worries that he does not appreciate the implications of the winged man’s existence. However, Jones-Gordon frequently transcends Kenlon’s expectations, perhaps most notably in this later passage:

Jones-Gordon stood staring out to sea, his heavy face almost expressionless. Kenlon recognized the fatalistic look that finally came into the lieutenant commander’s eyes. The officer said in a curiously quiet voice:
“If our situation is as this creature described, then we are, so far as the United States Navy is concerned, an expended unit. By that statement you will see that I take no stock in their promise to return us to 1944 when we have accomplished this ridiculous purpose of theirs. I think we are justified in assuming that we are lost men, and are, therefore, free of all constraint and all the petty alarms of men who still retain hope.”
He stopped; and Kenlon sighed inwardly. Like all human beings, Jones-Gordon could not be docketted into one pigeonhole. Practical he might be, but in this mood his character changed almost literally. Somehow, long ago, the lieutenant commander had resigned himself to death. It had made him utterly fearless, cool and unexcitable in battle, the perfect commander. It was theoretically possible that all the men who went down to the sea in submarines should similarly surrender themselves to a destiny with death. But they hadn’t. Kenlon hadn’t. In battle, his nerves tensed to violin-string tautness; his mind was as cold as the metal plates of the sub in which he served; his calmness the artificial calm of the trained man who has a job to do, and does it.
But he feared death. Sometimes at night he would wake up sweating from a dream in which they had been sunk, and the water was pouring in with a hellishly final violence.  p. 65

There is convincing evidence to suggest that “E. Mayne Hull” was little more than a pseudonym for A. E. van Vogt² but, reading the passage above, I wonder. The far-future plot and elements certainly seem to be typical of van Vogt, but the writing above? Did E. Mayne Hull (van Vogt’s wife) perhaps write the story based on her husband’s outline?

The Yehudi Principle by Fredric Brown starts with Charlie Swann demonstrating a newly invented device to the narrator:

“Does what?” I wanted to know.
The dingbat, I might interrupt myself to explain, was a headband.
It fitted neatly around Charlie’s noggin and there was a round black box not much bigger than a pillbox over his forehead. Also there was a round flat copper disk on each side of the band that fitted over each of Charlie’s temples, and a strand of wire that ran down behind his ear into the breast pocket of his coat, where there was a little drycell battery.
It didn’t look like it would do anything, except maybe either cure a headache or make it worse. But from the excited look on Charlie’s face, I didn’t think it was anything so commonplace as that.
“Does what?” I wanted to know.
“Whatever you want,” said Charlie. “Within reason, of course. Not like moving a building or bringing you a locomotive. But any little thing you want done, he does it.”
“Who does?”
“Yehudi.”  p. 69

After “Yehudi” does various simple tasks for the pair—drinks arrive, and are mixed—Charlie explains that there really isn’t a Yehudi completing these tasks but that the device is an “automatonic autosuggestive sub-vibratory superaccelerator”, a device which allows the wearer to do the task incredibly quickly but not remember doing it (and this is why the wearer “blurs” for a second or too when using the device).
The narrator then uses the device write a story in less than a second.
This goes on for a while until a final scene where (spoiler) one of the two says “shoot yourself”. This is followed by a bang, and the device ceasing to function. There is then the realisation that Yehudi may have been doing the tasks, and that they have just killed him. The pair then notice the recently written story describes all these events, including the ones that happened after it was created . . . .
This is metaphysically entertaining stuff, but you cannot escape the fact that the author continually moves the goalposts (Yehudi to “accelerator” to Yehudi), and then tacks an ending that has little to do with the rest of the piece.³

Cuckoo by P. Schuyler Miller is initially told from the viewpoint of Commander Jeff Norcross of the Triplanetary Space Patrol, the unwilling officer in charge of the Morgan Wildlife Preserve on Venus. The story gets going (as much as it ever does) when he and his assistant Hall host two professors at a dinner party:

Professor W. Ouderkirk Simms led the procession. He would have come to Hall’s shoulder if he had cared to stand on tiptoe to try it.
The top of his head had been planted with a stiff white herbage of about the length and distribution of the green variety which one occasionally saw growing from the skulls of plaster Hibernians in florists’ windows back on Earth. His face was pink, pear-shaped, and full of little wrinkles, and his eyes were bright and beady. He had a nose as long and as sharp as Norcross’ own hawkish beak, and a series of punctured chins draped one behind the other in descending sequence above a neat bow tie. He was wearing the formal professorial garb of the previous century—stiff shirt front, high collar, and flapping tails. He had a row of medals pinned unevenly over the breast pocket of his rather rusty coat.
Behind the little professor loomed a female whom Norcross took to be C. Virginia Banning—and his eyes glittered with wicked satisfaction as he sized her up. She had long red hair, cut raggedly to shoulder length, apparently with a kitchen knife on a bread board. It streamed out in all directions as though each separate filament were highly charged and repelling every other one. Her face was her own, and she was balancing pince-nez precariously on a nose which did nothing whatever to supply them with an adequate foundation. She was broad of shoulder, long of leg, and massive of contour, and she had dressed to display her squareness and massiveness to the greatest if not the best advantage.  p. 81

This passage illustrates the story’s semi-farcical tone and general bagginess. The rest of the story, largely told from second-in-command Hall’s point of view, involves: a “whippersnapper” nest with a “cuckoo’s” egg in it; Hall shooting down a drone above the reservation and discovering an embedded Geiger counter; the cuckoo hatching from its shell, and the latter found to be made of pure U235; and (spoiler) both professors’ involvement in the discovery of a uranium lode in a new part of the reserve.
Or something like that—I rather lost interest in this unlikely and padded tale half-way through. It is hard to believe that this one came from the author of the fast-paced and lean The Cave (Astounding, January 1943).

House of Tomorrow by Roby Wentz is set in WWII Munich, where a schoolboy tells his master of the strange device that he has found in the vaults below. Eventually, the schoolmaster narrator goes down to see it:

At first I saw nothing where he pointed in the gloom. Then, moving in the direction, I caught my first sight of it. I made out the lines of the hull first, then forgot them for the moment as the candlegleams touched the surfaces and flamed back in mirrored beauty from the brilliant surfaces of the most exquisitely fashioned sculpture or artifact of an inanimate object I have ever seen.
It was a ship, or rather boat, yet modeled with the antique lines of an ancient galley, about the length and size of a modern canoe. What it was made from, I cannot tell: a lifetime as a teacher of physical science gives me no clue to the metal—if it was metal—of the object, it was silvery-smooth, more polished than the aluminum of an airplane wing, yet with an indescribable quality of depth—as though one were gazing into water of incredible clarity.  p. 121

There are more visits. During one of these the boy climbs in, grabs the controls, and promptly vanishes. Later, as the master searches for him, the ship reappears, piloted by a man who turns out to be a time-traveller from centuries earlier. He reveals himself as a member of a strange guild (the forerunners of Bacon and Galileo) that invented the time boat and other advanced devices. The man later says he is searching for three men from his guild who stole the boat to get to this time period: their descriptions match those of Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels. The narrator then agrees to lure them to the vault (by sending a letter with details of the machine, etc., to Berlin) in exchange for the safe return of the child.

The first part of this is a well written and atmospheric piece (I suspected a mainstream writer slumming⁴) but the second half is a more routine and melodramatic potboiler. Entertaining piece, though, although it would be better without the framing device of a future archaeologist finding and reading the narrator’s account.

One of the highlights of Astounding in 1944 and 1945 was Clifford Simak’s ‘City’ series, which begins with the novelette City in this issue. The beginning of this story will, to those of us who have robot vacuum cleaners and the like, feel very contemporary:

Gramp Stevens sat in a lawn chair, watching the mower at work, feeling the warm, soft sunshine seep into his bones. The mower reached the edge of the lawn, clucked to itself like a contented hen, made a neat turn and trundled down another swath. The bag holding the clippings bulged.
Suddenly the mower stopped and clicked excitedly. A panel in its side snapped open and a cranelike arm reached out. Grasping steel fingers fished around in the grass, came up triumphantly with a stone clutched tightly, dropped the stone into a small container, disappeared back into the panel again. The lawn mower gurgled, purred on again, following its swath.
Gramp grumbled at it with suspicion.  p. 117

When Gramp’s friend Ole drives by in his car, he stops to talk. During this conversation we find that internal combustion cars are obsolescent, the roads unused, and towns and cities are largely abandoned. Gramps reflects further on these subjects when he later goes for a walk around the deserted neighbourhood:

The years had moved too fast. Years that had brought the family plane and helicopter, leaving the auto to rust in some forgotten place, the unused roads to fall into disrepair. Years that had virtually wiped out the tilling of the soil with the rise of hydroponics. Years that had brought cheap land with the disappearance of the farm as an economic unit, had sent city people scurrying out into the country where each man, for less than the price of a city lot, might own broad acres.
Years that had revolutionized the construction of homes to a point where families simply walked away from their old homes to the new ones that could be bought, custom-made, for less than half the price of a prewar structure and could be changed at small cost, to accommodate need of additional space or just a passing whim.
Gramp sniffed. Houses that could be changed each year, just like one would shift around the furniture. What kind of living was that?
He plodded slowly down the dusty path that was all that remained of what a few years before had been a busy residential street. A street of ghosts, Gramp told himself—of furtive, little ghosts that whispered in the night. Ghosts of playing children, ghosts of upset tricycles and canted coaster wagons. Ghosts of gossiping housewives. Ghosts of shouted greetings. Ghosts of flaming fireplaces and chimneys smoking of a winter night.
Little puffs of dust rose around his feet and whitened the cuffs of his trousers.
There was the old Adams place across the way. Adams had been mighty proud of it, he remembered. Gray field stone front and picture windows. Now the stone was green with creeping moss and the broken windows gaped with ghastly leer. Weeds choked the lawn and blotted out the stoop. An elm tree was pushing its branches against the gable.
Gramp could remember the day Adams had planted that elm tree.
For a moment he stood there in the grass-grown street, feet in the dust, both hands clutching the curve of his cane, eyes closed.
Through the fog of years he heard the cry of playing children, the barking of Conrad’s yapping pooch from down the street. And there was Adams, stripped to the waist, plying the shovel, scooping out the hole, with the elm tree, roots wrapped in burlap, lying on the lawn.
May, 1946. Forty-four years ago. Just after he and Adams had come home from the war together.  p. 141

At that point a young man arrives and starts talking to Gramps. He eventually identifies himself as Adam’s grandson, and he is there to visit the old house.

The next part of the story introduces Webster, who arrives at a city council meeting where there is an argument about burning empty houses to move squatters on and prevent crime. Webster quarrels with the other men, and loses his job, but he ends by giving a speech which says they should be glad the cities are dead, and people and industries dispersed, otherwise humanity would have perished in an atomic war.
After this long (largely talking heads) section, Webster goes to the Bureau for Human Adjustment, where Taylor, the man who interviews him, does more talking about recent changes, and finishes by offering Webster a job.
The rest of the tale (spoiler) concerns a stand-off between the police and Gramps and the squatters. This is resolved when Gramps and the grandson turn up at city hall to reveal that the grandson has bought all the houses that have unpaid taxes. He wants the city charter dissolved, and plans to turn the city into a museum to show people how their ancestors lived.
There are some good parts in this story, such as the material about a transition to a post-capitalist society, but there’s also a lot of speechifying and data-dumping, and the standoff at the end feels rather contrived. A middling start to a major series.

Environment by Chester S. Geier⁵ has a spaceship arrive at a deserted alien city looking for previous settlers who have subsequently gone missing. As the two crew, Gaynor and Harlan, fly around in their anti-grav packs, they see what look like crystalline birds:

As they flew, a small cloud of the aerial creatures flashed past. The things seemed to be intelligent, for, as though catching sight of the two men, they suddenly changed course, circling with a clearly evident display of excited curiosity. The crystalline chimings and tinklings which they emitted held an elfin note of astonishment.
If astonishment it actually was, Gaynor and Harlan were equally amazed at close view of the creatures. For they were great, faceted crystals whose interiors flamed with glorious color—exquisite rainbow shades that pulsed and changed with the throb of life. Like a carillon of crystal bells, their chimings and tinklings rang out—so infinitely sweet and clear and plaintive that it was both a pain and a pleasure to hear.  p. 164

The pair land, and see a fountain decorated with a bas-relief showing humanoid creatures. They later find crystals inside the city’s many apartments and, when they hold these, they have visions of ghostly furniture and machines, and get an inkling of something they can sense but cannot understand.

The rest of the story (spoiler) has them go through all the apartments in the city. During this process they turn into the aerial creatures they saw after landing:

“The Third Stage. The tasks will be very difficult, Wade—but interesting. We’ll be putting our knowledge into practice—actually creating. This means we’ll have to deal directly with the powers of the various soldani and varoo. As these are extradimensional, control will be solely by cholthening at the sixth level, through means of the taadron. We’ll have to be careful, though—any slightest relaxation of the sorran will have a garreling effect—”  p. 176

This piece is essentially a Mimsy Were The Borogoves redux, with an added last line that suggests the city is some sort of trap:

A perfect environment, the city. Ideal for the inquisitive humanoid.  p. 178

Well-enough, if predictably, done.

The Cover by William Timmins is a good effort I think—the bulbous red spaceship, the abstract sun image, and the Van Gogh swirl in the background work for me.
The Interior artwork is the usual mixed bag, but I liked the Paul Orban illustrations for the Hull (although the second one has what looks like a normal bloke with wings drawn on⁶) and the Wentz, and A. Williams quirky spot drawings for the Miller,⁷ as well as his work for the Simak. Alfred’s two contributions are uninspired and boring (but it’s a hard story to illustrate).
Sandwich for Nazis by John W. Campbell, Jr. is short essay about compound materials which ends by describing those used in the RAF’s “Nazi-killing Mosquito”:

In essence, the sandwich materials represent the compound material reduced to its simplest elements.
A layer of material A, a layer of B and a layer of A—or C. Common plywood is the # 1 representative of the class. The next most familiar example is shatterproof glass. In plywood, the “layer of A” is wood, and B becomes the binding adhesive. In shatterproof glass, it’s glass and a synthetic resin. But the sandwich really begins to come into its own with the type of sandwich represented in the famous Mosquito fighter-bomber. The sandwich is wood, with a glue binding the layers together; the trick is that the wooden sandwich is made up of a layer of very thin, fragile hardwood veneer, a comparatively thick slab of balsa—on the order of a quarter of an inch in thickness—and another thin, fragile peeling of hardwood veneer.
[. . .]
The sandwich is tough, strong, rigid, and extremely light—as perfect for the job as the Nazi-killing Mosquito is in its job.  p. 6

In Times to Come starts off bemoaning the lack of space and of letters for the Analytical Laboratory.⁸ It seems that Campbell has finally realised that he should allow a longer period between the publication of an issue and the published results. The rest of the column is a warmongery plug for Murray Leinster’s Trog:

Some while back I remarked editorially that attacking the United States with mechanised war was inherently an unhealthy idea. Like a man attacking a lion on a tooth-and-nail basis—the lion’s got more teeth and lots more nail. The mechanized weight of American power is really beginning to swing into action now, proving the argument. But—how could you attack America? Past experience indicates that the Nazis’ successors in control of Germany will probably try. German citizens seem to like monomaniac rulers—with a mania for world conquest.
Murray Leinster has a long novelette next month—“Trog”—that has an astute suggestion on that problem. He’s right, too—it’s one form of attack we might fall for—and before!  p. 28

Power is a short photo article about various kinds of motors and gearing.

Beachhead for Science by John W. Campbell, Jr. fleshes out last month’s editorial announcement about the purported discovery of magnetic monopoles by Dr Ehrenhaft. Campbell is an awful science writer and his explanations are as clear as mud:

Curiously, electrical engineers and physicists have, for years, calculated the properties of free magnetic poles—north pole charges, without south pole accompaniment—and of magnetic currents, flowing magnetism, as well as the properties of magnetic fields. It was long recognized as a mathematicophysical simplification to consider that free north poles did exist, and calculate the behavior of such poles under the conditions laid down in the problem. Electrical engineering data were so calculated—always with the accompanying denial of the reality of the free north pole.
Other engineering and physical problems were solved—meaning, naturally, that they got the answers that agreed with the facts!—by assuming the existence of a magnetic current, purely as a means of simplifying the mathematical processes of attacking the problem. And, of course, denying the reality of that current.  p. 104

Why give a clear example when you can waffle? Although I skimmed most of the rest of this, I got the impression that Campbell also has other bad habits for someone who wants to be a science writer: one is odd analogies (there is one about aliens trying to measure the heating effects of electrical current in remote vacuum, where most metallic materials are superconductors), and another is a tendency to leap into blue-sky speculation about what we may not know and what might be possible.

Perhaps another part of the article gives a clue as why (other than temperament) Campbell had this latter habit:

Resurveyal of atomic theory is nothing new; it has been done with great regularity about once every five years since 1890. Recently, they’ve discovered neutrons and positrons in the atom. Because their figures would not balance properly, they have been forced to postulate a neutrino, a changeless particle of electron mass.  p. 117

With basic science changing at such a rapid rate perhaps this kind of over-excited piece is inevitable. I’ll be interested to see to what extent this tendency is exacerbated by the events of August 1945.

Brass Tacks has a couple of letters about technical matters (space travel, and the machining processes in one of George O. Smith’s stories) and a long, interesting one from John Gergen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, that discusses Simak’s writing and the magazine’s artwork among other matters. It’s worth reading in its entirety (click on the image above).

The serial is the only highlight of what is a lacklustre issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Alva Rogers says that The Winged Man was “a moderately interesting story” but later adds:

Miss Hull always gave the impression of being a second-rate writer, and this short novel didn’t materially change that impression.  p. 130

Pah.
He has this to say of Simak’s ‘City’ series:

Clifford D. Simak, one of the best craftsmen in the science fiction field and one of the handful of old pros who had smoothly managed the transition from the thud and blunder of the thirties to Campbellian science fiction of the middle forties, began in May a series that would eventually bring him “The International Fantasy Award” when all the stories in the series were combined into a book. The story, of course, was “City,” which told, from the viewpoint of the Webster family, of the breakup of the urban complex and the return to a more pastoral existence brought about by automation, inexpensive and fast transportation, etc. This novelette was quickly followed by “Huddling Place,” a short in the July issue and “Census,” the cover story for September. “Huddling Place” examined the phenomenon of man, served by robots, surrounded by labor-saving devices and in instant face-to-face communication with any point in the world, being psychologically unable to face the prospect of leaving his home. “Census” was concerned with the need to determine the probable number of non-human mutants who could take over and keep the dreams of man alive when man eventually vanished from the Earth. The dogs, of course, were the ones who would fill the bill. A fine series that deserved every bit of acclaim it received.  p. 132

2. There is a post on the subject of “E. Mayne Hull” at Sevagram.

3. I would have put serious money on this story of Brown’s turning out to be a refugee from Unknown Worlds (Astounding’s companion magazine folded in late 1943, and several stories were transferred from its left-over inventory). However, it isn’t listed in Stefan Dziemianowicz’s The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (1991).

4. This was actually the fourth of four stories that Roby Wentz contributed to Astounding and Unknown. His ISFDB page.

5. Geier’s story is a potential addition to the list of stories in Astounding where the aliens win (the big myth is that Campbell always insisted on human supremacy). See the comments section in this Classics of Science Fiction blog post for a longer list of stories where this did not apply.
I note that this is the only story Geier sold to Campbell for Astounding, although he did sell him a couple for Unknown. Geier sold many other stories to his main markets, Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures: his page at ISFDB.

6. Orban’s “normal bloke with wings drawn on”:

 

7. Some of Williams’ other illustrations for Miller’s story:

8. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in September:

I’m surprised that (a) the Hull/van Vogt serial didn’t come top, and (b) the Smith did as well as it did.  ●