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_____________________

Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.

Fiction:
Voyage 13 • short story by Ray Cummings ∗
The Secret of the Canali • short story by Clifton B. Kruse ∗
Rule 18 • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗
Good Old Brig! • short story by Kent Casey ∗∗
The Men and the Mirror • novelette by Ross Rocklynne ∗∗
The Dangerous Dimension • short story by L. Ron Hubbard –
The Legion of Time (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Jack Williamson ∗∗∗∗
Hotel Cosmos • short story by Raymond Z. Gallun –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Howard V. Brown
Interior artwork • by Howard V. Brown (x2), Elliot Dold Jr. (x4), Charles Schneeman (x5), H. W. Wesso (x2), C. R. Thomson
Beyond That Limit—? • science essay
Language for Time Travelers • linguistics essay by L. Sprague de Camp
Contest • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Analytical Laboratory: May 1938
In Times to Come
Giant Stars • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Arthur McCann]
Relativity in Metallurgy • science essay
Science Discussions • letters
Brass Tacks • letters

_____________________

With this issue Astounding completed its transition to an on-sale date of the fourth Friday of the month.¹

The fiction opens with a melodrama, Voyage 13 by Ray Cummings. A young space officer, Jon Halory, is on a ship departing Venus when his colleague points out a good-looking young woman. Halory learns that she is the blind daughter of the recently deposed and murdered Venusian President. She and her brother are escaping to Earth.
Halory later makes her acquaintance and they spend time together: he quotes poetry to her under the star dome while she tells him about the bad feelings she has about some of the passengers. This last (spoiler) telegraphs the baddies murdering nearly everyone on board as they again try to kill the deposed President, who is actually still alive and hiding in her cabin. There are ray-gun fights, and Halory is eventually involved in a hand to hand combat outside the ship with the usurper Talone.
This is well enough told but is far too formulaic.

The Secret of the Canali by Clifton B. Kruse is another mediocre pulp tale, this time set on a Mars that has two cartographers going on a mapping mission. The main problem they have is that the canals are full of inimical vegetation and wildlife:

[They] were plenty dangerous; full of dens and sometimes alive with scaly, crawling, biting things. But they could be crossed. The leader would go ahead, dragging a rope behind him and holding a torch. The flames would sizzle some of the dry stuff and scare off the worst of the insects. When a big enough cavern down in the maze was located, the rest of camp would follow. Then the leader would strike out again, feeling his way down and around. Of course it was weird. The mass of metallike vegetation shut out every vestige of light, and there was always a queer, musty stench. Too, when you stood still and listened, the sounds of thousands of scurrying claws would make the stiff, wiry stuff rasp and whistle as though a wind were tearing through the gorge. There were often sudden drops, and every foot of the way had to be tested, lest a heavy mass suddenly give way, plunging the venturer into a dark well filled with greedy vermin.  p. 23

The narrator starts to sense that his boyish companion has a fear of these spaces but, when they eventually have to cross one of the canals, he manages without any problems.
Later they start to find signs of an ancient Martian civilisation (there are known remnants of a long dead race on the planet) and soon come to a huge wall in the depths of one of the canals.
The last section (spoiler) has them fall into a corridor that has a light at its end. There is then some discussion of an “eternal flame” and speculation that the Martians may still exist. The two men become separated, and there is a last scene where the narrator’s companion does some telepathic explaining before he disappears through the eternal flame to where the Martians have gone.

The quality improves with the next story (which heralds the return of Clifford Simak to the field¹), Rule 18. This opens with Earth losing an American football game with Mars for the sixty-seventh consecutive year. One chief sports writer, Hap Folsworth, opines why:

“They just don’t grow them big enough or strong enough on Earth anymore,” he declared. “We are living too damn easy. We’re getting soft. Each generation is just a bit softer than the last. There’s no more hard work to be done. Machines do things for us. Machines mine ores, raise crops, manufacture everything from rocket ships to safety pins. All we got to do is push levers and punch buttons. A hell of a lot of muscle you can develop punching a button.
“Where did they get the famous players of the past? Of a couple, three hundred years ago, or of a thousand years ago, if you like?” Hap blared. “I’ll tell you where they got them! They got them out of mines and lumber camps and off the farms—places where you had to have guts and brawn to make a living.
“But we got smart. We fixed it so nobody has to work anymore. There are husky Earth lads, lots of them—in Martian mining camps and in Venus lumber camps and out on the Ganymede engineering projects. But every damn one of them has got Martian or Venusian blood in his veins. And Rule Eighteen says you got to be lily-pure for ten generations. If you ask me, that’s a hell of a rule.”  p. 34

This passage has more than a whiff of Campbell about it, and one wonders if it was in the original draft.
The story goes on to introduce Alexis Andronovitch, a scientist who has just completed an unspecified project, before cutting to Rush Culver, a football player visited at three in the morning by a strange man.
After all this we get most of the rest of the story from the viewpoint of sportswriter Jimmy Russell, who is sent by his boss Folsworth to find out what he can about Earth’s line-up for the next match. When Russell gets nowhere he snoops around the coach’s office to see if he can find out anything, but ends up going through a time tunnel to a Native American reservation. He finds a number of football players from various time periods training for the next game with the Martians. This is all rather corny, but quite entertaining nonetheless.

When (spoiler) the Earth team beat the Martians, Jimmy turns up at his editor’s office with his time travel story, along with an Native American (“Indian” in the story) he calls Hiawatha. His wild story is dismissed—until that is, the editor is phoned in the middle of the night:

The soft, but insistent whirring of the night phone beside his bed brought the editor of the Rocket out of a sound sleep. He did not take kindly to night calls and when he saw the face of one of his reporters in the visaglass he growled savagely.
“What are you waking me up for?” he asked. “You say there are fires out in the Great Bowl— Say, do you have to call me out of bed every time a fire breaks out? Do you want me to run down there and get the story—? You want to know should we shoot out an extra in the morning? Say, do we put out extras every time somebody builds a bonfire, even if it is in the Great Bowl? Probably just some drunks celebrating the victory while they’re waiting for the football special to come in.”
He listened as words tumbled out of the phone.
“What’s that,” he shouted. “Indians? . . . Holding a war dance! How many of them? . . . You say they are coming out of the administration building? . . . More coming all the time, eh!”
Hart was out of bed now.
“Listen, Bob, are you certain they are Indians? . . . Bill says they are, huh? Would Bill know an Indian if he saw one? . . . He wasn’t around this afternoon when Jim was in, was he? He didn’t see that freak Jim hauled in, did he? . . . If he’s playing a joke, I’ll crack his neck.
“Listen, Bob, you get hold of Jim . . . . Yes, I know he’s fired, but he’ll be glad to come back again. Maybe there’s something to that yarn of his. Call all the speakies and gambling joints in town. Get him if you have to arrest him. I’m coming down right away.”

Jimmy, however, has led the natives through the police lines into the administration building, and they have returned to the past; the time tunnel device explodes after they go through. The inventor, Andronovitch, agrees to work on a new machine when the newspaper owner offers enough money. The scientist is later murdered by gangsters (who now have problems with their gambling operations) after all the footballers return to their own time periods. Jimmy, however, is left stranded in the past.
The last scene is a darker one with Hiawatha dead from a bear attack, and Jimmy up a tree musing about being a white god for the Incas.
In synopsis form this probably doesn’t seem that promising, but this newspaper-room centric piece is light-hearted and amusing (in spite of the last page or two) and the dodgy time-travel explanations don’t detract from that.

Good Old Brig! by Kent Casey is the first of the ‘Private Kenton’ stories. This introduces the long-time private (still at this basic rank due to his perpetual waywardness and malingering) as one of the crew of a tugboat who are repairing targets while their ship does some gunnery practice. Once they are back on board the ship has a gun blow up and the captain decides to take the ship to a nearby planet to make repairs.
When they arrive, Kelton thinks he recognises the planet and convinces one of the other crewmen to jump ship and go to a nearby town for some unauthorised R&R. Several hours into their adventure, Kenton realises that he is on a different planet, and the rest of the story details their adventures with the reptilian creatures that live there. Meanwhile the captain, who has been to the world before and who knows the world is ultimately harmless (if unpleasant), decides to let the two absconders stew for a while.
This is an inconsequential but readable enough story.

Also readable is The Men and the Mirror by Ross Rocklynne, the third of the ‘Colbie & Deverel’ series.³ It starts with Lieutenant John Colbie turning up at Jupiter station and explaining to the dome commander that he is in pursuit of a criminal called Edward Deverel. During this scene we get a data dump that recaps on the two earlier stories in the series:

I caught up with him on Vulcan, near the Sun, and we found it was hollow by the simple expedient of falling through a cavity on its surface. I had Deverel prisoner then, but he proved a bit too smart for me. We were trapped there, well enough, at the center of gravity. But he figured that the gases filling the planet’s interior would expand as the planet came to perihelion, thus forming currents which Deverel used to his advantage in escaping the trap and eluding me at the same time
I found him again, but we were wrecked above Jupiter, fell into a pit with a liquid ammonia lake at the bottom. And Deverel, using, I’ll have to admit, remarkably astute powers of deduction, figured that the lake drained by means of a siphon of some height. He eluded me that way, and I was left in the pit. I finally caught on—from some deliberate hints he had let drop—and followed him through the siphon. But he was waiting for me at the other end, demanded my credentials, and extracted from me a promise that I’d stay where I was for twenty-four hours.” Colbie grinned in slight mirth. “So after twenty-four hours I came on. And now he’s gone.”  p. 76-77

This clunky start didn’t raise my hopes for the rest of the piece, and I expected a poor gimmick story to follow. This is pretty much what I got, but it has a decent middle section.
The first part, however, stretches credibility somewhat. After this interview, Colbie speculates that Deverel has gone to Cyclops, a new planet that has arrived in the solar system, because “He’s curious, insanely curious about all things bizarre, and he won’t be able to resist it”.
Matters become even more risible when Colbie arrives there and finds Deverel suffering from potentially terminal space-sickness:

Colbie knew what to do in cases like this. He went forward to the control room, manipulated oxygen tank valves, and increased the quantity of oxygen in the air. He got all the clean linen he could find, and bathed Deverel from head to foot in luke-warm water. He turned the mattress over, put on clean sheets, and then lifted Deverel lightly as a baby back onto it. Then he stuck a thermometer into the outlaw’s mouth.
He cleaned the room, occupying a full hour in washing dishes with a minimum of valuable water. Then he took meats and vegetables from the refrigerator, where they had doubtless reposed for months perfectly frozen, and started a pot of soup.  p. 81

He should maybe adopt Deverel rather than arrest him.
After Deverel recovers they decide to extend a previously negotiated truce to investigate the mirror on Cyclops (the planet gets its name from a huge highly polished mirror on the surface, almost one thousand miles in diameter). When they get there after a perilous journey, they both fall in. On the way down the bowl and back up the other side they realise there is virtually no surface friction—but there is some as they come to a halt ten feet short of the opposite rim, and slide back down.

The initial part of their time in the mirror bowl going back and forth, and the solution at the end, are interesting but, unfortunately, Rocklynne pads the episode with a lot of pointless bickering between the two men. This is a little tiresome given that most people will probably be able to think of a solution to the problem (but see the next spoiler paragraph).
Colbie eventually suggests (spoiler) an angular momentum idea that has both men spinning around each other on a rope. When they execute the plan at the apex of one of their ascents, Deverel cuts the rope and Colbie goes over the rim and sixty feet into space. He lands and breaks a leg.
We then get a pendulum lecture: the mirror has rotated under them and, consequently, only on every sixth crossing would they arrive at the point they entered the bowl, and thereby be near the ship. Deverel crosses to the other side of the bowl and comes out at their entry point, and then flies across to rescue Colbie. If both had come out at the wrong place they would have died as they would have been too far away from the ship.
At the end of the story Colbie lets Deverel go.
This has a clever gimmick and is an entertaining enough piece, but suffers from the shortcomings listed above.

The Dangerous Dimension by L. Ron Hubbard is his debut in the magazine and a terrible one it is too. This dreadfully padded story is about a professor who formulates an equation which lets him apport to any place he thinks of. The narrative has him bouncing between his study, where he is hen-pecked by his housekeeper; a university lecture hall where he is due to speak, where he is hassled by the dean about his appearance (slippers and ink stains on his housecoat); and various other locales such as the Moon, Mars, etc.
This is a typical mainstream writer’s ‘anything can happen in SF story so I’ll let anything happen’ effort, and I doubt Campbell would have bought this turkey if his bosses hadn’t previously instructed him to accept anything that Hubbard or Arthur J. Burks submitted.⁴

The last instalment of The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson starts with their annihilation by the gyrane averted when the Chronion materialises directly in front of them in the throne hall. When they are safe in the ship they find the object they have stolen is a v-shaped piece of iron, a simple magnet. They find McLan in the control room, where he tells them he has found the critical point in the timestream:

“The time is an afternoon in August of the year 1921,” whispered Wil McLan. “The broken geodesics of Jonbar had already given us a clue to that. And I have found the place, with the chronoscope.”
Lanning gripped his arm. “Where?”
“It’s a little valley in the Ozarks of Arkansas. But I’ll show you the decisive scene.”
The little man limped to the metal cabinet of the geodesic analyzer, and his broken fingers carefully set its dials. A greenish luminescence filled the crystal block, and cleared. Lanning bent forward eagerly, to peer into that pellucid window of probability.
An impoverished farm lay before his eyes, folded in the low and ancient hills. A sagging shack of gray, paintless pine, a broken window gaping black and the roof inadequately patched with rusty tin, leaned crazily beside an eroded rocky field. The sloping cow pasture, above, was scantily covered with brush and gnarled little trees.
A small, freckled boy, in faded overalls and a big ragged straw hat, was trudging slowly barefoot down the slope, accompanied by a gaunt, yellow dog, driving two lean red-spotted cows home to the milking pen.
“Watch him,” whispered Wil McLan. And Lanning followed the idle path of the boy. He stopped to encourage the dog digging furiously after a rabbit. He squatted to watch the activities of a colony of ants. He ran to catch a gaudy butterfly, and carefully dissected it. He rose unwillingly to answer the halloo of a slatternly woman from the house below, and followed the cows. Wil McLan’s gnarled fingers closed on Lanning’s arm, urgently.
“Now!”
Idly whittling with a battered knife, the boy spied something beside a sumac bush, and stooped to pick it up. The object blurred oddly in the crystal screen, so that Lanning could not distinguish it. And vision faded, as Wil McLan snapped off the mechanism.
“Well?” demanded Lanning, bewildered. “What has that to do with Jonbar?”
“That is John Barr,” rasped the voiceless man. “For that metropolis of future possibility is—or might, be—named in honor of the boy, barefoot son of a tenant farmer. He is twelve years old in 1921. You saw him at the turning point of his life—and the life of the world.”
“But I don’t understand!”
“The bifurcation of possibility is in the thing he stoops to pick up,” whispered Wil McLan. “It is either the magnet that we recovered from Sorainya’s citadel—or an oddly colored pebble which lies beside it.
“And that choice—which Sorainya sought to decide by removing the magnet— determines which of two possible John Barrs is ultimately fixed in the real universe by fifth dimensional progression.”  p. 123-124

This is a great scene (in what is a cracking chapter): not only does it explain the origin of Jonbar’s name (and for SF fans what a “jonbar point” is) but it also has the fate of future empires hinging on the casual action of a farm boy in the middle of Nowhereville, USA (a background perhaps similar to that of many of Astounding’s readers).
McLan goes on to explain that John Barr will take one of two paths depending on whether he finds the magnet or not. If he does find it he will eventually invent the dynatomic tensor, the dynat, a device that will make possible the release of atomic energy under control of human will; if he doesn’t he’ll invent a gambling machine and another inventor, Ivor Gyros, will later invent a less efficient machine called the gyrane, and a new fanatical religion will sweep the world.

Just as they finish discussing this Sorainya’s time ship arrives and they are boarded. There is a bloody fight during which they pull away from the Gyronchi timeship. Halloran advances on Sorainya but is paralyzed by her beauty and dies, leaving Lanning to lapse into unconsciousness.
When he comes to, Lanning hears Sorainya talking to McLan in the control dome. He goes up and they fight. Just when it looks like Lanning is also about to perish (spoiler), McLan throws a silver object from around his throat to Lanning. Lanning crushes the tube and Sorainya perishes in front of his eyes (and we are once again treated to Williamson’s Weird Tales skills):

But the silver cylinder had rolled to his foot. Desperately—and shuddering with a cold, incredulous awareness that, somehow, he was so crushing Sorainya’s victorious beauty—he drove his heel down upon the tube.
It made a tiny crunching sound.
But Lanning didn’t look down. For his eyes were fixed, in a trembling, breathless dread, upon Sorainya. No visible hand had touched her. But, from the instant his heel came down, she was—stricken.
The bright blade slipped out of her hand, rang against the dome, and fell at Lanning’s feet. The smile was somehow frozen on her face, forgotten, lifeless. Then, in a fractional second, her beauty was—erased.
Her altered face was blind, hideous, pocked with queerly bluish ulcerations. Her features dissolved—frightfully—in blue corruption. And Lanning had an instant’s impression of a naked skull grinning fearfully out of the armor.
And then Sorainya was gone.
The woven red mail, for a weird fractional second, still held the curves of her form. It slumped grotesquely, and fell with a dull little thud on the floor. The plumed helmet clattered down beside it, rolled, and looked back at Lanning with an empty, enigmatic stare.  p. 131

There follows an explanation from McLan about how Sorainya was saved from the Blue Death many years ago by using the silver tube of serum that Lanning destroyed, and which McLan had retrieved from the past. McLan further explains that this act is irreversible, but the future of Jonbar is still in peril, and gives a hand-wavey fifth-dimension science lecture that I didn’t entirely understand.
The final scene is almost anti-climactic: the pair arrives at John Barr’s pivotal moment to find Glarath’s ship and the gyrane warrior ants waiting. Lanning attempts to fight his way through but is badly injured. One of the dyons—the far future inheritors of Jonbar—appears to him and gives him strength. Lanning makes one last effort and tosses the magnet towards the pebble. The boy picks it up, the gyronchi and the Chronion disappear.
McLan has meantime taken the ship back to Jonbar to get help but dies en route; others go back in time to rescue Lanning and the rest of the Legion of Time.
Lanning time-travels to Jonbar and sees his friends, all of who have been rescued from their past deaths, and he finally ends up in the arms of his good girlfriend, and possibly his bad one too, in a clever have-your-cake-and-eat-it ending:

“Denny Lanning!”
Lethonee came running toward him, through the flowers. Her violet eyes were bright with tears, and her face was a white smile of incredulous delight. Lanning turned shuddering to meet her, speechless.
For the golden voice of the warrior queen had mocked him in her cry. And the ghost of Sorainya’s glance glinted green in her shining eyes. She had even donned a close-fitting velvet gown of shimmering crimson, that shone like Sorainya’s mail.
She came into his open, trembling arms.
“Denny—” she sobbed happily.
“At last we are—one.”
The world was spinning. This same hill had borne Sorainya’s citadel. Jonbar and Gyronchi—conflicting possible worlds, stemming from the same beginning—were now fused into the same reality. Lethonee and Sorainya, also—? Eagerly, he drew her against his racing heart. And he murmured, happily—
“One!”  p. 139

Overall this is an impressive piece both in terms of its concept and page-turning readability. I’d recommend it to modern-day readers; to those 1938 fans it must have seemed stunning.

Hotel Cosmos by Raymond Z. Gallun is another poor piece. “Easy Goin’ Dave” Ledrack is a policeman/security type who works at a future Earth hotel called the Cosmos. All alien visitors to Earth stay there in their natural environments.
Dave is notified of the arrival of 4-2-5, a particularly untrustworthy type of alien. Shortly after its arrival Dave starts to feel xenophobic feelings towards the guests in the hotel, and it isn’t long until this affects them and the staff to the point of violent disorder. Needless to say Dave suspects 4-2-5 is behind these events, and when (spoiler) he eventually breaks into his room and kills him, all ends well.
There is a bit more to this lamentable story than I have described, but not much.

The Cover by Howard V. Brown is an impressive and original piece of work that stemmed from a suggestion from Robert D. Swisher (a friend and correspondent of Campbell’s) about a spaceship “part in sunlight, part in darkness”.⁵
I haven’t gone back and checked, but the Interior artwork in this issue seems to have more double page spreads than normal, and they are of a pretty good standard. My favourites in this issue are (probably again) by Charles Schneeman and H. W. Wesso.
I note in passing that the artwork for Cumming’s story isn’t credited either in the magazine or by ISFDB, but it looks like Brown (and he did the cover for that story), and his in the only name on the contents page that doesn’t match up to any of the signed artwork.

Language for Time Travelers by L. Sprague de Camp sounded like it was going to be a rather dull article but I could not have been more wrong: I found it fascinating. That said, I’m not sure everyone will feel the same way (if the English language interests you—I regularly read Oliver Kamm’s The Pedant column in Saturday’s The Times, and keep half an eye on the Language Log blog—you’ll love it).
De Camp covers a lot of subject matter so maybe it is best if I just quote a few passages to give you a feel for the piece:

English of the 1500’s would sound to us like some sort of Scotch dialect, because it had the the rolled “r” and the fricative consonants heard in German: ich, ach (that’s what all those silent gli’s in modem English spelling mean—or rather, used to mean) which have been retained in Scottish English, but lost or transformed in most other kinds of English. We have a fair idea of the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s time because about then people began writing books on the subject. It’s amusing to reflect that if Shakespeare returned to Earth, he’d get along passably in Edinburgh; he could manage, with some difficulty, in Chicago—but he’d be hopelessly lost in London, whose dialect would differ most radically from his! So much for the “language of Shakespeare!”  p. 64

Sounds that have been dropped can be restored by the influence of spelling. An example is the “t” in often, which was dropped long ago along with the “t’s” in soften, listen, castle, but which has been revived by a few speakers, including the President of the U. S. Such an addition of a sound to a word is called a spelling pronunciation and is considered incorrect when first introduced. But sometimes one takes hold and becomes universal, after which it is “correct”.
Examples are the “h” in hospital and the “l” in fault, which originally (when the words were taken over from French) weren’t sounded at all.
We might here dispose of the illusion that there is an absolute standard of “correctness” to which we can refer. There are no tablets of stone stating once and for all what is and isn’t correct, and dictionaries are compiled by fallible human beings and often disagree. The only real standard, aside from individual prejudices, is the actual usage of educated people. The fact is not that we use pronunciations because they’re correct, but that they’re correct because we— or a large number of us—use them. If a hundred million people pronounce after with the [vowel] of cat, that’s correct by definition, even though not the only correct form, dictionaries to the contrary notwithstanding.  p. 67-68

The rate of change of pronunciation is probably dependent, to some extent, on the state of a civilization, and changes should take place more rapidly in periods when illiteracy is high, and schools and spelling have less braking effect. A collapse of civilization in the English-speaking world would make another vowel-shift more likely, and result in more dropping and assimilation of sounds. If our hero knows this, he might be able to make a shrewd guess at the vicissitudes through which the world has passed even before he learns its actual history since his time.  p. 68

Our grammar has been simplified about as much as it can be, so that only limited changes are to be looked for therein. We still have some irregular plurals, such as child:children, mouse:mice, deer:deer; these are hangovers from Anglo-Saxon, which had several declensions of nouns forming the plural differently. (For this undiluted blessing— the loss of a multitude of cases, forms, and rules— we are, probably, indebted to the fact that English was, for some centuries, the poor-man’s tongue. The Normans invaded England, and made their language the tongue of all educated, refined people. For centuries, all who could write, wrote anything but English—usually Latin. The result was that English was freed of all grammarians, conservatives, and formulists. The farmers, peddlers and country people proceeded joyfully to throw out large quantities of unnecessary verbiage that got in their way. By the time the grammarians again laid hands on the language, a lot of useful pruning had been accomplished).  p. 69

There are one or two unconvincing examples in the article (Scottish/British pronunciations which don’t ring true) but I’ll be reading this again after finishing the second part in next month’s issue.
I wonder if this piece influenced the writing of Anthony Boucher’s The Barrier (which is in the September 1942 of Astounding I just reviewed) and which plays with the idea of linguistic drift?⁶
Contest by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial that floats the idea of a story contest and the prizes before going on to show that this is what already happens with the magazine’s submission process:

So Astounding can announce a contest—a contest for new, good authors, a contest that has neither entry nor closing date, nor is it limited to one prize apiece nor one entry per contestant. We’ve all gained by those past winners; we’ll gain, I know, on new winners. Better stories—new ideas.
The contest is on—and goes on.  p. 73

The Analytical Laboratory: May 1938 and In Times to Come are together on one page this month.⁷ After a short comment about the former (discussed here in the review of the May issue) the rest of the column is given over to plugging next issue’s contents, which will include Campbell’s own Who Goes There?
Giant Stars by John W. Campbell, Jr. starts with a discussion of Epsilon Aurigae (a supergiant star) and its companion (the sizes given in the article don’t agree with Wikipedia, so I suspect some of this is out of date) and goes on to talk about the partial eclipsing of the supergiant by its partner:

There are also two short science fillers, Beyond That Limit—? about the limits of telescopic vision, and Relativity in Metallurgy, a short piece about the non-history of hardened copper.
Science Discussions has a letter from Norman F. Stanley rebutting Arthur C. Clarke’s space flight equations in a previous issue (no doubt we can look forward to another letter from Clarke rebutting Stanley’s rebuttal), and Campbell writes in as McCann explaining the technology behind the new fluorescent lights which makes them produce a bright white light. It is strange to think that this was new technology in 1938.
Brass Tacks leads off with a letter from Isaac Asimov, Brooklyn, New York, which says, in part:

I catalogue each story of each issue and have done so since the August, 1936 issue. Therefore the following stories are listed according to my catalogue ratings based on a five-star maximum.
For first place, I consider it a tie between two stories: Nat Schachner’s “Island of the Individualists” and the first part of Jack Williamson’s “Legion of Time” (which was announced beforehand, by the way as “Legion of Probability”. Why the change?). I have given both five stars but think the edge goes to the Schachner yarn. For one thing you can never tell how a serial will turn out, and for another I strongly like the whole “Past, Present. Future” series, having given each of the three stories printed so far five stars. And let me tell you that I don’t hand out five-star ratings right and left either. Since August, 1936 when I began my ratings, only “Galactic Patrol” and your own series “Accuracy” received five stars, aside from these three mentioned above.  p. 158

He goes on to give his ratings for the issue and concludes with this:

And now for stories which I think ought to be “panned consistently and hard”. What in the world induced you to print “Ra for the Rajah”. Do you realize that it has no plot outside of one that would fit it for some future “scienti-love magazine”. The only good point about it— which gave it the one and a half stars it rated—is the aerial polo game Peterson has invented.
And as for “Three Thousand Years”. You may be crazy about it but I’m not. I read it because I always read Astounding from cover to cover but it is only a sense of duty that impels me on.  p. 158

Most of the rest of the letters gives likes and dislikes, sometimes for an issue, sometimes they are lists of the best stories published in the previous year. There is also this, though, from Donald G. Turnbull, Toronto, Canada:

In the last six or seven publications females have been dragged into the narratives and as a result the stories have become those of love which have no place in science-fiction. Those who read this magazine do so for the science in it or for the good wholesome free-from-women stories which stretch their imagination.
A woman’s place is not in anything scientific. Of course the odd female now and then invents something useful in the way that every now and then amongst the millions of black crows a white one is found.
I believe, and I think many others are with me, that sentimentality and sex should be disregarded in scientific stories. Yours for more science and less females.  p. 162

Campbell replies:

Misogynist! Bet you hear from Miss Evans!  p. 162

Although this issue isn’t as good as the last one, I enjoyed it anyway.  ●

_____________________

1. The May issue had a copyright date of April 13^th (second Wednesday of the month), the June issue was May 20th (third Friday), and this issue was June 24^th (fourth Friday). This information comes from Catalog of Copyright Entries 1938 Periodicals Jan-Dec New Series Vol 33 Pt 2, available here.

2. Simak published five stories in 1931-32, and had one story appear in the intervening six years. His ISFDB page is here.
He was praised in a February 28^th letter from John Campbell to Robert D. Swisher (Fantasy Commentator #59/60, edited by Sam Moskowitz & A. Langley Searles, Lulu.com):

“We were having a hell of a time getting stories. Things are looking up. All at once and suddenly, they started coming in from all the regulars, and several new ones that look promising. Among the new ones—at least I thought at first he was brand new, because he hasn’t written in so long—was Clifford D. Simak. I’ve found one he did—in August, 1932 Astounding, I believe it was (There was no August, 1932 Astounding, but its June, 1932 issue had ‘Hell-Hounds of the Cosmos’ by Simak)—and that was good. His present one is even better—a corking good yarn. Called ‘Rule 18’ (Astounding. July, 1938). Has to do with the traditional Mars-Earth football game. Earth, it seems, has been licked 67 years running—42 years without scoring on Mars.
“The Earth coach…collected a team of men…with a time machine, picking the greatest football players of all Earth history. The plot is merely amusing, not strong. But by God, the boy wrote the yarn with a finesse and smoothness that took all humor out of the plot, and made it strong as hell! It’s a swell yarn…smooth as velvet. It bounces along so fast you can’t stop to figure it out. I wrote him right away and told him check on the way—get going on the next one.  p. 82

3. Ross Rocklynne’s ISFDB page is here.

4. The imposition of Hubbard on Campbell by Tremaine is mentioned by Moskowitz in his comments on a June 19^th letter from Campbell to Robert D. Swisher (Ibid.):

Some months before he had been discharged, Tremaine had taken Campbell aside and told him he thought the fiction in the magazine was getting [too] heavy. He ordered him to buy some fiction from L. Ron Hubbard, an author who had contributed to several of his other magazines, because he had a light touch. Campbell gritted his teeth at the order, but when he met Hubbard he rather liked him.* He purchased from him ‘The Dangerous Dimension’ which appeared in the July, 1938 issue. It was completely atypical for Astounding or any other science fiction magazine and should not have been bought. The plot dealt with a Professor Mudge who discovers the negative dimension. By wishing or even involuntarily, by thinking, he can transfer himself anywhere instantly, even to Mars or the moon. Appearing and disappearing as he shifted to various destinations, he disturbed his colleagues and housekeeper. He resolved the situation by working out an equation that permitted him to control his movements. In this regard he wrote to Swisher June 19: “Interested in your rating of the mag. Particularly with respect to ‘The Dangerous Dimension.’ I’ve gotten several other guys to rate ’em. including Sprague, Laura (his sister). Dona, and one of the editors at the office. They are all science fiction people, more or less, and all rated ‘The Dangerous Dimension’ highly. Sprague rated the stories on a scale of A. B. C, D, E. and gave ‘Dimension’ the only A in the issue; B’s to ‘Rule 18’ and ‘Legion of Time’. Ray’s vintage piece (‘Hotel Cosmos’ by Raymond Z. Gallun) was, I realized, just that. But as you said, it was passable, average-rate stuff, and Ray’s name is worth something to us. To some extent I’ve gotta be a hard-boiled commercial editor rather than a science fiction enthusiast. Ray gripes me—but pays the mag. ‘Hotel Cosmos’ I’d rated a greenish-blue rather than bluish-green— little higher than you did— because of the basic idea of a hotel for other-world beings and its mechanisms and possibilities.  p. 89

*Hubbard describes what happened at the meeting in his introduction to Battlefield Earth (I’ve previously quoted this in the review for the February 1938 issue, and it is repeated here for convenience):

It will probably be best to return to the day in 1938 when I first entered this field, the day I met John W. Campbell, Jr., a day in the very dawn of what has come to be known as The Golden Age of science fiction. I was quite ignorant of the field and regarded it, in fact, a bit diffidently. I was not there of my own choice. I had been summoned to the vast old building on Seventh Avenue in dusty, dirty, old New York by the very top brass of Street and Smith publishing company—an executive named Black and another, F. Orlin Tremaine. Ordered there with me was another writer, Arthur J. Burks. In those days when the top brass of a publishing company—particularly one as old and prestigious as Street and Smith—”invited” a writer to visit, it was like being commanded to appear before the king or receiving a court summons. You arrived, you sat there obediently, and you spoke when you were spoken to.
We were both, Arthur J. Burks and I, top-line professionals in other writing fields. By the actual tabulation of A. B. Dick, which set advertising rates for publishing firms, either of our names appearing on a magazine cover would send the circulation rate skyrocketing, something like modern TV ratings.
The top brass came quickly to the point. They had recently started or acquired a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Other magazines were published by other houses, but Street and Smith was unhappy because its magazine was mainly publishing stories about machines and machinery. As publishers, its executives knew you had to have people in stories. They had called us in because, aside from our A. B. Dick rating as writers, we could write about real people. They knew we were busy and had other commitments. But would we be so kind as to write science fiction? We indicated we would.
They called in John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of the magazine. He found himself looking at two adventure-story writers, and though adventure writers might be the aristocrats of the whole field and might have vast followings of their own, they were not science fiction writers. He resisted. In the first place, calling in topliners would ruin his story budget due to their word rates. And in the second place, he had his own ideas of what science fiction was.
Campbell, who dominated the whole field of sf as its virtual czar until his death in 1971, was a huge man who had majored in physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Sciences degree. His idea of getting a story was to have some professor or scientist write it and then doctor it up and publish it. Perhaps that is a bit unkind, but it really was what he was doing. To fill his pages even he, who had considerable skill as a writer, was writing stories for the magazine.
The top brass had to directly order Campbell to buy and to publish what we wrote for him. He was going to get people into his stories and get something going besides machines.

5. Moskowitz comments on Campbell’s letters of 14^th and 18^th of March (Ibid.) to Swisher:

Swisher suggested a cover scene to Campbell: a space ship out in galactic space, part in sunlight, part in darkness, with several small space-suited figures on the outside. This was rendered very effectively by Howard V. Brown to illustrate ‘Voyage 13’ by Ray Cummings in July, 1938. Apparently Swisher was to receive the original back after use for his suggestion, to interpret the letter of March 14: “Per your request, I am having the item you asked about arranged for. Mr. H.V. Brown in now at work on the matter which will be finished for the July issue. “Approximately 30 days after publication of that issue, we will be able to supply you with the finished work. I was wondering what in blazes we were going to use for the July issue. Thanks. It was a swell idea. Order in, with reservation attached!’ Apparently Swisher had some further ideas for the rendering of the cover for on March 18, Campbell wrote: “Your amended idea is too late. The painting is now well under way. Also, there are practical difficulties inasmuch as the form you now suggest would make it impossible to accurately convey the full outline of the ship. The way it is actually being done will put the ship across the dim nebulosity of the Milky Way gas clouds, where the unilluminated parts of the ship as black as space save where port-lights shine out.  p. 83

6. My review of The Barrier by Anthony Boucher (Astounding, September 1942) is here.

7. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared two months later in the September issue:

These results mystify me (with the pleasing exception of the de Camp) and, according to a July 6^th letter to Swisher (Ibid.), Campbell too:

 “The answer’s in on the July (1938) issue—and am I befuddled! With some hesitancy I tried Sprague’s article on English—which isn’t, strictly, a science fiction subject (‘Language for Time Travelers’). There was a natural expectancy of howls, but the actual result astounded me. The howls rated one ‘not really a science fiction article, but rather interesting.’ The votes for it ranged from ‘best thing Astounding’s ever published’ through ‘superb,’ ‘excellent,’ “highly interesting’ down to a mere ‘good article.’ Approval was practically unanimous. It ranked first place by a nice, fat margin.
“And second—by a nice margin over all others—was, despite your feeling, ‘The Dangerous Dimension.’ I guessed wrong, too. I’d have said ‘Rule 18’ belonged in second or first place. It didn’t. ‘Legion of Time’ came in behind ‘Dangerous Dimension,’ with “Rule 18’ trailing. Incidentally, it was having a hell of a fight for fourth place. Ross Rocklynne’s ‘Men and the Mirror’ gave it plenty of competition. There was nothing the matter with “Hotel Cosmos,’ ‘Secret of the Canali,’ etc., except that they came out the same month. ‘Voyage 13,’ however, got a nice hand at panning. It got 10 goose-eggs and 11 checks and pluses combined. ‘Giant Stars’ got as much favorable comment as ‘Voyage 13.’ The cover rated high—just behind ‘Rule 18.’  p. 92

Interesting to see that there are perhaps only a couple of dozen people voting (“It got 10 goose-eggs and 11 checks and pluses combined”) on some stories.  ●

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