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

Fiction:
The Weapon Makers (Part 1 of 3) • serial by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗+
Flight into Darkness • novelette by J. Francis McComas [as by Webb Marlowe] ∗∗+
Mimsy Were the Borogoves • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗∗
The Man in the Moon • short story by Henry A. Norton [as by Henry Norton] ∗∗+
Opposites—React! (Part 2 of 2) • serial by Jack Williamson [as by Will Stewart] ∗∗
Probability Zero:
Blue Ice • short story by Henry Kuttner –
Efficiency • short story by Malcolm Jameson [as by Colin Keith] –
Noise is Beautiful! • short story by Fox B. Holden –
The Anecdote of the Movable Ears • short story by L. Sprague de Camp –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by William Kolliker (x6), Frank Kramer (x5)
The Silver Lining • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
In Times to Come
God’s Footstool • science essay by Malcolm Jameson
The Analytical Laboratory: December 1942
Brass Tacks • letters

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The first part of The Weapon Makers by A. E. van Vogt has Neelan coming back to Earth from an asteroid at the other side of the solar system. He has come home to the find out how his brother Gil died but, when he arrives, there is no record of his brother’s death. . . . His investigations take him to his brother’s last address, where he finds out from the landlady that Gil never stayed overnight in his room, and left a year ago. Later, Neelan goes to see a professor at the Eugenics Building (a childhood connection) who discreetly makes a suggestion:

“Why don’t you,” said Professor Rayburn, “try the Weapon Shops? It is not generally known, but they have an Information Center that has no equal. And now good-by and good luck.”
He turned away, without looking at Neelan, and busied himself with papers on a side desk.
Neelan’s mind was still jumping as he reached the street. Because he hadn’t known. He thought: “And I believed they only sold guns. I should have known. Why, I’ve been all over the solar system, been in several of their shops, had long conversations with that fellow on Europa—”
He felt torn; his personal despair yielded briefly to a sense of immense things, the utter tremendousness of the Weapon Makers establishment, with its stores existing in tens of thousands of cities and towns in the far-flung Isher Empire, an independent, outlawed, indestructible, altruistic opposition to tyranny.  p. 13

The tyranny mentioned is that of the House of Isher’s malevolent Empress, of who more later.
Neelan goes to one of the Weapon Makers’ shops, and we get a variant of one of the scenes from the earlier story The Weapon Shop (Astounding, December 1942),¹ but with a different result:

The Weapon Shop was in a glade of green and floral vegetation; it made a restful, idyllic picture between two giant buildings. The great, universal sign of the store told its old, old story to all who cared to see:
.
THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS IS THE RIGHT TO BE FREE
.
The window sign was the same, too, as in all the shops he had seen. The letters were smaller, but the words were just as positive:
.
THE FINEST ENERGY WEAPONS IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE
.
Neelan stood very still, staring at the gleaming display of revolvers and rifles. It wasn’t that there was anything new here. For years he had carried one of those marvelous, defensive guns. The weapon was in place now, fitted snugly in its holster under his left shoulder.
Seven times, in the days when he had lived by his remarkable gambling luck, that supergun had flashed its abnormal power. No, definitely it wasn’t the newness. The only thing was—
The very sight of a Weapon Shop always gave him an eerie sensation. It required a distinct mental reaching to realize that every Weapon Shop was an impregnable fort, and that bloodily earnest attempts had been made by the Isher government in long-gone years to smash the entire organization—unreal picture, amazingly hard to visualize.
Neelan shook himself, and walked toward the door. It wouldn’t open. He tugged at it, startled, thinking: Was it possible that the sensitive door was condemning him because he had so recently come from a government institute? Report said the door worked by thought; and no enemy of the Weapon Shops, no servant of the Empress Isher, was ever admitted. It—
It opened gently like a flower unfolding its petals, only faster. It was weightless in his fingers, like some supernally delicate structure insubstantial. And when he stepped through the opening, it crowded his heels without touching them, and closed behind him silent as a night in space.  p. 13

After Neelan speaks to man inside, the latter manages to get Gil’s last work address, but asks Neelan to let them investigate. However, after Neelan leaves the shop he gets a job interview—and it is at the same address, so he decides to go after leaving a note for the professor.
Matters rapidly become more perilous for Neelan. He goes to the address and finds, after being held at gunpoint by a man called Greer, that the building contains a huge (and later we find, very advanced) spaceship, half the length of which is in an underground shaft.

In a parallel story thread we are then introduced to another character, Captain Hedrock, an immortal who is a third party who acts as a liaison between the Weapon Shops and the Empress of Isher. In his room at the palace he watches a spy-ray showing the Empress condemning him to death, and ordering his hanging after lunch. He then consults with the Weapon Shop High Council, and their no-man Edward Gonish. When Gonish cannot provide any guidance, he decides to attend the meal. There is much verbal sparring at the lunch, which ends when Hedrock states the Weapon Shops can predict the death moment of any person: he tells General Lister that he will die imminently, and then materialises an invisible gun from his ring. The weapon’s vibrations cause the General’s death, but no-one but Hedrock knows what has killed him. The Empress subsequently changes her mind about Hedrock’s execution but he is arrested again before he can leave the palace.

Meanwhile, Greer agrees to let Neelan have the job on the ship but tells him that he cannot leave, and supervises him at gun-point. Neelan learns that Greer plans on selling the ship to the Empress, and that he marooned Gil and the team who developed the spaceship on an alien planet during a test flight.
Neelan soon uses his technical knowledge to overcome and restrain Greer but he can’t make him reveal the whereabouts of his brother, so he goes out to get a Lambeth mind-controller. Shortly after he leaves the ship he is snatched off the street and taken to the palace.

Neelan shortly finds himself in front of the Empress of Isher. She wants Neelan to kill Greer. They give him a projectile gun, an invisibility device, and a telestat so they can watch him. If he does not do as she wants he will die.
This is fast paced and absorbing first half, with what looks like more super-science entertainment to come.²

Flight into Darkness by J. Francis McComas³ is a story that is a thinly veiled look at a defeated Germany after the War—although the country is never explicitly named there are references to a “Leader” and eugenics, and there is this when an oblivious secretary leaves the villain in his office one night:

“Don’t stay late, sir. You’ve been working awfully hard lately.”
“Now, now,” he said. “You run along and don’t worry about me. You must enjoy yourself—not think of an old man like me.”
She shook her curly head.
“You’re not old, doctor.”
She smiled again as she went out. Linkman heard the office door slide shut behind her. The benevolent look was replaced by a scowl.
“Little flirt,” he grated. “Women in industry—bah! Their place is in the home, bearing children for the race!” He shrugged. “Ah, well. That, too, will change.” p. 43

The man is Linkman, a civilianised ex-general from the defeated nation who has been put put in charge of a post-war aviation factory. His own men are in key positions, and they start building a spaceship designed by his younger (and disabled) brother. These diehards will go to Venus or Mars (with a number of women) and start a colony there, and return to Earth one day for vengeance.
Meanwhile, one of the (presumably Allied) psychiatrists briefs Oliver (who is in charge of the occupying administration) and General Mac (who channels General Patton throughout the story) about the questionable results of Linkman’s psyche profile—but Oliver refuses to start an investigation.
Linkman’s project progress; spies are killed. Oliver himself disappears, kidnapped by Linkman’s goons. The story resolves when (spoiler) Linkman’s brother discovers what is going on and frees Oliver. The spaceship launches, and Oliver atones by taking an aircraft up and ramming it, killing himself in the process.
For the most part this isn’t a bad piece, although the melodramatic ending spoils it a little. It is quite gloomy about the probable success of any post-war de-Nazification process. An interesting, if not entirely successful, piece.

Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore starts off with a similar idea to their recent story The Twonky (Astounding, September 1942). In this one a man from millions of years in the future sends two experimental time machines back into the past, using his children’s cast-off educational toys as ballast. One of the machines—an odd looking box—is found in 1942 by a seven-year old boy called Scott, who is playing hooky from school.

Initially the events in the story are those you would expect from an archetypal two parent, two child family situation and all that entails (the odd questions children ask, the illegible scribbles that Scott’s two year old sister Emma writes—which her brother can understand but the adults can’t, etc.). Eventually the parents begin to notice the children’s increasingly odd behaviour, especially their interactions with the strange toys:

“Any homework?”
“N-no,” Scott said, flushing guiltily. To cover his embarrassment he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads. Paradine didn’t see it at first, but Emma did. She wanted to play with it.
“No. Lay off, Slug,” Scott ordered. “You can watch me.” He fumbled with the beads, making soft, interested noises. Emma extended a fat forefinger and yelped.
“Scotty,” Paradine said warningly.
“I didn’t hurt her.”
“Bit me. It did,” Emma mourned.
Paradine looked up. He frowned, staring. What in—
“Is that an abacus?” he asked. “Let’s see it, please.”
Somewhat unwillingly Scott brought the gadget across to his father’s chair. Paradine blinked. The “abacus,” unfolded, was more than a foot square, composed of thin, rigid wires that interlocked here and there. On the wires the colored beads were strung. They could be slid back and forth, and from one support to another, even at the points of jointure. But—a pierced bead couldn’t cross interlocking wires—
So, apparently, they weren’t pierced. Paradine looked closer. Each small sphere had a deep groove running around it, so that it could be revolved and slid along the wire at the same time. Paradine tried to pull one free. It clung as though magnetically. Iron? It looked more like plastic.
The framework itself— Paradine wasn’t a mathematician. But the angles formed by the wires were vaguely shocking, in their ridiculous lack of Euclidean logic. They were a maze. Perhaps that’s what the gadget was—a puzzle.  p. 56-57

The couple later become so concerned about their children’s behaviour that Paradine asks a psychologist colleague called Holloway for help. Holloway causes them more disquiet with his rambling (and rather unlikely, to be honest) speculations that the toys are from elsewhere in space or time, his musings on non-Euclidean space, and lectures on how children think differently. He does, however, recommend that the toys are taken away from the two children.
However, the children’s thought processes have gone past a critical point, and Emma, the two year old, gets Scott to start collecting various objects for her:

Scott kept bringing gadgets to Emma for her approval. Usually she’d shake her head. Sometimes she would look doubtful. Very occasionally she would signify agreement. Then there would be an hour of laborious, crazy scribbling on scraps of note paper, and Scott, after studying the notations, would arrange and rearrange his rocks, bits of machinery, candle ends, and assorted junk. Each day the maid cleaned them away, and each day Scott began again.
He condescended to explain a little to his puzzled father, who could see no rhyme or reason in the game.
“But why this pebble right here?”
“It’s hard and round, dad. It belongs there.”
“So is this one hard and round.
“Well, that’s got vaseline on it. When you get that far, you can’t see just a hard round thing.”
“What comes next? This candle?”
Scott looked disgusted. “That’s toward the end. The iron ring’s next.”
It was, Paradine thought, like a Scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted—familiar logic—at Scott’s motives in arranging the junk as he did.
Paradine went out. Over his shoulder he saw Scott pull a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket, and head for Emma, who was squatted in a corner thinking things over.  p. 68

There is another hint of what is coming (spoiler) in a later conversation between Paradine and Scott:

That night, however, Scott evinced an interest, later significant, in eels.
There was nothing apparently harmful in natural history. Paradine explained about eels.
“But where do they lay their eggs? Or do they?”
“That’s still a mystery. Their spawning grounds are unknown. Maybe the Sargasso Sea, or the deeps, where the pressure can help them force the young out of their bodies.”
“Funny,” Scott said, thinking deeply.
“Salmon do the same thing, more or less. They go up rivers to spawn.” Paradine went into detail. Scott was fascinated.
“But that’s right, dad. They’re born in the river, and when they learn how to swim, they go down to the sea. And they come back to lay their eggs, huh?”
“Right.”
“Only they wouldn’t come back,” Scott pondered. “They’d just send their eggs—”
“It’d take a very long ovipositor,” Paradine said, and vouchsafed some well-chosen remarks upon oviparity.
His son wasn’t entirely satisfied. Flowers, he contended, sent their seeds long distances.
“They don’t guide them. Not many find fertile soil.”
“Flowers haven’t got brains, though. Dad, why do people live here?”
“Glendale?”
“No—here. This whole place. It isn’t all there is, I bet.”
“Do you mean the other planets?”
Scott was hesitant. “This is only—part—of the big place. It’s like the river where the salmon go. Why don’t people go on down to the ocean when they grow up?”
Paradine realized that Scott was speaking figuratively. He felt a brief chill. The—ocean?  p. 67

Before the climax of the story there is a short section which details what happened to the first time machine/box sent into the past: this has a girl telling her Uncle Charles a nonsense rhyme she has made up. The two are Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”), and Alice Pleasance Liddell (the Alice of Alice in Wonderland): the poem later produced is Jabberwocky.⁴ This part sets up the end of the story:

Downstairs the telephone stopped its shrill, monotonous ringing. Paradine looked at the paper he held.
It was a leaf torn from a book. There were interlineations and marginal notes, in Emma’s meaningless scrawl. A stanza of verse had been so underlined and scribbled over that it was almost illegible, but Paradine was thoroughly familiar with “Through the Looking Glass.” His memory gave him the words‍—
.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimbel in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe
.
Idiotically he thought: Humpty Dumpty explained it. A wabe is the plot of grass around a sundial. A sundial. Time— It has something to do with time. A long time ago Scotty asked me what a wabe was. Symbolism.
Twas brillig—
A perfect mathematical formula, giving all the conditions, in symbolism the children had finally understood. The junk on the floor. The toves had to be made slithy—vaseline?—and they had to be placed in a certain relationship, so that they’d gyre and gimbel.
Lunacy!
But it had not been lunacy to Emma and Scott. They thought differently. They used x logic. Those notes Emma had made on the page—she’d translated Carroll’s words into symbols both she and Scott could understand. The random factor had made sense to the children. They had fulfilled the conditions of the time-span equation. And the mome raths outgrabe—
Paradine made a rather ghastly little sound, deep in his throat. He looked at the crazy pattern on the carpet. If he could follow it, as the kids had done— But he couldn’t. The pattern was senseless. The random factor defeated him. He was conditioned to Euclid.
Even if he went insane, he still couldn’t do it. It would be the wrong kind of lunacy. His mind had stopped working now. But in a moment the stasis of incredulous horror would pass— Paradine crumpled the page in his fingers. “Emma, Scotty,” he called in a dead voice, as though he could expect no response.
Sunlight slanted through the open windows, brightening the golden pelt of Mr. Bear. Downstairs the ringing of the telephone began again.  p. 69

This is a story deserving of its classic status, for its transcendent ending if nothing else, although I note in passing that there are also some interesting and atypical (for SF) observations about children.⁵ That said, it is a bit baggy in places (Holloway’s comments are probably more discursive than the story needs) and, in general, feels longer than necessary.

The Man in the Moon by Henry A. Norton is an odd, atmospheric story about a strange man who turns up at an observatory with a 200-inch telescope and starts making a bench for his work. It has unusual properties:

The bench was constructed from some plastic metal, rough and pitted, but solid-looking. As Ferris said afterward, it looked like the metal had been chewed into shape. Raven rubbed his hand reflectively over the surface and withdrew it at once.
“Not a very level working plane, Sereda,” he said.
“It will smooth itself,” Sereda ventured.
“What is it?” asked Ferris, touching the bench gingerly. It had a curious feel, a faint resilience. Ferris had a momentary impression that the bench was feeling him, appraising him, as he touched it. Sereda mumbled something incomprehensible in answer to the question, and Raven announced it was time to get to work as though he were glad to dismiss the bench from his mind.
Trouble was, it wouldn’t stay dismissed.
The subject came up again the next night when Raven came in about nine. Ferris was up on the platform, and Sereda was in his corner on the main floor of the building.
“He must have polished on that bench all day,” said Ferris in amusement. “We should turn him loose on some of the brass work. See how shiny he got it?”
“I saw it,” Raven answered shortly.
Bob Ferris looked at him in surprise. It was one of the few times he had ever heard Raven speak abruptly. He followed the direction of the older man’s gaze. The astronomer was looking at Sereda’s workbench. It looked small from that elevation, and every plane of it showed a reflection, as if light were striking it from every direction.  p. 72

As matters progress, it becomes obvious (spoiler) that Sereda is not human. Throughout the story he is obsessed with light and, eventually, the head of the observatory convinces Sereda that he would have constant light on the moon, and he leaves. The moon then becomes brighter and brighter. . . .
This doesn’t entirely work as a story (the direction of travel changes after this last suggestion) but until that point it is, like the McComas story, an interesting piece, in this case because of Serada’s strange obsessiveness.
It has a nice, though inaccurate, last line, “Just imagine, no more dark nights” (presumably the moon would only shine brightly on the nights that it is seen, i.e. dependent on phase and cloud cover).

The second part of Opposites—React! by Jack Williamson does not get off to a good start. Anders and Ann spend more time together as they travel to the Invader/seetee spaceship, during which we suffer from more tin-eared dialogue: Anders now calls Ann (technically his adversary) “bright-eyes”, “darlin’”, and “precious” as well as “beautiful” and “gorgeous”. There is probably a SF convention drinking game to be had out of this—you take turns reading the story aloud and have a drink at every endearment. Paramedics would need to be in attendance as you would get very, very drunk.
When Anders isn’t all over Ann he fends off his first officer Protopov, who appears to be channelling his inner Cro-Magnon man.

Once they are within visual range of the Invader and Martian spaceships (this happens while Anders is having a platonic breakfast with Anne) Anders orders his gunners to open fire on the latter, as you would when there is no apparent movement and it does not seem a threat. This has the effect of driving it towards the Invader/seetee ship, and there is a huge explosion when normal and seetee matter meet. This destroys the Martian ship and leaves the Invader with minor damage. After this dumb move, Anders and Ann (she has seetee handling experience, he does not) go across to the Invader ship, and the story picks up somewhat.
When the pair arrive there they note that the rusty looking side of the ship is normal material and safe to stand on (Ann uses a piece of wire to test it). They then find the normal side of the ship connects to the seetee side by way of a number of disks—base plates—and they find one of them missing, presumably cut away by Rob McGee. Ann tells Anders it will be dangerous to cut out another and, if he attempts this, he will be on his own—she won’t assist an Interplanet man.

Inside the ship they find a motionless spacesuited body:

The searching beam of Anders’ head lamp found the dim figure, where she pointed. It was near the mighty curve of the wall. The dead man wore bulky space armor, blackpainted. He sat on the floor, with steel-clad legs spread wide apart. His arms were closed fast around a massive iron bar, holding it upright. At the top of the bar, just above his dead helmet light, was the thick polished disk of a seetee bedplate.
The sight was grotesque. Anders thought the dead man resembled some clumsy toy, embracing the stem of a queer metal mushroom. He choked back a shocked, mirthless laugh.
The man in the black armor was really dead.
His rigid, unnatural posture made that certain. With the slow escape of body heat from the suit, his flesh was probably already frozen nearly as hard as the iron stalk he supported.
“It isn’t Cap’n Rob.” Ann’s whisper had a shaky relief. “But who could it be? And why was he just sitting there, holding that thing in his arms?”
“S’pose he’s one of the men from the Martian,” Anders said. “Might be von Falkenberg, himself. He wanted one of those bedplates for a model, like your friend McGee. Prob’ly intended to carry it out to his ship. Maybe weld it to the hull—’course he couldn’t take it inside.”
Their lights probed upward.
“There’s where he got it,” Ann whispered suddenly. “He cut it out from under that ramp—” From the quiver of her breathless voiced he knew she shuddered. “But what killed him?”
“Prob’ly ran a hand cutting torch off his own battery pack,” Anders suggested, “Used more juice than he thought. The bedplate has a couple of tons of mass, with that long stem. Maybe he forgot this permanent field. Anyhow, when he got the thing cut loose, he didn’t have power left to lift it.”
Ann’s voice shivered. “And he couldn’t put it down!”
“Not without blowing himself through the roof.” Anders stared at the figure in black. “The ramp was too high to lean it on, and he couldn’t let the seetee part touch the floor. He just had to sit and hold it balanced on the stem, till his batteries gave out and his air unit quit. Waiting, maybe for his friends to come back. Only they didn’t come.”  p. 108

Anne wants to leave the ship as she thinks it is a death trap but Anders perseveres, and Ann later has to grab him before he goes down an ore chute and is disintegrated. They come across more dead bodies, before finding Rob McGee wandering around in the depths of the ship (he is arrested but also saves Anders’ life later by telling him about the ship’s electrical rails.)
When the three of them finally exit the ship (spoiler) they see Ander’s ship Challenger very close, and it fires at them! Ander’s first officer Protopov is really Von Falkenberg, and his Martian men have taken over the ship.

Anders is knocked unconscious during this attack and comes round to find Ann replacing the damaged batteries in his suit. They discuss the consequences of the Martian Reich taking the bed-plate, and then going on to Freedonia to destroy the Drake’s operation. Ann reveals that Rob has told her that the Invader ship is a power plant that can wirelessly transmit energy. They also talk about the disappearance of the seetee people when the Invader planet hit the trans-Mars planet, etc.
Once this data dump is over, McGee returns. He tells them his ship was not destroyed but hidden. They leave for Freedonia, hoping they will get a chance to warn the Drakes.
When they eventually get close to Freedonia they see a blue flash—Von Falkenberg’s ship has hit one of the mines that the Drakes had put in place around the asteroid.
The three land and meet the Drakes. McGee tells them all he has moved the alien ship so that he is the only one that can find it.
I think that, overall, this story is okay but one of its main weaknesses is the character of Anders, who is arrogant, dumb, and permanently moonstruck. Also, the story doesn’t have the same strong narrative arc and ideas as Williamson’s Legion of Time (which shows the writer at the top of his game) and, as I’ve said before, the rest of the field is improving around Williamson while he stands still.

All the Probability Zero stories (brief tall tales) are awful, and a complete waste of four pages: I would rather look at adverts. In Blue Ice Kuttner tells a tall tale of a blind space navy crew going FTL to even the odds with the smugglers they are fighting (the smugglers can’t see the light from their fluorescent tubes either as it can’t catch up with them—maybe they just need a relativity refresher); Keith’s Efficiency has a spaceship fuel system making more fuel than it can use (all the upgrade components give more than a 100% increase in efficiency); Holdens’ Noise is Beautiful! has a surgeon connecting a man’s visual nerves to his auditory ones so he can see sound; The Anecdote of the Movable Ears by L. Sprague de Camp is a time travel story about a man being charged by an animal that is something between a mastodon and an elephant. The contrived ending is like a non-pun Feghoot. This last one was the most disappointing as I’d hoped for better from him.

The Cover by William Timmins is pretty average—his best work would come later. The Interior artwork by William Kolliker and Frank Kramer perfectly illustrates the complaints in Brass Tacks. It just isn’t very good, and too many of the illustrations have people from the 1940s parachuted into scenes with standard SF furniture (look at the hairstyle of the Empress, or the hat that Neelan wears in the illustrations for van Vogt’s story for instance). The title page illustration for the Kuttner/Moore is crude work.
The Silver Lining by John W. Campbell, Jr. is an editorial about the many possible uses of silver in industrial processes, but adds that “The Silver Bloc”⁶ prevents its industrial use as they see it as a money substitute.
In Times to Come has a big fat lie about next month’s cover story coming from a new writer (it was written by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore):

A new author takes first place in next month’s issue—Lawrence O’Donnell’s story, “Clash By Night,”has the cover plate.
[. . .]
An excellent piece of action science-fiction for a first-timer, or an old-timer, for that matter. I’ve said before that most top-notch science-fiction writers turn in top-notch material very soon after they start trying—the first one, or the second or third, usually. It still holds. It would probably hold for a lot of people who’ve never quite had the urging to try pounding out the yarn they had in mind.
I most deeply wish some of them would now. It’s heartbreaking, though, to have someone write a lovely yarn like “Clash By Night,” raise my hope of one new man to replace some of the men now in the army and navy—and then find that, like O’Donnell, he’s about to enlist. O’Donnell comes for the first time next month; I now find it’s very apt to be his last for the duration. You can expect to hear from him again, though—about the spring of 1944 is my personal guess!  p. 39

I wonder if Campbell was doing this kind of thing (as with Probability Zero) to encourage new writers.

God’s Footstool by Malcolm Jameson is an article on geodesic surveying, whether the Earth is an oblate spheroid, etc. Some of the essay is a little unclear, but it made me go and find a You Tube video of how Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference,⁷ and I also learned about an interesting surveying error that caused a dispute about the Texas/Oklahoma border.⁸
The Analytical Laboratory: December 1942 was discussed in the review of that issue.⁹
Brass Tacks has two interesting letters, both critical of the interior artwork. The first correspondent, Sam Salant, Brooklyn, NY, has this:

Can it be that your interior artists have succumbed to the spell of Flash Gordon? Oh, those monsters! Kramer must work on heavy-duty sandpaper. Nothing else could give his drawings that rough-and-ready look that no comic strip is complete without. However, with the exception of the illustrations for “Not Only Dead Men,” Kramer’s work in the November issue is definitely above par—for him.
Kolliker stands alone and aloof upon his rocky pinnacle. His work is not only scratchy but downright bad. His creations are still distinguished by their perpetual look of naïve astonishment, as if they, too, were surprised at such magnificent incompetence.
The cover was fairly well done, I thought except that it seemed to lack unity. A coherent painting has a greater virtue than one whose brush strokes are technically perfect. On the whole, the cover painting impressed me as being one which was not well thought out.
Final Impressions on Art Work: Distinctly subpar. You need someone like Schneeman, who was not afraid to express himself in broad brush strokes. Finlay is out—his work is too delicate. Wesso’s work is stereotyped—all his men are twins, and all his women are asinine.  p. 92

He continues in an equally trenchant manner about the fiction:

I regret that you have allowed yourself to drift into a pattern in the selection and layout of the material. The lead story is invariably excellent; “Overthrow” is no exception. These “Dawn of Great Promise” stories are right in my personal groove. “Four Little Ships” comes in second, mostly because I liked the way Author Leinster handled a difficult idea. Third place is a scramble between “Not Only Dead Men,” “Minus Sign and “The Gentle Pirates,” with van Vogt skinning through. “Sand” should be buried under some.
Above all, Mr. Campbell, give us fewer ray guns, more Time paradoxes, less blood and thunder, more of Brass Tacks and, most of all, more emphasis on the social sciences and psychology. And, please, no more cowboy stories with Lensmen gallivanting around, shooting up the place, and raising general heck. I have had enough! War stories are all right, but kill as few as possible. Make the bullets go farther, and shoot fewer of ’em. But no parallels about Hitler. He stinks no matter what century you put him in.
More de Camp, please. He can liven up many a dull day.

The second long letter, from Arnold Greenhouse, Leavenworth, KS, is more reflective and starts by looking at the magazine’s development since Campbell’s appointment, giving a thumbs-up to everything apart from the interior artwork (Campbell pre-replies that change is coming). The rest of the letter gives a list of Greenhouse’s best stories of 1942 (you can read most of it in the page image above for Opposites-React!: his first three choices were Asylum by A. E. van Vogt, There Shall Be Darkness by C. L. Moore, and Beyond This Horizon by Anson MacDonald—referred to as MacDonald/Heinlein at the end of the letter).

This issue is more of a mixed bag than last month’s but the van Vogt and Kuttner/Moore are the highlights.  ●

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1. My review of Astounding, December 1942, and The Weapon Shop is here.

2. I’ve only briefly glanced at the book version of The Weapon Makers, but it seems entirely different from this one. In the book version Hedrock replaces Neelan in the scene in front of the Weapon Shop, before going inside to meet him!

3. I didn’t discover that “Webb Marlowe” was a pseudonym for J. Francis McComas (Anthony Boucher’s future co-editor at F&SF) until after I had read the story.

4. Jabberwocky can be read here.

5. As noted in the review of the last issue, Catherine Moore was pregnant around this time: one wonders to what extent the observations about children (and the anxiety about them growing up different) were informed by this. There is no mention of any children on Moore’s Wikipedia page.

6. “The Silver Bloc” is described on this Google Books page.

7. This YouTube video explains how Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth over 2000 years ago.

8. There is information about the Texas/Oklahoma border dispute on this Texas State Historical Association page.

9. The Analytical Laboratory for this issue appeared in Astounding, April 1943:

I observed in a previous review that Lester del Rey’s Nerves got the first score of “1.00” I’d seen. In this lab there is the first “Special” I’ve seen, for Kuttner/Moore’s Mimsy Were the Borogoves. I wonder how many more, if any, of those there were?  ●

Edited 24th October 2108: minor changes to Neelan/Greer part of The Weapon Makers synopsis.