{"id":129,"date":"2015-12-20T17:21:37","date_gmt":"2015-12-20T17:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=129"},"modified":"2023-10-21T17:57:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T17:57:29","slug":"sf-digest-1-1976","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=129","title":{"rendered":"SF Digest #1, 1976"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SFDigestx600\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fiction:
\nTrading Post<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 short story by Michael G. Coney ♥♥
\nIn the House of Double Minds<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 reprint short story by Robert Silverberg ♥♥
\nThe Junk Shop<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 short story by John Bronsan ♥
\nLast Orders<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 short story by Brian W. Aldiss ♥♥♥
\nThe Second Generation<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 short story by Rachel Pollock ♥♥<\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nCover<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0\u2022 \u00a0David Bergen
\nInterior Artwork<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0\u2022 \u00a0Tim White, John Higgins, Andrew Stephenson, Christos Kondeatis,
\nGuest Editorial: SF on Screen<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 essay by John Brunner
\nA Consumer Guide to Science Fiction of Robert A. Heinlein<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 by Maxim Jakubowski
\nThe Unimaginable Future with Dr Christopher Evans<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 interview by Peter Linnett
\nPull-out Poster<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0\u2022 David Bergen
\nWhat Are They Doing Now?<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 news column by Maxim Jakubowski
\nScience Fiction Super Quiz<\/strong><\/em>
\nSF Digest Questionnaire<\/strong><\/em>
\nNews<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 by Maxim Jakubowski
\nA Consumer Guide to Science Fiction of Issac Asimov<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 by Maxim Jakubowski
\nA Consumer Guide to Science Fiction of A. E. van Vogt<\/strong><\/em> \u2022 by Maxim Jakubowski<\/p>\n

Well, here’s a magazine we don’t discuss every day… I suspect it will be not that well known to British and Commonwealth readers and virtually unknown to those in the States and elsewhere. This title, which was announced as a replacement for the large size Science Fiction Monthly<\/em> poster magazine, was something of an oddity in that (a) it wasn’t a digest\u00a0\u2014\u00a0SFE describes it as ‘small A4’ \u2014 and (b) it was DOA.1<\/sup> New English Library, a book publisher, had decided to get out of magazine publishing about the time this appeared so there were no further issues. A pity: although nothing in this is particularly noteworthy in this issue, it could have become something worthwhile, but more of that later.<\/p>\n

The five pieces of fiction are OK pro-level stuff with the exception of the squib by John Bronsan: The Junk Shop<\/strong><\/em> is one of those universe-in- a-bottle-in-a-junk-shop stories that should have been left in the slush pile, and probably would have been if Bronsan hadn’t been a regular non-fiction contributor to Science Fiction Monthly<\/em>. Apart from the naff idea at the core of this, the dialogue sounds odd.2<\/sup> Can I suggest that if Sturgeon’s first law is ‘Ninety per cent of everything is crap’ his second law should be ‘Ninety-nine per cent of all short-shorts are crap’?<\/p>\n

The rest of the fiction includes Michael G. Coney’s Trading Post<\/strong><\/em>, which involves Rodney Black (the narrator), Trader Jack and an alien called Bo-8 who run an antiquated cartwheel space station as a business. They are left with some strange freight (the maguffin) and are subsequently overrun with refugees and pirates. All ends well. This has the feel of a series story and is pleasant enough, but the motion of cogs and wheels rotating is obvious in a way that it wasn’t in his better work. With the likes of The Girl with the Symphony in her Fingers<\/em> (Galaxy,<\/em>\u00a0January 1974) and The Cinderella Machine<\/em> (F&SF,<\/em>\u00a0August 1976) you weren’t aware of the mechanisms till they snapped shut at the last line and took your fingers off.<\/p>\n

Robert Silverberg’s In the House of Double Minds<\/strong><\/em> is an unacknowledged reprint of a story from Vertex<\/em> (June 1974). It tells of a group of future children who have the left and right halves of their brains separated before their training as oracles. One of the children, Runild, starts behaving erratically and becomes a problem for the institution. This is fine as far as it goes but it rather peters out at the end and reads like the first part of a longer work.<\/p>\n

Last Orders<\/strong><\/em> by Brian Aldiss is an apocalyptic tale of a shattered moon causing the destruction of the Earth and the evacuation of the population. One of the rescue workers finds a couple in a bar but they never get beyond having one more drink for the road… I found the nihilism of this more attractive than when I first read it many years ago and it is probably the best of the issue.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is Rachel Pollock’s The Second Generation<\/strong><\/em>, which has a teenage boy and girl popping pills to change sex, something commonplace in the future world they live in. One of them subsequently changes into an intersex person, gets frightened and eventually changes back: end of story. OK, but I couldn’t really see the point.<\/p>\n

As for the non-fiction, there is an editorial by John Brunner, which (rightly) bemoans the standard of film and TV SF of the time, and an interview with Dr Chris Evans by Peter Linnett (it is like reading an interview with Ballard: you can see how they became friends). There is a quiz and several pieces of colour artwork \u2014 the magazine is part coated and part uncoated stock \u2014 including quite a good Tim White space scene for the Micheal Coney story.\u00a0 The centre pages contain an almost A3 size poster of the cover.3<\/sup> There are also several non-fiction items by Maxim Jakubowski: a news page, a What Are They Doing Now?<\/strong><\/em> page that tells of forthcoming material from writers4<\/sup> and three Consumer Guides<\/strong><\/em> to Asimov, Heinlein and Van Vogt.<\/p>\n

The Consumer Guides<\/strong><\/em> fascinated me in 1976 and still do today. What we have in these guides5<\/sup> is basically a grid with the books of the respective author down the left hand column and a list of various critics\/reviewers along the top.\u00a0The body of the table is a matrix of star ratings. Higher rated works are at the top, and lower at the bottom. I am sure all reviewers are horrified at something so simplistic but it is reader gold!
\nThere were several things that I found intriguing about this feature: first off, you get the wisdom of the masses in one glance. Alternatively you can follow an individual critic or reviewer.6<\/sup>
\nOther things stand out: M. John Harrison has read only a little more Heinlein than me (not much) and seems to have hated most of it. Andy Ellsmore likes nearly everything! The final observation I would make is that just because something is hailed as a classic you may only be hearing from the people that liked it and not from the ones who didn’t (both MJH and Peter Weston hated The World of Null-A<\/em>).<\/p>\n

To conclude, I think this might have been quite an interesting magazine given time, a few more pages, bimonthly schedule and perhaps a letter column. The connective tissue supplied by Maxim Jakubowski certainly pulls it up a notch or two.<\/p>\n

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          1. It is 202mm by 276mm (7.9″ by 10.8″). A4 is 210mm by 297mm. It is actually ‘B5 Extra’ size, 201mm by 276mm. Yes, I vanished down an Internet black hole there for a few minutes\u2026<\/li>\n
          2. I originally criticised this for being by a British writer using a faux-American accent until it was pointed out that Baxter is Australian. Oops, I think I knew that once.<\/li>\n
          3. David Bergen’s cover for Harry Harrison’s In Our Hands, The Stars<\/em>.<\/li>\n
          4. I shamelessly ripped off this idea for a BSFA Matrix<\/em> magazine column in the late ’70s.\u00a0This column refers to three subsequently unpublished works by Langdon Jones. As far as I know they still haven’t appeared. Pity: I didn’t always get his work but liked The Garden of Delights<\/em>, The Great Clock<\/em>, etc. enough to seek it out.<\/li>\n
          5. Here is an example:
            \n\"SFDigest3x1024\"<\/a>
            \nI would so love\u00a0to see the publication of a book of these things covering, say, the top 100 SF writers.<\/li>\n
          6. Yes, I know. I looked at Amazon ratings: not the same, the spread of average scores is a lot tighter, and you can’t easily track one reviewer’s scores. At the time I used the high rating of Double Star<\/em> in these guides to pick it as the next Heinlein to read after Glory Road<\/em> and the half of Stranger in a Strange Land<\/em> I had managed. My bubble was punctured when my response to that novel was lukewarm. Now I look at the matrix and see that John Clute (or at least the John Clute of 1976) seems to have the closest rating response to what I have read of Heinlein so far. Consequently, The Puppet Masters<\/em> or The Star Beast<\/em> is next for me.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

            Fiction: Trading Post \u2022 short story by Michael G. Coney ♥♥ In the House of Double Minds \u2022 reprint short story by Robert Silverberg ♥♥ The Junk Shop \u2022 short story by John Bronsan ♥ Last Orders \u2022 short story by Brian W. Aldiss ♥♥♥ The Second Generation \u2022 short story by Rachel Pollock ♥♥ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sf-digest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-25","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14886,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/14886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}