{"id":2045,"date":"2016-10-07T11:41:31","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T11:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=2045"},"modified":"2016-10-07T11:41:31","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T11:41:31","slug":"science-fiction-monthly-v03n02-february-1976","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=2045","title":{"rendered":"Science Fiction Monthly v03n02, February 1976"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sfmv03n02x600\"<\/p>\n

Galactic Central link<\/a>
\nISFDB link<\/a><\/p>\n

Fiction:
\nSadim\u2019s Touch<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Kenneth Harker \u2665
\nBrother\u2019s Keeper<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Anthony Peacey \u2665<\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nZenya<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 cover by Frank Kelly Freas
\nInterior artwork<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Chris Foss, John Storey, Frank Kelly Freas, John Higgins
\nEditorial<\/em><\/strong>
\nOn the Way to the Stars: Part Four: Galactic Empires<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by Peter Weston
\nThe Artist in Science Fiction: Frank Kelly Freas<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by Sandra Miesel
\nFrank Kelly Freas: The Artist in his Studio<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by Sandra Miesel
\nSF TV Review: The Invisible Man<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by John Brosnan
\nSF in the Cinema: Bug<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by John Brosnan
\nMusic and Science Fiction<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Maxim Jakubowski
\nNews<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Julie Davis
\nLetters <\/em><\/strong>
\nThe Query Box<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]<\/p>\n

Of the half dozen issues of Science Fiction Monthly<\/em> that I bought I think this one has the most memorable cover (although a few of the others run it a very close second). I don\u2019t know if my teenage self appreciated the symbolism on an intellectual level, but I\u2019m pretty sure I got the message.<\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t much in the way of fiction in this issue as the first story, Sadim\u2019s Touch<\/em><\/strong> by Kenneth Harker, is a fairly long piece (approx. 8,500 words). The story starts with Bannerman, a down-and-nearly-out science columnist for a newspaper, and a scientist called Moncrief, who has developed a device that can let you see a short time, microseconds, into the future. Bannerman provides Moncreif with the funds for further development and starts to experiment with the device. Moncreif shows Bannerman that the device is set to look a fraction of a second\u00a0into the future as he believes that a short term edge is all that is needed to improve the user\u2019s confidence. Bannerman, against Moncrief\u2019s advice, starts looking seconds along multiple time tracks into the future.
\nUp to this point it is a conceptually and philosophically intriguing piece but unfortunately it goes downhill from there as Bannerman (spoiler) slips across \u2018time tracks\u2019 to a future where Moncrief is swindling him. Bannerman subsequently kills the scientist\u00a0and then finds he is in a time track where he is a mental patient. This all rather shakes the story to bits.<\/p>\n

Brother\u2019s Keeper<\/em><\/strong> by Anthony Peacey gets off to a good start with its opening paragraph:<\/p>\n

Matz looked sideways at Jorvin, that lumpish head inches away to the right who shared the shoulders, shared all of the muscular, skin-clad body with him. Jorvin was intent upon the goat in the verdant, shut-in space between the stained cliffs of dead buildings with their rows of empty, black eye-sockets. They needed the goat. They had quenched the thirst of the dust bowl in a sewer where the water ran sweet after a couple of centuries of winter rains; but their hunger remained.<\/em> p.26<\/p>\n

There is a lot going on there: the description of the mutant brothers, the post-holocaust setting, and the push-pull comment about the sewer. Unfortunately the rest is a fairly derivative, and brutal, tale of their subsequent encounter with a young girl and, later, a group of marauding \u2018norms.\u2019 The ending (spoiler) where the good brother\u2019s head grows back after the bad brother has hacked it off might have worked for a horror story but doesn\u2019t really do so for this SF one.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the non-fiction space is taken up by Sandra Miesel with a couple of articles on the featured artist. The Artist in Science Fiction: Frank Kelly Freas<\/em><\/strong> is a short introduction to Freas\u2019s work and, although I knew he was a popular and successful artist, I wasn\u2019t aware that he had (at the time of writing) won nine<\/u> Hugo Awards, nor that he did so much work for NASA (including designing the mission patch for the Skylab 1 crew at the request of the astronauts). The Artist in Science Fiction: Frank Kelly Freas<\/em><\/strong> is a longer, more detailed article about how Freas physically creates his work, although it does have other interesting snippets:<\/p>\n

At the beginning of a career getting work can be more difficult than doing it. The first portfolio Freas submitted to John Campbell was a masterpiece of neophyte\u00a0pretension\u00a0consisting of expensively contrived\u00a0mockups of <\/em>Astounding pages. It was returned to him scorched by Campbell\u2019s wrath. Only after several humbling years in the pulps (when the train fare to a magazine office might equal the fee earned there) did he dare approach Campbell again. This meeting soon led to his first <\/em>ASF cover, <\/em>The Gulf Between, which Freas still counts among his special favourites. The painting shows a giant robot beseeching Someone to heal the mortally-injured human he holds in his hand. This sombre and innovative illustration ignited the artist\u2019s career in sf.<\/em> p.18<\/p>\n

Work involving people requires simple costuming and appropriate models. Freas enlists family (his daughter posed for <\/em>A Womanly Talent; the boy in <\/em>Second Kind of Loneliness resembles his son), friends, and even total strangers in this enterprise. So indefatigable is he in the pursuit of interesting faces\u2014restaurants are favoured hunting grounds\u2014that an American fan has written a song warning people to\u00a0stay alert in the artist\u2019s presence lest \u2018when you wake up, you\u2019re on the front of <\/em>Analog\u2019 (this clever fellow appears on the cover for <\/em>Renegades of Time). Freas also impresses himself into service as a model occasionally. He can grimace and wave a blaster convincingly (as for <\/em>Your Haploid Heart) but finds comic roles more congenial: the hairless, green voyeur in <\/em>Martians, Go Home! and the battered lion-man in <\/em>Pandora\u2019s Planet.<\/em> p.19<\/p>\n

Some of the covers mentioned above lead me neatly to the one criticism that I have concerning\u00a0the selection of Freas\u2019s artwork for inclusion. According to the editorial page Freas selected the paintings himself, but they lean too heavily on earlier work with six out of the nine pieces coming from the Planet Stories<\/em> era. It would have been nice to see a couple of better known works in amongst these, e.g. The Gulf Between<\/em>, Martians Go Home!<\/em>, The Second Kind of Loneliness<\/em>, etc.1<\/sup>
\nThe rest of the non-fiction is the usual Science Fiction Monthly<\/em> mix. On the Way to the Stars: Part Four: Galactic Empires<\/em><\/strong> by Peter Weston is an interesting article about Galactic Empires but it depressed me that I\u2019ve read so few of the stories and novels listed (I\u2019ve read some of Eric Frank Russell\u2019s work, but not And Then There Were None<\/em>, and I\u2019ve not read anything by H. Beam Piper).
\nJohn Brosnan\u2019s SF TV Reviews<\/em><\/strong> and SF in the Cinema<\/em><\/strong> cover the 70\u2019s TV program The Invisible Man<\/em> and the movie Bug<\/em>, both of which sound like\u00a0poor fare. Music and Science Fiction<\/em><\/strong> by Maxim Jakubowski provides a lukewarm review of Red Octopus<\/em> by Jefferson Starship. There is a tiny News<\/em><\/strong> column by Julie Davis, a ho-hum The Query Box<\/em><\/strong> by Walter Gillings, and a Letters<\/em><\/strong> column that includes missives from two moaning Scots:<\/p>\n

I remember someone writing in saying how prophetic sf was and how it was the literature of the future. I also remember that I was planning a long letter deriding this and asking you to refrain from printing such rubbish in SFM again.
\nI\u2019m scared stiff by reading books, newspapers and magazines which make it obvious to me that we\u2019re half way there already! Looking more deeply into the problem it also becomes clear that modern science is the cause. It\u2019s dragging morality through the gutter and spitting in its face. Sex and love have gained different meanings, marriage is old-fashioned, God is non-existent. Test-tube babies, abortion, birth control, artificial preservation of life, sex before marriage, artificial insemination, parthenogenesis, transplants, transfusions, sterilisation, mechanical hearts and organs, sex changes,\u00a0etc,\u00a0abound everywhere. If you believe that any of these are perfectly natural then it just shows how you\u2019ve been conditioned by society to accept them. <\/em>Ian Garbutt (Torbrex, Stirling) p.28<\/p>\n

I have this month (October) cancelled my order for SFM for the following reasons:
\n(1) The magazine should be retitled Science Fantasy Monthly due to the fact that I like my science fiction to be reasonably believable. The recent fiction in the magazine would appear to be the product of disturbed imaginations.
\n(2) There are far too many articles on authors and books.
\n(3) The posters were excellent to begin with but now they have deteriorated into pure rubbish.
\n(4) Who needs comic strips?
\nI know of at least two other people in my area who have recently cancelled the magazine for the same reasons. David Quinney (Clackmannanshire, Central Scotland)<\/em> p.28<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure what the point of publishing either of these is. The first appears to have more\u00a0to do with his personal political views than SF; the second has a point about the deterioration in artwork quality but the rest of it just seems to deny the magazine\u2019s identity.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, quite a lacklustre issue.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Here are the nine paintings\u00a0used for the feature, bar the cover (they could have squeezed in another two if they had left out the double-page Foss on the inner front\/back cover):
    \n\"sfmv03n02freasx600\"
    \nMy favourites are the cover and the these three:
    \n\"sfmv03n02i1x600\"
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    Galactic Central link ISFDB link Fiction: Sadim\u2019s Touch \u2022 novelette by Kenneth Harker \u2665 Brother\u2019s Keeper \u2022 short story by Anthony Peacey \u2665 Non-fiction: Zenya \u2022 cover by Frank Kelly Freas Interior artwork \u2022 Chris Foss, John Storey, Frank Kelly Freas, John Higgins Editorial On the Way to the Stars: Part Four: Galactic Empires \u2022 […]<\/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":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction-monthly"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-wZ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045","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=2045"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2059,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2045\/revisions\/2059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}