{"id":2273,"date":"2016-11-25T17:37:10","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T17:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=2273"},"modified":"2016-11-25T17:37:10","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T17:37:10","slug":"the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-10-october-1951","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=2273","title":{"rendered":"The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #10, October 1951"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fsf195110x600c\"<\/p>\n

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

Of Time and Third Avenue<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Alfred Bester \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nThe Gorge of the Churels<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by H. Russell Wakefield \u2665\u2665
\nThe Shape of Things That Came<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Richard Deming \u2665
\nAchilles Had His Heel <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 short story by Joseph H. Gage \u2665\u2665
\nThe Rag Thing<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Donald A. Wollheim [as by David Grinnell] \u2665\u2665
\nThe Cocoon<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Richard Brookbank \u2665
\nThe Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright] \u2665\u2665
\nBeasts of Bourbon<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt \u2665
\nJane Brown\u2019s Body<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novella by Cornell Woolrich \u2665
\nDress of White Silk<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Richard Matheson \u2665\u2665<\/p>\n

Half of this issue is taken up with Jane Brown\u2019s Body<\/em><\/strong>, a reprint novella by Cornell Woolrich (All-American Fiction<\/em>, March-April 1938), a response to reader demand for short stories with the odd longer novelette: the editors ask for feedback on this short-novel experiment.
\nTo begin with this is an intriguing and atmospherically written piece about a rather nervous Dr Denholt driving a car through the night with what would seem to be an unconscious young woman on the back seat:<\/p>\n

Three o\u2019clock in the morning. The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil-drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere behind a rise of ground.
\nTwo other, fiercer, whiter moons, set close together, suddenly top the rise, shoot a fan of blinding platinum far down ahead of them. Headlights. The humming burgeons into a roar. The touring car is going so fast it sways from side to side. The road is straight. The way is long. The night is short.<\/em> p.61-62<\/p>\n

The tension builds when he stops at a railway crossing and is observed by a man in the bus alongside, and once more as he almost runs out of fuel. He is then stopped by a policeman for speeding but talks his way out of it by explaining he is taking the woman on the back seat to a hospital. Eventually he reaches a remote house, and takes her to his laboratory\u00a0where he\u00a0gives her an injection in the back of her neck. It becomes apparent that she is dead and that he is trying to bring her back to life and, over the next few hours, he succeeds but all her memories and personality seem to have vanished leaving her with\u00a0the mind of a newly born child\u2026.
\nThis first part, although it is somewhat dated \u2018elixir of life\u2019 fiction, isn\u2019t actually that bad but matters rapidly take a turn for the worse. At the beginning of chapter three a new character is introduced called Penny O\u2019Shaughnessy, who has just crashed his aircraft near the doctor\u2019s house:<\/p>\n

Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn\u2019t roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn\u2019t bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through the clouds through which to spot something flat enough to come down on; he doesn\u2019t like bailing out anyway, hates to throw away a good plane.<\/em>
\nThis one lying all over the side of the mountain around him is not so good any more, he has to admit. The first thing he does is feel in his pocket, haul out a rabbit\u2019s foot, and stroke it twice. Then he straightens up, hobbles a short distance further from the wreck, turns to survey it. Almost instantly the lightning, which already stunned him once in the air, strikes a nearby tree with a bang and a shower of sparks. It cracks, comes down with a propeller-like whirr of foliage, and flattens what\u2019s left of his engine into the ground.
\n\u201cAll right, you don\u2019t like my crate.\u201d O\u2019Shaughnessy grumbles, with a back-arm swing at the elements in general. \u2018\u201cI believed you the first time!\u201d<\/em> p.72<\/p>\n

After making his way downhill he comes to a wire fence that triggers an alarm and brings a young woman to see what is happening. It is Nova, the woman that Dr Denholt brought back to life a couple of years earlier. He has a strange conversation where she reveals that she does not know what a telephone or aeroplane is. This is cut short when Denholt turns up to admit him to the house and tend his wounds.
\nFrom this point on it is mostly just pulp nonsense, and not even good pulp nonsense at that (multiple spoilers follow). O\u2019Shaughnessy hears from Nova about her repeated injections; the doctor tries to slip him a mickey but fails; O\u2019Shaughnessy proposes to Nova and they later escape.
\nThe plot becomes even more ludicrous once O\u2019Shaughnessy and Nova are in Chicago. O\u2019Shaughnessy is talking to a low-level mobster about a job that involves locating some stashed loot from the air, and the former recounts a tale of the death\u00a0of a young girl who was with their now imprisoned boss when he hid the money. She was being interrogated about where he had hidden it before she committed suicide. When Nova appears he is badly startled and leaves. Subsequently, persons unknown try to get hold of Nova\u2014she is the gangster\u2019s ex-moll!
\nThis is followed by yet another daft subplot that involves a Chinese man fortuitously turning up as the couple are just about to go on the run: he offers O\u2019Shaughnessy a job for a Chinese warlord, so the pair of the them end up in Shanghai after much (inaccurate) gunplay during their escape from Chicago.
\nThe final section involves O\u2019Shaughnessy coming home after several weeks away to find out that the lack of injections has finally had an effect on Nova. He discovers this when they go out to a restaurant and he tries to put a huge diamond ring he has bought on her finger:<\/p>\n

He takes the three-thousand-dollar ring out of his pocket, blows on it, shows it to her. \u201cTake off your glove, honey, and Iemme see how this headlight looks on your finger\u2014\u201d
\nHer face is a white, anguished mask. He reaches toward her right hand. \u201cGo ahead, take the glove off.\u201d
\nThe tense, frightened way she snatches it back out of his reach gives her away. He tumbles. The smile slowly leaves his face. \u201cWhat\u2019s the matter don\u2019t you want my ring? You trying to cover up something with those gloves? You fixed your hair with them on, you powdered your nose with them on\u2014 What\u2019s under them? Take \u2018em off, let me see.\u201d
\n\u201cNo, O\u2019Shaughnessy. No!\u201d
\nHis voice changes. \u201cI\u2019m your husband, Nova. Take off those gloves and let me see your hands!\u201d
\nShe looks around her agonized. \u201cNot here, O\u2019Shaughnessy! Oh, not here!\u201d
\nShe sobs deep in her throat, even as she struggles with one glove. Her eyes are wet, pleading. \u201cOne more night, give me one more night,\u201d she whispers brokenly. \u201cYou\u2019re leaving Shanghai again in such a little while.
\nDon\u2019t ask to see my hands. O\u2019Shaughnessy, if you love me …\u201d
\nThe glove comes off, flops loosely over, and there\u2019s suddenly horror beating into his brain, smashing, pounding, battering. He reels a little in his chair, has to hold onto the edge of the table with both hands, at the impact of it.
\nA clawlike thing\u2014two of the finger extremities already bare of flesh as far as the second joint; two more with only shriveled, bloodless, rotting remnants of it adhering, only the thumb intact, and that already unhealthy looking, flabby. A dead hand\u2014the hand of a skeleton\u2014on a still-living body. A body he was dancing with only a few minutes ago.
\nA rank odor, a smell of decay, of the grave and of the tomb, hovers about the two of them now.
\nA woman points from the next table, screams. She\u2019s seen it, too. She hides her face, cowers against her companion\u2019s shoulder, shudders. Then he sees it too. His collar\u2019s suddenly too tight for him.
\nOthers see it, one by one. A wave of impalpable horror spreads centrifugally from that thing lying there in the blazing electric light on O\u2019Shaughnessy\u2019s table. The skeleton at the feast!<\/em> p.107-108<\/p>\n

As you can probably gather the remainder of the story picks up considerably as it continues\u00a0in an\u00a0equally entertaining and ghastly manner. They head back to the States to seek help from Dr Denholt, although only after O\u2019Shaughnessy\u00a0decides to sell his aeroplane and book passage on a steamship that is going to take several weeks to return home. Not the smartest of decisions, but this course of action provides scenes such as this one, which occurs after the rest of the ship have discovered her condition:<\/p>\n

Days pass. The story has circulated now, and turned the ship into a buzzing beehive of curiosity. People find excuses to go by her on the deck, just so they can turn and stare. O\u2019Shaughnessy overhears two men bet that she won\u2019t reach Frisco alive. She tries to smoke a cigarette through the lips of the mask one afternoon, to buoy up his spirits a little. Smoke comes out of her hair-line, under her chin, before her ears. A steward drops a loaded bouillon-tray at the sight of her. Nova stays in her cabin after that.<\/em> p.112<\/p>\n

Unfortunately these lurid developments are too little too late for what is\u00a0mostly a hard-boiled gangster story. I have no idea what the Boucher and McComas were thinking of in resurrecting this: it would perhaps be of some passing interest in a late-thirties pulp for its initial and final sections but it is completely out of place in an early 1950\u2019s F&SF<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Apart from one notable exception that I\u2019ll come to at the end, the rest of the fiction isn\u2019t up to much either, the majority of it passing\u00a0notions that have been written down as opposed to proper stories.
\nThe Gorge of the Churels<\/em><\/strong> by H. Russell Wakefield is a story about a couple in Imperial India going for a picnic with their child and man servant. Before they go their man-servant attempts to dissuade them, stating that the location gets its name from the spirits of women who have died in childbirth and who attempt to steal living children to ease their pain. You can probably tell what happens once they get there making this far too straightforward a tale, but at least it is an atmospheric one with a good sense of place.
\nThe Shape of Things That Came<\/em><\/strong> by Richard Deming is a story set in 1900 that concerns a writer who has written a story set fifty years in the future after using his scientist uncle\u2019s time-travelling nightshirt! He is told by his editor that the story\u00a0is unbelievable, and there is a weak twist ending (spoiler) involving a parallel Napoleonic world.
\nAchilles Had His Heel <\/em><\/strong>by Joseph H. Gage is a western tale that tells of what happens when the Ferryman from the Styx passes through a ranch and leaves some of the river\u2019s water behind. One of the ranch hands later becomes \u2018intolerable,\u2019 immune to knives and bullets, etc., until he plays in a card game and becomes over-amused that is…. Not a bad twist on the Achilles\u2019 heel idea.
\nThe Rag Thing<\/em><\/strong> by Donald A. Wollheim is an example of one the notional pieces I referred to above with its straightforward story about a dirty rag stuck down the back of a radiator that comes to life. This is all a bit unlikely but for whatever reason I thought this was OK.
\nThe Cocoon<\/em><\/strong> by Richard Brookbank is an odd story about a Captain who bales out over a planet and is imprisoned by alien cocoon makers. He is subsequently liberated by one of his lieutenants, and the events leading up to all this are recounted as they travel back to the latter\u2019s ship. Apart from the fact that I didn\u2019t get the ending (spoiler) where the captain leaves to return to the cocoon makers, there is other stuff in here that doesn\u2019t seem germane to the story\u00a0(the Captain\u2019s relationship with his wife features, as well as a woman that the lieutenant is going to marry).
\nThe Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles<\/em><\/strong> by Margaret St. Clair is another of her pseudonomyous \u2018Idris Seabright\u2019 stories, and is an odd story about a man who attempts to sell rope to the gnoles\u2014strange Jerusalem-artichoke shaped beings with tentacles\u2014and who makes a serious error of judgement in\u00a0what he attempts to take in payment.
\nBeasts of Bourbon<\/em><\/strong> by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is another dreary \u2018Gavagan\u2019s Bar\u2019 tale. This one is about a man who brings strange animals into existence when he drinks too much. There is a chase or two down to the bar in an attempt to escape them, and a later section where a love-interest sketches the animals after a ship-wreck but that\u2019s it. This is fairly typical of the \u2018bar format\u2019 story: come up with a half-baked idea or notion, drop it into the template, don\u2019t bother developing it: cheque please.
\nDress of White Silk<\/em><\/strong> by Richard Matheson has an introduction where the editors state that his Born of Man and Woman<\/em> (F&SF<\/em>, Summer 1950) is the most popular story they have printed to date. Coincidentally this story is also written in an odd style, the narrator again a young child.
\nShe tells of her deceased mother and her white dress. When the child is caught in her mother\u2019s room playing with the dress her grandmother says she must not do that or go into the room. Later, a friend comes to play (spoiler) and the pair end up in the room, unpack the dress and the visiting child dies. It was not entirely clear to me what happened, some type of vampirism or possession possibly?<\/p>\n

The one saving grace of the entire issue is Of Time and Third Avenue<\/em><\/strong> by Alfred Bester. This is one of the first of a remarkable run of stories that this writer would produce in the 1950s (while also producing two classic novels, The Demolished Man<\/em> and Tiger! Tiger!\/The Stars My Destination<\/em>).1<\/sup>
\nA man claiming to be from the future arranges to meet Oliver Wright in a bar and attempts to convince him to hand over an almanac he has bought. Wright hasn\u2019t yet realised it is from forty years in the future. The actual story from there on is fairly straightforward, although it has a clever ending, and there are hints of the sophistication and slickness Bester would bring to his later stories. Bester has his time-traveller speak a linguistically odd version of English:<\/p>\n

\u201cMQ, Mr. Macy,\u201d the stranger said in a staccato voice. \u201cVery good. For rental of this backroom including exclusive utility for one chronos\u2014\u201d
\n\u2018\u2018One whatos?\u201d Macy asked nervously.
\n\u201cChronos. The incorrect word? Oh yes. Excuse me. One hour.\u201d
\n\u201cYou\u2019re a foreigner,\u201d Macy said. \u2018\u2018What\u2019s your name\u2014? I bet it\u2019s Russian.\u201d
\n\u201cNo. Not foreign,\u201d the stranger answered. His frightening eyes whipped around the backroom. \u201cIdentify me as Boyne.\u201d
\n\u201cBoyne!\u201d Macy echoed incredulously.
\n\u201cMQ, Boyne.\u201d Mr. Boyne opened a wallet like an accordion, ran his fingers through various colored papers and coins, then withdrew a hundred-dollar bill. He jabbed it at Macy and said: \u201cRental fee for one hour. As
\nagreed. One hundred dollars. Take it and go.\u201d
\nImpelled by the thrust of Boyne\u2019s eye\u2019s Macy took the bill and staggered out to the bar. Over his shoulder he quavered: \u201cWhat\u2019ll you drink?\u201d
\n\u201cDrink? Alcohol? Never!\u201d Boyne answered.<\/em> p.3-4<\/p>\n

As to the non-fiction, this month\u2019s Cover<\/em><\/strong> is one of George Salter\u2019s poorer efforts. There is a short editorial note, Larroes catch philologists<\/em><\/strong>, commenting on inconclusive reader correspondence about the meaning of the word \u2018larroes\u2019 (they should have googled it like I did last issue), and in Recommended Reading<\/em><\/strong> they have this to say about a handful of anthologies:<\/p>\n

The Conklin <\/em>[Possible Worlds of Science Fiction] and the Crossen <\/em>[Adventures In Tomorrow] are musts, and the Derleth <\/em>[Far Boundaries] and the Leinster <\/em>[Great Stories of Science Fiction] recommended for any science fiction bookshelf. The fifth recent anthology is Donald A. Wollheim\u2019s <\/em>Every Boy\u2019s Book of Science Fiction (Fell), of which we\u2019ll say only that no boy of ours is going to be introduced to this noble field by means of archaic and subliterate pap.<\/em> p.58<\/p>\n

Somewhat unfortunate given (a) Wollheim had a (pseudonymous) story in the issue and (b) the Cornell novella in this issue (don\u2019t throw bricks at people from inside a greenhouse). They go on to cover a lot of other books (twenty titles in total!)<\/p>\n

A disappointing issue, notable only for the story by Alfred Bester.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The story in this issue was one of a baker\u2019s dozen of stories that Alfred Bester published in three periods of activity between the early fifties and the mid-sixties:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The Devil\u2019s Invention <\/em>(variant title Oddy and Id)<\/em>, Astounding<\/em> (August 1950)
    \nOf Time and Third Avenue<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (October 1951)
    \nHobson\u2019s Choice<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (August 1952)
    \nThe Roller Coaster<\/em>, Fantastic<\/em> (May\/June 1953)
    \nStar Light, Star Bright<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (July 1953)
    \nTime Is the Traitor<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (September 1953)
    \nDisappearing Act<\/em>, Star Science Fiction Stories #2<\/em>, ed. Frederik Pohl (Ballantine, 1953)
    \n5,271,009<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (March 1954)
    \nFondly Fahrenheit<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (August 1954)
    \nThe Men Who Murdered Mohammed<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (October 1958)
    \nWill You Wait?<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (Mar 1959)
    \nThe Pi Man<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (October 1959)
    \nThey Don\u2019t Make Life Like They Used To<\/em>, F&SF<\/em> (October 1963)<\/p>\n

    The reason that nearly all these appeared in F&SF<\/em>\u2014Galaxy<\/em> got both the novels\u2014may have had something to do with an editorial meeting that Bester had with John W. Campbell of Astounding<\/em> after the latter wanted revisions to Oddy and Id<\/em>, as recounted in his essay My Affair With Science Fiction<\/em> in Hell\u2019s Cartographers<\/em>, ed. Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss:<\/p>\n

    \u201cI wrote a few stories for Astounding<\/em>, and out of that came my one demented meeting with the great John W. Campbell, Jr. I needn\u2019t preface this account with the reminder that I worshipped Campbell from afar. I had never met him; all my stories had been submitted by mail. I hadn\u2019t the faintest idea of what he was like, but I imagined that he was a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford. So I sent off another story to Campbell, one which no show would let me tackle. The title was \u2018Oddy and Id\u2019 and the concept was Freudian, that a man is not governed by his conscious mind but rather by his unconscious compulsions. Campbell telephoned me a week later to say that he liked the story but wanted to discuss a few changes with me. Would I come to his office? I was delighted to accept the invitation despite the fact that the editorial offices of Astounding<\/em> were then the hell and gone out in the boondocks of New Jersey.
    \nThe editorial offices were in a grim factory that looked like and probably was a printing plant. The \u2018offices\u2019 turned out to be one small office, cramped, dingy, occupied not only by Campbell but by his assistant, Miss Tarrant. My only yardstick for comparison was the glamourous network and advertising agency offices. I was dismayed.
    \nCampbell arose from his desk and shook hands. I\u2019m a fairly big guy but he looked enormous to me, about the size of a defensive tackle. He was dour and seemed preoccupied by matters of great moment. He sat down behind his desk. I sat down on the visitor\u2019s chair.
    \n\u2018You don\u2019t know it,\u2019 Campbell said, \u2018you can\u2019t have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished.\u2019
    \nI stared. \u2018If you mean the rival schools of psychiatry, Mr Campbell, I think\u2014\u2018
    \n\u2018No I don\u2019t. Psychiatry, as we know it, is dead.\u2019
    \n\u2018Oh come now, Mr Campbell. Surely you\u2019re joking.\u2019
    \n\u2018I have never been more serious in my life. Freud has been destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time.\u2019 \u2018What\u2019s that?\u2019
    \n\u2018Dianetics.\u2019
    \n\u2018I never heard of it.\u2019
    \n\u2018It was discovered by L. Ron Hubbard, and he will win the Nobel peace prize for it,\u2019 Campbell said solemnly.
    \nThe peace prize? What for?\u2019
    \n\u2018Wouldn\u2019t the man who wiped out war win the Nobel peace prize?\u2019
    \n\u2018I suppose so, but how?\u2019
    \n\u2018Through dianetics.\u2019
    \n\u2018I honestly don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about, Mr Campbell.\u2019
    \n\u2018Read this,\u2019 he said, and handed me a sheaf of long galley proofs. They were, I discovered later, the galleys of the very first dianetics piece to appear in Astounding<\/em>.
    \n\u2018Read them here and now? This is an awful lot of copy.\u2019
    \nHe nodded, shuffled some papers, spoke to Miss Tarrant and went about his business, ignoring me. I read the first galley carefully, the second not so carefully as I became bored by the dianetics mishmash. Finally I was just letting my eyes wander along, but was very careful to allow enough time for each galley so Campbell wouldn\u2019t know I was faking. He looked very shrewd and observant to me. After a sufficient time I stacked the galleys neatly and returned them to Campbell\u2019s desk.
    \n\u2018Well?\u2019 he demanded. \u2018Will Hubbard win the peace prize?\u2019
    \n\u2018It\u2019s difficult to say. Dianetics is a most original and imaginative idea, but I\u2019ve only been able to read through the piece once. If I could take a set of galleys home and\u2014\u2019
    \n\u2018No,\u2019 Campbell said. \u2018There\u2019s only this one set. I\u2019m rescheduling and pushing the article into the very next issue, it\u2019s that important.\u2019 He handed the galleys to Miss Tarrant. You\u2019re blocking it,\u2019 he told me. \u2018That\u2019s all right. Most people do that when a new idea threatens to overturn their thinking.\u2019
    \n\u2018That may well be,\u2019 I said, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s true of myself. I\u2019m a hyperthyroid, an intellectual monkey, curious about everything.\u2019
    \n\u2018No,\u2019 Campbell said, with the assurance of a diagnostician, You\u2019re a hyp-O-thyroid. But it\u2019s not a question of intellect, it\u2019s one of emotion. We conceal our emotional history from ourselves although dianetics can trace our history all the way back to the womb.\u2019
    \n\u2018To the womb!\u2019
    \n\u2018Yes. The foetus remembers. Come and have lunch.\u2019 Remember, I was fresh from Madison Avenue and expense-account luncheons. We didn\u2019t go to the Jersey equivalent of Sardi\u2019s, \u201821\u2019, or even P. J. Clark\u2019s. He led me downstairs and we entered a tacky little lunchroom crowded with printers and file clerks; an interior room with blank walls that made every sound reverberate. I got myself a liverwurst on white, no mustard, and a coke. I can\u2019t remember what Campbell ate.
    \nWe sat down at a small table while he continued to discourse on dianetics, the great salvation of the future when the world would at last be cleared of its emotional wounds. Suddenly he stood up and towered over me. \u2018You can drive your memory back to the womb,\u2019 he said. \u2018You can do it if you release every block, clear yourself and remember. Try it.\u2019
    \n\u2018Now?\u2019
    \n\u2018Now. Think. Think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You\u2019ve never stopped hating her for it.\u2019
    \nAround me there were cries of \u2018BLT down, hold the mayo. Eighty-six on the English. Combo rye, relish. Coffee shake, pick up.\u2019 And here was this grim tackle standing over me, practising dianetics without a licence. The scene was so lunatic that I began to tremble with suppressed laughter. I prayed. \u2018Help me out of this, please. Don\u2019t let me laugh in his face. Show me a way out.\u2019 God showed me. I looked up at Campbell and said, \u2018You\u2019re absolutely right, Mr Campbell, but the emotional wounds are too much to bear. I can\u2019t go on with this.\u2019
    \nHe was completely satisfied. \u2018Yes, I could see you were shaking.\u2019 He sat down again and we finished our lunch and returned to his office. It developed that the only changes he wanted in my story was the removal of all Freudian terms which dianetics had now made obsolete. I agreed, of course; they were minor and it was a great honour to appear in Astounding<\/em> no matter what the price. I escaped at last and returned to civilization where I had three double gibsons and don\u2019t be stingy with the onions.
    \nThat was my one and only meeting with John Campbell and certainly my only story conference with him. I\u2019ve had some wild ones in the entertainment business but nothing to equal that. It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles. Perhaps that\u2019s the price that must be paid for brilliance.\u201d p.57-60<\/p>\n    \"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Galactic Central link ISFDB link Of Time and Third Avenue \u2022 short story by Alfred Bester \u2665\u2665\u2665 The Gorge of the Churels \u2022 short story by H. Russell Wakefield \u2665\u2665 The Shape of Things That Came \u2022 short story by Richard Deming \u2665 Achilles Had His Heel \u2022 short story by Joseph H. Gage \u2665\u2665 […]<\/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":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasy-and-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-AF","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273","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=2273"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2313,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273\/revisions\/2313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}