{"id":767,"date":"2016-01-28T15:46:16","date_gmt":"2016-01-28T15:46:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=767"},"modified":"2020-02-09T18:46:14","modified_gmt":"2020-02-09T18:46:14","slug":"unknown-v03n03-may-1940","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=767","title":{"rendered":"Unknown v03n03, May 1940"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Unknown194005x600\"<\/p>\n

Other Reviews:
\nFred Smith:\u00a0Once There Was A Magazine\u2014<\/em><\/a>\u00a0p.19-20.<\/p>\n

Fiction:
\nThe Roaring Trumpet<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novella by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥♥♥♥
\nMad Hatter<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Winston K. Marks
\nWell of the Angels<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by E. Hoffmann Price ♥♥♥
\nThe Pipes of Pan<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Lester del Rey ♥♥
\nThe Reign of Wizardry<\/em><\/strong> (Part 3 of 3) \u2022 serial by Jack Williamson ♥♥♥<\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nThe Roaring Trumpet<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 cover by M. Isip
\nInterior Artwork<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Edd Cartier, Don Hewitt, R. Isip, Charles Schneeman
\nOf Things Beyond<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by The Editor
\nEighty Percent<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by Willy Ley<\/p>\n

This month\u2019s cover1<\/sup> by Manuel Isip illustrates the lead novella, The Roaring Trumpet<\/em><\/strong>, and is a much better work than his bland effort for March. The interior illustrations are also better than normal, largely due to a couple of particularly stunning images by Ed Cartier.2<\/sup><\/p>\n

Before L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt were known for their \u2018Gavagan\u2019s Bar\u2019 stories,3<\/sup>\u00a0they collaborated on\u00a0their \u2018Incompleat Enchanter\u2019 tales of which The Roaring Trumpet<\/em><\/strong> is the first.4<\/sup>
\nThis is a superior fantasy novella that tells of a modern American psychologist, Harold Shea, transported to the world of Norse myth during Fimbulwinter. After a set-up chapter where he meets with his colleagues, and they discuss the matter of travelling to other realities, Shea decides to give it a go. Using logic formulae, he ends up in a grey, misty world where it is snowing and almost immediately meets a one-eyed man on a horse who turns out to be the god Odinn. Shea finds out his identity at an inn at the Crossroads of the World, where he also meets the gods Thor, Loki and Frey amongst others. Soon he is travelling with them to find lost hammers and swords, fighting Giants, escaping the attentions of dragons, being imprisoned by Trolls, etc., all against the coming of the Time<\/em>, of Ragnarok.
\nThis has a strong start and finish with some parts which are premium fantasy storytelling. Indeed, much of the entertainment value of this is watching Shea trying to fit into this strange world and usually failing dismally, such as the scene in the inn where Shea comes by the name \u2018Turnip Harald\u2019. Eventually, in\u00a0a\u00a0later scene\u00a0in the dungeons where he attempts to hoax\u00a0a\u00a0troll jailor by \u2018magically\u2019 reducing the size of his nose, he most spectacularly does fit in. The other thing this has going for it, compared with the SF of the time, is that it hasn\u2019t dated at all.<\/p>\n

Mad Hatter<\/em><\/strong> by Winston K. Marks leads off the short fiction and is as bad as the previous novella was good. A man who designs hats for a living has a small man (referred to as a pixy) appear from one of his drawers. There then follows a lot of alcohol abuse in an attempt to make him disappear\u2014some of which is recommended by a doctor friend:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, I shouldn\u2019t be at all surprised that what you really need is a good bender. Buy yourself a quart and drink it all yourself. You artists need relaxation. Get yourself really plastered, and I bet that when the hangover wears off you\u2019ll find out you\u2019ve had some fun.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

This story is more preposterous for its attitude to drink than for the fantasy elements.
\nThe novelette by E. Hoffman Price, Well of the Angels<\/em><\/strong>, is quite a good story about an expat oil employee who is stuck in Iraq and cannot leave because of his contract. He gets the middle-aged Arab office boy to take him to ruins in the desert to learn to be a magician. Unexpectedly, he is granted the magical power to leave by Harut and Marut, two fallen Angels who were tempted by Satan. Subsequently, a woman he met at the entrance to the pit where the Angels were, and an old school friend who is an archaeologist, come into his life. This is a well told piece and has a convincing sense of time and place. Strange, though, how words that would have been exotic and largely unheard of by readers in the 1940s: \u2018Mosul\u2019, \u2018Kurd\u2019, \u2018Yezidi\u2019, etc. are so commonplace now.
\nThe final piece of short fiction is The Pipes of Pan<\/em><\/strong> by Lester del Rey. This story starts off with the god Pan at the deathbed of his last believer. After the man\u2019s death Pan is a god no more and has to enter the world of humanity and get a job. This all becomes increasingly unlikely towards the end of the story but it is a pleasant enough journey getting there.<\/p>\n

Jack Williamson\u2019s serial The Reign of Wizardry<\/em><\/strong> has its third and final part in this issue. Thesis discovers that the bull in the cave (spoiler) is actually Cyron, a pirate crewmember, armed with a horn. Together they manage to use Thesis\u2019 sword Northstar to find their way out of the cave, and they eventually exit at the small temple of Cybele where\u00a0Thesis retrieves the magic charm given to him by Ariadne. Next, they go to Amir\u2019s encampment to rescue the enslaved pirates and start a rebellion. Finally,\u00a0they head to Knossos for a\u00a0showdown, which involves perhaps a bit more than is necessary of people and gods not actually being who or what they seem.
\nThis part was not as good as the first two and stretches credulity at points, but it is a reasonable end to what was, for the most part, a pretty good read.<\/p>\n

There are only a couple of pieces of non-fiction5<\/sup>\u00a0in this issue. As ever, Of Things Beyond<\/em><\/strong>, is mostly puff for the next issue, specifically Norvell Page\u2019s Without Horns<\/em>, and goes into detail about mutations and modern X-Ray\u2019s, radium, etc., at some length. At the end of the column Campbell states that the next issue will:<\/p>\n

[Include] shorter material, of course, to total our usual eighty thousand words of fantasy.<\/em>
\nIncidentally, that fact\u2014that one copy of <\/em>Unknown contains considerably more text than the average two-dollar book\u2014rather surprises most people. You\u2019re invited to check it if you don\u2019t quite believe that the rather slim-seeming magazine can contain so much.<\/em><\/p>\n

It is certainly a chunky publication with a lot of reading in it: possibly the nearest modern equivalent for wordage would be the bimonthly The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction<\/em>. However, Unknown<\/em> came out every month, and so did Astounding<\/em> and there were plenty of other magazines around as well (but no TV or computers to distract).
\nThe essay by Willey Ley, Eighty Percent<\/em><\/strong>, is a rather rambling piece that starts with the fact that we only use 20% of our brain and it leaps from there to telepathy and clairvoyance, etc. Some of the assertions seem dubious:<\/p>\n

If a needless organ should be brought into existence, so to speak as a by-product, the body would soon thrust a duty on it.<\/em><\/p>\n

What, like my appendix? Some of the conclusions drawn seem debateable as well, such as the body finding a function for the eighty per cent of unused brain or getting rid of it: I don\u2019t think evolution works that way.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, the de Camp & Pratt, Price and Williamson stories make this the best 1940 issue of Unknown<\/em> so far.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. This cover is another edited image from Siren in the Night<\/a><\/em> on flickr.com.<\/li>\n
  2. The two illustrations that really caught my eye were:\"Unknown194005Cartier1bw\"\"Unknown194005Cartier2b\"<\/li>\n
  3. See The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction<\/em> #2, Winter-Spring 1950<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  4. For the background to how de Camp and Pratt met, and for details of their collaboration, see Fletcher and I<\/em>, an essay by de Camp that can be found in various editions of the \u2018Enchanter\u2019 stories (mine was in the 1979 Sphere edition of The Incompleat Enchanter)<\/em>. One quote is of particular interest: \u201cI will say only that they were heroic fantasy, or swordplay-and-sorcery fiction, long before these terms were invented. While Robert E. Howard is justly hailed as the major American pioneer in this subgenre, neither Pratt nor I, when we started the Shea stories, had ever read a Conan story or ever heard enough about Howard to recognise his name.\u201d (p.xiii) In another part of the essay, de Camp mentions that Pratt \u201cdespised\u201d the Conan stories: \u201cHe had no use for heroes who merely battered their way out of traps by their bulging thews, without using their brains.\u201d (p.ix)
    \nTwo other points regarding this story: a quick cut and paste of de Camp & Pratt\u2019s story from the PDF to Word gives a count of 36,000 words: a long novella. It also contains a line describing how magic works: \u201cAnother is the law of contagion: that things once in contact continue to interact from a distance after separation.\u201d (p.11) Compare and contrast to the recent news headlines about quantum entanglement\u2026<\/li>\n
  5. Adverts aren\u2019t non-fiction but sometimes they can be almost as fascinating. One from this issue urges women to: \u201cENLIST In the Women\u2019s Field Army of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, and help in the intensive war against this disease. EDUCATE yourself and others to recognize early symptoms that may indicate cancer. SAVE some of the 150,000 who will die this year unless promptly treated. Early cancer can be cured\u201d (p.154) And there was me thinking that the idea of early detection and treatment of cancer was a modern thing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Other Reviews: Fred Smith:\u00a0Once There Was A Magazine\u2014\u00a0p.19-20. Fiction: The Roaring Trumpet \u2022 novella by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt ♥♥♥♥ Mad Hatter \u2022 short story by Winston K. Marks Well of the Angels \u2022 novelette by E. Hoffmann Price ♥♥♥ The Pipes of Pan \u2022 short story by Lester del Rey ♥♥ […]<\/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":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unknown"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-cn","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767","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=767"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12224,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions\/12224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}