Amazing Stories (October 1965)

Joseph Ross (editor) Amazing Stories (October 1965)
I picked this up because of Murray Leinster. The first installment of his Killer Ship is dry but approximately readable, transposing traditional nautical escapades to deep space, complete with salty sea captains who enjoy punch-ups in dockside taverns. Leinster breaks the usual supposedly golden rule by telling as well as showing, to the extent that two thirds of the text have the cadence of a synopsis for something he'd been thinking about writing. The narrative reads like Asimov minus that vaguely creepy sensation which heralds the arrival of a token female character - here the beautiful daughter of a space shipping magnate. Killer Ship does okay for something so obviously traditional and sort of foreshadows The Expanse in certain respects, but is pretty much doomed by the uninviting style in which it was written, assuming here that Ross didn't just print the initial pitch by accident.

Ray Bradbury's, Chrysalis is an early effort dating from 1946, and which presumably predates our man developing the characteristic style which made him so readable. It's okay, but falls short of delivering anything consistent with Bradbury's reputation.

Actually, a lot of these seem to be early efforts, because Amazing was seemingly all about the unit shifting big name reprints by 1965, although apparently it wasn't all about paying the authors of those reprinted stories. That being said, I'm beginning to wonder if they retained the rights to any of the good stuff. John Wyndham's The Eternal Eve, for example, is okay, and streets ahead of shite such as his Pawley's Peepholes; but it's still massively underwhelming considering this is the guy who wrote Triffids, Kraken, and Dumb Martian. Along similarly underwhelming lines, Jack Williamson's The Metal Man reprints his first published story, which was notable for being so basic that the title not only gives away the not really much of a twist ending, but almost counts as a synopsis. We open with a letter - a literary device I've really grown to loathe as the last resort of scoundrels - in which our man, already introduced as having mysteriously turned into a man quite literally made of metal, tells the narrator about some mysterious force which turns things into metal, and fuck it, he's going in. I won't spoil the ending for you.

The Time Jumpers was apparently Phil Nowlan's third sale to Amazing back in the dawn of time, with the first two being Buck Rogers tales, so that's where the character originated. Even were some of the same magic to be found in this story, I'm not sure I'd know what to look for, although it's still more engaging than anything else in this issue. The Time Jumpers features a man who invents a time car, leading to historical encounters with faintly racist Red Indian stereotypes and George Washington - who helpfully introduces himself as such, thus providing an uncanny foreshadowing of Hartnell era Who; but it's nicely told and is not without some charm.

Every time I read something by Robert Silverberg, I seem to find I like him just a little less than before. The Kensington Stone is an article rather than an example of his fiction, one examining a detail of that whole Vikings discovered America thing by means of a massive Nordically engraved stone which has since been unfortunately mislaid but definitely existed, probably. I don't know whether Vikings discovered America but, honestly, I've never really cared given that we already have a substantial wealth of information about the people who got here first and stuck around long enough to develop complex indigenous cultures. Silverberg maintains a degree of scepticism, although this in itself begs the question of why he bothered to cover the subject in the first place.

Finally we have Dusty Answer by Arthur Porges, which I read this morning but about which I don't remember anything. I think some guys in a spaceship landed on a planet. Maybe the December issue will be better...

Fantastic Stories of Imagination - December 1964

 

Norman M. Lobsenz (editor)
Fantastic Stories of Imagination December 1964 (1964)
Someone deposited a stack of these at my local Half Price Books so I bagged all those issues which looked interesting, seeing as they were going for just two dollars each. The thing which looked interesting about this was it being the original home of Philip K. Dick's The Unteleported Man which I'd never read in this form. Dick added a second half for the reprint as an Ace Double, then eventually expanded the thing and renamed it Lies Inc., which I have read, and about which I don't remember a great deal beyond that it probably didn't need quite such a lengthy guitar solo half way through side one. The Unteleported Man seems to have been Phil trying his hand at a spy thriller, or at least something which borrows from spy thrillers. It's fairly typical of what he was writing in the early sixties, although feels a little more forced than usual, or at least lacking both the usual jazzy sparkle and the humour - which is perhaps why he revisited it. The story runs that Earth is suffering from overpopulation and so everyone is encouraged to relocate to a distant colony planet, communication with which has proven suspiciously difficult; so we don't know if the migrants are enjoying a new life in outer space, or if the teleport is simply a more technologically advanced gas chamber, meaning those Germans are up to their old tricks again. The paranoia is pronounced even by Phil's standards, and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the suggestion of Germans being up to their old tricks again, but it generally works better than it did as Lies Inc.

Elsewhere we find Harry Harrison's They're Playing Our Song, Gordon R. Dickson's It, Out of the Darkest Jungle, Christopher Anvil's Merry Christmas from Outer Space, and John Starr Niendorff's I Am Bonaro. There's also The Fanatic by Arthur Porges which I read but can't remember any of the details, whether I got anything out of it or what. I'm likewise sketchy where Merry Christmas from Outer Space is concerned because I read no further than the first page. It's one of those stories told as a series of letters, a conceit which has always struck me as gimmicky, kind of lazy, and usually the last resort of a scoundrel, so I didn't bother. Similarly gimmicky and lazy is It, Out of the Darkest Jungle being written as a screenplay, either in reference to its achingly stereotypical b-movie narrative, or because Dickson just couldn't be arsed.

You might expect better from Harry Harrison, but in this instance you would be mistaken. Being 1964 and the height of Beatlemania, They're Playing Our Song is about a hit pop combo called the Spiders. They play a concert for their screaming fans, a couple of whom manage to sneak past security and make it to the groups' hotel room, only to be eaten alive because the Spiders really are spiders.

Clever.

I Am Bonaro was all right - nothing Earth shattering, but certainly readable. I have a few more issues of Fantastic to get through, but on the strength of this one, even with the presence of Philip K. Dick, I'm not too surprised it hasn't lasted.