August Derleth (editor) - Worlds of Tomorrow (1953)

It feels like it's been a long time since I read one of these collections and I warmed to this one quite quickly, enjoying the spirit of the enterprise even where a couple of the stories were underwhelming for one reason or another. The spirit of the enterprise was, in this instance, visions of tomorrow, I suppose - which was doomed to failure given science-fiction's somewhat shaky predictive track record; but at the heart of that spirit was the notion of there being a future as something exciting or at least vastly different to the present. I feel we've lost sight of this, so it's nice to be reminded.

Anyway, aside from a few clunkers reliant on twist endings which have since become massive clichés - and may even have been clichés in 1953 for all I know - the collection is mostly great, and actively astonishing in a couple of cases. Jogging straight past the first Earthman on Mars ending up in a Martian zoo, Frank Belknap Long's The Great Cold reminds us of the genre's roots in - or at least its passage through - weird fiction, taking us to a far future where super-evolved barnacles rule the Earth, which the author somehow manages to write as genuinely weird and upsetting rather than just plain screwy, additionally using his beautifully vivid prose to say something beyond weird innit! Somehow, there's a lesson for us even in this world of super-evolved barnacles.

It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.

The Fires Within by Arthur C. Clarke is similarly fantastic, with weird physics performing the heavy lifting for what is essentially a conversation between a couple of eggheads at a research centre. Fritz Leiber, Mack Reynolds, and Simak collaborator, Carl Jacobi all turn in respectable pieces, but the finest are possibly the last two. The Martian and the Moron may be the best thing I've read by Theodore Sturgeon, and it could be significant that it contains no traditional elements of science-fiction, or at least, the detail upon which the story spins remains ambiguous, leaving us with a radio ham who may or may not have picked up an alien transmission, and his son's relationship with a person I won't describe here because, despite having read the story, I still can't work out what or who she's supposed to be. The Martian and the Moron puts the reader to work, but it feels worth the effort. Finally, William Tenn's Null-P serves up an unfortunately familiar future history of the United States with lashings of sardonic wit. Despite what I wrote in the first paragraph, this is one case of a prediction having been fired in the right direction even if he doesn't quite hit the bullseye. Tenn's future America is founded on a fear of book learnin' with stupidity reclassified as a mark of character. Tenn fails because, as an optimist, he didn't account for basic greed as a motivating factor, with lies and telling people what they want to hear as a means to this end; but it's a wonderful piece of writing, alternately chilling and funny without resorting to slapstick.

Robert Heinlein - Methuselah's Children (1958)

 

I guess Bob had taken to thinking about his own mortality, or at least about his no longer qualifying as a spring chicken, whatever that is. I know the feeling. Methuselah's children are a group of extraordinarily long lived humans whose socially awkward longevity has brought them all together as a secretive subgroup inhabiting the fringes of human society. They're not a secret society in that they don't, as a group, have any particular collective influence on anything, and - unusually for golden age science-fiction - neither are they anything so obvious as homo superior or the coming race. They're simply people who live longer than the rest of us for reasons no-one quite understands. Anyway, fearing discovery and the possibility of dissection in order to glean the secret of longevity when even they have no idea what that secret could be, they band together and flee the planet, going off in search of a world where they can all live their lives without having to forge a new birth certificate every seventy years or so.

Whether by accident or design, Stephen Baxter would eventually revisit a few of these ideas in the Destiny's Children books, because they're worth revisiting, and Heinlein threw out some weird and fascinating ideas in this one. The problem is that we're two thirds of the way through the novel before anything interesting happens. I can barely remember what occurred during the first hundred pages. There seemed to be a lot of yacking, page after page of dialogue and not much else, and most of it the sort of snappy content-free repartee which made Stranger in a Strange Land such a fucking chore; so it's a relief when they steal the spaceship and flee the solar system because things happen, and Bob gets to play with science and relativity and the rest, which is where he excels. I also enjoyed the fact of this final third of the novel having the almost haphazard cadence of Simak or even A.E. van Vogt, eschewing the usual brilliant minds with elaborate scientific plans and the need to explain them at length. The long lived hundred or so thousand just sort of sneak onto the conveniently unoccupied New Frontiers - as the galaxy spanning craft is named - assuming there will be something to eat, places to sleep and so on; and one of the gang has conveniently come up with a revolutionary new star drive.

'It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.' He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking space drive. 'You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?'

'That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course, I don't really know that it will work,' Libby admitted. 'There is no way to test it.'

'Suppose it doesn't?'

Luckily it works, and we're off. The two extraterrestrial civilisation they eventually encounter are both friendly but very odd, and the crew of the New Frontiers decide to head back to Earth after all, because this isn't one of those novels about seeking out new life, new civilisations, or boldly going anywhere in particular. It's mostly about mortality, specifically that of the author.

'I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wisdom and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren't for us at all, ever. Either way, I'm satisfied to be living and enjoying it.'

I've had trouble reading later Heinlein, and you can tell the preoccupations which informed his less agreeable works were creeping in here, but he's still making the effort, still mostly at the top of his game, and still delivering much more than is promised by the summary on the back cover.

The Best of Lester Del Rey (1978)

 

It's taken me a little while, but Del Rey finally makes it into my own personal top tier, and I take back any disappointed noises I may have made on the grounds that van Vogt has fired off at least a couple of duds, and even Simak managed one. Of Del Rey's novels, most that I've read have been juvies - those being what I tend to find in second hand book stores for some reason - and although they've been good or even great, it's difficult to get the measure of a writer keeping at least some of his schtick reigned in for the sake of a particular audience; and then there's Day of the Giants which is fantastic, and Nerves which isn't. The Best of mostly comprises short stories which first appeared in Astounding, Galaxy, Unknown Worlds and the like, and this seems to be where he really shines.

It may be the ideas, which often pack a genuine punch of astonishment even after a half century of fucking everything having a twist ending; or it could be the telling, which is fresh, and engaging, and didn't seem loaded with reminders of having been written prior to the invention of teenagers - Superstition, for one example, reminded me of Stephen Baxter on more than one occasion. Whatever it may be, Del Rey does it with a lightness of touch that makes it seem easy and compels you to keep reading in much the same way as did Philip K. Dick, where the poetry is shaped in what is described rather than given as description in its own right.

This being said, I encountered a lull around half way through which picked up with the aforementioned Superstition, although this may have been down to me and my daily circumstances rather than to anything Lester wrote. However, focusing on his strengths, he seems at his best when jamming something which shouldn't work into the middle of an otherwise traditional story, then forcing everything else into line. If this sounds familiar, I suspect Superstition's apparent reference to the similarly awkward A.E. van Vogt may not have occurred just in my imagination:

'This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan's we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind-reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!'

The story - some unknown force instantaneously throwing a number of spacecraft across two-hundred thousand light years - actually sounds like the work of A.E. van Vogt, here presumably rendered as A.E. van, then just plain Aevan in case that wasn't obvious; and what follows slaps the reader about the face with the similarly inexplicable whilst simultaneously pondering on religious models of reality with the sort of conviction that Dick managed in a few of his later books. Related themes of theology and morality are revisited in For I Am a Jealous People, The Seat of Judgment and Vengeance is Mine, each of novella length and as such extremely satisfying. I was mostly expecting well-executed tales of robots and rockets, but Lester Del Rey obliges you to consider what you're reading.

This comes just after some online observation made about how he could be a bit of a twat in real life, but the same has been said of Harlan Ellison - one of Del Rey's proteges - so I don't really care.

Analog April 1980

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog April 1980 (1980)
Just when you think you know someone… as Lord Rothermere observed on the first of September, 1939. I've developed certain expectations as I work my way through a handful of unread back issues of Analog picked up here and there over the years, and true to form, the April 1980 issue features a science article which I couldn't be bothered to read beyond the first couple of pages, Jerry Pournelle droning on about something or other, advertisements which appear faintly ludicrous with hindsight, and the second instalment of Bob Buckley's World in the Clouds - which would be fine if it were just about terraforming Venus as the science is quite interesting and well communicated, but said terraforming is undertaken as some kind of futuristic community service deal by a street tough. I assume tough as a noun made sense for my father's generation and I remember finding it weird in Topper and Beano when I was a kid. The problem is that, science aside, the rest of the tale is written in a style consistent with the kind of writing you would expect in a story about a street tough.

Also, there's David A. Roach's Memo from the Big Chief which takes the form of correspondence between various cavepersons - one of whom is imaginatively named Ugg - detailing, I presume, health and safety concerns raised by the invention of fire. I didn't read it because I make a point of not reading short stories which take the form of correspondence, and the premise just isn't that funny.

However, this was otherwise a surprisingly enjoyable issue of this thing. The characteristically right leaning editorial is fairly liberal and concerns itself with the environment in terms which serve to remind us that Republicans weren't always the largely amoral corporate shitbags we see before us today and were once worth listening to, sometimes. The letters page features satisfyingly testy missives from Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and A.E. van Vogt defending his 1979 novel Renaissance from a reviewer who may or may not have bothered to read it.

The star attraction for me, the reason why this leapt off the shelf and into my hands, would be Simak's Grotto of the Dancing Deer which notably won Nebula, Hugo and Locus awards for best short story. Oddly, it's nothing spectacular in context of Simak's body of work, but is nevertheless decent - as you would most likely expect - so I suspect someone or other simply felt it was high time Cliff won another award, which is fair.

Finally we have the novella length Nightflyers, an example of George R.R. Martin's early science-fiction work. I sort of enjoyed the first couple of seasons of Game of Thrones, but not enough to read the books so this is my first encounter with his writing, and it's not difficult to see why he would eventually be shifting this stuff by the truckload. Nightflyers almost mashes a ghost story up with a murder mystery and flings the results out into deep space, and is of sufficient complexity and sophistication to oblige me to re-read the first half when I came back to it because I was already lost; and yet going back to start again turned out to be a genuine pleasure, such is the quality of the tale, which may even be the best thing I've read in any of these digest magazines. At least I can't, off the top of my head, think of anything I've enjoyed more.

I appreciate that even a stopped clock is correct twice a day - unless it's digital - but this one has made for a very pleasant change to the usual.

Analog November 1979

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog November 1979 (1979)
Here's an Analog I've had for something like fifteen years, picked up from a shop in Cornwall because it seemed a shame to leave it on the shelf but never read because I soon came to realise that Analog was often shite, particularly the September 2008 issue which - seeing as I haven't mentioned it in about five minutes - featured Henry G. Stratmann's Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya, which is competition level dreadful.

Anyway, here we get off to a poor start with Beyond Relativity, G. Harry Stine's guest editorial about how science is never finished, and Einstein would have said as much and would therefore have been quite pissed off to find his theories about general relativity now set in stone. It's interesting and seems worth taking seriously once you've read past the repetitive tone of a nutcase muttering about how those fools have got it all wrong - wrong, I tell you! Elsewhere we find Stine explaining how difficult it will be to fly spaceships, and as a friend of doctors and dentists - professional people - he should know. Whether or not he has a valid point, I stopped caring because he does that thing which autodidactic bores always do of challenging you with a rhetorical question you will be unable to answer.

Why do you think there are still three highly-qualified people riding on that flight deck engaged in constant monitoring and ready to assume complete command in a split second?

I don't fucking know, George, but I'm sure you're about to tell me.

I couldn't get past the first few pages of Roger Arnold and Donald Kingsbury's lengthy article explaining where NASA have been going wrong all this time with regards to getting things up into orbit. Apparently there's a much easier way. Given that this notionally revolutionary article appeared in 1979 and it's now 2023 and we're still using massive rockets, I'm guessing maybe there wasn't a much easier way after all. Whilst Analog's blend of science fiction and science fact, or science almost fact was probably commendable, I read New Scientist for a number of years back in the nineties and I don't recall a single article written in the slightly cranky, defensive tone of the stuff you find in this thing - not one instance of anyone muttering about fools who don't understand.

On a marginally happier note, we have the fiction, of which Mark J. McGarry's Phoenix is readable and interesting from an anthropological perspective, placing a lone explorer in the midst of an inscrutable alien species, although it's somewhat let down when the phoenix turns out to be himself experiencing an holistic (or something) awakening after watching an extraterrestrial birthing ritual. His career was on the rocks but now he has purpose, you see.

Also featured is the second of three instalments of Simak's The Visitors, published as a complete novel in 1980, and even read bereft of top and tail, it's a pleasure and one which makes everything else in the mag seem underwhelming at best. The Visitors uncannily foreshadows the movie Arrival - or whatever novel that was based on, I guess - with its uncommunicative extraterrestrial monoliths floating hither and thither. I'm guessing it's either Simak's response to Close Encounters of the Third Kind - or some editor nudged him in that direction - from which healthy distance is achieved in, for one example, a character who shuns identity because he does not want it known that he had been 'taken up' by the visitor, he does not want to be another kook associated with flying saucers. As ever Simak, does his own thing.

Maybe it was because it was so totally unlike the common concept of something out of space. To a people brought up on the idiocies of TV and movie imagination, the reality must seem quite commonplace.

It's probably odd to read just the middle part of a novel I have on the shelf, but Simak is rewarding in any configuration, and this excerpt is additionally interesting in that the two page synopsis also seems to have been written by himself, or is at least recognisably his voice, which for me renders it the written equivalent of rare studio outtakes.

A less ambitious alien invasion is somehow prevented by a pair of old codgers in Kevin O'Donnell's Old Friends, which centres upon extraterrestrial technology disguised as a park bench - but a lot less Tharg's Future Shocks than that may sound and therefore pretty decent by Analog standards; and we end with Movers and Shakers by Thomas A. Easton which is satisfyingly absurd and possibly the best thing I've read in an issue of this magazine.

 

So this ended better than I had expected. Given the history of Astounding and John W. Campbell, Analog always had a lot of unfortunate stuff in its DNA, and even with the occasional uncharacteristic ray of sunshine peaking through those frowning clouds of manly pipe smoke, the advertising reminds us that we're hanging out with persons who don't work right, the sort of people who would actually read an outer space newspaper or send off for the microfilm edition of the magazine because it seemed futuristic and therefore exciting. From this, I guess we learn that these people were always amongst us. The difference is that now they have the internet.

 

 

Day of the Giants

Lester Del Rey Day of the Giants (1959)
Firstly, the flying saucers shown destroying a city with rays of some description on the cover appear nowhere in the novel. Weirdly, I find this sort of inattention to detail on the part of a publisher often serves to indicate that something truly special is to be found behind the wildly misleading painting; and so it is here. I can't say anything I've read by Lester Del Rey ever truly blew my nuts off, but there was always, I felt, a lot of promise, enough so as to suggest there might be a genuine classic hidden somewhere in the back catalogue. It might be this one.

Our story transports an average farmhand and his twin brother to Asgard, realm of the Norse Gods of legend. Ragnarok is approaching and so the Gods are recruiting, and the twin brother has the makings of a hero. Unfortunately our guy was caught up by accident, and being as Asgard doesn't take kindly to non-heroic types, he strives to make himself useful so as to avoid the wrath of his hosts. This he does by teaching them about gunpowder, how to make hand grenades, uranium-235, and other martial innovations which had never occurred to them, Asgard being a stubbornly traditional society. He also undertakes some pruning and restores Yggdrasil, the world tree, to full health; and his advanced weaponry aids in the defeat of the frost giants at the end.

It probably doesn't sound like much, aside from predating Marvel's similarly urbane version of Asgard by a few years, and the story approximately distills Lord of the Rings down to a snappier 128 pages - unassuming rustic type travels far to battle terrible power and so on and so forth; but the telling seals the deal. Where the one about how the chess club loser defeats the thickies, so beloved of Asimov and others, is almost a genre in its own right, Del Rey writes something which almost feels like Simak in its good natured understatement - no lecturing, no speechifying, and Leif Svensen really is just a regular guy, as distinct from the former star of the Charles Atlas adverts created in revenge for some high school wedgie which Isaac the author can neither forgive nor forget. Asgardian magic is explained, or at least accounted for, without any stretching of points or ill-fitting lectures about protons, and most of the book is simply our man titting about in Asgard, making sense of things, and teaching dwarves about firearms. There's no hint of questing, nor of any attempt to get the reader's pulse racing, and it's funny without telling jokes. I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of Loki as amiable and witty, but long-suffering given most of his peers being mainly about the mead and fighting; and by the time he nips back to Earth to bring back cartons of fags for Leif and his twin, I was sold. It's fantasy without the hey nonny no, or science-fiction which remembers that it also has to tell a story, which it does before delivering a lesson about conservatism, tradition, and the importance of taking chances; so it's a great story, well told, and it even has something to say. Wonderful.

I always suspected he had one like this hidden away somewhere.

Other Worlds of Clifford Simak

Clifford D. Simak Other Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960)
This was originally a twelve story hardback collection by the name of The Worlds of Clifford Simak, divided in half and reprinted as two individual collections due to the limitations of paperback book binding in the sixties. The six stories which didn't make it into this one were also printed in paperback form as The Worlds of Clifford Simak, which seems confusing but never mind.

It's been a while since I read any full length Simak, meaning cover to cover as distinct from stories appearing in the digests, and I somehow forgot what a pleasure it can be when he's firing on all four cylinders. Well, I didn't forget, but merely recalling having enjoyed a Simak or two isn't really the same as what you get from actually reading; and this one has been a real pleasure.

Given the number of short stories he churned out over the years, it's inevitable that they can't all be The Big Front Yard - which is amazing although it isn't in this collection - but this is nevertheless an impressively solid set with only Green Thumb representing any sort of dip in focus or standard, albeit not actually much of one. Of those authors who have achieved escape velocity from the science-fiction ghetto - here assuming such a shift is even desirable purely for the sake of argument - it seems increasingly strange that Simak remains yet to join Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and others on the shelves of persons who otherwise wouldn't be seen dead reading anything with a picture of a rocket on the cover. His stories explore what it is to be human, or more accurately to belong to something bigger than ourselves, which he does by means of strange and fantastic ideas we tend to identify as either science-fiction, or science-fiction by virtue of their not really belonging anywhere else; and the warmth and humanity of his stories is both powerful and profoundly moving, yet without eschewing realism at the expense of the dunderhead positivity which often blights the work of authors going for the same sort of effect. He doesn't always get the balance quite right, but he shines bright in this lot with homespun tales of seemingly familiar people in weird or jagged situations unlike anything I've noticed anywhere else in fiction. Dusty Zebra, Carbon Copy, Founding Father and Idiot's Crusade are in particular amongst the best Simak I've read, and I've read a lot.

Amazing Stories February 1980

Omar Gohagen (editor)
Amazing Stories February 1980 (1980)
I picked this up from eBay a while back for the Simak interview but never quite got around to reading the rest, for some reason. For what it may be worth, the Simak interview is great and leaves one wishing that it were possible to go back in time and hang out with the guy; and on the subject of the direct testimony of science-fiction authors, we also get observations from Asimov, Silverberg, and Alan Dean Foster of which the latter - often unfairly criticised as a hack for churning out all those movie tie-ins - is particularly enlightening.

Amazing Stories went through a number of significant changes during its lengthy publishing history - cancellation, relocation then revival without much duplication of the success of the Gernsback years, depending upon how one defines success. The sixties version seems to have been remembered as the era of crowd-pleasing big name reprints from which original authors received nary a red cent. I'm guessing the eighties incarnation continued the tradition of great editorial savings with, in this issue, big name interviews - which presumably qualified as promotional for those interviewed - and original stories by people you've never heard of, and possibly won't hear of ever again and who were most likely glad just to be in print.

Hal Hill's Chimera is accordingly underwhelming, despite being the main feature of this issue at thirty or so pages, nearly half of which constitute the biggest extended info-dump I've read in a long time. The story itself isn't actually bad, and I'd hesitantly hail it as a prescient foreshadowing of all that cyberpunk stuff which followed soon after were it not for the fact of it reading like the tie-in to a Quinn Martin telly adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Ubik.

Wayne Wightman's Do Unto Others, if harmless and mercifully short, reads somewhat like the response to a high school English assignment on the theme of just deserts. Michael P. Kube-McDowell - who apparently later co-wrote something with Arthur C. Clarke - continues the scholastic theme with Antithesis, wherein the black sheep of the college physics class writes a paper proving Einstein wrong; which would be okay in itself but for the slightly depressing two page supporting essay describing what we've just read as though we hadn't understood it, delivered in the tone of Leonard Nimoy emerging from the side of the screen to explain how not everything is as it seems; or like an episode of Catfish wherein Trayvon's dilemma with the elusive Tamiqua is reiterated over and over as though we hadn't understood it the first four fucking thousand times; or like me rephrasing the same complaint in three different ways right here.

Talking of repetition, this issue embellishes each tale with a few paragraphs under the heading Why We Chose This Story attempting to reinforce the proposed excellence of each tale but mostly just delivering a redundant summary.

When you are allowed to realise what really is happening, the surprise is as incredible as it must have been for Troy Haver, who then figures how to make the mental leap to liberation after all.

We know. We've just read it.

Linda Grossman's Black Hole, may or may not be science-fiction depending upon how you interpret the story. The editor reckons it is, which feels somewhat like a clandestine attempt to smuggle literature into the magazine of robots and bug-eyed monsters. I personally don't think it is, but it doesn't matter because it's about the only thing here that's worth reading apart from the interviews.

Normal service is resumed in Flight Over XP-637 by Craig Sayre in which the twist ending is that the shape changing alien visitors are disguising themselves as ducks, which is funny because we are led to believe that they are attempting to pass themselves off as human, but they aren't! They're changing themselves into ducks, like I said! Brilliant! Hope I haven't spoiled it for anyone.

Kurt von Stuckrad's Mushroom Farmers, is one of those cold war things featuring silos full of missiles which is, as such, okay in context of its type, I suppose, providing you don't mind that one of the nuclear button pushers had also been the class stud and no woman known had ever turned him down. It didn't bother me personally, although I'm confused by the idea of there being such a thing as a class stud. I don't even know if we had those in schools back in England, although if we did I'm fairly sure it wasn't me.

Finally, and mercifully, and mercifully short too, we end with Steve Miller's, Time Cycle, which is about a bloke who travels through time on a time cycle - which is like a motorbike - hence the title. I doubt it's the same bloke, but if it is, I definitely preferred Abracadabra and the song about people calling him the space cowboy, and I didn't like those at all.

I also have to wonder if people really called him the space cowboy, because it's interesting that he doesn't seem to remember the names of any of these people in the song. Perhaps he just wanted us to believe that people called him the space cowboy.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966 (1966)
Here we are with another one of these, and mostly reprints this time for some reason, excepting Chad Oliver's Just Like a Man, which is relatively readable and set on a planet so indistinguishable from Earth as to actually have lions. The point is anthropological, focusing on the absolutely fascinating means by which Oliver's alien lemurs failed to evolve into anything resembling humanity. My use of the term absolutely fascinating in the previous sentence may contain trace elements of sarcasm.

David V. Reed first enquired as to Where is Roger Davis? back in 1938, the answer apparently revealing that those swastika toting hordes about to sweep across Europe may have been aided by Martians. It's one of those first person account tales impersonating  private correspondence which opens with I know you're not going to believe this, but the other night as I charged my trusty meerschaum with a goodly plug of tobacco… To be fair, that sentence doesn't appear in the story because I just made it up, but somehow it feels as though it did. Also, the Martian invasion force comprises just three of them, which is probably understandable when you're trying to make a kid's show on the cheap, but—oh never mind.

Simak's The Trouble with Ants is one of those short stories which was eventually included in City, which is approximately a novel; and I know it won a million awards and that it's Simak and I generally love Simak without exception or reservation, but I've always found City a little overrated with its cast of talking dog and their robot pals just a little too silly to work. This one is about how the talking dogs and their robot pals realise that you have to be careful with ants, otherwise they develop technology. I sort of wonder if Cliff was experiencing trouble with his heating that month, because City suggests the influence of certain powerful fumes. I'm told it can get a bit nippy at times up there in Wisconsin.

Almost Human by Tarleton Fiske, who was actually Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, tells of an innocent robot corrupted by the kind of toughs commonly portrayed by James Cagney and who end each statement with a quasi-interrogatory see, see. It's readable, if nothing life-changing, see.

Theodore Sturgeon's The Way Home is short and pleasant but didn't make much sense - or maybe I mean didn't seem to have a point - but never mind because the last two pretty much justify the entrance fee. Henry Kuttner's Satan Sends Flowers is one of those tales where someone has an actual conversation with the devil and is very satisfying; leaving just Isaac Asimov's Satisfaction Guaranteed, which apparently I've read before although I don't remember it. It's one of his Susan Calvin things, but herself is thankfully only a secondary character. Being written by Asimov in 1951, we probably shouldn't be too surprised to meet a housewife who just wants to keep her home clean and her man happy, which I'm sure will have gone down a storm with the usual Goodreads wankers. I sometimes find this sort of thing a bit painful, and true enough, when Asimov falls on his arse, he falls hard; but here the focus on the actual thrust of the story - yet more robot stuff - is of such elegant precision that blaming Asimov for a) the fifties and b) having been born as someone other than Andrea Dworkin seems both unfair and a bit of a waste of time, tantamount to whining about Silas Marner seeming dated.

I'm still not sure why Fantastic went tits up. I guess maybe there were just too many of these things and not enough readers coughing up to a monthly timetable.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965 (1965)
This one is dated to the month of my birth, beyond which I don't have anything interesting to add regarding these unrelated facts aside from makes you think, dunnit?

Fritz Leiber's Stardock is one of his Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser tales, a series I've given a wide berth up until now because I didn't like the sound of it. Leiber writes like a dream when he's writing something interesting - expressive and arguably unique in the history of this sort of literature; but Stardock is unfortunately more or less what I expected it to be, namely the adventures of bearded men who point at distant objects and exclaim behold! The bearded men in this case are engaged in mountain climbing in search of the inevitable treasure, and they both get to knob sexy faerie ladies, and it's sixty looong pages which I read in a single sitting because I knew I'd end up skipping the rest if I took a break. It's probably great if you like that sort of thing and I don't, but it's nice to know my instincts regarding whether I'm going to like something or not seem reasonably on point.

Thankfully, it's mostly uphill for the rest of the trip. Simak's You'll Never Go Home Again is characteristically nourishing; and Sally is one of those tales in which Asimov did something other than invite us to figure out the puzzle, so that's jolly nice; and this issue's vintage reprint was David H. Keller's The Worm from 1929 - then much younger than this magazine is now - which isn't anything mind blowing but does a job.

Frank R. Paul's cover illustrates The Man from Mars, his one page speculative essay on Martian biology. It's preposterous but charming and, dating from 1939, somewhat refutes the claim - which I read somewhere or other and have probably repeated - of Simak being the first writer to depict alien intelligence as something other than inevitably hostile.

The finest of the selection is Theodore Sturgeon's The Dark Room featuring a cast of mostly vodka-Martini guzzling fifties men and which is as such absurdly dated but works in spite of itself, and because Sturgeon's prose has a uniquely jazzy energy which crackles off the page.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963

Norman M. Lobsenz (editor)
Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963 (1963)
Here's another one of these, costing peanuts and picked up from the second hand place mainly because Simak is mentioned on the cover. It also seemed like I should have another go at enjoying J.G. Ballard, but A Question of Re-Entry isn't quite the lost astronaut tale I might have hoped for, instead concentrating on those sailing up and down the Amazon in hope of locating his capsule. As with most Ballard that I've read, it's well written with a reasonably literary flourish but the narrative just sort of floats along without doing much of anything and I couldn't get on with it, and the missing astronaut element may even have been tagged on so as to justify publication in one of these digests for all the difference it makes. That said, at least I finished the thing, in contrast to Roger Zelazny's Nine Starships Waiting which I gave up after about five mystifying pages.

In addition to the usual short stories, Fantastic was in the habit of reprinting forgotten or otherwise mislaid works from before the dawn of the science-fiction and fantasy digests, of which three turn up in this issue. Guy de Maupassant's An Apparition is distinctly underwhelming, the plot being that it's a ghost, which most of us will have guessed from the title. I've encountered the name of Maupassant as significant in the history of literature, but this example contains few clues as to why. Marginally more whelming is Jean Richepin's The Wet Dungeon Straw which is essentially a slightly depressing shaggy dog story but is peculiar enough to be enjoyable. Finally Austyn Granville's His Natal Star features a person who finds himself subject to the gravity of a distant star, and enough so as to cancel out the pull of the Earth. The story, such as it is, is mostly our man walking around on the ceiling marveling at all those tables and chairs up there, but it worked for me.

Coming at last to the main feature, Simak's Physician to the Universe - which it turns out I haven't read before - is odd even by Cliff's standards, sustaining the atmosphere of a de Chirico painting, albeit one depicting a swamp, for the full forty or so pages. Here Simak does that van Vogt thing of having each paragraph bring more questions than it answers and when the end delivers resolution, it actually sort of doesn't and leaves us more bewildered than ever. This is something I enjoy about Simak's writing, namely that his explanations often serve to emphasise the sheer scale of the mystery more than they illuminate. Here his protagonists are exiled to a swamp serving as a form of limbo - locales which Simak has used more than once to place his characters outside of space, time, and  conventional reality. Somebody will one day write a thorough examination of Simak's oeuvre, it patently being of a depth and complexity sufficient to warrant such an undertaking, and light will hopefully be shed on the significance of the swamp to which he returns time and again. Until then I don't have much idea, but it's fun to ponder.

3 in 1

 

Leo Margulies (editor) 3 in 1 (1963)
The idea was to collect novella length stories from the digests which weren't long enough to reprint as novels in their own right, and yet which weren't sufficiently breezy as to justify inclusion in a short story anthology. I'm not sure what the highest available page count would have been for a paperback produced in the early sixties, but I'm guessing not much more than a couple of hundred, hence this volume. I'm also guessing the potential page count may have risen somewhat soon after this was published, which is why we haven't seen a load of these things all washed up in second hand book stores.

Anyway, this one seemed like an essential purchase given the presence of both Simak and Leinster. Theodore Sturgeon's There is No Defense sags a bit towards the end, although is worth reading just for the first half which pretty much beats James S.A. Corey to everything which made The Expanse interesting - at least on the box - but did it all back in 1948. Simak's Galactic Chest is characteristically wonderful, and is actually hard to read without one's inner film director giving the lead role to James Stewart. Finally, there's Murray Leinster's West Wind which isn't one of his best, but is nevertheless worth reading at least once because it's Leinster and as such goes everywhere but the places you might expect it to go. Truthfully, the only points deducted are for how much it reminds me of one of Algis Budrys' slightly twitchy cold war fables, and there are probably worse things to be reminded of.

Murray Leinster - the Life and Works

 

Billee J. Stallings & Jo-An J. Evans
Murray Leinster - the Life and Works (2011)
Murray Leinster was a giant in terms of science-fiction for at least half a century, specifically the half a century when science-fiction meant the written word, novels, short stories, and digest magazines. He was your favourite author's favourite author; he predicted the internet in a short story written in 1946, and not just something which sounded vaguely like a similar sort of deal, but something which now seems astonishingly familiar but for the names being different; and yet he's now only loosely remembered, depending on where you're looking. Gollancz SF Masterworks are supposedly going to reprint Leinster's Sidewise in Time - the novel which kickstarted the entire alternate history genre - which is nice, but also kind of shabby given that the imprint has been going two decades and this will be their first Leinster.

I think the problem is a PR issue. For a while, the term science-fiction author conjured images of a certain generic and usually conservative type belonging to a world of women with pointy breasts and cars with extravagant tailfins. He wore a tweed jacket, he smoked a pipe, he churned out story after story for the pulp magazines like a human conveyor belt, and there was absolutely nothing remotely Bohemian about him; and that man, it could be argued, was Murray Leinster. Except as always, the legend bears an only superficial resemblance to the person stood behind, and so it was with Leinster. He made no bones about his writing being a job like any other job and so produced thousands of short stories inhabiting all marketable genres during his lifetime - western, romance, detective, adventure, and of course science-fiction, all hammered out on his trusty Remington as he puffed away on his pipe, smartly turned out in a shirt and tie regardless of the Virginia heat. His writing was tight, efficient, and free of the eccentric flourishes which made the reputations of other, better remembered authors.

Yet, because he treated it as a job, at least in terms of its daily production, he became exceptionally good at what he did. His stories are lively, expressive, always witty, and for all that certain dramatic conventions have subsequently dated, his tales very rarely go where you might expect them to go, and the sometimes homely atmosphere often ends up providing dramatic contrast to some truly weird and peculiar revelation - like a slightly less ponderous Simak.

Similarly, the man himself - as described in this wonderful biography by two of his daughters - bears little resemblance to the image which usually forms as an inevitable interference pattern at the confluence of typewriters and pipe smoking. He was self taught, but properly self-taught, widely read, a jobbing inventor with working and even profitable patents to his name, and in some ways a genuine renaissance man. It's also pretty obvious that he was both principled - someone we won't ever need to excuse as being of his time - and a genuinely lovely guy.

I don't know if his work will ever come back into favour but I'm glad to see that he is at least remembered so well and in such detail by those who knew him; and the fact of this extended portrait being so warmly and eloquently captured is itself probably a testimony to Leinster's influence and generous spirit. This book actually feels like it's doing you good as you read it, and - for what it may be worth - Leinster's own writing advice, as quoted extensively, is illuminating stuff both in terms of his own books and in contrast to all the story arcs and character development bollocks you'll get from other authors.

More people should read Murray Leinster.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 717

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 717 (2015)
The last digest magazine I tackled was an old issue of Analog which left me feeling slightly unclean, and this, combined with a failed attempt to read the work of Yukio Mishima - a man whom I'm fairly certain Kenneth Clark would have denounced as quite, quite beastly - I've really come to appreciate Fantasy & Science Fiction, a digest which has yet to let me down. Even given that not everything in such a collection is going to click with every reader, and that I'm really not even that struck on fantasy as a genre, the standard is such that you can even appreciate the quality of the occasional turkey, and that turkeys tend to be in the eye of the beholder with Fantasy & Science Fiction; or to put it another way, even the weaker material is usually a decent read. As for this issue, I was less than knocked out by Francis Marion Soty's interpretation of a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, but the rest range from respectable to even wonderful.

Telling Stories to the Sky by Eleanor Arnason, and Jubilee: A Seastead Story by Naomi Kritzer both have enough going on for it to be worth mentioning. Better still is Dale Bailey's Lightning Jack's Last Ride, which seems to suggest that the western is alive and well, despite the author substituting cowboys for post-apocalyptic NASCAR drivers. It's also a refreshing change for being an actual narrative rather than just a plot with characters attached.

Matthew Hughes' Prisoner of Pandarius seems to be a fairly literal fantasy transposition of E.W. Hornung's Raffles the Gentleman Thief as Raffalon, who inhabits a pseudo-medieval world of taverns, spells, imps and the like. I've often found such settings to be something of a stumbling block, but Hughes really drew me in with a tightly knit and elegantly delineated mystery nevertheless based around people who nick stuff from castles and hang around with wizards. In fact Prisoner of Pandarius was so engaging that I'm  going to see if I can't find some more by the guy.

Bud Webster's Farewell Blues is actually the reason I bought this issue, having faintly known Bud online as part of a Simak appreciation group. We were hardly brothers from other mothers, but Bud was one of the people I liked in an online community which nevertheless managed to attract the usual quota of disagreeable arseholes, despite our having been brought together in mutual appreciation of an unusually gentle and pacific author. I'd enjoyed Bud's excellent and informative online articles about the aforementioned Simak, Murray Leinster, and other favourites, and he mentioned having a story featured in Fantasy & Science Fiction then departed this mortal coil before I actually had a chance to read the thing. Farewell Blues is, with a certain irony, about death and the passing of loved ones, and is dedicated to Bud's father. It's centered around jazz players in New Orleans, two of whom are named Hardy Fox and Homer Flynn after alleged members of the Residents, and refers to an afterlife which is actually the place we all go when we dream - a Mexican folk myth which I used in Against Nature; so it turns out we would have had plenty to talk about had I read this while he was still with us, not least being that Farewell Blues is a wonderful tale and the peculiar likelihood of Bud actually having known the Residents; but never mind.

Once again, I feel thoroughly restored by this thing and encouraged by the fact that it is still able to exist in a world of corporate entertainment product, franchises, and cynical marketing.

Oh No It Isn't!

Paul Cornell Oh No It Isn't! (1997)
I realise this is the third Who related thing I've read this month, which is a bit depressing. Having spent much of the last decade wrestling with a to be read pile the size of the Empire State, I've avoided stocking up on too many new books this year, intending instead to read all those I've had for at least a decade which I either never got around to reading, or at least read so long ago that they may as well be new books. Practically speaking, this means that when I come to the end of one thing and suddenly decide I feel like reading something in the general direction of science-fiction, ruling out anything read in the last decade leaves me with either a back issue of some digest magazine or one of four-million Who tie-ins; and yes, it is a bit depressing, because despite the magic of Who being that it can tell any kind of story, it rarely has much to say outside a few very specific kinds of story, with one of the main ones being where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal - which I state in full knowledge of having done this myself.

Anyway, so as to save the usual preamble, let's just assume this is Doc Savage or some other piece of serial fiction. It's Who, but one of the Virgin Who novels after the point at which the BBC reclaimed all of their copyrighted material, the stuff they decided might still yield a few shekels if they could just squeeze hard enough; so it's Who without Who, if you will, sort of like:

Bernice Summerfield is Emma Thompson as an archaeologist who has adventures in outer space, but generally more entertaining than that may sound depending on who was writing. At worst, her books tended towards generic Douglas Adams impersonations based on the sort of boffo larks we all had at uni, unfortunately predicated on the notion that the word bonking was still funny; but occasionally someone got it right with a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Paul Cornell always seemed like one of those authors with more to offer than just further Who, which I guess you could say has turned out to be the case. Here he does that thing where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal, but it works because the premise is so deeply fucking ludicrous as to defy expectation, namely that reality has come to resemble pantomime. Professor Summerfield is granted access to an archaeological dig upon an alien planet just as a species called the Grel show up in argumentative spirit and suddenly we're in a world of glass slippers, princesses, and shoddy scenery.

'We have not escaped from a show!' exclaimed Moody. 'we work in our mine, and sell the rubies and diamonds that we find there in the village market.'

Bernice frowned. 'Is there much of a market for precious stones in a small agrarian community?'

The dwarves all looked at her blankly.

Truthfully, it all gets a bit knotted up at the end with far too many characters chasing around for reasons I couldn't quite follow, but it doesn't really matter. This sort of thing could have fallen flat on its arse, but is otherwise actually as great as one might hope, and genuinely funny without digging the reader in the ribs and smirking the whole fucking time. In this respect it reads a little like Terry Pratchett with the post-modernism turned up a notch or two, notably while self-consciously posing for the cover art.

She put her hands on her hips and inspected the room, a rueful expression on her face.

Wolsey looked around the cave to his right, leaning his weight on his right front paw, holding the gun in his other hand.

They stood like that for a moment.

Somehow, there also seems to be a point to all of this beyond the basic requirement of scrapes and chuckles, namely that this sort of thing is essentially absurd at the best of times even without the pantomime, so why the fuck not?

One might easily view Oh No It Isn't! as heir to Simak's Out of Their Minds or even Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky, at least more so than to The Underwater Menace or even Cornell's Love and War. As with the best of the line, it counts as a respectable effort in its own right.

Analog April 1961

John W. Campbell (editor) Analog April 1961

(1961 but felt more like 1931)
Up until last November, I'd read only one issue of Analog. It was kind of shit, but I assumed I'd simply picked up a dud copy of an otherwise decent magazine and so casually accumulated a further five back issues as I happened upon them in junk shops on the grounds of the covers holding promise, and I'd get around to reading them eventually, and maybe there would be something amazing in one of them. This is now my third and I think I'm beginning to see the central flaw in my strategy regarding back issues of Analog. In this instance I was drawn in by the prospect of fresh Simak. The Fisherman actually turns out to be the serialised version of the novel which was later published as Time is the Simplest Thing, and is therefore wonderful, even in this truncated form. The problem is the sharp contrast it throws across everything else in the magazine.

Beyond Simak, the collection isn't entirely without redeeming features but you really have to work at it. We kick off with one of Campbell's characteristically unsavoury editorials, this time discussing colonialism by comparing examples from science-fiction literature with the history of Africa, the Americas and elsewhere. The racism is very much in the casual school but, perhaps unsurprisingly, his views of less technologically developed societies and their worth in the great scheme of things are typically appalling. I therefore also skipped Campbell's essay about innovations in the manufacture of light bulbs because fuck that guy.

Excepting J.F. Bone's underwhelming but mercifully short A Prize for Edie, the remainder comprises tales of space pilots, teams, men who address each other as sir, colonels, and other species of square, enjoyment of which probably depends on the reader having some kind of military background and being the sort of fellow who enjoys a well-mixed Martini after a few hours on the golf course. Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s Still, Small Voice - in which military types attempt to influence the politics of a pseudo-medieval planet - is just about saved by its culminating revolution sparked through the invention of the trumpet. I gave up on Christopher Anvil's Pandora's Envoy after five or six pages, skipping ahead to Robert Donald Locke's Next Door, Next World.

Lance kissed her. A tender kiss, yet gusty enough that he lifted her from the ground and her high-heeled shoes kicked in free fall.

The pilot found his girl's breath warm, loving. Yet her cheeks seemed colder than even the crisp air should account for. And her body was trembling.

Lance is a dashing space pilot, and his girl is the colonel's daughter. Lance flies off into space and when he returns, he finds the colonel has never had a daughter because of space warps and alternate realities 'n' shit. I'm sure it was mind blowing back in April 1961. Anyway, following Next Door, Next World I took another shot at Pandora's Envoy and found it wasn't quite so bad as it had seemed; but honestly, most of this stuff would seem pitiful in competition with Andre Norton, never mind Simak.

There's also a section of book reviews comprising mostly plot summaries of the offerings under scrutiny. This novel features an intrepid space reporter named Jed who travels to Titan to cover the Interplanetary Space-Golf Tournament, but when Jed arrives he finds that a mysterious stranger is already checked into his hotel under his name. At first he decides to blah blah blah…

Three down, three of these turkeys to go...

Fantasy & Science Fiction #676

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 676 (2008)
Back in 2008, I decided to educate myself regarding what science-fiction* there was to be had beyond Philip K. Dick - of whom I'd already read a fair bit - and Who novels. I'd taken to picking up whatever I could find which looked interesting, mostly from charity shops, and so became familiar with Asimov, Simak, van Vogt and others; but still I felt the need to know what was going down on the mean streets of science-fiction literature right now, right at this moment, or right at that moment in this case, so I got my ass to Borders and picked up the September issues of Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and this one, Fantasy & Science Fiction, which seemed to be the best of the bunch.

This issue featured Paolo Bacigalupi's Pump Six, which I thought was fucking amazing, and which compelled me to buy at least a couple of his other books, and which seems even more amazing twelve years later, not least because it describes the sort of profoundly sickening environmental decline which has actually been coming true right outside our windows.

Even better was Carolyn Ives Gilman's Arkfall which makes fairly profound observations about the human condition and specifically how we relate to each other, but makes them quietly and without any shouting in one of the weirdest, most unsettling environments you could imagine, at least without invoking quantum theory. This one really affected me when I read it, and I've just noticed my having failed to read anything else by the woman, so I'll try to put that one right.

Elsewhere in the mag, Jim Aiken's Run! Run!, Robert Reed's Salad for Two, and Laura Kasischke's Search Continues for Elderly Man are decent, and probably in that order; leaving us with one of those tales told as a series of letters sent back and forth between the two protagonists which I couldn't be arsed to read, and Rand B. Lee's Picnic on Pentecost, which opens with the planet has a face like a dead circus performer, but then did nothing else to keep me from skipping ahead. To be specific, the story is mostly told by means of that Claremont-speak which attempts to fakesimulateinvoke thought by running words words words together in a cloying-annoying way - sillystupidcrappy - and which once endangered the narrative integrity of many an X-Men comic back in the day, so I couldn't be arsed to read that one either. All the same, with Pump Six and Arkfall together in this single volume, you tend not to notice a couple of duds. This issue may not quite be where it all began for me, but it was certainly where something began.

*: Referring here to the written word because I generally couldn't give a shit about film or TV, or at least ceased to do so around this time.

The Wild Boys

William S. Burroughs The Wild Boys (1972)
This was bloody rubbish and it don't make no sense and to be honest I'm surprised Simon Le Bon let him write it because it don't even say anything about the band and none of them are in it and it don't even name any of their songs. Mostly it's just about a lot of boys bumming each other and looking at each other's private parts. Disgusting is what I call it. Shame on you, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Seriously, in case anyone ever wondered, Russell Mulcahy who later went on to direct Highlander - which is possibly one of the worst movies ever made - wanted to film Burroughs' Wild Boys, so persuaded Duran Duran to record a song inspired by the book, or at least inspired by his description of the book; he then produced the lavish but essentially ridiculous promotional video for the song in the hope of using it as a showreel to impress upon film studio people just how amazing his big screen version of Burroughs' novel would be if they paid him to make it. I guess they weren't sufficiently impressed because that's the end of the story, aside from me suffering a Duran fucking Duran earworm every single time I picked this up to read it.

I looked all of that up so that you don't have to.

Where The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded all seem to constitute fall-out from The Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys - along with Exterminator! and Port of Saints - were generated by The Job, roughly speaking, specifically as the material taking the form of fiction rather than essays. The shift of focus is difficult to define but is nevertheless tangible with much less actual cut-up material despite the occasional lapse into Cubist or otherwise non-linear narrative. The Wild Boys as a novel works with the logic of a dream, meaning the reader's focus remains in the moment, with the before and after of cause and effect being vague and impressionistic. It feels like it adds up even if it doesn't in terms a mathematician would recognise, which is why simpletons insist that none of it makes any sense, which I would argue is the same as saying that a landscape makes no sense as you move through it. It's all a matter of perspective.

The Wild Boys is a science-fiction novel, one which I personally take as a demonstration of what happens once control systems are disrupted and subverted by the events described in The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded; and what happens is revolution as a natural development, a personal and organic process rather than anything political in the traditional sense.

The young are an alien species. They won't replace us by revolution. They will forget and ignore us out of existence.

Naturally Burroughs equates existential liberty with man on man action, so there's a lot of that going on, possibly as a symbol of moving beyond the known and the authoritarian. Sex is, after all, freedom.

'The new look in blue movies stresses story and character. This is the space age and sex movies must express the longing to escape from the flesh through sex. The way out is the way through.'

This idea, that we are here to go, is further invoked as part of an arguably traditional science-fiction narrative by a full page of very specific references to Clifford Simak's Time is the Simplest Thing in chapter six, a novel centred upon telepathic projection of the self to other worlds. I must admit I was very pleasantly surprised to find Bill reading Simak, although I suspect the appreciation would have been very much a one way street.

If you have trouble making sense of Burroughs, The Wild Boys is probably less of a headache than a few of his previous efforts, and I can see why the Highlander dude thought he could make a movie out of it - although I'm glad that he didn't.

Halcyon Drift

Brian Stableford Halcyon Drift (1972)
Back in what I calculate to have been 1978, or 1979 at the latest, my second (or possibly third) year English class was running some sort of book club whereby we could buy cheap books direct from the publishers. Amongst the promotional material we were sent was a poster featuring the covers of thirty or forty science-fiction novels published by Pan including Michael Coney's Brontomek!, Simak's Werewolf Principal, Heinlein's Green Hills of Earth, Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer and others - notably this one. The other side of the poster was Angus McKie's gorgeous cover art for Brian Stableford's Rhapsody in Black, a spaceship called the Hooded Swan which likewise appears on the cover of Stableford's Halcyon Drift, which is the first in a series. The point of this extended digression is that it was this poster which most likely imprinted me with those spacecraft painted by Angus McKie and others, and which has ultimately informed my reading habits for at least some of the last decade; and when I happened across this one in a used book store with that immediately familiar cover, I nearly lost my shit.

Inevitably, Halcyon Drift could never have lived up to four decades of expectation, but it's decent of its kind. It's space opera, essentially a western set amongst the stars, but is well-written, even crafted, and with just the right quota of mind-expanding concepts to keep things interesting and even unpredictable without stretching the genre too far. I'd say it's in the vein of Larry Niven, except I always seem to find myself irritated by Larry Niven; and whatever his crimes may be, Stableford manages very well without them. Being space opera, a genre with which I feel entirely sated by this point, I would say Halcyon Drift does very well in instituting a series that I very much doubt I'll read, but - let's face it - a few more with Angus McKie covers would probably be enough to swing it.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 345

Edward L. Ferman (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 345 (1980)
Freed from the tyranny of the to be read pile, I find myself at liberty to scour my shelves for anything which escaped the net first time around, titles I may have owned for a while without actually noticing my failure to have read them. This is one of a dozen or so issues of the digest magazines - a category also including issues of Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories - mostly excavated from the crappiest of thrift stores out of a sense of pity in the belief that, being magazines rather than books in the normal sense, their existence is on a more ephemeral footing, thus requiring that I rescue them. Of course, being arguably more ephemeral than your regular book store novels, such magazines seem to present an elevated possibility of weird obsurities by persons who only had one decent story in them, or whose work never made it into an anthology. On occasion I've bought these magazines from news stands as they were published - mainly just for the sake of poking a thermometer up science fiction's bottom in order to assess its health at time of purchase - but I've never been a regular subscriber, because I've always had too much waiting to be read as it is without asking for extra homework.

Anyway, here we are. In February 1980, I was a regular reader of the Star Wars and Doctor Who comics, plus 2000AD, and Tornado; I bought Sham 69's Hersham Boys album and was thinking about buying Never Mind the Bollocks; and I received a Valentine's Day card from the girl I fancied at school, which turned out to have been sent by her friends in jest, prompting me towards a period of bitter introspection. Fantasy & Science Fiction was a long, long way off my radar.

This is probably the most underwhelming issue of the magazine I've encountered, although to be fair, it has been a nevertheless pleasurable delve even if the rewards aren't what I had hoped they might be. Most of the book is taken up with the final quarter of Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle, published in instalments for some reason, which is readable but dull as fuck. I've read Silverberg before, and if not consistently amazing, he wrote well when it suited him. Lord Valentine's Castle is possibly symptomatic of the late seventies upsurge in fantasy fiction, the stuff against which Gibson's Neuromancer was supposedly a reaction just as the Damned had been a reaction against Pink Floyd, should you subscribe to that reductionist and not entirely workable theory. To me it reads like Silverberg going to see Star Wars, noticing the success of Frank Herbert's Dune, then deciding he wants in on the action.

Unfortunately I am no more able to read fantasy than I am able to attend renaissance fairs dressed as a fucking minstrel. As soon as I read a sentence suffixed with my Lord, my brain shuts itself down. For this reason I managed only three pages of Tanith Lee's Cyrion in Bronze - also in the issue - then gave up. I made it through Silverberg's contribution, but without much enthusiasm. I have a theory that fantasy is mostly written by and for dunces. They lack the skill to describe the existing world with any sort of insight, and, lacking imagination, are only able to compose using a well established cast of characters and ideas already found within the public domain - elves, wizards, castles, magic by which plot can be moved forward without the need of complicated explanation, vampires, imps, plucky young farmhands, and so on and so forth. Successful fantasy, what little of it there may be, is either exceptionally well written or else does something unexpected with its staples - which I suppose leaves us with Simak, Tolkien, Clark Ashton Smith, and maybe a couple of others. Lord Valentine's Castle, like much of the genre, may as well be a novelisation of the drama imagined by small boys playing with action figures, my Lord.

Jack Massa's The Daydream Enhancer and Robert Grossbach's All Things Come to Those Who Weight are okay, at least short and sweet; and Fud Smee by Connor Cochran - writing as Freff - is mostly great but for an underwhelming conclusion. Cochran is better known as an illustrator, but Fud Smee seems like the best thing in here by some way, so it's a shame he didn't write more, or at least have more published.

Actually, the best thing in here is probably Asimov's The Finger of God, an essay on why Hitler lost and why the US bombed Japan even though the war was pretty much over. Asimov's writing is well suited to this sort of analysis, and this essay capably illustrates why he enjoyed such a stellar reputation. I only wish I liked his science fiction novels as much beyond the one or two which were exceptional.

The rest of the magazine comprises reviews, notably by Joanna Russ who made her name with The Female Man, which I still haven't read. Her reviews are insightful if a little dense, and she clearly had no fear of naming names when some beloved science fiction sacred cow curled off a stinker, doubtless accounting for the small ad in the rear of the magazine campaigning for her removal from its pages. I expect she opined something harsh but fair about Heinlein. That said, her better reviews don't inspire me to rush out and buy anything any more than Baird Searles' amusingly withering review of Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time has me looking for the DVD on Amazon.

I've read better issues of this magazine, but this was still interesting and has left me well disposed towards Joanna Russ on the grounds that she was probably doing something right in annoying the mysterious TDC of Glen Burnie, Maryland.