Analog July 1971

John W. Campbell (editor)
Analog July 1971 (1961 but felt more like 1931)
This looks interesting, you think, so the next time you see a copy in a second hand place, you pick it up, maybe acquiring a stack of back issues before you've actually read any of them. Then you read them and a hard lesson is learned.

Campbell's editorial comprises the usual ranting about how hippy beatnik liberals are living in cloud cuckoo land, DDT is good, and how he'd like to see every endangered species wiped off the fucking face of the Earth; and on page seven there's an advert for a hardback collection of previous editorials should you wish to charge your pipe with a goodly plug of tobacco and sit chuckling over accounts of damn liberals and long hairs revealed for the fools they are by the mighty power of scientific discourse; and so to the stories...

Joseph P. Martino's Zero Sum seems to be a loose analogy of what was going on in Vietnam, which eventually comes out as one of those Asimov-style logic puzzles. Here's one sparkling example of its dialogue.

'Anyway, the point is there's one best mix of tactics, and you can't improve your situation by deviating from it. In fact, if you do deviate, your average losses increase. The way we figure it, on each engagement between a Destroyer and a Monitor, on average we should lose three quarters of a man less than they do. Instead, their losses average one and three eights man per engagement more than ours. And the reason is they're using the wrong mix of tactics. If they'd use the right mix, they could cut their losses, and there wouldn't be a thing we could do about it.'

There's a scene of our lads watching governmental speeches about the war on telly which lasts for nine pages. To be fair, it picks up a little in the second half but only in the sense that an Ed Sheeran album probably won't be anything like so terrible as you expect it to be.

F. Paul Wilson's The Man with the Anteater starts off with both the charm and the cast promised by the title, then turns into a pseudo libertarian opinion column while the reader is distracted by union bashing comments on just the third or second page, all of which leaves a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste.

I managed about four pages of Gordon R. Dickson's The Outposter, presumably the second half of a novel here serialised in instalments. It's probably unfair to judge something so poorly on the strength of four pages somewhere in the middle, but I couldn't even plough my gaze through the synopsis of what had already happened in the previous episode. I think it's about a ragtag crew of rebellious space renegades, or pirates, or something. I guess I'll never know.

James H. Schmitz's Poltergeist is, if not amazing, certainly readable; and A Little Edge by S. Kye Boult seems massively out of place here in terms of quality and, weirdest of all, seems to foreshadow the general tone of certain things by China Miéville.

Also there's an article about a computer game excitingly named Spacewar, which is probably hilarious if you care about such things given that this was 1971 and the guy spends twelve pages gushing over what may as well be Pong, but I couldn't give a shit about computer games. I tried half a page and found myself granted particular insight into Midge Ure's feelings regarding the city of Vienna.

The book review section uses up quite a few words in sneering at mainstream literary authors who dabble with science-fiction, for their admittedly well-written efforts are as naught compared to the power of Gordon R. Dickson, or indeed everything else published in the mighty pages of Analog; then spunks away what little validity the argument may have accumulated with praise for something by - ugh - Colin Wilson; which leaves us with just the letters page, which is mostly praise for previous Campbell editorials, including an angry housewife fulminating against kids these days. The one note of dissent comes from an anthropologist defending his field as a legitimate area of study, warranting a significantly longer response from Campbell restating his position that it's not science if it doesn't involved a blackboard covered in complicated equations, and only a fool would claim that blah blah blah…

I've got another four of these fucking things on my reading pile.

Amazing Stories July 1961

Cele Goldsmith (editor) Amazing Stories July 1961 (1961)
Whenever I pick up one of these old digests - and usually because Murray Leinster is promised by the cover - the story within nearly always turns out to be something I've already read, and usually one of his series featuring Doctor Calhoun, a sort of spacefaring version of the district nurse. Pariah Planet is thankfully not one of the Calhoun stories with which I'm familiar, although it's fairly typical of the series, meaning it may as well have been written by Hank Hill and comprises a sequence of Asimov style narrative puzzle boxes which the reader is invited to see if he, or she - but probably he, can solve before our man gets there. So it's pretty dry and this one isn't helped by a ton of speculation as to what Calhoun might find before he's actually found it, which tends to diminish the potential for surprise and threatens to muddy the distinction between what's happening and what may yet happen; but on the other hand, Leinster is rarely, if ever, a chore, and this episode borders on being a western with planets as frontier towns and our man Calhoun solving medical mysteries on a world overrun with cattle, so I'm not complaining. Also, Virgil Finlay's line illustrations are gorgeous.

Elsewhere, we're very much reminded of the space race transpiring right outside the reader's window with an article on escape capsules of the future, and Gordon Dickson's efficient but underwhelming account of lunar heroism. Thankfully we also have Dan Morgan's implausible but satisfyingly disgusting Father, and The Coming of the Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker.

I hadn't heard of the guy, and The Coming of the Ice is significant as having been the first original story to be commissioned and printed in Amazing back in 1926, everything before that having been reprints of Wells and the like; and it turns out he lived in San Antonio, so that's interesting - at least to me. The Coming of the Ice isn't life changing, but it's snappy, well written, and deliciously suggestive of that short window in publishing history during which no-one was quite sure what science-fiction was supposed to be, and the notion of an idea being too wild was yet to take hold. It concerns a man who is made immortal by scientific means, describing his experiences over the millions of years to come as humanity evolves around him even as he himself remains essentially unchanged. The influence of Wells is obvious, but it's got enough of a spark to get me on the hunt for more Wertenbaker, and more than justifies what little I paid for this magazine.

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.

The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction

Robert P. Mills (editor)

The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction eleventh series (1962)
Rightly or wrongly, I've always had the impression of Fantasy & Science Fiction as the American analogy to New Worlds, roughly speaking, at least in relation to Analog, Amazing, Galaxy, and the other magazines. Whilst you could usually expect a short story involving rockets and another involving alien civilisations from most of them, Fantasy & Science Fiction seemed to be the one to publish the weird stuff which didn't really fit anywhere else. That being said, I expected to enjoy this collection more than I did.

In its favour there are characteristically wonderful contributions from Clifford D. Simak and Poul Anderson, while Cordwainer Smith and Avram Davidson have both written impressively peculiar tales of quality sufficient as to suggest that I really need to hunt down a few more by those two. Then there's an underwhelming early work by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., something by Isaac Asimov which is probably about as whelming as I expected it to be, and my first encounter with Gordon R. Dickson which at least suggests that I've been wise to steer clear of anything with his name on the cover. George by John Anthony West is okay, and then there are another five tales listed in the index which I know I read but about which I can't remember a single thing; plus there's a couple of poems which weren't really my sort of thing.

Still, I suppose this kind of deal will always be very much like a box of chocolates in so much as that you never know which one you're gon' git, excepting cases of it being one of those boxes of chocolates wherein the various flavours featured amongst the selection are quite clearly denoted on the inside of the lid. They can't all be amazing, I guess, but it's nice that some of them are. Maybe they were just having an off year.