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...

The Best of Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson The Best of Jack Williamson (1978)
Earlier in the year I read a collaboration between this guy and Frederik Pohl which impressed upon me the notion that I should probably make an effort to read something by Jack Williamson, his having been somewhat off my radar up until that point; except it appears that I have imagined the whole thing and can find no trace of whatever the collaboration may have been or my having read anything of that description. It would be nice if this were like something from a story written by Jack Williamson, but sadly it isn't.

Jack Williamson was going at it way back when we were still calling it scientifiction. His early tales tell of Gernsbackian science-heroes having the sort of adventures which kept Edgar Rice Burroughs in business, with one foot firmly planted in the nineteenth century, a world in which men were men, women were glad of it - even the liberated sciencey ones, and the canals of Mars seemed plausible. Occasionally he'd throw in a fistful of nosebleed physics just to keep it interesting, but mostly it was about as good as you'd expect.

Nonstop to Mars sees Earth imperiled by a sort of space tornado which sucks Earth's atmosphere off to the red planet, and the protagonist of the story saves the day by flying his light aircraft along the tunnel formed by the distended eye of its storm.

We return to Mars in The Crucible of Power, wherein our rosy-cheeked, two-fisted hero bests the alien weirdies by much the same terms as white people bested Africans back when we weren't quite sure whether or not they were human.

My father gathered his five or six allies at the crest of a low yellow dune, and waited for the charge. As the yelling lancers came down the opposite slope, he walked boldly out alone to meet them, with the grave statement that he was their new ruler, sent from the Sun.

Breakdown examines the rise and fall of civilisations as the process by which revolutionary tendencies ossify and become the status quo, which would be nice had Williamson chosen to build his future society on something besides labour unions with too much power, because even the term makes me uncomfortable, it being one of those phrases which has taken on the same sort of resonance as I'm not racist but...

This being said, it seems Williamson was nothing if not adaptable, and there's a massive improvement in his writing after the second world war, and so With Folded Hands reads like the work of a different author and is as such not only readable, but even enjoyable. This generally elevated standard is more or less maintained for the rest of the collection; although after another couple of hundred pages it becomes apparent that simply being better than Nonstop to Mars probably isn't enough in and of itself. The Equalizer seems to go on forever, and I had no idea what it was actually about, and thus gave up about twenty pages before the end. The remainder are of more reasonable length and more engaging content, but still tend towards the sort of creaking twist ending in which it all turns out to have been a dream, or they're actually androids, or any other variation on the kind of thing which got well and truly hammered into the ground by Tharg's Future Shocks and others.

Jack Williamson wasn't without talent or ideas, and he wrote well for the most part, but otherwise I dread to think what the turkeys must have been like if this was genuinely his best.