In our last episode we read a 1926
Weird Tales serial by Edmond Hamilton, "Across Space," and it came to our attention that in 2015 "Across Space" was reprinted in an Italian paperback omnibus along with another Hamilton tale, 1929's "Locked Worlds." "Locked Worlds" debuted in
Amazing Stories Quarterly and was reprinted in
Amazing Stories almost forty years later. Let's take a look at that 1968 issue of
Amazing, an issue produced in the brief period when that magazine was edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld fame.
Despite Harrison's protests, publisher Sol Cohen's policy during this difficult time in
Amazing's long life was to devote most of
Amazing's page count to reprints of stories that had appeared earlier in the magazine (or its sister publication
Fantastic) and it looks like this attitude extended even to the covers--the cover illo of this July 1968 issue is a mediocrity that had appeared first on
the cover of a German magazine four years earlier! Is this the behavior of the "World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine"? Sad!
Harrison starts the issue off with an editorial about developments in the SF field that I confess I found to be a little vague and all over the place; he tackles many ideas and provides a minimum of supporting evidence (but throws in various personal notes) when I would have preferred he address a small number of ideas directly and clearly. Harrison suggests the avant garde of SF (he offers his drinking buddy J. G. Ballard as its exemplar) can be described as "subjective," in contrast to old-fashioned SF which is "objective." A subjective "new wave" story emphasizes not what the story is "objectively" about--what physically happens in the story--but rather what is going on in the "inner space" that is the minds of the story's characters, or the mind of the author writing the story. He argues that what such Ballard stories as "Terminal Beach" and "End-Game" are truly about is guilt.
Harrison's editorial is not only descriptive, but proscriptive, and he warns against two trends in SF that he does not like: 1) the "vacuous" and "cliched" adventure story full of "standard props" like "blasters" and "starships" that has no plot other than violence and no meaning or wit; and 2) the overly complex or opaque story that uses experimental methods that inhibit rather than facilitate communication and whose writers import from literary fiction a snobbish "ivory tower" attitude.
Look at the frightening example of James Ballard and see what can happen. His latest works are almost unreadable and incomprehensible, the direct opposite of his earlier magnificent efforts.
I find these kind of controversial statements provocative and exciting, but their value--especially to those of us reading them 55 years later--is severely diminished by the fact that Harrison didn't offer examples of vacuous adventure stories full of violence and didn't specify which Ballard stories are allegedly "unreadable."
More controversy is to be found in the book review column, in which Leroy Tanner attacks Algis Budrys, and in the letters column, in which Ted White attacks Tanner in response to Tanner's earlier attack on Roger Zelazny. (If you are looking in the pages of Amazing for some brotherly love, Poul Anderson gushes about an Isaac Asimov collection, Asimov's Mysteries. If you are looking for boredom, there is Brian Aldiss' two pages about a trip to Oslo--Aldiss met a bunch of fun and interesting guys in Norway, but doesn't tell us anything fun or interesting about them.)
Alright, let's look at some of the fiction in this issue of Amazing. There is actually a new story, one by by "Samuel R. Delaney," a man better known as "Samuel R. Delany," but I think it is a portion of the novel Nova, a novel I read in the period before the birth of this blog and so I am passing it by. We'll turn our eye to three of the reprints: Hamilton's 1929 "Locked Worlds" and one story each by Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman first published in the 1950s. (Note that I am reading all three in their 1968 printings--this may have been a mistake, as I ran into quite a lot of typos.)
"Locked Worlds" by Edmond Hamilton (1929)
"Locked Worlds" is the account of Harker, an English professor employed by Northeastern University. As the story begins, the most famous academic at NEU is the 30-something physicist Adams, a man universally recognized by those in his field as a top innovator, an actual revolutionary, but unpopular for his bitter sarcastic tongue and arrogant nature. After explaining to us what atoms and electrons are, Harker describes the controversial theory put forward by Adams that sets the story's plot in motion in more ways than one. These long repetitive science lectures may have some readers longing for the "standard props" and violence that Harrison was complaining about in his editorial (such readers' patience will be rewarded.)
In brief, Adams has discovered that the atoms in our universe all have two sets of electrons that move in opposite directions around the same nucleus and are dissimilar in number. This means (he says) that all the matter in our universe exists simultaneously in two different worlds that occupy the same space but are invisible to each other, and that atoms of one element in one world are a different element in the other world. If we can manipulate these electrons and reverse their courses we can travel between these two parallel worlds--the matter that is a person in this world can be sent to the other world, and in its place will appear in this world an equal number of atoms that are rocks or trees or whatever from the other world.
The matter that is the scientists of this world find Adam's theory, known colloquially as the "interlocking atoms" theory, so ludicrous that Adams' formerly high reputation is dashed and he becomes the target of ridicule, so much so that his position as head of the NEU physics dept is threatened. Adams then disappears, leaving behind a cryptic note. Weeks later, Adams' assistant Rawlins, the narrator's friend, reveals that he has been examining the apparatus found in Adams' lab and believes Adams transposed himself into the parallel world described in his theory...and probably is planning to inflict a monstrous vengeance on this world whose inhabitants ridiculed him! Newspaper stories about people in remote areas like Iowa and Suriname reporting the disappearance of geographical features and the appearance in their place of some never-before-seen soil add meat to Rawlins' suspicions. Rawlins and Harker decide they must follow Adams into that parallel world in order to stop him from launching some kind of attack on our own.
"Locked Worlds" is like 48 pages long, and after a dozen pages of all that sciency background stuff we get to the adventure portion as R & H find themselves in a world of mobile vegetation grazing low-nutrient blue soil under a blinding blue white sun, a world of spider people armed with disintegrator ray guns and anti-grav sleds that fly by managing the sleds' repulsion from and attraction to the planet's magnetic poles. The college professors don't get to explore on their own much, but are rather provided a tightly controlled guided tour by the spider men who immediately capture them and take them to a city of thousand-foot high conical buildings connected by a highway of cables so the city resembles a huge spider web. Adams the vengeful scientist has allied himself to the spider people, promised to transport them to Earth--a more fertile world than this infertile blue world--where they can conquer us. Adams has Rawlins imprisoned in the city's central building, intent on forcing him to act as his here as on Earth, assistant, and leaves Harker to the tender mercies of the spider people, who imprison him in a nearby tower, in the same cell as a bird man.
This bird man, Nor-Kan, teaches Harker his speech, and schools him in the history of this world. The bird people built a high-tech civilization, but generations ago became lazy and so bred from mindless natural spiders a servant race of giant intelligent spider people to do all their work for them. In due course, the spider people overthrew their masters and took over most of the world--a small remnant of the bird people still holds out in a fortress on the south pole. (As did the slave race in that last Hamilton story we read, "Across Space," the spider people in "Locked Worlds" remind us of the shoggoths of Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness and are perhaps a warning against becoming reliant on machines and/or the labor of other ethnic groups that might have reason to resent you or ovet your position.)
Nor-Kan and Harker escape their cell and climb up the side of the conical skyscraper in which is located the prison and then go hand over hand to the HQ building where are to be found Adams and Rawlins. While Harker frees Rawlins and makes an abortive effort to capture Adams, Nor-Kan retrieves the flying machine he was piloting when he got captured. The three barely escape after a bloody fight and fly south to the bird city at the pole, narrowly evading pursuit by spider-creature aircraft.
The bird-people are easily convinced to launch an attack on the spider-city where Adams is almost finished creating the machines to transport spider cities and spider armies to our Earth, because if the eight-legged fiends conquer Earth, they can just go to Earth's South Pole and Adams can transport them behind the impregnable walls of the bird-city. The last ten pages or so of "Locked Worlds" concern the bird attack on the spider capital, a long naval battle in the air between two air fleets of over a thousand vessels each that climaxes with a hand to hand struggle between Adams and Rawlins on the apex of a conical tower over the controls of a machine that will either transport the spider horde to our Earth or exterminate the entire spider race. After the two-legs-good, eight-legs-bad ending, Harker and Rawlins return to an Earth that has no idea how close it came to being conquered by ray gun wielding arachnids.
Though it gets off to a slow start with its repetitive lectures about electrons, I'm giving "Locked Worlds" a grade of moderately good. It has many similarities to "Across Space," which I judged as simply acceptable, but has many advantages over that 1926 story. It has an interesting villain, for one thing, and he spider city is also better than the subterranean city of "Across Space"'s Martian colonists. I enjoyed the long sequence covering the escape from the prison and then the aerial chase to the polar city, as well as all the different fun types of high-tech artillery and defense measures with which Hamilton armed the two alien war fleets.
Like "Across Space," "Locked Worlds" would be reprinted by Haffner Press and by the Italian publisher Edizioni Della Vigna in our own 21st century.
"The Impossible Weapon" by Milton Lesser (1952)
It looks like we've covered four short stories by Lesser on ye olde blogge,
"'A' as in Android," "The Graveyard of Space," "Ennui," and
"It's Raining Frogs!"; I read his fix-up novel
Secret of the Black Planet before I started this blog. According to my notes I thought
Secret of the Black Planet "bland and forgettable" and the links above attest to the fact that I was not terribly enthusiastic about those four stories, but maybe this one, "The Impossible Weapon" will be more exciting. Hope springs eternal, people.
The writing style Lesser employs for "The Impossible Weapon" reminded me of that we find in hard-boiled or noirish detective fiction, bitterly, cynically jokey in a way that exposes human frailty. You science nerds don't have to worry, though--Lesser manages to integrate some science lectures about atoms and the behavior of light into his text.
Earth is at war with the Venus-Mars-Ganymede League, a war which started with a nuclear sneak attack on this big blue marble of ours. Earth's fleet was defeating the enemy fleet when the Leaguers whipped out a new weapon, one that could penetrate any Earth forcefield. Now that Earth's ships and surface are defenseless, it looks like we may have to sue for peace with the villains of the League.
Stanley Stokes is a "quantum technician," and he thinks he knows how to nullify the League's new weapon. His fiancé is the daughter of the United Nations' Assistant Secretary of Defense Weapons, Spatial Division, and he gets an interview with this bureaucrat, but the paper pusher considers Stokes' idea to be crazy. When Stokes gets drunk and complains about her father to his fiancé, she calls off their engagement.
Stokes goes to a bar frequented by spacemen, meets a big hulking brute of a spacer, a guy who fights in bar brawls on the regular and even rumbles with the cops. This veteran sailor of the void between the planets, O'Hanrohan (of course this dude is Irish), wants to take the fight to the League, and so is willing to join forces with Stokes in a desperate effort to illegally acquire a space ship and the necessary supplies to test Stokes' theory out beyond Earth orbit, in the teeth of the enemy. Our heroes hold off the police, get their stolen ship into orbit, and prove that Stokes has developed a way to counteract the League ray weapon, making them heroes and getting Stokes' girl to agree to marry him after all.
A little slight, but a fun story; Lesser's jokes actually work, and the humor and the science lectures don't overwhelm or distract from the plot but actually support it. Thumbs up for "The Impossible Weapon." Besides in its two appearances in Amazing, you can find "The Impossible Weapon" in the 2013 collection 'A' as in Android.
"This is My Son" by Paul W. Fairman (1955)
I have little familiarity with Fairman's work; looking at the regular sources on line (isfdb, wikipedia, the internet archive) it seems Fairman was a prolific writer who had his hand in many genres, including science fiction, westerns, detective stories, novelizations of TV sitcoms I have never seen like
Bridget Loves Bernie and
That Girl and even soft core porn spoofs--isfdb credits Fairman with five titles in the series
The Man from S.T.U.D.; two sample titles:
The Orgy at Madam Dracula's and
Rape is a No-No. Much of Fairman's work appeared under pen names, including the only thing I think I have read by him, the novel
Whom the Gods Would Slay which debuted in
Amazing and would be published as a paperback with a Jeff Jones cover. I liked
Whom the Gods Would Slay so maybe I'll like "This is My Son," which debuted in
Fantastic, as well.
It is the 2030s. John Temple is a young American physicist working on a major contract down in Latin America--this super duper important job requires that he spend six continuous years on the job site and not return home to the USA even once. He can talk to his wife and kid on the video phone, but that doesn't seem like enough, and again and again his colleagues have to talk him out of breaking the contract and rushing back to his family and thus ruining his career.
Temple, as a college student and early post-grad, wanted more than anything to have a son. After marrying an attractive woman, Jill, he was very disappointed to find the two of them couldn't seem to have a child, even after two years of trying. When the Latin American opportunity came up--a six-year job which would yield enough money on completion of the contract to set them up for life--he only took it because he had no child--if he'd had a child he would have been unable to part from it. Poor Jill realized this and was broken-hearted because she loved her husband for himself, and it was now clear he primarily saw her as a potential mother.
Amazingly, only a few months after he has arrived in South America, Jill tells Temple she is pregnant. It is a hard six years, but eventually Temple gets back home to live with his family. Everybody is happy until by chance Temple learns the truth--John, Jr. is not his biological son! Wanting Temple to love her, Jill purchased a bespoke artificial baby--an android--designed and conceived in a lab and has been passing it off as their natural son! Temple calls the kid a monster to his innocent little face and John and Jill immediately separate. For years Temple lives a life of gambling and womanizing, all the while sending to his estranged family all the money they might need. Then one day he sees in the paper that his son at private school has been severely injured while rescuing his classmates during a fire. John, Jr. is a hero, hovering on the brink of death! Temple rushes to the hospital and gives his son a blood transfusion, so that, in a way, he becomes his true flesh and blood, and we are led to believe that John, Jill, and John, Jr. will live together happily ever after.
A pleasant little human interest story that explores how new technology might affect family life; we might even call this a pro-diversity story that argues that there are all different kinds of families and the traditional way of creating a family is no better than other less typical ways. Naysayers might argue this is not really a SF story, but a redecorated mainstream story about adoption, the way those same naysayers will tell you space operas and planetary romances and Jack Vance's revenge drama The Demon Princes are just redecorated westerns or detective stories or adventure tales about Western adventurers in the mysterious East. These analyses are appropriate, but do nothing to detract from a story's literary or entertainment value, and do not stop me from giving "This is My Son" a thumbs up.
I like it, but it seems that after its second appearance here in Amazing that "This is My Son" has never been reprinted.
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It is understandable that members of the SF community in 1968, especially professionals like Harry Harrison, would want to read or work for a magazine that printed brand new stories and not a bunch of reprints. But the three reprints we read today are pretty good! The Hamilton and Lesser stories are solid classic SF about scientists who invent paradigm-shifting devices and get mixed up in wars in which people discharge a dizzying array of energy weapons at each other. And the Fairman actually has mainstream literary elements like those we expect a New Wave "inner space" story to have--it is about the psychology and relationships of three people, and about how new technology shifts paradigms not in the realms of war or transportation, but the world of the family. To me, this seems like a pretty rewarding issue of Amazing.
More 1950s SF in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.
I think Sturgeon is a good writer, but find his scolding elitism, his suggestion that the cognitive elite should collar and corral the common masses, and his affection for the idea of collective consciousness to be tiresome. Probably I haven't read this story yet because the title made me think it would be an exercise in dismissively attacking the human race by contrasting us with good goody Martians. But today we'll overcome our inhibitions and see what's up with this thing, a Weird Tales cover story that would go on to appear in Leo Margulies' The Ghoul Keepers and various Sturgeon collections.