Larry Niven's 1968 collection Neutron Star contains eight stories.  We've already read four, "Handicap," "Neutron Star," "A Relic of the Empire," and "At the Core;" let's read the other four, all of them set in the same fictional universe, Niven's "Known Space."

"The Soft Weapon" (1967)

Two humans, Jason Papandreu and his wife Anne-Marie, have been hired to take a passenger, a mentally ill puppeteer, Nessus, to a meeting with a third race of aliens to collect some cargo.  The rendezvous was a success, and they are on the return trip.  Jason decides to take a little sight-seeing detour, and they are captured by a ship with a small crew of Kzin.  The Kzin seize the puppeteer's cargo--it turns out to be an assortment of supplies, equipment and personal items over a billion years old, artifacts of one of the races subordinate to the Slavers, a race of expert technologists who rose up against the Slavers.

"The Soft Weapon" is kind of long, and a lot of time is spent on Kzin efforts to figure out how the principal piece of ancient equipment operates, and Jason and Anne-Marie's efforts to manipulate the Kzin into neutralizing themselves by misusing the device; this malleable, plastic thing has like ten different forms and uses, as a communications device, as a propulsion unit, as various super weapons, and as a super computer.  The humans and the puppeteer are desperate to prevent the Kzin from bringing the device back to their people, as it might give them an insuperable military edge over the human and puppeteer polities.  Victory is secured by the good guys, in part because the puppeteer in the story is, as I mentioned, mentally ill--healthy puppeteers are cowards, but being essentially insane, Nessus demonstrates courage that takes the cat-people by surprise and gives the anti-Kzin side a chance.

Pretty good.  Wikipedia is telling me "The Soft Weapon" was adapted into an episode of the Star Trek cartoon.  The Karel Thole cover to the abridged Italian translation of Neutron Star is inspired by "The Soft Weapon" and depicts the billion-and-a-half-year-old stuff the puppeteer bought and the Kzin tried to seize.  As I have remarked before, Thole really must have read the stories he illustrated.   

"Flatlander" (1967)

"Flatlander" stars the same spendthrift pilot we met in  "Neutron Star" and "At the Core," Beowulf Shaeffer.  I guess Niven has written seven or eight stories about this guy.

As this story begins, Shaeffer, our narrator, is a passenger on an Earthbound ship.  Niven portrays space travel as being mentally taxing--there are no windows for passengers because the sight of hyperspace drives people insane, so passengers habitually spend their trips between star systems cheating on their spouses and getting drunk.  Beowulf gets beaten up by the husband of the woman he is fooling around with on the trip, so he makes friends with an overweight man called Elephant and they spend their time drinking and playing cards and swapping stories.  Shaeffer was born on a planet whose first settlement was called Crashlanding City. so he and his people are known as Crashlanders.  Elephant, as an Earthman, is called a Flatlander, which he resents; he wishes he could have a space adventure which would prove that this nickname for Earthpeople shouldn't be applied to him.

Beowulf and Elephant separate when they arrive on Earth, but Beowulf finds Earth bewildering and even dangerous.  Niven portrays Earth as a sort of wild and decadent place, where people dress crazily (dying their hair and skin nonsensical colors like green and blue), picking pockets is not illegal and is in fact routinized, and many people have risky hobbies, like racing primitive ground cars on the few intact ground roads, vehicles that lack radar safety systems and automatic controls and might even crash.  Beowulf feels the need of a guide and tracks down Elephant, whom he learns is one of the richest men in human civilization, his ancestor having invented the ubiquitous teleporters people use to move on the surface of human-settled planets.

Elephant shows Beowulf around Earth, and then they go on the kind of adventure together Elephant has long wished he could.  He contacts a race of mysterious aliens, the Outsiders, who are famous for selling information, and asks to be directed to the most unusual planet they know of.  It turns out to be a small world orbiting a protostar--planet and protostar are moving at amazing speed through our galaxy, apparently having come from some other galaxy.  Niven unleashes some speculative astronomy, physics and biology on us.  In the end, Elephant's flatlander status is only confirmed--had they approached the extragalactic visitor planet they would have been killed, and Beowulf's caution, the product of his training as a space pilot and real life piloting experience, preserves them.

One of the things Niven seems to like to do is set up rules in his fictional universe (like how puppeteers are cowardly) and then show us an exception to the rule (like Nessus the insane puppeteer who attacks a Kzin in "The Soft Weapon.")  Here in "Flatlander" one of the puppeteer space hulls, which have never been breached, is disintegrated by antimatter, which is rare in our galaxy but which makes up the substance of the small planet orbiting the protostar.

Not bad.

"The Ethics of Madness" (1967)

It looks like "Grendel" was first printed here in Neutron Star; it would later reappear in Crashlander, a fix-up that collects the Beowulf Shaeffer stories.

In our last episode, we read Larry Niven's 1967 story "Handicap" and I liked it so much I was inspired to read a few more of Niven's Known Space stories published in the same general time period.  So today let's read three 1966 stories by Niven, the first three tales in Neutron Star, a 1968 collection that would be reprinted time and again in many languages.  All three of these stories debuted in Frederik Pohl's If, but I'm going to read them in a scan of a paperback edition of the collection.

"Neutron Star" 

"A Relic of the Empire"

This one was chosen to represent the Known Space series in a 1980 anthology of sample stories from many famous SF series.  It also was reprinted in a 2020 anthology of space pirate stories.

"A Relic of the Empire," like a lot of these Known Space stories apparently, revolves around the influence of the cowardly puppeteers and the long extinct Slavers, and humans' pursuit of money.  A lone human scientist who has suffered a lifelong fear of poverty is investigating plants on an uninhabited planet, plants of a species created by the Slavers via genetic engineering many millions of years ago.  He hopes to secure his financial health by writing a book about the Slavers and their Empire.

A space ship lands and the 15 or 20 men aboard it take the scientist captive.  These desperate characters are on the run from the law; they have learned the location of the puppeteer homeworld, and their ship is full of cash looted from puppeteer ships--in most star systems, piracy is impossible because of the presence of security forces, but the cowardly puppeteers don't fight, so are easy prey within their own system.  Back in human occupied regions, they have to find a place to hide.

The leader of the pirates describes his adventures to the scientist, and the scientist then takes advantage of the pirates' ignorance of the plants he is studying to destroy them.  Niven came up with interesting animal life forms in "Handicap," and here he has conceived of an interesting plant, one which is an organic rocket--it propagates itself across the surface of planets, and even throughout the galaxy, by taking off and exploding, spreading seeds hither and yon.  The scientist tricks the pirates into detonating these plants, killing them and making his fortune.  Niven does a good job of making the reader both a little suspicious of the scientist and a little sympathetic to the pirate leader, adding depth and tension to the tale.

I like "A Relic of the Empire" unreservedly; the pace, characters, style, and SF elements all work quite well.  It is a good representative of the Known Space series.

"At the Core"

The star of "At the Core" is the same pilot who investigated the neutron star in "Neutron Star."  This guy loves to spend money, and like four years after that risky operation we see him taking on another dangerous job for the puppeteers.

The area of space familiar to the human race, the puppeteers, and the kzin is on the edge of the Milky Way and like 60 light years across.  The galactic core is thousands and thousands of light years distant, and it would take current craft like three centuries to get there.  The puppeteers have invented a huge ship with huge hyperdrive engines that, they claim, can get to the galactic core in like 25 days, and they hire the narrator to make this test run, a publicity stunt to drum up interest among other intelligent species in the project of developing still better ships--this ship they just invented is stuffed full of engines, and has no room for cargo or passengers, just a pilot, so it is not useful for trade or colonization or anything else profitable.

As the narrator approaches the core he discovers something mind-blowing--the core of the Milky Way galaxy is exploding, a chain reaction of supernovae that is generating a wave of radiation that will exterminate all life it touches.  This wave of radiation will reach Known Space in 20,000 years.  This discovery initially means little to short-term thinkers like most humans, but the puppeteers, long-term thinkers, are shaken.  They immediately retool their entire society to focus single-mindedly on building a fleet of ships to escape the Milky Way, meaning they stop trading with other races, which causes a major stock market crash and economic downturn in all of Known Space.

Pretty good; Niven describes the technology stuff, the journey to the core, and the sight of the core entertainingly, and the twist ending is good, philosophical and with a touch of the old sensawunda.  

Among the numerous places "At the Core" was reprinted are If editor Frederik Pohl's The Second If Reader and a Dutch magazine where Niven's tale sat beside A. E. Van Vogt's "Fulfillment," a story we read some time ago and quite liked.

But first, a quick glance at Pohl's editorial and Algis Budrys' book column.  Pohl praises the recently deceased Hugo Gernsback and brags about Hugos recently won by If and by Jack Vance and Jack Gaughan for work that appeared in Galaxy.  Budrys takes the occasion of the publication of a new edition of In Search of Wonder and of the second Orbit anthology to talk a lot about Damon Knight.  Knight is usually discussed in worshipful terms, so it is interesting to hear Budrys' criticisms of the man.  Budrys also savages some poor bastard Joe Ross for his anthology Best of Amazing, not only attacking Ross' selections but the man's command of English grammar.  Ouch!  On the other hand, Budrys likes the stories in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, though he finds the arrogance and self-importance of the Playboy staff repellent and has something condemnatory but oblique to say about Arthur C. Clarke's relationship with Playboy which I am not getting.  Budrys comes off as pretty harsh in this column. 

"Outpost of Empire" by Poul Anderson    

The French edition of Galaxy printed "Outpost of Empire" as a two-part serial in 1972.  Otherwise, the story has reappeared in three different Anderson collections, The Long Night, Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire, and Question and Answer.  Gray Morrow fans should check out the US magazine version, as it features four full-page action-oriented illustrations by Morrow.  

"Handicap" by Larry Niven 

It looks like this one appears as "The Handicapped" in the oft-reprinted collection Neutron Star.  It is just "Handicap" here in Galaxy and in the various editions of Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction: 1968.  

"Handicap" is well-done traditional science fiction that glorifies science, technological innovation, and the risk-taking businessman and describes lots of weird alien species and futuristic technology in a convincing and fun way.  

The narrator of the story is the youngest in a long line of businessmen who design and manufacture prosthetic devices that serve as hands for intelligent beings who lack hands; the canonical example are Earth dolphins, which in Niven's Known Space setting are an intelligent species.  (Like Anderson's "Outpost of Empire," Niven's "Handicap" is a component of the author's elaborate future history of a galactic civilization, the "Known Space" series, and is full of little references to this broader universe.)  The narrator has a hunch that the strange immobile creatures of planet Down known as grogs are, secretly,  just such a species and thus a market opportunity, and the story relates his investigations.  The twist of the plot is that the grog race is psychic, and has been manipulating the human colonists on Down in order to keep its intelligence and powers a secret, and has similarly manipulated the narrator in order to pave the way for a business deal with him.

Classic science fiction stories like this often portray paradigm shifts and strive to impart a sense of wonder in the reader in their conclusions, and Niven does both.  A business relationship and personal friendships between humans and grogs revolutionizes grog life, the ecosystem and economy of Down, and political life on the human space empire, all for the better, and the last line of the story holds out the possibility that in the vastness of space, humanity is likely to meet even more amazing alien beings.  Niven also adds a little touch of Lovecraftian cosmic horror to this generally sunny story, I think.  We are told that in ancient times the galaxy was ruled by a race of slavers who used psychic powers and genetic engineering to dominate all other races; one of the intelligent species who are the narrator's customers are the product of this slaver race and are somewhat reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's shoggoths.  The grogs are the degenerated descendants of the slavers (racial degradation and devolution are of course typical Lovecraftian themes) and the narrator recognizes the possibility that the grogs could take over Down and maybe all of human civilization and humans would never know it.

Thumbs up!  Above I compared Niven's Known Space project to Anderson's Technic History, but in terms of style and tone the men's writing is quite different, Niven's style feeling smooth and sprightly compared to Anderson's sometimes laborious prose.  And while I stressed above the note of cosmic horror, the tone of the story is light and optimistic, with camaraderie and fellowship being pervasive themes and all parties benefiting in the end, a contrast to the sense of tragedy we get from Anderson.  

In the two years between publication of these two editions Niven got a promotion and Roger Zelazny suffered a demotion; SF is a tough business!

"The Fairly Civil Service" by Harry Harrison

As a kid I enjoyed Harrison's broad satire Bill the Galactic Hero and the humorous Stainless Steel Rat adventure stories; my appreciation of this kind of thing has waned in my adulthood, but let's give "The Fairly Civil Service" a shot anyway.

It is the socialistic bureaucratized future in which the government tells you where to live and whether you can have children!  Our protagonist is a postal clerk, and as we watch he has to deal with a stream of irrational, irate, demanding, and even dangerous customers.  The customers are way over the top slapstick caricatures, like an old woman who needs help filling out the forms that are a prerequisite to her receiving her pension and she rants and raves, threatening to kill herself then and there if she doesn't get the help she needs, a stick up man, and a young woman who tries to use sex appeal to get the clerk to bend the rules for her.  At the end of the story, as has been foreshadowed, we learn this ordeal is not exactly real, but a simulated post office experience--the main character is wearing a hypno helmet and sitting for an exam (for the twelfth time in as many years) to see if he is qualified to be a postal clerk.

This is sort of a filler story, but it moves quickly and I did laugh at the old woman's shrieking and at her gushing blood when she followed through on her suicide threats, so I guess I have to give it a thumbs up.  Some stories, like Anderson's "Outpost of Empire," deserve more respect than they inspire pleasure, and other stories, like "The Fairly Civil Service," demand little respect but trigger enjoyment even against the will of the reader.  

"The Fairly Civil Service" has been anthologized in some foreign publications and has reappeared in Harrison collections like Prime Number under the title "A Civil Service Servant."  

**********

All three of these stories are pretty entertaining; we have to congratulate Fred Pohl and everybody involved for producing here a pretty satisfying issue of Galaxy.  I have to admit that all three of these tales have me thinking I should read more stories from the period by Anderson, Niven and Harrison; it seems that The Long Night, Neutron Star and Prime Number are all available at internet archive, so maybe we will make that happen.

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Roger Elwood's 1973 anthology of all new science fiction stories, Ten Tomorrows.  In our last episode we read stories by Robert Silverberg (in the future you should work for the Revolution), Barry Malzberg (in the future you will be allowed to hunt down and kill old people), Laurence M, Janifer (in the future a chronoscope device will allow us to make decisions that end racism and avert nuclear war) and Edgar Pangborn (in the future we'll live on communes and have lots of gay sex.)  Let's see what futures Anne McCaffrey, Pamela Sargent, and Larry Niven came up with in their contributions to Elwood's anthology.

"The Rescued Girls of Refugee" by Anne McCaffrey

As a youth I read a bunch of those Pern books and I guess I enjoyed them.  As an adult I tried to reread one and thought it pretty poor.  This is the first time I have read any fiction by McCaffrey in ages, and seeing as the story is mediocre, it is perhaps the last time I read any fiction by her.

The protagonist of "The Rescued Girls of Refugee" is a young woman living in an authoritarian matriarchal society, I guess a colony on an alien planet set up by feminists who fled Earth or whatever.  Like all the young women in the colony, the protagonist has never seen a man and has been conditioned to believe men are filthy disgusting dwarves.  This girl has had a complex and vivid dream, and is greatly troubled over it, so she is describing it to one of the matriarchs.  In the dream she met men, and they were handsome and kind.  It was explained to her in the dream that she was being conditioned to like men, in fact to be attracted to a specific man, to counteract the conditioning of the matriarchs who have squelched the natural desire of most women to have a sexual relationship with a man.  It turns out that our protagonist is not the only woman in the colony to have this dream.

In the end of the story a space ship lands and men come out of it and the young women who had that dream run to join them.

There is a long SF tradition of stories in which different factions of the cognitive elite are battling over the shape of society behind the scenes, and the plot of the story concerns the protagonist learning this and having to choose sides between the secret factions, and there is a related tradition of stories about how the elite are fully justified in manipulating the common run of humanity.*  There is also a long tradition of SF stories which depict societies run by women; some of them depict such matriarchal societies as utopian, others as dystopian.  "The Rescued Girls of Refugee" is an addition to all these traditions that doesn't do anything particularly new or do anything particularly interesting, but isn't exactly bad.  It makes sense to interpret McCaffrey's story here as an anti-feminist story, but the fact that the leaders of the heterosexual society uses the same intrusive methods on the hapless girls as do the rulers of the authoritarian lesbian society adds a level of moral ambiguity--at least I think it does.    

Merely acceptable.  The style is not very good--the protagonist's dialogue sounds more like the overwritten purple prose of a professional genre writer than the speech of a confused girl talking to a fearsome commissar--but at least the story is short at eight pages.    

"The Rescued Girls of Refugee" reappeared in Elwood's 1976 anthology Visions of Tomorrow, and then never again.

*Many van Vogt works, Asimov's famous Hari Seldon stories, Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture" are some prominent examples of SF productions that fit into either or both of these categories. 

"Matthew" by Pamela Sargent

I don't think I've ever read any fiction by Pamela Sargent.  "Matthew" has never been reprinted, so is perhaps not representative of her best work, but let's see; you never know, maybe I'll like it.

"Matthew" is a first-person narrative delivered by a guy living in the future who has a difficult family life.  This isn't one of those stories in which the author tells you the background setting of the story at the start, and then you get the plot in a straightforward chronological manner; rather, Sargent explains things gradually in dribs and drabs, out of order, so as you read it you are piecing it together.

In brief, our narrator lives in a world where most people don't have to work, because robots and computers do most everything--you just "dial" up you meals from a machine.  A few conservative types dial up the groceries and cook the food themselves, but they are considered retrograde weirdos.  This world is no utopia, though!  Due to a capital-P Plague in the past, few women are able to carry a baby successfully to term--births are so rare that they are news events broadcast on TV.  By the end of the story it is clear that population is in radical decline, there are fewer than 100,000 people in the whole world, and the computer network everybody relies on is breaking down because nobody has the knowhow to maintain and repair it, most people being decadents who spend their time using drugs and watching TV.

The narrator has a job filming births for the TV.  He had a sexy girlfriend, a Greek-American expert on Ancient Greece named Athena, and had a child with her, Matthew.  Matthew is a genius, but was born without hands.  When Athena was pregnant with Matthew, the narrator married his other sexy girlfriend, a volatile African-American woman with yellow eyes, Laura.  Laura is apparently unable to have a child, and is jealous of Athena and Matthew, whom the narrator goes to see every month or so.

Adults try to keep the truth about the terminal decline of the human population from children, but Matthew is a genius and has access to the computer network and all its records and has made friends over the network with other genius youngsters, and has figured it out.  He has also figured out that the Plague was likely engineered by somebody in authority in the Northern Hemisphere as a way to solve the overpopulation problem--he theorizes it was meant to just afflict Indians and Africans and Latin Americans but got out of hand.  

The narrator decides little Matthew needs psychiatric intervention to stop him from thinking these dark thoughts.  But before his appointment, Matthew turns up dead at the bottom of a cliff at the beach--did he commit suicide, or was it just an accident?

This story is pretty good.  The SF stuff works, and all the human drama works, Sargent successfully constructing characters who have believable personalities and act in a believable fashion and about whom we are interested and can even feel for.  I've read five stories from Ten Tomorrows so far and "Matthew" is the second best of them.  Maybe I should read more things by Sargent.  According to isfdb, she wrote a history of women characters in SF that is illustrated with paintings of naked women having sex--that sounds worthwhile.

[UPDATE MAY 8, 2022: isfdb says Firebrands: The Heroines of Science Fiction and Fantasy "Contains much erotic imagery and nudity;" I have acquired a copy of the book and I can assure you this simply means that many of the women in the paintings are baring their breasts or bottoms; there is no sexual activity depicted.  Also, I have to say that I don't think Ron Miller is very good at painting people or animals.] 

"The Defenseless Dead" by Larry Niven

Thankfully, "The Defenseless Dead" is moderately good, a SF story built on a classic model--a police detective story set in the future complete with a manly man protagonist who has a shootout with a criminal that is integrated with speculations on how high technology will affect politics and society.  The technology in question is medical technology, efficient organ transplants and the ability to cryogenically freeze people who are ill in hopes of reviving them in the future when their ailments can be cured.

(The Gil Hamilton stories are set in Niven's Known Space setting, and we have already read a little about this transplant business in another Known Space story, Niven's 1967 tale "The Jigsaw Man.") 

The Background: In the 22nd century, people's lifespans can be greatly extended by trivially easy replacement of their organs and body parts.  But there is a shortage of spare human parts.  One solution to this problem is passing laws mandating the death penalty for more and more crimes--people who get executed for making a mistake on their taxes or running a red light are a source of new body parts.  (This was the theme of "The Jigsaw Man.")  Another solution is the black market--criminals known as organleggers kidnap people and carefully kill them and cut them up and sell the parts.  Gil Hamilton is a cop with the united world government's federal police (the Amalgamated Regional Militia--ARM), he has psychic powers and he is working for the division of the feds' police force assigned to hunt down organleggers.  As the story begins the organleggers have been doing less work lately, as a law was recently passed that opened up a new source of body parts: people who had been frozen.

Some years ago, there was a youth craze that saw some daffy young people, even though they were healthy, getting themselves frozen with the idea that they would have the chance to wake up in the far future when life would be more interesting or more comfortable due to technological and societal advances.  People who wanted transplants saw these frozen healthy people as a source of new body parts.  Now, obviously, it costs money to keep people frozen, and some of these silly kids' estates, due to bad luck or incompetent management or whatever, had run out of money and could no longer pay to maintain the frozen kids.  In response to public demand, the government passed a law that allowed frozen people who could no longer pay the maintenance fees to be killed and their parts added to the organ banks.  This flood of legal parts onto the market meant the organleggers were largely out of business.

The Plot: As the story begins, the organ banks are again running low on supplies.  A new law is proposed that will allow people who were frozen because of mental illness to be killed and their healthy parts put into the organ banks.  One side effect of this law would be that the heirs of frozen people who are killed would inherit the money of their formerly frozen relatives, an incentive for them to not oppose passage of the law.  (Thus the title, "The Defenseless Dead.")  Will the organleggers oppose the law because it will again create competition for their illegally obtained spare parts?  Or can they turn the new law to their advantage by using their expert kidnapping skills to sieze and hold for ransom the new millionaires who will be created when frozen rich people are slain?

I won't summarize the somewhat complicated mystery plot, in which Gil Hamilton and his girlfriend are attacked by a laser armed organlegger for unknown reasons and then Hamilton and his police colleagues hunt for clues and interview people and have to see through disguises and all that, all the while taking into account how their actions might affect the upcoming vote on passage of the new law; I'll just say it is reasonably well handled, moderately interesting and entertaining.

Past the dinosaur-centric cover, an ad for a free camera ("you pay only for film and processing!"), and the table of contents, we come to Fred Pohl's editorial, which which eloquently bears witness to the vagaries of the publishing world.  After making tepid jokes about how Jack Vance's house is high atop a San Francisco hill, Fred promotes the appearance of Vance's The Killing Machine in the pages of If starting next month--but it seems that The Killing Machine was never printed in magazine form anywhere.  Fred also touts the appearance in this number of new author L. D. Ogle's "The Heat Racers"--in fact, "The Heat Racers" would be printed in the coming January issue of If.  Fred also urges us to start attending SF conventions, saying that the recent convention in Berkeley, where guests of honor Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett, as well as Harlan Ellison and Forrest J. Ackerman, spoke, was a "first-rate affair"--on this matter, at least, I am sure Fred is not mistaken.

This issue of If is full of embarrassing mistakes, printing errors, and typos

"When Time Was New" by Robert F. Young 

I liked four out of five of those stories; maybe "When Time Was New" can make it five out of six.

If memory serves, "Thirty Days Had September," "The Dandelion Girl," and "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" were about things like failing sexual relationships and baleful changes in society, while "The Ogress" (like Starscape...") had as one of its themes terrible violence.  These were, for lack of a better term, "adult" or "mature" stories.  In contrast, "When Time Was New" reads like a juvenile.  The story can be saccharine sweet, is full of squeaky clean G-rated jokes, and when the main characters have to fight monsters or bad guys they never directly threaten their lives--they employ force fields, stun guns or luck out when the villains kill each other or blunder into a deadly accident.

The main character of "When Time Was New" is Carpenter, a guy who works for a 22nd-centrury institution that sends people back in time in robotic dinosaurs to investigate anomalies in the fossil record.  While plodding about the Cretaceous landscape in his robotic triceratops (the horns of which are powerful stun charge projectors) he spots two kids hiding from an aggro stegosaur!  He rescues them and learns they are from Mars, where, 79 million years ago, there was an advanced spacefaring human civilization.

These kids, Marcy (11) and Skip (9), were kidnapped and brought to Earth, and recently escaped their captors.  While he drives them around, giving their pursuers (who fly robot pterosaurs) the slip, the kids tell Carpenter all about Mars and its totalitarian society in which the government raises all children and in your teens you have to take drugs that suppress your emotions so you will behave like a good logical citizen.  Marcy and Skip are geniuses (Marcy can multiply two nine-digit numbers in her head faster than Carpenter can type them into his calculator and Skip is a whiz with machines) and so are very valuable to the bolshies that rule Mars with an iron fist. 

Carpenter then camps out with the kids, and Young describes in detail how he tells them all about American history and how they eat hot dogs and roasted marshmallows and so on.  Skip falls asleep and Carpenter tells Marcy all about the woman he has a crush on, one of his colleagues back at the North American Paleontological Society.  Carpenter is shy and afraid to talk to his crush (he calls her a  "goddess" whom he "worships from afar") and Marcy urges him to be brave and tell her of his love. 

The kidnappers are defeated (by the prepubescent geniuses as much as by Carpenter) and Martian government goons arrive to take Marcy and Skip back to perform their duty to the state on the red planet.  The triceratops robot got damaged in the struggle with the kidnappers, so Carpenter can't get back to the 22nd century, and the Martians don't want a guy with emotions mucking up their logical world so he is left behind to be menaced by a tyrannosaur.  

The tyrannosaur, luckily, is a robot driven by Carpenter's colleagues, including the woman he has a crush on.  He is rescued!  And, Young using a similar plot device to the one he used in "The Dandelion Girl"--and reminding us of some of the shenanigans we see in Heinlein novels--Carpenter's crush turns out to be a grown-up Marcy, who so fell in love with him on their camping trip that she and Skip built a time machine under the noses of the Martian commissars so she could come to the 22nd century to marry Carpenter! 

Young's heart is in the right place--of course I like dinosaurs and of course I hate Martian commies--but this story, which takes up over 30 pages of the magazine, is long and slow and sappy.  At first, seeing as the female lead is a math genius who saves the day, I thought I might be able to recommend this story to the feminist community, but since Marcy performs her arithmetical wizardry and demonstrates her heroic perseverance in pursuit of a man (and is the only female character in the story, besides) I guess "When Time Was New" fails the Baldanders test and must be categorized as patriarchal propaganda.  

Maybe I would have given "When Time Was New" a thumbs up as a kid, but I'm afraid today I have to give it a regretful marginal negative vote.  In 1983 an expanded version of the story was released as the novel Eridahn. 

(On a side note, the story references the 1869 poem "Darius Green and His Flying Machine" by John T. Trowbridge, a poem I had never heard of before but was perhaps (?) famous in 1964.) 

"The Coldest Place" by Larry Niven

The copy of December '64's If that was scanned and uploaded to internet archive is actually signed by Niven, which is fun.  (Is this an opportunity for me to remind you that I own a copy of Alone Against Tomorrow signed by Harlan Ellison?)

"The Coldest Place" is more like an anecdote than a full story.  The narrator, an astronaut, and Eric, the disembodied brain that runs the spaceship, go to Pluto to investigate the possibility that there is life there.  They take a sample of a big mobile blob, unsure whether it is an amoeba monster or just helium reacting to the temperature conditions that prevail on Pluto in a way that surprises Earthers.  The End.  I guess the "arc" and surprise of the story are supposed to be provided by the hinting and then revelation that Eric is a disembodied brain, but Eric appears in "Becalmed in Hell," which I've already read, so I knew what to expect.

Acceptable.

"At the Top of the World" by J. T. McIntosh 

Gallery 71 is an underground city housing 53,000 people, a place which has no contact with the outside world and where the government strictly controls population and forbids all inheritance.  The founding documents of the 200-year-old settlement instruct that at the two-century mark the inhabitants should dig straight up for five thousand feet.  We readers know this is to discover if the radiation on the surface has abated enough that the people of Gallery 71 can leave their subterranean authoritarian state, but, like the passengers in a generation ship in so many SF stories who don't know they are in a spacecraft, the inhabitants of Gallery 71 don't realize there is a surface.  To them, "Gallery 71" is synonymous with "the world" or "the universe."

Some people are willing to follow the inscrutably mysterious instructions of the Founders, others think the vertical tunneling too risky or a simple waste of time and want to ignore this inexplicable decree from the forgotten past.  The debate gets so heated a riot erupts, and McIntosh gets to indulge in his penchant for sexualized violence by describing the bloody beatings and fighting that takes place; the beautiful daughter of the head of government has her blouse stripped off by an attacker and then her constricting skirt ripped off by a friend so she can run away to Daddy's flat.  

The head of government authorizes the digging of the new 5,000 foot vertical shaft, revealing the surface and sky, to the amazement of everybody.  Thirty young people, including the government head's sexy daughter, explore the surface for a few hours--they love the feeling of the sun on their skin and take off their clothes!  They return inside as the sun sets and temperatures drop.  The next day these troglodytes have painful sunburns and the government thinks that sunlight is the dangerous radiation the Founders warned of, and collapse the tunnel, much to the consternation of the young explorers, who try to convince the old people in government, without success, that you can protect yourself from sunburn just by keeping your clothes on.  The final paragraph, however, vindicates the caution of the olds--an enemy aircraft spotted the kids yesterday, and today this unidentified enemy, still at war with the people of the Gallery 200 years after driving them underground, drops a radiation bomb where the shaft was opened yesterday, making the surface above Gallery 71 deadly to all life again.

J. T. McIntosh doesn't seem to know what he is doing when he writes these things.  The sex and violence that so many writers use to add tension and excitement to their stories and to emphasize their points he just tacks on in a way that feels inorganic and encumbers rather than strengthens the story.  For a while I thought J. T.'s objective with the story was to make more or less legitimate but totally banal observations about politics that everybody already knows or at least pretends to believe while they are burning down the police station or looting the department store: that mob violence is wrong, that old people tend to be cautious and young people tend to be adventurous, that a society needs both conservatives and risk takers because sometimes it makes sense to be prudent and careful and other times it makes sense to strike out across frontiers and do risky new things, that tradition can be a useful guide but some traditions eventually outlive their usefulness when circumstances change, etc.  But what are we to make of the two twist endings that have the old people making a mistake that inadvertently preserves the Gallery from the commies or aliens or whoever operates the bombers?  That we should always be super duper cautious?  Or that life is a random chaos and whether we survive or expire is down to luck?

Perhaps a bigger sin than bungling whatever argument McIntosh might be trying to make is that his writing is lacking in feeling and personality.  There is no fun or fear in his work because his writing style is so lame--even a scene of a young woman having her clothes torn off generates no emotion in the reader.  

Thumbs down!   

Our Italian friends were brazen enough (or negligent enough) to print a translation of "At the Top of the World" in a magazine with a characteristically terrific cover illo by Karel Thole.  The issue is headlined by James H. Schmitz and A. E. van Vogt, whom I daresay are much better emissaries of English language genre literature than ol' J. T.  

"Pig in a Pokey" by R. A. Lafferty 

Two people, a pig-like space alien and a human, have staked claims to an asteroid.  The alien has secured his claim by killing an earlier human claimant via a cunning trick that leaves him safe from prosecution.  The current human claimant also falls afoul of the trap, but figures a way out of it and turns the tables on the porcine alien.

The alien trap, which I won't describe here, is fun and interesting, and Lafferty's breezy pleasant style is enjoyable to read.  "Pig in a Pokey" is the only story in this issue of If that I can recommend without reservation.  Maybe it is slight compared to Lafferty's more crazy, more ambitious productions, but it works like a charm--I can't think of anything about it that should be removed and I can't think of anything that should be added, it is entertaining from start to finish.

"Pig in a Pokey" was included in the 1974 collection Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?

In the middle of "Pig in a Pokey," in the center of the magazine, is an envelope and order form for those interested in taking advantage of holiday subscription rates for If, Galaxy, and Worlds of Tomorrow.  These ephemera feature some pretty adorable science-fiction images of Santa Claus.

After the Laumer serial is the letters column, "Hue and Cry."  A John D. Cochran criticizes the SF programs on TV (Outer Limits and Twilight Zone) saying they are fashioned to meet the standards of "garbage truck drivers" and "the twelve year old national intelligence." He suggests that a letter-writing campaign might browbeat the TV networks into producing TV shows of the caliber of such stories from If as Hal Clement's "The Green World" and Cordwainer Smith's "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell."  Another snob, Peter Riley, writes in to say that E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Imperial Stars" was no good, which in and of itself is not snobby, but then he adds that the other people who read If will probably like it.     

There is also a heart-wrenching letter from a woman in Tacoma.  She would like to join a club or discussion group of people interested in talking about SF and E.S.P. but the group has to be in Tacoma because she is "severely crippled" and has trouble getting around.  Damn, I hope things worked out for this person.  

(The letters column at If is an emotional roller coaster!)  

At the end of the magazine is a full page ad for book plates, including two by Emsh, one of them featuring a slide rule, a circuit diagram, and a lot of other sciency stuff--I guess the SF fans of 60 years ago really knew, or aspired to know, about the hard sciences.   

**********

I don't want to say this is a poor issue of If, because maybe the Laumer is good, and Emsh's contributions are certainly worth a look, but the two long pieces I read don't deserve a passing grade and only one of the short pieces, Lafferty's, merits a grade above "acceptable."  Let's just say this was not Fred Pohl's finest hour, and he and Niven and Young would go on to do better things.