by John Boston
The January 1971 Amazing introduces itself rather vaguely. Its cover, by Jeff Jones, depicts what looks like a slightly flattened Saturn-like planet (i.e., it has rings) but the closer you get the more it looks like it was knitted from fuzzy wool, with several ambiguous objects in the foreground that might be satellites. Or not. The best to be said is that it’s pleasant enough from a distance.
by Jeff Jones
Ted White’s editorial says nothing about the cover, but notes that Amazing was just on the Hugo ballot for the first time in years. He also mentions the winners, segueing into the revelation that next issue will feature the first part of Ursula K. Le Guin’s new novel The Lathe of Heaven. He proceeds thence to his new baby and plans to move from Brooklyn to his childhood home in Falls Church, Virginia—where, a reader informs him, Amazing and Fantastic are no longer carried at the neighborhood drugstore he once frequented. The move won’t affect his editing much, but it will interfere with designing and producing the covers, so he’ll be looking for help on that front. Artist Steve Stiles will be taking over his Brooklyn apartment and will carry on White’s tradition of hosting meetings of the local fan club the Fanoclasts.
Unfortunately, the book reviews are absent this issue, but the other features—fanzine reviews by John D. Berry, the letter column, and the science article by Greg Benford and David Book—are present as usual.
The letter column covers a lot of territory. It begins drearily with James Blish’s rejoinder to White’s last installment of trashing Blish’s book Black Easter. The high point is the conclusion: “this discussion is closed as far as I am concerned.” In response, White gets in his whacks and is “pleased” by Blish’s last line, then gets in another knife twist.
A reader disapproves of White’s increase in the type size, and White disputes his factual assumptions, stating that Amazing’s circulation has fallen along with that of all the other SF magazines, and that the loss of wordage per page is only “about fifty words or so.” (But it sure is easier to read.) He also reassures us that he’s not going to engage in “horrid editorial cutting” of serials or anything else. Speaking of publishing mechanics, another reader flags a pretty serious instance of misplaced text in the recent serial Orn, prompting White to explain how the magazine is put together (cold type and “flats”) and to identify yet another such mistake. Appropriately, I guess, he concludes that “pride can still proceed a fall.” Sic. Just so.
Richard E. Geis, publisher of the Hugo-winning Science Fiction Review, complains of John D. Berry’s “evil” review thereof (the issue may be that it pays too much attention to science fiction), and offers readers a free copy so they can make their own judgments. Reader Scott Edelstein reports on a 1968 book titled Creative Writing with a chapter on SF that is almost entirely devoted to praising Ray Bradbury and also says there are 40 or 50 magazines publishing only SF and fantasy. Another reader vents at length about Dr. Wertham, the scourge of comic books who is now planning to write about SF fandom; editor White recounts a fanzine appearance (say what?) by Wertham taking up the cudgels against the theories of ethologist Konrad Lorenz, author of the best-selling On Aggression. White in turn takes up the cudgels against Wertham. Perry Chapdelaine, who’s had some stories in If and Analog, wants to start a publishing company and is seeking investors. And finally, one Spencer Lepley resurrects the Old and New Wave arguments by saying at length that there’s nothing to argue about.
On to the main events. Unfortunately, the two featured pieces of fiction in different ways crystallize my discontent with a large amount of current (and past!) SF production.
**One Million Tomorrows (Part 2 of 2), by Bob Shaw
In the future of Bob Shaw’s One Million Tomorrows, you don’t have to die, at least as long as you’re careful. Just take a shot of a “biostat,” which in effect freezes aging at the time of administration. Of course there’s a catch. The immortality treatment effectively neuters males, sterilizing and de-sexualizing them, while having no similar effect on women. The slogan is “Don’t die off, tie off.” Still-functional males are called funkies; those who’ve taken the treatment are cools.
Obviously this development has after two centuries led to some changes in society. Now, with many fewer men sexually functional, women rather than men are the paying customers in bordellos, and polygamous marriage is common, with funkie grooms collecting multiple dowries. There are also Priapic Clubs involving plastic appliances. Humanity generally has become more risk-averse, now that people have centuries to lose from accidental death; war is abolished, and space travel has largely been abandoned. (One philosopher has called this human world “ ‘the bitch society,’ meaning a world population in which the historic male traits had effectively vanished.” There’s no further elaboration on this alleged philosophy.) The population has stabilized at Twentieth Century levels, though there’s no explanation of how, since hardly anybody dies, but men remain fertile for most of the usual child-siring age span, and women apparently do so forever if they are still fertile when they take the drug. Male contraceptive pills are mentioned, but that’s only part of an answer.
by Michael Hinge
Our hero Willy Carewe is an accountant for Farma, a pharmaceutical company. At age 40, he is a funkie thinking about tying off, but worried that he will lose his wife Athene when he does (it’s a rare one-on-one marriage). Willy is asked by his superiors to be the secret guinea pig for a new drug called E.80 that would confer immortality without affecting male functionality. He bites. “He could feel the golden centuries rolling out before him like a lush, endless carpet.”
However, he botches it with Athene. They take the shots, he tries clumsily to explain what’s really going on, she thinks he’s mocking her and is actually tying off, and blows up, telling him she’s pregnant by someone else. So he blows up too, and she leaves him. Disconsolate, he asks to be sent to Africa to help with giving biostats to the Fauves. I’ll explain that later.
Willy quickly discovers that someone is trying to kill him. He arrives, goes to his quarters, the lights are out, he feels around and finds the switch, then discovers that the safety panel is off and he could have been electrocuted. Next day, on his way to the work site, his floater engine fails and he winds up at the bottom of a river, escaping death only by considerable ingenuity. He manages to get stabbed by a Fauve, and a fake hospital worker who enters while the front desk attendant is called away tries to poison him. He’s quickly booked on a plane going home, but given these events, arranges instead to take a small plane with a bush pilot thinking no one will know where he is. However, someone has planted a hallucinogenic gas dispenser so the plane crashes in the middle of nowhere, fortunately only injuring the pilot.
In short, we’ve switched tracks from a story about the effects of a scientific development on human life to a hackneyed thriller plot.
Willy books his own flight home and finds Athene is still absent, whereabouts unknown. Barenboim, the Farma supervisor who recruited him for the experiment, says a rival organization must have taken her because they assume she’s pregnant by Willy and want to know the effect on progeny of the new drug. So Barenboim hires Gwynne, a private detective, to find Athene, but Gwynne tries to murder Willy as they search and Willy kills him in self-defense.
Now Willy calls the cops and spills everything, and their lie-detection gear says that he’s telling the truth. An officer shows him Farma financial data, new to him, revealing that Farma’s been spending big time on a factory that hasn’t produced any returns—obviously where Athene will be found, thinks Willy. He doesn’t mention this theory to the police. Instead he goes shopping in this gun-less utopia, buys a knife, an axe and a satchel at a camping store, and charges off alone to this mysterious factory. He chops through its outer wall with the axe, goes in and finds Athene, knocks out Barenboim who has conveniently appeared, and takes his car, but collides with his associate Pleeth on the way out. They are taken prisoner. It’s then revealed that E.80 is a hoax, Willy’s shot was only water, and Athene was given an effective immortality shot laced with an aphrodisiac, in a scene of bizarre melodrama that leaves Pleeth dead and Barenboim disarmed.
On to the last chapter, and it’s happily ever after (and how): Athene is going to bear and keep the child (it’s Pleeth’s—that’s the bizarre part), and as for Willy: “He picked up the hypodermic, fired its contents into his wrist in an icy cloud, and went down to the beach to rejoin his wife at the beginning of their long, long summer.”
So this novel starts out with the interesting SFnal question of the effect on a rather staid society of immortals, where the price of long life is loss of male sexuality and fertility, of a new treatment that preserves those capabilities. But it turns into a cliched shoot ‘em up/beat ‘em up opera, at the end of which the interesting question vanishes and nothing will change. This sort of bait and switch is all too common in SF, whose writers are so often good at coming up with interesting speculative ideas, but so lacking in ability to develop them, that their ideas ultimately serve only as backdrop for worn-out maneuvers borrowed from other genres. Sometimes SF is the literature of checks that can’t be cashed.
Well, the novel is capably written for what it is. Two stars, too bad.
Oh, and biostats for the Fauves? Fauves is a French word that means “wild beasts” and was applied to a school of artists who used particularly extravagant colors and brush techniques. In the story, it refers to African villages that go rogue and start raiding other villages, and the Unations (sic) forces respond by sending teams in to forcibly immortalize and neuter the male residents, usually against violent resistance. I guess the idea is that they will all calm down and behave after this treatment. However, Willy is stabbed by the woman partner of a man he injects. Willy decides he really doesn’t much like this activity, but he quickly departs and little more is said about it. I wonder if Shaw got the idea from the British practice of castrating men captured in the course of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.
Almost Human, by J.T. McIntosh
The Scottish writer J.T. McIntosh has published a number of SF novels and around a hundred stories in the SF magazines, to limited effect—he’s had relatively few anthologizations and there’s been no collection of his stories, most likely because they are highly uneven. Some are quite good, many are mediocre, and some make no sense at all. His novelet “Almost Human” falls in the middle category and is Exhibit 2 in my complaint against the state of the field.
Here’s what happens: Vince and Sam are caretakers on a remote interstellar space station. Sam has a chip on his shoulder because he’s an android, and androids feel inferior and unsure of themselves—even though Sam, “since chance played no part in his physical makeup, was tall, handsome, and strong as an ox” unlike Vince, who is small, “unusually ugly,” and weak.
by Jeff Jones
A space yacht approaches the station, piloted by a woman named Freda. Vince contacts Space Control and is informed that she killed one of the yacht owner’s friends, and she probably wasn’t on the yacht voluntarily. He is instructed to try to find out if she’s human, android, or robot (yeah, in this future they have robots too). “If she’s a human, no jury would ever convict. If she’s android, your instructions are to blow the yacht out of space.” Earlier, Space Control reported that the police said if she’s human, “there probably won’t be any charges, no matter what happened. . . . If she’s an android, she’s a killer on the run.” The analogy is made to racial discrimination in earlier centuries.
Sam concludes that she’s an android, but Vince disregards orders and doesn’t blow the yacht out of space. He tells Freda to stop at the station, where she confirms that she was kidnapped and threatened with rape before killing her assailant. Vince drugs Sam, and flees in the yacht with Freda, betting that no one will bother to chase them down, and at the end Freda’s thinking “Maybe he could love her and she him.”
So this is a nice little morality play of one man’s stand against injustice, tempered with a bit of self-interest (Freda is extremely good-looking and Vince hasn’t had much luck with women). It’s worked out a bit more cleverly than my highly compressed summary conveys.
So what’s the problem? The whole thing is two-dimensional and formulaic, with the author in effect moving flat pieces marked “human,” “robot,” “android,” “space yacht,” etc., around a game board, with minimal attention to the hypothesized world that makes these items and their relationships possible. We’ve got a technologically advanced and affluent society in which interstellar travel is commonplace and rich people have their own spaceships as toys. So why does it need to create a whole underclass of beings who appear to have all the capabilities of ordinary humans except for the ability to reproduce? (Though they are apparently able to entertain romantic feelings, as indicated above, and it is plain from context that they are capable of sexual activity.)
It says here: “Less than a century ago androids had been grown as slaves and given only whatever training was essential to get the most work out of them. Even now, although androids were perforce recognized as the potential equals of humans, they were given only training and not education. It was too expensive to allow androids sixteen years or more to mature.” Why did they need slaves? Was there a labor shortage? Is there still one? (Vince reckons that Freda “could only have had at most four or five years of conscious life,” so androids are still being created.)
Even though androids are “perforce recognized as the potential equals of humans,” how is it that a human murderer would probably not even be charged “no matter what happened,” and “If she’s a human, no jury would ever convict,” but a functionary at Space Control can order that this android be summarily executed by an even lower-level functionary at a way station? One can imagine that a Nazi-level dictatorship might function that way, but there’s no indication in the story that the characters are living in such a severely authoritarian regime.
There might be answers to those questions if the author cared to think about them, but obviously he didn’t (and if he had, the story would likely have gone in a different direction). Yet an interest in those sorts of questions is the major part of what distinguishes the better neighborhoods of the SF genre from all the other pools and puddles of popular fiction. Mustering all my critical resources, such as they are, I pronounce: This is a pile of crap with a nicely decorated surface.
So what follows? One star, you might think. Problem is that the defects of this story are not all that different from those of a great deal of what appears in the genre magazines, just a bit more obvious. And the surface is professionally rendered. Two stars, grudgingly. And in the spirit of the season—Bah! Humbug!
**Soul Affrighted, by Howard L. Myers
Howard L. Myers’s “Soul Affrighted” is a variation on what Brian Aldiss has called the “shaggy god” story. The protagonist, Dellbar, is much aggrieved at his wife Margitte, who’s been running around, though she proclaims her fidelity—“Where was she this time? Tripping out on acid? Or had she gone on to the really hard stuff?” Meanwhile, having learned of the “dark technology” revealed only by word of mouth among electronics engineers, he has built a “visualizer,” which is supposed to reveal whatever the user wishes to see.
by Michael Kaluta
Dellbar decides he wants to see Reality. “Not the routine reality of daily life, of biology, of electronic theory, of the physical laws of the universe, but the underlying reality—the realm of basic cause, of which all things man knew were merely effects.” What he gets on the screen is an old guy with white hair, who says, “One of you has penetrated! Very clever!” and reveals that “There is a purpose, all right, but you flatter yourself if you think you can understand it.”
And it turns out not everybody has a soul: they are in short supply because of the human population explosion, and lots of people are running around soulless. Suspicions confirmed! And by the way, Dellbar, since you’ve gotten this far, your soul will be moving on, but you’ll be fine without it. The story ends with Dellbar thinking about how he can use the visualizer to get rich in dishonest ways, dump his wife, and buy another woman with his ill-gotten gains. But meanwhile, he tunes into a pornographic movie. Mildly amusing; three stars.
The Volunteer, by Allen Rivers
Allen Rivers’s “The Volunteer,” his first professional sale, is another overpopulation story, this one in dystopian mode. Family is class four, living in deprivation and misery, but they could move up to the slightly less oppressive class three if Dad volunteers. For what? The problem is too many people, so take a wild guess. Commendably brief, three stars.
The Sun Doom, by Stanton A. Coblentz
The “Famous Amazing Classic” this issue is “The Sun Doom,” by Stanton A. Coblentz, from the June 1942 Fantastic Adventures, and it finds the author waxing more topical than usual. The protagonist is “Johann Emanuel Kraft, the world-famous astro-physicist,” who has been thrown into durance vile—extremely vile—for no apparent reason by “Ferdinand Narlith, the Chief Juke of the powerful nation of Elmania!”
by Gordon C. Davies
The dictator Narlith has Kraft brought from his cell to discuss Kraft’s paper which states that the Sun is maintained in a delicate equilibrium by gravity and “the tendency of atoms to disintegrate and fly apart, under extreme conditions of heat and chemical activity." If you poured a lot of extra energy into it, it would blow up and take us all with it. “Narlith chuckled. His face, in the glow of the fire, had taken on an almost fiendish expression.” A bit later: “Kraft paused, and stared at his master, dumbfounded. An idea so wild, so monstrous, so diabolical had come into his head that he reeled, and almost fell. But as he stared into the maniacally gleaming eyes of the Juke, he received confirmation of his worst surmises.”
So why is Narlith interested in such a suicidal denouement? Well, his war efforts are going badly: “the bullies and traitors of Muskovians counter-attacked and drove us out after we won half their country. They and their murderous allies the Anglams have invaded our land, without any provocation except that we tried to invade them first. They don’t appreciate the rights of the Master-Race.” And they’re coming for the Juke! So:
“You must make all speed—such speed as no man ever used before! You must throw forth your ray, and blow up the sun—the sun, and the whole earth with it! We will all die together in one glorious conflagration! Then, and then only, will the Juke be avenged!” Then he “laughed—laughed long and horribly.”)
Kraft says no, but Narlith threatens his family with the “fire and sulfur cure,” and he caves. Or seems to. In fact, the good guys show up early because Kraft used his ray to inscribe a giant SOS in the constellation of Cassiopeia, with arrows pointing to his prison, so the world will not be destroyed and Kraft will be up for the International Gold Medal of Valor! Whoopee! One star for this overdone bag of cliches, and a fine argument for abandoning this reprint series entirely.
The Road to HAL, by Greg Benford and David Book
This issue’s “Science in Science Fiction” article by Greg Benford and David Book is “The Road to HAL,” referring to the rebellious computer featured in the film 2001. As the title suggests, it examines the prospects for having real computers with the capabilities of that movie computer any time in the foreseeable future. This article is so chock-full of information about the state and prospects of computer technology as to defy summarization—it’s Benford and Book’s familiar method taken pretty close to its limits. The bottom line is that they think a HAL-like computer by 2001 is feasible, but only if we get started now. Four stars.
Summing Up
Well, that was mostly a bust. Two decent minor short stories plus the usual Benford/Book info-stuffing don’t quite redeem the lackluster serial and lead novelet. The promise of a Le Guin novel is the best thing in the issue.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]