I can’t get into steampunk – the very idea – but I can still appreciate the significance of a steampunk story by virtue of its having appeared in the final issue of Galaxy magazine.
The copy shown below was purchased from the late Robert Madle, from whom I obtained the December, 1942, and November, 1946, issues of Astounding Science Fiction. This was back in the former, now-perhaps-unknown, world of the 1980s. (I suppose this “dates” me, but then again, the passage of time eventually dates all men!) By virtue of having been one of the first pulps that ever came into my possession, and equally, by the sense of wonder and ambiguity inherent to A.E. van Vogt’s story – “The Weapon Shop” (an aspect of Van Vogt’s oeuvre panned by Damon Knight, and praised by Philip K. Dick … I go with PKD on this one!), and the soft mystery of Hubert Rogers’ cover art, the December ’42 issue has for me a special significance.
But, back to the final Galaxy… As described at Wikipedia, subsequent to October of 1979, …“Rights to the title were transferred to a new company, Galaxy Magazine, Inc., owned by Vincent McCaffrey, proprietor of Avenue Victor Hugo, a second-hand book store in Boston; UPD [Universal Publishing and Distribution Corporation] retained a ten percent interest in order to receive income from future sales to pay off their debts. Stine had compiled two more issues, but neither ever appeared; McCaffrey, who had also launched a separate magazine, Galileo, had cash-flow problems that prevented him from distributing the magazine as he had planned. One more issue did finally appear from McCaffrey, in July 1980, in a large format; it was edited by Floyd Kemske. A subsequent issue, to be dated October 1980 [edited by Floyd Kemske], was assembled, but never distributed.” As shown in the magazine’s issue grid at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, “A brief revival as a semi-professional magazine followed in 1994, edited by H. L. Gold’s son, E. J. Gold; this lasted for eight bimonthly issues.”
And more: “The last few years of Galaxy‘s life were marked by stories of unpaid contributors. John Varley, for example, reported that he was still owed money for his stories five years after they appeared. Submissions from well-known writers fell away, and the lack of financial support from UPD meant that the pay rate was an unattractive one cent per word. Higher postal rates, higher paper costs, and continuing competition from the paperback science fiction market all added to the pressure on Galaxy. These problems were not resolved by the sale to McCaffrey, who did not even have enough money to pay for circulation postage, with the result that not every Galaxy subscriber received a copy of the final issue. Frederik Pohl places the blame for Galaxy‘s demise on Arnie Abramson, who, Pohl contends, “simply did not perform [the] basic functions of a publisher”: paying the authors, ensuring subscribers received copies, and meeting other obligations.”
Ita gloria publicationis transit
While oddly unavailable at the Pulp Magazine Archive, the issue is available at the Luminist Archives, and can be downloaded in PDF format here.
Notably, there’s a substantial degree of non-fiction content:
“Son of Calculator and the Electronic Lifestyle”, by Steve North, anticipating personal computing and the Internet
“Your Car and Your Computer”, by Ed Teja
“Words” – Computer acronyms and lingo
“If You Don’t Talk to Your Stereo, I Will”, by Eric Blair
“Defending the Empire: Intelligent [computer] Games”, by Ed Teja
“Careers” [in computing]
“Michael Kaluta: Storytelling Fantasy Artist”, by Floyd Kemske
“Projections – Galaxy Looks at the Making of Fritz Lang’s Classic Film Metropolis”, by Robert Stewart
Plus, an ad for the first four issues of Galileo, featuring Larry Niven’s “The Ringworld Engineers”
Cover art by Larry Blamire, for “In The Days of the Steam Wars”
Illustration by Tom Barrett, for “The Colony”, by Raymond Kaminski (p. 21)
Illustration by Larry Blamire, for “In The Days of the Steam Wars” (p. 35)
Illustration by Barclay Shaw, for “Jem”, by Frederik Pohl (part 5) (p. 49)
Illustration by Tom Barrett, for poem “Mapping the Island in Images – The Four Shores, Beta Bernal, resonant orbit, 2080”, by Robert Frazier (p. 59)
Untitled Illustration by Cortney Skinner (p. 73 – interior of rear cover)
This cartoon, by The New Yorker cartoonist George Price, is hilarious, for it takes a commonplace idea – a literary idea – and carries it to an (il)logical conclusion. More than the merely weird idea of assembling all the authors of a anthology’s collected works for a single book signing, the appearance, facial expression, and attire of every individual is unique, exaggeratingly embodying the life experience of every author. It’s this, combined with the hilarity of a collective book signing, makes the cartoon work so well.
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Price’s cartoon reminds me of the cover of the October, 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which featured depictions of twenty contributors (excluding “Bug-Eye”) who were making the by then two-year-old magazine a success. A very clever idea. The magazine leads with a report to its readers touching upon its successes, challenges, and plans for the future, and mentions upcoming works by Isaac Asimov and Clifford Simak, and, includes a key – reproduced below – identifying the authors and contributors shown on the cover.
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Annual Report to our Readers
The twelvemonth between our first annual report and this, which marks the beginning of our third year, was rammed full of activity for GALAXY. It all boils down to this one astonishing fact, however:
GALAXY has acquired the second largest circulation in science- fiction and is pushing hard toward first place.
For a magazine to achieve this record in so short a time is a tribute to its unyielding policy of presenting the highest quality obtainable; to its readers for their loyalty and appreciation; to its authors for helping it maintain those standards and even advance them.
During the turbulent first year of GALAXY’s existence, other publishers thought the idea of offering mature science fiction in attractive, adult format was downright funny. They knew what sold – shapely female endomorphs with bronze bras, embattled male mesomorphs clad in muscle, and frightful alien monsters in search of a human meal.
• We have the biggest promotion campaign mapped out that any science fiction magazine has ever had. • We are working out the broadest circulation possible. Note that we reach the stands regularly on the second Friday of each month. (Subscribers, however, get their copies at least five to ten days before.) • Better printing, paper and reproduction of art lie ahead. • These new art techniques I mentioned in the past are on their way. They were stubborn things to conquer, but you’ll be seeing them soon. • If you want to find WILLY LEY in a science fiction magazine henceforth, you’ll have to buy GALAXY. As our science editor, he will work exclusively for us in this field. • Last and by far the most important, the literary quality of GALAXY will continue to be a rising curve – as steeply rising as we can manage. Coming up, for example: • November: THE MARTIAN WAY by Isaac Asimov, a novella, that introduces problems and situations in space travel that I have never seen before,. • December: RING AROUND THE SUN by Clifford D. Simak is a powerful new serial with a startling theme and one surprising development after another. • March: After the conclusion of the Simak serial, we have THE OLD DIE RICH by a chap named Gold. Naturally, the story was read by impartial critics – no writer can judge his own work – and they report it’s GALAXY quality. I hope you’ll agree with them.
Yes, it’s been a fine year. Next year looks even better.
– H.L. GOLD
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1 – Fritz Leiber (“Gonna’ Roll the Bones”) 2 – Evelyn Paige 3 – Robert A. Heinlein 4 – Katherine MacLean (Dragons and such) 5 – Chesley Bonestell 6 – Theodore Sturgeon 7 – Damon Knight (“To Serve Man”) 8 – H.L. (Horace L.) Gold 9 – Robert Guinn 10 – Joan De Mario 11 – Charles J. Robot 12 – Cyril Kornbluth 13 – E.A. (Edmund A.) Emshwiller 14 – Willy Ley 15 – F.L. Wallace 16 – Isaac Asimov 17 – Jerry Edelberg 18 – Groff Conklin (anthologist) 19 – John Anderson 20 – Ray Bradbury (“The Fireman” (“Fahrenheit 451”)) 21 – Bug Eye
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But, where did Horace Gold get the very idea to acknowledge people instrumental to Galaxy’s success, in such a clever way?
I don’t know.
But, while perusing the contents of other, lesser known magazines at the Luminist Archive, I came across the November, 1951 issue of Marvel Science Fiction, which features cover art by Hannes Bok, in his own immediately recognizable style…
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…and this two-page cartoon of the members of the by then four-year-old “Hydra Club”, an organization of professionals in the field of science fiction. Though far more “busy” than the scene depicted on the cover of Galaxy, the design is remarkably similar, right down to the number key at the bottom of the cartoon, and, the accompanying diagram of “who’s who” at lower right, the names of “who” are all listed below.
Was this the inspiration for Horace Gold, or, art director W.I. Van Der Poel? Given the timing, could be!
An organization of Professional Science Fiction Writers, Artists and Editors.
Article One: The name of this organization shall be the Hydra Club.
Article Two: The purpose of this organization shall be…
PUZZLED silence greeted the reader as he lay down the proposed draft of a constitution, and looked hopefully at the eight other people in the room.
“The rest of it was easy,” he explained, “but we spent a whole evening trying to think of something for that.”
“Strike out the paragraph,” someone said. “We just haven’t got a purpose.”
And so we did. The Hydra Club was, officially, and with no malice in the forethought, formed as an organization with no function at all. It was to meet twice a month; it hoped to acquire a regular meeting place and a library of science fiction; its membership was to be selected on no other basis than the liking and approval of the charter members, who organized themselves into a Permanent Membership Committee for the new club.
That was in September, 1947. In four years of existence, the club has increased sevenfold. Its roster now lists more than sixty members, and the number is that low only because of the strict stipulation that admission to membership is by invitation only. There is no way for a would-be member to apply for admission; and invitations are issued only after the holding a complex secret-ballot blackball vote.
Of the nine charter members of the club, five are still active on the Permanent Membership Committee. Lester del Rey, who had been absent from the science fiction field entirely for several years, when the club was started, is now once again a leading name in the field. Dave Kyle and Marty Greenberg, who first met each other in the organizational days of the club, have since become partners in a publishing firm, Prime Press. Fred Pohl, who was then still writing an occasional story under the pen-name of James MacCreigh, has developed the then still-struggling Dirk Wylie agency into the foremost literary agency in the science fiction field. And yr. humble correspondent, who had just a few months earlier written her first science fiction story, has since become, among other things, Mrs. Frederik Pohl.
There are half a hundred other names on the rolls, many of which would be completely unfamiliar to science fiction fandom. The Club has never attempted to limit its membership to professionals working in the field. It has endeavored only to gather together as many congenial persons as possible. In the four years of its existence there have been many changes in character, constitution, solvency, and situation. A considerable library has been acquired by gift and donation, but no permanent meeting place or library space has ever been found. Meetings are now held only once a month, sometimes in the studio apartment of the Pratts’, or that of Basil Davenport, more often in a rented hall. From time to time, under the impetus of an unwonted ambition, the club has even initiated major endeavors, and less frequently has actually carried them through.
The single exception to this renewed enthusiasm for purposelessness is the annual Christmas party … perhaps because we have found it possible for all concerned to have a remarkably good time at these affairs in return for an equally remarkably small output of work. The success of the annual parties has rested largely on the willingness of member talent to be entertaining (and the dependable willingness of the guests to amuse themselves at the bar). At such times, there is little holding back. Why watch television, after all, or empty your pockets for a Broadway show, if you can have Willy and Olga Ley explain with words and gestures the structure of the Martian language – or watch your best friends cavort through a stefantic satire devised in the more mysterious byways of Fred Brown’s Other Mind – or listen yearly to a new and even funnier monologue delivered by Philip-William (Child’s Play) Klass-Tenn?
Between this yearly Big Events, club meetings very considerably in character. A member may arrive, on any given meeting date, to find a scant dozen seriously debating the date of publication of the second issue of Hugo Gernsback’s third magazine – or to find seventy-off slightly soused guests and members engaged in the most frantic of socializing, to the apparent exclusion of science fiction as a topic of interest. At these larger meetings, it takes a knowing eye to detect the quiet conversation in the corner where a new line of science fiction books has just been launched, or to understand that the clinking of glasses up front center indicates the formation of a new collaborating team.
Perhaps one of the most unlikely and most pleasant things about the Hydra Club is the way it manages to contain in amity a membership not only of writers and artists, but also of editors and publishers. We like to think that it is due to the “by invitation only” policy, and to the profound wisdom of our P.M.C., that the lions and the lambs have been induced to lie down so meekly all over the place. Even rival anthologists and agents are seen smiling at each other from time to time, and the senior editor of a large publishing house is always willing to pass on advice to newcomer specialist publishers. There are thirty-odd magazine writers in the crowd, and ten or more magazine editors – and still not a fistfight in a barload!
Hydra members are selected for interest, individuality, intelligence, and an inquiring mind, a combination unique among science-fiction organizations in my knowledge, we have now achieved four years of existence without a single major internal feud. What difficulties have arisen in relation to the club, from the outside, appear to be entirely due to the fact that, without trying, Hydra has become an increasingly important group in the professional field. But the business that takes place in and around the Hydra Club remains incidental.
When bigger and better purposes for clubs are found, the Hydra Club will still point happily to its nonexistent Article Two.
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1 – Lois Miles Gillespie 2 – H. Beam Piper 3 – David A. Kyle 4 – Judith Merril Pohl 5 – Frederik Pohl 6 – Philip Klass 7 – Richard Wilson 8 – Isaac Asimov, Ph.D. 9 – James A. Williams 10 – Martin Greenberg (anthologist) 11 – Sam Merwin, Jr. 12 – Walter I. Bradbury 13 – Bruce Elliott 14 – J. Jerome Stanton 15 – Jerome Bixby (Twilight Zone!) 16 – Basil Davenport 17 – Robert W. Lowndes 18 – Olga Ley (Willy’s wife) 19 – Oswald Train 20 – Charles Dye 21 – Frank Belknap Long 22 – Damon Knight 23 – Thomas S. Gardner, Ph.D. 24 – Harry Harrison 25 – Sam Browne 26 – Groff Conklin 27 – Larry T. Shaw 28 – Lester del Rey 29 – Frederic Brown 30 – Margaret Bertrand 31 – Evelyn Harrison 32 – L. Sprague de Camo 33 – Theodore Sturgeon 34 – George C. Smith 35 – Has Stefan Santessen 36 – Fletcher Pratt 37 – Willy Ley (Olga’s husband) 38 – Katherine MacLean Dye 39 – Daniel Keyes 40 – H.L. (Horace L.) Gold 41 – Walter Kublius
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For your amusement…
Here’s the book where I found George Price’s cartoon…
Price, George (Introduced by Alistair Cooke), The World of George Price – A 55-Year Retrospective, Harper & Row, New York, N.Y., 1989
My recent posts about the reality of space warfare – as imagined in Astounding Science Fiction in 1939 – present articles by Malcolm R. Jameson and Willy Ley, and, readers’ responses. That Willy Ley would figure so prominently in this topic is hardly surprising, for by profession he was a science writer with a lifelong focus in rocketry and space exploration, though his interests did extend further, encompassing the pseudoscience of – *ahem* – cryptozoology. The true scope of his enormous output can be fully appreciated by even the quickest glance at his biographical profile at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. He body of work was quite multi-faceted, for it comprised a novel, letters, book reviews, interior art (primarily in 1948 issues of Astounding), twenty-two perhaps-more-better-known non-fiction books, as well as – well, primarily! – essays and articles for mid-twentieth-century science fiction pulps. An example of the latter is his oeuvre for Galaxy Science Fiction, whichbetween 1952 and 1969 published over 150 of his articles under the heading “For Your Information”.
His straightforward science journalism was accompanied by four (or five, depending on how you count?!) works of fiction. The “first” four are…
“At the Perihelion” (1937) “Orbit XXIII-H” (1938) “Fog” (1940) “The Invasion” (1940)
…the first three of these having been published in Astounding, and “The Invasion” in Super Science Stories.
Having read “Fog” (while preparing this post, and my posts about Space Warfare), I have to confess that I found it to be utterly underwhelming. Except for being placed in a metropolitan setting in post-1940s America, it’s much more a tale of totalitarian surveillance (hmmm…!) and political chaos (hmmm…?) in a dystopian future, I think inspired by Ley’s own experiences in Nazi Germany, from which he fled in early 1935. So, the simple title – it is apropos! – connotes the constant sense of uncertainty that pervades daily life in such a situation. (Once again, hmmm…!!) Otherwise, Charles Schneeman’s two illustrations for the story were better than the mere story itself!
Given Willy Ley’s huge body of work and influence in popularizing rocketry and space exploration, the abundance of information about him is entirely unsurprising. However, while delving into his biography amidst my posts on space warfare, I came across the following poignant news item by New York Times science writer Walter Sullivan: It’s Willy Ley’s obituary, published after his passing on June 24, 1969. While the obit doesn’t necessarily present information not already known and available elsewhere, it’s still of historical interest in terms of the details of Ley’s personal life, and, how a figure so significant in the worlds of science and journalism (like Walter Sullivan, himself!) was perceived in the popular press.
Here it is:
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Willy Ley, Prolific Science Writer, Is Dead at 62
Prophesied Travel in Space in Book Issued in 1926 Fled Germany in ‘35 – Tested Rockets in Westchester
By WALTER SULLIVAN
The New York Times June 25, 1969
Willy Ley, who helped usher in the age of rocketry and then became perhaps its chief popularizer, died yesterday morning at his home In Jackson Heights, Queens. His age was 62.
Mr. Ley, the author of more than 30 books in English and German, was a frequent lecturer as well as teacher and industrial consultant.
His death, apparently from a heart attack, came suddenly. About a week ago a medical checkup had disclosed a circulatory disorder and he was taking digitalis.
Earlier in the day, in a telephone conversation with a book publisher, Mr. Ley spoke of the possibility that he might have to follow man’s first flight to the moon by television from his home, instead of from the Manned Spacecraft Center in Texas. It was a disappointing prospect, for Mr. Ley had been one of the earliest protagonists of such a flight.
He was born in Berlin in 1906 and his early studies, at the Universities of Berlin and Konigsberg, were in astronomy, physics, zoology and paleontology (the study of fossils). Some of his most successful books were on exotic beasts of fact and myth.
However, in 1927 he and his German colleagues were inspired by the writings of Hermann Oberth to found the Society for Space Travel. A punctilious registrar in Breslau at first refused to permit the group to incorporate under the title Verein fur Raumschiffahrt because, he said, the last word of the title (meaning “space travel”) did not exist in the German language.
Collaborated on Films
Mr. Ley’s first book on space travel appeared in 1926 and during that period he collaborated with Fritz Lang in several German science-fiction films, including one entitled “Frau im Mond” (“Woman in the Moon”).
(Here’s “Frau im Mond”, from Daily Motion.)
(And, a sort-of-counterpart to Lang’s film, from a decade later: Vasili Zhuravlov’s “Cosmic Voyage” (Космический Рейс – Kosmicheskiy reys) from 1936.
Among those whom he recruited into the Society for Space Travel was a young man named Werner Von Braun who ultimately became a leader in German military rocket development. After World War I, when Dr. Von Braun had begun working with the American rocket program, he and Mr. Ley collaborated on several books including “The Exploration of Mars.”
As the Nazis rose to power they were determined to take over rocket research from the society. The latter, through a series of flights with primitive liquid-fueled rockets from an abandoned ammunition dump on the outskirts of Berlin, had shown that rockets could be used to circumvent provisions in the Versailles Treaty forbidding German development of artillery.
In 1935, Mr. Ley got word to Dutch and British friends that he was in trouble with the Gestapo. He had been ordered to cease writing on rocketry for foreign publications and did so, but some of his earlier articles being held in reserve by British newspapers appeared after this edict.
Mr. Ley left for Britain and then was brought to the United States under the auspices of the American Interplanetary Society (which about this time changed its name to the American Rocket Society). Members of this group put up bond to permit his entry into the country.
Built Test Stand
Mr. Ley lived for half a year with G. Edward Pendray, head of the American Rocket Society, and the two men built a test stand for small rockets near Mr. Pendray’s home in Crestwood, N.Y. It was in a swamp between Scarsdale and Bronxville.
Mr. Pendray recalled yesterday the alarm of neighbors at the roaring of rockets on their test stand. However Mr. Ley’s activities as an experimenter gave way to concentration on writing.
He turned out a steady stream of books and articles. Interest in rocketry and space travel was low at the time and his titles ran to such subjects as “Salamanders and Other Wonders,” “Dragons in Amber” and “The Lungfish, The Dodo and the Unicorn.”
However when the rockets developed by his former colleagues in Germany began flying across the English Channel, there was a dramatic change. The demand for expert writing on rocketry became insatiable.
Meanwhile, Mr. Ley in 1940 joined the newspaper PM as science editor and soon met a Russian-born ballet dancer, Olga Feldman [Feldmann], who was writing a column on physical fitness for the newspaper. They were married in 1941.
Soon afterward, Mrs. Ley was doing research for her husband at a public library and read to him, over the phone, certain information on rockets that she had uncovered there. Someone in the next phone booth overheard transmission of this information in a Russian accent and reportedly notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It took a certain amount of explaining to convince the Federal authorities that nothing untoward was going on.
In 1944 he became a United States citizen and left PM. He became further identified with space travel with such books as “Watchers of the Skies,” “Conquest of Space” and “Rockets, Missiles and Men in Space.” He also developed a powerful lecture style.
One close acquaintance noted yesterday that Mr. Ley’s big frame and German accent conspired to give him an impressively authoritative manner. Perhaps, he suggested, that was why Mr. Ley unconsciously retained the accent, even though he became fluent in his spoken and written English.
One of those who knew him well said he was a natural lecturer, “not only on the platform, but in private.”
“If you asked him a question you got a lecture,” he said, adding that Mr. Ley’s knowledge was “encyclopedic.”
Mr. Ley enjoyed good food, good drink and good conversation and belonged to a small convivial group of writers and scholars known as the “Trap Door Spiders,” who met once a month. The name, members say, is based on the practice of such spiders in closing a trap door to escape their mates.
He was a great admirer of Wagner operas and could accompany himself on the piano as he sang- Wagnerian arias.
Publishing associates said yesterday that Mr. Ley had at least six books under contract. He had told Scribners that next Monday he would deliver the final section of “Man and the Moon,” a major work, in preparation for five years. It deals with the role of the moon in music and literature.
Mr. Ley, one of his book editors said, was “like those 19th-century natural scientists who were up on every field of science.” He had been on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University for many years.
While Mr. Ley was an ardent promoter of trips to Mars and other distant bodies, his earliest passion was for the moon.
“The moon is still silvery in the night sky,” he wrote in The New York Times last year, “but it is no longer unreachable.”
“In 1930 I introduced a number of aeronautical engineers in Berlin to the first liquid fuel rocket they had ever seen,” he said. “It stood about 5 feet tall and, even when fueled, was light enough to be lifted with one hand. It could climb about 1500 feet and was brought back by parachute.
“What, the engineers wanted to know, was the aim of all this? Eventually, I replied, rockets of this type will carry men to the moon.”
Mr. Ley lived to within one month of the scheduled fulfillment of his prophecy.
Besides his widow, he is survived by two daughters, Sandra Ley and Mrs. Xenia Parker of 252 East 61st Street. Since World War II Mr. Ley had lived at 37-26 77th Street in Jackson Heights
The funeral will take place ‘tomorrow at 1 P.M. at the Walter B. Cooke funeral home, 1504 Third Avenue.
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Despite Willy Ley’s prominence in the history of science journalism, oddly, no information is available about his place of burial. However (!), if we’re talking biographical details, here’s the Declaration of Intention for American citizenship that he filed on June 22, 1937, five months after he reached Miami – from Havana – on February 2 of that year. Note that, appropriate to his current and future career, he listed his profession as “Scientific Research Writer”. (This document’s from Ancestry.com.)
A Reference or Two, or Three, and More, for Willy O.O. (Otto Oskar) Ley, at…
…Archive.org – Publications (262 scanned works – includes monographs, but primarily comprised of issues of science-fiction pulps featuring his articles.)
…Project Gutenberg (7 books. These appear to be juvenile or young adult fiction, all authored by Carey Rockwell, with Willy Ley as “Technical Advisor”.)
The cover of the June, 1967 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, displays a painting by Gray Morrow inspired by a scene from Roger Zelazny’s “The Man Who Loved the Faioli”.
Yes, there are skeletons in the story, which is set upon a planet which is “the graveyard of the worlds”. Yes, there are robots in the tale (the scene takes place in the Valley of the Bones), but their appearance is left entirely undescribed. But they, like the valley, like the bones, really play an incidental role in the story, which features only two characters: Sythia, a Faioli, and, John Auden, the events being told through the eyes of Auden. And, the narrator.
The story – only seven pages long and the shortest tale in this issue of Galaxy – is unusual, and lies far more in the realm of fantasy than science fiction, with elements of the latter being incidental to the theme and plot.With that, while I cannot say that I particularly enjoyed the tale, neither can I deny its originality.
“To Avenge Man”, the inspiration for Richard McKenna’s cover art of the December, 1964, issue of Galaxy, is a brief, but well-written story. The protagonist is the robot who is depicted on the cover kneeling amidst the ruins of a desolate and abandoned moon-base, his pensive gaze directed somewhere between the earth overhead and, the flaccid remnants of a discarded spacesuit lying before him. Though the scene doesn’t exactly parallel the events of the story, in symbolism and setting it well captures the meaning of Del Rey’s tale.
As to the story itself, after an introduction which will hint at its eventual outcome, the first part builds slowly and in a straightforward fashion, but with a meaningful twist: It’s a tale of isolation, solitude, and survival: Specifically, the survival – mechanical and electronic such as it is, but survival nonetheless – of “Sam”, a unique, singular, and entirely sentient robot, after a scientific expedition has abandoned a lunar settlement to return to the Earth, during a time of war. Then, amidst a global war, all contact with men, from men, by men, and between men, completely vanishes. However, the actual nature and origin of the war is deliberately left ambiguous, and touched upon only slightly.
And, though Sam is by definition and design an artificial being – does he have a soul? – Del Rey does a fine job of showing the evolution and eventual creation of Sam’s personality, which is characterized by a combination of naïveté, a complete and altruistic devotion to humanity, and unrelenting intellectual curiosity – the latter quality manifested in Sam’s reading of science-fiction (yes, seriously) from the 1930s and 1940s. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Sam comes under a kind of monomaniacal spell which compels him to return to Earth to find men, contact men, aid men, determine the nature and origin of the war, and, defend men against all enemies. Enemies, that is, as Sam has perceived, interpreted, and fully anticipated through the tales of Edward E. Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Enemies which, he believes, are entirely real.
Sam eventually cobbles together a one-robot spacecraft (hey, life support is of no consideration here!) and does return to Earth. And from this point on, Del Rey’s tale rapidly moves from a story of endurance and survival to one of slightly mythic tones. The final direction of the story soon becomes apparent, and its ultimate conclusion – apparent through a careful reading and contemplation of the above-mentioned introduction – while not wholly unexpected, is wholly well told.
Here’s work by an artist whose compositions have thus far not appeared in this blog: Walter Brooks, probably Walter H. Brooks, concerning whom there’s relatively little information, or at least, vastly less than for other book illustrators, his primary genre was not actually being science fiction, per se. His painting is a straightforward and effective illustration for Clifford D. Simak’s “Time And Again”, which was first published in the October (first volume, first issue), November, and December issues of Galaxy Science Fiction, under the title “Time Quarry”, reviews of which can be found at GoodReads.
I read this novel some time ago (!), and was impressed by both the plot and style of writing, which was entirely consistent the high standard of Simak’s work as established in tales published in Astounding Science Fiction in the 40s and 50s, and, subsequent issues of Galaxy Science Fiction. Notably among these stories is July, 1944’s “Huddling Place” in Astounding, which – paralleling Paul Callé’s illustration for Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” in the November, 1950 issue of Galaxy, in retrospect was eerily (…and, unintentionally…) prescient about would become of “Western Civilization” in the year – the world – of 2021. As for Simak’s later work – of the late 1960s and beyond – while it was characterized by the same quality of quietude and introspection as his earlier stories, I found the plots and overall “pacing” of his stories far less appealing, of not slowly paced, if not tedious. Still, my feeling his work certainly remains very positive.
Now here’s something interesting: The back cover carries an announcement about a certain science fiction writing contest held by Galaxy, Dell, and Simon & Schuster. (“Veritably! By jove, what gives?!”) I didn’t really take note of this until editing the image for this blog post.
So, here’s the blurb about the contest, which appears in the book’s last page:
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DELL BOOKS, GALAXY MAGAZINE, SIMON and SCHUSTER
Announce
THE RICHEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL CONTEST in HISTORY!
$6500.00 Minimum
Guaranteed to the author of the best ORIGINAL Science Fiction Novel Submitted.
The author of the prize-winning novel will receive at least $6500 in outright cash gifts, payments and guaranteed advance royalties.
The award novel will appear as a serial in Galaxy Science Fiction. It will afterward be published in book form by Simon and Schuster. And Dell Books will publish it as a reprint.
The prize-winning author will thus receive a GUARANTEED MINIMUM of $5500 for the purchase of First World Serial and T.V. rights by Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, and advance royalties from Simon and Schuster and Dell Publishing Co. … Plus an outright gift of $1000.
FOR DETAILS AND RULES WRITE TO
NOVEL CONTEXT GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION 421 Hudson Street New York 14, New York
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Like I said,“What gives?!”
As discussed in detail by Matthew Wuertz at the Black Gate and Charlie Jane Anders at Gizmodo (quoting from Matthew Wuertz, and, author Michael Ashley in Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970), the contest, if not characterized by a level of disingenuousness from the start, certainly eventuated in that direction: The actual submissions received by Horace L. Gold, editor of Galaxy, were deemed of poor quality. Instead, the chosen (as it were) novel – Preferred Risk, by Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey; not even an actual entry – was “entered” under the pseudonym Edson McCann and declared the winner, and was serialized in Galaxy from June to September of 1953.
And with that, here’s the cover of Galaxy Science Fiction for March, 1953, wherein the “announcement” for the contest – * ahem * – is carried: A composite of photographs rather than “art”, per se. (The names of the lady and gentleman aren’t listed in the table of contents.)
Contest “rules” (!), as explained on pages 80 and 129 of the March issue. (These two images were made from a PDF version of the magazine, one of the several formats typically available for download at Archive.org’s Pulp Magazine Archive, rather than by scanning my own copy: I didn’t want to break the somewhat brittle, now seventy-seven-year-old binding!)
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Here’s the cover of the 1955 Simon & Schuster edition of Preferred Risk, presently (August, 2021) on sale at L.W. Currey, Inc. Note the cover blurb – as ironic as it was cynical – “Winner of the Galaxy – Simon and Schuster contest for 1955’s best work of science-fiction.” The specific copy illustrated is described as having been signed on the front free end-paper by Lester Del Rey and Frederik Pohl as: “To Bob / Lester Del Rey / (1/2) Edson McCann / and also / Fred Pohl.”
So I see simplified figures – flattened, two-dimensional figures – of human beings superimposed on a graph. And…
Why do I think of ‘Acebook? (To be clear, not “Ace Books”!) Why do I think of ‘Witter? Why do I think of ‘Oogle? Why do I think of ‘Napchat? Why do I think of ‘Nstagram?
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…while here’s the cover of Dell’s March, 1962 paperback edition of the book, with cover art by Richard M. Powers – immediately recognizable as such. Though slightly worn and chipped, this still-intact cover (it’s my own copy) clearly displays the central qualities by which Powers’ compositions can be recognized: An absence of realistically portrayed human figures; the presence of objects that are at once vaguely mechanical and vaguely organic, yet retaining a clearly anthropomorphic, elongated appearance; the presence of symbols and objects that are vaguely “techy” and “sciency” in appearance, such as – in this case – an undulating Cartesian graph with human skeletons superimposed upon it; a vaguely defined background (“Is that a horizon, or isn’t it?!”) comprised of shades of the same color.
From Heritage Auctions, here are two images of Powers’ original art for the book’s Dell paperback edition. The composition is described as “Mixed media on board. 16.25 x 21.75 in. Signed lower right.” Part of the Bob and Diane Yaspan collection, the painting was reportedly sold on October 31, 2017, the sale including (bonus!) a copy of Dell’s 1962 printing.
A close-up of the composition, showing Powers’ signature, and, two uh – strange – uh – objects. People? (I don’t know!) Buildings? (I surely don’t know!) “Things?” (Most definitely!)
And, the painting’s backing board. Is that Powers’ signature on the back? Hmmm… …could be.
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As seen above, the final interior page of Dell’s 1953 paperback edition of First He Died -the book’s final page lists the postal address to which submissions for the (supposed!) contest were to be sent: “421 Hudson Street, New York, N.Y.” which unsurprisingly was the address – at least, in 1953! – of the main office of Galaxy Science Fiction.
That made me a little curious. What? – where? – exactly was 421 Hudson Street?
It turns out that the answer is readily available. The building, very much standing and in good condition today (well, it should be – it’s a condo) was constructed in 1911, and goes by the name of The Printing House Building. As you can see from the map below, it’s located in the West Village of Manhattan.
Here’s an undated, sligthly sepia-toned image of the building, from NYCBlogEstate. According to CondoPedia, “…the Printing House began life as a commercial space that appropriately enough housed industrial printers. It was in 1979 that the building was first co-opted into use as a residential building, although it wasn’t until 1987 that the Printing House experienced its first big renovation and began to offer units for sale as condominiums.”
This image of 421 Hudson, ever-so-slightly-more-recent than above (!), originally (quite literally, a few weeks ago, this being mid-August of 2021) appeared at Halstead.com. While no longer a home to printers and publishers, the building’s external appearance has remained largely unchanged for over a century.
Where I Got All These Details n’Stuff
Cover of Simon and Schuster’s 1955 edition of Preferred Risk…
“Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung ‘to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.’ Jung held that to ascribe meaning to certain acausal coincidences can be a healthy, even necessary, function of the human mind – principally, by way of bringing important material of the unconscious mind to attention. This further developed into the view that there is a philosophical objectivity or suprasubjectivity to the meaningfulness of such coincidences, as related to the collective unconscious.”
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So I was perusing; leafing through; skimming; wandering within, the pages of my copies of Galaxy Science Fiction, and chanced upon the issue of November, 1950, which features Don Sibley’s cover art for Fredric Brown’s short tale “Honeymoon in Hell”. The issue also contains part two of Clifford Simak’s three-part serial “Time Quarry” (retitled in novel form as Time and Again) and notably, Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man”, which was the basis for Twilight Zone Episode # 89, adapted for television by Serling himself and broadcast under the same title on March 2, 1962.
Remarkably for its cultural significance, Knight’s story is only six pages long. It also features David Stone’s illustration of a Kanamit, the tale’s extraterrestrial protagonist (or, one of the protagonists, for those Kanamits seem to be pretty indistinguishable from one another) which portrayal is utterly unlike the aliens as depicted in the Twilight Zone adaptation.
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Close-up of Don Sibley’s cover art.
Red uniform? Soviet Cosmonaut, Anna Borisovna.
Blue uniform? American Astronaut, Captain Raymond F. Carmody.
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Interesting. But, for all its prominence in pop culture, “To Serve Man” has never been one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, for the plot, though ending with a twist that’s as disturbing as it is clever – o k a y, I’ll grant it t h a t – is really quite simple in concept. Unlike many ‘Zone episodes, “To Serve Man”, though obviously and easily adaptable to television because of the simplicity and brevity of the original story, is one of the series’ more middling episodes because it simply does not have anywhere near the psychological and even moral depth of the numerous other, more complex episodes. The best of these involve individuals confronting and often (but not always!) overcoming their moral, psychological, and even spiritual “ghosts” in settings where themes of science fiction, the paranormal, and occasionally the supernatural – alone, or in combination – while inherent to plot and setting, are actually incidental to themes of personal transformation. And if not transformation, at least an epiphany.
So, suppose that every aficionado of the series has their own (!) favorite episodes, here are mine:
A story of great complexity, based upon an extraordinarily simple premise, with an excellent near-solo performance by Joe Mantell.
Outstanding, by all measures.
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But, getting to the subject at hand. Or more accurately, the image at hand.
Within the November, 1950 issue of Galaxy is another short story; one by Fritz Leiber, Jr., entitled “Coming Attraction”, (You can listen to Atomic Julie’s audio version here.) As summarized (in greater depth) at Wikipedia, the tale is set within a mostly uninhabitable Manhattan – rendered so by a Soviet “Hell Bomb” – amidst an ongoing war between the United States and (former) Soviet Union. The protagonist, British citizen Wysten Turner, has ventured to New York City to obtain grain in exchange for electronic equipment which may be intended for an American military installation on the moon.
The story, however, features none of the standard science fiction tropes, such things as transformative technology, extraterrestrials, space voyages, time travel, and genetic engineering being quite absent. Instead, the plot focuses on social interactions between men and woman, through the experience of Turner himself, in a society that has the air of a social dystopia – albeit a bland, soft, depressing sort of sociological dystopia rather than one characterized by material want or technological regression – where women have taken to wearing masks as a taken-for-granted accoutrement of everyday attire.
Unsurprisingly, given Leiber’s extraordinary literary skill, the story is well constructed; it’s “tight”, moving forward at a steady pace with no extraneous detail, tedious digressions, or slack. Yet with that, I still don’t think it’s one of Leiber’s best efforts, and I find it very odd that it was deemed worthy of inclusion in volume one of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, published two decades later. While certainly interesting in concept and well executed on a technical level, it’s just not one of Leiber’s strongest tales, or really, that strong of a tale at all. Though it was included in Ballantine Books’ The Best of Fritz Leiber, it’s easily outshown by most of the other tales in that anthology, particularly “Gonna Roll The Bones” (1967), and “A Deskful of Girls” (1958), the latter showing Leiber’s originality at its best.
So much for words.
And pictures?
The story is illustrated by single thematic image, created by Paul Callé, which – soon after you begin reading the tale – leaves no room for ambiguity.
Well, if these were “average” times (but there are no more average times, and I doubt if any era has ever been “average”, anyway) the reader would take a look, think “hmmm, interesting,” and much for any story, flip the page and move on.
Alas, times are no long average, and they may not be so again in our lifetimes. I wish that were not so, but so it is; so may be. (But, for how long?)
Did Paul Callé’s art, of a mask as a fashion statement (in the story, it serves no other function), in some unanticipated way portend the year 2021? And beyond?
She just sat there. I couldn’t even tell if she was trembling. I tried to read a message in her eyes through the mask.
“I’ll take you away,” I said to her. “I can do it. I really will.”
He smiled at me. “She’d like to go with you,” he said. “Wouldn’t you, baby?”
“Will you or won’t you?” I said to her. She still just sat there.
He slowly knotted his fingers in her hair.
“Listen, you little vermin,” I snapped at him. “Take your hands off her.”
He came up from the seat like a snake. I’m no fighter. I just know that the more scared I am, the harder and straighter I hit. This time I was lucky.
But as he crumpled back, I felt a slap and four stabs of pain in my cheek. I clapped my hand to it. I could feel the four gashed made by the dagger finger caps, and the warm blood oozing out from them.
She didn’t look at me. She was bending over little Zirk and cuddling her mask to his cheek and crooning: “There, there, don’t feel bad, you’ll be able to hurt me afterward.”
There were sounds around us, but they didn’t come close. I leaned forward and ripped the mask from her face.
I really didn’t know why I should have expected her face to be anything else. It was very pale, of course, and there weren’t any cosmetics. I suppose there’s no point in wearing any under a mask. The eyebrows were untidy and the lips were chapped. But as for the general expression, as for the feelings crawling and wriggling across it…
Have you ever lifted a rock from damp soil? Have you ever watched the slimy white grubs?
I looked down at her, she up at me. “Yes, you’re so frightened, aren’t you?” I said sarcastically. “You dread this little nightly drama, don’t you? You’re scared to death.”
And I walked right out into the purple night, still holding my hand to my bleeding cheek.
No one stopped me, not even the girl wrestlers. I wished I could tear a tab from under my shirt, and test it then and there, and find I’d taken too much radiation, and so be able to ask to cross the Hudson and go down New Jersey, past the lingering radiance of the Narrows Bomb, and so on to Sandy Hook to wait for the rusty ship that would take me back over to seas to England.
[This post, created on May 8, 2017, is pretty simple: It shows the cover (by Dember) of the October, 1966 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, and interior illustrations by Virgil Finlay for Larry Niven’s “How The Heroes Die”, and one illustration by Jack Gaughan for Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Recursion in Metastories”. I’ve updated the post to include an image of Finlay’s original art for the second of his two pieces for Niven’s story. Just a black and white image, but it shows his work with much better crispness than even the best scan from the actual magazine. Even when limited to a vertical / rectangular format, his art was stunning.]
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Finlay’s illustration for Larry Niven’s story “How The Heroes Die” (p. 59).
Finlay’s illustration for Larry Niven’s story “How The Heroes Die” (p. 71).
…Virgil Finlay’s original art, from Heritage Auctions. The original is described as “pen and ink on paper, 9.5 x 6.5 inches, signed lower right, from the Jerry Weist Collection“.
Jack Gaughan’s illustration for “A Recursion in Metastories”, by Arthur C. Clarke (p. 87).
Reference (…well, just one reference…)
“Two Spacemen Fighting, science fiction pulp interior story illustration”, at Heritage Auctions May 8, 2017
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.” – Norbert Wiener
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In the summer of 2020, I read a book.
Actually, in 2020 I read several books, and I’m reading a book right now, in 2021: Judgement Night, by Catherine L. Moore. But of last year’s reading, two works – read back to back – have particularly stood out for me: S. Ansky’s (pen name of Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport) The Enemy At His Pleasure, and, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
A central theme of both – viewed from a very distant literary vantage point! – is the sudden and unanticipated transformation of a culture, society, and nation through the development and impact of forces within and without. While in practically ever significant respect the books are vastly dissimilar (not even considering the central fact that Ansky’s is non-fiction and Bradbury’s not) a commonality of their writings is the reaction of people – people as individuals; people collectively – to overwhelming, unexpected, and traumatic social change.
In retrospect, coincidentally or not, how very strange that having read in The Enemy At His Pleasure in April, I finished Bradbury’s novel on a Friday in the latter part of May: While seated in a quiet, shaded garden adjacent to a public library in a (for the time being…) peaceful suburb (was it only a few brief months ago that public libraries maintained full operating hours?) – considering the events would soon follow in the United States, and even beyond in the still-atrophying “West”, shortly thereafter.
Regardless of how the events of 2020 are viewed “now”, I think that future historians – that is, assuming history even survives as an intellectual discipline in the future – will come to understand the events of the past year (primarily in the United States, and secondarily in parts of Western Europe) as having been a kind of antinomian religious frenzy. This strikingly parallels the millenarian social unrest that persisted in central and western Europe from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. But, rather than ostensible (and really, superficial) concerns about “social justice”, the events of 2020 were at heart a reflection of obsessions about the potential loss of social status by a secular (and comfortably insular in that secularity), credentialed, technocratic, entitled, and ultimately quite venal elite.
Or more accurately, “elite”.
Oh, back to the novel at hand…
And while the power and depth of Bradbury’s novel were well forceful enough on their own in literary, emotional, and intellectual terms, the intersection of these qualities with the impact of events in “outside world” – the “real” world – only intensified the validity and force of the book’s message. Or, messages, of which there were several.
And so… This also gave me an appreciation for the quality of Ray Bradbury’s writing, for despite having long been a devotee of science fiction (specifically that of Cordwainer Smith and A.E. van Vogt and Philip K. Dick and Catherine L. Moore and Cyril Kornbluth and Dan Simmons and Poul Anderson; Isaac Asimov not so much and really not at all), this was actually the first time I’d read any of Bradbury’s novels. (Well, I guess people change.) The very antithesis of a “hard SF” writer – though technological conjecture and extrapolation are nonetheless central to his stories – I found that Bradbury excelled in the description of emotion and thought; actions and event; communication and conflict, with a richness of language born of an uncanny (well, sometimes overdone, but it works) use of metaphor and similie.
And, so… In much that same way that my posts combine scans a book or magazine’s cover (and frequently interior) art with excerpts from those publications, this post revisits my earlier post about Fahrenheit 451, which displays the cover art of the book’s first American paperback edition, by displaying the cover of the book’s Del Rey / Ballantine Book edition of April, 1991. As you can see, the central component of Joseph Mugnaini’s art – a “Fireman”, whose fireproof suit is actually made from the torn newspaper pages is wreathed in flames – has been retained from the 1953 edition, but otherwise, the cover is simplified: The Fireman appears in black & white, and there is no background. That’s all there is. For reasons of literary and cultural familiarity, I suppose this was enough.
And… In much the same way that some of my posts – at least, those for the genre of science fiction! – include images of both a book’s cover, and, the cover art of the magazine in which said book was first serialized, this post features images of Fahrenheit 451’s first appearance: The February, 1951, issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Bradbury’s novel, illustrated by Karl Rogers, occupies half the magazine’s length (pages 4 through 61), the other stories being “…And It Comes Out Here” by Lester Del Rey, “The Protector” by Betsy Curtis, “Second Childhood” by Clifford D. Simak, “Two Weeks in August” by Frank M. Robinson, and the second installment of Isaac Asimov’s “Tyrann”.
And… This is an instance most interesting and not uncommon, where the magazine’s cover art has absolutely no relation to the stories within. Entitled “The Tying Down of a Spaceship on Mars in a Desert Sandstorm,” the time-frame (early 50s) subject matter and vivid softness of the colors make the painting easily recognizable as a work of Chesley Bonestell,
And yet… Even as I read Fahrenheit 451, I couldn’t help but notice the way that the world constructed by Ray Bradbury – either through prescience, chance, or an uncanny combination of both – has captured our world: The world of the recent past; the world that exists now, in 2020; the world that seems to await us, even as this second decade of the twenty-first century is shortly drawing to a close. So, I’m presenting excerpts of some (hard to chose!) of the novel’s most crisply and vividly crafted passages, juxtaposed with contemporary symbols that most uncannily match and embody the events, scenes, and characters depicted in these very passages.
Among these excerpts are some videos and book over art that reflect the mood and message of Fahrenheit 451.
The post closes with by Yann Tiersen’s melody “Comptine d’un autre été – “Rhyme for Another Summer”, from the sound-track for trailer of 2001’s Amélie, at Rousseau’s YouTube channel. I chose this because it’s the background theme for the short video, “This Is Our World – I Am Speechless“, in the “middle” of this post.
I wish that Ray Bradbury were with us now, to “illustrate” (pardon the pun!) by words the world we now inhabit. But, he is not. He died in 2012, only eight years by the measure of time, but another world by the measure of technology.
“We have a good deal of experience as to how the industrialists regard a new industrial potential. Their whole propaganda is to the effect that it must not be considered as the business of the government but must be left open to whatever entrepreneurs wish to invest money in it.”
In the myths and fairy tales that we read as children we learned a few of the simpler and more obvious truths of life, such as that when a djinnee is found in a bottle, it had better be left there; that the fisherman who craves a boon from heaven too many times on behalf of his wife will end up exactly where he started; that if you are given three wishes, you must be very careful what you wish for. These simple and obvious truths represent the childish equivalent of the tragic view of life which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess, and which is somehow missing in this land of plenty.
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”
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We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?
It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time…
For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead.
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His wife said, “What are you doing?”
He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.
A minute later she said, “Well, just don’t stand there in the middle of the floor.”
He made a small sound.
“What?” she asked.
He made more soft sounds. He stumbled towards the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend’s house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. But Montag said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet. (41)
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And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty. (44)
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A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom … and you fell so fast you didn’t touch the sides either … never … quite … touched … anything.
The thunder faded. The music died.
“There,” said Mildred,
And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened. Even though the people in the walls of the room had barely moved, and nothing had really been settled, you had the impression that someone had turned on a washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music and pure cacophony. He came out of the room sweating and on the point of collapse. Behind him, Mildred sat in her chair and the voices went on again: (45)
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He had chills and fever in the morning.
“You can’t be sick,” said Mildred.
He closed his eyes over the hotness. “Yes.”
“But you were all right last night.”
“No, I wasn’t all right.” He heard the “relatives” shouting in the parlor.
Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon. He could remember her no other way. (48)
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“No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me the rest of my life. God! I’ve been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I’m crazy with trying.”
“You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman.”
“Thought!” he said. “Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them.”
The parlor was playing a dance tune.
“This is the day you go on the early shift,” said Mildred. “You should have gone two hours ago. I just noticed.”
“It’s not just the woman that died,” said Montag. “Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before.” He got out of bed. (51)
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And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the ceiling and the pump-snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes moving in their mouths when they talked. But that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met. He turned away. (52)
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“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click,
Pic,
Look,
Eye,
Now,
Flick,
Here,
There,
Swift,
Pace,
Up,
Down,
In,
Out,
Why,
How,
Who,
What,
Where, Eh?
Uh!
Bang!
Smack!
Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” (55)
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“There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down.
There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!
Technology, mass exploitation,
and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Today, thanks to them,
you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
“Yes, but what about the firemen, then?” asked Montag.
“Ah.” Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. “What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike.
Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says,
but everyone made equal.
Each man the image of every other;
then all are happy,
for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
So!
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.
Burn it.
Take the shot from the weapon.
Breach man’s mind.
Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.” (58)
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(Art by Ed Lindlof, for cover of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death – Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1986 Penguin Edition)
Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.” (61)
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“This Is Our World – I Am Speechless” (creator unknown)
“THESE SYSTEMS ARE FAILING”
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Across the street and down the way the other houses stood with their flat fronts. What was it Clarisse had said one afternoon? “No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking chairs any more. They’re too comfortable. Get people up and running around. My uncle says … and … my uncle … and … my uncle …” Her voice faded. (63)
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The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.
“Jesus God,” said Montag. “Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it? We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 1960. Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don’t hear those idiot bastards in your parlor talking about it. God, Millie, don’t you see? An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe…” (73)
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He could hear Beatty’s voice. “Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.” There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm. (75-76)
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The people who had been sitting a moment before, tapping their feet to the rhythm of Denham’s Dentifrice, Denham’s Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham’s Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice, one two, one two three, one two, one two three. The people whose mouths had been faintly twitching the words Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice. The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run; the great air-train fell down its shaft in the earth. (79)
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“It looks like a Seashell radio.”
“And something more! It listens! If you put it in your ear, Montag, I can sit comfortably home, warming my frightened bones, and hear and analyze the firemen’s world, find its weaknesses, without danger. I’m the Queen Bee, safe in the hive. You will be the drone, the travelling ear. Eventually, I could put out ears into all parts of the city, with various men, listening and evaluating. If the drones die, I’m still safe at home, tending my fright with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of chance. See how safe I play it, how contemptible I am?” (90)
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They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls of the house, and now they were screaming at each other above the din. Montag found himself at the parlor door with his food still in his mouth. (93)
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Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlor, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned forward at the sound of Montag’s swallowing his final bite of food. They listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that if you touched these three staring brows you would feel a fine salt sweat on your finger-tips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the sub-audible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode. (95)
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The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness: (99)
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His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never rested, always stirred and picked and hid in pockets, moving from under Beatty’s alcohol-flame stare. If Beatty so much as breathed on them, Montag felt that his hands might wither, turn over on their sides, and never be shocked to life again; they would be buried the rest of his life in his coat-sleeves, forgotten. For these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands seemed gloved with blood. (105)
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There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms. Montag drifted about as if still another incomprehensible storm had turned him, to see Stoneman and Black wielding axes, shattering window-panes to provide cross-ventilation. (114)
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Nowhere. There was nowhere to go, no friend to turn to, really. Except Faber. And then he realized that he was indeed, running toward Faber’s house, instinctively. But Faber couldn’t hide him; it would be suicide even to try. But he knew that he would go to see Faber anyway, for a few short minutes. Faber’s would be the place where he might refuel his fast draining belief in his own ability to survive. He just wanted to know that there was a man like Faber in the world. He wanted to see the man alive and not burned back there like a body shelled in another body. And some of the money must be left with Faber, of course, to be spent after Montag ran on his way. Perhaps he could make the open country and live on or near the rivers and near the highways, in the fields and hills.
A great whirling whisper made him look to the sky.
The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the grey head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried, wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the sir, continuing their search. (125)
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There it lay, a game for him to win, a vast bowling alley in the cool morning. The boulevard was as clean as the surface of an arena two minutes before the appearance of certain unnamed victims and certain unknown killers. The air over and above the vast concrete river trembled with the warmth of Montag’s body alone; it was incredible how he felt his temperature could cause the whole immediate world to vibrate. He was a phosphorescent target; he knew it, he felt it. And now he must begin his little walk. (126)
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He was three hundred yards downstream when the Hound reached the river. Overhead the great racketing fans of the helicopters hovered. A storm of light fell upon the river and Montag dived under the great illumination as if the sun had broken the clouds. He felt the river pull him further on its way, into darkness. Then the lights switched back to the land, the helicopters swerved over the city again, as if they had picked up another trail. They were gone. The Hound was gone. Now there was only the cold river and Montag floating in a sudden peacefulness, away from the city and the lights and the chase, away from everything.
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills: For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him.
He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood. (140)
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(Art by Guy Billout, for cover of Thedore Roszak’s The Cult of Information – The Folklore of Computers And the True Art of Thinking, 1986 Pantheon Books Edition)
“Listen,” said Granger, taking his arm, and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass. “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
***
Granger stood looking back with Montag. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” (156-157)
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The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south. Montag crushed himself down, squeezing himself small, eyes tight. He blinked once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other.
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Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and Lt. “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens), commander and medical officer of Starship C-57D, in Forbidden Planet (1956)
Adams: So you took the brain boost, huh?
Ostrow: You ought’a see my new mind. It’s up there in lights. Bigger than his now.
C’mon, easy, doc!
Morbius, was too close to the problem. The Krell had completed their project. Big machine. No instrumentalities. True creation!
C’mon doc, let’s have it.
But the Krell forgot one thing!
Yes, what?!
Monsters, John. Monsters from the id!
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For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead. (160)
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And so, we return to where we began: summer’s end.
A very nice example of Richard Powers’ work from the mid-1950s. Like the covers of Star Science Fiction Number One and Number Two but even more stylized than those illustrations, the book depicts a jagged alien landscape which actually “wraps” around all four sides of the cover. It seems as if the cover was deliberately designed – both front and back – to allow “empty” areas for the presentation of the title, editor’s name, authors’ names, and a short blurb about each of the six stories.
This time, however, there is no space-suited explorer. Rather, the symbolic figure of a man holds a ringed-planet.
An interesting aspect of this book is that the title of each story includes an illustration by artist David Stone, all of which are original to this book. (I’d like show scans of these images, but I don’t want to risk breaking the binding in my scanner!)
As for the stories themselves, I read “Surface Tension” some years ago, and found the premise to be quite innovative, though the “science” behind the story is another question!
Contents
“The Blast”, by Stuart Cloete, from Colliers, April, 1946
“Coventry”, by Robert A. Heinlein, from Astounding Science Fiction, July, 1940
“The Other World”, by Murray Leinster, from Startling Stories, November, 1949
“Barrier”, by Anthony Boucher, from Astounding Science Fiction, September, 1942
“Surface Tension”, by James Blish, from Galaxy Science Fiction, August, 1952
“Maturity”, by Theodore Sturgeon, from Astounding Science Fiction, February, 1947
Illustration by Tom Barrett, for “The Colony”, by Raymond Kaminski (p. 21)
