Retro Magazine Review: Astounding, July 1955
Astounding Science Fiction, under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr., was the central magazine of the so-called "Golden Age of Science Fiction", which is typically considered to have lasted from 1938 through the 1940s. Campbell's influence was both good and bad, though I believe on balance the good outweighed the bad. He insisted on better prose from his writers than had been typical in the pulp magazines of the 1930s. He encouraged a greater focus on plausible scientific rationales for the speculations in the stories he published (which is not to deny that a certain amount of scientifically absurd tropes were still acceptable, nor that Campbell himself had an attraction to some very doubtful scientific ideas.) He was very supportive of new writers. His politics were certainly of the Right, but he was tolerant of stories by writers who disagreed with him. That said, he was also tolerant of profoundly imperialist attitudes, and sometimes racist attitudes; and his support of crank science led him to midwife the birth of Scientology by publishing L. Ron Hubbard's first Dianetics essay. In his latter years, Campbell's taste seemed to ossify, and his 1960s
Analog (
Astounding after a rename) was often boring, often obsessed with "psionics", though not worthless -- Poul Anderson's contributions remained interesting, and towards the end he published a few very interesting new writers, notably James Tiptree, Jr., and Stephen Chapman.
The Golden Age, in the common narrative, ended with the founding of two key competitors to Astounding -- The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1949, and Galaxy in 1950. The real story is muddier, as most stories are: the sister pulp magazines Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories had greatly improved by the late 1940s, and other magazines such as Planet Stories and Amazing Stories were mixing in some excellent fiction -- though to be sure often benefiting from the writers Campbell had nurtured. In my view, though, by 1950 the focus of the field had certainly broadened, due not only to these new magazines, and the improvement of older magazines, but also due to the emergence of books as a market for science fiction writers. Ultimately I think the science fiction of the 1950s was better than that of the 1940s -- standing on the shoulders of that decade's advancements, no doubt, but still superior, better written, and featuring a broader range of views. But Astounding soldiered on. And here is a look at an issue from right in the middle of that decade.
The cover for this issue is by Kelly Freas, who had just recently become a regular artist for Astounding, a role which he maintained nearly until his death in 2005 (his last new work for Analog appeared in 2003.) Interiors are by Freas, H. R. van Dongen (another long-time ASF artist) and by "Riley". I couldn't find out anything about "Riley" -- he illustrated five stories for Astounding in 1954/1955, and that seems to be it. (The ISFDB credits him for some illustrations (in other places) in the 21st Century, but I doubt those are the same person.)
The stories then, beginning with two by Eric Frank Russell, a Campbell regular.
"The Waitabits"
A Terran military team lands on a world they have been warned is unconquerable. The natives do indeed turn out to be unconquerable, but for an amusing reason. Decent enough, but I think a bit long for its substance.
"Tieline" (under the name Duncan H. Munro, presumably for the fairly obvious reason that it appeared in the same issues as "The Waitabits")
Men sent to an isolated "lighthouse" planet inevitably go mad. How can they be kept sane? A bad story -- the setup is strained beyond belief (they go insane on 10-year hitches -- why not try shorter hitches? Pets aren't allowed -- but that is pretty much contradicted by the eventual solution.).
"In Clouds of Glory", by Algis Budrys
I mentioned above Campbell's imperialist sympathies. It's not fair to evaluate anyone on a single story, but "In Clouds of Glory" is certainly a prominent exhibit supporting that description of his tendencies. It's a fairly early story in the career of Algis Budrys -- an author I greatly admire for his best work. This is early stuff, however, and Budrys was still developing his skills. On the other hand, by the time this story appeared, Budrys had published some 40 stories and a novel, including such outstanding work as "The End of Summer" and "Nobody Bothers Gus". In that company "In Clouds of Glory" reads to me as something written to order to satisfy Campbell. (And it has only been reprinted once, in an anthology co-edited by Jerry Pournelle and called Imperial Stars, Volume I: The Stars at War.)
The story concerns one Bill Demaris, who works for a shady organization called the Agency. His job is to go in disguise to alien planets, and foment wars, or manipulate wars, so that the Earth's favored side "wins". Demaris himself is bitter that Man's ambitions seem to stop at Pluto, however -- there are all those planets out there to conquer, so why aren't we? His newest mission has him undergoing a special treatment so that he looks like and smells like whichever alien race he's infiltrating, and worming his way into a place of trust, from which he can arrange that the local King for whom he "works" wins his war in the most damaging way possible. The trick ending is that the other guys in the war are also "helped" by a disguised Earthman, with the ultimate object being to pretty much leave the various planets involved ripe for the picking when Earth decides to conquer them. There's also some guff about the pampered rich people back on Earth being too soft for the job of conquering new planets, so that this secret Agency recruits only the toughest, who will of course eventually be the colonizers. Oh -- and one way they manage to get themselves hired as advisers everywhere is to poison the most influential of the aliens so they are too stupid to effectively operate.
It's really profoundly offensive. There's a lot of pretty overt cynicism among the members of the "Agency" -- but no real regrets. After all, they're reasonably well paid, and Humanity Uber Alles, eh? It occurred to me that Budrys might have intended the story to be satirical, but I don't think so, and if he did, the satire doesn't come through well.
"Rat Race", by Frank Herbert
Another fairly early story from a writer who would become very prominent about a decade later. "Rat Race" is a somewhat convoluted, but not uninteresting story. An investigator, visiting a mortuary to check up on a dead woman, sees some strange things -- a weird passageway, and disappearing tanks of -- something -- that don't seem to belong in a mortuary. He keeps following up, and the rather odd mortician shows signs of stress -- until he shoots the investigator and commits suicide. It's a science fiction story, so we can kind of guess what's going on -- the mortician is an alien. But why are aliens doing strange things with human bodies? The answer is a bit of a twist. I didn't quite buy all the steps it took to get there, but at least the story is after something interesting.
"Earth, Air, Fire and Water", by Robert Sheckley
Robert Sheckley and Algis Budrys started selling SF stories in the same year -- 1952 -- and were similarly prolific at the start of their career. (One could, through the 1950s but not really after that point, make a living selling short stories to magazines.) Sheckley, at this point in his career, was better than Budrys, partly because he was often funny, partly because he was a clever writer in a way Budrys wasn't. Unfortunately, "Earth, Air, Fire and Water" isn't him at his best, not even close. A space pilot is on a mission to Venus, with two objectives -- recover some recording devices from an unmanned probe, and test a brand new spacesuit model. Upon landing, he puts on the suit and starts walking to the probe -- but there's a snowstorm and, for unconvincing reasons, the spacesuit is a problem and he has to take it off ... It's really just not a good story. It's filler.
"The Long Way Home", part 4 of 4, by Poul Anderson
This serial was Anderson's fourth novel, only his second science fiction novel for adults, after Brain Wave (1954). (A juvenile, Vault of the Ages (1952), and a Norse-based fantasy, The Broken Sword (1954), were the other two predecessors.) I read this long ago and I don't remember it well. It's about a spaceship testing a hyperspace drive that returns to Earth to find that the drive doesn't really work like they thought, so they are 5000 years in the future. It was published in book form as No World of Their Own, part of an Ace Double backed with The 1000 Year Plan, by Isaac Asimov -- which of course was Foundation after application of the Don Wollheim title-generation algorithm. I have that Ace Double, and I'll read it soon and report on it! Later reprints restored Anderson's original title, and apparently also restored some cuts Campbell had made (I'm not sure if the Ace Double also had those cuts restored.)
"Brass Tacks" and also Campbell's editorial
"Brass Tacks" was the letter column at Astounding, and it was noticeable for tending to be focussed less on the quality of the stories the magazine published than it was on nitpicking -- or seriously disputing -- scientific or other ideas -- not just from the stories but from the science articles and also Campbell's editorials. In this issue all three letters take issue with a very controversial essay by Donald Kingsbury from the April issue, "The Right to Breed". Essentially (as I recall) Kingsbury was advocating draconian eugenics policies -- only allowing "worthy" parents to have children, in order to prevent overpopulation. A torrent of letters came in, almost all (apparently) vociferously rejecting Kingsbury's ideas. Campbell's editorial this issue, "The Fanatic", claims that Kingsbury's objective was to show that one could write something stringing together facts with logical deductions from them to come to an awful conclusion -- and that the readers were supposed to see that the point was that the essay demonstrated how fanatics took things too far and made seemingly logical steps lead one to a terrible place. Kingsbury later confirmed this, and said that he had to revise the piece multiple times at Campbell's insistence to get it just right. The letters reprinted in this issue give three responses -- two by readers who missed the point and one by a reader who basically got it.
"The Reference Library"
This is Astounding's Book Review column, which was written by P. Schuyler Miller from October 1951 through January 1975 (shortly after I started reading Analog). (Miller had died in October of 1974.) In this column he covers a couple of nonfiction books about Mars, plus the novels Earthman, Come Home, by James Blish; The Mouse That Roared, by Leonard Wibberley; False Night, by Algis Budrys; and The Chaos Fighters, by Robert Moore Williams. He ranks them pretty much in that order. He also discusses two anthologies: Stories for Tomorrow, edited by William Sloane; and Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time, edited by Judith Merril. He has very high praise for both anthologies, especially Merril's. A couple more nonfiction books are covered: The Sun and the Earth as a Planet, edited by Gerard Kuiper; and Sun, Sea and Sky, by Irving P. Krick and Roscoe Fleming. And Miller finishes by mentioning a couple of (gasp!) fantasies, which he describes as "charming". These books are by a certain Professor Tolkien -- The Hobbit, and The Fellowship of the Ring. Miller does praise them, but doesn't quite seem to get them -- though he had not yet seen The Two Towers nor The Return of the King. (He also misidentifies a character he is sure the readers will be fascinated by: Tom Bombadillo.)
"Is Bode's Law a Coincidence?", by Roy Malcolm
This is a short science article, discussing the still well-known suggestion that planetary orbits follow a predictable pattern, that works for the Solar System if you consider the asteroid belt to be where a planet should have been. It works, to one degree or another, with the major moons of some of the planets. But ever since its discovery (co-credited to Johann Ebert Bode and to Johann Daniel Titius, both German astronomers of the 18th Century) people have questioned whether the pattern represents something real or is, well, a coincidence. This article sensibly discusses the state of things as of 1955 -- and I was surprised to learn that the question is still somewhat open in 2026. (I have generally believed that it was most likely just a coincidence.)
The bottom line, I think, is that this is a pretty mediocre issue of Astounding, redeemed to some extent by the Herbert story and perhaps by the Anderson serial. The magazine, even in the 1950s, was usually a bit better than this, I'd say -- but this does show signs of the decline that, really, continued until Ben Bova took over after Campbell's death.
