woodwardiocom

One of the things I picked up at Arisia this year was all 12 issues of the 1941 Astounding Science-Fiction. Since that happens to be exactly 70 years ago — threescore and ten, a human lifetime — I thought I'd review one issue a month.

For context, this is about three years after John Campbell took over and began improving both the science and the storytelling over the pulp adventures that dominated the genre. This is also a year and a half after Heinlein published his first short story. This is relevant because Heinlein dominated this year of Astounding, to the point that Campbell required him to use the pen name of Anson MacDonald half the time, so that he wouldn't obviously have two stories in one issue. Counting the Sixth Column and Methuselah's Children serials as three stories each, he had 13 stories in that one year. Clearly, Heinlein's writing career hit the ground running.

So, January 1941. We open with part 1 of Heinlein's novel Sixth Column. This is a near future story in which the Pan-Asians have conquered America, and an Army outpost with a handful of men, and a scientific breakthrough, must take it back. Legend has it that Heinlein was handed the basic premise by Campbell, and then tried to strip out the anti-Asian racism as much as possible. It's still grating to modern sensibilities, but you can tell he's trying. Otherwise, it's reasonably fun and well thought-out, with Heinlein's usual attention to characterization.

The other story in here I'd read before is Maurice Hugi's "The Mechanical Mice", in which a scientist invents a time-viewer, looks past humanity's extinction, and recreates the strange mechanical device he sees there. Vicious little clockwork rodents ensue. I've always found this one very atmospheric.

"Doom Ship" by Harry Walton is by-the-numbers and a bit too heavy on the science. A down-on-his-luck spaceship crewman is recruited aboard a cargo vessel bound for Mercury, and finds out that the skipper actually plans to escape in the lifeboat and crash ithe ship into the sun for the insurance money. Our hero uses clever tricks to save the day, and all is puppies-n-chocolate evermore.

"The Traitor" by Kurt von Rachen reads a bit like a Western with the numbers filed off. I'd summarize it, but it's both complicated and unremarkable.

"Lost Rocket" by Manly Wade Wellman (a name to conjure with) is set aboard a spaceship that's been sabotaged to conceal a drug deal. Our captain must escape the frame set around him and determine which of the three survivors betrayed him. The Martian engineering officer is the highlight here, being something other than an ethnic stereotype in space.

"The Opportunists" by E. A. Grosser is a dystopia more interesting for its origins — a plague that destroys people's ability to read — than for its execution, which is full of holes and silliness.

And lastly, "The Day We Celebrate" by Nelson S. Bond is an odd duck. On Uranus, humans are colonizing and contending with the locals. The parallels to Europeans treatmant of the Native Americans are rampant. Headquarters announces that they're going to solve the native problem once and for all the next day, and imply the day is a holiday, without specifying which holiday. The day turns out to be November 19th, Empire Day, celebrating the day the Human Empire was founded, and the plan is to wipe them out. Our comic hero (who can't get through the word "culinary" in less than three tries) assumes it's a different holiday (having lost track of the real date), and that the plan is to sit down and make friends with the locals over a feast. His plan, oddly, works, and all is forgiven.

The problem being, in the last few paragraphs, we learn the hero thought the holiday was Christmas. The hell? Thanksgiving isn't mentioned. Did the author miss the parallels? I wondered if this was due to some of Campbell's legendary interference, but it's collected in Possible Worlds of Science Fiction, with the same ending. The whole story seems to be setting itself up for a Thanksgiving ending, right down to the Nov. 19 date, and then it goes in a different direction. Weird.

(Edit: Note that I'm not saying that a Thanksgiving ending would have made this into a good story, or a PC one. It's a bit away from the former, and not within sight of the latter. It just would have made more sense.)

As one might expect, there are no non-white-male protagonists in this issue, and only two of the stories have women with speaking parts: "The Traitor", in which she follows the hero around puppy-like, and "The Opportunists", in which our hero's girl nearly gets drafted into a pleasure camp before he rescues her. "Mice" and Column are the only two I'd particularly recommend, and Column has the caveats mentioned above.