Astounding: February 1941
Feb. 28th, 2011 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
woodwardiocomBeing a continuation of my month-by-month review of Astounding Science-Fiction.
This issue opens with an invitation from Campbell to the readers to submit stories, pointing out that many SF writers were successes from day one. (The language implictly assumes that these authors will all be male, I noted.) An interesting bit was the pay guidelines Campbell included: "It amounts to the equivalent of a couple of new suits, or a suit and overcoat, for a short story, a new radio with, say, FM tuning for a novelette, and a new car or so for a novel." Yeah, you read that right. Oh for the days when cars were cheap and radios were expensive!
This issue contains two Heinlein entries, both of which I've read and enjoyed many times. Part 2 of Sixth Column (under the name "Anson MacDonald") is much like the first, though the (allegedly editorially mandated) racism is a little more in evidence. We also have the short story "—And He Built a Crooked House", in which an architect builds a house in the shape of an unfolded tesseract, and then an earthquake folds it back up again. (No racism in this one, just a shrewish wife.) The art for "Crooked House" was interestingly wrong, as the male leads are shown wearing suits throughout, though the opening scene is clearly about them sitting around a kitchen table in their shirtsleeves getting drunk.
Both Heinlein entries have some good science in them, which contrasts with P. Schuyler Miller's "Trouble on Tantalus", a very pulpy story of a hard-fighting Irishman wrasslin' across an alien world of strange monsters, finding his long-lost grandfather, and then nearly succumbing to a vampire goddess before tossing her into an obsidian pit full of scintillating violet crystals, et cetera, ad adjectivia. Apart from being largely pointless and badly overwritten (as opposed to, say, Doc Smith's or Lovecraft's good overwriting), the mood also fluctuates wildly, from cosmic horror to a common brawl within two pages. Bleh.
The cover novelette was Nelson S. Bond's "Magic City", set sometime after an apocalypse of unspecified origin. Our heroic, superstitious couple are trying to hunt down Death in the ruins of New York, and instead end up rediscovering science. This story suffers from being teeth-grindingly cute about how language has changed. E.g., our heroine describes her pilgrimage to the Place of the Gods: "At last I reached the desolate grottoes of 'Kota, and looked upon the carven stone faces of the gods. Grim Jarg, the sad-eyed Ibrim, ringleted Taamuz, and far-seeing Tedhi." A New Yorker replies, "But we worship still another god, the mighty Granstoom!" That's when I stopped reading. Yes, we get it, you can make new words and cute misunderstandings out of "Grant's Tomb", ha ha. Mr. Bond is not impressing me.
Two of the short stories are solid and workmanlike, getting in and getting out with the job done. "Castaway" by Robert Moore Williams is about a lighthouse keeper who finds a stranger on his island, who appears to be a somewhat simple castaway, until he re-rigs the radio and summons his people from the deep. "The Best-Laid Scheme" is set in the near future, in which a minor bureaucrat builds a time machine, and threatens to alter history if he's not put in charge of the government. When pursued into the past, he accidentally rewrites his own personal history, and discovers he'd now rather be a poet.
Last in this volume is "Completely Automatic" by Theodore Sturgeon, which I read recently elsewhere. Interplanetary ships have become so automatic that the crew are lazy slackers, just there for show, until something unpredicted goes wrong, and only a suicidal move can save everyone. Vaguely entertaining, and good science, but not a highlight of the issue.
Plus, fact articles on the brand new klystron tube, whether there are canals on Mars (still disputed at the time), and a letter from Willy Ley about motion pictures with smell!
This issue opens with an invitation from Campbell to the readers to submit stories, pointing out that many SF writers were successes from day one. (The language implictly assumes that these authors will all be male, I noted.) An interesting bit was the pay guidelines Campbell included: "It amounts to the equivalent of a couple of new suits, or a suit and overcoat, for a short story, a new radio with, say, FM tuning for a novelette, and a new car or so for a novel." Yeah, you read that right. Oh for the days when cars were cheap and radios were expensive!
This issue contains two Heinlein entries, both of which I've read and enjoyed many times. Part 2 of Sixth Column (under the name "Anson MacDonald") is much like the first, though the (allegedly editorially mandated) racism is a little more in evidence. We also have the short story "—And He Built a Crooked House", in which an architect builds a house in the shape of an unfolded tesseract, and then an earthquake folds it back up again. (No racism in this one, just a shrewish wife.) The art for "Crooked House" was interestingly wrong, as the male leads are shown wearing suits throughout, though the opening scene is clearly about them sitting around a kitchen table in their shirtsleeves getting drunk.
Both Heinlein entries have some good science in them, which contrasts with P. Schuyler Miller's "Trouble on Tantalus", a very pulpy story of a hard-fighting Irishman wrasslin' across an alien world of strange monsters, finding his long-lost grandfather, and then nearly succumbing to a vampire goddess before tossing her into an obsidian pit full of scintillating violet crystals, et cetera, ad adjectivia. Apart from being largely pointless and badly overwritten (as opposed to, say, Doc Smith's or Lovecraft's good overwriting), the mood also fluctuates wildly, from cosmic horror to a common brawl within two pages. Bleh.
The cover novelette was Nelson S. Bond's "Magic City", set sometime after an apocalypse of unspecified origin. Our heroic, superstitious couple are trying to hunt down Death in the ruins of New York, and instead end up rediscovering science. This story suffers from being teeth-grindingly cute about how language has changed. E.g., our heroine describes her pilgrimage to the Place of the Gods: "At last I reached the desolate grottoes of 'Kota, and looked upon the carven stone faces of the gods. Grim Jarg, the sad-eyed Ibrim, ringleted Taamuz, and far-seeing Tedhi." A New Yorker replies, "But we worship still another god, the mighty Granstoom!" That's when I stopped reading. Yes, we get it, you can make new words and cute misunderstandings out of "Grant's Tomb", ha ha. Mr. Bond is not impressing me.
Two of the short stories are solid and workmanlike, getting in and getting out with the job done. "Castaway" by Robert Moore Williams is about a lighthouse keeper who finds a stranger on his island, who appears to be a somewhat simple castaway, until he re-rigs the radio and summons his people from the deep. "The Best-Laid Scheme" is set in the near future, in which a minor bureaucrat builds a time machine, and threatens to alter history if he's not put in charge of the government. When pursued into the past, he accidentally rewrites his own personal history, and discovers he'd now rather be a poet.
Last in this volume is "Completely Automatic" by Theodore Sturgeon, which I read recently elsewhere. Interplanetary ships have become so automatic that the crew are lazy slackers, just there for show, until something unpredicted goes wrong, and only a suicidal move can save everyone. Vaguely entertaining, and good science, but not a highlight of the issue.
Plus, fact articles on the brand new klystron tube, whether there are canals on Mars (still disputed at the time), and a letter from Willy Ley about motion pictures with smell!
