Astounding: March 1941
Mar. 31st, 2011 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
woodwardiocomContinuing my month-by-month review of Astounding magazine, 1941.
March is another double-Heinlein issue, including the last part of Sixth Column, on which I have no new comment. The other story by the Dean of SF is "Logic of Empire", in which Heinlein argues that slavery can exist in a high-tech future (especially in the jungles of Venus), so long as the same economic forces are in play as in history. ("Empire" also gives us one of the few women with speaking parts in this issue.)
The issue opens with an editorial by Campbell in which he speculates about bringing a jet fighter back from 1991 to 1941, and what advances people in the 40s could learn from it. Almost all his specifics are wrong; e.g., he imagines it would be atomic-powered, with machineguns that work by loading a solid shell, pumping in gunpowder behind the shell, then setting it off. However, his general point is actually that a 1991 jet would be nigh-useless, since none of the manufacturing processes would be known, and most could not be deduced from the end result. This is quite true; 1991 microchips would be inexplicable to the 1940s.
Clifford Simak's novelette "Masquerade" is set on Mercury, which is being used to generate power for the whole Solar System. The natives are mysterious, harmless energy beings called Candles, who can imperfectly mimic anything humans think of. Then they turn out to be a skoosh smarter than anyone thought. This bears a vague resemblance to Campbell's own "Who Goes There?" (made into the movie The Thing by John Carpenter), in that the question of who is really what they appear to be drives the last half. Not a bad story. It even contains a non-white human, in the form of the black cook. He's badly stereotyped, but he survives, and is even mildly heroic.
"Blockade Runner" by Malcolm Jameson is about an attempt by an Earth ship to break the blockade of the outer Solar System and load up on atomic fuel. They get caught, but our captain rigs part of the ship to kill the enemy officer placed on board. The story tells us how to build a gamma ray projector from spare parts in detail, but I ended up being uncomfortable at watching the bad guy slowly going nuts from radiation poisoning.
"Poker Face" is something of a Twilight Zone-ish science fantasy, by Theodore Sturgeon. A group of poker buddies find that one of them is from a sterile, regimented future, sent back to the past to hunt down an escaped criminal. Alas, the past is just so much fun!
(Note that "Masquerade", "Blockade Runner", and "Poker Face" have no women in them whatsoever.)
"Putsch" by Phillips & Roberts is a fairly typical example of "the ingenuity and gumption of the exceptional individual will always triumph over the regimented forces of dictatorial control" genre that for some reason was common in 1941. This one is set on Venus, in a post-scarcity future where the three factions are those who still work because they choose to, those who do no work because they choose not to, and those who want to control the first two groups. A and B gang up on C, and triumph. The leader of B is our second female speaking part, though she doesn't do much.
Finally, "Eccentric Orbit" by D.B. Thompson is a nice anti-colonialist tale, in which a couple of criminals flee the Solar System, and settle on another world. They pretend to be gods in order to get the fuzzy, Bronze Age locals to build them a superweapon. Unfortunately, A) they don't notice that the planet has a highly eccentric orbit, and the upcoming winter will be years long, and B) the locals are smart enough to get all their technical know-how out of them, before shutting off their heating system... Got a couple female aliens in this one, who actually do some clever things!
And the issue winds up with a non-fiction article on absorption lines in deep space, a topic that hasn't dated all that badly. Overall, this issue is a good example of Campbell's strengths and weaknesses as an editor: Good science, smart people solving interesting problems, but a dire lack of women, or particularly deep characters.
March is another double-Heinlein issue, including the last part of Sixth Column, on which I have no new comment. The other story by the Dean of SF is "Logic of Empire", in which Heinlein argues that slavery can exist in a high-tech future (especially in the jungles of Venus), so long as the same economic forces are in play as in history. ("Empire" also gives us one of the few women with speaking parts in this issue.)
The issue opens with an editorial by Campbell in which he speculates about bringing a jet fighter back from 1991 to 1941, and what advances people in the 40s could learn from it. Almost all his specifics are wrong; e.g., he imagines it would be atomic-powered, with machineguns that work by loading a solid shell, pumping in gunpowder behind the shell, then setting it off. However, his general point is actually that a 1991 jet would be nigh-useless, since none of the manufacturing processes would be known, and most could not be deduced from the end result. This is quite true; 1991 microchips would be inexplicable to the 1940s.
Clifford Simak's novelette "Masquerade" is set on Mercury, which is being used to generate power for the whole Solar System. The natives are mysterious, harmless energy beings called Candles, who can imperfectly mimic anything humans think of. Then they turn out to be a skoosh smarter than anyone thought. This bears a vague resemblance to Campbell's own "Who Goes There?" (made into the movie The Thing by John Carpenter), in that the question of who is really what they appear to be drives the last half. Not a bad story. It even contains a non-white human, in the form of the black cook. He's badly stereotyped, but he survives, and is even mildly heroic.
"Blockade Runner" by Malcolm Jameson is about an attempt by an Earth ship to break the blockade of the outer Solar System and load up on atomic fuel. They get caught, but our captain rigs part of the ship to kill the enemy officer placed on board. The story tells us how to build a gamma ray projector from spare parts in detail, but I ended up being uncomfortable at watching the bad guy slowly going nuts from radiation poisoning.
"Poker Face" is something of a Twilight Zone-ish science fantasy, by Theodore Sturgeon. A group of poker buddies find that one of them is from a sterile, regimented future, sent back to the past to hunt down an escaped criminal. Alas, the past is just so much fun!
(Note that "Masquerade", "Blockade Runner", and "Poker Face" have no women in them whatsoever.)
"Putsch" by Phillips & Roberts is a fairly typical example of "the ingenuity and gumption of the exceptional individual will always triumph over the regimented forces of dictatorial control" genre that for some reason was common in 1941. This one is set on Venus, in a post-scarcity future where the three factions are those who still work because they choose to, those who do no work because they choose not to, and those who want to control the first two groups. A and B gang up on C, and triumph. The leader of B is our second female speaking part, though she doesn't do much.
Finally, "Eccentric Orbit" by D.B. Thompson is a nice anti-colonialist tale, in which a couple of criminals flee the Solar System, and settle on another world. They pretend to be gods in order to get the fuzzy, Bronze Age locals to build them a superweapon. Unfortunately, A) they don't notice that the planet has a highly eccentric orbit, and the upcoming winter will be years long, and B) the locals are smart enough to get all their technical know-how out of them, before shutting off their heating system... Got a couple female aliens in this one, who actually do some clever things!
And the issue winds up with a non-fiction article on absorption lines in deep space, a topic that hasn't dated all that badly. Overall, this issue is a good example of Campbell's strengths and weaknesses as an editor: Good science, smart people solving interesting problems, but a dire lack of women, or particularly deep characters.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 10:43 am (UTC)I was being ironic.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 02:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 01:36 pm (UTC)