Black Gate

Here’s a latish Cele Goldsmith issue… indeed, she became Cele Lalli with the August issue (and her tenure ended with the June 1965 issue). This one has a cover by Emsh for Robert F. Young’s “Arena of Decisions.” Interiors are by George Schelling and Virgil Finlay.

Norman Lobsenz’ Editorial is about SFnal games, referring to Lewis Carroll’s notion of Circular Billiards. In the book review column, The Spectroscope, a new reviewer is introduced: Lester del Rey. The column had missed one issue, with the January issue having been longtime reviewer S. E. Cotts’ last. Curiously, del Rey lasted only one issue, though the Editorial implies a long run was coming. Robert Silverberg took over with the next issue – I don’t know the story behind this. Del Rey did later have long runs at If and Analog doing review columns. In this issue he praises Simak’s Way Station and (with reservations) Dean McLaughlin’s The Fury from Earth, and he is quite negative about Heinlein’s Glory Road.

The letter column features Jeff Rensch (wants to ditch the magazine’s name), Jim Hawkins, Ricky Hautala, Georgia Covington, Michael L. Abraham, and Robert Lewis. Of those I know Hautala’s name – he was a fairly prolific horror novelist in the ‘80s.

Ben Bova contributes the Science article, “The Time of Great Dying,” which discusses the Cretaceous Extinction, summarizing the current theories and adding one of his own (the proliferation of grasses led to the extinction of the dinosaurs). Bova’s summary is sensible and clear, but as with almost all such on this particular event, it can largely be thrown in the dustbin of history. (He does suggest a nearby supernova as a possibility, though.)

The fiction, then:

Sunburst (part one of three), by Phyllis Gotlieb (18500 words)
“Arena of Decisions,” by Robert F. Young (6,800 words)
“Now is Forever,” by Dobbin Thorpe (5,200 words)
“Jam for Christmas,” by Vance Simonds (7,300 words)

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John W. Campbell died in July 1971. He had been editor of Astounding/Analog for 34 years. His name appeared on the masthead through December of that year, along with remaining editorials. Presumably Kay Tarrant did the work necessary to keep the magazine going, possibly, some suggest, even buying new stories, until the new editor was chosen. Ben Bova took over officially with the January 1972 issues. (Rumor has it that Charles Platt, of all people, was one of those considered for the job; a more obvious possibility was Frederik Pohl, who said he was asked to apply. [He had left Galaxy at about this time, and was as I recall editing books for Bantam.])

So I thought I’d consider an issue from the end of Campbell’s tenure, and one from the beginning of Bova’s: November 1971 and October 1972.

The November 1971 issue has a cover by John Schoenherr. Interiors are by Schoenherr, Kelly Freas, and Leo Summers. Campbell’s editorial, his second-last, was called “The Gored Ox,” in which he inveighs against the press’s desire to print anything they want (inspired by the Pentagon papers). The Science article is by Margaret Silbar, who contributed 16 pieces of non-fiction to Analog between 1967 and 1990. It’s called “In Quest of a Humanlike Robot.”

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The cover of this issue gives Robert Silverberg’s byline as “Bob Silverberg,” though the Table of Contents shows “Robert Silverberg.” Bob Silverberg seems to have been given as his byline on a few stories (including his first publication), as well as some letters.

The cover is by Albert Nuetzell, showing a spaceship and some people investigating an archaeological site, presumably on another planet, complete with strange writing and an enormous stone humanoid head (click on the image at left for a bigger version). It doesn’t go with any of the stories in the magazine. Interior illustrations are by Mel Varga and by Virgil Finlay.

Norman Lobsenz’ very brief editorial is about Project Ozma, Frank Drake’s pioneering attempt to detect signals from intelligent extraterrestrials using radio. S. E. Cotts’ brief book review column, The Spectroscope, covers Benjamin Appel’s The Funhouse, Murray Leinster’s The Pirates of Zan, and Adam Lukens’ The Sea People.

The letters in “Or So You Say …” come from Jacqueline Brice, Jess Nash, Bob Adolfsen, Paul H. Taylor, Frank H. Terrell, and Dr. Raymond Wallace, none of those names familiar to me. The biggest common theme is praise for Alan Nourse’s novel Star Surgeon.

The stories are:

Novel:

Seven from the Stars, by Marion Zimmer Bradley (42,800 words)

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A bit of a change of pace here, a late ’60s issue of Galaxy. Frederik Pohl was the editor. It is billed as the “Seventeenth Anniversary Issue, and the conceit is that the contributors are all celebrating an anniversary in the field. For example, Pohl himself published a poem in an SF magazine in 1937, making this his 30^th anniversary. George O. Smith’s first story was published in 1942, so his 25^th anniversary. H. L. Gold is here as the founding editor. Fair enough. The contributor that puzzles me is Roger Zelazny. The cover says “representing his 17^th anniversary, but never explains that. This was the fifth anniversary of his first published story. Does it mean he started reading SF in 1950? I don’t know – it’s not explained at all.

The cover is by Gray Morrow, illustrating Gold’s story accurately enough. Interiors are by Gaughan, Morrow, and R. Dorfman (his or her only appearance, according to the ISFDB, in SF). Willy Ley contributes a science essay in his “For Your Information” series, which ran from 1952 through 1969. This one, “The Worst of all the Comets,” is about the great comet of 1680, which has a 574 year period, and which one writer speculated was the comet that caused the Biblical Flood (by raining water on the Earth when it passed very close). Pohl’s brief editorial is about the changes since his poem was published, in 1937.

Algis Budrys’ Galaxy Bookshelf covers Damon Knight’s anthology Worlds to Come (he objects that too many of the stories aren’t really SF), a reissue of Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time (which, Budrys reminds us, is really a play), Robert A. Heinlein’s landmark collection The Past Through Tomorrow (his big Future History collection, which Budrys praises highly), and, most significantly, Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection. In the Thomas Disch piece just reprinted in Stories for Chip Disch writes of Delany telling him happily that Budrys had declared him (Delany) the best SF writer in the world. I don’t know if this is the review that prompted Delany’s happiness (apparently it was his review of Nova), but it would certainly make one happy. One quote: “The man simply operates on a plane that Robert Heinlein never dreamed of.”

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Here’s an issue from the first year of Cele Goldsmith’s tenure, and a significant month for me – I was born October 5, 1959. It has an interesting mix of authors – the first (and arguably only) SF novel by a Grand Master, a fine early story by one of my personal favorite writers in the field, and four stories by obscure names (though one of those at least is a pseudonym for a fairly well-known writer).

The cover is by Leo Summers, and depicts some sort of anti-spaceship installation hidden in a small asteroid, firing on a spaceship. Interiors are by Summers and Finlay (with one uncredited). There is a cartoon by “Frosty.”

Norman Lobsenz contributes his usual brief editorial, this one referring to Eric Frank Russell’s attack on astronomy as an “inexact science.” S. E. Cotts’ book review column, The Spectroscope, was at this time only allotted two pages. The reviews are of George O. Smith’s The Fourth R (fairly positive), Brian Aldiss’ collection No Time Like Tomorrow (very positive), and Jeff Sutton’s Bombs in Orbit (mistitled, amusingly, Bombos in Orbit in the review), not too positively.

The letter column, “… Or So You Say”, has mostly short letters, with only one name I recognized (Paul Zimmer, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s brother). The other letter writers are Edward J. Lynch (liked Silverberg’s “Collision Course”), Paul Shingleton (hated “Collision Course”, even though Bob S. is his favorite author), W. C. Brandt (loved “Collision Course”), Zimmer (seemed snarky about Doc Smith though it’s hard to say), Dave Boyer (loved stories by Sheckley and Douglas), David Locke (hated Doc Smith), Clark Peterson (is in favor of book length novels in the magazine), and Harry Thomas (defending Doc Smith from his detractors). Those who know fandom better than I remember David Locke particularly, as an active fan and letter writer, and also Shingleton and Brandt.

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