Dynamic Science Fiction, June 1953: R Z Gallun, R E Banks and C M Kornbluth & D A Wollheim

Bopping hither and tither at isfdb and the internet archive, one will often discover little gems.  My latest uncovered treasure is the June 1953 issue of Robert W. Lowndes' Dynamic Science Fiction.  The issue has a terrific red cover, a montage of classic SF elements like a man in a spacesuit, a satellite, a rocket ship ready for launch, an atomic bomb blowing up your town...and a naked woman in chains!  Wow!   

Inside, we find the magazine is full of beautiful little sex and violence spot illustrations and chapter headings that probably have nothing to do with the stories in which they appear.  There's a naked woman expressing dismay with heavy machinery, a naked woman reclining high in the atmosphere, multiple crashed rockets (stop texting while driving, guys!), a man in a space helmet brandishing his ray pistol, a woman using her pistol to disintegrate a man (you've come a long way, baby!), a variety of futuristic artillery and armored vehicles, and on and on.

So this magazine looks gorgeous.  But anybody can just look at an old magazine.  Not everybody will actually read a 70-year-old magazine!  Now, I'm not suggesting that I myself am going to read this magazine from cover to cover, either, but I will read three stories and skim the editorial by Lowndes and letters from Robert Silverberg and James Blish.

Both Lowndes in his editorial and Silberberg in his letter talk at some length about the labels affixed to pieces of magazine fiction to indicate their length; the general idea is that, for advertising purposes, texts bearing such appellations as "novellas," "novelets" and "novels" are getting shorter and shorter, so that what might have been labelled a "short story" back in the Thirties might today be called a "novella" or "novelet."  Silverberg is excited that Dynamic is going to have trimmed edges, complains at length about the typeface on the cover of the last issue of the magazine, and indicates that he hates present-tense narration.  Blish in his letter says he is glad that the covers of Dynamic have been portraying "situations from science-fiction, rather than the burlesque runway" (I wonder what he thought of this June cover) and then complains about the practice of editors commissioning stories from authors based on cover paintings; he suggests Judith Merril once wrote a story based on a cover illustration and instead of writing up a scene based on the painting just had the painting appear in the story as a canvas on a wall--Lowndes corrects him, suggesting the mention of the painting was added to the story after it was written.  (Is that better?)  Dynamic is a new magazine, this June issue being the third, and Blish offers a long list of advice for going forward, including getting rid of the spot illos I was just praising, and by all means keeping Dynamic's pages free of cartoons ("seldom funny, usually painful"), a personals section, gossip, and reviews of fanzines.      

Alright, now the stories, tales by Raymond Z. Gallun, Raymond E. Banks, and C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim writing under the pen name "Wallace Baird Halleck."

"Double Identity" by Raymond Z. Gallun 

If isfdb is to be believed, this story, Dynamic's cover story, was reprinted in an Australian magazine in 1954, and then faded into oblivion, never to be printed again.  I tend to like Gallun's work (most recently "Bluff Play," "Brother Worlds" and "Saturn's Ringmaster" in Thrilling Wonder) so I am not going to let that discourage me.

Unfortunately, "Double Identity" is not very well written, with clunky dialogue and somewhat intrusive exposition.  The plot and themes are OK, but not particularly fresh.

The Verden brothers are young self-educated intelligent farmers in rural Missouri.  One of them is affianced to Mary Koven, the daughter of the farmer whose property abuts theirs.  The brothers have always been interested in astronomy and space travel, avidly watching via the newspapers the career of rich businessman and adventurer Frank Cramm, who is on the brink of launching private space ships to the moon.  So, when a meteor lands near the farm, the three countryfolk go investigate it, only to find it is a small missile from the moon!

Contact with the missile starts changing the nearby landscape, turning Earth plants into the kind of plants that live in a valley on the far side of Luna, a deep valley which has retained an atmosphere and still supports life.  The Verdens and Mary Koven also start changing, growing fur and undergoing many other changes that make them look like monsters!  Eventually their very minds begin to change--they develop memories, and see visions, of a lunar landscape, even a lunar civilization!  

Just as some ignorant locals are hunting them down because they are scary, the consciousnesses of the three farmers shift into the bodies of moon people strapped onto operating tables in the lab of a lunar scientist.  The rest of the plot consists of the three Earthlings trying to act as ambassadors between the human race of Earth and the dying race of lunar people, who have technology superior to our own but number only three hundred.  The big theme of "Double Identity" is that people suffer a fear of the unknown and an inability to identify with what we now call "the other."  In theory, Earth peeps and loonies could through friendship help each other tremendously, but in practice each finds the other scary and is likely to shoot first and ask questions later, and for much of the story it looks like Frank Cramm's space ships, working in coordination with the USAF, are going to nuke the hidden valley.  The Verdens wonder if the natural aggression of the human race towards aliens, which is probably shared by other intelligent races throughout the galaxy, means that space travel will inevitably mean war and imperialism, that peaceful relations between civilizations are impossible.  But the three farmers, and the lunar scientist, through trickery and bold action, manage to forestall a Terra-Luna war and convince Frank Cramm to deal peaceably with the loonies.  So we have a happy ending in which it is proven that different civilizations can peacefully coexist and undertake mutually beneficial relations.

The ending gets even happier when it becomes clear that in a year or so the Verdens and Mary Koven's lunar bodies are going to change into human bodies under the influence of their human consciousnesses.  This, I thought, was sort of a cop out--if the three farmers had to live the rest of their lives in alien bodies it would have better suited the story's themes of getting along with "the other," that beauty is only skin deep, and space exploration is a risky plunge into the unknown but ultimately worthwhile.  It would also be easier to swallow scientifically.

For much of "Double Identity"'s twenty five pages I expected to give it a thumbs down because the writing was irritatingly poor, but either I got used to it or the later parts of the story aren't so bad, so having read the whole thing I guess it deserves a grade of barely acceptable.       

"Never Trust an Intellectual" by Raymond E. Banks

We just read Banks's story about a guild of robot programmers who took extreme measures to defend their monopoly, "The Instigators."  It looks like "Never Trust an Intellectual" was Banks's first science fiction story sale (Lowndes tells us that Banks has already been published in Esquire and has also written a stage drama and radio-plays) and has never been reprinted.  Not a good sign, especially since I couldn't bring myself to recommend "The Instigators."  But let's give it a chance!

"Never Trust an Intellectual" is a joke story about a future in which reading books is frowned upon--everybody gets information and entertainment from electronic devices, and private individuals don't own books--those who like to read go to "bookbars" where the licensed proprietor has permitted books up on a shelf for you to rent on the premises by the hour.  We are subjected to dopey jokes that liken reading to drinking alcohol--the narrator brags he can read anybody "under the table," there is talk of people being "bookdrunk," a college kid who sits at the bar reading a comic book is said to be "underage" and so on.  

This is the "Era of Happiness," the time of the new morality of sexual licentiousness and government-imposed limits to access to information that might make you sad or anxious.  "...reading books is anti-social.  It leads to withdrawal, conflicting ideas and permanent memories."  People are strongly discouraged from reading (signs don't even have words on them, menus have pictures of bills and coins to denote prices instead of numerals) and from refusing sexual advances.  People who follow the old morality of sexual modesty or monogamy are suspected of being intellectuals who read books.    

Our narrator edits a video magazine, a little metal box that can fit in your pocket; you plug it in and it projects TV shows on the wall--no text, just video and narration.  (The sample story from his magazine, Listeners' Digest, that we learn about is a saccharine report on a community which banded together to help a blind canine.)  Our hero is also a bootlegger of books.  A pretty woman catches him trying to move 1,500 copies of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; is she one of the Happiness Police, or a rival seller of illegal books trying to crush a competitor?  We get lame humorous chase scenes and fight scenes as another woman, the head of the Anti-Book squad of the local Happiness Police, enters the fray, and then the story ends abruptly without what I would consider a proper climax.         

"Never Trust an Intellectual" has a lot in common with "The Instigators," in that both take a facet from history--in "The Instigators" the fight of guilds and unions against progress, here the battle of bootleggers against revenuers--and use it as the basis for a future conflict.  Also, neither is very good.  "Never Trust an Intellectual" is the worse of the two, lacking a satisfying build up and conclusion--it is more of an idea upon which are hung some jokes than a narrative with a satisfying beginning, middle and end.

If we are being generous we might say Banks's story prefigures our own era of trigger warnings, cancel culture and political correctness, in which there are social and even legal sanctions for using words that might allegedly hurt other people's feelings, words like that H-bomb of words, the "n-word," or strings like "Bruce Jenner is a man."  But Ray Bradbury had already trod this ground by the time "Never Trust an Intellectual" appeared.

Thumbs down!

"Go Fast on Interplane" by C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim 

I generally avoid Kornbluth because I have a patience for left-wing satires in which ad execs or insurance salesmen or whoever take over the world that was never great and has severely diminished over the years (as you've seen, I don't even have much patience for satires attacking guilds and censorship, even though I am against guilds and censorship.  As a kid I enjoyed irony and parody and satire, but I have had it up to here with that stuff and now seek authenticity and sincerity.)  But I find Wollheim an interesting figure and thought this blog post should probably address three stories as well as slobber over pictures of naked girls and space tanks like I was still thirteen.

"Go Fast on Interplane" is a competent filler story.  The plot is totally ordinary, but the style of the prose is actually good, and the pacing and structure are good, making it superior to today's questionable Gallun and Banks pieces.

A guy who loves to drive and has a top-of-the-line automobile discovers a highway that leads to other dimensions, parallel Earths.  He talks to the natives, who welcome him as a foreign tourist, eats lunch.  Then he returns to our Earth.  When he tries to get back to the alternate world he finds the road he took there has been dismantled.  Following the newspapers, he discovers clues that suggest a power struggle among our nation's elite--some want to have a relationship with the alternate Earths, others do not.  He wants to further explore the alternate worlds, and when he stumbles upon an indication that access may again be possible, he hastens to seek the right highway.

Acceptable.

Translated into Italian, "Go Fast on Interplane" would appear in the 1965 anthology of SF about cars Il grande Dio Auto.  isfdb has a note about Il grande Dio Auto, but no entry for it; those interested can see a contents list at goodreads.com.  Under the title "Interplane Express," "Go Fast on Interplane" would be reprinted in the 1988 Wollheim collection Up There and Other Strange Directions.   

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Not a brill selection, but we gotta take the rough with the smooth in the reading old magazines at random game.  Our selection will be a little less random next time, when we read stories recommended by Kornbluth and Wollheim's comrade Judith Merril.