Norman Conquest 2066 by J. T. McIntosh

'Tell me, Conan, what are we?  Who are we?'

'Something special,' said Conan soberly. 'Perhaps freaks.  They're special.'

'There must be a purpose.'

'Of course there's a purpose.'

WARNING: This novel contains no spacecraft

I'm not sure why I am reading another book by J. T. McIntosh, whose Million Cities I thought was incredibly bad. Probably I should take Voltaire's attitude of "Once a philosopher, twice a pervert," but I guess I am more curious than cautious, and so I resolved to tackle Norman Conquest 2066 when I spotted it on a bookstore shelf recently.  I purchased the 1977 Corgi paperback edition of the novel, with its fun Chris Foss painting and charming typeface. This is apparently the only physical edition ever printed, though two electronic versions came on the market in 2012, so everybody with internet access can sample the pleasures of this literary work.

The year is 2066 and England has fallen on hard times!  Population is in decline, houses and office buildings sit vacant, factories are idle, and the few remaining automobile enthusiasts have to scavenge at scrap heaps for tires and spare parts. Locomotives and aeroplanes (I usually call them "airplanes," but when in Rome...) are rarely seen, there are no TV broadcasts or national newspapers, and public services are limited--the police don't even investigate accusations of rape!  Luckily, rape is rare because the British populace is so psychologically depressed that most men have lost their "virility."  One character says "Many people these days have the death wish. Sometimes it's conscious, sometimes unconscious."  These dreadful conditions prevail all over the Earth.

Among our numerous characters is Sally Wells, a beautiful blonde shopkeeper and one of the few people in this broken society with any get-up-and-go.  Her two shops are located in the same town as the world's last semi-efficient factory ("There was purpose in the factory, purpose lacking almost everywhere else"), which is owned and managed by Arthur Gardner.  Gardner is a sado-masochist who enjoys being whipped and whipping and otherwise torturing others.  One of our many subplots involves Gardner's flunky Vince Hobley's efforts to rape Wells and kidnap her for Gardner's use in the torture chamber.  Sally knows judo and tosses the Hobley into a river, but Gardner doesn't get too hung up over this failure; his attention has shifted to the project of getting his hands on and torturing the seven children of one of his employees, Frank Seymour. ("...the terror of a girl of eight would be something for a connoisseur.")

Who are these individuals like Wells, Gardner, Hobley and Seymour, who still have a sex drive and the ability to accomplish things, like successfully running a business? Wells discovers that two new genetic strains of homo sapiens appeared at the start of the 21st century and live in secret among the apathetic general run of humanity.  The Sexons can be identified by the fact that they are very hairy, while the Newmen have no body hair whatsoever.  Both groups have modest psychic powers.  But what really distinguishes the Sexons and Newmen (who, inspired by the approach of the thousand year anniversary of William the Conqueror's invasion, take the names "Saxon" and "Norman") from the "peasants" is their tremendous sex drive and ability to effortlessly have five or six orgasms in the space of an hour!  Sally Wells (like we readers) learns most of this information from Conan Hersholt, a Norman, who, in his efforts to increase the Norman population (currently less than half a percent of the total human population) has had sex with over 500 women (nice work if you can get it!) and has his eye on our Sally.  Sally is a hot commodity, and several of our subplots include men trying to get into her pants.

There are plenty of unusual sex scenes, attempted rapes, and scenes of torture in the book.  When Gardner, who is a Saxon, goes a little overboard during a whipping session and kills somebody, he fears the police will finally come after him, and so decides to organize all the Saxons into a revolutionary army and take over the town, the country, maybe even the world.  "From now on no Saxon conceals himself....We march!"

In the streets the Gardner's mob battles a coalition of Normans and the more stable of the Saxons battle for world supremacy.  This fracas lacks urgency for the reader largely because each "army" has only dozens of members and the Normans, it turns out, are psychologically inhibited from committing violence and get martyred instead of fighting back.  I guess the "battle" is supposed to remind the reader of 20th century street protests and riots between rival political factions like in late Republican Rome or Weimar Germany.  (Or maybe the 1964 fights between Mods and Rockers; wikipedia is telling me that the biggest Mod vs Rocker fight was dubbed "The Second Battle of Hastings.")  In the end it is Wells, with the aid of that Norman with seven kids, Seymour, who kills Gardner in a struggle in Gardner's torture chamber.

Besides the pervasive themes of outre sex (did I mention that Saxons and Normans don't get all their powers until they lose their virginity?) and nudity (people are taking their clothes off all the time to prove they are or are not Saxons or Normans) one of the themes of the book is a sort of personification of "nature"; everybody talks about how the appearance of the Saxons and Normans must have some kind of "purpose," that these new races must be the result of decisions made by "nature" who is at times assigned a female pronoun of "she" or called "the old girl."  McIntosh doesn't expand on this idea or do anything interesting with it; it just sits there, irritating my sense of scientific propriety without adding any religious, moral or spiritual dimension to the book.  In the end of the novel we learn that Wells, who has a normal distribution of body hair but nevertheless is ambitious and resourceful, is one of the first specimens of nature's latest and most promising attempt to put the human race to rights, a fourth, as yet unnamed, race that will inherit the Earth from the pathetic peasants, unstable Saxons and ineffectual Normans.

I can't think of much nice to say about Norman Conquest 2066.  The ideas and style are pedestrian at best, and the writing sometimes shoddy--Normans, including Conan Hersholt the womanizer, die at the battle because they are unable to strike blows at their assailants, but then Seymour the Norman gets a knife and tries to stab Gardner in the back, with no explanation.  There are lots of characters, but few of them are interesting or sympathetic, and the high volume of characters (and McIntosh's poor ability to structure the plot) means that the story is diffuse, just a bunch of thinly connected episodes.  Characters will appear and then disappear for long periods of time, and a high proportion of characters are killed.  It feels like the characters and ideas are an excuse for the gratuitous and exploitative sex and violence, but the sex scenes and action scenes are not thrilling--most feel long and slow and clunky.

The best subplot of the novel follows a Norman who, thanks to the intervention of Hersholt and Wells, escapes the smothering domination of his mother (and her dozens of cats!) and his dull grey life and learns how to use his superb Norman body and his psychic powers.  This material could have made for a decent short story, but as part of Norman Conquest 2066 it is submerged and nearly lost in a 156-page mess.

Another J. T. McIntosh failure, characterized by a shaky plot and weird, often eroticized, violence.  Two bad novels and two bad stories are enough; this time we are through J. T.!

1962 stories from J. G. Ballard, Avram Davidson, J. T. McIntosh, & Ward Moore

Because I found the cover illustration by Emsh irresistible, at Jay's CD and Hobby in a strip mall in southern Des Moines, I purchased a crumbling copy of the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  The beautiful blue-eyed blonde, the twisting curling thorns, the disparate ill-disciplined crowd of soldiers...I kept looking at the picture, looking away, then looking at it again.  I knew I'd want to look at it yet again after I'd left the store, so I forked over the cash and took the magazine home.

This issue of the magazine includes the novella by Edgar Pangborn, "The Golden Horn," which makes up part of his novel Davy, which I read back in June.  It also includes a reprinted 1954 story by Richard Matheson, "The Traveller," which I read in June of 2013, shortly before this blog arose from its vat and began its march across the landscape, sowing amazement and indifference throughout an unsuspecting land.  (Joachim Boaz read the story, along with ten other Matheson stories, early this year, and proclaimed it "Bad."  My notes on "The Traveller" say "Eh.")

Even though I already had 40 or 50 pages of this one under my belt, so to speak, there were still attractive items I hadn't read yet.  This weekend I read them.

"The Garden of Time" by J. G. Ballard

This symbolist fantasy has been reprinted numerous times in collections of Ballard's work and in various anthologies.  I read a bunch of poems by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot a few weeks ago, and "The Garden of Time" reminded me of one of the more easily digested of these verses, Pound's "The Garden."

Image from the Internet Archive 

"The Garden of Time" is about two good-looking sophisticated people who live in a beautiful Palladian villa full of rare books, fine paintings, busts and vases. Within the outer walls of the estate there is a pool and a fine garden, outside the walls an empty plain as far as the eye can see.  The Countess at her harpsichord fills the house with the sound of Bach and Mozart (my own wife at the TV fills our house with the sound of The Gilmore Girls, which is not the same thing at all.)  Every evening before a stroll around the grounds the Count looks out across the naked featureless landscape; sometimes he sees, miles away, a vast horde approaching, a rabble which stretches from one horizon to the other.  If this sea of filthy unkillable infantry is in sight he plucks one of the "time flowers" from his garden, and as the blossom expires time is shifted and the invincible ill-disciplined mob recedes back out of sight.  But there are almost no flowers left; soon the horde will batter down the walls, destroy the cultural treasures they are unable to appreciate.

Presumably this is a lament that the modern age, the age of mass capitalism and democracy, socialism and the welfare state, overpopulation and mass media, etc (pick your bogeyman), is an age in which nobody will appreciate the finer things, an age in which society will fail to preserve the finer things.  On the one hand there may be something to this, but on the other hand, technological advances in transportation and communication in my lifetime have made high culture more easily accessible, while the elite have been able to manipulate the political class in such a way that the taxpayers subsidize things like opera and poetry festivals, things very few taxpayers actually care about.  For the time being, high culture is available to those who still care about it.  

Vivid and thought-provoking.

"The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street" by Avram Davidson

Years ago I read Avram Davidson's 1960s novels Rork! and Mutiny in Space--I still remember the girl at the checkout counter of the antique mall laughing at the title of Mutiny in Space.  These novels were OK, no big deal.  Tarbandu at the great PorPor Books Blog has reviewed quite a few of Davidson's works--click here to read a tarbandu review of two Davidson novels in which I make an appearance in the comments.  While he praises "The New Zombies," a story Davidson wrote with his wife, tarbandu mostly seems to award Davidson 2 or 3 stars out of 5.  Let's see if this six page story with the 14 word title meets or exceeds these expectations.

This is an elaborate joke story, set in an alternate universe 1961 USA in which there are dragons and magic, with magic spells a sort of consumer good produced by rival firms who commit industrial espionage against each other.  It is full of Shakespearean speech, outrageous puns, and topical jokes about things like Ed Sullivan and the JFK inauguration (occurring a year before this issue of F&SF was on the newsstands,)  No plot, no character, no emotion, just the kind of wordplay that may be fun to write but is a drag to read.

Horrible.

"One Into Two" by J. T. McIntosh

Speaking of horrible, it's once more unto the breach of a piece of J. T. McIntosh fiction.  (Dare I read such a piece?)

It is the future!  Millions of people commute everyday between Terra, Luna, Marsa and Venusa via matta transmittuh.  These are the kind of teleporters that read your atoms, vaporize you, transmit the data to your destination, and build a replica of you at your destination, the kind of teleporters that make every person reading the story say, "Wait, they are killing the person," and vow never to be matter transmitted regardless of whether a Kirk or a Spock or a Scotty tells them it is perfectly safe.  The government carefully regulates the teleporters to make sure what goes into the booth is completely annihilated, otherwise some smart guy would use the booth to duplicate money or hot chicks, and that would cause undesirable inflation.

The main character of the story is Willie Ross, a crook who works for the teleporter company.  Regardless of all that government regulation he duplicates himself so he can be on two planets at once.  While one version of Ross is setting up an alibi on Luna, the other version is on Mars murdering a man he's never met before, a guy who is married to a former partner in crime of Ross's.   I don't think McIntosh makes it very clear why Ross kills this innocent man, vengeance, I guess, or so he can pressure his former associate for money or something.  "One Into Two" is a mystery in multiple senses of the word.

The police very quickly catch both Rosses, either because they betray each other, or because they are able to trick the Rosses and have experience dealing with other assholes who have tried to exploit the teleporter system.  "You never had a chance, Ross....You don't think you're the first to try this, do you?"  Like numerous things in this story, it wasn't quite clear to me.

At the end of the story the police teleport Mars-assassin-Ross and Luna-alibi-Ross to New York, at the same time, to the same booth.  This means there is only one Ross again, but he has the memories of both Rosses--McIntosh even tells us that the food each ate separately is now together in his one stomach!  I don't think this makes any sense.

Bad.

"Rebel" by Ward Moore

I read a story by Ward Moore earlier this year, and liked it.  Can he get me out of this bad story rut?

This is a gimmicky story which reminds you that attitudes, tastes, mores are just faddish opinion and change over time.  In 1962 parents wanted their kids to play outside and sit up straight at the dinner table and conservative people had short hair and rebellious kids wore long hair.  In this story young Caludo's parents have long hair and tell Caludo to recline and lament that he played outside as a kid instead of staying inside to read books and that he now wears his hair short.  Those are just a few examples--the entire story, eight pages, is a conversation between Caludo and his parents that is one obvious switcheroo joke after another--Mom and Dad smoke and drink and think it impolite their son abstains, Mom and Dad are artists and think son is wasting his time becoming a businessman, blah blah blah.

Lame.

***********

Alfred Bester, who wrote the famous The Stars My Destination wrote the "Books" column in this issue of F&SF, and addresses three books.  The Theodore Sturgeon collection A Way Home he tells us is great because Sturgeon is great--the word "genius" appears.  The novels Battle for the Stars by Edmond Hamilton and Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford Simak he admits are doing things that have already been done ("space-opera" the former, "conventional persecution" story the latter) but that Hamilton and Simak do these familiar things well.  I have read both Battle for the Stars and Time is the Simplest Thing myself, and those interested can find my Amazon reviews at the links in this paragraph.

***********

One hit and three misses?  Damn!  Well, you pays your money and you takes your chances, as they say.  Besides, I read these things, in part, to learn about the SF field and the intellectual milieu of the past, so my time reading these stories, no matter how groaningly bad some were, was not wasted.  And I still have that gorgeous Emsh cover to comfort me.    

Four more tales from the Sept '51 issue of Planet Stories

Let's read four more selections from the September 1951 issue of Planet Stories! Three are in the public domain and readily accessible at the PDF page at the SFFaudio website, while one I draw from a volume recently added to my personal collection!

"The Incubi of Parallel X" by Theodore Sturgeon

I don't think member of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame Theodore Sturgeon requires any introduction.  Just this week I bought, at Half Price Books, a 1978 paperback edition of the 1964 collection Sturgeon in Orbit, specifically to read this story, featured so prominently on the cover of Planet Stories' 1951 September issue.

In a little intro to the story the author himself says that the "The Incubi of Parallel X" is "the most horrible title ever to appear over my byline."  He uses the rest of the intro to say nice things about Ray Bradbury and editor Malcolm Reiss.

"The Incubi of Parallel X" is a complicated and goofy story, and has as a main topic Sturgeon's oft-addressed issues of love and sex.  There is also plenty of "sciency" stuff: gates to other dimensions, plenty of scientists, lots of talk of super strong materials and chemical interactions, some engineering, and the contempt for religion we often see in SF.  Today's socially conscious readers may be pleased by the way women characters solve intellectual problems and repeatedly physically rescue the hero from death.

The opening scenes are a complicated description of two guys, Garth Gesell and Bronze, using a super strong rope and an atlatl spear thrower to get into a sort of fortified house by a cliff.  Then we get the complicated backstory.  Twenty-two years ago, a portal from a parallel dimension opened in Hackensack, New Jersey.  (Yay, New Jersey!)  Out of the portal came little people, the Ffanx, clad in little space suits and flying little space ships.  The Ffanx spread over the entire world, and kidnapped and murdered women by the millions.

Feminist-style, Sturgeon tells us that there is very little physical difference between men and women, except that women produce a special chemical that men do not produce, extradiol.  The Ffanx can use extradiol beta-prime, a component of extradiol, to make an immortality drug.  Moral relativism-style, Sturgeon reminds us that if there was an animal that could produce an immortality drug for us, we'd mercilessly hunt it down, just like the Ffanx mercilessly hunted down our mothers, sisters, wives and daughters.  So don't get on your high horse, human!
      

The cover art accurately depicts something that
happens in Sturgeon's story 

Garth Gesell's father was the world's greatest scientist in these dark days of the Ffanx.  He developed his own gate to another dimension, a peaceful dimension, and many women fled our dimension for that one; Garth Senior gave women who were smart and sexy priority in the queue.  Then he developed a chemical weapon which he tossed through the Ffanx gate, rendering the entire atmosphere of the Ffanx version of Earth a deadly poison to the Ffanx.  Since the Ffanx couldn't breathe the air on our Earth, the Ffanx were exterminated.  Take that!

Unfortunately, one of the last shots of the Ffanx-human war was the shot that took out Garth Senior.

The Ffanx-human war left Earth in a total shambles, and, as happens so often in science fiction stories, humanity quickly reverted to a medieval or even Stone Age existence, with people walking instead of riding cars and hunting with spears instead of guns.  Even worse, 90% of women were gone, either turned into now useless immortality drug or fled to that other, pacific, dimension.  Even though nobody remembers how to maintain an internal combustion engine or a shotgun, lots of horny guys remember that there's a portal to a world of women at the old Gesell mansion. Unfortunately, Gesell set up a ray gun trap at his mansion, and so lots of horny guys get zapped to cinders trying to get to the portal.  Sad trombone sound effect.  :(

Gesell Junior and his hulking buddy Bronze are able to get past the defenses and into the mansion.  With the help of a clever educated young woman (she had access to one of Gesell Senior's hypnoteaching devices), halfway through the story they enter the dimension of women.  They find the Earth women, who are now 75 feet tall!  Every thing in this dimension is huge!  Hey, it's just like how the Ffanx were tiny compared to humans when they came to our dimension!  Sturgeon gives us a long explanation that went over my head as to why things in different dimensions are different sizes. Time also moves at different rates in different dimensions--the women aren't 22 years older, like Gesell Junior is, merely eight months older.  (The hot chicks that went through the gateway are still hot!)  Then comes the happy ending when Gesell Junior explains how to get the fugitive women back to Earth and at the appropriate size for having sex with.    

I often feel like Sturgeon stories are too long (this baby is 50 pages in the edition I own), and that they have lots of complex moving parts that don't actually help the machine accomplish anything.  I felt the same way about "The Incubi of Parallel X."  I don't regret reading it, as it is amusing in its wackiness, and I was curious about the content and character of Planet Stories September 1951 and so felt a need to read the cover story, but I don't really think I can recommend this thing to other people without all kinds of caveats.  Consider all those sentences above caveats.

"Lord of A Thousand Suns" by Poul Anderson

I don't think Grandmaster Poul Anderson needs any introduction.  Let's see what he was writing in the early 1950s.

A small portion of the Janyard fleet, en route to Earth

This story has a frame--two old space hands are shooting the shit, swapping stories of their adventures as space navy officers during the recent galactic civil war and as explorers, surveying the innumerable habitable planets of the universe.  The main story is a tale from Laird, the older and more reserved of the spacemen.  Oddly, it is written in the third person, even though the frame is written in the first person (from Laird's comrade's point of view.).

During the civil war--our main characters are "Solmen," adherents of the victorious conservative faction centered on Earth's solar system, and call the civil war the "Janyard revolt"-- Laird was doing archaeological work alone in pyramids on a planet that, a million years ago, was home to a highly advanced civilization, Vwyrdda.  He hopes to find technology that will help the Solar war effort.  But then Janyards, led by a female officer, land on the planet.  As they are about to capture him, Laird, following instructions in the form of pictographic hieroglyphs, puts on a million-year-old helmet and flips a switch.

The consciousness of a hero of the ancient civilization, Daryesh, enters Laird's brain!  The two wrestle for control, then work together--Daryesh can grok what Laird and the Solar Empire of Earth are going through, because a million years ago Vwyrdda's space empire was destroyed in a civil war of its own!  Or so he says!  Daryesh is attracted to that sexy Janyard naval officer, and acts like he is going to teach her how to use all the super weapons and super force fields from the pyramid.  He even gives the Janyards a little speech about how their vital frontier society should overthrow the boring conservative society based on Earth!  If the Janyards get Vwyrdda technology the Solar Empire is doomed!  Is Daryesh tricking Laird, the Janyards, or both?

Of course we already know that the Solar Empire wins the war, so the suspense in the story centers around how Laird got out of this mess and what became of Daryesh and the Janyard love interest.

This is a pretty fun space adventure.  I like stories in which guys wrestle over control of a brain; I guess I like anytime one guy's brain or consciousness gets moved to another body.  As a kid I loved when The Flintstones or Gilligan's Island used such gimmicks.        

"Sanctuary, Oh Ulla!" by J. T. MacIntosh

Years ago I was quoted in no less a publication than The Onion expressing my utter disdain for J. T. MacIntosh's novel The Million Cities.  Now, people who know me might tell you I am still bitter about the crimes of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, but the truth is I am a real forgive and forget kind of guy, always ready to let bygones be bygones, bury the hatchet, and give a guy another chance.  I even bought a novel by MacIntosh recently!  And it is in this spirit of reconciliation that I will read MacIntosh's story, "Sanctuary, Oh Ulla!"

My wife and I must look like this when we're tooling around in the Toyota Corolla and I spot a bald eagle

"Sanctuary, Oh Ulla!" is written in a jocular tone, but I guess we are supposed to take the plot more or less seriously.  The jokes aren't offensively bad, so I won't hold them against the story.

Al Gannett is an interstellar criminal who thinks he is smarter than he really is--this is where much of the comedy comes in.  As our story begins Al's stint as a captain of a space pirate ship has ended disastrously, and Al is all alone, fleeing the solar system in a tiny space ship, the Galactic Patrol on his tail.  He eludes the forces of justice, and heads for Ulla, a planet he chose essentially at random from a gazetteer.

Ulla has a large population and an impressive industrial base, and could be a mover and shaker in interstellar trade and politics if it threw off its isolationist policy.  So Al works to reshape that policy at the same time he is seducing an Ullan woman.  (The alien Ulla are close enough to human to excite his erotic desire.)  The Ullans study Al and his little ship, getting an understanding of human biology and technology, then build a battlefleet of one hundred thousand ships and set off to conquer Earth.  The Galactic Patrol routs this fleet, however; by basing their assumptions about Earth on inferior specimens--Al and his crummy little ship--the Ullans underestimated what the human race and Earth space navy were capable of.  Now the Earth is going to conquer Ulla.

At first the Ullans want to punish Al, but Al tells them being conquered by Earth need be no problem.  Closely administering the vast population (seven trillion) of Ulla will be more trouble than the Earthlings will want to take, and it won't be impossible to convince the humies to just open trade relations with Ulla.  As the only person familiar with both Earth and Ulla, Al is the perfect person to handle such negotiations.  The factories of Ulla are so productive (they just made 100,000 space warships in a year, after all) Ulla will be able to produce enough consumer goods for the Earth market to make them all rich!  

This story is not very good.  It is full of incongruities, red herrings and dead ends.  Is Al smart or stupid?  He keeps escaping the Galactic Patrol and outwitting the Ullans, so he must be smart, right?  But the plot requires that he be below average, to make the central gag about the Ullan space fleet's defeat work.  As for dead ends, MacIntosh spends quite a bit of time describing how Al plans an escape from Ulla, but then he doesn't need to escape at all.  MacIntosh's love story is also somewhat incoherent.

Obviously, the story of a criminal who betrays his people and falls in love with someone from another civilization could have all kinds of philosophical and psychological resonances and move the reader emotionally and intellectually, and, just as obviously, MacIntosh isn't even trying to do any of that.

Thumbs down!        

"Hospitality" by J. W. Groves

British writer Groves has two novels listed on isfdb, and a dozen stories.  He is quoted in Robert Reginald's Contemporary Science Fiction authors as saying "I've had no career.  Just jobs."  I kno your feels, bro!

Have you guys seen Dejah Thoris any where around here?

"Hospitality" is a filler story, three pages of text that tell an anemic gimmick story.

Like Al Gannett, Brent and Durgan are interstellar criminals on the run from the space patrol who choose a planet to hide out on from a gazetteer.  But where Al was lucky enough to choose a planet with some hot chicks, the firm of B & D sets up shop on a planet where the purple six-limbed Stone Age people look like the kind of freaks John Carter and Tars Tarkas would have to exterminate on their way to or from rescuing a princess.          

The natives, with whom B & D have no real way to communicate, consider visitors from the sky sacred and so are very friendly, providing food and so forth.  But whenever B & D try to sleep, the natives prod them awake.  This planet does not rotate on its axis, so there is no night in this part of the world, and the natives never sleep.  So when they see the humans losing consciousness they assume their sacred visitors are dying, and prod them awake.  This goes on long enough that B & D are driven to the edge of insanity from lack of sleep and use their radio to surrender to the space patrol.  At least in prison they will be able to sleep!

Lame.

**********

No real surprises here, Sturgeon, Anderson, and MacIntosh delivering the kind of stories I would expect from them, based on my earlier experiences with them.  The Anderson story is the most entertaining, while the Sturgeon is probably the most challenging and interesting, with its defiance of gender stereotypes, attacks on religion (which I didn't get into here, but which are front and center in the text) and mass of (pseudo?)scientific jargon about materials, chemicals, biology, and interdimensional physics.

Thanks to SFFaudio, for making this exploration of the illustrations as well as text of a very cool magazine from over 60 years ago possible.  As you probably know already, SFFaudio's site is worth the attention of any classic SF fan--if you haven't yet, check it out!  

The Million Cities by J. T. McIntosh

Back in late 2007 I read J. T. McIntosh's crummy book, The Million Cities, and then wrote a scathing review of it on Amazon.  In 2008 someone at the Onion, the joke newspaper, took notice of my review and quoted me in his own hostile review of McIntosh's novel.   

Below I paste my entire Amazon review of The Million Cities.  Behold, the pinnacle of my career as a literary critic:

"The Million Cities" is an elitist, anti-democratic and anti-humanist celebration of conspiracy and political violence. The book is full of murders, riots, sabotage and torture, most of it committed by the protagonists, and McIntosh even echoes Stalin's assessment of mass death, writing "...what did a few million people matter? The world had too many of them anyway." (p 141)

Something so bizarre might be interesting if well-written, but McIntosh's writing is quite poor; he employs an irritating omniscient narrator who describes to you the characters' personalities instead of having the characters demonstrate them.

The novel also contains weird mistakes; on the first page of text (p 7) we are told that smoking has become taboo, and, in fact, that no tobacco has been grown for centuries. But in two later scenes (one is at p 22) characters smoke, and no explanation whatever is given; presumably McIntosh and his editor just screwed up. We are also told that the Earth's population continues to rise, despite a rigidly enforced policy of allowing each couple to give birth to only one child; does that make any sense mathematically?

"The Million Cities" is so strange it is a wonder to me that it even got published. I read (endured?) the 1958 paperback by Pyramid Books with the Virgil Finlay cover.