Amazing Stories, May '57: H B Piper, M Lesser & C E Fritch

We just read Harlan Ellison's story "Night Vigil," which debuted in a fanzine but was reprinted (with a new title) not long after in one of the most famous of SF magazines, Amazing.  That issue of Amazing, May 1957, has an intriguing cover, so let's see what that swimsuit girl and robotic falconer are up to, and investigate the claim that the issue prints a story that is "Too Hot To Handle."  I'm going to read these stories in a scan of the original magazine, and you can do the same at this link.

If it's Ellison content you crave, the May 1957 issue of Amazing has an ad for the May Fantastic, highlighting Ellison's "Satan is My Ally," which we blogged about back in 2017 when I read four 1957 stories by your pal Harlan.  If you are looking for jokes and gripes, the editorial to this issue is a lame joke that serves to notify readers about former Amazing editor Howard Browne's Hollywood career is going, and, as a joke, this month's letter column is mostly people writing in to complain about Amazing.  The letters column is legitimately funny, so check it out, laff-lovers.  

"The Edge of the Knife" by H. Beam Piper

The editor's intro to "The Edge of the Knife" asserts that "This story was rejected by two top-flight science-fiction editors for the same reason: 'Too hot to handle.' 'Too dangerous for our book.'"  If we choose to believe this claim, who could Amazing editor Paul W.  Fairman mean?  Campbell at Astounding?  Gold at Galaxy?  Boucher at F&SF?  Who am I missing?  Thrilling Wonder and Weird Tales were defunct in 1957.  Is James Quinn of If "top-flight"?  Well, there's a mystery for us.

"The Edge of the Knife" is quite long, like 40 pages here in Amazing, so it had better be good, or I am going to be bitter.  I definitely want to see why it might have been considered "too hot to handle," though.

World War II veteran Ed Chalmers teaches modern history at a college in California in the year 1973.  Chalmers has a secret special power--every so often he spontaneously develops "memories" of things that will happen in the future.  Chalmers knows all about wars and revolutions and other political developments that will occur decades and centuries in the future, but his info is not systematic or comprehensive; for example, he will rarely know the dates or even years of the future events he "remembers."  These memories of the future are so vivid and real that Chalmers will sometimes casually mention some such event, absentmindedly forgetting that the event has not happened yet, leading others to think he is joking or mentally unbalanced.  As our story begins, he is telling his class about the assassination of some contemporary Middle-Eastern potentate--"the greatest Moslem since Saladin"--an assassination that has not yet occurred.  Students and faculty have witnessed such queer comments from Chalmers before, and this is the last straw--enough people are now convinced that Chalmers is insane that they fear he will harm the rep of the school and want him removed, and the president of the college asks Chalmers for his resignation.  But Chalmers has all kinds of tenure protections, and resists being let go, and contacts his lawyer.

Things cool down for a month, but then that Muslim politician gets murdered in the very way Chalmers described and people start believing Chalmers can predict the future--including academics whose specialty is parapsychology and want to pump Chalmers for data--while the president thinks it is all some kind of scam or hoax and redoubles his efforts to fire Chalmers.  A big meeting is held in the president's office with many attendees from multiple stake-holding groups, and much of the story reads like a courtroom drama, with Chalmers' lawyer there trying to protect our guy.  

I wasn't thrilled to be reading scenes of tense meetings among academics and between a guy and his lawyer like Amazing was printing some mainstream novel that was blowing the lid off what goes on in the shadow of the ivory tower.  Am I opening up SF mags to read stuff like “As faculty members, any controversy involving establishment of standards of fitness to teach under a tenure-contract concerns all of us, because any action taken in this case may establish a precedent which could affect the validity of our own contracts.”  Did I accidentally pick up a copy of The Chronicle of Higher Education?  Zzzzzzzz....  

The most important result of the meeting is that everybody agrees that Chalmers submit to a psychological exam by a top government shrink.  The president of the college expects Chalmers to be declared insane and committed to a mental institution, so he can fire him, and most everybody else involved thinks Chalmers will be given a clean bill of mental health and that this will serve his interests.  But during the exam Chalmers gets new "memories" that indicate that California is going to be hit by multiple nuclear weapons during the brief war that will result from the assassination in just a few days.  The insane asylum is in a safe place beyond the mountains, so Chalmers deliberately fails the exam so he will be out of the blast radius and fall out zone of the enemy rocket detonations.  He also arranges it so two friends of his will to move to the town where the booby hatch is sited and bring with them his papers so he can continue his work.  

I like the final twist of the story.  I wish Piper had maybe spent more time on Chalmers' relationships with the two friends he preserves--they seem to be sort of tacked on to the story, and we spend much more time with the lawyer and the president who are doomed to be annihilated.  The meat of "The Edge of the Knife" is not bad, but feels slow.  We'll judge "The Edge of the Knife," the title of which refers to the thin separation between past and future and the narrow difference between sanity and insanity, to be acceptable.

But what do we make of the claims the story was "too hot to handle"?  There's no sex in the story.  The academic business--professors fighting the administration--seems like the typical stuff of fiction, and knowing the future but Cassandra-like being unable to change it feels like standard SF fare.  Maybe this story is a hot potato (if we choose to believe the sensational claims) because, while the Soviet Union is not named, the story depicts the commies unsympathetically; they are to blame for the nuclear war, and they lose, getting wiped out thanks to American ingenuity--the Pentagon has stocked America's moon base with an arsenal of missiles and our boys rain them down on the Reds.  Maybe other magazines were scared of offending their left-wing readers with this kind of anti-communist triumphalism, the idea that a nuclear war is winnable, and what amounts to an endorsement of the militarization of space? 

"The Edge of the Knife," isfdb is telling me, is part of Piper's Federation series, a series to which other people have apparently contributed fiction, and has been reprinted in Piper collections and Federation-centric anthologies.  This story's style is competent, and Piper seems skeptical of or hostile to the commies, so maybe some day I'll read other Federation stories; I have always avoided Piper's famous Fuzzy stories because I figured they were allegories/wish fulfillment fantasies of primitive natives outwitting the evil white capitalists, but maybe my guess is off.   

"Winged Planet" by Milton Lesser (as by Adam Chase)

We've read I guess five things by Lesser in the benighted era of this blog's bewildering existence, "'A' as in Android," "The Graveyard of Space," "Ennui," "The Impossible Weapon," and "It's Raining Frogs!"  Let's see what this caper, which is illustrated on the cover of the mag and appears under a pen name, is all about.  I've been lukewarm about Lesser, but maybe I will love this one?  C-3PO, I mean, isfdb, reports that "Winged Planet" has never been reprinted--hey, never tell me the odds!

It is the future of interstellar civilization, the 30th century.  Ann is one of the galaxy's greatest dancers, and she travels from star system to star system, entertaining the men of the frontier worlds.  Recently she was on Earth, which, to the alarm of us patriotic readers, is now some minor planet in the vast human space empire.  Some things change with the forward march of technology and history...but some things don't--the men of the future are still hornier than women can handle!  Everywhere Ann goes, men make passes at her, and she always rejects them.  

Ann is currently a passenger aboard a ship about to transition from hyperspace to real space, and she is in the observation lounge to watch the change--she never gets tired of seeing these dramatic transitions.  Also there is Cliff, an officer of the ship, and he keeps trying to make time with Ann, to the point she slaps the man.  Also present is a newlywed couple, Garry and Joyce; watching them, Ann pities the young woman because her new husband, Ann can tell by how he acts in anticipation of the transition, is a coward, and Joyce will soon fall out of love with this loser.

Immediately after the transition the ship crashes into a planet and almost the entire ship is wrecked, and almost everyone killed--it is only the observation deck that is spared, and our four cardboard characters.  Fire is spreading to the observation lounge, and Cliff the spaceman is unconscious and almost dead, and Joyce paralyzed with pain.  Ann has to badger and insult Garry to get the coward to help her carry the other two people off the wreck before they burn up.  

On the apparently barren planet, the injured Cliff and Joyce are immediately carried off by a huge bird.  Garry and Ann chase after the feathered kidnapper, so all four shipwreck survivors end up in the custody of a robot who strips them naked to experiment on them!  You see, the robot and its 100+ fellows, many centuries ago, crashed on this planet and all the humans with them were killed.  The robots feel a terrible need to serve humanity, so started experimenting on the local fauna, which consists entirely of avians and bugs, to figure out if they could create new masters.  Their researches have fostered the development of techniques that can heal animals and people almost instantly and, through genetic engineering, the ability to make animals smarter, bigger, stronger, etc., than normal.

All those centuries have degraded the robots' intellectual capacity, so they have to be convinced that they don't need to carve up the four shipwrecked travelers because they are human and can serve as masters to the robots; luckily the robots are convinced before anybody gets vivisected.  Goody-Two-Shoes Ann wants to hand these robots over to the government so the government can figure out the best way to use the healing and genetic engineering techniques they have developed.  Cliff, the kind of guy who aggressively pursues women, is also the kind of guy who likes the idea of getting rich and powerful by making the robots his personal army and using their groundbreaking methods to make himself dictator of the galaxy. 

Initially Cliff wins the allegiance of the robots, and starts plotting an ambush of the rescue ship that must be on the way and initial experiments on Garry and Joyce, but Ann figures out how to get the robots to switch their loyalty to her.  When Cliff kisses Ann against her will and tells her he wants her to rule at his side, she resists violently and declares her intention to kill Cliff.  The robots, having been ordered to protect Cliff, kill Ann.  But then their "serve mankind" programming kicks in and they prioritize serving the fallen Ann, bringing her back to life, and restrain Cliff, who instigated the violence that killed Ann.  The expected rescue ship arrives and the robots and their technology are placed in the beneficent hands of the government.  As the story ends we are reminded that Ann not only saved the galaxy from Cliff but taught Garry to be brave.

Barely acceptable; "The Winged Planet" is a sort of bottom-of-the-barrel standard SF story, even with its theme of multiple contrasting (but mostly wrong) ways of being a man and its self-sacrificing girl-boss central character who sees her job as teaching men how to behave and helping the government accrue as much power as possible.  (Ann obviously never heard Muswell Hillbillies.)  It is interesting seeing Lesser deploy these progressive values alongside exploitation material, like the women being subjected to losing their clothes and facing the threat of sexual violence and being cut to pieces while still alive.          

"No World for the Timid" by Charles E. Fritch

In 2024 I read Fritch's "The Big Wide Wonderful World" on the recommendation of one Judith Merrill and I liked it, so there is a chance this will be today's best story, though written by today's least well-known author. 

You know, I think this probably is today's best story.  For one thing, it is economical--short and to the point.  For another, it has real human feeling, something Piper's story, with its unsympathetic academics and attorneys, and Lesser's story, with its flat one-note characters, lack.  "No World for the Timid" is also sort of shocking, or at least makes a respectable effort at being shocking.

Our narrator is perhaps the last man in the world after the nuclear war.  Yes, this is yet another post-apocalyptic story.  He survived because he hid in a cave and a landslide sealed him in, far from the radiation.  In the cave system he met another survivor, perhaps the only woman left in the world.  Somehow, they survived down there, eating bugs and fungus and whatever, emaciated and covered in sores but alive.  Alive for years!  So long, that the woman gave birth to three kids!  Kids old enough to talk by the time they find an exit back to the sunlight!

This story is over-the-top grim; the editor introduces it with an over-the-top warning: "This is a story for readers who like their meat raw, their facts plain and unvarnished, their fiction tough and realistic."  "Realistic" may be pushing it--how do they see in the dark to catch food?  Still, "tough" is appropriate,  with the woman talking about eating her own children, the kids talking about one day getting big enough to overpower Dad and eat him, and Dad contemplating killing the kids before they are too big to overpower him.  And then there is the fact that the woman has grown so accustomed to living underground that she is reluctant, pathologically so, to stepping out into the sunlight again.  The story ends on a down note; they don't meet other survivors or helpful aliens or a cache of tools that will make life easier or anything.

Worthy of a mild recommendation.  "No World for the Timid" was reprinted in the Fritch collection Crazy Mixed-Up Planet (advertised as "spine-chilling"), a reprint magazine the main attraction of which is John Wyndham's "The Troons of Space" (I've read two of Wyndham's Troons stories, "Asteroids, 2194" AKA "The Emptiness of Space" and "The Moon AD 2044" AKA "Idiot's Delight" but not that one) and the ninth of Richard Davis' Space anthologies. 

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Well, we've wrung a lot of content out of this issue of Amazing, self-described as "The World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine."  Let's spend some more time in 1957,  shall we?