162 pages
Published 1975
Read October 30
Rating: 2 out of 5
My F&SF collection extends patchily into the 1960s and '70s, but until now, the December 1982 issue had been the earliest I’d read. Time to change that!
I picked this one more or less randomly — no significant dates here. Though there is a Poul Anderson Time Patrol story here that tipped the scales in its favor, even though it likely sucks and I read it before as a kid, in the 1991 collection The Time Patrol.
Onward, into the '70s!
“The Custodians” by Richard Cowper. An unexpected treat: Cowper’s F&SF debut! His tale “What Did the Deazies Do?” was the sole highlight of the dismal December 1982 issue, and in another lifetime I appreciated his The Road to Corlay. This sprawling novelette centers on Spindrift, a World War I vet and historian of medieval philosophy, who has followed a meager document trail left by one Meister Sternwärts, 13th century Gnostic and magister of arcane arts. Spindrift feels like Sternwärts has been guiding him to the monastery of Hautaire, where the meister spent his final years writing his Praemonitiones — a text of astonishingly accurate prophecies. Soon Spindrift learns that fresh prophecies continue to be written at Hautaire, with a “horizon” of about fifty years — and he’s been destined to come to Hautaire to continue the work. Some fifty years later, Spindrift meets his own successor: a faddish young woman named Judy Harland. “Custodians” is firmly of its time, but it’s quite good for all that, deliberately paced and atmospheric, depicting generational trauma’s role in ushering in nuclear annihilation. B
“Senior Citizen” by Clifford D. Simak. My only exposure to Simak was the dire Mastodonia, so I had slim hopes for this tale of an old man’s retirement to “a leisure cubicle in space.” Sure enough, by the third paragraph our surly Mr. Lee is already fuming at the feminine voice in his capsule: “Women, he thought — bitches, all of them.” The story manages to literalize the horror of how age can strip memory and self from you, so it succeeds at what it sets out to do. But the best part is how brief it is. D+
“Down to a Sunless Sea” by Cordwainer Smith. A posthumous publication, “completed by [Smith’s] wife after his death” — though she’s otherwise uncredited. Like the only other Smith story I’ve read, “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” (which I reviewed here), this one is an early galactic-baroque excursion. The sunless pleasure planet Xanadu welcomes Space Lord Kemal bin Permaiswari, a Lord of the Instrumentality, a psychic superman and war hero, wounded when he saved humanity in the battle of Styron IV. There are rideable cats; fear machines; “underpeople” genetically engineered from animals; illegal telepathy barriers; pitchers divided to pour both blissful drinks and deadly poisons; and of course devious scheming. There's also a bird-man named Mr.-Stokely-from-Boston. Clearly written sometime in the early ’60s, “Sea” is like a weirder, scruffier prototype of Dune, though it lacks Dune’s anti-authority streak. Like “Kittons,” “Sea” piles on the weird until it topples into silly, especially toward the end, but nonetheless I enjoyed it. Somewhere around C+
“The Pearcey Boy” by R. Bretnor. Distasteful, boring, and dreadfully overlong, this tale of a “defective” boy annoying and unsettling other lodgers in a 1928 boarding house didn’t even arrive at its coy revelation of its fantastical element (such as it was) until the last page. Utter dreck. F
“Gibraltar Falls” by Poul Anderson. I love how the Messinian salinity crisis (the drying out of the Mediterranean basin), and the subsequent titanic waterfall that refilled the sea through Gibraltar, had such a hold on the sci-fi imagination during the 1970s. See also: The Many-Colored Land. This one is a formulaic Time Patrol piece that I read once in a collection as a tween. Tom Nomura, natural scientist recruited for the Time Patrol from 1972, is in love with Feliz a Rach, an artist from a matriarchal society some two millennia after his birth. From him she learns the value of a man. “Gibraltar” offers no surprises, and I certainly won’t give it points for plot, but at least it has more atmosphere and scenic description than, say, most Reginald Rivers stories. I’ll be indulgent and offer it a C-
“Counterkill” by Jack Williamson. Skimmed past this one the moment it became clear that this (white) author thought he was being cheeky with how close he could come to the N-word without using the N-word. The dark planet’s name, the name of its dark-skinned people — yeah, you weren’t slick, Jack. Especially since the story is about a young man named Blacklantern hoping to enlist the aid of alien “Benefactors” to “civilize” his “primitive” world before it’s destroyed. Fuck this. A big old F
“The Mother Trip” by Frederick Pohl. Less a story and more of a series of variations on the theme of first contact. In one, police in Jackson, Mississippi stop and frisk the first visitor to our world, and cause automatic planetary annihilation. In another, humanity bands together in historic cooperation to nuke the alien mothership. In another, the aliens watch enough TV — and enough warfare — to declare that humans have a “death-wish.” Pretty standard stuff for the time. Nothing terrible, but also not terribly interesting. C-
And that’s it for my first issue from the ’70s! A mix of surprisingly tolerable stories alternating in precise rhythm with some of the worst shit you’ve ever seen. Reminiscent of the ’80s incarnation of the magazine, except this issue, at any rate, might be a slight improvement over any ’80s issues I’ve read so far.
Except for the Bretnor story. And the Williamson story. Goddamn.
Also, would it have killed them to put anyone who wasn’t a white man on the TOC?
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