Edited by Edward L. Ferman
130 pages
Published 1968
Read from July 21 to July 24
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
Continuing my project to hop through all the decades of F&SF.
The online PDF archives seem to end at the dawn of the 1960s, so I have to turn to my own collection now, which doesn’t leave me with many sixties issues to choose from. This issue has a novella (a “short novel” in the magazine’s parlance at the time) by Samuel R. Delany, which is a compelling enough reason to pick it. Unfortunately, it’s also all male. The small gains made by women writers in the 1950s F&SF scene clearly got discarded before we reached here.
Halfway through, I belatedly realized that this issue means I have read at least one full issue from every decade of F&SF’s existence! Next goal: one from each year? I’ll have to obtain a lot more physical copies to accomplish that.
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“Lines of Power” by Samuel R. Delany. A unique (in my experience) dystopian novella about Global Power, which trundles its massive cables and machines around the globe, and the various hyper-individualistic nonconformists (today, it’s the biker-gang coded “Angels” who ride jet-powered broomsticks) who withdraw to the last unpowered pockets of wilderness to avoid them. The concept feels halfway between Logan's Run and something I could picture getting published in Asimov’s in the mid 1980s. There's some racial, sexual, and gendered stuff that no doubt was radical in 1968 but hasn't aged so well; much of the plot concerns postures of masculinity. Delany’s style has, by this point, evolved into the denser, more elliptical phrasing he would continue to elaborate into the 1970s. Not my favorite Delany piece, but it's vivid and memorable, and interesting for its place in his evolution as a writer. Maybe C+?
“The Wilis” by Baird Searles. A ballet dancer fantasy by an ex-professional dancer? Not an item I expected to find in this era. The prose and storytelling are thoroughly competent, albeit uninspiring (and a tad predictable). The ending, especially, felt a bit out of place in this decade, like something that could have been published in the early 1950s. C-
“Gifts from the Universe” by Leonard Tushnet. Routine “mysterious shop in a rundown back alley” tale, with a Venusian twist straight out of the ’50s. An inordinate percentage of its word count is the narrator charting out his efforts to find full-silver quarters to pay the mysterious (and ailing) Mr. Tolliver. A shrug. D
“Beyond the Game” by Vance Aandahl. This would-be surrealist little number about a grade school boy escaping the horrors of dodgeball feels thoroughly sixties (in a derogatory sense). It has less to say than it thinks it does. Not much to it. D
“Dry Run” by Larry Niven. This tale, by contrast, feels thoroughly eighties (in a derogatory sense). It’s one of those “shitty man dies on his way to kill his soon to be ex-wife, gets judged by the heavenly Powers That Be based on what he would have done had he survived” tales. (Spoiler: It’s okay! He only murders her dog, doesn’t tell her, and it works out between them!) Fuck this. F
“A Quiet Kind of Madness” by David Redd. A proto-feminist fantasy written by a man, published in 1968? I’m gonna be skeptical of that. Especially since it has a guy roaming around trying to sweet talk our protagonist into giving him another chance after he tried to assault her six months before… and she actually finds herself gaslit into considering it. Yeah, this isn’t any feminism I would recognize. I did enjoy the vaguely post-apocalyptic Finnish vibe of the setting, but the rest of the story was on thin ice. (Heh.) F+
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And that’s my first issue of F&SF from the ’60s! It started out so interesting, but quickly settled into another Ferman-curated disaster.
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