"Astounding Science-Fiction", June 1943 (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents & review

For stories where I have a separate post, link on story title goes there. Links on authors fetch more fiction by author. For read stories, my rating appears in brackets.

Table of contents (best first, unread last).

1. [novelette] Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "The World is Mine" (as by Lewis Padgett) (B): "Galleger, the mad--or at least cockeyed--scientist, really got himself in a jam that time. A plague of corpses, all murdered, descended upon him--"
2. [novelette] George O Smith's "Calling the Empress": 'Physics says that a thing which cannot be detected by any means does not exist. So their problem was to make a "nonexistent" spaceship somewhere between Mars & Venus change it course--'
3. [ss] Anthony Boucher's "Pelagic Spark": "One man, to prove a point, cooked up a phony prophecy. And other men, believing it implicitly, made it come true!"
4. [ss] E M Hull's "Competition": "Artur Blord backed down like a scared cur when faced with real danger. But it so happened he was backing rapidly in a direction he'd never have been able to go face forward!"
5. [ss] Lester del Rey's "Whom the Gods Love": "The Japs murdered his personality; their terrible error was that they didn't murder him. They gave him something that was a magnificent antithesis of Death--for him. For them it was Death."
6. [ss] Anthony Boucher's "Sanctury" (as by H H Holmes): "The commondoman knew the Nazis were close on his heels; his one though was to get to some other place in a hurry. The professor had another idea--& the Villa had a ghost that haunted parties!"
7. [serial - 2/2] Fritz Leiber, Jr's "Gather, Darkness!": "The Hierarchy was a phony religion based on super-scientific "miracles" & rigid tyranny. And the revolution was a magnificent buffoonery of super-scientific witchcraft based on military tactics!"

Fact sheet.

Labeled: "Vol XXXI No 4"
Download scans as a cbr file. [via David T @pubscans]
Alternate, supposedly better version, of scan. [via ka280al@pbscans]
Note: I have personally seen only the first (original) version.
Related: Fiction from Astounding/Analog, whole issues only, only issues edited by John Campbell; 1940s; old pulps.

Free fiction: Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for St Aquin"

It's one of the best known stories of science fiction.

[via Dave Tackett]

Anthony Boucher's "Q.U.R." (as by H H Holmes) (novelette): How the world moved from androids to function-specific robots

I found it a silly story, though readable enough. But it must have been well regarded once, given that I found it in "Adventures in Time & Space".

Title stands for "Quinby's Usuform Robots". Dugglesmarther H Quinby is the inventor.

Story summary.

In a world where androids are common place, some sort of a disease is sweeping through this android population - limbs refuse to work, random babbling, ... Quinby, a young engineer, has an idea: since androids are normally deployed for special purposes, their unused parts atrophy, as they would in humans! So we get a great business idea: making special purpose robots, instead of all-purpose androids.

See also.

1. Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "The Proud Robot" (download): This hilarious story features perhaps science fiction's most famous beer bottle opener. The Boucher story features a cocktail mixer in somewhat similar spirit.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, March 1943.
Rating: B.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Stories of Anthony Boucher.

"The Magazine of Fantasy", Vol 1 No 1 (Fall 1949) (eds Anthony Boucher & J Francis McComas) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

This is the inaugural issue of F&SF, subtitled "An Anthology of the Best Fantasy Stories, Old and New", & the only issue that carries this title. Next issue will be named "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction".

Scans of the magazine in the form of a CBR file are available online as part of a larger package.

Publisher, Lawrence E Spivak, in his introduction tells us of the magazine's focus: "whatever our senses may reject, but our imagination logically accepts." His invitation to authors solicits material "sufficiently out of this world to contradict the laws of man's logic -- while adhering firmly to a freshly created logic of their own."

Note that this is not all-original; it includes reprints, in addition to original fiction.

In the past, I've read at least two of the stories - "Private--Keep Out!" & "The Hurkle is a Happy Beast" - but don't remember much of the either. Later, I think, is widely anthologized.

Table of contents (11 stories).

Where I'm aware of alternate download links for individual stories, I include that too. Links on author, publisher, or year fetch more matching fiction.

1. [original] Cleve Cartmill's "Bells on His Toes": "broad farce-fantasy".
2. [reprint] Perceval Landon's "Thurnley Abbey"; download; Raw Edges (collection), 1908: "plausible cold terror". "merely one of the three most terrifying stories in the English language." "in the supernatural field, things are not always what they seem ... or even what they seem not to be."
3. [original] Philip MacDonald's "Private--Keep Out!".
4. [reprint] Fitz-James O'Brian's "The Lost Room"; download; Harper's Magazine, September 1858.
5. [original] Theodore Sturgeon's "The Hurkle is a Happy Beast".
6. [original] Anthony Boucher' "Review Copy" (as by H H Holmes): "supernatural vengeance".
7. [reprint] Guy Endore's "Men of Iron"; 1940 (where?): "social irony". "the implications of the machine age".
8. [reprint] Stuart Palmer's "A Bride for the Devil"; 1940 (where?): "horrible hilarity".
9. [reprint] Oliver Onions' "Rooum"; download; The Fortnightly Review, December 1910: "the story of the craneman Rooum, the lone wolf of the construction world who was never quite alone."
10. [reprint] Richard Sale's "Perseus Had a Helmet"; Argosy, 5 February 1938: "border-line humor". "somewhere on the borderline between logical crime & a world gone mad."
11. [original] Winona McClintic's "In the Days of Our Fathers": First published story of the author.

Related: Fiction from F&SF/1940s.

Anthony Boucher's "One-way Trip" (novelette, slow glass, free)

This is a very involved story - best read as a short novel, though only of novelette length.

At a gross level, it's simple enough: a mad man comes in possession of a novel weapon, & dreams of becoming a world dictator. Hero, with help, will foil his plans. But there are many characters, threads, backgrounds, technology, ...

Title is related to social background of story. This is a world that has taken the "code of Devarupa", a man modeled after Mahatma Gandhi, to heart. Killing is banned, even by state. So the punishment for extreme crimes is "one-way trip": you're put in a rocket with enough provisions for your "calculated" life & blasted out to space with variable unspecified velocity - rocket might go in orbit around earth, moon, or somewhere else, but you're never going to talk to anyone else.

"Lovestonite".

A clay found in Australia, discovered some 20 years ago. Also, the glass made from this clay. This glass has a curious property - light passes through it at about a quarter of its vacuum speed.

No one knew what to do with it, till recently. Emigdio "Mig" Valentinez, a very famous painter/tinkerer - a sort of Leonardo da Vinci, has taken up a project to paint himself. He finds mirrors unsatisfactory, & apparently still photography wasn't available.

Valentinez discovers that speed of light is not fixed in Lovestonite, but can be varied - from near 0 to near its normal (vacuum?) speed - by subjecting it to carefully controlled electromagnetic field. So he builds the gadget - combination camera & display device.

You stare at the gadget for a while while speed is set to near zero. You press a button so the light quickly goes to other side & again slows down. So you have your staring image coming out from other side for a while!

A crook finds his secret, & thinks up another use: as a weapon. Let a lot of sunlight enter it at slow speed; so glass acts as a battery, storing solar energy. Then release it at will at a specific target!

At the end of the story, hero will propose yet another use for it: as enabler for colonization of Mars because a thin sheet can store enough energy to burn a town! Made me wonder what the melting point of this glass be!

Notes.

1. A quote from story: "the practical vigor & solemnity of the western religion with the sublime mysticism of the orient."
   
   I've lived all my life in India, & I haven't seen much "sublime mysticism". I wonder where the myth of mystic East originated. Or may be India is not counted in the East?
2. Story features a "World State", centered in US (of course). And there is a "world-wide spread of Basic English".
   
   May be the author could have suggested a solution to India's babel of languages, & saved us many a protest & riots! Going by India's experience, I have serious doubts on the feasibility of any single "world language".

See also.

1. Bob Shaw's "Slow Glass" (download) is a more realistic story on Valentinez's gadget.
   
   Caution: at the moment, download link doesn't seem to be working - apparently due to server overload. But it should work eventually. At least it did when I copied the link.
2. L Sprague de Camp's hilarious "The Exalted" also features a similar slow-glass weapon. But de Camp uses it in passing, as one of the inventions of a genius prankster.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, August 1943.
Download full text as part of the scans of Astounding issue where it originally appeared.
Rating: A.
Among the stories from John Campbell's Astounding/Analog.
Related: Works of Anthony Boucher; fiction from 1940s; Tuesday Classics.

** Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for Saint Aquin" (short story, science fiction)

In a future dystopia where most people have fallen back to primitive existence, the very few ruling elite are technologically advanced & planet-faring, & where Christianity is banned in the US, an underground Christian movement in California has sent an agent to confirm rumors of a messiah in a remote village. And he gets astonished after discovering the thing that makes the long dead body of this rumored messiah special.

Collected in.

1. Robert Silverberg (Ed)'s "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume One, 1929-1964".
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Raymond J Healy (Ed)'s "New Tales of Space & Time" (1951).
Rating: B

Note: Why is this post so short?