"Science Fiction Plus", Vol 1 No 6 (October 1953) (ed Hugo Gernsback) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Scans of this magazine in CBR format are online as part of a larger package.

There is an interesting call for authors on ToC page: "$100.00 will be paid by this magazine for each Short-Short Science-Fiction Story. These stories must be real science fiction, not fantasy, & should not run over 1,000 words.The Short-Short + will occupy one full page." Doesn't that make it the highest paying flash fiction market of its time?

Note: Magazine seems to interchangeably use "Science Fiction Plus" & "Science Fiction +" as its titles. Cover logo blends the two.

Table of contents. 

Links on authors fetch more fiction by author. Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there.

1. [novelette] Thomas Calvert McClary's "The Celestial Brake".
2. [short novel] Philip Jose Farmer's "Strange Compulsion": "The conquest of many of the most distressing infirmities is made difficult by the veil of prudery which covers such illnesses as venereal diseases, & even today there exists the absurd notion that it is not respectful to have cancer or a hernia. It seems logical that even the most careful preparation will not avoid the contraction of new diseases when man conquers space--& should those ills be fostered by prudery, the result might prove tragic."
3. [ss] Jack Williamson's "Operation: Gravity": "at present we simply have no concept of the nature of gravity. If ... we should have the opportunity of studying gravity under special conditions, we may arrive at an understanding that will make science-fiction notions about gravitation a possibility."
4. [ss] Eric Frank Russell's "Postscript" aka "P.S." (A): 'How great are the odds against human beings feeling emotions of sympathy, understanding, & compassion for any alien races that may be discovered on distant worlds in the years following interplanetary travel? View the great difficulty the peoples of the world seem to have in getting along with human beings who are different only in color of skin. Consider the tendency to treat groups of opposing religious or political thought as "different," & something less than human.'
5. [ss] Roger Dee's "Worlds Within Worlds": "what would happen if we discovered that an insuperable barrier imprisoned us to the surface of the Earth forever"?
6. [ff] Anne McCaffrey's "Freedom of the Race".

See also.

1. Fiction from old "pulp" magazines.
2. Fiction from 1950s.

Some Philip José Farmer recommendations from Dave Langford

OK - Dave is not really calling them recommendations in the obituary in Ansible, #260 (March 2009); but I guess I can take them as such: "He won Hugos as Most Promising New Author in 1953, following his pioneering alien-sex stories 'The Lovers' (1952); for 'Riders of the Purple Wage' in Dangerous Visions (1967); and for To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), opening the popular Riverworld series. He was perhaps best loved for the exuberant science-fantasies of his World of Tiers, beginning with The Maker of Universes (1985). The elaborately recursive Wold Newton saga cheekily assumes that a single extended family of mutant supermen includes Tarzan, Doc Savage, Sherlock Homes, Fu Manchu, and so on to Nero Wolfe and James Bond".

RIP: Philip José Farmer

He died on 25 February 2009. Obituary at SF Scope.

I've only read one of his stories - "Sliced Cross-wise Only-on-Tuesday World" (download), original story that later was expanded into Dayworld trilogy.

It describes a world so overcrowded that there is not space for everyone; 6 out of 7 people are in hibernation! So, e.g., there are Tuesday people - whose whole lives are lived only on Tuesdays! This love story describes a complicated affair between a man who lives on one day of the week with a woman who lives on a different day.

Philip José Farmer's "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World" (short story, science fiction, free): Romance in a weird overpopulated world

This story was later expanded into "the Dayworld trilogy, set some thirteen-hundred (normal, not divided by seven) years later", according to Dave at The ED SF Project.

Story summary.

Imagine a world where everyone lives only one day of the week; rest of the week, you hibernate. So you may be a Tuesday person, I may be a Wednesday person, etc!

It's a pretty crowded world. Many unrelated people live together. Somewhere in your house is a "stoner room" where people who use it the other 6 days are hibernating. The hibernation vaults of everyone who share the home - on the same day & on other days - are all together, & have transparent front. These hibernation vaults are called by many names: "eternium cylinders", "stoners", or "coffins".

At the end of your day, you go stand in your vault, & press a button. Machine will automatically wake you next week your day.

When you tell someone your age, you say "thirty-five (Tuesday time)"!

This also is a world with a somewhat high handed government. Oh - the government is also, of course, day-based. So Wednesday President is a different individual than a Tuesday President.

You can seek transfer to another day by applying to governments of both days. It's an extremely tedious process - can take years. And you will be lucky getting the transfer once in a lifetime.

This is the story of Tom Pym, a Tuesday man. "He had been sixteen about one hundred and six years ago, not that that made any difference. Physiologically, he was thirty."

He's just been alloted "the very house he had picked". He will be one of the 63 men & women sharing this home - 9 awake each day. When going into hibernation at the end of the day in his new home, he will fall in love (at first sight) with "Jennie Marlowe. Born 2031 A.D., San Marino, California... twenty-four years old. Actress. Unmarried.", a Wednesday woman who shares his home. He'll leave a message for her; she's not interested in a friendship where she can never meet him.

But he's obsessed with her. So he goes through the years long process of getting himself transfered to her day, after a lot of governmental forms & interviews. Finally, when he arrives in Wednesday world of hers after transfer, he finds to his horror that she has been transferred to Tuesday, his original day, the same day!

Looks like she was also unhappy with her day, had been seeking transfer for a long time, & one of the government officials involved in Tom's transfer who had visited her as part of governmental approval process had also fallen in love with her! Poor Tom, exiled in another world that doesn't have his lady love!

Fact sheet.

First published: Robert Silverberg (Ed)'s "New Dimensions 1", Doubleday, 1971.
Rating: B
Download full text from Internet Archive.
Included in Ellen Datlow's Sci Fiction classics.