[January 2, 1962] Hope, Free Thought, and Character Arcs (James Blish’s The...
I’ve reserved a special prize for my first guest author, Rosemary Benton. Today is January 2, and not only will her piece be the first of 1962, but it will be published concurrently with an important...
View Article[January 7, 1962] Mismatched pair (ACE Double D-485)
by Gideon Marcus I recently discovered the goodness that is the ACE Double. For just 35 cents (or 45 cents, depending on the series), you get two short books back to back in one volume. I’ve been...
View Article[January 9, 1962] Unfortunate Tale (Anderson’s Day After Doomsday)
by Gideon Marcus The Earth is dead, its verdant continents and azure oceans replaced with a roiling hell. The crew of the Benjamin Franklin, humanity’s first interstellar ship, gaze on the holocaust...
View Article[January 12, 1962] Odd one out (February 1962 Galaxy)
by Gideon Marcus Science fiction is a broad genre. It includes hard scientific, nuts-and-bolts projections that read like modern tales with just a touch of the future in them; this is the kind of...
View Article[January 14, 1962] Horrors! (February 1962 Fantastic)
by Victoria Silverwolf Since the demise nearly a decade ago of the fondly remembered magazine Weird Tales, there has been a dearth of markets for horror stories. Occasionally a tale of terror will...
View Article[January 19, 1962] Killing the Messenger (February 1962 Analog)
by Gideon Marcus I said in a recent article that science fiction runs the gamut from the hard-nosed to the fantastic, and that the former can be found most consistently inside the pages of Analog...
View Article[January 21, 1962] January Freeze (The Great Explosion, by Eric Frank Russell)
By Ashley R. Pollard I mentioned last time I find December winter difficult. In January it snowed, which reminds me of the song Let it Snow! by Vaughn Monroe, though the cover version sung by Dean...
View Article[January 23, 1962] A Methodical Approach to Writing (H. Beam Piper’s Little...
by Rosemary Benton Science fiction is a wonderful genre in that it allows an author the opportunity to pick a discipline – religion, economics, etc. – and create scenarios that are free to play out...
View Article[January 25, 1962] Shameless self-promotion (Nominate Galactic Journey for...
Each year, authors compete through the written word for the honor of owning a miniature replica of a spaceship. Since 1953, the Hugo Award has been the most regular and prestigious honor bestowed to...
View Article[January 27, 1962] Bumps in Road (February 1962 Fantasy and Science Fiction)
by Gideon Marcus It’s been a topsy turvy month: Snow is falling in coastal Los Angeles. Castro’s Cuba has been kicked out of the Organization of American States. Elvis is playing a Hawaiian beach...
View Article[January 30, 1962] Heads or Tails? (Ace Double F-127)
by Gideon Marcus What if the South had won at Antietam? Or the Mongols had not been so savaged by the Hungarians at Mohi? If Hitler had grown up an artist? Time travel has been a staple of science...
View Article[February 1, 1962] Silver Lining (January Space Race round-up!)
by Gideon Marcus January has been a frustrating month in the Space Race. We are no closer to matching the Soviets in the manned competition, much less beating them, and our unmanned shots have been a...
View Article[February 4, 1962] Promised Land in Sight? (the March 1962 Amazing)
by John Boston A couple of months ago I described Amazing, as “promising.” Now here’s the March 1962 issue, with two up-and-comers on the cover and a third on the contents page. Verdict: promise partly...
View Article[February 7, 1962] Funny Business (March 1962 Fantastic)
by Victoria Silverwolf Dying is easy; comedy is hard. These famous last words, ascribed to many a noted actor on his deathbed, are probably apocryphal. Even if nobody ever really uttered them before...
View Article[Feb. 10, 1962] Here is the News (March 1962 IF)
by Gideon Marcus If “no news is good news,” then this has been a very good week, indeed! The Studebaker UAW strike ended on the 7th. The Congo is no more restive than usual. Laos seems to be holding...
View Article[February 12, 1962] Out of the Wasteland (The Twilight Zone, Season 3,...
by Gideon Marcus and by Lorelei Marcus Reading a recent Radio Television Daily, I see that Rod Serling is once again up for an award. I’m not surprised. While his latest achievement, The Twilight...
View Article[February 14, 1962] St. Valentine’s Update (The Second Sex in SFF, Part V)
by Gideon Marcus It’s not quite time for a funeral, yet! Nearly a decade ago, the Chicken Littles of our genre scribbled at length in our magazines and buttonholed each other at conventions to voice...
View Article[February 17, 1962] Time and Culture at Odds (Andre Norton’s The Defiant Agents)
by Rosemary Benton It’s an interesting premise: what would a meeting between Apaches and Tartars be like in a “wild west-esque” science fiction setting? And what if the Apaches were American explorers...
View Article[February 19, 1962] February Thaw (tales from the British fan)
By Ashley R. Pollard This month’s theme is anticipation. For instance, the anticipation of the coming spring that will soon relieve the winter blues, signaled by the mornings and evenings getting...
View Article[February 20, 1962] American Made (John Glen and the flight of Friendship 7)
by Gideon Marcus And the Free World exhales. At long last, an American has orbited the Earth. This morning, Astronaut John Glenn ascended to the heavens on the back of an Atlas nuclear missile. He...
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