(Cover price 1/9 – an increase of 75% over 69 months.)

This is the issue I bought at an antique fair last year along with the corresponding magazine issue from July 1952. The dimensions had by this time shrunk to 8 x 5½ inch. As well as the fiction there is an editorial, an article, some book reviews and a puff for the next issue. The cover illustration is by Kelly Freas. The seventeen interior illustrations are by Freas and van Dongen. The layout is in single columns.

The Gentle Earth by Christopher Anvil
Invaders from another planet land in the central US as a first step. Their knowledge of conditions on Earth – climatic and social – isn’t adequate. The story is meant to be humorous and is diverting enough but it’s a throwaway.

The Shrines of Earth by Robert Silverberg
Earth is a rural backwater, peopled by flute players. It is under threat from the Hrossai and the locals hatch a plan to inveigle help from former colony worlds to protect the ancient shrines of Earth.

Article: Science Fiction in a Robot’s Eye by Jack Williamson
This comments on a “recent” study of stories from 3 SF magazines over the years 1951-3 where statistical techniques were used for analysis. Bug-eyed monsters were rare, predictive type stories over-represented and minorities treated better than in other magazine fiction of the time.

One Per Cent Inspiration by Edward Wellen
A tale about how a Montana farmer one day in 1998 invented the teleportation drive.
This had one linguistic term I don’t remember seeing before, “stacks of timothy.” Apparently timothy is a kind of grass used for hay.

Citizen of the Galaxy, part 3 of 4 by Robert A Heinlein
Since I’m never likely to come across parts 1, 2 and 4, I didn’t bother with this.

There was an interesting article by Adam Roberts in yesterday’s Guardian Review about the two contrasting political strands in SF.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find it on the Guardian website – neither by searching for Adam Roberts nor for, “Who owns the political soul of SF” (Yes, the article’s title did have a missing question mark.) It is probably there somewhere, though.

By and large the article focused on the differing attitudes to the “other,” taking as its exemplars of either breed, Iain M Banks and Robert A Heinlein. (Ever since I worked out his political allegiances – see below – I always perversely liked to think of him as Roberta Heinlein as I’m sure that would have annoyed him.)

The gist of Roberts’s piece was that lefty SF tends to be inclusive and heterogeneous on encountering the alien, whereas right wingers reach for the ammunition. (I paraphrase, but not much.)

Aside:-
I remember well reading Heinlein’s short story The Roads Must Roll, wherein as the principal mode of travel people are conveyed by moving walkways. Those who work on the system throw a spanner in the works. Heinlein overstates the case by making this sabotage rather than something more peaceful and, as the story’s title suggests, comes down firmly on the side of the owners and users. Despite Heinlein’s intentions, while I was reading it my sympathies were fully on the side of the workers who to my mind were being exploited. I realised then that as far as Heinlein would be concerned there was something wrong with me, I was less than human. My dignity (and those of honest toilers) did not compare with his dignity.

In my own novel A Son of the Rock the narrator, Alan, shockingly encounters the “other” in the shape of an old man. At first frightened, he eventually embraces the strangeness and makes it his own.

Clearly, in Roberts’s dichotomy, Alan was (will be? – it is SF after all) – and I am – a leftist.

Sorry about that.