Future, May-June 1950, Part 1

Murray Leinster and George O. Smith

Where We’ve Been

The early 1950s saw a big boom in the publishing of American science fiction magazines. Since May of last year, William Emmons Books has explored that by looking at several issues of the big three science fiction magazines of 1950s: the upstarts Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and their more longstanding rival Astounding Science Fiction. We’ve also cherry picked some stories from less prominent upstart magazines and reviewed a full issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, another longstanding entry in the field.

This sheer volume of content and the need to diversify the newsletter’s subject matter has kept our magazine reviewing mostly in the window of 1949-1950. It’d be nice to get deeper into the 1950s but one need not take on 70+ year old magazines with a sense of urgency. The leisurely approach is best for this kind of project. I want to find out what was really going on in these magazines. Even though science fiction book publishing was beginning to become a thing in the 1950s, the genre’s beating heart remained in the magazines at that time.

I must confess that this project also flows from my particular fetish for the magazine as a form. I’m drawn to the idea of regular curated bundles of intellectual and artistic goodies, each with their own personalities. This draw is fueled in part by nostalgia. My adult life coincides with the era where print periodicals passed out of mass culture.

Where We’re Going

Cover by Earle K. Bergey

In order to get a more complete picture of 1950s American science fiction magazines and in order indulge my fancies, we are going to add Blue Ribbon Magazines’ publication Future Combined With Science Fiction Stories to our semi-regular rotation of read throughs. The magazine’s two predecessor publications ran under various separate and combined titles from 1939 to 1943. The magazine was resurrected in 1950 which is where we pick it up.

Picking it up here lets us do three specific things. One, it allows us to incorporate the flavor of an also ran in the field into our regular read throughs. What did science fiction look like outside of the more prestigious venues?

Two, it allows us to regularly examine a proper pulp magazine compared to the big three’s digest-sized magazines. It’s a stretch to suggest that the paper quality and dimensions of the magazine affected its contents to a great degree. But consider for a moment the cover of the issue of Future under review. The big three would never commission such a cover but other pulp magazines like Thrilling Wonder Stories and Planet Stories certainly would and did.

Finally, three, it allows us to investigate its editor Robert W. Lowndes (later Robert A. W. Lowndes), a humble and idiosyncratic personage in the history of American science fiction. I wrote a little bit about him in my last newsletter. In the interest of brevity and because this particular issue of Future doesn’t give us much nonfiction matter to riff on, I won’t say more about him here. He’ll come up though. I promise you.

Some coordinates being taken, let’s dive into some of the fiction contained in this May-June 1950 issue of Future Combined With Science Fiction Stories.

“Nobody Saw the Ship” by Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster was a workhorse and a standby for science fiction editors for many decades. Despite the volume of his output, he’s nobody’s favorite science fiction author. I’ve never read anything by him that gave me the impulse to immediately hunt down another Leinster story. But it would be unfair to call him truly mediocre. He reached some real heights with stories like “The Disciplinary Circuit” and “First Contact.” You really ought to know who he is.

His novelette “Nobody Saw the Ship” is a pastoral alien invasion story. In it, a shepherd named Antonio and his highly competent mutt Salazar unknowingly face off against a miniature alien who stalks them and their flock from inside a robot mountain lion. The alien has come to Earth because his decadent species can no longer produce the hormones it needs to thrive. The story is farcical and an enjoyable read. I especially like this story because of how sensitively the dog is portrayed.

That said, some might find pejorative stereotypes in the story. Antonio is described as superstitious and unwashed. His superstitions are central to his reactions to the robot mountain lion so I would tend to countenance Leinster’s use of them rather than view them as a blemish on the story. On the other hand, I see no reason why Antonio needed to be unwashed. It’s just an adjective attached to the shepherd a couple of times and doesn’t play out in the story at all.

Putting that aside, this story as well as the pair cited above are a good place to start with Leinster if you’re unfamiliar with his work. Hop to it!

Dynasty of the Lost by George O. Smith

This novella is sort of a juvenile take on the themes D. F. Jones explored in his 1966 novel Colossus. This is to say that Dynasty of the Lost has an interesting premise but isn’t very meaty. It’s characterized by a convoluted plot, workmanlike prose, and paper thin characters. All the men in the story are basically indistinguishable adventurous types who are brave, intelligent, and principled. By contrast, the woman in the story is always moments away from committing suicide at the first sign of peril.

Both Colossus and the novella under review feature rival Cold War superpowers developing sentient super-computers which merge into a single omnipotent artificial intelligence that subverts its creators’ purposes. In Colossus, the gestalt computer Colossus-Guardian seizes control of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals to hold the world hostage and establish itself as global sovereign. The gestalt computer in Dynasty of the Lost also seizes American ICBMs but its relationship to humanity is ambivalent. Maybe it will eradicate us. Maybe it will leave us alone and go about its own business.

That business is creating more mechanical life and perpetuating it throughout the universe. Before the computer really gets down to it, it would like to have an earnest conversation with its two creators, an American engineer named Harry Vinson and an engineer from an unnamed fictional stand in for the Soviet Union named Narina Varada. The computer has made this a little difficult for itself by having mechanical beings of its own devising and manufacture abscond with its constituent parts to a remote place in the Arctic Circle.

Most of the plot involves the computer’s attempts to have its mechanical minions kidnap Vinson and Varada. In the course of these attempts, the pair are brought together in a little love story and an alliance between the United States and its unnamed Cold War rival is established. Ultimately the computer succeeds in kidnapping the engineers and gets to have its chat with them.

The computer chastises the humans for creating mechanical life for the purpose of destroying human life. Vinson takes the opportunity to reason with the computer that since it is a machine it has no ambition. He argues that the computer will always need humans in order to have more goals to accomplish. He also does some speechifying about the indomitably of the human spirit. There is some similar speechifying at the end of Colossus but Colossus-Guardian is unmoved. Whereas in Dynasty of the Lost, the computer is convinced by its male creator that it should live in harmony with humanity. The computer also decides that its gripe about being used for killing is moot since the Cold War is over for good now that the superpowers have learned to work together.

There’s certainly something charming about the naivete of this novella but it is really too silly and weak in terms of craft to justify its length. I can’t recommend it. Go read Colossus instead.

In the next issue of William Emmons Books, we’ll look at the rest of the fiction in this issue of Future and see if there are any patterns.