Future, May-June 1950, Part 3

James Blish, Noel Loomis, Lester del Rey

Illustration uncredited.

Today’s edition of William Emmons Books concludes our read through of the May-June 1950 issue of Future Combined With Science Fiction Stories. The previous installments in this series are here and here.

My assessment of this issue of Future is that it is an adequate issue of a science fiction magazine. The lead novella by George O. Smith is fairly weak but nothing in the magazine felt like it couldn’t have appeared in contemporaneous issues of Astounding Science Fiction, the leading publication in the field, or Thrilling Wonder Stories, a prominent science fiction pulp magazine. Approaching magazines I tend to like a little bit better, the stories under review in this missive by James Blish and Lester del Rey have a poor man’s Galaxy Science Fiction feel. All of the stories in this issue of Future lack the attention to literary craft that characterizes those in the early issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. My judgment is that the magazine under review would have been worth the reader’s 15¢ (<$2 in 2025 money) if the reader had the free time and gumption to read it on top of other better science fiction magazines.

Fiction

The fiction we’re looking at today is pretty short, so I’ll stick to capsule reviews.

“Battle of the Unborn” by James Blish — Don’t look now but it’s our old friend eugenics! This is a story about the clandestine maneuverings of operatives from competing species of mutant supermen on the United Nations’ Mutation Control Board. The reader slowly gets fed information about just what is going on with the mutated human species of Hiroshima and on the Board. Then there’s a touch of violence, all is revealed, and that’s the end of the story. I like that this story isn’t longer than it needs to be but counterintuitively feel like Blish could have done more with it.

“Parking, Unlimited” by Noel Loomis — This comedic yarn is in essence a good old fashion Gernsbackian gadget story. The narrator is hustled out of $300 by his friend who uses the money to rent a parking garage where the friend installs a shrinking apparatus of his own design. The pair make out like bandits when they are able to park more cars for less money than anyone else in town but catch the ire of the other parking lot operators and codes enforcement. Hilarity ensues! Even in the context of 1950 this story feels like a dinosaur but I was here for it.

“Imitation of Death” by Lester del Rey — This cloak and dagger story about interplanetary politics has a pretty brutal scene in it—or does it? One can read this as a Lester del Rey story whose mildly convoluted plot confuses the doomed and unsavory protagonist, a spy who seeks to murder a politician and replace him with a specialized kind of robot called a simulacrum (misspelled “similacrum” throughout). A more generous (if anachronistic) reading is that this is an undercooked attempt at a Philip K. Dick-style version of Double Star. Anyway, there are more simulacra than one initially thinks and whether the politician is a simulacrum or not at any given moment becomes an open question by the end of the story.

Correspondence: More on Frank Belknap Long’s Political Leanings

I sent Bobby Derie of the Deep Cuts In A Lovecraftian Vein blog my last post which involved speculation about whether Frank Belknap Long was a Communist. He wrote me back the following:

There are enough indications from Long's letters that we know he leaned Socialist in the 20s and 30s, but how far he went isn't clear. It should be cleared up later this year when the full volume of Lovecraft's letters with Long is published.