Magazine Review: Other Worlds December 1951 edited by Ray Palmer
Let’s have another look at this long-running science fiction magazine! The opening editorial by Ray Palmer hypes up the serial which will start in the next issue, Rog Phillips’ These Are My Children, advertised here as something truly special. Sadly, the book version seems to have not made an impact at all.
“Act of God” by Richard Ashby leads off with the first part of the serial. It is the near future of 1980, and we start by witnessing the kidnapping of three seemingly unconnected people, a Catholic priest, a general, and a television actress. These abductions are the work of a new cult that is called “the Disciples” that has been gaining power in the Western United States in the last decade. The Disciples are a mix of true believers, grifters who have bought in for money and power, and brainwashing victims. Two of the kidnapped people are in for that last treatment.
The Disciples have enough behind the scenes power to arrange for Army Air Corps (not the Air Force in this alternate timeline) Captain Leslie North to be framed for espionage and discharged from the military, so that they can recruit him into their cause. But although him being a skilled engineer is useful, what they’re really after is his connection to his sister.
Y’see, the cult is actually a front for a coalition of wealthy business types led by “Grandmother” Ganley. And the gaining of social and political power is a secondary byproduct of their primary goal, finding and capturing the secretive scientific organization known as “the Group.” And the Disciples have managed to discover that one of the group is Leslie’s sister, so they want him to track her down for them.
What the Group is up to is trying to crack the secret of immortality and eternal youth. Which is currently held by a man named David Ganley. It seems that back in the 1850s or so, David had saved a Cheyenne man from drowning. Years later, the man returned the favor by giving David a canteen filled with a strange liquid that healed wounds and stopped/reversed aging. However, he had not drunk the liquid himself despite his own wounds and died before David could ask the man where he’d gotten it from.
Careful nursing of the liquid kept David alive and youthful for decades before he realized that it was eventually going to run out. So he worked with a Doctor Ganley, who was one of his many descendants, on analyzing the liquid. Unfortunately, the doctor gave some vague hints about what was going on to less scrupulous relatives, who killed him in an attempt to steal the secret of immortality.
David was more cautious about his next attempt, and the Group was founded in strict secrecy. The wealthy because unscrupulous descendants formed a coalition to try to track him and the Group down, and that’s where things stand.
Some minor details: travel from California to Hawaii is now done by suborbital rocket, and personal helicopters have largely replaced automobiles in California; bicycles coming back into fashion for short range travel.
Leslie meets his sister, and now must choose between the Thanes of the Disciples, or the Group. And that’s where this part ends. There’s some interesting ideas, but I suspect based on having never heard of this story before that the second part didn’t stick the landing.
“Yelisen” by Richard S. Shaver is not one of his “Shaver Mystery” stories. Instead it’s set in the far future, when the people of Earth have gone to the stars. In a “backwater” section of the Galaxy known as The Horn, Henry Masson of the Masson Trading Company has been deliberately playing down the available resources so the Terran Central Authority would not open the area to general exploitation.
Sadly, Masson has died, leaving the company to his local bride, the beautiful and long-lived Yelisen. Franel, leader of the warlike Hai-Han, wants Yelisen to be his bride as he thinks this will allow him to control the trading company assets and take over the Horn. He hasn’t realized that the Central Authority is only allowing Yelisen technical ownership of the company as a courtesy, with the real decisions being made by the late Masson’s right-hand man Paul Daniels. If she marries a non-Terran, the Central Authority will take control and open up full exploitation.
Franel’s spy abducts Yelisen, and it’s up to Paul and his merchant crew to figure out some way to use science to get her back. This is good old space opera with a bit of ambivalence towards colonialism. Sure it’s bad to exploit the natives and take their stuff, but they’re barbarians so they need a benevolent white guy to take care of them.
“Quandary” by George O. Neumann is a short-short dealing with an illustrator for science fiction magazines wishing he could see a real alien. He gets the chance. It’s…something that exists.
“The Tchen-Lam’s Vengeance” by Robert Bloch starts in the Gobi Desert. Our protagonist is fleeing after stealing a fabulous gem from a lamasery in Tibet, pursued by the title guard/sorcerer. On the verge of collapsing, the thief is approached by an elderly Hindu mystic, Dagur. It seems that Dagur has a plan and will agree to save the American’s life in exchange for the thief taking him to the United States and opening a beauty parlor with him.
This sounds insane, but it’s not like the thief has any other available options. So he agrees. Turns out that Dagur has the ability to swap minds between two people who don’t resist it. He tricks the Tchen-Lam into trading bodies with him in exchange for the gem. And then killing off his frail original body so he can take back the gem. With the Tchen-Lam’s supplies, he and the thief are able to make it to civilization, sell the gem for a healthy fraction of its worth, and sail to the States.
In America, the pair open an exclusive high-end beauty parlor. The gimmick is that they promise wealthy but elderly women to restore them to young healthy bodies. This is done through Dagur’s mind-swapping technique, and you may be asking where the young healthy bodies are coming from. They come from exactly where you’d think.
Once the pair racks up a substantial bank balance, the thief starts thinking maybe it’s time to eliminate his partner and abscond with the funds. But the Tchen-Lam has been waiting for his revenge.
This really isn’t a science fiction story, and falls more into the horror category. Also, it rockets right past ordinary 1950s science fiction racism to 1930s pulp racism. I mean, wow, the story is going there. The sexism is also pretty rancid but not so much the point. It’s the most striking story in this issue, but not one I’d recommend without caveat.
“The Big Dealer” by William Bailey concerns an American entrepreneur trying to make his way in an alien civilization after Earth is destroyed and its inhabitants become refugees. He finds himself stranded on a world that has a post-scarcity economy, and the smug immigration officer telling him that there’s no way he will be able to make trouble here with his wheeling and dealing as he did on the last world.
Our protagonist takes that personally, and eventually figures out how to create an organized collectibles market that slowly consumes the planetary economy. This one’s for fans of “humans, and especially white male American humans, are special” stories.
“I Flew in a Flying Saucer” by Ray Palmer is allegedly as told to him by Captain A.V.G., and fictionalized as to specific names, dates and places. This is the second part. Per the summary, the first part was pretty standard UFO witness testimony. The Captain and his friends are military pilots who see odd lights in the sky and what sure as heck looks like unearthly phenomena.
The agents from “Project Saucer” come around and try to convince the witnesses that they saw swamp gas or weather balloons or hallucinations. Attempts to gain photographic evidence are confiscated by the government and returned as “overexposed, no evidence here.” Finally, one of the pilots decides he’s going to get proof even if he has to ram a saucer, His plane vanishes off the radar and he disappears.
So it’s up to A.V.G., and the first part ends with him encountering a flying saucer that seems to speak into his mind.
This part opens up with the Captain being brought on board the saucer, plane and all. He meets his friend, who’s very much alive, but in a way that means he can never return to his normal life. It is explained that the crew of the UFOs are in fact Earth humans or the descendants of humans who live on the moon. The real Moon, not the projected illusion Earthlings see in the sky. They’ve been visiting the Earth for thousands of years, watching over humanity and slowly inspiring our development.
It’s made clear that it’s only inspiration, what the Earthlings did with it is their own choices. It’s implied that at one point the flying saucers were manned by actual aliens, but none of them are in the solar system now. Oh, and it turns out the film thing was actually not the result of government conspiracy. The saucers are shielded in frequencies that prevent a clear picture being taken with mechanical devices.
A.V.G. meets Lee-La, the historian of the saucer people, and once the rightful Empress of Pan, the continent that used to fill what is now the Pacific Ocean. She was usurped by an evil advisor, and the resulting civil war resulted in the first atomic warfare on Earth. Stopping this turned Lee-La into the greatest mass murderer our planet has ever known, and all these millennia later, she still feels the guilt.
Neat bit: you learn about history by reliving the memory of the person who experienced it, so for a short while A.V.G. is “in” Lee-La’s body.
It’s hinted that there are also enemies of humanity, but that’s not followed up on. Instead, we learn that the reason so many flying saucers have been seen lately is because they’ve been trying to fix Earth’s atmosphere so that the damage caused by atomic testing won’t kill us all off.
The Captain is returned to Earth on the premise that no one will ever believe him, which is why this story is being presented in a science fiction magazine as fiction.
This is a pile of neat ideas masquerading as a story.
Now for the “Special Features “
“Science Fiction Book Reviews” by P. Schuyler Miller takes a look at a new edition of the first three books of the Lensman series by E.E. “Doc” Smith. He feels that the editing done to the first volume, Triplanetary, to bring it more into line with the later parts, gives away too much of the slowly unveiled mystery of the series. But he liked the upgraded binding and paper of the new edition.
“Personals” is a thick-packed column of people looking for back issues or fan clubs to join.
“Fun with Science” talks about Dr. Reich and his experiments in ESP, and tells a long joke about an alien parrot and a magic trick.
“Letters” is a lively discussion between the readers and editor Ray Palmer. One correspondent nitpicked the Chinese names in a story. There’s also an exchange on whether science fiction can actually predict the future or just affect it. Very philosophical!
The editor mentions that he will gladly eat his words if necessary, as the pulp paper Other Worlds is printed on is edible. He’s kind of sexist towards the one female reader printed, “how deliciously female of you to say that.”
“News of the Month” includes the formation of a fan club for veterans and active duty military members, and mentions that Other Worlds’ managing editor Bea Mahaffey was attending Nolacon, the 1951 Worldcon in New Orleans.
And last there’s a photo feature on editor Ray Palmer, with a biography that mentions his many back injuries.
This isn’t a particularly good issue of the magazine, with the one standout story being the Bloch one. He’s been extensively collected elsewhere, so you should be able to find it with little trouble. On the other hand, a certain kind of collector will find the biography of Palmer irresistible.
Recommended to Bloch collectors and those that collect biographies of science fiction notables.
