Amazing Stories 88th Anniversary Issue: Amazing Stories April 2014 Read online

  Amazing Stories® 88th Anniversary Issue April 2014

  On the Cover

  by Frank Wu

  Steve Davidson asked me to do the cover for the re-launch of Amazing Stories. Whoopee!

  AMZ was the first magazine dedicated to science fiction, and my hero Frank R. Paul did all the covers for the first few years. This meant that the first SF images ever seen by the likes of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and Forry Ackerman were FRP covers.

  And what visions they were! HG Wells’ Martian war machines! Rockets to Jupiter! Robots fighting lions! Submarines fighting pterodactyls! At a time when most Americans didn’t even have a telephone, FRP was painting spaceships zooming across the galaxy!

  And so my cover would be a tribute to FRP’s first cover for the first SF magazine. His painting, reproduced here, is frankly INSANE. OK, sure, people ice skating on some distant world orbiting a planet that sort of but doesn’t quite look like Saturn (the color is wrong and banding too pronounced). But the weirdest thing? There are sailing ships high on ice spires. Did these astro-Shackletons get to this world…on sailing ships? Floating on interplanetary phlogiston? And how did the ships get onto the pillars? Did unseen Frost Giants put them there?

  Notably, the brushwork seems a little rough. This is because Gernsback saw an unfinished draft of the painting and liked it so much, he published it as is. FRP never got a chance to complete it.

  So that became my job.

  I decided that, if FRP had had a little more time, he would have replaced the boring people with dinosaurs. Ice-skating dinosaurs. Because, why not.

  Also, you may notice that I stuck in a cameo of my giant space chicken Guidolon ice-dancing with my wife Brianna’s creation, Holiday from "Revolution 60." So there’s tiny tribute to love in there, too.

  And I replaced the sailing ships with a giant laser tank.

  FRP loved stuff that blows up—though, curiously, the first AMZ cover was one of his few pieces without an explosion. So I corrected that. And FRP loved tanks and giant guns, so there you go.

  I did do something, though, that as far as I know, FRP never did.

  (Now we get real.)

  I made a political statement.

  The piece is really about the war in Afghanistan.

  As I was finishing this up, we crossed over the 12-year mark (making this America’s longest war). 2000 Americans dead, plus untold Afghans, allies and others. And more soldiers coming home every day with PTSD and moral injuries.

  During Viet Nam, there were daily protests and marches, a stream of songs, rallies and movies about the war. And during Afghanistan? Not so much.

  Most Americans just go about their regular business—ice skating blissfully, if you will—while the war rages and people are dying unseen in the background.

  Because, well, why can’t we have a giant laser tank and a hidden political message, too?

  Table of Contents

  AMAZING STORIES April 2014 Volume 75, Number 1 Issue 610

  -- FICTION --

  The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years by Don Wilcox

  Spirit Dance by Douglas Smith

  Customer Service by John Purcell

  Cosmic Corkscrew by Michael A. Burstein

  Lightning War by Duncan Long

  Virtually Yours by Nina Munteanu

  Tool Dresser’s Law by Jack Clemons

  Weird Stories, Strangely Told by Ira Nayman

  Finity by Felicity Savage

  Where the Space Pirates Are by John M. Whalen

  Heavenly Horizon by Ricky L. Brown

  The Pixie by Steven M. Long

  The Jester by Michael J. Sullivan

  The Geno Virus by R. K. Troughton

  -- FEATURES -

  On the Cover by Frank Wu

  Introduction to The Voyage that Last 600 Years by JM Stine

  Interview: Andy Weir Author of The Martian Conducted by Steve Davidson

  Science Featue: Private Industry and the Quest for Space by Gwen Whiting

  Review: The Martian by Steve Davidson

  Review: The Martian

  -- DEPARTMENTS --

  Editorial

  About This Issue

  Behind the Scenes

  Contributors

  Cover by Frank Wu. Interior Illustrations by Duncan Long, Bob Bello & Derek Benson.

  Steve Davidson – Publisher & Editor Pro Tem

  Kermit Woodall – Design Editor; Duncan Long – Art Director; Ricky L. Brown – Reviews Editor; Tanya Tynjala – Spanish Language Editor; J. M. Stine – Classic Reprints; Michelle Bradbury – Assistant Editor; Rachel Isaacs – Assistant Editor; David Decker – Staff Photographer; Judith K. Dial – Advertising Sales; Michael J. Sullivan - Electronic Formatting

  Amazing Stories® (ISBN 9781615086375) Volume 75, Number 1, Whole Number 610, April 2014. Published irregularly by The Experimenter Publishing Company.

  Editorial Offices: Amazing Stories, PO Box 1068, Hillsboro, NH 03244.

  www.amazingstoriesmag.com

  Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved.

  Amazing Stories® is a Registered Trademark of Steve Davidson and the Experimenter Publishing Company. All Rights Reserved.

  Editorial: The End of the Beginning

  Happy 88th Anniversary Amazing Stories!

  And welcome all to the first official new issue of that venerable title!

  Back in the Fifties, Cold War era nuclear nightmare films were legion; Hollywood lore had us being subjected to the deprivations of a host of greatly enlarged creatures, from all manner of insects—scorpions, ants, bees, praying manti, tarantulas—straight on up through nearly every branch of the evolutionary tree—crustacea, fish, lizards, birds and culminating in—what else?—giant people.

  Many of these films employed a cheap, cliff hanger like end title: the words "THE END" would appear and after a few seconds those words would be joined by a question mark. The message of course was that we may have defeated the foe this time, but there were sure to be even more things frozen in those glaciers or buried deep beneath the sea that were just waiting for their own atomic alarm clocks to wake them up at the appointed hour.

  It didn’t take long for those end titles to start getting old. So film makers began playing around in an attempt to keep it fresh. One memorable film (the title escapes me at the moment—an exercise for the reader) must have decided to go whole hog and covered all the bases with

  “The End of the Beginning…or the Beginning of the End?”

  Right now, Amazing Stories has arrived at the first portion of that phrase. The 88th Anniversary issue marks the conclusion of our beginning phase: in December 2012 we opened up our multi-author blog for beta testing. In January of 2013 we opened our doors to the public and have been growing in community awareness, memberships and influence ever since.

  Our blog, covering every aspect (we can think of) of the combined genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror (which carry a slew of sub-genres along on their coattails) has been contributed to by over 130 different contributors, ranging from fans to award winning authors, artists, editors, and fellow travelers. Our subjects run the gamut from film to comics, fandom, the pulps, television and film fare and the occasional odd interests that are part and parcel of the fan experience.

  But our goal was not just to establish a popular genre-oriented blog. Our goal has always been to return Amazing Stories to regular publication in a sustainable fashion. To that end, we determined early on that in order to survive in today’s economy and meet our market’s demands, we needed to find non-traditional sources of revenue in additio
n to the traditional subscription and advertising model.

  While the details will have to wait for a soon to be forthcoming series of press releases, the gist of it is that we’ve managed to achieve that goal. The Experimenter Publishing Company is now in the process of licensing the Amazing Stories® brand into two different market segments—and has plans to expand that effort over the coming year. We have a great deal of confidence that the revenue from our licensing deals will provide the foundation of a steady revenue stream that will allow us to shortly begin publishing fiction on a regular basis, as well as support other necessary efforts such as promotion and the further development of our website.

  Please do not mistake this announcement or the publication of Amazing Stories, Volume 75, Number 1 as the marker of a regular return to publication; we’re not quite there yet. A few more months need to go by before things really begin to kick in and we’ll be able to budget and forecast. We’re not quite there yet—but we have planted a flag to mark

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  About This Issue

  Amazing Stories Volume 75, Number 1, April 2014.

  The Blog Team at Amazing Stories is quite the crew. Most of them have never met each other except online, but they all share something in common: a deep and abiding love for and interest in seeing Amazing Stories come back as a market for short fiction.

  A few months more than a year ago I reached out to the genre community to find people who might be interested in helping me bring the magazine back. The response was so overwhelming, I ended up with over fifty volunteers—many of them well-recognized names in the industry and nearly as many relative new-comers.

  We’ve since grown to a team approaching 150 people—authors, bloggers, artists, editors, reviewers, collectors, convention runners—fans of science fiction, fantasy, horror and any and every sub-genre of those fields you can possibly imagine.

  We’ve made tremendous progress over the past fifteen or so months, progress that would not be possible if everyone involved hadn’t been willing to give of themselves in the finest tradition of fandom.

  Several weeks ago it became apparent that behind the scenes work was approaching a conclusion and I realized that we might be able to make some significant announcements during the month of April—which also happened to be the 88th anniversary month of the magazine.

  I asked if everyone was up to a rush job of putting an issue together and—knowing our contributors the way I do—the response was unsurprising; offers of stories and artwork, articles and support came pouring in.

  You are now looking at the results. Fourteen stories, wonderful artwork, a science article in the best tradition of the magazine and an interview with one of the hottest new authors in the field.

  Everyone involved should be justly proud of their efforts, as proud as I am.

  Things may look a little rough at first—some features won’t appear until the end of the month and we’re trying to coordinate the magazine with the daily blog entries, but by the end of April everyone will be able to enjoy a complete issue of the magazine, jam-packed with the kind of stories we’re all looking for, peppered with new artwork, a worthy addition to the six hundred and nine issues that have gone before.

  Amazing Stories is back folks and you have the Amazing Stories Blog Team to thank for that. Give them all some hearty applause—and then get right back to enjoying everything we’ve prepared for you.

  Thanks for joining us.

  An Introduction to The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years

  by JM Stine

  (The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years was originally published in Amazing Stories Oct 1940)

  Old-timers and historians of science fiction typically identify Robert A. Heinlein’s “Universe” as the first generation starship story and A. E. Van Vogt’s “Far Centaurus” as the first story where, during the long voyage, technology on Earth spurted ahead and by the time the final generation reached their new home, it had already been colonized by Earth using infinitely faster ships. Those who believe this, however, are wrong. The first generation starship story, which also included the breakthrough notion of Earth developing faster than light ships that beat the g. s. to its destination, appeared in the October 1940 issue of Amazing Stories. Heinlein’s “Universe,” on the other hand, was first published seven months later in the May 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction; while Van Vogt’s “Far Centaurus” did not reach the newsstand until three years later when it appeared in the January 1944 Astounding.

  This mistake in accreditation is easy to understand, when you consider that by the late 1930s Astounding had leapt far into the lead among science fiction magazines and Amazing had fallen so far behind, that every self-respecting, science fiction fan was reading the former, while the latter was almost universally, and unfairly, shunned. At first Astounding had been a blood and thunder adventure magazine with the thinnest veneer of science, but when a new editor, F. Orlin Tremaine, took over, in just half a year, according to Isaac Asimov in Before the Golden Age, “Astounding Stories took a clear lead over Amazing. Astounding Stories had the best stories, the most interesting artwork, the liveliest letters column. After five years of allegiance to Amazing Stories as the best of the magazines, I switched instantly and massively to Astounding Stories and so did nearly everyone else. Beginning in early 1934, Astounding Stories became the dominating magazine in science fiction and has remained so, through a couple of changes in name, a couple of changes in editor, and many changes in competition, for forty years.”

  Why did fans abandon Amazing Stories, their long-time favorite and the first of all science magazines, for Astounding? The fact is Astounding and fandom were both seeking an adult, competently written kind of science fiction, which with the advent of Heinlein, Asimov, del rey, Raymond F. Jones and others, they would soon have. Gernsback had been a youthful, visionary forty-two when he launched Amazing Stories. T. O’Conor Sloane, who was appointed Amazing’s editor-in-chief when Gernsback lost the magazine due to financial difficulties (some say do to an unsustainable standard of living), Sloane was eighty years old, a staid and conservative professor of electrical engineering at Seaton Hall University with four degrees including a Ph.D. and LL.D; a thinker, moreover, who had proved mathematically that the acceleration needed to travel to other worlds was scientifically impossible and the author of such tomes as The Standard Electrical Dictionary, Arithmetic of Electricity, and Liquid Air and the Liquefaction of Gases. The stories he selected for Amazing were about as boring and undistinguished as you might imagine and the few memorable stories he published were submitted out of the blue or by writers who had been developed by Gernsback. Fans may have hoped for an upgrade, when Amazing Stories was sold a second time, in 1938, to the venerable Ziff-Davis publishing company, but imagine their disappointment when the new editor, the twenty-eight year-old Raymond A. Palmer announced, that far from raising Amazing’s standards toward the rarified heights of Astounding, he was taking a distinctly juvenile slant, aiming at readers who had out-grown comic books but were not yet ready for anything so sophisticated as Astounding had become. As a result, most self-respecting older fans or later historians turned their noses up at Amazing Stories (although discerning young and up and coming fans, like Robert Silverberg and Terry Carr, wrote paeans of praise for the magazine during the Palmer years) thus missing hundreds of stories that would not have disgraced the hallowed pages of Astounding. Such as the landmark, and “first of”, which follows.

  — Jean Marie Stine, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by JM Stine. All Rights Reserved.

  Artwork Copyright © 2014 by Duncan Long. All Rights Reserved.

  Other fine classics can be found at FuturesPastEdition

  The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years

  by Don Wilcox

  Thirty generations would live and die before the Flashaway reached its destination. Could the one man who was to live on keep them to their purpose? — Original magazine blurb

  They gave us
a gala send-off, the kind that keeps your heart bobbing up at your tonsils. “It’s a long, long way to the Milky Way!” the voices sang out. The band thundered the chorus over and over. The golden trumpaphones blasted our eardrums wide open. Thousands of people clapped their hands in time.

  There were thirty-three of us—that is, there was supposed to be. As it turned out, there were thirty-five.

  We were a dazzling parade of red, white and blue uniforms. We marched up the gangplank by couples, every couple a man and wife, every couple young and strong, for the selection had been rigid.

  Captain Sperry and his wife and I—I being the—odd man—brought up the rear. Reporters and cameramen swarmed at our heels. The microphones stopped us. The band and the crowd hushed.

  “This is Captain Sperry telling you good-by,” the amplified voice boomed. “In behalf of the thirty-three, I thank you for your grand farewell. We’ll remember this hour as our last contact with our beloved Earth.”

  The crowd held its breath. The mighty import of our mission struck through every heart.

  “We go forth into space to live—and to die,” the captain said gravely. “But our children’s children, born in space and reared in the light of our vision, will carry on our great purpose. And in centuries to come, your children’s children may set forth for the Robinello planets, knowing that you will find an American colony already planted there.”

  The captain gestured good-by and the multitude responded with a thunderous cheer. Nothing so daring as a six-century nonstop flight had ever been undertaken before.