by John Boston

The March 1971 Amazing leads off with the first installment of Ursula K. Le Guin’s new novel, The Lathe of Heaven, which of course gets top billing—and it’s a coup!  (Nurse, the slapstick, please.) You would think that the instantly near-revered winner of the Hugo Award for her previous novel The Left Hand of Darkness would command the more elevated pages of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or at least those of the fading Galaxy. 

Unfortunately the cover does not reflect any such refined sensibility as Le Guin’s; it’s another generic one by John Pederson, Jr., featuring a guy (or maybe an alien) in space suit on a barren planet or satellite, leaning on what looks like a gun, unless it’s a stick vacuum cleaner.

by John Pederson, Jr.

This month’s editorial recounts the somewhat tortuous path to publication of Dick Lupoff’s groundbreaking comics history book, All in Color for a Dime, to which White contributed, then segues to an account of his unpleasant experience as a guest on a radio program with a gossipy and airheaded mistress of ceremonies with crude misconceptions about science fiction. 

And speaking of unpleasant experiences: in last November’s issue, Barry N. Malzberg’s article “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” recounted his encounter with Dianetics’s successor Scientology.  Apparently the editor was contacted by Scientology representatives (details a little murky), and as a result this issue contains “What Is Scientology,” by the Rev. Robert N. Thomas, Deputy Guardian for the U.S. Churches of Scientology.  I didn’t manage to finish it (not that I tried very hard) and will not comment on it.  The editor says that this item “is not a dispassionate survey or evaluation of Scientology. It was written in rebuttal to Malzberg and is designed to state the Scientologists’ own case as persuasively as it might.” He adds that its publication is not an endorsement of Scientology, that it is published “largely in the interests of fair play,” and that he hopes it will close the Pandora’s Box Malzberg’s article inadvertently opened.

But there’s more: a note from Malzberg himself states that he was contacted by an attorney who accused Malzberg of libelling an interviewer who appeared in a film shown at the Scientology center.  He says: “I wish to put the following on the record: it was not my intention in this article to make any comment or inference on the character of this alleged interviewer, who I do not know and have never met. The article was a self-investigation written within the context of an encounter with modern Scientology. It was autobiographical in intention and execution and I had hoped that the context of this article would have made that clear.” It’s a fair inference that the editor received an equally menacing communication from the notoriously litigious Scientology organization, and that’s why White has given over nine pages of his magazine to this turgid lump of propaganda.

And that is no doubt why the book review column is missing again this month, to my continued annoyance, along with the fanzine review column.  But the letter column “Or So You Say” survived the Scientology onslaught, with the usual mix of the interesting and the tiresome.  With the James Blish/Ted White feud put to bed last issue, now we have Sam Moskowitz tediously disputing Richard Lupoff’s review of his book Under the Moons of Mars and claiming Lupoff is biased because Moskowitz has discredited his theories about Edgar Rice Burroughs’s work.  Lupoff replies, less bombastically. 

Robert A.W. Lowndes, former editor of SF mags and famous for making something out of almost nothing in the way of budget, recounts James Blish’s acerbic comments on the dumbing down of popular taste. There’s yet more about Dr. Fredric Wertham, who attacked comic books in The Seduction of the Innocent: it seems this book contained a picture portraying a man’s shoulders with a detail that, if sufficiently enlarged, sort of resembles a woman’s crotch.  Unfortunately the editor merely tells but does not show us this wonder.  And there’s more on Dianetics, parent of Scientology; but enough of that. 

A reader accuses Bob Shaw of plagiarism of two earlier short stories in his recent serial One Million Tomorrows, based on having read its first installment. Editor White says he hasn’t read the stories, but “Ideas are a dime a dozen in this field; there's not one which hasn't been used many times before and by many writers, often without knowledge of each other.” He also chides the writer for making the accusation based on only half the story.  Another reader wants to know why the new cover logo looks so much like Analog’s.  White responds that it “was designed to fit approximately the same space as the old.  It was designed to be modern, sans-serif, and attractive. Esthetically, that demanded lower-case letters (perhaps you remember our uppercase logo of the fifties?).” And they wanted something that looked good and those design choices inexorably yielded something a bit like Analog's "extremely well-designed package.”

Continue reading [February 12, 1971] Billing and Couping (March 1971 Amazing) →