Blog Archives

There wasn’t anything all that special in Astounding Oct. 1949’s letters section, and since the letters haven’t caught up to where I’ve actually read yet, it’s hard to glean much from them. Typical mixed bag of “It’s great” and “It’s terrible”, though I’ve noticed that Lensman seems to be a really love-it-or-hate-it series, even in […]

The Finan-Seer by E. L. Locke appeared in the October 1949 issue of Astounding. It is his only short story (Locke was primarily an essayist for the magazine), the story is something of a follow-up of his essay on cybernetics in the previous issue. This may have been the Astounding story that has defeated me. […]

Cold War, by Kris Neville, appeared in the October 1949 issue of Astounding. It can be read at Archive.org here. A President has a conversation! A hard-nosed journalist is briefly introduced and just as quickly dispatched! The dark secret the conversation was about and the journalist was killed for is revealed in another conversation! Cold […]

Cirsova Publishing has teamed up with Little Rocket Publications on the eve of the 35th anniversary of Michael Tierney’s Wild Stars® to publish a special edition of Wild Stars III: Time Warmageddon. Faster-than-light scouts are arriving at distant suns to discover that they have been “replaced” by white dwarfs and their planets have gone missing… […]

Chance Remarks, by J.J. Coupling, and The Great Floods, by L. Sprague de Camp, were the featured essays in the October 1949 issue of Astounding. They can be read here at Archive.org. I probably won’t normally cover the essays in Astounding, but there are a few things I wanted to spotlight. The first essay in […]

Have you heard the one about how readers don’t cross genres, and so authors should pick one and stick to it if they want a large readership?  Apparently, neither has Robert Kroese, because his Dream of the Iron Dragon breaks every rule in the modern playbook, and always to good effect. The time-travel subgenre of […]

The Automagic Horse by L. Ron Hubbard appeared in the October 1949 issue of Astounding. It can be read here at Archive.org. It figures that the first really good story I’d read in Campbell-era Astounding would be by L. Ron Hubbard. Maybe not good enough start a religion around the guy and give him all […]

Time Heals by Poul Anderson appeared in the October 1949 issue of Astounding. It can be read here at Archive.org. I know what I said about Poul Anderson stories, but I would be remiss if I did not thoroughly review issues of Astounding to give as complete a picture (snapshot, really) of the publication. Time […]

Production Test by Raymond F Jones appeared in the October 1949 issue of Astounding. It can be read here at Archive.org. While I was excited to see a Raymond F. Jones story in this issue, Production Test was something of a let-down. Unlike his noir thriller, The Martian Circe, or his raygun epic The Jewels […]

The Aristocrat by Chan Davis appeared in the October 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It can be read here at Archive.org. My next issue of Astounding begins promisingly enough with Chan Davis’ The Aristocrat. While it certainly falls into the category of “thinky stories,” this one manages to strike a balance between the actions […]