Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog

Reading and Travel

In the summer of 2007, I traveled to Europe for a month and I brought with me, as entertainment for the flight, the recent James Bond hit Casino Royale. I spent my first few days in Europe in Venice, and as I walked about St. Mark’s Square, I was momentarily taken aback by its familiarity. Then I realized I had just seen this place in the James Bond film. How cool it was to actually be in the same city!

One of the joys of fiction is visiting places I’ve never been. I’ve wandered through the Library of Trantor at the center of the Galactic Empire1. I’ve watched an old man wrestle with a fish off the coast of Cuba2. I’ve sat in shady backrooms of the Tweed machine in 19th century Manhattan3. I’ve been to Manhattan, of course, but never to 19th century Manhattan.

But much as I discovered with St. Mark’s square, there is also a joy of encountering in a work of fiction a place that I have visited. This happened recently as I read Dan Brown’s latest suspense thriller, The Secret of Secrets.

I’m not a huge Dan Brown fan, but I’ll admit to enjoying The Da Vinci Code when it first came out, attracted by the words “Da Vinci” and “Code.” Brown is a kind of modern-day pulp writer—and as one who loves pulp science fiction from the late 1930s and 1940s, I don’t mean this as an insult. His writing is jagged and primary colors, but his stories can pull me in. What pulled me in about this one particularly was that it was set in Prague, and I spent several days in Prague in the summer of 2024.

It was fun to see Robert Langdon race through the various places I’d been in the city: walking across the Charles Bridge; strolling past the Fred and Ginger buildings; watching the clock chime in the old town square; looking over the city from the parapets of Prague Castle. It reminded me that as much as fiction can take you places you’ve never been before, there is no substitute for actually being there. I would have visualized scenes much differently had I not been to the city myself, and that may have changed my perception of the book.

The “Fred and Ginger” buildings, Prague.

Ultimately, I found Brown’s story intriguing—for the first half of the book. After that, I thought it got a little silly. But I kept reading mainly because the story was also a travelogue through Prague, and it was a pleasant reminder of my time in that ancient capital.

Mostly in Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov. ︎In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea ︎In Pete Hamill’s wonderful Forever . ︎

Emerson and His Notebooks

I have been reading Robert D. Richardson’s 1995 biography Emerson: The Mind On Fire. I find myself more fascinated by Emerson’s use of notebooks than by his actual writing or transcendentalism. Halfway through the biography, it seems to me that Emerson thought through his notebooks. By the end of his life, he’d filled hundreds of them. It was Emerson who asked a young Henry David Thoreau, “Do you keep a journal?” setting Thoreau down a path that would lead to his famous journals.

I’ve written before of my fascination with journals and diaries and notebooks. That fascination has, over the years, manifested itself in attempts to reproduce the use of journals and notebooks in digital form: first with Evernote, and later with Obsidian. These are fun experiments, but ultimately, for me, they are failed experiments. All of the exciting features that digital tools bring (linking, searching, etc.) never seem to live up to the value I get from notebooks, from paper. I’ve given this a lot of thought and one conclusion I’ve arrived at is that possibly this is a bridge too far across the digital divide. I grew up writing everything down: letters, schoolwork, early diaries and journals. It wasn’t until college that I began to use a computer for writing, and then, initially, it was not for notes but for final drafts of papers and essays. Like Emerson, I think better on paper. And yet, the “paper” always seems more cumbersome than its digital counterpart. This makes the digital world appealing, and accounts for my many experiments.

It seems odd to me that a number of seemingly practical skills were, for the most part, left out of my education. With one exception—a fantastic 7th grade science teacher—I was never taught how to take notes, either in a classroom lecture or from my reading. I was never taught how to do research: that is, I was never taught the process of going about research, the dos and don’ts. No one ever told me to go to primary sources wherever possible. No one told me how to look for what I needed. I was never taught to write a journal. These seem to me to be practical skills, but I had to figure them out on my own.

In Emerson’s time, things were different. As Richardson writes,

One thing he had learned in college was how to keep journals. Beginning in 1819, when he was a sophomore, Emerson began keeping a college theme notebook as well as a list of books he had read1. A third notebook, begun for drafts of his college essays on Socrates, turned into a notebook for poetry. A fourth, begun in 1820 for notes in a lecture course… grew into a general notebook for drafts of essays and poems. Also in 1820 he began a series of notebooks, each called “Universe,” each with a number, which were commonplace books full of quotations from his reading.

Emerson learned this in college and it seems to me that these journals and notebooks became his primary tool for thinking. Much later in the biography, as Emerson is starting to write his Essays, Richardson notes how Emerson had tried to be systematic about his journals from the start. He writes,

Emerson’s journals were now numerous. There were perhaps as many as a hundred by 1839, and just finding specific entries in the shelves of his notebooks was a problem that increased with time. He made an index of each journal’s contents in the back of it. By 1838 he began making lists of topics, entering under each topic a list of passages that might apply, giving location symbols and page numbers by which he could locate each passage. By 1843 he had a separate notebook with a topic at the head of each page and for each topic dozens of one-sentence references to passages in the journal. By 1847 he had a 400-page master index of topics, each followed by scores, even by hundreds of short quotes and location symbols.

Richardson goes on to make an important point:

These indexes themselves… represent many months and perhaps years of work all by themselves.

But that work was also learning. Emerson wasn’t just using the notebooks to organize his thought, cull what he had captured to find the best material. And in doing so, he learned the material better and better as he went along. This is something that never worked well for me in my attempts at digital notes and notebooks. The ease of search, the linking of notes made it too easy in some regards. The tools did all of the work and I did almost none, the reverse of Emerson’s situation.

There has always been, for me, a lure to technology, a promise of something better through it. The truth, in my experience, has been something less than the promise. I started my Going Paperless experiment because, throughout the second half of the 1990s, I’d been reading about this elusive paperless office, but had never seen one in practice. Was it possible? I wondered. For some people, perhaps, but growing up, as I did, on paper, so to speak, I found that the vision and the reality rapidly came into conflict.

In one of my favorite of Isaac Asimov’s essays, “The Ancient and the Ultimate2,” Asimov wrote about the evolution of books. He predicted how they would become electronic, how they would allow us to carry entire libraries with us. They would need a power source but over time that too would be improved. They would grow smaller and more compact. They would remember exactly where you left off reading. The end result was—the very paper books that we have today. I feel the same way about notebooks. They can grow, evolve, morph into a digital form, but the ultimate, to me, seems to be on paper.

Emerson’s model is interesting to me because it worked for him. He was systematic. He thought on paper. I suspect that this was not uncommon generally in his time, but that he was uncommon specifically.

My kids don’t have notebooks the way I had them in school. They have laptops and iPads. Their “notebooks” are Google Docs and other digital forms. They’ve grown up this way, but I wonder if it impacts the way we think: on paper versus on a keyboard or tablet? And I don’t see anyone teaching them how to take notes, or how to do research, or how to keep a journal. The medium for journaling has morphed from the long-form, handwritten journal to the quick Instagram or Snapchat post. Notes, journals, diaries have been a source of historical context and value for thousands of years. It seems a bit of a shame to see that fading away into the digital event horizon.

At least I started keeping a list of books I’d read! ︎The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1973. ︎

My Ideal Library

I am currently in the process of taking inventory of the books in my library. I’ve started with the physical books and so far I’d put the estimate somewhere between 1,200-1,400. I know that I have more than 1,700 audiobooks on top of that. And another 500 or so e-books. Call it 3,600 books all told. The physical books are dearest to me. The audiobooks get backed up locally “just in case,” but I don’t backup the e-books because I don’t care enough about them. I rarely buy e-books these days.

In my journal, I clip pictures of other people’s libraries and offices that appear in magazines. (I have a double-spread from a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine on Cormac McCarthy’s library.) I see these libraries with ten times the books I have in mine, and I’m envious.

Yet sometimes, early in the morning when I come into my office/library before my morning walk, I sit for a moment, surrounded by a library that I’ve built up over most of my lifetime, and I am grateful. Walking into my office is like walking into a bookstore tailored to just my taste in books. It is my ideal library.

A Saturday To-Do List

Well, my desk is a mess and maybe I’ll put it into some order today. I have far too many books I want to read, all of them RIGHT NOW and on a wide variety of subjects. I want to re-learn science, not how it was taught in school, but with a historical backbone to it. But having just finished Joe Posnanski’s The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, I want to learn magic and some of its history. I want to produce an inventory and card catalog of all of my books. I want to clean out–and get rid of–the filing cabinet in my office. There is a backlog of magazine articles I want to read. I want to get a new interactive version of my reading list up on the blog. I want to complete my Vacation in the Golden Age. And this is all just from the top of my head. I need to pick something–anything–and start with that. Well, my desk is a mess and maybe I’ll put it into some order today.

My Favorite Field Notes Notebook

It recently occurred to me that I have been using and collecting Field Notes notebooks for more than a decade now. My first notebook dates from June 2015, which means I’ve been using these notebooks longer than our youngest daughter has been alive1. In that time, I’ve collected a few hundred notebooks, thanks in part to the Field Notes quarterly subscription I’ve had for much of this time. As I use the different notebooks, I’ve found that I like some more than others.

My favorite of all of the Field Notes notebooks I’ve used is their Heavy Duty notebook. It is my preferred notebook to carry around with me, and it is the one that I have ordered more of than any other. The notebook was introduced in the summer of 2020 and I’ve filled probably half a dozen of them now.

These are durable, spiral-bound notebooks, bound at the top rather than the left side like most of their traditional notebooks are. They have a heavy cardboard cover and backing, and thicker paper. One side of the paper is lined and the other side is a grid. There are also 80 pages in this notebook, almost twice as many as are typically included in a Field Notes notebook.

From a practical standpoint, I find it easier to pull this notebook from my pocket and flip it open and start scribbling. I use both sides of the page so that when I hold the notebook open, all of the scribbles are in the same direction.

A typical page from my current Heavy Duty notebook.

These days, I use these notebooks much the same way that I always have, capturing thoughts out in the wild, scribbling lists, notes from reading, names of waiters at restaurants. In addition, I’ve found that I’ve also started jotting observations and other ideas that I normally would reserve for digital notes. So these notebooks have become truly a set of Field Notes for me, and flipping through one gives me a good picture of what I was doing and thinking on any given day.

Every now and then, I’ll order a few more of the Heavy Duty notebooks, even though I have a variety of notebooks to choose from, because I really enjoy using the Heavy Duty notebooks, and I want to make sure I have a decent supply in case Field Notes decides to stop making them.

I used to use a Pilot G-2 0.7 pen to write in my Field Notes notebooks, but with the Heavy Duty notebooks, I’ve been using a Tombow MONO drawing pen 01, which I buy in 12-packs.

I frequently give Field Notes notebooks as little gifts, but I selfishly hold back my Heavy Duty notebooks. I like them that much.

Indeed, I have a notebook in which I recorded all of the details of her birth from heading to the hospital to bringing her home a few days later. ︎

Cormac McCarthy’s Library

The September / October issue of Smithsonian Magazine has a fantastic article by Richard Grant1 on Cormac McCarthy’s library. Over the years, I’ve read just three of McCarthy’s books: No Country for Old Men in 2018, and more recently the dual novel / novella The Passenger and Stella Maris, both of which were among my best reads of 2023.

I’m a sucker for libraries, and I love to read about the personal libraries of other people. Grant’s article was all about McCarthy’s library, two years after his death. That library contains an estimated 20,000 books2!

Some people collect books to preserve them in pristine condition, elevating their value. With few exceptions, I don’t do that, and it turns out, McCarthy is a kindred spirit:

His books, many of which are annotated with margin comments, promise to reveal far more about this elusive literary giant than the few cagey interviews he gave when he was alive.

I am also fascinated by polymaths, and according to Grant,

McCarthy was a genius-level intellectual polymath with an insatiable curiosity.

If I could go back in time to when I was 6 or 7 years old and adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, instead of saying “astronomer,” I would say “genius-level intellectual polymath with an insatiable curiosity.” Maybe it would have focused me more.

McCarthy’s library is eclectic, much like my own, and his interests spanned over everything. “‘Seventy-five titles by or about Wittgenstein’,” writes Grant, “‘And most of them are annotated, meaning Cormac read them closely.'”

Later in the article, Grant notes:

Then I learned he had an eidetic memory and could remember nearly everything he had read or heard, including the lyrics to thousands of songs.

If I could go back in time to when I was 6 or 7 years old and adults would ask me what superpower I would want, I’d say an eidetic memory. I’ve known only one person who I was almost certain had an eidetic memory, and it was impressive!

There were other similarities I saw in the article:

McCarthy often had a pencil when he was reading and would make tiny vertical marks next to sentences that interested him and add comments in the margins in small print handwriting.

Or,

He never left the house without a book.

One place where we differed was in our opinions of Moby Dick. According to McCarthy’s brother, it was Cormac McCarthy’s favorite book. I enjoyed it, but saw it mostly as a travelogue.

His library was largely in disarray, but the sheer size and variety of it made my mouth water as I read the article. I sat in my reading chair, surrounded by more than a thousand of my own books, thinking, Gee, I wish I had a library of my own!

For book lovers, and includes fantastic photos of McCarthy’s library by Wayne Martin Berger. This is a great piece and I highly recommend it.

Grant is probably my favorite feature writer for the magazine. In a little squib about him for the article, it mentions that he is working on a book about McCarthy. ︎I’m in the process of updating the catalog of my own library, which contains considerably fewer than 20,000 volumes. ︎

The Inimitable David McCullough

Sometimes, I need a breath of fresh air. Back in February, I discovered that one of my favorite writers, the late David McCullough, was coming out with a new book, edited by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson. The book, History Matters, came out today and I began listening to it with delight on my morning walk.

The book is a collection of unpublished essays, speeches, and miscellany from McCullough’s paper. His words are a breath of fresh air in these trying times. I’ll have more to say about the book when I finish it, but I wanted to alert readers who happen to be fans of McCullough that this book was now available.

And bonus: if you get the audiobook edition, there is at least one speech which was recorded and you can hear McCullough’s voice (the voice that narrated Ken Burns’ The Civil War) once more.

McCulloughs words put me in a good mood. They are, as he was, both realistic about the short-term future, but optimistic about the long-term. It is a refreshing tone, and one that I greatly admire.

The Orbital Mechanics of Reading

There are, from time to time, books I attempt to read that I am simply not ready for. They seem interesting, I start them, but I don’t make it very far. Years later I might come back to them, and find that I am ready, and I read the book with joy and delight that wasn’t evident on that early attempt. What gives? There are other times when my mind seeks out everything, when an embarras de richesses of books sit stacked on my desk and it seems I am bombarded on all sides by books that I desperately want to read and find myself paralyzed by the pull of so many different interests, a kind of Lagrange point in reading space. What gives?

I have frequently pointed to the butterfly effect of reading as a guide to what I choose to read next, but recently, while contemplating why it sometimes seems I am not ready to read a book, I have come up with a possibly better explanation. I call it the orbital mechanics of reading.

Gravity Well and Escape Velocity

Reading takes effort. Unlike film and television, which is passive, where the sound and images are provided for the audience, reading is active: a reader is presented with words and must decode and interpret those words to create the scenes, the connections, and the understanding all inside their head. There is a kind of literacy gravity well that exists which takes energy and effort to escape.

I have only the vaguest memories of learning to read1, but one thing I do remember was thinking that it was hard, and that as I stuttered along trying to make out the words, it seemed as if I’d never be fluent, never get to the point where I could soar on my own.

The earliest rockets didn’t escape Earth’s gravity but instead made parabolic arcs to the edge of space and then fell inevitably back to the Earth. It takes enormous amounts of energy to break free of Earth’s gravity well and reach escape velocity. This is true for reading as well. Enormous effort goes into decoding and parsing out the strange characters on the page. It takes more effort to allow those characters to create images in one’s head. And it takes stamina to sustain the flight. My early efforts found me making similar parabolas, up, up, attempting to read a book, only to tire or grow frustrated and fall back to the Earth.

But like with any exercise, you keep at it, build your strength, and one day, you find yourself reading a book with seemingly no effort. The words on the page have vanished, the images in your head are clear. You are floating above the world. You are reading. You are ready to begin exploring.

The Orbital Mechanics of Reading

Books, for me, have an attraction that is analogous to gravity. I escaped the initial gravity well of learning to reading when I was young. Imagine my trajectory as a curve moving out from that point in spacetime. Early on I encountered an astronomy book that had an outsized influence on me. Its attraction was strong. Its gravity altered my orbit slightly, pulling me in one direction, perturbing the initially smooth curve of my journey.

In junior high school, I encountered a dense gravitational source, a galaxy of science fiction and fantasy novels2 that pulled me in. Over the course of many years, I whisked through the galaxy, one book slingshotting me on to the next. Yet eventually, I emerged from that particular gravitational source, slung out to discover what else was out there.

These dense gravitational sources, subject areas like science, history, or even particular authors or series, make up a lumpiness to the geometry of reading space. They explain the major perturbations of my trajectory. But what about those near misses, the ones that I try out, don’t fit, but seem to fit perfectly years or decades later?

The geometry of reading space, like that of spacetime, is four-dimensional. What I think happens on those near misses is that our orbits don’t actually intersect enough for the gravity of the book to take hold. I am moving too fast, or too far from the subject of the book for it to hold me. I think, for instance, of E. O. Wilson’s Consilience as one such example. A friend recommended it to me in the late 1990s, but it didn’t stick. I was too fast or too far from its subject matter at that time. My journey continued and my trajectory was shifted this way and that by my reading, until, two decades later, I reencountered Consilience, and this time, our orbits intersected perfectly. I was better equipped from my two decades of reading to read the book than I had been two decades earlier.

At other times (now is one such time) it is as if I am passing through a field of high-density subjects that push and prod me from my path, making it hard to stick with any one, because I want to read all of them. It explains well why I am slowly making my way through a re-read of Carl Sagan’s Broca’s Brain, Martin Gardner’s Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, and Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. All have dense gravity fields, all have a pull on me, and there are even more dense fields up ahead. At times like these, it is hard to focus on any one book because I want to read all of them.

Charting the Heavens

My trajectory is easy to chart, thanks to the list I’ve kept of books I’ve read since 1996. In one possible model, one could imagine plotting time on the x-axis, and subject matter on the y-axis. From that, one could see graphically not only the curve of my trajectory over the decades, but identify the gravitational sources that pulled and prodded my reading this way and that. One might even be able to model the relative strength of those gravitational sources based on how long they kept me in their thrall.

Charting the Future Trajectory

Here, at last, my analogy with orbital mechanics breaks down. Where astronomers can clearly predict the orbit of a comet or planet for centuries into the future, the reading horizon in front of me is necessarily short. One gravity well might grasp me for a book or two before I slingshot out toward something else. A book that seems super-interesting might fall flat. A topic for which I never gave much thought might have the density of a white dwarf and suck me in for months. It is from this unpredictable nature of where my reading will take me next that I initially came up with the butterfly effect of reading.

My reading, it turns out, is more directed than just random flaps of a butterfly’s wings. There was an initial launch, a long, slow cruise while my abilities improved. I then began encountering asteroids, planets, solar systems, and entire galaxies of knowledge that pushed and pulled my course, slowing me at times, speeding me up at others.

This also explains why, when I talk about what I plan to read next, it is just that: aspirational. I cannot see the as-yet invisible gravity wells that lie ahead of me and shift me away from that plan to something even more interesting.

And isn’t that what makes reading and learning the amazing journey that it is?

I remember the joy I felt sounding out the word “L-O-V-E” the first time and realizing thatE was silent. ︎I was all over the map here. A lot of Piers Anthony, introduced to his novels by my junior high school friend Noah. There was also Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent books. At this point in my journey, I was finishing maybe half of the books that I started. ︎

Vacation in the Golden Age, Episode 41: November 1942

Note: I’m cleaning up the blog for its 20th anniversary. This episode of my Vacation in the Golden Age only appeared on Medium, at a time when I was experimenting with that platform. I am moving here where it belongs.

I wrote Episode 40 of this Vacation in the Golden Age in October 2012. Four years later, I’m back on Vacation, with Episode 41. Four years is a long hiatus, and a lot has happened in that time, but I’ve wanted to get back to this Vacation and do my best to see it through, and this new installment is the beginning of that effort.

We left off in the fall of 1942, with the United States involvement in the Second World War nearly a year old. John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding had been complaining about all of the writers and artists he’d been losing to the war effort: Heinlein (and Heinlein’s pseudonymous Anson MacDonald), A. E. van Vogt, Huber Rogers, and many others. And yet, the stories in Astounding continued to flow from writers, both in and out of the war.

The cover for the November 1942 issue, by Modest Stein, depicts an early scene from Cleve Cartmill’s lead story in the issue, “Overthrow.” I wasn’t impressed by the cover, having been spoiled by countless beautiful Rogers covers. Campbell bills “Overthrow” as a novel. Indeed, two novels appear in this issue, as well as 4 short stories, and two science articles.

Editorial: “Sneak Invasion”

Campbell’s editorial this month centers around how new technologies tend to sneak into our daily lives, almost unnoticed. At the time I first read this editorial, Trevor Quachri, current editor of Analog asked me if I’d write a guest editorial for the magazine on a short deadline. This would be my second guest editorial for Analog (my first, “Gem Hunting” appeared in the June 2013 issue), and I was flattered that Trevor felt I could deliver on short notice. I took up Campbell’s editorial and wrote a response to it, which I called, “Sneak Invasion, Revisited.” You can find it in the March 2015 issue of Analog.

In his editorial, Campbell writes,

The new techniques filter into normal life so smoothly, in such small steps, with so much forewarning, that they never surprise us. No company manufactures new devices until they’ve prepared the public to receive them and use them.

In my response, I wondered how a science fiction writer from 1942 might respond, if pulled through a time into 2015, perhaps by a lightning bolt, a la L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall. Would our present be a recognizable future to that science fiction writer? Campbell was largely right in this case: when you live through the changes, you are well-prepared for them, and they sneak in. But if you skipped over those incremental changes, how different would things seem? And, of course, how will these sneak invasions alter our own future, what will the world look like, say 70 years from now, and will our kids even notice the changes?

“Overthrow” by Cleve Cartmill

Blurb: His idea was to prove he’d been falsely accused, to prove he was an honest, sincere upholder of the government. Somewhere, things got confused — and he did what he set to to prove he wasn’t doing!

“Overthrow” is the first of two complete novels that appear in this issue of Astounding. So far as I can tell, it is the first time that two novels have appeared in a single issue in the course of my Vacation. We’ve seen one other complete-in-an-issue novel, and that was Robert Heinlein’s “Waldo” (August 1942, Episode 38)

Cartmill’s latest is a fairly typical class-struggle story that we’ve seen before in this vacation (like de Camp’s “The Stolen Dormouse” for instance). Cartmill’s writes in classical Golden Age style, with lots of adjectives thrown in for good measure:

Captain Jorgeson fixed the screen with a bright-blue glance. His great hands knotted. His face flamed as red as his hair.

What makes the story a little less typical is that the struggle takes place through the efforts of Josh Cameron to demonstrate that he has been falsely accused of rebelling against the current order. In order to prove his innocence, however, he is forced to rebel.

Cartmill does a pretty good job of describing a future society, without being overly preachy about its structure, the way Heinlein can sometimes be, but the vision of that future society is fairly immature, with segments of society coalescing into “centers” of various industries, none of which seem to entirely trust the other, but completely dependent on one another for survival.

And then there are the outlaws, the people living outside these social structures. Robert Silverberg would do this far more successfully in his novel The World Inside, decades later.

Ultimately, I thought the story was overlong for its topic. There were interesting subplots, like the “contraterrene screen” that the outlaws used to help balance the power against the centers. This was a kind of early nuclear detente before the advent of atomic weapons. But really, the story could be summarized by a single line of dialog that takes place when the outlaws are trying to convince Cameron of their position. Cameron cannot seem to get it through his head that the centers are anything but the one true way of life, and that all the outlaws are looking for is a ways back in. They counter with a simple question:

Has it ever occurred to you that they may not want to go back?

This, coupled with the way that Cameron is forced to rebel in order to prove his innocence, redeem an otherwise overly long story on social structure.

“Four Little Ships” by Murray Leinster

Blurb: An old favorite of science-fiction is back again with an ingenious tale of little ships and special gadgets — ordinary sorts of gadgets — and a naval victory that didn’t need battleships or planes or air carriers. Just — ingenuity and planning, plus four little ships.

Part of the delight of this Vacation is discovering hidden gems. I wrote about this in a guest editorial title “Gem Hunting” in the June 2013 Analog. There are gems that are well-known, among them, in my opinion, L. Ron Hubbard’s “Final Blackout.” But it is the lesser-known gems that I discover along the way that make this Vacation a pure joy. “Rust” by Joseph E. Kelleam is one example. And, much to my surprise, “Four Little Ships” by Murray Leinster (a.k.a. Will Jenkins) is another.

The story is unlike anything I’ve read in Astounding. Like many of the gems I’ve encountered, it is barely even science fiction. Instead, it is the story of four minesweepers during a war. Or, as the story opens:

This is the story of four little ships in wartime.

The story itself reads like something you might find in James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, where the ships are the characters in the story. The little mine sweepers, coming out ahead of battle to clear the waters for their big brothers. The Heron, Tanager, Gannet, and Thruh work the seas as battles rage.

Leinster’s writing is anything but purplish in this piece, and despite the story being completely narrative, it carried me away with its description, for instance,

Down below the horizon, momentary flashes looked somewhat like pale heat lightning. But it was air bombs — heavy ones. The mine sweepers paid no attention. They were busy. From time to time the heavy, booming sound of a detonating mine arose form the Challoner Bank. Then buzzing began overhead. A flare blossomed in the sky. The mine sweepers plowed on their way. The buzzing grew louder and became roars. Streaks of colored sparks darted up from one mine-sweeper and then from another. Sharp, cracking detonations told of bombs dropped upon them as targets. They went on, firing their machine guns with complete futility.

The passage reminds me of Hemingway, and the tone carries through the entire short story. Days pass in paragraphs, Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday, and on, but the descriptions of what the four little ships see on their missions carry us on, beauty amid destruction:

The palms on the island let their fronds droop discouragedly. The surf boomed languidly on the beaches. The only activity anywhere was the planes, which buzzed continually above the island. Now and again one of them darted away toward Mahapa, and now and again another came back. But there was no gunfire of any sort. The enemy did not appear to attack Kaua. Nobody knew why.

Of course, it was the work of the four little ships. With their simple tools, they were out detecting and clearing mines, flummoxing enemy shipping, and while the technology was not described in any detail, it is what made the story science fiction — barely.

According to Murray Leinster: The Life and Works by Billee J. Stallings and Jo-an J. Evans, Leinster’s mystery technology in “Four Little Ships” may have hit a little close to home:

The military censors were also interested in the Leinster story “Four Little Ships” when it was published in Astounding Science-Fiction (November 1942). This story described a way of disrupting enemy shipping using underwater sound transmission, which was, coincidentally, under military development at the time.

I read “Four Little Ships” twice — it is short enough. And while the Kramer illustration for it is appallingly bad, it is definitely my favorite story of the issue.

“Minus Sign” by Will Stuart

Jack Williamson, in his Will Stewart guise, is back with another Seetee story, this one a novel-length space opera dealing with the strange effects of contraterrene matter — or what we today would call antimatter. The story continues the saga that began in “Collision Orbit” (July 1942, Episode 37) Compared to the writing in “Four Little Ships,” the story felt unusually pulpy for Williamson. I lost count of the number of ways in the first few pages he referred to the hero of the story, Rick Drake, as tanned. They included, “space-bronzed” (multiple times within a few sentences), “his tanned, powerful fingers.” Suffice it to say, we get it. He was tan!

That said, the story moved quickly, and was a fun read. Drake wants to go back to mining with his father, and solve the mystery of what appears to be a Seetee asteroid that blows up. Captain Anders tries to oppose him in this, and for a while, things get confused. Working with his father’s friend, Rob McGee, they race Anders to the asteroid to try and understand cryptic messages that have been received.

Ultimately, we discover that Seetee affects time in a strange way, and Drake and McGee actually travel back in time to make their claim on the Seetee rock.

There were interesting elements within the story. Williamson made valiant attempts at realistic science — setting aside the Seetee time-travel business. For instance in describing a space cruiser, he writes,

Two long spacial rifles, counterpoised in two opposite turret blisters so their recoils wouldn’t spin the ship, lay flat and ugly against the hull.

My main problem wasn’t the fault of Williamson at all. This was the second of two short novels in the issue. Not novelette, but novels, as listed in the table of contents. I think that was too much for a single issue of Astounding.

“Sand” by Colin Smith

Blurb: Mars is a desert world, a dry, rusted corpse of a planet. And deserts are always tricky things — but a world of shifting sand made trickier yet by shifty crooks —

Malcolm Jameson — in his Colin Keith disguise — provides us with a straight mystery set on Mars. “Sand” is the story of Special Investigator Billy Neville of the Interplanetary Police, and his attempt to help Martian authorities solve a series of diamond robberies taking place in the sand mines of Mars, and leaving behind a high body count.

The mystery itself is straight-forward, and perhaps even a little amateurish. It is framed as a locked-room mystery, with robberies taking place with no obvious way for the robbers to get into the mines, given how the mines are built, how the sands of Mars constantly shift, and the raging winds of Mars offering protection to the mines against unauthorized intrusion. As the local official explains,

What has us stumped is that all the robberies take place while the mine is submerged and yet no one ever enters through the trunk or leaves by it. How they get in and get away is what we want to find out.

Neville ultimately traces the villains to the company that constructed the mines themselves, creating a literal backdoor into the mine, one that faces into the wind, so that it would not be picked up during inspection. As I said, not a particularly strong mystery.

But I liked “Sand” because of the writing. This was not the typical pulpish story we still find in many of the Golden Age tales. The writing shows a maturity that Jameson has worked hard to gain over the years. It is different in tone from his “Bullard” stories, and he has clear control of what he is trying to do. The opening of the story illustrates this tone and control:

The grimmest joke on Mars is the daily weather forecast. You see it — if you can see anything — just as you leave the sky port at Ghengiz. It is engraved in inch-deep letters on a monolithic bloc of permalite, and even that unabradable stone is worn round on the corners from years of sand blasting. The standing prophecy says:

WEATHER FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW: Hot, dry, and windy, with sandstorms and shifting dunes.

It is a triumph of paradoxes, for it is not only a masterpiece of accuracy, but of understatement as well.

Jameson maintains this control throughout the story, and it makes for an interesting read, even if the mystery isn’t a strong one.

Article: “Ice King” by Malcolm Jameson

Blurb: Vulcan, God of Fire and volcanoes, isn’t the sort of being you’d ordinarily associate with the world’s worst — and coldest — weather. But he’s responsible — as Jameson shows.

We get a one-two punch of Jameson this Episode, first with his pseudonymous story “Sand,” and now with an article — his second in my Vacation. The article is on the subject of global climate, although it might not have been called such in 1942. In it Jameson takes us through the history of volcanic eruptions in human history, and how those eruptions seem to affect the weather in years afterward. It is a good article, and there are three things of particular interest.

First, the opening paragraph is one of those times in my Vacation where my knowledge of the future — or more aptly, the writers assessment of his present, diverge into different paths. Jameson writes,

It would be the height of irony if this coming winter Japan should annihilate Hitler and Nazidom. If it is done — and it may very well be — it will be done without intention or malice; even unwittingly. For by Japan is meant Japan, not its rulers, its armed might, or its people, but the island of Honshu itself — an inanimate thing of rock and soil.

Jameson goes on to point out that Asamayama has reported to have erupted, and if history is any judge, it could mean a cold winter for Europe — and more hardship for the German army. The rest of the article explains why this is so, but I find it most interesting that those winters didn’t pan out quite the way Jameson hoped in 1942.

Second, Jameson quotes a remarkably prescient observation of none other than Benjamin Franklin:

During several of the summers months of the year 1783, when the effects of the Sun’s rays to heat the Earth in these Northern regions should have been greatest, there existed a constant fog over all Europe and great part of North America.

Franklin lists the results of such “fog” on the climate and then goes on to postulate causes:

The cause of this universal fog is not yet ascertained. Whether it was adventitious to this Earth, and merely a smoke ball preceding from the consumption by fire of one of those great burning balls or globes which we happen to meet with in our course around the sun, and which are sometime seem to kindle and be destroyed in our atmosphere, and whose smoke might be attracted and retained by our Earth; or whether it was the vast quantity of smoke, long continuing to issue during the summer from Hecla, Iceland, and that other volcano which arose out of the sea near that island, which smoke might be spread by various winds over the northern part of the world, is yet uncertain.

Finally, Jameson, in providing the ultimate answer to the cause of the cold winter that follow volcanic eruptions — that of the volume of ash absorbing or reflecting sunlight — draws a distinction over which there is often still confusion today: weather vs. climate.

I enjoyed Jameson’s article, and I found it mildly ironic that both his short story in the issue, and his science article essential dealt in dust.

“The Genetic Pirates” by John Berryman

Blurb: A neat little yarn that proves the old saying “Figures don’t lie but liars figure” doesn’t always have to apply to human beings.

John Berryman has an amusing story this month about space pirates. A passenger vessel moving between Leo III and Leo IX is hailed by pirates seeking out some diplomatic documents. So long as instructions are followed, no one gets hurt. This isn’t the first time pirates have attacked ships on this run, however, and it piques the curiosity of one of the passengers, an alien named “Cash” Bowen, who happens to be a “detector calculator.” In other words, he designed the ships computers.

In a clever twist, it turns out that there really isn’t another ship. As Cash intimates during the course of the story,

No, the very idea of spaceships contacting with each other while riding the geodesics smells bad mathematically.

Instead, one of the pilots, and one of the passengers are the pirates. Through manipulations, they make it seem as if there is a ship out there, and collect the diplomatic pouch without incident — until Cash catches on.

The story is told in first person, and Cash Bowen had an interesting interior voice. It was clear from early-on that the story was meant to be humorous. The clever puzzle and the humor in the story combined to make it a fun read.

Article: “It’s a Tough Life” by Frank Belknap Long

Blurb: But some of the forms of live have developed toughness — and camouflage — to match. Frogs you can walk on without killing ‘em —

This months science article is not by Willy Ley or R. S. Richardson, but by Frank Belknap Long — the fiction writer, and horror writer. We’ve seen him once before in this Vacation, back in Episode 25, with his story, “Brown” (July 1941). But now, he’s got a science article, a humorous one, and one that in addition is a direct response to a 2-part science article we’ve seen before. As long writes,

For two years now I have been brooding over Sprague de Camp’s article, which was labeled: “ There Ain’t No Such .” Buttressed by an erudition surpassing anything I can hope to muster, De Camp made the wild life of Mars, Venus, and the great outer planets seem utterly prosaic by dishing up a few choice tidbits of sober natural history.

Long’s “complaint” is that de Camp’s article (November — December 1939, Episodes 5 and 6) makes it hard for science fiction writers to come up with unique aliens, because de Camp has shown just how diverse the animals on Earth really are. As he puts it,

Being a top-flight science-fiction writer himself, De Camp should have known better than to deprive his fellow scriveners of their bread and beer.

Not to be outdone, however, Brown has some of his own earth-bound creatures to add to the list. Arguing that the key factor is survival, he outlines several creatures, from the common freshwater eel (“five minutes in boiling water, and he’s still thinking about raising a family) to a frog, Trichobatrachus robust, that can flatten itself out at the bottom of bonds.

It is a fun article, made more fun by the tone Long takes, and by the clear pleasure he has in the friendly mocking of de Camp, who I can only assume, was a friend in turn, and took it in the spirit it was intended.

Book Reviews: Shells and Shooting by Willy Ley by Robert Heinlein

Robert Heinlein makes a brief appearance this issue, one not listed in the table of contents, to review a book on ordinance by Willy Ley. The book is entitled Shells and Shooting, and Heinlein gives it high praise, saying,

Mr. Ley probably knows as much about the history and development gunnery as any man alive, and his treatment of modern weapons is authoritative and meticulously accurate.

While I can’t speak to the book itself, not having read it, I have read several of Ley’s articles on weapons in this Vacation (“Space War”, Episode 2, “The Magic Bullet”, Episode 10, “Bombing is a Fine Art”, Episode 38, and “The Paris Gun”, Episode 40) and I have enjoyed them all. Moreover, I have learned more from them about weapons than from any other nonfiction on the subject that I have encountered.

“Not Only Dead Men” by A. E. van Vogt

Blurb: There are times when silence is so utterly vital that lives mean little, times when the fact men are being silent, even, must not be known. For such cases, there are ways which lead to silence other than death.

“Not Only Dead Men” puts an interesting spin on a typical van Vogt “beast” story. The story involves a whaling ship in the Bering Straight that discovers what it thinks is a submarine, but what turns out to be an alien spacecraft. A lizard-like creature sets out to sabotage the whaling ship, and the crew fights back.

Eventually, they learn of the way the alien ship got to Earth, and of the other creature, very whale-like indeed, that it was fighting when it crashed here. The whalers attempt to fight the creature, and in their victory, seal their doom. As Dorno, the alien lizard explains,

When important assistance has been rendered a Galactic citizen or official, no matter what the circumstances, it is morally necessary to the continuity of civilized conduct that other means be taken to prevent the tale from spreading —

Dead men tell no tales. But… not only dead men. This is why the crew of the whaler have been stolen away.

It wasn’t my favorite van Vogt by far, but Alva Rogers approved of it. In his Requiem for Astounding he wrote,

“Not Only Dead Men” by van Vogt, told of an American whaleship’s unexpected involvement in an interstellar war, how the Americans helped one side, and how they were subsequently rewarded. A very nice switch, by van Vogt, on his monster theme.

Probability Zero: Calling All Liars

I have a suspicion that, at this point, the Probability Zero pieces Campbell is publishing are not exactly the type he had in mind. They seem almost as if they are jokes, always with some punchline at the end. Flash fiction today has improved upon the style (although the ending still sometimes leave something to be desired).

Avenue of Escape by Hal Clement

Some soldiers wonder how their esteemed mess sergeant managed to escape from almost certain doom when he was trapped in his fox hole. His avenue of escape turned out to be based on an arithmetic gimmick involving the number of gunshots per minute, and the muzzle velocity of the bullets. Absolutely improbably, and yet perfectly logical. This one is probably the closest of the batch to what Campbell intended.

Eureka! by Malcolm Jameson

Perhaps the most important thing about Malcolm Jameson’s paradoxical “Eureka!” is that it marks his third appearance in this issue. I think that is a first for my Vacation. The story itself is about a universal solvent. It will dissolve anything. Including glass. Which makes one wonder about the container that holds it.

The Sleep That Slaughtered by Harry Warner, Jr.

Harry Warner, Jr.’s is a bit longer, and involves a man who discovers that he can do anything faster in his sleep. This is based on the premise that we can have what seems like a long dream in mere fractions of a second. So he learns to sleep with his eyes open and with the newspaper in front of him so that he can read the front page while he sleeps. He moves on to routine tasks, and ultimately enters an elevator to take him down one floor. The problem is that the elevator is air-tight and in his accelerated dream-state, he suffocates and dies.

The Green Sphere by Dennis Tucker

“The Green Sphere” in the story is over a mile in diameter and deadly after three days. To get if off the planet, they essentially build a massive pool cue through the earth and knock it off.

A Matter of Eclipses by P. Schyler Miller

Miller, who has been absent from the Vacation since April 1941, has a yarn in which Old Man Mulligan spins tall tales about times in which eclipses taking place on various planets (Mars, Jupiter, etc.) have saved his bacon and gotten him out of various scrapes.

Brass Tacks

In the first letter this month, James W. Thomas of Valley Falls, Rhode Island asks,

What is happening to Brass Tacks? If it deteriorates any more it will hit the low that did only once before in the history of the magazine. Does everyone agree with everyone else? Does no one feel in an argumentative mood?

He complains about the short shift the letters column has taken over the last several month. Campbell replies,

I guess too many readers are too busy making hardware for Hitler to write arguments to Astounding.

Still, after months of short letter columns, with just a handful of letters, we finally get our due. The Brass Tacks in the November issue is 8 pages of letter. That’s 14 columns and 10 letters (some long, and some short).

Harry Warner, Jr. has a letter in this issue in which he makes the following observation about Heinlein and MacDonald’s absence due to the war effort:

I believe I’ll miss MacDonald more than Heinlein: the former’s rambling plots had a freshness and novelty not to be found in Heinlein’s work. And I can’t think why.

Oh, the irony!

In an earlier Brass Tacks column, reader Earl C. Smith complained about excessive amounts of scientific explanations in stories. Campbell makes the following interesting observation in response to a Mr. Leonard Powsner who brings up a similar point:

If the author handles his material skillfully, he goes not need to take time out to explain his science — a practice Mr. Earl Smith objects to. It can be worked into the story without interruptions, as the top authors do. It takes immensely more skill, however.

I think Heinlein does a pretty good job of this, and it is what I try to do in my own stories. In my first Analog story, “Take One for the Road” (June 2011), I had one brief paragraph of “hard science” and it was to the best of my ability, built into the narrative of the story so as not to seem intrusive. I can’t say whether or not I was successful, as I’m a terrible judge of my own writing — but I tried, and Stan Schmidt did publish the story.

Another reader from Great Britain complains that there are too many war-related stories. And Campbell asks for comments back from his readers? More war stories? Or none?

I have the same thought each time I dive into the Brass Tacks: who were the people writing these letters? Some of them — like Harry Warner, and Cleve Cartmill, who also had a brief letter in the issue — were well-known fans and writers. Others were just fans who took the time to write in, in one instance, from South Africa. I’d be hard-pressed to imagine any are still alive today, and some almost certainly died in the War. But their passion for science fiction lives on in these pages.

Analytical Laboratory and My Ratings

You may or may not recall the fact that, for some reason, Campbell never published the AnLab results for the June 1942 issue of Astounding. Well, despite being nearly half a year late, we get the AnLab for both June and September 1942 in this issue. My ratings for those issues appear in parentheses.

AnLab Results for June 1942Bridle and Saddle by Isaac Asimov 1.55 (1)Proof by Hal Clement 3.40 (2)Heritage by Robert Abernathy 3.7 (10)On Pain of Death by Robert Williams 3.8 (3)My Name Is Legion by Lester del Rey 4.0 (4)AnLab Results for September 1942Nerves by Lester del Rey 1.00 (3)The Barrier by Anthony Boucher 1.81 (4)The Twonky by Lewis Padgett 3.5 (5)With Flaming Swords by Cleve Cartmill 3.8 (7)Pride by Malcolm Jameson 3.9 (1)

And here are my ratings for the current issue:

Four Little Ships by Murray LeinsterSand by Colin KeithMinus Sign by Will StewartThe Gentle Pirates by John BerrymanOverthrow by Cleve CartmillNot Only Dead Men by A. E. van Vogt

Possibly, this is the first time that van Vogt has taken last place in my rankings.

In Times To Come

Once again, Campbell bemoans that fact that many of his reliable authors are involved in the war effort with little time to write. He then goes on to talk about three new writers of “major promise” that have been developed, a statement that is a white lie. He names Padgett, Will Stewart, and Hal Clement as the three writers. Of course, Padgett is not new, it’s simply C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner in disguise. And Will Stewart, of course, is Jack Williamson. Hal Clement is legitimate in this case.

The rest of the In Times To Come section doesn’t mention any stories. Instead, Campbell talks about how he is running an “unofficial recruiting office” for the war effort,

I know a place where some young engineers, with engineering degrees and a little experience, a degree at least, are badly needed. The work being done is most naturally, decidedly, secret…. It’s a a chance to really serve your country in a way that will make your training… count for maximum results.

I thought, perhaps, he was referring to the Philadephia Navy Yard, where Heinlein, Asimov, and de Camp were, or would be working. But he doesn’t say. Instead, he encourages readers to write in if they are interested, and he will see to it that their letters reach official channels.

So, no coming attractions from Campbell. Fortunately, I happen to have the December 1942 Astounding right here next to me. The lead novelette is A. E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shop.” Also stories by Cleve Cartmill, Lewis Padgett, Ross Rocklynn, Frank Belknap Long, an multipart article by de Camp, and another Probability Zero column.

Science in the Shadow of Virginia Studies

At a recent back-to-school night, I was astonished to learn that science education takes a back seat to Virginia Studies in 4th grade. Part of the reason seems to be that 4th grade students take a standardized test on Virginia Studies, and there is much to pack in to prepare students for the test. I can’t understand why this is a priority over science1.

At a time when science is under attack and the scientific method is increasingly misunderstood, it seems that science education should be of the utmost importance. Fourth grade is a time when many students’ curiosity is blossoming—only to have to wade through a year of Virginia Studies.

Rather than sacrifice science, why not teach Virginia Studies through science. Virginia boasts one of very few Presidents who was also a scientist and naturalist: Thomas Jefferson2. Jefferson corresponded with many scientists of his day3. He wrote Notes on the State of Virginia, which provides both a natural history of the state and an entry point into its social history. It seems possible to weave these subjects together rather than displace science.

Back in 1962 a dinner was held at the White House for 49 U.S. Nobel Laureates. At that dinner, President Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Fourth grade students in Virginia dine alone at the table of science. They have no choice but to fend for themselves if they are interested in science. And given that Virginia Studies squeezes out classroom time for science, they must do this outside of the classroom.

As Carl Sagan once noted, science and technology shape much of modern life, yet few of our leaders have scientific training. That is why it is troubling to hear that 4th graders—just as their curiosity is blossoming—are asked to put science aside until 5th grade.

One irony in all of this is that there is a fourth grade field trip to Jamestown as a way of reinforcing Virginia history with a real place outside the walls of the school. This year, however, parents are being asked to contribute funds to support the trip because our town, in its infinite wisdom, cut funding for the trip. How much of a priority can Virginia Studies be when a town in Virginia cuts funding for a field trip to an important Virginia historical site during the year students are supposed to be learning Virginia history?

I don’t remember having “Rhode Island” studies in fourth grade. I do remember learning about the history of New England, and in particular, the Revolutionary War and the events leading up to it. These were emphasized by field trips to places like the Gilbert Stuart House4, Sturbridge Village5, and parts of Boston, where we walked the cobblestone streets past Paul Revere’s shop. And we still managed to get a full load of science, including a visit to the Boston Aquarium and the Museum of Science.

Virginia is just about average in science and math when compared to other states. Why is average acceptable? Why are Virginia’s leaders not asking how we can be better than average? Why are they not asking how Virginia can be an innovative leader in science and math education? Punting on science because students have to cram in facts about Virginia in order to pass a state test6 makes me think that the education system has given up.

ETA: It occurred to me after I posted this that an even better title would have been “Notes on the State of Virginia Science Education in the Fourth Grade.”

Well, the cynical part of me understands. State legislators like looking at those SOL scores and seeing that the patriotic students of Virginia public education know their state history. ︎Theodore Roosevelt was also something of a naturalist, but I would not call him a scientist. Benjamin Franklin was a scientist, but he was never president. ︎Reading Andrea Wulf’s wonderful book The Invention of Nature , I was amazed to learn that Jefferson not only corresponded with, but met the famous naturalist and polymath Alexander von Humboldt. ︎Where we were told by someone there that ghosts ran a vacuum cleaner upstairs a night. That was why we were not allowed upstairs. ︎I enjoyed this field trip so much that decades later, in 2015, we took our kids there. ︎I’m not going to get started on standardized testing here. I’ll never stop. ︎