Ted White (1938-) took over as editor of Amazing Science Fiction and Fantastic from Barry N. Malzberg in October, 1968. As the magazines were bi-monthly and Malzberg had already acquired stories for multiple later issues, White’s first issues appeared in 1969. He’d accepted the position on the condition that he phase out the reprints (not acquired by White) slowly over multiple years.¹ Apparently while White was not a fan of the New Wave movement, he “was all for more daring fiction exploring adult themes and saw no reason why these stories could not co-exist alongside more traditional stories.”² Thus, his two magazines attempted to appeal to a wide-range of readers.

By the early 1970s, White demonstrated growing interest in even “greater liberalization of science fiction, in line with what was happening to youth nationwide.” He saw SF as “a vehicle to push back on the barriers of the ‘establishment’, with no suppression of soft drugs, ‘healthy sex,’ or free expression.”³ His magazines included stories emphasizing future sex in all its forms” far more frequently than its competitors.⁴ As the pay rates of both magazines were low–White could only pay 1 cent a word vs. 3 cents for the bigger magazines of the day–he attempted to appeal to writers who did not mesh well with the “establishment.”⁵

White did not earn a living wage as the editor despite the magazines consuming much of his time. In order to cobble together a meager living he also served as art director (which included cutting and pasting each issue) and wrote stories to publish in his own magazines!⁶ White’s first professional stories appeared in 1962 after a decade of fan writing.

This post includes three of White’s own violent and bleak visions of future society that appeared in Amazing and Fantastic. While he might not have been a fan of the experimental tendencies of the movement, his obsession with violating taboos, scenes of urban decay, and general miasmic gloom are certainly on display.

I am increasingly fascinated by the more radical, bleak, and grimy stories within White’s magazines–both from his pen and others–and plan on exploring more. See my earlier reviews of Lisa Tuttle’s “Stone Circle” (1976) and Grania Davis’ “New-Way-Groovers Stew” (1976).

Let’s get to the stories!

3.75/5 (Good)

“Growing Up Fast in the City” (1971) first appeared in Amazing Science Fiction, ed. Ted White (May 1971). You can read it online here.

The best of White’s stories I’ve read so far, “Growing Up Fast in the City” (1971) charts a brief moment of meaning in the lives of two adrift teenagers. The male narrator reflects back on the moment at sixteen that he met the fourteen-year-old Alys at a student rally (74). Fleeing from the inevitable police raid, the narrator hands Alys his extra “Injectab” as protection against the thick “Sick Gas” (74). They escape across a rusted urban cityscape filled with abandoned buildings, “grubby” lightbulbs, and concrete tunnels, dodging cops. They hide out at her apartment, paid for by her absentee mother. The narrator puts on a show of the masculine acquirer of women. Alys attempts to talk to the narrator about her interest in sex only if it’s “real” (78). After they have sex, she tells him “girl has feelings. She wants to get to know a boy first. She wants to be able to like a boy” (79). She likes him. He asks for her picture. And when they part, he realizes the meaning behind her words. But the city is a big and ever changing place. And he doesn’t know her last name.

There’s an effective sadness to the proceedings. It’s the story about the briefest of moments, a flicker of connection between two lost souls eager to strike out against the world and chart their own paths without a clear idea of what that all means. One one level the story might be interpreted as a critical take on the student protests of the 60s as it’s not entirely clear what the two are even protesting. It is clear that both teenagers have essentially been abandoned by their parents. In White’s formulation, change comes from meaningful interpersonal moments, not mass movements.

Ted White originally wrote “Growing Up fast in the City” for Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967). Ellison rejected it. A bit mysteriously considering the content of other New Wave stories of the time, readers of Amazing condemned the story as “pornographic.”⁷

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3/5 (Average)

“Junk Patrol” (1971) first appeared in Amazing Science Fiction, ed. Ted White (September 1971). You can read it online here.

Sam spends his days on the Lunar surface eking out a living attempting to farm its difficult soils while trapped in a frustrating marriage with all its passive aggressive moments. Farming on the Moon you say, how? Scientists have developed, Sam doesn’t really understand all the details, a “pliofilm envelope” floats on top of an artificially created atmosphere that allows small-scale farming. Unfortunately, various chucks of mysterious alien junk floating pulled in by gravity clogs up the Hole (yes, the moon’s anus), a passage through the film that allows spacecraft to descend to the surface.⁸

When a particularly large chunk blocks the passage, Sam and other working-class teams are called into action. A skeletal look tugs, that “looks like something you might put together with a Mekkano set,” ferry the men towards the metal objects (13). It’s a dangerous job. Sam returns to his wife with an artificial foot. She didn’t know when he would be back. He finds her, alone, in the dirty laundry watching a “porny cassette” (108). A day in the life of the laborer of the future…

While Ted White might have suggested he’s not a fan of the New Wave movement, “Junk Patrol” certainly puts on some of the New Wave clothes and does a serviceable impression of its ironic treatment of science and sex. I found this one bleakly funny. I appreciated its sarcasm and utter disinterest in what might have been the focus of an author of more traditional science fiction–THE ALIEN ARTIFACTS. For a comparison, I recommend you read “Junk Day” in conjunction with James E. Gunn’s Station in Space (1958), a far more triumphant celebration of the future blue-collar worker,

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3/5 (Average)

“Things Are Tough All Over” (1971) first appeared in Fantastic, ed. Ted White (December 1971). You can read it online here.

Like Lars Van Trier’s controversial exercise in gruesomeness The House that Jack Built (2018), White deliberately sets out to induce eye-covering and visceral unease. After a nuclear exchange with China that left half the country “good for nothing but fireflies,” the United States undergoes a dietary readjustment (17). The victorious US conducts as massive aid campaign, à la post-WWII’s The Marshall Plan, for the survivors in the tattered wreckage of its erstwhile enemy. Told to “Do What We Can” and “Pull in Our Belts,” Americans put up with stretch foods to stretch the supply (180). Paul Barnes craves meat: “Hell, I eat as much soya bread as the next guy; and I’m big on salads. But look at a man’s digestive system; look at his intestine” (16). And Paul will do what it takes to acquire it. And his wife sends him off with a slobbery kiss to kill young Chinese immigrants in refugee slums.

Some readers possess the inability to separate author from a psychopathic main character, convinced there’s must be a moment of slippage and overlap between the two. I would suggest that “Things Are Tough All Over” can be read as a stark manifestation of the extreme implication of racist rhetoric that verges on genocidal–aimed at both African Americans and immigrants–spouted by white supremacists in the 60s. An early example comes to mind from Mississippi senator, and KKK member, Theodore G. Bilbo stated that African American civil rights organization Mississippi Progressive Voter’s League should be “atomically bombed and exterminated from the face of the earth.”⁹ White’s horror of a vision, operates entirely through the eyes of the psychopath — his self-justifying fanaticism crawls under the skin with its moments of jocularity and I just gotta do what a man gotta do vibes.

Deeply unsettling and hard to read, I can only recommended “Things Are Tough All Over” (1971) for readers interested in SF takes on psychopathic main characters and scholars of race and racism. An unnervingly brutal distillation of New Wave angst and grime.

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Notes

1. Mike Ashley, Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1970 to 1080 (2007), 70. ↩︎
2. Ashley, 74. ↩︎
3. Ashley, 76. ↩︎
4. Ashley, 82. ↩︎
5. Ashley, 77. ↩︎
6. Ashley, 84. ↩︎
7. Ashley, 82. I suspect the references to gay sex offended readers far more than the teenage lovers. ↩︎
8. I am reminded of Barry N. Malzberg’s novel The Men Inside (1973) ↩︎
9. Cited here with context. For the African American press’ response to Bilbo, see Jacqueline Foertsch’s Reckoning Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America (2013), 110. ↩︎

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