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Reviews
Amazing Stories, July 1953 by Randall Garrett, Harriet Frank Jr., Howard Browne, Arthur C. Clarke
expendablemudge's review
4.0
This review is for "Man from Saturn" by Harriet Frank, Jr.
Real Rating: 3.5* of five
In my daily perusal of the Obituaries, I saw a notice that Harriet Frank, Junior, had died at 96. I loved the, um, well, adaptations is too different in modern usage to apply here, let's say "films inspired by the work of William Faulkner" that she and her husband Irving Ravetch wrote long, long ago. In following the trail left in that obit I saw she'd published a lone SF story in 1953; got curious, and hadda go get it. Green men (emphatically not little ones!) who reconstitute in water, from metallic meteor fragments from Saturn's rings, who are six-four and built like bodybuilders? Sign. Me. Up.
But good lawsy me, I've become such a silly ol' SJW that the Bechdel Test splashed a lot of mud on my shiny denial of the sheer, absurd impossibility of the set-up and smacked my sensawunda to the canvas before I was on p5. Not one single instant was spent *not* thinking about "Sam Saturnis" and how...eager...Betsy Simms was to...deepen...their acquaintance.
That it also involved a Government investigator, a creep of a fiancè, a slimy man-trap, well...all the standard tropes of romantic fiction, I can't be sure how Amazing came to publish it. It was very skillfully constructed, but it probably lit up the letters section for months with misogyny! And that ending, well, it's bog-standard and if you know one single thing about romantic fiction you already know what it was.
It was free to read here, so you won't lose any money. But it's not exactly a classic.
You've been warned.
Real Rating: 3.5* of five
In my daily perusal of the Obituaries, I saw a notice that Harriet Frank, Junior, had died at 96. I loved the, um, well, adaptations is too different in modern usage to apply here, let's say "films inspired by the work of William Faulkner" that she and her husband Irving Ravetch wrote long, long ago. In following the trail left in that obit I saw she'd published a lone SF story in 1953; got curious, and hadda go get it. Green men (emphatically not little ones!) who reconstitute in water, from metallic meteor fragments from Saturn's rings, who are six-four and built like bodybuilders? Sign. Me. Up.
But good lawsy me, I've become such a silly ol' SJW that the Bechdel Test splashed a lot of mud on my shiny denial of the sheer, absurd impossibility of the set-up and smacked my sensawunda to the canvas before I was on p5. Not one single instant was spent *not* thinking about "Sam Saturnis" and how...eager...Betsy Simms was to...deepen...their acquaintance.
That it also involved a Government investigator, a creep of a fiancè, a slimy man-trap, well...all the standard tropes of romantic fiction, I can't be sure how Amazing came to publish it. It was very skillfully constructed, but it probably lit up the letters section for months with misogyny! And that ending, well, it's bog-standard and if you know one single thing about romantic fiction you already know what it was.
It was free to read here, so you won't lose any money. But it's not exactly a classic.
You've been warned.
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