Galaxy Magazine (May 1951) by Galaxy

Author:Galaxy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 1951-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

SHELF

THE POUR-SIDED TRIANGLE, by William F. Temple. Frederick Fell, Inc., New York, 1951. 240 pages, $2. 75.

I FIND it difficult not to go off the- deep end about this novel. It is one Of the best written (when the British write well they write magnificently) and warmest, most brilliantly charactered and humanly real science fiction tales I have read since S. Fowler Wright's completely ilar Deluge. With this book, Temple becomes a British novelist in the &rand tradition. Make no mistake, you will never forget the book or its people.

Since the jacket blurb gives away the novel's plot in the first para-

graph, there is no reason why the reviewer shouldn't, also. Very aim-ply, it is based on the idea lh.it two men in love wlih the same girl invent a mallei-duplicating machine and nuke a duplicate- of the girl, as well as of other things.

Temple tells the stnry through the eyes of a wonderful elderly physician who is general practitioner fur the whole- community whi i

action takes place. In addition to the doctor, the book gives us x group of people so poignantly real that the) actually seem to come alive on the page. There is the brilliant, lovable, erratic boy who is i bom scientist and a born fool: there is the son of an old country family who exemplifies everything that is

***** SHELF

good and bad about the traditional British gentleman; and there is a. girl—well, wait till you read the book. She is surely one or" the most original and most desirable creations in any recent novel, science fiction or otherwise.

H. L. Gold has defined adult science fiction as: fiction that is based on credible characters with believable motivations, whose conflicts and problems are the result of a projected environment, with which their attempts to Sad a solution, and the solution itself, are logically consistent. Tb* Four-Sided Triangle fits that definition as perfectly as any science fiction I have ever read.

DRAGONS IN AMBER, by Willy Ley. The Viking Press, New York, 1951. 320 pages, $3.75.

fTlO THOSE who are familiar X with The Lr/ngfuh, the Dodo and the Unicorn, this new collection of "Adventures of a romantic naturalist" (as the book's subtitle describes it) will come as a welcome and long-awaited second helping of something already tasted and found good. For strangers to Willy Ley as a wanderer down the byways of paleontology, piscatology, vulcanol-ogy, and a lot of other natural olo-gies, who know him only as one of the nation's outstanding rocket experts, the book will come as an unexpected treat, a rich and flavorsome one.

In that completely charming.

slightly Europeanized English which makes Willy Ley such a tine and individual stylist, we are told of the incredible life cycle of eels; the curious history and prehistory of amber; the paleontological parade of the camel and his kin (did you know that the camel is supposed to have originated in the Americas, and emigrated to Asia?); the hair-raising story of Krakatoa, the volcano that blew itself to bits, and

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