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This month's short story is "Deadline" by Cleve Cartmill. It might not be very good, but it has a really interesting story surrounding it. It should be fun reading the story & seeing what all the fuss was about.

Unfortunately, I couldn't only find the story for free in one place:

You're right, as a story it's pretty crude. BG: Greg Benford has a cool discussion in his essay on the topic of real science <-> SF, with the Los Alamos guys reading the story when it came in the mail in 1944, & the censors getting their knickers in a twist. I'll dig it out, if no one else beats me to it. Very cool essay! 🚀 ✈️

I think I read this a long time ago, but hadn't remembered it. It really isn't very good & Cartmill agreed. The Wikipedia article about "The Cartmill Affair" is better than the story, IMO.


It reminds me of a little of the investigation into the soft porn Silverberg, Block, Ellison, Burdys, & others wrote in the late 50s & early 60s after the pulps had crashed. Nasty & not as funny as their investigation into in the mid 60s. The PTB doesn't seem to do their homework very well. Our so-called 'Land of the Free' has had some pretty nasty censorship at times.

Add Barry N. Malzberg to the list of SF turned porn writers. I bought one accidentally once. Pure excrement. In a later interview I recall he expressed profound embarrassment for this period of his writing. I'm amazed to find so many other SF writers turned to porn to make a living. I can't think of a less natural genre for a typical SF writer to take up.

I am sure glad you located a free copy of the Cartmill story. My search turned up only these free stories by him:
In that last entry is a Buck Rogers film (the first?). The introductory remarks refer to "Deadline," but never by name. How in the world did this film turn up in my search with no key terms to ping on?

Anyway, "Deadline" has been anthologized a lot. If one needs a copy in print, here's a list of less expensive collections that contain the story one can buy: I recommend using , a meta search engine of used book sellers, to get the least expensive copy.

As for the story itself, I gave it a hasty first reading, but want to reread it more carefully. By my count Cleve Cartmill wrote forty-six short stories between 1941 and 1956. That's an average of three per year, all while doing whatever it was he did to support himself. I think that an admirable accomplishment.

I guess this isn't much of a hit. Sorry about that, but I found it pretty incredible how the FBI lost its collective mind over the minor 'secrets' contained in this story.

I've already mentioned several times in this group a biography of Campell that I read recently, called "Astonding!". At the risk of sounding like a literary agent promoting my client, I'll talk about it again!

In the book, the history is a little different from what is presented in that wikipedia article. Cartmill wrote to Campbell proposing to do a story about the ghost ship "Marie Celeste". Campbell said he didn't want that story and suggested instead this one. He sent a three-page letter with all the main ideas of this story including all the technical ideas and the idea that it should be set among non-human aliens with tails. Cartmill didn't want to write the story, but was willing to be paid to do so. Campbell sent another letter with more details that Cartmill also used.

It was apparently common for Campbell to do this, though he didn't want to be listed as co-author.

Campbell knew that he was supposed to submit war-related stories to a board of censors and intentionally did not do it for this story.

The discussion that this story created at Los Alamos was maybe the first time the scientists started talking to each other about the ethics of their work.

The reaction of the government does seem a little overblown, but this was the most accurate description of an atomic bomb that was published prior to the trial of the Rosenbergs. And, though not known to Campbell, Werner von Braun was a subscriber to the magazine which he received at a P.O. Box in Sweden. (It is not known whether he read this story. Anyway, many of the technical details were wrong.)

Similarly, the German film was banned in Germany during the war because the multi-stage rocket was considered too close to the reality of rocket work by von Braun.

A month ago I watched parts of that film on you toob in a version where the title cards were in Spanish. I defy anyone to sit through the entire 162 minutes, much of which is on Earth planning for the mission, but it is interesting to skip around and see bits of it.

There is a bit of a "Cold Equations" feel to it since there is a boy who is a stowaway and there isn't enough oxygen for everyone to make the return trip. (Luckily, there is plenty of oxygen to breathe on the far side of the moon, which was real theory that some real scientists believed at one time, but probably not many by 1928.)

That's interesting, Ed. I've never heard of the film. I'll try to look it up tomorrow.