Jr. Sam Merwin
Life and career
Sam Merwin Jr. (1910–1996) was an American fiction writer and an influential editor of science-fiction magazines. His first science-fiction story appeared in 1939, and in 1944 he took charge of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, helping move both magazines beyond their earlier juvenile emphasis. He also wrote detective fiction and published under several pseudonyms. His later editorial work included Fantastic Universe and Satellite Science Fiction. This background places his stories within a working culture in which the demands of a magazine and an author's imaginative experiment met. Readers can attend to how a compact premise develops into a problem of judgment or responsibility.
Extraordinary ability within an ordinary arrangement
The science-fiction premise places exceptional demands beside the routines of marriage and work. A person's usefulness to a dangerous undertaking can conflict with the life already established around her. The earlier story's connection forms part of the publication history, but this installment has its own immediate pressures. The interest lies in how a speculative ability changes expectations between people who think they know one another.
The white rain came
Lynne Fenlay watches the hurried marriage ceremonies of Mars with homesickness and frustration, feeling how poorly her upbringing on Earth fits the colony's rough practical arrangements. Her attachment to Rolf Marcein adds another source of conflict between personal desire and the life she is expected to accept. Then a disastrous event at a telepathic research depot interrupts those questions: contact with an unknown mind has left the team in desperate condition. Lynne's sensitivity makes her urgently necessary to an investigation whose implications extend beyond the laboratory. This sequel to Nightmare Tower combines the domestic pressures of a speculative frontier with contact across radically different kinds of intelligence. It appeared under Jacques Jean Ferrat, Sam Merwin Jr.'s pseudonym, in Fantastic Universe in May 1955. English story published as Jacques Jean Ferrat in Fantastic Universe, May 1955.
Watch who defines the obligation
When Lynne is needed, ask who describes that need and who is expected to bear its cost. Compare an intimate conversation with the larger emergency it touches. The pseudonymous byline belongs to the story's magazine publication, not to a separate life that must be invented for it. Read the fantastic event through the practical decisions it requires from the characters.