I swithered between putting this here, or the
Reading Around in Old SF Magazines thread. The coin flip put it here.
Fiction magazine was the French edition of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In addition to translations from stories selected from the English language version there were reviews and news from the French SF scene, editorials, and intros to stories from the local editor. From the start (or very early on) they also published original French stories. I'll just be looking at the French stories.
Issue 24 November 1955.
Rever un homme (To Dream a Man) by Alain Doremieux a gentle eight page pastiche / homage of the the Ray Bradbury Martian stories in which a young Martian girl dreams into reality a Man who, to her surprise, claims to be the first being to have come to Mars from Earth. In the end she gets annoyed with him and his ludicrous story and stops dreaming him and he vanishes. Maybe she will try again some other day. Meanwhile on Earth preparations are made for the second mission.
Not badly done but nothing that Bradbury hadn't done much better in the originals.
This issue also contains the Alfred Bester story '
Fondly Fahrenheit' here renamed '
L'Android assassin', a title which does rather spoil the story somewhat, and because no one outside of the US uses F°...
Et le thermomètre ce soir-la enregistrait glorieusement , 33° centigrades.
Issue 25 December 1955.
Two stories in this issue:
Le Foulard qui remuait (The Scarf that Moved) by Yves Dartois. A couple wanting to spend the night at a lonely house get to read the diary of the last occupant who has problems with a haunted scarf before the diary cuts short and they are told he was found dead at the bottom of a cliff. They stay the night but creaky creaky... and then, dear reader, I awoke to find the the scarf across my throat! etc. etc.
Very run of the mill ghost (or
was it?) story.
L'oeuf D'Elduo (The Egg of Elduo) - The universe is explored and only one planet, Elduo, has been overlooked. An expedition sets out to have a poke as the whole of the human race watches. They don't find much. No life at all. Some ancient ruins and that's about it. Just as they are about to return one of the explorers finds an egg. It doesn't appear to be a fossil or anything like that it's just an egg and no one sees any reason why it shouldn't hatch. They take it back with them to Earth. It doesn't hatch. People wait. The whole galaxy becomes obsessed with this enigma. Books are written, long academic discussions are had but for some inexplicable reason the egg does not hatch. A 'celebrated savant' comes up with an idea. He gets permission to try an experiment, and live on television before everyone, he promptly cooks and eats the thing....
While he is getting seven kinds of crap kicked out of him and thrown into jail we have a brief interlude in italics from the POV of an alien creature curling up on Elduo and waiting for fresh prey to turn up...
Three dramatic chords please.
The 'celebrated savant' gets belly aches, then cramps, and then dies. During the autopsy a hideous winged thingie emerges and starts absorbing one of the medical staff. Gas and 'triple plexilaine' bullets have no effect. It breaks free of the room - humanity is doomed! but luckily they have one last... a 'disintegration rifle' is fired at the flying beast from a spaceship and it dies. But did it lay any eggs before it did...?
Three more dramatic chords please.
Given that the beastie escaped and was then shot down dead in a mere seven lines doesn't exactly make me think that any new monsters are going to prove to be much of a problem really, so the open question ending is a bit wasted.
The itallicy alien bit was straight out of Van Vogt's
The Black Destroyer and the end made me think of
The Giant Claw (which was still two years in the future when this was written) with a, long time before it was written, bit of
Alien thrown in too.
A very early story from Curval who went on to write much better stuff.