[October 7, 1962] …like a Man.  (the surprising true identity of sf author Lee Chaytor)

[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Victoria Lucas

OK, that’s neat.  Mostly when I look at the covers of science-fiction magazines, I see silly bug-eyed monsters and rocket ships that look like they’re out of early movies, and I don’t know who those men or boys are who wrote those stories or why, but I suspect the stories are for other men or boys.

But now I see "Lee Chaytor’s" name on an sf magazine cover and I feel like giggling — for Lee is no he!  A friend going to San Diego State College sent me word that she’s a lecturer in English, name of Elizabeth Chater, and she is writing science fiction (and advocating that it be taught as literature, of all things!) while she works on her Master’s degree there.

Chater/Chaytor has a story in the May 1958 Fantastic Universe Science Fiction magazine that I happened to see when I was in that dusty bookstore I mentioned last time.  On this visit the cat got down from the desk near the door and accompanied me as I fumbled around, trying to remember where I’d seen it.  Ah, there, with bug-eyed monsters, a flying saucer, and a rocket ship, with an eagle harassing an alien.  And “featuring their BAIT FOR THE TIGER A New Novel by Lee Chaytor.” So I gathered my pennies and, after considering leaving them with the cat since the owner was elsewhere, I found him, showed him the magazine, gave him my handful of change, and walked out reading it.

Wow!  She doesn’t stint on the monsters, but these sound close to human in their description.  Lots of suspense after the story opens with men locked into a corner of a lower floor of the Pentagon, secret government workers affiliated with the FBI.  There is a flying ball of green light, a master race (the aliens) and a subservient one (the aliens again), and what’s left of a town cringing in fear as the aliens take over a piece of Oregon.

Oh, and of course there has to be a buxom blonde (is she blond?), Valentine, 6 feet tall, an exotic dancer with a “magnificent body” who uses a robot snake in her performances, and who is described in florid terms.  The wife of a missing agent, she falls in with a scheme to try to find out if the aliens have her husband.  Other characters include a sad and terse bodyguard for the telepath running the operation, an argumentative type who tries to keep an eye on the telepath; and a domestic agent who makes breakfast and does the dishes, the most sympathetic of the men to me.  The telepath is a little man who knows all and is predictably headstrong and obnoxious.  The men spout British poetry.

Complications enter the plot in the form of a dying agent who heard a human consorting with the aliens, said to be golden and godlike (as well as conceited), nothing like the green monsters on the cover of the magazine.

I don’t know if I like the piece.  It’s a fast-moving story; you want to find out what happens!  But at this pace in a magazine novella, there is no time for character development.  There are no other women in the narrative, and I can’t identify with the one introduced so far, with those full lips and young, lissome beauty one expects to see in a science fiction tale (at least from looking at other covers).  I guess it’s always been the covers that have alienated me and often deterred me out of science fiction books and magazines.  Scantily clad women, bug-eyed monsters, weird-looking space ships and flying saucers: what’s for me to like?  Adventure?  I consider music and poetry and history and art and architecture to be adventure.  I guess that just sounds pompous, but those media constitute my adventurousness.

Oh, well, back to “Lee Chaytor.” Valentine is up to the task.  The suspense continues.  We hear how nasty the aliens are, how ruthless.  Will she survive?  The team of three men and a telepath stays as close to her as possible as she pursues her mission, but they cannot get too close.  Not yet.  At this point, I had the suspicion that Valentine, “Val,” now referred to as a “girl,” would still be a “girl” at the end of the narrative, and might never become a “woman,” even though much of the narrative is through her eyes.

The ending could be considered to be a happy one, less so inside the circle of characters we know.  I won’t tell you what happens because you have a right to see for yourself.  I’ll just say this: Valentine lives and is unhurt, but, as so often happens with women, her interests come last and are hardly considered.  We have instead clichés about male bonding and jealousy. 

I haven’t learned much from this tale about aliens and secret US government departments, but I did learn this: that a woman can write like a man when she chooses — take that as compliment or damn.  But it does make me wonder: how many other woman authors (and English Professors!) lurk behind androgynous pseudonyms?




[October 4, 1962] Get to work!  (The Mercury Flight of Sigma 7)

[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

Five years ago, satellite launches were quarterly events that dominated the front page.  Now, the Air Force is launching a mission every week, and NASA is not far behind.  The United Kingdom and Canada have joined the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in the orbital club, and one can be certain that Japan and France aren't far behind.  It's truer than ever that, as I've said before, unmanned spaceflight has become routine.

Yesterday, the same thing happened to manned missions.

39 year-old Navy Commander Walter M. "Wally" Schirra blasted off early the morning of October 3, 1962, flew for six orbits, and splashed down safely in the Pacific near Midway Island less than half a day later.  His Sigma 7 capsule was in space twice as long as Glenn and Carpenter's Mercury ships and, to all accounts, it was a thoroughly uneventful trip.  Aside from the whole nine hours of weightlessness thing.

While the newspapers all picked up the mission, radio and television coverage was decidedly less comprehensive than for prior flights.  Part of it was the lack of drama.  Shepard was the first.  Grissom almost drowned.  Glenn's mission had the highest stakes, it being our answer to the Soviet Vostok flights, and his capsule ran the risk of burning up on reentry.  For a couple of hours, Carpenter was believed lost at sea.

But the upshot of Schirra's mission seemed to be that, as the Commander put it, a chimpanzee could have flown it.  The giant Atlas rocket blasted off just 15 minutes late (the delay was due to a radar malfunction at a overseas tracking station), and that was the most remarkable snag.  One of Schirra's tasks was to make observations of various points of interest on the ground and snap shots with his camera.  Unfortunately, mother nature was not accommodating, clouds obscuring most of Schirra's targets (further reducing his active scientific role).  The pilot did see Glenn's "fireflies," though, which have since been determined to be ice crystals shaken loose from the capsule. 

After Carpenter's flight, wherein a combination of engine malfunction and pilot exuberance led to Aurora 7 running out of fuel on reentry, Schirra chose to let his capsule drift.  When Sigma 7's heat shield began to glow on contact with the atmosphere, it still had a tank that was 78% full.  The spaceship landed less than a mile from the carrier recovery fleet, well within view of television cameras on the deck of the U.S.S. Kearsarge (I felt a brief eerie sensation at the thought that almost exactly twenty years ago, American carriers had patrolled these same waters — to do battle with their Japanese counterparts.)

It was, as Schirra termed it, a "textbook flight."  If you read the Press Kit, you might well have skipped watching the news.  And yet, it is the lack of drama that makes the flight so dramatic.  Now, instead of biting our fingernails, wondering if our rockets will work, our ships will function, our pilots will survive…now we can focus on getting the work of spaceflight done.  We've passed the Wright Flyer stage — now we're ready to put our craft to use.

There will probably be just one more Mercury flight, this one to last a full day.  The pilot has not been chosen for this mission, but it had been broadly hinted that it will be L. Gordon Cooper, the remaining active Mercury astronaut (Donald K. Slayton having been removed from the roster for heart trouble).  After that, we move on to two-man flights aboard the aptly named Gemini.

Whether we beat the Soviets to that stage of the Space Race remains to be seen…




[Oct. 2, 1962] Women of Washington, Unite!  (The Seventh Geek Girl Con in Seattle)

[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

Ah, Geek Girl Con.  Every year, Seattle's clarion call of intellectual feminine fandom calls us to attend Washington's signature science fiction/fantasy event.  It is an intimate (but growing) gathering of sff devotees with a fascination for things both creative and technical.

This year, as with last year, the Journey was invited to speak on the last 12 months in fandom, and boy did we have a lot to relate.  From coverage of Marvel Comics' slew of new superheroes to a report on this year's Hugo winners, and with a special piece on the woman pioneers of space exploration, our four panelists ensured that our several dozen attendees left educated and excited.

Of course, there was plenty more going on this year, from a burgeoning Huckster Hall to an active costuming scene.  There was a host of interesting panels.  We personally attended one on activism and how our breed of fanaticism can be channeled to make a positive difference in the world.  Sort of a "Fen Forward!" or "Beatniks for a Better world!"  With all the racial strife, economic inequality, strife on the foreign scene, and the increasing specter of Goldwater isolationism and reactionary policy going on, we need all of our wacky team united in the cause of improving society. 

There was also an excellent panel on Black fandom (there are more members than you think!) and the hope for the appearance of a Black comic superhero.  My bet is that, of the two big comics houses, Marvel is the more likely to dare in that direction.  But who knows?

Here, then, is a mini-gallery of some of the dressed-up friends I managed to snap photos of.  My apologies for not having so many this year – it was an awfully busy (but very fun!) time:


The radiant Sarah Kauppila as Snow White…and her lovely mother, Luann, as the Evil Queen


Cruella de Ville from last year's Disney film, 101 Dalmatians


Erika Rae Heins, a Middle Earth enthusiast


Rosemary, a modern-age Wonder Woman


Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble

That's it for this year, but it's almost a certainty we'll be flying back on Alaska Airlines come next October.  Especially now with their swell Convair 880s, which go a bit faster than the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8.  First time we've ever ridden in one!

[AND DON'T MISS LIVE COVERAGE OF WALLY SCHIRRA'S SIGMA 7 MERCURY FLIGHT BEGINNING TONIGHT!]