by Gideon Marcus
Stacked
For as long as I can remember, American culture has really liked people who have extra on top. Whether it's Charles Atlas showing off his wedge-shaped physique or Jayne Mansfield letting herself precede herself, we dig an up front kind of person.
So I suppose it's only natural that this month's issue of Galaxy put all of the truly great material in the first half (really two thirds) and the rest tapers away to unremarkable mediocrity (though, of course, I'm obligated to remark upon it).
Dessert first
by Jack Gaughan
The Last Castle, by Jack Vance
by Jack Gaughan
Millenia after the Six-Star war, Earth has been resettled in a series of citadels by a league of aristocrats. Their stratified society disdains the wretched nomads who remained on the birthplace of humanity, instead living an effete life served by a variety of caste-bound aliens: The ornamental Phanes, the laboring Peasants, the conveying Birds, and the technician Meks.
That is, of course, until one and all, the Meks rebel. They sabotage the human equipment and begin a methodical campaign to destroy all of the castles. Presently, only mighty Hagedorn remains. Can our race survive? Should it?
In the Algis Budrys' review column this month, he laments that Frank Herbert could have made a real epic out of Dune if someone had told him they don't have to be 400+ pages long. After all, the Odyssey, the original epic, is less than 200. And Jack Vance has created a masterfully intricate and beautiful epic in just 60.
There is sheer art in beginning a story in medias res, then retelling the opening scene with further detail, and then elaborating still further on this scene once more, and the result being utterly compelling. Storytellers take note: Jack Vance knows his craft. Not since The Dragon Masters (also Vance's) has there been such economy of impact.
Five stars.
The Crystal Prison, by Fritz Leiber
The Last Castle is a hard act to follow. Luckily, the aforementioned Budrys column forms a refreshing interlude. I don't always agree with Budrys, but the instant article is passionate and poetic.
Leiber's piece is rather throwaway, about two ardent striplings barely in their thirties, suffocating under the oppressive ministrations of their several century-old great-grandparents. He is forced to wear a padded suit, and She must wear a virtual nun's habit. Both are required to have eavesropping electronics on their persons at all time. Oh, the old biddies mean well, but is that living?
The young'ns don't think so, and thus they hatch a plan to get away.
Three stars for this trifling cautionary tale.
Lazarus Come Forth!, by Robert Silverberg
by Jack Gaughan
Ah, but then back to the meat. We've now had three tales in Silverberg's Blue Fire series, involving a pseudo-scientific cult (reminiscent of Elron Hubbored's, in fact) having taken over the Earth circa 2100. Author Silverbob clearly intends making a book out of all of these, and Editor Fred Pohl is probably delighted to be able to stretch out a thinly disguised serial in his magazine.
In this latest installment, which features lots of characters we've met before, we finally get to see Mars of the future. The Red Planet has chosen neither the cobalt-worshipping Vorsterism of Earth nor the heretical Harmonism sect that is taking Venus by storm. But the individualistic Martian culture is thrown for a loop when they discover the tomb of Lazarus, founder of the Harmonists. According to legend, Lazarus had been martyred. Actually, he is simply in cold sleep, and the Vorsterites now have the ability to restore him.
But is this merely providence or part of old man Vorster's long range plan?
By itself, I suppose it might only merit three stars, but I really like this series, and I was happy to see more.
So… four stars.
The Night Before, by George Henry Smith
When the world is going to pot, and atomic annihilation seems a button press away, it's natural to seek out wiser heads to right things. And when all of humanity has gone nuts, your only option is to look elsewhere for guidance.
And hope they aren't in the same boat…
Smith is a new name to me, though my friends assure me he appeared in the lesser mags in the '50s and that he maintains a decent career outstide the genre. Three stars for this somewhat inexpert yet oddly compelling story throwback of a story.
For Your Information: The Re-Designed Solar System, by Willy Ley
One of the fun things about being a science writer for decades is being able to compare the state of knowledge at the beginning of your career to that at the current moment of writing. Ley was penning articles back when Frau im Mond debuted, more than 30 years before the first interplanetary probes. In this latest piece, he talks about how our view of the planets has changed in these three decades.
Good stuff, interspersed with pleasant doggerel.
Four stars.
Big Business, by Jim Harmon
And now, after admiring the impressive pectoral, the well formed abdominal, and the fetching pelvic zones, we arrive at the sickly thighs, the slack calves, and the flat feet. What remains is serviceable — after all, the body still stands — but little more can be said of these lower extremities.
Jim Harmon's piece is one of those overbroad talk pieces. In this one, a man from the future and an extraterrestrial compete against each other for the patronage of a rich old cuss who'll see humanity burn if he can keep warm by the fire.
It's not very good. Two stars.
The Primitives, by Frank Herbert
by Wallace Wood
Speaking of throwbacks, this is the tale of Conrad "Swimmer" Rumel, a man of surpassing intelligence but brutish appearance who, as a result, turns to a life of crime. He ends up blowing up a Soviet sub to steal a Martian diamond, but the only one who can cut the thing is a four-breasted Neanderthal stonecutter from 30,000 B.C. Can the neolithic Ob carve the diamond before the mobster fence's impatience proves Rumel's undoing?
Herbert crams a lot of science fiction canards into this short story (which is still half again as long as it needs to be). It's got the same writing crudities that plague the author, but somehow I stayed engaged to the end.
A low three stars.
Devise and Conquer, by Christopher Anvil
A joke story in which the American race problem is solved by the simple expedient of making it impossible to know what race anyone is.
Less annoying than when he appears in Analog — another low three.
Twenty-Seven Inches of Moonshine, by Jack B. Lawson
by Jack Gaughan
Finally, we peter our with this nothing "non-fact" article about fishing on the Moon in the 21st Century. Maybe I'd have enjoyed it more if I were a rod and reel man. Or if it were science fiction.
Two stars.
Shave a little off the bottom
Of course, the ironic thing about all this is that if you took out the subpar stuff, you'd still have a full issue's worth of material. Ah, but people already grouse about having to pay that extra dime (Galaxy is 60 cents; the other mags are 50) for 194 pages. They'd scream their heads off if Galaxy went to 128. So, we end up with a mag that looks great from the waist up, but less good as you gaze goes down.
Ah well. You can still do a lot, even with half a loaf. Or a pair of pastries.
The Journey is once again up for a Best Fanzine Hugo nomination — and its founder is up for several other awards as well! If you've got a Worldcon membership, or if you just want to see what Gideon's done that's Hugo-worthy, please read his Hugo Eligibility article! Thank you for your continued support.
I found the Vance rather less compelling, even overly long in places. It's still a good story. It just doesn't draw all the superlatives from me.
The Leiber was the sort of thing he tosses off for a quick buck before going back to polishing his better pieces. Mind you, mediocre Leiber is still pretty good and worth a read.
I agree that the Blue Fire series is intriguing, though I didn't much care for it at first. Actually having all the stories in one place will help, too. It's sometimes hard to remember just who all the recurring characters are when they played a minor role in a story that ran several months ago. I look forward to seeing how Silverberg wraps this up.
Possibly the only thing I know about George Henry Smith is that I have to remind myself that he isn't George O. Smith and adjust my expectations accordingly. It feels like there's been a surfeit of ironic twist stories of late, so this one felt rather limp. Not terrible, just not terribly good either.
A good article from Willy Ley, and finally one about science. Though I have to admit that even his recent articles that didn't seem all that science oriented have at least been quite enjoyable. There was a period a couple years ago where his articles were a real slog for me. That seems to be over.
Speaking of ironic twist stories, "Big Business" fits the bill. If Bob Sheckley had written this, it would have been terrific. Instead, it's a warmed-over Twilight Zone plot.
The Herbert was far from his best work, though not his worst either. Aldiss gave a pretty good review of Herbert's career in his article and you can see where he went off the rails from the promise he showed early on. He almost got back to that with "Greenslaves" last year. Keep him away from Campbell and let him work with a good editor and there's hope.
The Anvil was just too facile for me to enjoy.
And "27 Inches" was too much of a fish story. I wonder if we have any fishing enthusiasts among our readers. If so, I'd love to know what they thought of it.
Weird to see them do a couple of long pieces and lots of vignettes. Felt like F&SF
I liked The Last Castle a lot but not quite a full five stars. Didn't have the wow factor he brought to The Dying Earth, but still I enjoyed it a lot.
Crystal Prison was nice but nothing amazing.
Blue fire stories don't really work much for me. Remind me a bit of Cordwainer Smith's instrumentality in style, which may be why other like them significantly more than myself.
The Primitives is poorly put together, overly-long and felt amateurish. Given it doesn't even get the chapter count right (there are two chapter IVs) I almost wonder if Pohl didn't edit this properly?
I don't have much to say on the rest, a series of forgettable sub-par vignettes.
_Storytellers take note: Jack Vance knows his craft_
Does he ever!
Full disclosure: I am actually a time traveler from the future a half-century hence. I have the full range of Mr. Vance's productions available to me (and born in 1916, he will live a long life, well into the next century) and have recently re-read some of his output I hadn't read in decades, as well as material unavailable to you because Vance had a second career as a mystery/crime novelist that never really took off — despite winning an Edgar for his first mystery novel in 1960 — and so much of his output in that genre was never published in your time.
And on re-reading Vance, what struck me was that, alongside the unsurpassed anthropological imagination and extravagantly mannered verbal style we all recognize him for, he had developed almost every virtue any writer could have. (Though he didn't start out that way.)
In particular, what I hadn't remembered was his remarkable skill for doing characterization in depth in just a few words.
For instance, his determined, resourceful adventure-heroes, usually at odds with the hierarchical societies they're born into or encounter — think Kerth Gersen in the Demon Princes series, or Adam Reith in the Planet of Adventure novels — would be implausible cardboard in any other writers' hands.
In Vance's, conversely, they live and breathe. and are utterly convincing in their thinking and emotions, and Vance will do this with a short paragraph or three of them watching an alien sunset over the world of another sea and reflecting on their situation. These are adventure novels and there was no requirement for the protagonists to have such depth. Nevertheless, Gersen in the Demon Princes novels understands and regrets that he's been turned into a blunt, limited killing machine; Adam Reith knows that in the long run, if he's successful in returning to Earth, he is bringing destruction to many of the intricate societies of Tschai, with all their horror and beauty.
Similarly, his villains range from the merely venal — though often murderously so — to the most outre types of psychopathy. But Mr. Vance gives them their own unique motivations and moments of pathos.
Looking back at Mr. Vance from here in the 21st century — and including his mystery novels, alongside his fantasy and SF — about the only writing skill he _didn't_ possess was the ability to whip out snappy, contemporary dialogue on the level of an Elmore Leonard (in my time famous as a crime novelist, in your era still writing Westerns). And for this deficiency he compensated by developing the style of archaically mannered, cynical rhetoric that all his characters perform their exchanges in, and that became another aspect of his art.
Just a remarkable writer.
(sic) 'over the sea of another world'
As a professional writer myself, I am in awe of his ability to craft. And as you say, he overcomes deficiencies by playing in his own court. I don't love everything he does, but his best stuff is truly admirable.
"The Last Castle" is a prime example of Vance's ability to create a truly exotic world, futuristic of fantastic. I don't think any other author could get away with using footnotes!
"The Crystal Prison" was minor Leiber, but not a bad bit of Galaxy-style satire.
"Lazarus Come Forth!" was pretty good. I think this series will work better if and when it becomes a book.
I thought "The Night Before" was obvious and predictable. The satire of California cults doesn't work very well.
I didn't care for "Big Business" at all. Much too silly.
I really disliked "The Primitives." I thought it was just stupid.
The problem with "Devise and Conquer," even as a trivial joke, is the fact that skin color is certainly not the only source of racial tension in the USA. I am quite certain that, given the goofy skin product suggested by this story, many "white" persons with extremely dark skin would still fight against equal rights for "black" persons with extremely light skin.
The fishing story was pretty much pointless.
If anything, I liked the poor stories even less than you did.