As I mentioned last month, this issue begins yet another new era for New Worlds. With the retirement of Mike Moorcock and Charles Platt from full-time editorialship in the last issue, it is Langdon Jones that steps up to the mark as editor this time.
For that reason alone, it should be an interesting one, but last month’s issue also pointed out that the April issue was going to have an apocalyptic theme:
The named list from last month.
With Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius saving the world from destruction, the advert proudly declared, “Is The Apocalypse Already Upon us??” Gone is the optimistic, forward-looking shiny and new future as suggested by the SF of the 1950’s, and in its place we have post-apocalyptic gloom, doom, decay and squalor. It has been an ongoing theme in the magazine for the last few years.
To be fair, the white cover with a minimalist approach to titling and imagery, this month by the recently deceased Mervyn Peake, does not give an impression of 'gloom and doom'. Far from it. I found it more interesting than the recent generic covers. A good start.
Lead In by The Publishers
Much is made of the fact that this issue has the UK debut of the US’s enfant terrible Harlan Ellison.
In a post-apocalyptic US we are told of teenager Vic and his telepathic dog, Blood. Vic is a teenage boy who spends his time scavenging the world for basic needs—food, companionship, and sex—as well as generally avoiding other groups, known as roverpaks, doing the same thing. They meet Quilla June – unusual because most women live where it is safer, underground. Vic rapes Quilla June before they are attacked by another roverpak. Blood is hurt in the scuffle. Quilla June escapes and returns to her underground home of Topeka.
Determined to get food and find Quilla June, Vic leaves Blood on the surface and follows Quilla June underground, to discover that bringing Vic underground was the original plan by the subterranean city elders. New blood (see what Ellison did there?) is needed to replenish the depleted stock of men! Vic sees this as a great opportunity for sex with lots of different women, but soon tires of being basically a sex slave. He escapes back to the surface with Quilla June, only to find Blood hurt and in need of food to survive. The open ending leaves Vic with a quandary – does he leave Blood or feed Blood?
This one should activate all the seismic shockmeters: there’s sex, masturbation, rape, gore, violence, cannibalism, radioactive mutations and a distinct lack of morals and ethics as Vic and Blood try to survive. (It's a little concerning when I'm told that Ellison used his own dealings with gang culture in the US as inspiration for this story.)
As good as it is, that’s not to say that there aren't worrying elements – Quilla June’s change from rape victim to willing participant is a little jarring to me, but to some extent this reflects the brutal society Vic and Blood live in and the amoral stance that Vic has towards life. Unsurprisingly, when presented with a version of what pre-War domesticity is like, he rebels and runs away back to his previous life.
Undoubtedly memorable and a million miles away from the classic hero template of older SF work, A Boy and his Dog reinvents the apocalyptic adventure story and generally holds up. I found it bold, interesting, lively and yes, controversial. As good as Delany’s Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stonesback in the December issue. 5 out of 5.
The Ash Circus by M. John Harrison
And here’s M. John Harrison’s take on Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius (more of which later.) They do say that imitation is the best form of flattery, and here Harrison copies the beginning of Ian Fleming’s James Bond movie You Only Live Twice before having Jerry return to a decaying London, then travel to Scotland and Manchester to become inspired by Byron and then get involved in a putsch in London, before meeting the authoritarian Miss Brunner again.
It’s actually not bad as a mixture of James Bond and The Avengers television series, with the dark humour of Cornelius coming to the fore, but it is less out-there than Moorcock’s own Cornelius material (again – more of which later.) This may, of course, make the story more readable than some of Jerry’s other esoteric stories. 4 out of 5.
How the Sponsors Helped Out by Anthony Haden-Guest
Poetry – or rather a list of different things sent by companies to ‘The Front’ – Hamleys sent toys, IBM sent a brain, and so on. This being New Worlds the poem doesn’t miss throwing out a few choice expletives in the mixture – guess what Playboy sent? I dare not repeat the word here. Mildly amusing. 3 out of 5.
Labyrinth by D. M. Thomas
More poetry. Described as ‘a poem for light and movement’, Thomas manages to produce strange typewritten boxes that are at times undecipherable. A typical ‘form over content’ type piece. 2 out of 5.
Another one of Ballard’s stories where novels are compressed into paragraphs. The clever part is that each paragraph begins with the letters of the alphabet. Described as ‘An Entertainment for George MacBeth’, this one reads like the description of an exotic holiday beach party and also feels, rather oddly at times, like a James Bond plot – not the first time I’ve thought that for this issue. One of the more enjoyable of Ballard’s recent stories for me, perhaps because it feels a little more like the material Ballard was writing when I first noticed him. 4 out of 5.
Inside by J. J. Mundis
The inevitable 'naked lady of the month' picture.
Another strange story from J J Mundis after the rather odd ‘Luger’ story last month. This time, a depressing stream of consciousness story that’s all sex, drugs and allegory about being empty inside. Nothing really worth remembering. 2 out of 5.
For Czechoslovakia by George MacBeth
Yet more poetry, this time from the poet J. G. Ballard wrote for earlier. As expected, it is dark, gloomy and depressing, combining prose passages from The Diary of a German Soldier, written in 1939 interspersed with verses written by MacBeth using the process of automatic writing. I’m intrigued by the process, if less impressed by the poetry. 3 out of 5.
After Harrison’s version, we now return to the originator of the Jerry Cornelius stories.
More artwork by Mal Dean.
This month Jerry continues his meandering travels across time with Karen von Krupp to try and find Bishop Beezley. Lots of prose in small sections (with even an homage of J. G. Ballard in Ballard style lists of text), whose connections are rather obtuse, lots of sex and Miss Brunner – again! (see also M. John Harrison’s story.)
The plot’s undecipherable, but I feel that this is one you appreciate for the enthusiastic energy rather than the plot. Who knows what’s going on, but the writer clearly had fun writing it. 4 out of 5.
Book Reviews
A Turning World by Brian W. Aldiss
Where Aldiss muses on how perspectives change through time, throwing in a couple of reviews along the way – basically, a discussion on how others might see us in the future.
The Cannon Kings by Joyce Churchill
Referring to recent publications, Joyce Churchill (also known as M. John Harrison) writes about the importance of Germany’s armaments manufacturers in the first half of the 20th century.
A Slight Case of Tolkien by James Cawthorn
It is left to James Cawthorn to review the genre books. This month he looks at Jack Vance’s Catch A Falling Star, Robert Burnet (sic) Swann’s Moondust, Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial, Clifford Simak’s So Bright the Vision coupled with Jeff Sutton’s The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, James Blish and Norman L. Knight’s A Torrent of Faces, Ron Goulart’s ‘light-hearted’ The Sword Swallower and a well-deserved reprint of William Hope Hodgson’s horror classic, The House on the Borderland.
Summing Up
This one’s heavy on the espionage Bond-type vibes this month, what with not one but two Jerry Cornelius stories and a Ballard that reads like a Bond story in a Ballard style. As a first issue of the new regime with Langdon Jones as editor, it is not bad – although it may have been better had the Cornelius stories been spread out across different issues. Personally I like the stories, but they're not for everyone, and there's a lot of it here.
But then there’s the Harlan Ellison story that surpassed even my high expectations of his work. If the 'impending apocalypse' is represented by this story, then it's a memorable one to be sure, if decidedly downbeat. According to Ellison, the future is dark and tough.
I can’t see this one being published in the US in the usual science fiction magazines, but even allowing for its deliberate shock tactics, it really impressed – much more than say Bug Jack Barron, which tried to shock readers in a similar way, I think.
If I needed anything to show how much the British genre scene has changed in the last few years, this would be my example, albeit written by an American. Shocking and controversial, yes – but perhaps the best story I’ve read in New Worlds to date. A real coup for the new editorship.
In December of 1965, Mary Beth Tinker, her brother John Tinker, and three other students were suspended from their high school for wearing black armbands on school grounds as a form of memorial for the lives lost in the Vietnam War and a call for a Christmas truce. Though they returned to school wearing all black shortly thereafter, they were only permitted to return once they agreed not to wear their black armbands.
The Tinker siblings in 1968, showing off the black armbands that started their five year journey to the Supreme Court.
On the 24th of February of this year, Tinker won a case against Des Moines in the hallowed halls of the United States Supreme Court. In a super majority decision, the Justices ruled that the students were wrongfully suspended and that they had a right to the freedom of speech in educational settings so long as the protest was not a disruption to the public peace. Though the use of black armbands has not been widespread, I suspect that this and other creative uses of clothing will be a hallmark of speaking one’s mind in public spaces moving forward and as an expression of the power of courageous youth.
"Work For Peace" reads on this man's armband at the Congregational Church protest, 1969, following the Tinker decision.
It’s not the first time that the underdog has employed this sort of tactic in the face of institutional power–the zoot suit of Mexico and Black America in the thirties or the Phygian cap and cockade of the French Revolution, for example–but it very well might be the first time in American history that the sons and daughters of the hegemony have taken up a cause in defiance of their predecessors. While these previous examples of fashion in protest were employed by oppressed groups, the majority group of these movements are white Americans from the suburbs.
In other words, an entire generation has signed on to the opinion that America is not as grand as it’s chalked up to be.
In truth, this should be no surprise. Tensions between those who experienced the Herculean efforts of World War II and those that are growing up amidst the morally black devastation of the Vietnam region and the draft simply continue to rise. While the newspapers take a pro-war or neutral stance, young people feel they aren’t being heard. So why not focus on being seen instead?
The Olive Drab uniform (or "OD" uniform), a version of which has been worn since the beginning of the twentieth century, now inspires protest rather than the patriotism it instilled in Americans following WWI and WWII.
Young men wearing OD uniform shirts along with their other protest regalia at an anti-war protest, 1968.
Young men have been defying the shackles of masculine European tradition for several years now, and it’s becoming more and more mainstream to do so. By growing their hair long, they renounce the military draft and clean-cut regulations for soldiers, but it goes much deeper than Vietnam. Growing one’s hair signifies a departure from the expectation that they will uphold the stability of the middle class. Most importantly, though, it signals that young men no longer see themselves as natural aggressors.
Michele Breton, Anita Pallenberg, and Mick Jagger on the set of "Performance", 1968. Notice Mick Jagger's long hair, Turkish tunic, and bell-bottoms.
Men are adopting long natural locks indistinguishable from women and an unisex dress code that includes elements such as tunics, t-shirts, bell-bottoms, sandals, and necklaces. The bell-bottom trend is particularly exciting in this new age, considering that in all of Western history, men’s trousers have always been slim to the shoe, or even tapered to fit the ankle. When our foremothers pioneered paperbag trousers and pyjama suits, the cut hid the line of the leg with a trapeze shape from hip to ankle that swung with one’s walk. Now, bell-bottoms combine both, with a slim thigh and a flared calf for both men and women that is named specifically for that feminine legacy of the swinging gait.
The Tinker v. Des Moines decision confirms the path of an exhilarating but violent future. This young generation of teens and collegiates is now defined by not only its opposition to the war, but by the power of its symbols of protest. Mainly, they understand that one’s identity is inherently political speech. The convergence of the Civil Rights, Women's Rights, Anti-War, and Hippie movements has led to a volatile cocktail that visibly threatens the status quo of Western tradition by adopting more equal and worldly fashions.
I can’t help but worry that we will reach a boiling point soon. What will be the next symbol?
And now for the man to whom the news wouldn't be the news without the news… here's Gidi!
Dateline: 1969
Apparently, President Nixon and Soviet head of government Kosygin have agreed not to blow up nuclear bombs on the ocean floor, of which there have been somewhere between zero and not many. This is being hailed as a tremendous accomplishment in the field of disarmament. The next great achievement will be banning test explosions on the 32nd day of every month.
I think the two deserve a Flying Fickle Finger of Fate, or the "Penetrating Pinky" as the producer calls it.
Dateline: 1969
Britain is building a giant radio telescope to hear the beginning of the universe. Astronomers believe the cosmos apparently was once compressed into a tiny point, even smaller than Governor Reagan's brain, and when it expanded, the temperature of the stuff dropped, as it always does when you maintain the amount of matter but increase the volume of its container.
A temperature that was once immeasurably high has now gotten so low that it radiates at very low energy levels—detectable by super-sensitive antennas! I imagine the observatory will determine if this radio hiss is uniformly distributed or not. They're also looking for quasars, those objects that are super bright in the radio spectrum, but invisible to the naked eye, and which may be the most distant (and thus, the oldest) objects in the universe.
Of course, we all know the oldest thing you can get on the radio is Jack Benny…
Dateline: 1969
Two airliners were hijacked to Havana yesterday. That's the sixth time this year that there has been a "double-header" seizing. We must be running out of rebels and Communists by now—I would not be surprised to hear that the hijackers are just retirees looking for someplace cheaper than Miami.
Dateline: 1969
President Nixon is coming to San Diego tomorrow. This will lay to rest any dispute, at least while he's here, as to the biggest Dick in town.
What's the news inside this issue?
I've just come back from a little bubble of time inside the roiling chaos that is the real world. It was a little Los Angeles SF conclave called Escapade, filled with fans of all things fannish. Keeping me company on this trip was the lastest issue of F&SF. Although not quite such a rousing success as the con, the issue did have a couple of things to strongly recommend it. Read on, and you'll see what they were:
by Bert Tanner
Deeper Than the Darkness, by Gregory Benford
Greg Benford is a young man, part of an identical twin fannish duo, who I'm pretty sure lives right here in San Diego. He was catapulted into the ranks of the professionals when he won an F&SF writing contest a few years back, and he's written a couple of pieces since then.
His latest is a space adventure involving Captain Clark, a tramp ship skipper impressed into navy service when the mysterious Quarm begin impinging on Terran star colonies. Clark is one of the few men of caucasian ancestry left after the hot wars of the fraught centuries, and human civilization is now dominated by Asians and Polynesians. Society is changed, too, more of a communal affair knitted together by cooperative social activies. Prime among them is Sabal, also referred to as The Game, which is a sort of roleplaying exercise in which each participant offers up vignettes, epigrams, and other creative orations designed to complement rather than dispute the last speaker. When fully harmony is reached, the Game is over.
It is frequent usage of Sabal that keeps the novice crew together as it reaches Regeln, a colony recently ravaged by the Quarm. But Sabal is no defense against, and indeed, a exacerbator for, the particular malady spread by the aliens—a kind of extreme agrophobia that drives humans to literally burrow away from the light, from each other, from the universe.
This downbeat tale is readable, but its psychological and racial underpinnings are a little implausible and more than a little unsettling.
Three stars.
Some Very Odd Happenings at Kibblesham Manor House, by Michael Harrison
A WW2 veteran runs across a much aged and enervated war buddy. Over beers, it turns out that the afflicted soldier has had an unfortunate run-in with the Celtic cult of Cybele, the Earth Mother. Said sect, prominent two thousand years ago, demands great sacrifices of its adherents. The male priests must scourge themselves, ultimately sacrificing that which most distinguishes them as men.
And Kibblesham, built on an ancient temple, infects all who inhabit it with Cybele's compulsion…
This is one of many old-fashioned pieces in the book, almost Lovecraftian in tone. Not really to my taste.
Some 12,000 years ago, before the final Ice Age, great magical societies were the rule. One of the age's great sorcerers is a man simply known as Warlock. In his 200 years of life, he has seen his powers wane several times, each instance compelling him to move on to a new locale, where his mana has been restored. Upon investigation, Warlock determines a terrible truth, one which spells doom for his spell-based civilization.
In the meantime, a stupid swordsman named Hap, wielding the eldritch blade Glilendree (or is it the other way around?), shows up to challenge the wizard. The ensuing battle is noteworthy, indeed.
This is one of Niven's only fantasies, and it's superb. While "magic was common before the modern age" is a frequently mined lode, from Lord of the Rings to Conan to Norton's recent Operation: Time Search, Niven is the first, perhaps, to explain why the magic goes away.
Five stars.
Trouble on Kort, by William M. Lee
This is a police mystery set on the planet of Kort, on which a dozen outworlders have disappeared (kidnapped?) and a dozen natives have taken their own lives—all in the space of just a matter of weeks. Peace Corps officer Jan Pierson is sent in to investigate.
It's a rather unremarkable tale, oddly juvenile in tone and occasionally tedious, but it's not unenjoyable. I appreciated the love interest, the Kortian named "Marty", who did not get enough page time.
A low three.
The House, by P. M. Hubbard
A married couple, awarded a homestead plot in the bombed out fringes of London, tries to build a house amidst the rubble. But the tumulus they choose as a foundation may already be occupied…
This tale is atmospheric but rather trivial, another of the throwbacks. Two stars.
The Incredible Shrinking People, by Isaac Asimov
Last issue, the Good Doctor explained the pitfalls of neglecting physics when dealing with miniaturized or enlarged people. This time, Isaac explains how he accounted for same while writing the novelization of Fantastic Voyage.
Neat stuff. Four stars.
The Freak, by Pg Wyal
There are beggars and there are beggars. The most deformed, crippled, and otherwise unordinary ones band together to form a union of sorts. Tired of their low income, they go on strike, ensuring that the beautiful citizens of Gothopolis have no one to compare themselves to.
Soon, the "normal" Gothopolians go crazy, and their John Lindsay analog must come up with a drastic solution.
The build-up wasn't bad, but the message isn't as profound as Wyal (or editor Ferman) thought it was.
Two stars.
Say goodnight, Dick!
Just as the week's news was much of a muchness, so was this issue of F&SF more a marking of time than the making of a landmark. Still, I am grateful for the Asimov and particularly the Niven, and the rest was not so much unpleasant as forgettable.
Good enough for now. I look forward, as always, to next month's issue—and I hope you do, too!
The other shoe dropped on February 17: Star Trek is officially canceled. Moreover, ABC won't pick it up for its "Second Season" in January. Fan efforts are being directed at CBS, but I can't say the prospects are promising.
One has to wonder if the decision was made due to the spate of lousy episodes that have plagued the second half of the Third Season. On the other hand, the decision was probably made based on the reaction to the first half of the season, which was actually quite good, so maybe Trek was always destined for the block.
This makes the latest episode, what appears to be the penultimate (if, indeed, they even air the last episode sometime in May after eight weeks of reruns and substitutions), particularly bittersweet. "All Our Yesterdays" is possibly Trek's finest hour, even as the clock ticks the show's last minutes.
That the show is so good comes as no surprise; writer Jean Lisette Aroeste wrote the sublime "Is There in Truth No Beauty", and director Marvin Chomsky ran the excellent "Day of the Dove". It is also an unique episode in many ways, from the profusion of excellent sets, to the complete absence of the Enterprise from the show (a phenomenon I cannot recall occurring in any prior episode).
For those who missed it, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet of Sarpedon, a civilized world doomed to be destroyed when its star, Beta Niobe, goes nova—in just a handful of hours. I guess they're there to pick up refugees (if so, there won't be very many…)
The Big Three find themselves in what looks like a post office or safety deposit box annex attended by an elderly Mr. Atoz. This fellow, assisted by several kindly replicas, is a "librarian" who has used his "Atavachron" (a great name for a time machine) to send all of the citizens of Sarpedon into the past, where they will be safe from the stellar explosion. Mr. Atoz assumes the three officers are Sarpedonites who are late to the party, and he gives them run of the archive to find eras to jaunt to.
"You've run up some considerable overdue book fines, young man!"
Well, through misadventure, Kirk ends up in Cromwellian England, where he is locked up under accusation of witchcraft, and McCoy and Spock end up in the planet's last Ice Age, risking frostbite and worse. Apparently, Sarpedon's past is identical to that of Earth, which would be egregious if we hadn't seen similar phenomena in "Miri" and "Bread and Circuses". Indeed, this is actually a welcome data point rather than risible.
"You're under arrest, guv'nor…for overdue book fines!"
"It's colder than a witch's left…" "Agreed, Doctor."
Luckily for Kirk, his judge is one of the refugees from the future, who helps him find the portal back to the library. Luckily for the other two, a lovely woman named Zarabeth, exiled from a time prior to the Enterprise's era, rescues them and gives them refuge in her cave. She quickly falls for Spock (who wouldn't?) and the half-Vulcan finds himself reverting to savagery as a result of his psychic bond with primordial Vulcans of five thousand years ago. Spock peeves at McCoy, moons at Zarabeth, and acts the least Spocklike we've seen him since "This Side of Paradise" in a very honest and affecting way.
Bones convinces Spock to go back to where they arrived in the Ice Age so as to find their way back to the library, which they manage with the help of Kirk. Returned to his time, Spock becomes himself again, but not without a touch of subdued regret at the loss of yet another opportunity at love.
The pacing for this episode is leisurely but consistent, really letting us soak in the environs, the characters, their emotions. The Act-end cliffhangers are unusual and sometimes not even danger points. All of the cast turn in masterful performances, and the guests do as well—standouts include Mr. Atoz (the actor last seen in "Bread and Circuses") and the magistrate who saves Kirk. Mariette Hartley (Zarabeth) is fine, and there is no question that she is lovely, but it's the pickpocket who Kirk rescues in his era, with her period speech and game manner, who is truly memorable. The optical effects are stunning, particularly the Atavachron portal effect.
"Just give the book back. No one will press charges."
Though something of a cul de sac in terms of development of the setting (time travel on Sarpedon only goes to Sarpedon, and the system blows itself up at the end of the episode), it is the opposite of a bottle show. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this episode, and so much that is right.
Five stars
Historically Inaccurate
by Erica Frank
In this episode, we see a mirror-image of the usual dynamic between Spock and Doctor McCoy. The doctor is the rational one, driven to find a solution that lets them get back to the Enterprise—while Spock is distracted by strange circumstances and a pretty lady, and he risks isolating them both because of his emotions.
He attacked McCoy over the epithet "pointy-eared Vulcan"… and although the insult was clear in McCoy's voice, it's also a simple fact: Spock is a Vulcan and his ears are pointy. McCoy has said more directly insulting things to him in the past, but this was apparently his breaking point.
You'd think if he wanted McCoy to shut up, he'd use the Vulcan neck pinch on him. Instead, he grabs him by the throat and brings him in close.
We are supposed to believe that tensions have come to a head because Spock is stuck in the past and atavistic patterns are controlling his behavior. That Spock reverts to savagery because the Vulcans of several thousand years ago were warlike barbarians who ate "animal flesh" and fought for dominance over petty insults.
The problem with that is…
Five thousand years ago on Earth, the Aegean Bronze Age was starting. Imhotep built the Step Pyramid of Djoser; around the same time, Stonehenge was built. Those were ancient human cultures, but they were not so alien from modern humans that a person transported to that time would find their entire nature changed. A modern human thrown back to that time — even with their cell structure and brain patterns adjusted to fit in — would act much like humans do today.
Our records show that human activities and motivations have been very similar throughout history, even as our technology and religions have changed. People complained about politicians, bemoaned their rebellious teenagers, and mourned the passing of beloved pets. Some fought over minor differences and more sensible people denounced those who could not get along with their neighbors. Some were involved in huge, elaborate projects that would not see completion in their lifetimes, and yet they found reason to participate and build on the work of those who had gone before.
Visitors at Stonehenge, perhaps considering what life might have been like 5,000 years ago on Earth.
"Stonehenge 1960s" photo by Annabel M, CC-BY 2.0
Are we to believe that Vulcans were violent barbarians much more recently than humans? That while humans were developing cuneiform and hieroglyphs, establishing the basics of accounting and medical texts, Vulcans were irrational and vicious—but have since surpassed humans in technology and developed powerful psychic abilities?
Something about this doesn't add up. I can more easily believe that Spock, badly disoriented by the trip through time and deeply worried about his friend's survival, latched onto the first viable way to cope: Accept that they are stuck here and focus on surviving in their new home.
Of course, this is only plausible if one believes that Spock would give up his friendship with Kirk for a life with McCoy and a woman he met an hour ago. That possibility raises even more questions.
Four stars. I can quibble over some of the "science," but the character dynamics were riveting.
Treasure from Trash
by Joe Reid
This week’s episode of Star Trek contained many interesting elements: a star about to go Nova, eliminating a solar system and the desperate race to find survivors. A man with duplicate copies of himself. A civilization with the power to travel in time. All interesting concepts that could fill volumes of science fiction. Sadly, these concepts were cheapened by the unnecessary common plot devices which ran rampant in this episode. From jumping to conclusions to failing to ask questions, there didn’t appear to be any characters in this episode unwilling to make critical mistakes that made situations worse than they already were.
Let’s start our examination on an individual level with Kirk and Atoz. Kirk and crew went to a doomed planet where everyone was gone, looking for people to save. Atoz, having saved everyone, was perplexed as to why these newcomers hadn’t escaped yet. This left us with a comedy of errors that shouldn’t have occurred. Had Kirk or Atoz not jumped to conclusions and taken a minute to fully introduce themselves and state their purposes, all parties would have been allowed to move on with their respective businesses without incident. Instead, we were forced to bear witness to two men fighting so hard to save each other they were willing to almost kill each other.
"Kirk, go to your room!"
The second cause of frustration in this episode revolved around the fact that questions were never asked during the times when people were the safest. Again, our two subjects are Atoz and Kirk, but mainly Kirk. Had Kirk asked before he leapt to aid the sound of a screaming woman, he might have saved himself some trouble. Even Spock and McCoy fell into the same situation, chasing after Kirk’s voice as he had the woman. Have none of them ever been taught that the time to ask questions is when you are still at the library, not after you’ve left? Eventually Kirk and crew were able to formulate questions after they found themselves in predicaments. They discovered the answers which led to their salvations. All completely avoidable.
At the end of the day, these mistakes lead to the exploration of fantastical places with many surprises. The journey to the frozen wastes, where Spock and McCoy find the lonely and beautiful prisoner, pushes Spock and McCoy to the brink both physically and emotionally. Kirk has to find unwilling allies in a strange past to save himself from his own prison, and after all that, has to fight to prevent re-imprisonment to save the lives of this crew. I found it amazing that this episode was able to push beyond the cheap narrative devices to deliver a worthy hour of TV. It ultimately rewarded the viewer’s patience for putting up with these forgivable follies to get to some good sci-fi at the end. All gripes aside, I enjoyed watching “All Our Yesterdays”.
Riding on Apollo's Coat-tails The Traveller recently referred to President Nixon’s 8-day European tour, but it would seem Mr. Nixon deliberately decided to pave the way by riding on the coat-tails of the general international applause accorded to the historic Apollo-8 mission. Shortly before he announced his own trip to Europe, the President personally dispatched Apollo-8 commander Colonel Frank Borman and his family on an eight-nation European goodwill tour. (The other Apollo-8 crewmembers, already in training as part of the Apollo-11 backup crew, were not available to participate in the tour.)
Departing on 2 February, Col. Borman, his wife Susan, and two sons undertook a 19-day tour, visiting the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (including West Berlin), Italy (including Vatican City), and Spain (like Australia, home to an Apollo Manned Space Flight Network station and a Deep Space Network facility): an itinerary very closely paralleling that later followed by President Nixon!
The Borman family meets the Royal Family and Col. Borman presents a picture of the Moon to the Pope during his goodwill tour of Europe
Col. Borman said that he was particularly gratified to make the journey because of a conviction that space efforts “can be a very positive force for creating better relations among the people of the world”.
A Long-Delayed Mission But while Colonel Borman was embarking on his diplomatic mission, the crew of the long-delayed first test flight of the Lunar Module (LM) in Earth orbit were in the final stages of preparations for the Apollo-9 mission, which splashed down just a few days ago with all its objectives successfully completed. Intended to be Apollo-8, the mission was bumped later in the sequence due to a succession of technical delays in the development of the LM, the first manned spacecraft designed solely for operations in space.
Apollo-9’s main task was to qualify the LM for manned lunar flight, demonstrating that the craft could perform all the necessary manoeuvres required for a landing on the Moon. The flight was therefore intended to be very much a mission of “firsts” that would finally fully test-out the entire suite of hardware needed to accomplish a Moon landing mission. It would see the first flight of the complete Apollo Saturn vehicle – Saturn V launcher (AS-504 for this mission), Command Service Module (CSM-104) and Lunar Module (LM-3) – as well as the first docking and extraction of a LM from the Saturn S-IVB stage.
Putting the LM through its paces would involve the first flight tests of its upper and lower stages, with the first firings of their engines in space, and include the first rendezvous and docking between with the CSM and LM. The mission would also undertake the first spacewalk of the Apollo programme, to test the reliability of the Apollo A-7L space suit and the Portable Life Support System (PLSS) backpack, essential for lunar surface operations.
The Crew Who Waited Original 1966 crew photo of Astronauts Scott, McDivitt and Schweickart. Their training for the flight that eventually became Apollo-9 commenced in January 1967, even before the Apollo-1 fire
Probably the best prepared mission crew to date, the Apollo-9 crew originally came together in January 1966, as the back-ups for Apollo-1, before being assigned as the first crew to fly the LM. Their 1,800 hours of mission-specific training was equivalent to about seven hours for every hour of their eventual flight!
With so much riding on a successful LM test flight, Apollo-9’s crew comprised two veteran Gemini astronauts and one rookie. Mission Commander Air Force Col. James McDivitt previously commanded the Gemini-IV mission, during which the first US EVA was conducted. Command Module Pilot Lt.-Col. David Scott, also with the US Air Force, was Pilot of Gemini-VIII, its flight cut short by the first US in-flight space emergency, but for which he undertook considerable EVA training.
Finally Go for launch! Astronauts McDivitt, Scott and Schweickart in their official Apollo-9 pre-flight crew portrait
The new kid on the block for Apollo-9 was LM Pilot Mr. Russell Schweickart, originally selected in the third group of astronauts in 1963. An experienced fighter pilot, serving with the U.S. Air Force and the Massachusetts Air National Guard between 1956 and 1963, Mr. Schweickart joined NASA as a civilian, from a position as a research scientist at the Experimental Astronomy Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Mr. Schweickart is nicknamed “Rusty” for his red hair (but in Australia, with our sense of humour, we’d have called him “Bluey”!).
Introducing Gumdrop and Spider Because Apollo-9 would have two spacecraft from the same mission operating independently for the first time (unlike the Gemini VI-VII rendezvous, in which the two spacecraft were separate missions with their own callsigns), they each required separate callsigns for easy communications identification. NASA Administrators therefore finally lifted the ban on spacecraft names, which has been in operation since the beginning of the Gemini programme, permitting the crew to select their own names for the CM and LM.
The Apollo-9 CSM and LM being prepared for launch at Kennedy Space Centre
The astronauts chose “Gumdrop” for the CM, based on the shape of the capsule, which resembles the popular sweet, and “Spider” for the LM, given the spider-like appearance of the lander, with its four spindly legs. Unfortunately, it seems that certain NASA officials were not happy with these choices, feeling they were not dignified enough, so I hope they will not place restrictions on the names that can be selected for future missions, or force the crews to revert to dull numerical callsigns.
Patching Up North American Rockwell artist Allen Stevens seems to be quite a favourite with the Apollo astronauts as a mission patch designer. He has designed the patches for Apollo-1, 7 and Apollo-9, and seems to have had a strong influence on the design of the Apollo-8 patch.
Stevens’ Apollo-9 patch evolved from a design he originally developed when Apollo-9 was still anticipated to be Apollo-8. The relatively simple concept depicts all the vehicle elements of the Apollo mission – the Saturn V in launch configuration, with the CSM and the LM flying separately as they would do during orbital test manoeuvres. In the final version of the design they appear against a mottled blue background that could represent either the Earth’s oceans or orbital space. Rather than show the CSM and LM docked together in orbit, as we often see them in NASA illustrations, Stevens chose to depict them in their on orbit ‘station-keeping’ positions, with the CSAM and LM facing each other, although this does give the impression that the CM is attempting to dock with the front of the LM!
Completing the design, the names of the crew and mission circle just inside the red-bordered edge of the patch, with the “D” in McDivitt’s name also filled in red. This is a nod to Apollo-9 being originally designated as the “D” mission in the sequence of Apollo flights prior to the Moon landing.
A Busy Moonport Due to the long delay with the LM, preparations for Apollo-9 initially overlapped those of Apollo-7 and 8. By February, while the astronauts were spending long hours in mission simulators preparing for their flight, Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) was a hive of activity with Apollo-9 in the final stages of pre-launch testing, and advance preparations for Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 also underway (Apollo 10 is currently due for launch in May and Apollo 11 in July).
In addition to Apollo-9’s launch preparations, the Apollo 10 spacecraft was moved from the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building (MSOB) to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for mating with its Saturn V launcher (above left); the first and second stages for the Apollo 11 Saturn V arrived, with the stacking of that launcher commencing in the VAB (above right); and the upper and lower stages of the Apollo 11 LM were also mated in the MSOB, in preparation for testing in the altitude chamber. NASA is really moving at a cracking pace to achieve a manned lunar landing this year!
An Unexpected Delay The countdown for Apollo-9 commenced on 26 February, for a planned launch on the 28th. But fate stepped in to delay the crew’s trip to space just a bit longer! Ironically, despite their years of training for this mission, the astronauts pushed themselves so hard in their final weeks that, as launch day approached, they developed cold-like symptoms such as sore throats and nasal congestion.
Apollo-9's LM crew, McDivitt and Schweickart, training in the Lunar Module simualator
For NASA’s most complex manned mission to date, senior managers and flight surgeons wanted the crew to be in the best possible health for the 10-day flight. (They were probably also mindful of preventing a recurrence of the issues with the Apollo-7 crew, due to in-flight health problems). Consequently, the launch was rescheduled to 3 March to give the astronauts time to recover.
Finally on their Way!
Once KSC medical director Dr Charles Berry finally cleared the crew for launch, Apollo-9 left the pad exactly on time at 16:00GMT on 3 March. Hopefully the smooth launch impressed Vice President Spiro Agnew (on right in the picture below), who was present in the Launch Control Centre in his new role as Head of the National Space Council, especially as President Nixon has asked his science adviser, Dr Lee Dubridge, to report on possible cost reductions within the US space programme.
To maximize the chances of accomplishing them, in case any problems forced an early return to Earth, the most critical mission tasks were scheduled for the first five days of the flight. So once the Saturn rocket’s S-IVB third stage and the CSM were safely in orbit, things moved quickly. During the second orbit, CM Pilot Scott turned the CSM and successfully docked with the Lunar Module, nestled in the Spacecraft-Lunar Module Adapter of the S-IVB stage. The linked spacecraft were ejected from the S-IVB, which was then remotely controlled to simulate Trans-Lunar Injection and eventually be sent into a solar orbit.
Demonstrating that the “probe and drogue” CM-LM docking assembly worked properly is another crucial step towards enabling the future Moon landing. If this system didn’t work, a lunar landing would not be possible.
Once the probe is inserted in the drogue it retracts and pulls the two spacecraft together so that a series of twelve latches locks them tight.
Burning Along Six hours into the mission, the next task was to establish that the docked CSM-LM could be manoeuvred using the Service Module’s Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine. A five-second burn placed the CSM in an orbit of 125 by 145 miles, to improve its orbital lifetime. This short firing demonstrated the CSM guidance and navigation system’s ability to control the burn and showed that the LM’s relatively light structure could withstand thrust, acceleration and vibration.
Following the first sleep period on an Apollo mission during which all three astronauts slept at the same time, Apollo-9’s second day focussed on putting the SPS engine, and the CSM, to the test, through a series of three burns. The first burn, lasting 110 seconds, raised Apollo 9’s orbit to 213 miles and tested the structural dynamics of the docked spacecraft under conditions simulating a lunar mission. This involved gimballing (swivelling) the SPS engine to determine whether the spacecraft’s guidance and navigation autopilot could dampen the induced oscillations. The CSM remained very stable, with the oscillations damped within just five seconds.
Apollo spacecraft diagram key. CSM (right) and LM (launch configuration) docked. I – Lunar module descent stage; II – Lunar module ascent stage; III – Command module; IV – Service module. 1 LM descent engine skirt; 2 LM landing gear; 3 LM ladder; 4 Egress platform ("porch"); 5 Forward hatch; 6 LM reaction control system quad; 7 S-band inflight antenna (2); 8 Rendezvous radar antenna; 9 S-band steerable antenna; 10 Command Module crew compartment; 11 Electrical power system radiators; 12 SM reaction control system quad; 13 Environmental control system radiator; 14 S-band steerable antenna
The second SPS burn lasted 280 seconds, changing the orbit to 126 by 313 miles, while the short third burn, just 28.2 seconds, changed the plane of the spacecraft’s orbit. These orbital changes were designed to position Apollo-9 for better ground tracking and lighting conditions during upcoming mission activities.
Space Sickness Strikes Entering the LM and checking out its systems was scheduled for flight day three, but planned operations were initially disrupted when space sickness reared its head. Flight surgeons still know little about this condition, which seems to affect some astronauts but not others, and some more than others.
A view inside Command Module Gumdrop
Both Col. McDivitt and Mr. Schweickart were affected, with McDivitt apparently experiencing some mild nausea. Mr. Schweickart, however, vomited in the CM and again later in the LM. When Col. McDivitt contacted the flight surgeons from the LM to report the medical situation, they were less than happy that the earlier incident had not been initially reported, as they could have treated Schweickart’s symptoms sooner.
Opening Up the LM Although the initial bout of space sickness delayed the start of operations to clear the docking tunnel and access the LM, the astronauts were able to continue with the day’s activities, and both Commander and LM Pilot used the docking tunnel to make the first ever transfer between manned spacecraft without needing to spacewalk. With Lt.-Col. Scott remaining in the CM, and hatches between the Gumdrop and Spider closed, the LM’s communications and life support systems demonstrated that they were operating independently from the CM. Schweickart also deployed Spider’s landing legs (which had been folded for launch) into the position they would assume for landing on the Moon, giving the LM the appearance of its namesake!
A Jumping Spider! During the nine hours they inhabited Spider, still docked to the CSM, Col. McDivitt and Mr. Schweickart conducted a major test of the Lunar Module’s descent engine, firing it for 367 seconds to simulate the pattern of throttling planned for a descent to the lunar surface. For the final 59 seconds of the burn McDivitt controlled the throttling, varying the thrust from 10 to 40 percent and shutting it off manually, marking the first manual throttling of an engine in space.
This burn, which demonstrated that the LM descent engine could manoeuvre the combined LM-CSM stack, was followed by an additional SPS firing after the LM crew returned to the CM. Together, these burns placed Apollo 9 into an orbit of 142 by 149 miles, ahead of the rendezvous exercises to be performed on day five.
Red Rover (Doesn’t Quite) Cross Over The step-by-step testing program for Apollo-9 earmarked the fourth day of the mission for a spacewalk to test the reliability of the Apollo EVA suit and the PLSS backpack, necessary because it would be impractical and dangerous for astronauts to move across the Moon’s surface trailing umbilical lines connected to the LM. As the only EVA scheduled before the Moon landing, it was the single opportunity to test the PLSS operationally in space.
Astronaut Schweickart training for his planned EVA
Using the call sign “Red Rover”, “Rusty” Schweickart was originally scheduled to perform a two-hour EVA to simulate a space rescue technique in the event that a CM-LM docking could not be made, crossing from Spider to Gumdrop. This would have involved him exiting the hatch on the LM and making his way along the outside of the spacecraft to the CM hatch, where Lt.-Col. Scott would be standing by to assist access to the CM. However, the LM Pilot’s bout of space sickness led Col. McDivitt to initially cancel the EVA, due to the flight surgeons’ concerns about the dangers of vomiting in a spacesuit. This also meant the cancellation of a planned TV broadcast of the spacewalk itself, which would have been another first.
Wearing Golden Slippers But with Mr. Schweickart feeling somewhat better by day four, a modified short EVA was substituted to enable the EVA equipment test to be carried out. After McDivitt and Schweickart again transferred to Spider, Mr. Schweickert climbed out onto the LM porch for a 37.5-minute EVA, exclaiming “Hey, this is like spectacular” as he stood in the void. For much of this time, the astronaut’s feet were held in gold-coloured restraints, nicknamed the “Golden Slippers”, but he was also able to move around the LM’s exterior using handholds to retrieve some experiments.
At the same time, David Scott, wearing a bright red helmet, made a stand-up EVA in Gumdrop’s hatch and both astronauts photographed each. Scott, too, retrieved experiments from outside the CM. Mr. Schweickart has said that he found moving around easier than it had been in simulations and was confident that he could have completed the spacewalk to the CM had it gone ahead.
The Spider Takes Flight
The key event in Apollo -9’s programme was the undocking and rendezvous tests scheduled for the fifth day of the mission. These manoeuvres would simulate all the activities required for a successful lunar landing and return to lunar orbit. With McDivitt and Schweickart in Spider, and Scott remaining in Gumdrop, the two craft undocked to commence a complex set of manoeuvres and burns of both the LM descent and ascent engines. These tests also carried a new element of danger. The Lunar Module has no ability to return to Earth on its own, since it lacks a heatshield: if something went seriously wrong its crew could end up stranded in space with no way home.
After 45 minutes separated but station keeping, an initial 24.9-second LM descent engine burn placed Spider into a 137 by 167 mile orbit; a second 24.4-second firing circularized the orbit around 154 by 160 miles, approximately 12 miles higher than Gumdrop. Over the next four hours, McDivitt fired the LM’s descent engine at several throttle settings, before lowering Spider’s orbit to begin a two-hour ‘chase’ to catch-up with Gumdrop. The LM descent stage was then jettisoned, and the ascent stage engine fired for the first time, lowering the LM’s orbit still further and placing Spider 75 miles behind and 10 miles below Gumdrop for the rendezvous manoeuvre.
Although it is planned that in future Moon missions, the Command Module pilot will conduct the rendezvous with a returning LM, for Apollo-9 Spider carried out the rendezvous, to demonstrate that the manoeuvre could be performed by either craft. Apart from this difference, the approach and rendezvous hewed as closely as possible to the current plans for lunar missions. Mission Commander McDivitt flew the LM close to Gumdrop, manoeuvring Spider so that CM Pilot Scott could see each side of the vehicle and inspect it for any damage. As he photographed the ascent stage, Scott joked “You’re the biggest, friendliest, funniest looking Spider I’ve ever seen.”
McDivitt then docked to the CM, guided by Scott, as Sun glare was interfering with his vision. Once Spider’s crew returned to Gumdrop, the ascent stage was jettisoned and remotely commanded to fire its engine to fuel depletion, simulating an ascent stage’s climb from the lunar surface. With the approach and rendezvous operation complete, the only major LM system that had not been fully tested during Apollo-9 was the lunar landing radar.
A Bit Camera Shy Unlike the previous two missions, Apollo 9’s packed programme restricted the television broadcasts made by the astronauts. Spider was equipped with a Westinghouse b/w Lunar Surface Lunar TV Camera, identical to the one taken to be carried to the Moon’s surface on the first landing, as another equipment trial. This low-light “slow scan” camera produced a 320 line, 10 frames per second non-interlaced picture.
Only two broadcasts were from Spider. The first, seven minutes’ long, occurred on day three and showed Mr. Schweickart and Col. McDivitt working in the confined space of the LM. The second broadcast occurred shortly after the end of the EVA on the fourth day, with Spider’s crew still wearing their spacesuits.
The quality of this 15-minute transmission was much better than the previous day, and the crew treated viewers to a scene of Col. McDivitt eating. The camera was then pointed out the LM’s top window to show Gumdrop, then through one of the forward windows to glimpse one of Spider’s attitude control thruster quads and a landing leg. Finally, the view switched back into the cabin to show the LM’s instrument panel and a radiation detector. Once the LM ascent stage was jettisoned, on day five, there were no further broadcasts as the CM did not carry a television camera.
Cruisin' in Orbit Once the crowded test schedule of the first five days was complete, the second five days of Apollo-9’s flight, intended to test the endurance of the CSM for the total length of a Moon landing mission, were quiet and relaxed by comparison.
Col. McDivitt thanked the Mission Control team for their work during the hectic first half of the mission and jokingly mused: “Might give you the impression that it might work, huh?” The crew sang a belated “Happy Birthdays” to Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., Director of Flight Operations at the Manned Spacecraft Centre, and Apollo 9 crew secretary Charlotte Maltese.
There were additional SPS burns on days six and eight to change the spacecraft’s orbit, with no major activities scheduled for the ninth day, although the astronauts made observations of the Pegasus 3 satellite, passing within 1,000 miles and 700 miles of Apollo 9 during two successive orbits. They also observed the LM ascent stage from about 700 miles away.
Observing the Earth The main activity of the second half of the Apollo-9’s flight was the mission’s only formal scientific investigation, a programme of multi-spectral terrain photography, using four Hasselblad 70 mm cameras pointed out the CM’s round hatch window. This allowed photographs to be taken in four specific wavelengths of the visible and near infrared spectrum simultaneously.
Multi-spectral images. The same view of San Diego and parts of California in four different wavelengths
This experiment was designed to determine whether multi-spectral photography can be effectively utilised for earth resources programmes such as agriculture, forestry, geology, oceanography, hydrology, and geography. The results will help to refine the instruments for the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), due for launch in 1972, Landsat, and techniques for multi-spectral photography to be conducted aboard the Skylab space station in the early 1970s.
Altogether 127 complete four-frame sets of photographs were taken over California, Texas, other areas of the southern United States, Mexico, the Caribbean and the Cape Verde Islands. Astronauts also took more than 1,100 standard Earth observation photographs of targets around the world, using colour and colour infrared film and a handheld Hasselblad camera.
Apollo-9 astronauts' colour photograph of the North Carolina coast and a colour infra-red view of California's Salton Sea
Coming Home Apollo -9 returned to Earth on 13 March (the 14th for us here in Australia), the tenth day of the mission. Re-entry was delayed by one revolution due to heavy seas in the primary recovery area, but Gumdrop splashed down safely in the Atlantic, within three miles of the recovery ship, the USS Guadalcanal, after a mission totalling 241 hours, 53 seconds – just 10 seconds longer than planned!
On board the recovery ship, the crew were treated to a share of a 350-pound cake baked in their honour. Now safely back in Houston for their flight debriefings, NASA’s attention – and the world’s – is already turning to Apollo-10, due to fly in May to test the LM around the Moon!
Ready for the Next Steps While Apollo-9 might not have seemed as exciting a mission as Apollo-8’s epic lunar voyage, it was critical because it has simulated in Earth orbit, as far as possible, many of the conditions that the astronauts and their equipment will face when the lunar landing attempt is made. Beyond that first landing and its successors, there is the Apollo Applications Programme, and other developments such as the Skylab manned earth orbiting workshop. Everything that has been learned in space with Apollo-9 will be useful sooner or later in future space activities!
And you can bet we'll be covering each and every one of them here on the Journey…
It's a highly superior clutch of books this month around—plus a double review of the new Vonnegut…
by Victoria Silverwolf
Sophomore Efforts
By coincidence, the last two books I read were both the second novels to be published by their authors. Otherwise, they are as different as they could be.
Coleman's first book was something called Seeker From the Stars. I haven't read it, so I can't comment. In fact, I was completely unfamiliar with this author, so I asked my contacts in fandom and the publishing industry about him. I turned up a couple of interesting facts.
Firstly, he's one of the few Black science fiction writers. (The most notable is, of course, the great Samuel R. Delany.) That's a good thing for the field. The more variety of writers, the better the fiction.
Secondly, he's currently in jail for burglary. It seems that he's taken up writing while incarcerated. That seems like a decent path to rehabilitation, so let's wish him good luck while paying his debt to society.
But is the book any good? Let's find out.
At some time in the future, humanity has reached the far reaches of the solar system. However, a conglomeration of business interests known as the Five Companies has put a stop to further development of space science, unless they control it. They're so powerful that they have their own secret police. Not even the World Government or the Space Patrol can keep them from crippling research.
Our protagonist is Catherine Rogers. She is part of a private space research group that dares to defy the Five Companies. Trouble starts when a scientist shows up at their headquarters, shot by the secret police. Just before dying, he gives Catherine and her colleagues a book and a key to a hidden cache of highly advanced technology brought from another world.
We quickly find out that two aliens in the form of glowing spheres are on Earth. One of them is insanely evil. He kidnapped the other, who is essentially the queen bee of her species. He intends to mate with her against her will, forcing her to produce one hundred million offspring (!) who will be raised to be as wicked as himself.
He wants to feed off the life force of human beings, and teach his children to do the same, wiping out humanity. Complicating matters is the fact that the evil alien shares his mind with one of the leaders of the secret police, who wants to get his hands on the advanced technology.
This all happens very early in the book, and we've got a long way to go. Suffice to say that Catherine and her friends work with the good alien, who has enormous psychic powers, to defeat the bad one.
The author's writing style isn't very sophisticated, sad to say, nor is the plot. Much of the time I imagined this story as a comic book. On the good side, the pace keeps getting faster and faster. By the end, it makes Keith Laumer look like Henry James.
I also appreciate the fact that the heroes are of mixed races, and a large number of them are women. All in all, however, I have to confess that this is a disappointing work.
Randall's first novel was called Hedgerow. I haven't read that one either, but apparently it's a Gothic Romance without supernatural elements.
Unlike Coleman, I'm familiar with this author. She had two excellent stories published in Fantastic a few years ago.
Will she be as adept at a longer length? Let's take a look.
An automobile accident claims the lives of the parents of two sisters. Elizabeth (twenty-four years old) escapes without a scratch, but Gabrielle (nineteen) is severely injured. The two young women move into a house owned by the great-aunt of a doctor who cared for Gabrielle during her long and painful recovery.
The house is located on an island off the coast of New England, the perfect setting for a Gothic Romance. Elizabeth and the doctor fall in love, giving us the other mandatory element for this genre.
The first half of the book is narrated by Gabrielle. On the very first page she feels the presence of Alarice, a woman who lived in the house long ago. (She's the dead sister of the great-aunt. Throughout the book, there's a strong parallel between the two pairs of sisters, including a love triangle.)
It's obvious from the start that Gabrielle is mentally and emotionally unstable, after her traumatic experience, so it's not always clear what's real and what's not. The second half of the book is narrated by Elizabeth, who gives us a very different perspective on events, including the tragic accident.
I haven't mentioned a third narrator, who shows up only a few pages from the end, adding a genuinely chilling touch.
This is a beautifully written book, with great psychological insight into its characters. Besides gorgeous language that makes me want to read it out loud, it has a plot as intricately woven as a spider web. We witness the same things happen from different viewpoints, completely changing what we thought we knew.
Five stars.
by Brian Collins
This month's Ace Double is a very good one for both Fritz Leiber fans and readers in general. The quality packed into this Double is unsurprising, though, since it is all reprints. There's the short collection Night Monsters, which contains four stories that all run in the horror vein. Three of these stories were previously printed in Fantastic, and so Victoria covered them some years ago. The other half is The Green Millennium, one of Leiber's more overlooked novels, first published in 1953 and not having seen print in the U.S. in about fifteen years.
The longest story here is also the best, at least in terms of the sheer beauty of Leiber's prose. It's Southern California in the early '60s, and the narrator is recounting the strange ramblings of a friend of his who would disappear under mysterious circumstances. Said friend believes that not only is oil a corrupting force, but that oil might somehow be alive. The supernatural is never seen but is strongly alluded to, in passages so evocative, so oppressive, that they compare with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The plot itself is rather structureless, but this doesn't matter because Leiber is so good at chronicling modern horrors such as industry and the urban landscape. I lived in California (in Pasadena) for a short time, and I'll be sure never to return.
Another contender for best in the collection is a more personal, more melancholy story. A middle-aged man, a chess-player, astronomer, and divorcee who reads somewhat like a stand-in for Leiber, sees a silhouetted figure behind him in the doubled mirrors he sees going up and down the stairs every night. Without giving away the ending, the apparition may be the ghost of a theatre actress he had met by chance who had committed suicide not long after their encounter. The man, in an attack of conscience, is confronted with a memory he had suppressed, of a person he had deeply wronged, though he didn't know it at the time. It's a ghost story, a striking portrait of guilt, and in a strange way, a love story.
As an unintended companion to the previous story, this one is interesting. It also features a ghostly woman who has been wronged, albeit the crime committed upon her is much worse. We're led to believe at first that this woman is simply a temptress, but while she may creep up on the unsuspecting male lead, she is not a totally malicious specter. "I'm Looking for 'Jeff'" is about a decade older than the other stories, and it certainly shows a restraint (given the horrific crime at the center) that Leiber would probably not show if he had written it today. My one real problem is the ending, which is an expositional monologue from a third party that explains the twist, rather than Leiber showing us what happened.
The last and shortest is also the most lighthearted; it's what you might call a horror-comedy. An actress is quite literally fading (her body is becoming more transparent) as her popularity is on the decline, so she resorts to a very old family ritual that might make her famous again—at a price. The satire is cute, although I think Leiber tackled something similar but better and more seriously in "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes." I'm also not sure about those rhyming couplets. It's fine, but ultimately minor.
Phil Gish is aimless and unemployed, but his life quickly gets turned upside down when he meets a green cat he takes an immediate liking to. He calls the cat Lucky, and like Lovecraft, who liked taking care of strays, he thinks of the animal as his own—only for Lucky to run off. Man gets cat, man loses cat, man goes looking for cat. This is the skeleton on which the book's plot is built, but it balloons into something much weirder and more convoluted.
The future America of The Green Millennium is dystopic, but not in ways we now take as obvious. Robots have become normalized, taking away much of human labor, and the people themselves are largely hedonists desperate for stimulation—not even for pleasure itself but more to fight off boredom. Despite being first published in 1953, it reads like something written in the past few years—in the wake of the New Wave and even something like Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Certainly it could not have been serialized in the magazines of the time, what with the explicit references to sex and drug use.
The plot, at its core, is simple, but Leiber introduces a colorful array of characters, all of whom want Lucky as much as Phil does. These characters include, but are not limited to, a husband-wife wrestling duo, an analyst who sounds like he himself could use an analyst, a woman with prosthetic legs that hide what seem to be hooves for feet, a pack of corporate higher-ups who may as well be mobsters, actual mobsters, and a few others I have not mentioned. The green cat might be an alien, or a mutant, or a weapon devised by the Soviets, I won't say which.
I might sound inebriated as I'm trying to explain all this, but let me assure you that I haven't smoked or ingested marijuana in five months!
Leiber is a mixed bag when it comes to comedy: he can be pretty funny, but he can also write The Wanderer. The Green Millennium is a madcap SF comedy that was written at a time (the early '50s) when Leiber could seemingly do no wrong, and it demonstrates his keen understanding of things that haunt the modern American. Most importantly, it's just a lot of fun.
On a routine flight from Stockholm to London, sixteen travellers (eight women and eight men) with no connection to each other, find themselves whisked to another world. Their new environs are suggestive of nothing so much as a zoo habitat designed to be reminiscent of home. To wit: a strip of highway flanked by a supermarket and a hotel, complete with electricity and running water. Two automobiles sans engines. A few workshops. A nightly replenished supply of booze, groceries, and tools.
Russell Graheme, M.P., quickly takes charge of the unwilling emigrants, organizing exploration parties. Soon, contact is made with a medievalist enclave, a Stone Age encampment…and what appear to be flocks of fairies.
What is this world? Who brought them there? And to what end? Those are the key riddles answered in this terrific little new book.
It's sort of a cross between Cooper's book Transit (in which five humans are transported to an extraterrestrial island) and Philip José Farmer's "Riverworld" series (in which everyone who ever lived is transported, along with his/her culture, to the banks of an extraterrestrial world-river) with a touch of the whimsy of L. Sprague de Camp (viz. The Incomplete Enchanter). It reads extremely quickly, and what with the short chapters and quick running time, you'll be done with the novel (novella?) before you know it.
What really engaged me, beyond the tight writing and fine characterization, was the central message of hope throughout the book. In "Riverworld", the various cultures who find themselves alongside each other in the hereafter almost immediately form belligerent statelets; war is the constant in Farmer's series. But in Seahorse, it's all about making peaceful contact, working together, having a productive goal. There's no Lord of the Flies to this story (though it is not unmitigatedly happy, either). Cooper clearly has a positive view of humanity, or at least wants to inspire us toward his idealistic vision. Count me in.
Five stars.
Contrast this upbeat book with the other one I read recently…
By page 100, Gideon determined that Slaughterhouse Five is not a book one enjoys, but rather experiences.
Two thirds of the way through the book, Gideon realized he'd been hoodwinked. Slaughterhouse Five is not science fiction at all, but rather the author's attempt to convey his experiences as a POW in Nazi Germany during the War, culminating in his presence at the firebombing of Dresden (now sited in East Germany). The SFnal wrapping, in which Billy Pilgrim is abducted by 4D aliens who unstick him in time and incarcerate him in an extraterrestrial zoo, seems there mostly to get eyes on the book. Or maybe to maintain a certain detachment from the material by changing the genre from "memoir."
For the same reason Billy Pilgrim, the eternal schlemiel, gets to be the closest thing the book has to a hero rather than the author, himself. The only way Vonnegut could work through his battle fatigue and War-derived ennui was to make the protagonist as hopeless and hapless as possible, to reflect the flannel-wrapped blinders through which the author now sees the world. To Vonnegut, Earth is a pathetic stage on which man inflicts indignity on himself and then on others. Then they die. So it goes.
On or about page 81, Gideon got a little tired of the fairy-tale language Vonnegut employs. It worked in Harrison Bergeron, but it's a bit of a one-trick pony.
Somewhere along the line, Gideon figured that the inclusion of the starlet, Miss Montana (who exists to provide someone besides the enormous Mrs. Pilgrim for Billy to stick his hefty wang into) was so that, in addition to appealing to SF fans, the book would appeal to horny SF fans. And horny readers in general. And because S.E.X. s.e.l.l.s.
Kilgore Trout, if he existed, would probably be reprinted these days in Amazing.
About a third of the way in, Gideon determined that he would write the review of Slaughterhouse Five in the style of Slaughterhouse Five.
Whatever the book is not, it is, at the very least, a memorable account of the author's feelings toward and memories of those dark last months of the war. It is a poignant counterpoint to all the jingoistic WW2 films that have come out this decade, and perhaps a more suitable epitaph for the millions who died in that conflict. So it goes.
Four stars.
by Cora Buhlert
War is hell: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Last month, thousands of people gathered in Dresden to remember the victims of the Allied bombings in the night from February 13 to 14, 1945, the night from Shrove Tuesday to Ash Wednesday and never was a day more aptly named. These memorial gatherings happen every year and while the number of East German officials and politicians attending and the degree of belligerence in their speeches waxes and wanes with the greater political situation (East German officials like using the Dresden bombings for propaganda purposes as an example of the infamy of the West), one thing that remains constant is the number of Dresdeners who come to remember the dead and the nigh total destruction of their city.
The burnt out ruin of the Church of Our Lady in Dresden, once a jewel of Baroque architecture.
The Semper opera house in Dresden after the bombings. The exterior is still standing, but the once gorgeous interior is burned completely out.
I have never seen Dresden before 1945, though my grandmother who grew up in the area told me it was a beautiful city and how much she missed attending performances at the striking Semper opera house, which was largely destroyed by the bombings and is in the process of being rebuilt (The proposed completion date is 1985). However, I have visited the modern Dresden with its constant construction activity and incongruous mix of burned out ruins, historical buildings in various stages of reconstruction and newly constructed modernist office and apartment blocks and could keenly feel what was lost.
Views of the modern rebuilt Dresden in postcard form
I also know survivors of the Dresden bombings such as my university classmate Norbert who witnessed Dresden burning as teenager evacuated to the countryside and who – much like Kurt Vonnegut – was forced to help with the clean-up work and body recovery and wrote a harrowing account of his experiences for the university literary magazine.
Of course, Dresden was not the only German city bombed. Every bigger German city has its own Dresden, that night when entire neighbourhoods were wiped out and thousands of people, the vast majority of them civilians, were killed. For my hometown of Bremen, the night was the night of August 18, 1944, when Allied bombers destroyed the Walle neighbourhood next to Bremen harbour (while miraculously missing most of the harbour itself, similar to how the bombing of Dresden miraculously missed the industrial plants on the outskirts of the city). My grandfather, a retired sea captain, lived in the Walle neighbourhood. He was one of the lucky ones and survived, though his home in a housing estate for retired seafarers was destroyed. I remember sifting through the still smoking rubble of Grandpa's little house with my Mom the next day, looking for anything that might have survived the bombs and the firestorm and finding only two bronze buddha statues that Grandpa had brought back from Thailand. These two buddhas now stand guard in my living room, the war damage still visible. Meanwhile, the street where Grandpa once lived no longer exists on modern city maps at all.
An aerial view of Dresden's old slaughterhouse, where Kurt Vonnegut was imprisoned and survived the bombing of the city.
This is the perspective from which I read Kurt Vonnegut's latest novel Slaughterhouse Five, which uses science fiction as a vehicle for Vonnegut to describe his experiences as a prisoner of war who survived the bombing of Dresden and – like my classmate Norbert – never forgot what he saw that night and in the days that followed.
The result, much like the contemporary Dresden with the burned out ruin of the Church of Our Lady overlooking a parking lot and a hyper-modern restaurant and entertainment complex sitting directly opposite the newly restored Baroque Zwinger palace, is jarring and incongruous. Vonnegut's protagonist is Billy Pilgrim, an American everyman whose suburban postwar life is disrupted when he is abducted by aliens and becomes unstuck in time, forced to revisit the bombing of Dresden over and over and over again.
No, this photo of the burnt out ruin of the Church of Our Lady in winter was not taken in 1945, but in 1960. It still looks the same today.
A banner advertises an exhibtion of contemporary Soviet art, while the ruins of Baroque Dresden loom in the background.
The ultra-modern restaurant complex Am Zwinger, the largest in all of East Germany, opened only last year – directly opposite the newly restored Baroque Zwinger palace.
Aerial view of the ultra-modern restaurant complex Am Zwinger, which includes a self-service restaurant, the Radeberger beer cellar and the Café Espresso, pictured here. Just don't expect the coffee on offer to actually taste like espresso.
Tourists lounge in the terrace café of the restaurant complex Am Zwinger, overlooking the recently rebuilt Baroque Zwinger palace.
Slaughterhouse Five is not so much a novel, it is a metaphor for the trauma of war, a trauma that still hasn't subsided even twenty-four years later but that keep rearing its ugly head again and again. Many veterans report having flashbacks to particularly traumatic experiences during the war – any war. But while those flashbacks are purely psychological, poor Billy Pilgrim physically travels back in time to the worst night of his life over and over again.
Barely a blip on the radar
The bombings of World War II loom large in the collective memory of people in Germany and the rest of Europe, yet they are comparatively rarely addressed in contemporary German literature. Der Untergang (The End: Hamburg) by Hans Erich Nossack from 1948, Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Love and a Time to Die) by Erich Maria Remarque (who was not even in Germany, but sitting high and dry in Switzerland during WWII) from 1954 and Vergeltung (Retaliation) by Gert Ledig from 1956 are some of the very few examples. It's not as if World War II plays no role in German literature at all, because we have dozens of war novels. However, these are all tales about the experiences of soldiers on the frontline, not about the civilians getting bombed to smithereens back home. Most likely, this is because war novels focus on the experiences of men (and note that both Slaughterhouse Five and Remarque's A Time to Love and a Time to Die focus on soldiers experiencing bombings and air raids) and the experiences of men are deemed important. Meanwhile, the people who suffered and died during the bombing nights of World War II were mainly women, children, old people, sick people, prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers and their experiences are not deemed nearly as relevant.
Considering how utterly destructive the bombing of Dresden was, it's notable that it is barely a blip on the radar of German literature in both East and West. Erich Kästner's memoir Als ich ein kleiner Junge war (When I was a little boy) touches on the bombing of Dresden, where Kästner grew up, though the book is not about the bombing itself, which Kästner did not experience first-hand, because he was living in Berlin at the time. And for the twentieth anniversary of the Dresden bombings, Ulrike Meinhof, one of the brightest lights of West German journalism, penned a scathing article for the leftwing magazine Konkret, condemning Winston Churchill and Royal Air Force commander Arthur Harris for ordering the attack on Dresden under false pretences. "Was Winston Churchill a war criminal?" the cover of the respective issue of Konkret asked, while quite a lot of readers wondered why this was even a question.
So should Slaughterhouse Five, a work by an American author, albeit one who witnessed the bombing of Dresden first-hand, become the definitive account of the destruction of Dresden and of the bombing nights of World War II in general? I hope not, because I want to read more accounts by German civilians about the bombings of World War II. Nonetheless, I'm glad that Slaughterhouse Five exists, as an account about the horrors of war by one who has seen them. I'm also glad that this novel was published in the US, because too many Americans still consider the bombings of cities and civilians during World War II justified. Maybe Slaughterhouse Five will make some of them reconsider, especially since – as I said above – it wasn't just Dresden that was destroyed by bombing. It was also Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Rotterdam, Coventry, Guernica, Hamburg and right now, it's Hanoi. And the next generation's Billy Pilgrim is currently locked up in a bamboo cage in the Vietnamese jungle somewhere, watching the flames over Hanoi turn the sky blood red.
Not a pleasant book at all, but an important one. Four and a half stars.
And now for something much more pleasant. For after a difficult book like Slaughterhouse Five, you need a palate cleanser. Luckily, I found the perfect palate cleanser in The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs, a young American writer currently living in Britain. The Face in the Frost is thirty-year-old Bellairs' third book and his first foray in the fantasy genre.
John Bellairs
The novel starts off with a prologue that informs us that this is a book about wizards – just in case readers of Bellairs' previous two books, collections of Catholic humour pieces, are confused – and then introduces us to the setting, two adjacent kingdoms known only as the North and the South Kingdom. Such prologues can be dry and boring, but Bellairs' whimsical humour, which is on display throughout the book, makes them fun to read.
Once the introductions are out of the way, we meet our protagonist, the wizard Prospero ("not the one you're probably thinking of", Bellairs helpfully informs us) or rather his home, "a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples", which Prospero shares with a sarcastic talking mirror which can offer glimpses of faraway times and places, though mostly, it's just annoying and also has a terrible singing voice.
Prospero's house, as illustrated by Marilyn Fitschen
This first chapter very much sets the tone for the entire novel, humorous and whimsical – with moments of dread occasionally creeping in. For Prospero has been plagued by bad dreams of late, he has the feeling that a malicious presence is watching him and finds himself menaced by a fluttering cloak, while getting a mug of ale from his own cellar. To top off Prospero's very bad day, he finds himself attacked by a monstrous moth that "smells like a basement full of dusty newspapers".
Luckily, Prospero's friend and fellow wizard Roger Bacon – and note that this time around, Bellairs does not inform us, that this is not the one we're thinking of, so this likely is the famed medieval scholar and creator of a talking brazen head – chooses just this evening to drop by for a visit, after having been kicked out of England, when a spell went awry and instead of constructing a wall of brass around the island in order to keep out Viking raiders, Bacon instead raised a wall of glass with predictable results.
As the two old friends discuss the day's events, it quickly becomes clear that something or rather someone is after Prospero and all that this is linked to a mysterious book that Bacon tried to locate on Prospero's behalf. However, it's late at night, so the two wizards go to bed, only to awaken in the morning to find the house surrounded by sinister grey-cloaked figures, sent by a rival wizard. There's no way out – except via an underground river that the two wizards navigate aboard a model ship, after shrinking themselves down to toy size.
A Magical Mystery Tour
What follows is a marvellous, magical quest, as Prospero and Bacon attempt to figure out just who is after Prospero and once they do, how to stop that villainous sorcerer from casting a spell that will plunge the whole world into everlasting winter. On the way, the two wizards encounter such fascinating locations as the village of Five Dials, which turns out to be an illusion, a magical Potemkin village of hollow houses inhabited by hollow people. They also escape all sorts of horrors their opponent sends against them such as a magical puddle that will capture a person's reflection, should they happen to look into it, and of course the titular face that appears in a frost-encrusted window to mock and menace Prospero.
Fantasy is experiencing something of a boom right now, triggered by the paperback release of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lancer's reprints of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian. But while Conan has inspired a veritable legion of other fantastic swordsmen and barbarian warriors from Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné to Lin Carter's Thongor, Lord of the Rings has inspired very few imitators. Until now.
This does not mean that The Face in the Frost is a carbon copy of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Quite the contrary, it's very much its own story, even though the Tolkien inspiration is clear and was acknowledged by Bellairs. Furthermore, Bellairs' light and frothy tone makes The Face in the Frost a very different, if no less magical experience than Professor Tolkien's magnum opus.
The Face in the Frost is a delightful book, skilfully mixing humour and whimsy with horror and dread, and the illustrations by Marilyn Fitschen help bring the wonderful world of Prospero and Roger Bacon to life. The ending certainly leaves room for a sequel and I hope that we will get to read it sooner rather than later. At any rate, I can't wait to see what John Bellairs writes next.
A wondrous confection of whimsy, horror and pure joy. Five stars.
by Robin Rose Graves
Society Without Gender…
Another year, another Le Guin. For those tuning in for the first time, my introduction to Le Guin began two years ago, with her novel City of Illusions, which left me disappointed. Last year, I read A Wizard of Earthsea, where finally I saw Le Guin’s potential realized. When I saw she has another book coming out this year, I was interested, but reined in my expectations when I realized The Left Hand of Darkness would take place in the same universe as City of Illusions.
This is book four of the Hainish Cycle, but fortunately, you do not need to read these books in order to understand the story. In fact, I found little connection between this book and the previous one.
Genly Ai is an envoy sent to the snowy planet of Winter to convince the people to join the Ekumen (a sort of alliance between planets). Winter, or Gethen in their native language, is not as technologically advanced as the rest of the universe. They have yet to build airplanes, let alone a vehicle capable of space travel. Following an outsider’s perspective allows readers to learn about a new culture alongside the narrative main character.
As per my experience with her previous works, Le Guin excels at creating compelling and unique settings. Smaller, intermediate chapters offer folkloric stories from the planet of Winter to further enhance the reader’s understanding of Gethenian culture.
All the characters are human, though the Gethenians differ in one key way. They are completely androgynous except for once a month when they enter their reproductive cycle (known as “kemmer”) where they then shift into either male or female (as in they can either impregnate or become pregnant.) Which role a Gethenian will take on during kemmer is not predetermined and can change between cycles.
This confuses and occasionally disgusts Genly Ai, who regards all characters with he and him pronouns, perhaps because he is male and unable to empathize with or respect anyone who isn’t.
Without gender, Le Guin posits that there is no sexuality, no rape, no war. People who get pregnant are not treated as lesser. Children are raised by everyone, not just the person who gave birth to them. Jobs account for kemmer, giving time off for those experiencing their cycle, and special buildings are set aside for reproduction.
Contrasted with the world we live in today, this book subtly calls out the sexism of our own society, while also exemplifying how we may improve. I was pleasantly surprised by the feminist slant of this book.
Five stars.
Reflections in a Mirage, by Leonard Daventry
By Jason Sacks
Leonard Daventry is a British science fiction author whose work tends to follow standard pathways – until it doesn’t. As my fellow Galactic companion Gideon Marcus wrote about one of Mr. Daventry’s previous novels, Daventry likes to explore ideas of free love and complex relationships, using familiar set-ups with slightly surprising resolutions.
His latest book, Reflections in a Mirage, is an excellent demonstration of how Mr. Daventry takes on those challenges while delivering his own unique view of the world. Unfortunately, this novel is perhaps overly ambitious for its length. Mirage consequently falls short of the author’s clear goals.
We return to the lead character Daventry established back in 1965 in A Man of Double Deed: Claus Coman is a telepath, a so-called “keyman” who can create connections to minds of both humans and non-humans. Coman is enlisted to join a motley band of outcasts and criminals who journey to one of the many worlds which humanity has discovered among the vast stars: a forbidding but intriguing planet called Sacron. Coman at least has the comfort of traveling with longtime companion Jonl, a woman with whom he’s had a complex relationship.
But just as many British exiles to Australia rebelled against their crew, the group of 50 outcasts rebel against the crew of their space cruiser. A violent, vicious battle kills most of the men who can fly the cruiser, and terrible damage is visited upon the ship. They only have one choice: to land on the planet which is ironically called Paradise 1. Paradise 1 seems to be a desert world, nearly bereft of any life whatsoever, but there are hints the planet may be more complex than it initially seems.
In fact, we get an intriguing revelation towards the end of the book (with a few concepts which will be well understood by Star Trek fans), but I found myself hungering for more context of the deeper story. At a mere 191 paperback pages, I was constantly under the impression that Daventry had to cut out important elements to the story; its brevity leaves the conclusion feeling a bit unsatisfying.
Reflections in a Mirage is at its best when it explores the human relationships it depicts. Coman’s relationship with Jonl is at the center of the story and provides a happy connection where so many of the other connections are tenuous. Daventry spends some time showing Jonl’s relationship with other women on the colony ship – the men and women are partitioned away from each other – and alludes to furtive, loving relationships among the women. There are similar hints about some of the men's connections to each other, and a strong implication that this society accepts a full gamut of sexuality, from polygamy to homosexuality and even to asexuality.
All of that is very interesting, and places this novel firmly in a “new wave” mindset, but there’s just not enough of it to satisfy. Ultimately, Reflections in a Mirage has the potential to be great, but I felt Daventry needed at least 100 more pages to fully illuminate his story.
You’ll probably be more satisfied reading some of the other works in this column. (I do recommend the LeGuin and Vonnegut books.)
This episode opened with the Enterprise circling an uninhabitable lava planet with a poisonous atmosphere, but anomalous readings of some kind of civilization or power source. They planned to leave anyway, until they got a message…from Abraham Lincoln.
"Welcome to Washington, Captain Kirk!"
Our crew is now very experienced with meetings with aliens who seem to be people from history or mythology. Most of them wanted to call his bluff immediately, but Kirk played along: he wanted to find out what's happening.
What's happening: A creature made of rock has decided to figure out what good and evil are by pitting four "good" heroes against four "evil" villains for the edification of its people.
Your host for the evening: an Excalbian rock creature that can read minds, terraform parts of a lava world, and shapeshift.
The Excalbian had arranged for Kirk and Spock—two people on the side of "good" (and the only living people involved)—to be joined by Abraham Lincoln, whom Kirk respects deeply, and Surak, the Vulcan philosopher who led the Vulcans out of war into their modern peaceful, logical society.
Abraham Lincoln dresses and speaks like a 19th-century statesman. Ancient Vulcan philosophers apparently dress and speak like the hippies who hang out at Haight & Ashbury in San Francisco today.
They were given opponents: Four of the worst villains from history (three of which we have never heard of before this episode)—two humans, one Klingon, and one other.
The Excalbians wished to "discover which is the stronger" of good or evil, and they had arranged what they call a "drama" with all the delicacy of a small child placing bugs in a jar and shaking it. In essence, "Here, we have put you all together and demanded you fight… whoever lives, that side must be the strongest."
As leverage to force the "good" side to fight, Kirk's crew would all be killed if he fails. The villains faced no such threats. Nor could they; whatever family or friends or honored associates they once had, none are alive today.
The villain line-up, from left to right: Genghis Khan, who needs (or at least gets) no introduction; Colonel Green, a genocidal war leader from 21st century Earth; Zora, a mad scientist from Tiburon; Kahless the Unforgettable, the Klingon tyrant.
At first, I wondered about the inclusion of Zora and Kahless: Is Klingon history so well-known to Kirk and Spock that the Excalbians can draw him from their minds? But the Federation and Klingons have been at odds for some time; they might well be familiar with their most famous historical figures. Zora seemed an outlier—until I remembered where I'd heard of Tiburon. It was the home of Dr. Sevrin, who led the quest for Planet Eden. (Apparently Tiburon has a history of unethical doctors.) Spock might well have known more about the planet's history.
The events that followed were annoyingly predictable. Green briefly attempted to negotiate, which was a distraction for an attack; the villains were driven off; Surak followed to speak to them, which resulted in his death; Lincoln tried to rescue him only to die as well; Kirk and Spock managed to defeat or drive off all four of the villains by themselves.
The Excalbian declared them the winners, but said he does not see any difference between their two philosophies. Kirk pointed out that he was fighting for the lives of his crew but the villains were fighting for personal power or glory. The Excalbian did not seem convinced, but sent them on their way, unharmed.
What was missing: Any mention that the value of "good" over "evil" is not shown on a battlefield, but in day-to-day living. That one strength of "good" is cooperation and shared resources—nearly irrelevant in a fabricated setting, with no time to develop tools, and a pre-selected pool of people who were chosen to play specific roles.
Colonel Green, the only white man on the "villain" team, watches from behind a rock while his companions fight for their lives. Maybe their lack of unity did matter.
I would have liked more consideration of the true nature of the six historical people: Just before they beamed "Lincoln" aboard the Enterprise, Spock said his readings were those of a "living rock" with claws. It seems likely that all the other people were Excalbians playing the part of historical characters. They were offered "power" if they won—but what would that mean? Would the other Excalbians hand them each spaceships and send them along to their respective planets? What could they possibly offer Genghis Khan?
Three stars. Interesting, but the pacing was odd (long, slow buildup to a couple of quick fight scenes), and I wanted more from both the philosophical and science fiction aspects.
Fair to Middlin’
by Janice L. Newman
Star Trek does like its ‘message’ episodes. Sometimes, as with "Day of the Dove or "The Enterprise Incident", the scriptwriter does a pretty good job of addressing the issues of the day. Other times, the scriptwriter does a poor or muddled job of Saying Something, as in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield".
The Savage Curtain falls somewhere between these two extremes. Roddenberry had a couple of pretty clear messages he wanted to send: “violence can be justified if the cause is just” and “peace is an admirable goal, but one that takes time and sacrifice, and in the meantime sometimes violence is necessary”. It’s not surprising that the man who wrote (or re-wrote) “A Private Little War” would want to make these points. But in doing so, he missed the chance to make a much clearer distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, one that would have served the story better.
The ‘evil’ characters in the episode showed an absolutely remarkable amount of teamwork. Colonel Green immediately took charge, and the others simply deferred to him and obeyed him. It stretched credibility just a little to see GHENGIS KHAN passively taking orders without so much as a peep of protest. In order to tell the exact story Roddenberry wanted to tell, characters that should have been backstabbing each other to get ahead or refusing to work together at all instead acted as a well-oiled unit. They had to trust each other, support each other, and listen to each other. In fact, the ‘evil’ characters had to act a little bit good. (While the ‘good’ characters in turn had to commit violence to make the story work, necessitating that they behave in an ‘evil’ way.)
How much more effective could it have been if the ‘evil’ characters had actually behaved in a selfish, anti-social, backbiting manner, and were defeated by people who worked together for the common good? How much more powerful could the message have been if the ‘good’ side found a solution that wasn’t based in violence, using teamwork, cleverness, and the combination of their knowledge and skills?
Maybe it would have been trite, but the idea of good and evil being absolutes is pretty trite, too.
The bit with Uhura explaining that race relations had progressed so far that words were no big deal was nice, though.
Three stars.
By What Right
by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele
In an episode that gave us Abraham Lincoln in space, cultural figures from Klingon and Vulcan history, and an amazing alien design, the thing that I kept thinking about after the episode was this:
KIRK: “How many others have you done this to? What gives you the right to hand out life and death?”
ROCK: “The same right that brought you here. The need to know new things.”
The question has been posed before. What right does Starfleet have? As early as season one, in "The Naked Time", a crewman despaired over humanity polluting space and sticking their noses where they “didn't belong”. His distress was exaggerated by an alien liquid, but the question was real. Is the crew—or Starfleet at large—doing harm in their quest for knowledge? The first directive shows that there has been significant thought on this, instructing Kirk not to infringe on cultures and to make repairs when possible if there has been a violation of the directive. It's an imperfect rule, and one that is broken frequently. Kirk or another officer decides that he knows better, or finds a reason why the directive doesn’t apply. There have been times when that directive hampers life-saving action.
The Excalabian’s actions are cruel by human standards, and as a means to understand the philosophy of “good vs. evil” make no sense to me. But that itself works as a mirror. I have no insight into the alien mind, no way to know what metric it judges by, no concept of how it views humans in relationship to itself. Equal beings? The way humans might regard a very clever animal? Insects under a microscope? Maybe even the way humans view other humans that fall outside their range of “people”.
This amoral broadcast brought to you in living color on NBC!
Human history is full of examples of people seeking knowledge and trampling over others to get it. The many places considered “untouched” on Earth that already have inhabitants, lands reshaped and mined for resources, animals hunted to extinction. The victims of experiments done under the guise of “progress”, psychological and physical studies done without permission, or care for the comfort or pain of the subjected person. Plenty of this has been done deliberately, but lack of ill-intent doesn't change the consequences either. As astronauts practice maneuvers in space, it is important for us, now, to remember that everything leaves a trace. The moon is a remarkable example, but hardly the only one. Just because we can doesn't mean we should – and yet, humans have a place in the universe too, and knowledge is part of that.
The question is not one with an easy answer, and might not have a correct answer. I think it is a question we should not stop asking though, because if we stop, that is when we have decided that yes we *do* know better, and stop caring what, or who gets hurt.
Even with all that philosophy, the episode still felt much like re-do of Kirk fighting the Gorn Captain in Arena, with more puzzling pieces than actual interesting plot.
2 stars
Truly Alien
by Joe Reid
“The Savage Curtain" was something unique. We have witnessed previous episodes where alien races test humans to see if they are honorable, or understand empathy, or if they are worthy of something. This week we had an alien race that wished to weigh the concepts of good and evil by playing the parts of the noble and of the wicked themselves; instead of seeking to understand something conceptually, they chose to understand experientially. Coupled with the inhumanity of their physical appearance, they were the most alien aliens that we have seen in a very long time from this show.
If I wished to understand women better, what options would be available to me? I suppose that I could talk to a woman to learn about them. I could go to my local library and borrow a few books about women. Hell, I could even watch women to attempt to learn about them through observation. I don’t have the ability nor would choose to become a woman and fully live as one merely to satisfy my curiosity. Excuse that poor and possibly male-chauvinistic example.
Let’s say I wanted to understand Phantom Limb Syndrome. That is the sensations that amputees experience from limbs that are no longer there. It would be impossible for me to truly understand what it is like without experiencing it. My point being that who would be willing to go through dismemberment to experientially understand something? Although through grave misfortune we could experience such a thing, we would experience it as ourselves. The Excalbians had the ability to learn by becoming who they were not. The very concept is alien.
"Don't look so stone-faced, Captain. Haha. That's an alien joke."
Walking a mile in another man’s shoe is one thing, walking with another man’s legs is entirely different. As novel as this ability of the Excalbians is, what’s more interesting and alien is the lack of judgment they had against the concepts of good and evil. It was as if these creatures never ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as humanity had in the story from the book of Genesis. How would beings such as the Excalbians gain that knowledge? Kirk and crew had a clear sense of right and wrong, the Excalbians seemed to not only lack it, but also held no bias of one over the other. Kirk apparently came to the same conclusion. As the Enterprise left Excalbia at the end of the episode, the crew cast no negative aspersions against the Excalbians for their lack of understanding. They were aliens and they got what they were after. Thankfully no one died.
In this episode the crew clearly found a new lifeform and new civilization. This one being a powerful yet innocent race of aliens whose reasoning is far removed from human rationale. They were refreshingly different and a welcomed change to the way that aliens are usually presented, as humans with some greasepaint.
4 stars
Eclipse Glasses for War
by Jessica Dickinson Goodman
On September 11th of this year, people on the west coast of America will see most of a solar eclipse. Adults who are smart or at least a little prepared will be viewing it through special eclipse sunglasses. Those of us with small children will be building cardboard boxes with pinholes in them, since there’s nearly nothing as futile as putting unwanted sunglasses on a toddler.
The boxes work like this: you pick a box big enough for both of your heads — like a home television box — and poke a round hole in it. When the appointed time to look comes, you put the box on your heads with the pinhole behind your right shoulder, aim the pinhole at the sun, and look the other way. The shadow of the earth will then creep across that perfect bright dot beaming onto the opposite wall of the box, allowing you and your child to track its progress without risking young eyes.
The dark box is a child’s version of Plato’s Cave, allowing us to safely view astronomical truths too large and too bright to safely see with the naked soul. It is also a bit like going to the movies: the appointed time, the rising tension, peak, and denouement, the use of light and darkness to tell a story. Most important to the experience is both the smallness and safety of it and of us: the sun is no more in that box than we are on its surface, but viewing it so allows us access to realities we could not otherwise safely imbibe.
That’s how I think of Star Trek’s suite of war analogy episodes, thoughtfully listed by Erica in the head article. The daily truth of America’s war on Vietnam involves numbers so astronomical, forms of violence so molten and charring, it is difficult to look directly at, much less explain to a child. But there are some dimensions of the conflict which can be conveyed in an episode like this, just as that pinhole box can convey the sun’s roundness, brightness, the semi-circular shape of earth’s intruding and then receding shadow, and the emotional excitement of having a Mama put a funny box over your head for 45 minutes during playtime. Likewise, this episode gave us some shapes from the war: the torture of POWs becomes Sarek’s simulated cries over the hilltop; the horror of punji sticks embedded in the darkling trails of the jungle become stakes carved and thrown by the characters. And tens of thousands of soldiers become four against four; brutal still, yes, but grokable. We don’t have Lodges and Westmorelands, Ho Chi Mins and Mao Tse-Tungs, but we can see the flickers of them in the shadows on the wall.
A poor man's Hanoi Hilton
Maybe you didn’t see this week’s episode as an allegory for Vietnam, but remember, we too are in the box or the cave, and what we bring with us affects what we see there. I see punji sticks and you may see the Bataan Death March. I see POWs and you may see a lynched man. But this episode gives space for us to approach different forms of violence and peace, evil and good, as and when we need to.
One way it does this is with the abject silliness of seeing Abraham Lincoln in space, shipless and fancy free. See, the episode seems to say, nothing is real here; this is just a silly sci fi show. But that is part of the box too and of the cave. The silliness of joining a new context shakes us free of our old one and allows us to see the dot on the wall, its roundness, its brightness, and the exact geometries of its transfiguration in a way we could never see the sun directly. The disgust I felt for the rock monster treating our beloved crew as chess pieces and bargaining chips only lightly touched on the incandescent rage I feel towards the Westmorelands and Maos of the world—playing greater power games as children die bloody. But it did allow me to touch it, to engage with it, to see it as small enough to understand the shape of it for once rather than be overwhelmed and blinded by its light.
This was not a good episode, as detailed above. The dialogue and morals were cloudy and at times crudely wrought. But as one in a series of episodes touching on different aspects of our nation’s current war, it did what it was supposed to: give us 48 minutes in the dark and the quiet to think about things we might not otherwise have been able to, see the shape and changing ways of them, and come out of it having touched something far beyond our reach.
Three stars.
[Come join us tomorrow (March 13th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
Vehicles travelling very rapidly were in the news this month, both in a good way and in a bad way.
On March 2, the French/British supersonic airplane Concorde made its first test flight in Toulouse, France. At the controls was test pilot
André Édouard Turcat.
Up, up, and away!
The plane reached a speed of 225 miles per hour (far below the speed of sound) and stayed in the air for twenty-seven minutes. Just a test, but expect a lot of sonic booms in the near future.
The same day, tragedy struck the Yellow River drag racing strip in Covington, Georgia. Racer Huston Platt was at the wheel of a car nicknamed Dixie Twister when it smashed through a chain link fence and hurdled into the crowd at 180 miles per hour.
Image of the disaster from a home movie taken by a spectator.
Eleven people were killed instantly. One later died in the hospital. More than forty were injured.
All this rushing around is likely to induce vertigo. Appropriately, the Number One song in the USA this month is Dizzy by Tommy Roe, a catchy little number that captures the feeling perfectly.
Even the cover art makes my head spin.
Speed Reading
With no less than thirteen stories in the latest issue of Fantastic, it's obvious that several of them are going to be quite short, resulting in quick reading.
The new stories slightly outnumber the reprints, at seven to six, but the old stuff takes up more than twice as many pages. Apparently today's writers like to finish their works at a quicker pace than their predecessors. Or maybe it's just a lot cheaper to buy tiny new works and fill up the rest of the magazine with longer reprints.
Cover art by Johnny Bruck.
As usual, the cover is also a reprint. It appeared on the German magazine Perry Rhodan a few years ago.
Also as usual, the original looks better.
Characterization in Science Fiction, by Robert Silverberg
This brief essay by the Associate Editor promotes more depth of character in the genre, and praises new authors Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany, and Thomas Disch for their skill in that area of writing. Can't argue with that.
No rating.
In a Saucer Down for B-Day, by David R. Bunch
Illustration by Dan Adkins.
The magazine's most controversial writer returns with a tale that is closer to traditional science fiction than most of his works. The narrator is an Earthman who is returning to his home planet with an alien. He wants to show the extraterrestrial Earth's big annual celebration.
The author makes a point about a current social problem, maybe a little too obviously. Even if this had been published anonymously, it would be easy to tell it's by Bunch from the style. (Just the fact that the narrator says YES! more than once is a strong clue.) More readable than other stuff from his pen.
Three stars.
The Dodgers, by Arthur Sellings
A sad introduction tells us the author died last September. This posthumous work features an engineer and a physician who land on a planet where many of the alien inhabitants are suffering from weakness and green blotches on their skin. As soon as the humans arrive, a bag full of gifts for the extraterrestrials vanishes. The mystery involves an unusual ability of the aliens.
I hate to speak ill of the dead, but this isn't a very good story. The premise strains credibility, to say the least, and the ending is rushed.
Two stars.
The Monster, by John Sladek
Illustration by Bruce Eliot Jones
A fellow eager to be a space explorer replaces a guy who's been the only person on a distant planet for a long time. The world turns out to be a dreary, boring place. The environment is so bad that our protagonist can't go outside for more than a moment. His only company is a robot in the form of a woman.
The author makes his point clearly enough. You're likely to see it coming a mile away. Still, it's not a bad little yarn.
Three stars.
Visit, by Leon E. Stover
The Science Editor for Fantastic and Amazing (which must be an easy job; do they ever have any science articles?) gives us this account of aliens landing in Japan. The American military officers present consult with a science fiction writer and a cultural anthropologist. After a lot of discussion, the aliens finally come out of their spaceship.
For a story in which not much happens this sure goes on for a while. Much of the text consists of references to other SF stories. The ending is anticlimactic. It left me thinking So what?
Two stars.
Ascension, by K. M. O'Donnell
The introduction reveals that O'Donnell is a pseudonym for the editor.
But which editor?
Glancing at the table of contents, you see that the Editor and Publisher is Sol Cohen, and the Managing Editor is Ted White. Cohen or White?
Trick question! It's actually Barry N. Malzberg, who was very briefly editor for Fantastic and Amazing. (My esteemed colleague John Boston goes into detail about the situation in his article about the March issue of Amazing.)
Obviously this issue was assembled under the auspices of Malzberg. Nobody ever said the publishing industry was fast.
Anyway, this is a New Wave yarn about a future President of the United States. (The 46th, which I guess puts the story somewhere around the year 2024 or so.) Civil liberties are thrown out, the President has an advisor killed, he gets kicked out by the opposition and shot, the cycle goes on. Something like that.
You can tell it's New Wave (with an acknowledged nod to J. G. Ballard) because sections of the text are in ALL CAPITALS and it ends in the middle of a sentence. I suppose it's some kind of commentary on American politics.
Two stars.
The Brain Surgeon, by Robin Schaefer
Guess what? This is yet another pseudonym for Malzberg. Must have had trouble filling up the issue. (No surprise, given the miserly budget.)
A man sends away for a home brain surgery kit that he saw advertised on a matchbook cover. He gets the instruments and an explanatory pamphlet in the mail. But what can he do with it?
Something about this brief bit of weirdness appealed to me more than it should. There's not much to it, really, but what there is tickled my fancy.
Three stars.
How Now Purple Cow, by Bill Pronzini
A farmer sees a (you guessed it) purple cow in his field. There's some talk of UFOs in the area. Then there's a twist at the end.
Very short, without much point to it. A shaggy dog (cow?) story. A joke without a punchline.
One star.
On to the reprints!
The Book of Worlds, by Dr. Miles J. Breuer
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear with this pre-Campbellian work of scientifiction from the pages of the July 1929 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Hugh Mackay.
A scientist discovers a way to view the fourth dimension. This allows him to see a enormous number of worlds similar to our own Earth, at stages of development from the first stirrings of life to the future of humanity. What he perceives has a profound effect on him.
Illustration by Frank R. Paul.
I have to confess that I wasn't expecting very much out of a story from the very early days of modern science fiction. This was a pleasant surprise. The author clearly has a point to make, and makes it powerfully. What happens to the scientist at the end may strike you as either poignant or silly. Take your pick.
Three stars.
The Will, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The January/February 1954 issue of the magazine supplies this moving tale.
Cover art by Vernon Kramer.
The narrator's teenage foster son is dying of leukemia. The boy is obsessed with a television program about a time travelling hero called Captain Chronos.
(No doubt this was inspired by the author's work on the TV show Captain Video not long before the story was first published.)
Illustration by Jay Landau.
The boy has a plan, involving his collection of stamps and autographs. But does he have enough time left?
Just from this brief description, you probably already have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. Despite the fact that the plot is a little predictable, however. this is a fine story. The emotion is genuine rather than sentimental. The ending is both joyful and sad.
Four stars.
Elementals of Jedar, by Geoff St. Reynard
Hiding behind that very British pseudonym is American writer Robert W. Krepps. This pulpy yarn comes from the May 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures.
Cover art by H. J. Blumenfeld.
A spaceship captain with the manly name of Ken Ripper and his motley crew of aliens from various worlds are in big trouble. Forced to land on a planet said to be inhabited by living force fields of pure malevolence, they have to figure out a way to escape with their lives.
Illustration by Rod Ruth.
Boy, this is really corny stuff. I have to wonder if it's a parody of old-time space opera. When the hero curses by saying Jove and bounding jackrabbits!, it makes me think the author is pulling my leg. The fact that one of the aliens on the spaceship is a humanoid twelve inches tall makes me giggle, too. Even if it's tongue-in-cheek, a little of this goes a long way.
Two stars.
The Naked People, by Winston Marks
This story comes from the September 1954 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Ralph Castenir.
The combination of a sore ear and a fight in a tavern sends the narrator to the hospital with a brain infection. When he comes out of his coma, he is able to see the ethereal figure of a unclothed man. The lecherous fellow is able to solidify himself sufficiently to have his way with a pretty nurse while she's unconscious and under his control.
Illustration uncredited.
Then a female ghostly being shows up, with an obvious interest in our hero. It seems that these folks have been hanging around, unperceived by normal people, since the dawn of humanity. They materialize enough to steal food and, to put it delicately, act as incubi and succubi.
I get the feeling that the author didn't quite know how to end the story. The hero fends off the advances of the lustful female being and saves the pretty nurse from the male one. He even marries her. But the naked people are still around, with all that implies.
An unsatisfying conclusion and a slightly distasteful premise make for a less than enjoyable reading experience.
Two stars.
And the Monsters Walk, by John Jakes
This two-fisted tale comes from the July 1952 issue of Fantastic Adventures.
Cover art by Walter Popp.
The narrator starts off aboard a ship bound for England from the Orient. Burning with curiosity, he investigates the secret cargo hold, although the captain warned the crew this was punishable by death. He finds boxes containing humanoid creatures.
Barely escaping with his life, he makes his way to shore. Mysterious figures are out to kill him. On the other hand, a Tibetan mystic and a beautiful young woman try to help him. In return, they want his aid in combating a conspiracy to destroy Western civilization by using demons to slaughter world leaders.
Illustration by David Stone.
John Jakes is best known around here for his tales of Brak the Barbarian. Those stories proved that he had studied the adventures of Conan carefully. This yarn convinces me that he is also very familiar with the pulp magazines of the 1930's.
I'll give him credit for not being boring, anyway. The action never stops, although you won't believe a minute of it. The author's intense, almost frenzied style keeps you reading.
Three stars.
I, Gardener by Allen Kim Lang
Our last story comes from the December 1959 issue of the magazine.
Cover art by Ed Valigursky.
The narrator pays a visit to a prolific writer. He speaks to a very strange gardener, who proves to be something other than what he seems.
I'll leave it at that, because I don't want to give away too much about the simple plot. You may be able to figure out who the model for the writer is, given the title of the story and the fact that the character's name is Doctor Axel Ozoneff. (The introduction to the story makes it obvious, so I'd advise not looking at it.)
Not a great story.
Two stars.
Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Alexei Panshin
Leiber looks at novels by E. R. Eddison, and Panshin has kind words to say about The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.
No rating.
Quickly Summing Up
Another average-to-poor issue, with only Miller's story rising above that level. At least most of the pieces make for fast reading, although a couple of the worst ones may make you furious at their lack of quality. You may be tempted to watch an old movie on TV instead.
From 1954, so it should show up on the Late, Late Show sometime soon.
Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States, is back from a tour of Europe. All of his visits made headlines, particularly when he went to the Vatican and a couple hundred students held signs that said, "Nixon go home!"
Hey now—we don't want him either!
The Dick met with the "Jesus of the Franks", General DeGaulle, for a high profile religious summit. Our President failed to return with the next Ten Commandments nor a commitment to allow Britain into the European Community (much less France's return to NATO).
Nixon is now back in the States. Apparently, Jack Benny managed to buy more than a gallon of gas at Texaco since he made it all the way to Andrews Air Force Base to amuse the President upon his return. Well, maybe the air fare was on the country's dime.
One of the places Nixon did not stop, but sent a staffer in his stead, was the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. The Jewish leader's death was rather a surprise, and his interim replacement is something of a dark horse: 70 year old foreign minister Golda Meir. She is the first woman leader of the Jewish state, and one of the few female national leaders this century. It is possible she will step down in favor of her party confederate Yigal Allon when he stands for the next regular election against conservative rival General Moshe Dayan.
Into the wild Blue/Black yonder
As I type this, Apollo 9 is currently in orbit, its crew practicing a series of maneuvers that will be duplicated on this summer's trip to the Moon. It's sort of like a Gemini training mission (two of the astronauts, Scott and McDivitt, are Gemini veterans) but with Apollo hardware. It is fitting, therefore, that the latest issue of Galaxy deals with space in almost all of its stories:
Centuries after a nuclear apocalypse, the Earth's four billions reduced to just one hundred million, humanity lives in a patchwork of low-technology communities. There are the farmers, who make up the vast majority; the villagers who comprise a rude middle class; the Luddites, barbarians who plunder, mostly for fun; the arrogant Neo-Scientists, who enslave many so that a few may reconstruct the wisdom of the past; and the Empires—petty states whose influence extends no further than their capital regions.
And there are the witch-doctors, who use "magic" to heal and educate, and the pilgrims, who seek the truth. "Witch Hunt" is the tale of two such pilgrims, their tour of America's degraded communities, and a survey of their relative merits and lacks. Of course, the story reveals the truth they have been searching for.
There is more than a whiff of Silverberg's Nightwings serial here, and while the prose is not quite so beautiful, it is serviceable.
Hobie was a precocious child whose life was irrevocably influenced by Star Trek, though the TV show is never mentioned by name.
A successful teen and, later, frustrated serviceman, he can't shake the feeling that he is somehow separate from the human race. The story's conclusion bears much in common with that of "Witch Hunt". I wonder if putting thematically-similar stories together was deliberate or coincidental?
Something about this story reminds me a bit of the works in our Rediscovery anthologies, or perhaps a bit of the works in the fanzines. In particular, the focus on Trek and also the fact that the protagonist is a minor for much of the piece set it apart from many of the stories we encounter regularly. I had to check the byline to make sure it wasn't by Evelyn E. Smith, or Rosel George Brown, or Zenna Henderson, for example.
As a whole the story isn't bad, but unfortunately, Tiptree botches the end. Three stars.
How Like a God, Robert Bloch
by Reese
Pride goeth before a fall: Mok is an incorporeal being who refused to surrender his personality to the group; as a consequence, the divine Ser confines him to an alien, physical body and banishes him to a planet of primitives. There, Mok becomes a kind of Prometheus, elevating the aborigines' culture and technology. But is Mok a God…or a serpent in the garden?
Kind of a neat piece. I think it falls on the lower side of the three/four star divide.
Simak loves to write "pastoral science fiction" set in his stomping grounds of Minnesota, and so, "Buckets of Diamonds" reads a bit like The Andy Griffith Show meets The Twilight Zone. Drunk Uncle Charlie gets locked up in the pokey one day when he is found staggering down the street, an Old Master's canvas under one arm, and carrying a bucket of diamonds. Later, he disappears from jail and turns up driving a hovercar alongside a sour-faced alien…who presently encourages all of the citizenry to dispose of their technological gadgets!
All of this is much to the chagrin of Charlie's nephew-in-law, a local attorney who must sort the mess out.
Not much to this tale, which ultimately doesn't go anywhere, or when. Three stars.
Slave to Man, Sylvia Jacobs
Tony is an editor for one of those schlock-houses that produces "the sexies" (prurient pulps). One day, he notices he's getting a lot of torn off covers from returns that say "Help! Help! I am being held in bondage! I am only 15 years old!"
Who he finds when he seeks the poor soul out, and how said soul revolutionizes the sexies industry is both amusing and, perhaps, prescient.
The saga continues of two immortal aliens destined for a final confrontation somewhere in 21st Century America. Last time, we learned that Gralgrathor had self-exiled from his stellar Federation to go native amongst medieval Vikings. His confederate, Lokrien, murdered 'Thor's wife and child to incentivize his return to galactic civilization.
In this installment, Lokrien, now fully healed from vicious scars he carried for decades, is looking for 'Thor, who now goes by the name of Grayle. Grayle, as you recall from last time, escaped from the Caine Island maximum security prison, where he had been languishing for over a century. Both immortals have assistants: Lokrien's is a mercenary cabbie who is efficient with his fists; Grayle has picked up a lovely woman named Anne who insists on helping him despite not knowing the whole story.
Meanwhile, an enormous whirlpool is growing in the middle Atlantic, generating hurricane force winds across the hemisphere. It seems to be powered by the newly online broadcast power plant on the Eastern seaboard. Attempts to shut down the plant are all thwarted by some unknown force. You can bet that the aliens are somehow involved, however…
Still interesting stuff. Four stars.
For Your Information: The Drowned Civilization, Willy Ley
This month's article is a potpourri dedicated to three questions: 1) how easy would it be for a planet to capture a new moon, 2) how would the Earth's land contours change should the ice caps melt, and 3) what kind of creature is the biblical zaphan?
Three stars.
There and back again
Well, that was rather fun! Nothing spectacular, but all in all, a rapid, enjoyable read. Galaxy remains my favorite of the monthlies, and I can't wait to see how the Laumer turns out. I am also happy to see that we're getting at least one woman writer each month again. The magazine was at its best when that was the case back in the '50s, and Sylvia Jacobs turned in one of my favorites of the issue.
Until next time…keep up to date with Nixon on Laugh-In, and science fiction on the Journey!
Star Trek has given us some amazing episodes over the past three seasons, episodes that made us think, made us gasp, made our hearts bleed for the characters and made us laugh out loud. Unfortunately, we’ve also had many kinds of bad episodes, from ridiculously, gloriously bad, to offensively, teeth-grindingly bad, to bizarrely bad, to pathetically bad. Yet somehow, The Cloudminders manages to be a different kind of bad than any we’ve seen before.
The story opens, as it so often does, on the Enterprise. A plague has affected a planetary member of the Federation, and the cure requires a substance found in only one place in the galaxy, the planet Ardana. (Is it just me, or have there been a lot of plagues recently?) When Kirk and Spock beam down to Ardana, however, instead of finding the precious shipment of zenite waiting for them, they are attacked.
In the heat of the moment, Mr. Spock has forgotten how to do a Vulcan Neck Pinch
The attack is interrupted by Plasus, the High Advisor of the planetary council. He brings the two of them to Stratos, a city in the clouds, where they meet Droxine, his daughter. Kirk and Spock go to the quarters prepared for them.
"Don't fret, my dear. We only have two more scenes like this where we tell each other things we already know for the benefit of the audience."
Once they’re gone, two guards bring in a “Troglyte”, a member of the underclass who work in the mines. Plasus starts to interrogate him, but he breaks free and throws himself over the balcony.
"Anything to get out of this picture!"
There follows one of the strangest and clumsiest bits I’ve ever seen in a Star Trek episode. Spock has a voiceover where he talks about the split between the haves and have-nots on the planet, overlaid atop flashbacks to scenes we just watched. He also has some highly un-Spocklike thoughts about Droxine’s charm, purity, and sweetness.
And speak of the devil, Droxine appears and proceeds to flirt with him. Having watched nearly three seasons of Star Trek we expected him to politely brush her off. Defying everything we have ever seen and learned about the Vulcan, Spock responds in-kind, flirting back and using what Gideon calls, “the boyfriend voice”. The dialog would have been eye-rollingly bad enough if Shatner had been spouting the lines, but it was unbearable with Spock doing it.
Speaking of Shatner, the scene (thankfully) cuts to where he’s taking a nap. A woman creeps up to him, a weapon in her hand, but he grabs her and immobilizes her before she can do anything. He tells her he’ll release her if she’ll answer his questions, and she agrees.
Yvonne Craig returns to reprise her role in "Whom Gods Destroy" sans green paint…
Unfortunately, the scene now returns to Spock and Droxine, where they are discussing (groan) the Vulcan mating cycle, and whether anything might ‘disturb’ it. Spock actually says, “Extreme feminine beauty is always disturbing, madam.” If this were a ploy, like The Enterprise Incident, maybe I could forgive it (though the writing in that episode was far better than this one). If Spock were intentionally seducing Droxine to get the much-needed zenite, taking a page out of Kirk’s book, maybe I could believe that he would say these words. But there is never any indication that Spock’s words are anything but sincere.
"Can't I do anything? Perhaps some Plomeek soup…or some Tranya?" (or) "Mrs. Droxine, you are trying to seduce me…"
Kirk calls out for Spock and Spock hurries to respond, so I guess at least one thing is still right with the universe. Droxine, Vanna, and Kirk argue politics for a while, and then Vanna is taken away to be tortured for the names of her associates. At her scream, Kirk and Spock come running. Kirk and Plasus argue about whether torture is an effective way to get information until Plasus orders them to return to their ship.
Back on the Enterprise, McCoy helpfully explains that zenite gives off a gas which makes people stupid and violent, but that the effects can be nullified with a face mask or removal from exposure. Kirk tries to explain this to Plasus, who unsurprisingly refuses to listen. Kirk then sneaks back down to the planet, getting beamed directly to Vanna’s cell. He makes a deal with her to trade masks for zenite, but she betrays him as soon as they’re beamed down to the mines. Snatching off his mask, she forces him to start digging. She gets too close to him with her stolen phaser, though, and he overpowers her and triggers a cave-in, sealing them in. Determined to prove to Vanna that the gas makes people stupid and violent (something which her own experiences should probably have convinced her was true, given that she went between the floating city and the mines regularly) Kirk has Plasus beamed in with them and makes him start digging.
"Hear that, Plasus? That's… the sound of… the men… working on the… chain… gang."
Plasus and Kirk, overcome by the gas, start fighting. Vanna gets a hold of Kirk’s communicator and calls the Enterprise for help. Vanna screams that the gas is affecting them as the crew beam to their rescue.
The final act takes place in Stratos once more, the city in the clouds. Vanna has agreed to supply the zenite, and Kirk will give the Troglytes the masks. Spock and Droxine have one final, nauseating moment, Kirk and Plasus snipe at each other unpleasantly, and then the crew leaves with just three hours to spare to save a dying planet.
"That's all for now. Tata!"
Well. That was an episode.
It’s hard to explain just why this episode was so bad. The writing was clunky, with every conversation going on three times longer than necessary. The guest characters felt like childish caricatures, while our beloved crewmembers (especially Spock) felt nothing like themselves. The pacing was bad, the acting not good, the directing clumsy. It was just…bad. In every way. There was no good episode inside trying to get out this time.
If I thought that NBC were the evil masterminds that some believe, I would say that they saved this episode for late in the season deliberately. Really, who’s going to complain about Star Trek’s cancellation after seeing this garbage? But I’m guessing that the sub-par script, sub-par direction, and sub-par acting were actually due to budget cuts, as NBC has shown they don’t much care what the fans think or want or say, no matter how many postcards we send them.
One star.
Not Bad
by "Greenygal"
I have mixed feelings about "Cloudminders", mostly relating to the xenite gas. It's a terribly convenient plot device; it means that I have to sit and listen to McCoy–McCoy!–talk about how the lower class really are mentally inferior to the upper class, which is such an ugly idea and is particularly jarring in this episode about bigotry and social inequality; and even though the stuff is "shipped all over the galaxy" (did no one do any testing on unprocessed xenite?) and the Troglytes mine it all their lives, apparently McCoy is the only one who's ever noticed that raw xenite can affect people's brains.
On the other hand, the Stratos sets and outfits are lovely. I thought the actors for Plasus, Droxine, and especially Vanna put in excellent performances. I really appreciated that Kirk is just not a part of Vanna's emotional story; she's not romantically or sexually interested in him and she doesn't learn love or mercy or responsibility or anything like that from him. Eventually she is convinced that he's telling the truth about the masks and that's as far as it goes. Bonus points for her ending the episode looking at Droxine, the other metaphorical half of the planet's future, instead of Kirk.
And oh, the message. Yeah, yeah, the xenite is clumsy, but it doesn't stop this episode from being sharp and fierce and clear about what it's portraying. Plasus and Droxine are pleasant and intelligent and educated, and they're also terrible bigots who talk so reasonably about how of course it's just natural for the Troglytes to do all the work and have no rights while the Stratosians get everything. Everything Plasus says is awful, but Droxine expressing the same horrible ideas in sweet, reasonable tones is chilling, and emphasizes both that this is a societal problem and that it doesn't matter how nicely you express your bigotry, it's still bigotry.
Also, we've got the Troglyte in the beginning being willing to throw himself off Cloud City rather than be taken, and Vanna being strapped to the torture pillar, as a clear show-not-just-tell for how bad things are under the surface.
And as a counterpoint to all this awfulness, we've got Kirk and Spock saying in no uncertain terms "What? They do all the work and they don't get the same advantages? They don't get light? That's awful. That's unthinkable. What do you mean they don't understand things like loyalty and justice? Obviously they do, if you're the one behaving like violence is the only option that's your problem, Jack, and also you're not going to lay a hand on her unless you go through me." Our Heroes absolutely refused to tolerate a single bigoted statement, and it just made me so happy to hear. (And in particular I appreciated it in contrast to Last Battlefield's "well, really, when you think about it, aren't both sides equally to blame for racial conflict?")
And what I think really saves the xenite gas from sabotaging the message is that fixing it does not suddenly fix everything. The Troglytes are still working in the mines, and Vanna says they're still going to be fighting for their rights, and Plasus is still talking about how awful they are. (And how "ungrateful"; I really enjoyed seeing Vanna flatly deny that she owes him anything for her training.) The masks will make things better for the Troglytes, and Droxine shows that the Stratosians can change. But there's still a real conflict here that didn't get an easy science-fictional solution, and I appreciate that.
I think 3.5 stars is fair. It's a flawed episode, no question, but the things that I like about it, I really like.
Skin Deep Rationale
by Joe Reid
The notion that a presumed higher group gets to benefit from the labor of a presumed lesser group while giving no thought to the lives and wellbeing of that lesser group is premise of this week’s episode of Star Trek. “The Cloud Minders” is a funny title for this episode, seeing as how the title itself even ignores the existence of that lesser group. This episode wasn’t named “The Dirt Miners”. It was those in the clouds who held the authority, and those under the surface who challenged that authority. At first glance this premise sounded compelling. On review the whole premise fell apart due to one simple fact—the Troglites really didn’t need the Stratosians for anything.
The episode began with Starfleet in need. They needed the mineral, zenite, to save people on another world. The Stratosians, who somehow had authority to represent all Ardana to Startfleet, promised that they would provide the mineral that they themselves would not take part in gathering. The loathsome long haired Troglites were tasked with collecting the zenite. The complete lack of anyone being compensated for anything was the real head scratcher here. The Federation was giving the people of Ardana nothing for their zenite. The Stratosians appeared to offer the Troglites nothing for their labor in mining the zenite. From what I gleaned, the Troglites seemed as if they were entirely self-sufficient and had no need of anything from the Stratosians. Granted, they did come up with a plan for capturing Starfleet officers in order to ransom them for weapons to fight the cloud people for the sins of talking down to them. Outside of emotional slights, the Troglites didn’t appear to require food, clothing, or shelter from the Stratosians. Why bother with fighting them?
"We need nothing from you—certainly not these stupid-looking masks!"
Looking at the Stratosians themselves: people with time to pursue art, learning, and leisure, but utterly lacking the ability to do labor or automate labor. If they were truly learned, they would have had a method to keep the people that they depend on happy.
The reason that this episode logically fell apart for me, outside of the fact that any real motive for conflict was absent, was that the conflict was resolved by the Enterprise crew, by forcing both sides to learn of a problem that neither side even knew existed. The knowledge that zenite poisoning caused the retardation of the Troglites didn’t truly change the circumstances on the planet. It didn’t even remove the bigotry of the Stratosian leader. It just made Kirk and the Troglites happy, and that fixed everything.
Setting aside the flawed logic and lack of rationale in this episode, the costumes and sets felt very original. The premise of the story was worthwhile as an ideal, but its shallow execution detracts from the weight that this episode could have carried. I would like more from my science fiction.
2 stars
[Come join us tonight (March 6th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
![[March 24, 1969] Apocalypse Impending? <i>New Worlds</i>, April 1969](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/New-Worlds-April-1969.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
The named list from last month.
Cover by Mervyn Peake.
In a post-apocalyptic US we are told of teenager Vic and his telepathic dog, Blood. Vic is a teenage boy who spends his time scavenging the world for basic needs—food, companionship, and sex—as well as generally avoiding other groups, known as roverpaks, doing the same thing. They meet Quilla June – unusual because most women live where it is safer, underground. Vic rapes Quilla June before they are attacked by another roverpak. Blood is hurt in the scuffle. Quilla June escapes and returns to her underground home of Topeka.
More poetry. Described as ‘a poem for light and movement’, Thomas manages to produce strange typewritten boxes that are at times undecipherable. A typical ‘form over content’ type piece. 2 out of 5.
The inevitable 'naked lady of the month' picture.
Artwork by Mal Dean.
More artwork by Mal Dean.
![[March 22, 1969] Flowers Are Better Than Bullets](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/tinker-kids-1968.webp?resize=672%2C372)
![[March 20, 1969] Going through the motions… (April 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690320cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[March 18, 1969] What a way to go! (<i>Star Trek</i>: "All Our Yesterdays")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690318title.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[March 16, 1969] Flight of the Space Spider (Apollo 9)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Apollo-9-Space-Spider.png?resize=547%2C372)
![[March 14, 1969 ] (March 1969 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690314covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[March 12, 1969] Rock Opera (<i>Star Trek</i>: "The Savage Curtain")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690312curtain.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[March 10, 1969] Speed (April 1969 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/COVERHALF.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[March 8, 1969] Around the Universe (April 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690308cover.jpg?resize=519%2C372)
![[March 6, 1969] Different points of view (<i>Star Trek</i>: "The Cloud Minders")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690306title1.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
