For the past few years, there's been a cycle of psychological horror films starring famous actresses who are no longer young enough to be ingenues. One producer/director is mostly responsible for this trend, as we'll see. However, I believe its roots begin in a classic film nearly two decades old.
Sunset Boulevard (1950) stars Gloria Swanson, a major star in silent films and early talkies. She plays Norma Desmond, who was — guess what? — a major star in silent films. (Apparently not in early talkies.) She is also as mad as a hatter.
The film is something of a satire of Hollywood and a dark comedy (it's narrated by a dead man) but it also has elements of horror. Desmond is a grotesque caricature of a fading star who lives in a Gothic mansion that would suit the Addams Family. The final scene is as creepy as heck.
Sunset Blvd (as the title actually shows up on the screen) is a great film, but it wasn't until a dozen years later that a fellow named Robert Aldrich took the idea of casting famous actresses who were no longer young in psychological shockers and made it a fad.
1962 saw the release of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Henry Farrell. It stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as sisters. Davis plays Baby Jane Hudson, a former child star. Crawford plays Blanche Hudson, whose own movie career was cut short when she was paralyzed from the waist down in an automobile accident.
The siblings now live together. Baby Jane is completely insane, dressing like a little girl and wearing outrageously heavy makeup. This unhealthy situation leads to psychological torture and, of course, murder.
The two stars play against each other very well. Hollywood gossip says they loathe each other, which may help. Davis has much the meatier role. The scene in which she sings I've Written a Letter to Daddy (His Address is Heaven Above), a sentimental number from her days as a child star, may give you nightmares.
The film was a success. Aldrich decided that there was no reason to mess around with a winning formula. He produced and directed Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, released in 1964, with the same screenwriter (Lukas Heller, this time assisted by novelist Farrell) and one of the same stars. Bette Davis is back, and Joan Crawford was supposed to return also, but she was eventually replaced by Olivia de Havilland.
Davis plays Charlotte, whose lover was brutally murdered in 1927 (in an extremely gruesome and bloody scene). Decades later she's a recluse. She's blamed for the killing, but it was never officially solved. Suffice to say that de Havilland plays a cousin who shows up to help Charlotte; or does she?
Other film makers jumped on the bandwagon. William Castle, famous for his gimmicky shockers, brought us Strait-Jacket the same year. Crawford (and not Davis) returns, this time as a woman who murdered her husband and his lover with an axe. Her three-year-old daughter witnesses the crime. A shocking scene opens the film, so know what you're in for.
Crawford spends twenty years in an institution for the criminally insane. When she gets out . . . Let's just say that heads will (literally) roll.
Not to be outdone by Yanks, British production company Hammer offered Fanatic (known as Die! Die! My Darling! on this side of the pond) in 1965. This time the actress of mature years is Tallulah Bankhead, who terrorizes the woman who was going to marry her recently deceased son.
Is there murder on the way? You betcha.
This trend has become so obvious that Mad magazine came up with a spoof of it.
It's in the January 1966 issue. Track down a copy of the issue and enjoy the full parody.
Let's take a look at the latest example.
What Ever Happened To Aunt Alice?
Aldrich is back, but only as producer. The director is Lee H. Katzin, and the screenplay is by Theodore Apstein. It's based on the 1962 novel The Forbidden Garden by Ursula Curtiss.
Obviously, Aldrich is alluding to the title of his biggest success in this genre. The trailer for the film makes this clear. It's also misleading, implying that it's a whodunit. We know who the killer is right at the start.
We don't even get the opening titles until after the first murder.
Geraldine Page, who has been nominated for four Oscars, a Tony, and who has won an Emmy, has the lead role. (Not Aunt Alice; we'll get to her later.) The film begins with her discovery that her recently deceased husband left her nearly penniless.
The new widow.
She doesn't even own her palatial home, so she moves to an isolated house in the American Southwest. (The film is unusual in having a sunny desert setting instead of the usual dark and spooky one.)
We find out right away that she has a habit of hiring housekeepers, convincing them to let her invest their savings, murdering them, burying them in her garden, keeping the loot, and making up some story about how the servants left.
Not the first victim, but the one that gets the plot going.
Some time after this latest killing, Ruth Gordon, fresh from her Oscar-winning performance in Rosemary's Baby, shows up and applies for the job. (She's Aunt Alice, but we don't find out who she's the aunt of for a while.)
Aunt Alice and the desert landscape.
Aunt Alice has her own secret, but let's not give too much away. Suffice to say that events threaten to unravel Page's little scheme. The arrival of a young widow and her pre-teen nephew in the abandoned house nearby, the only one for miles around, adds complications.
There's also a dog that's very interested in the Forbidden Garden.
Aunt Alice snoops around, for a reason we'll discover later. She finds evidence of Page's crimes.
A letter written to the victim we saw above.
Not quite as gruesome as some others of its kind — it almost looks like a made-for-TV movie at times — this is an enjoyable thriller. There are a lot of other characters I haven't mentioned yet, and even a love story.
But Page and Gordon are the whole show. The interaction between these two gifted actresses is a joy to behold. Page is imperious, haughty, sarcastic, and ruthless. Gordon is down-to-earth but brave and clever.
The plot creates a great deal of suspense. It's not obvious whether or not Page will get away with it, or whether Gordon will expose her. There's a nifty bit of irony at the very end.
Four stars.
I hope you enjoyed this journey through what has become a bonafide subgenre. Who knows when the next film of this type will come out—but you can bet it'll make a killing…
Every four years, Americans head to the polls to vote for who they want to lead the Free World. At least, that's what they think they're doing. What really happens is your vote determines if your choice for President wins your state. And then, representatives of the states, the so-called "Electoral College", announce who they've been empowered to choose. Technically, these representatives are not bound to uphold the will of the voter; in practice, bucking the election results has been for protest rather than consequence.
This means that the swingier the state and the bigger the state, the more attention it will get. For instance, California, somewhat evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and currently the most populous state in the Union, is more important to a candidate than, say, a reliable and sparsely settled state like Arizona.
No more? This week, the House passed a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would make Presidents directly electable. This would mark the first major change to the system since 1803.
It looks like half the Senate is in favor, but it will take two thirds of that chamber plus three quarters of the states for the measure to go through. Opposing such reform are representatives of small states and rural areas, as they wish to retain their outsized impact on the process. With the rapid rate of urbanization, particularly on the coasts, this proposed amendment threatens to wipe out the electoral relevance of most of the central region of our country, from the Rockies to the Mississippi.
But that's precisely why the time for such an amendment has come, its advocates propose. People vote—not acres.
The bill faces an uphill battle, but it's an idea whose time has probably come.
Magazine by the Few
by Ronald Walotsky
Even with an Electoral College, with 50 states, you still get something approximating the will of the people. With a science fiction magazine, you've only got six to fourteen pieces. That means any individual story can dramatically affect your enjoyment of an issue, and the variations in quality can make for a wild ride. Such was my experience reading the latest Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Susan Calvin, renowned roboscientist, has gone into semi-retirement, passing the torch to the new generation. Said successors develop a robot with flexible programming, one that can make free associations rather than rely on its own hard-coding. Its designers, all male, decide that such fuzzy thinking could only be ascribed to a female, and so they built the robot with feminine curves and a sexy contralto voice. JN-5, or "Jane", is a big hit with all the (male, of course) scientists and politicians.
Jane is employed to determine which of the 5500 stars with 80 light years of Earth would be most likely to be inhabitable so that humanity's limited interstellar capacity can be used most efficiently. Jane fingers three candidates, but she and her maker are killed in a freak accident. Only Susan Calvin can save the day.
The story drips with male chauvinism, but ultimately, that's the point. It's an uncomfortable ride, but wait for the end, which redeems the story.
A brilliant physicist discovers his wife has but one year to live. He builds a room in which time goes much more slowly so that he will have more time to discover a cure. When the wife gets lonely (since she's by herself for all of…what…a week?) the husband picks out a brilliant but plain woman to be his wife's companion.
Decades later, when the physicist discovers the cure, he returns to the room to find the two women making love. Jealously, he locks the room and accelerates time, leaving his wife to die, his wife's lover to live out the rest of her life with the corpse, and for both of them to be out of the physicist's ken in the blink of an eye.
I didn't like the story much when I read it, and now, having to revisit it for this summary, I realize that I hate it. Not just for the misogyny, but for the absurdity of the premise (there are no spinoff societal effects from inventing time control?!) and the laughability of the final insult—oh no! Wife is not only unfaithful but (whisper it) a homosexual!
A perennial extra, veteran of 450+ films, spends most of his life at the Silent Movies. He's not just reliving his glory days; it's how he can catch glimpses of his lost love, a fellow extra, who died in 1930, just as her career was beginning to take off.
The fellow knows every movie, every scene in which he and his girlfriend appeared. So why does she start showing up in films she never appeared in before, some that even date to before her start in show biz? And why does it seem she is mouthing messages for him alone? Is she enjoying a kind of celluloid life after death?
Once transportation via personal helicopter becomes a cheap and ubiquitous reality, everyone moves away from points north of 40 degrees latitude to reside in California, Florida, the Mediterranean, and other like climates. This is the tale of the last man in England, and the friend who tries to convince him to join the other emigrés.
I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one—was the Earth growing cold? Had their been a calamity in the Northern Hemisphere? No. People were just leaving wholesale out of personal preference.
Never mind that some people like seasons. Never mind that the tropics can't fit all those people. Never mind that Aleuts and Laplanders haven't left their ancestral homes despite the capability of moving to town if they want to.
Lots of folks like Bradbury. Maybe I started on him too late.
Two stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Worlds in Confusion, by Isaac Asimov
Wherein the Good Doctor takes on Velikovsky and his ridiculous, religion-cloaked-in-pseudoscience tome, Worlds in Collision. Did Jupiter really eject Venus as a comet? Did that rogue planet stop the Earth in its tracks, causing no ill effects beyond the Ten Plagues and the pausing of the day at the Battle of Jericho? Do people really believe this claptrap?
Four stars.
by Chesley Bonestell
"Russian astronauts have arrived on the rim of Copernicus only to discover that the Americans have already been there …"
A mission to Jupiter finds the gas giant teeming with life. On the Moon, a giant black edifice (made by people, not aliens) sifts human dreams, becoming the repository for archetypes—the goal to find a solution to strife and hatred in the world. On Earth, the globe is split between Communist, Free, and Black domains. The "Free" world is highly regimented, with children taken from their parents after a decade, and marital partners divorced on the same schedule.
Our protagonists, such as they are, are neurotic Westciv citizens, adapted, but not adjusted, to the new way of life. Their collected dreams represent the only way out of the mess technology has gotten us into.
What a lousy story this is. Turgid, mock-momentous claptrap. Budget Ballard. Thoroughly unentertaining, its message buried, and not a lick of science to be found in this so-called science fiction. I recognize that the definition of the genre now goes beyond nuts-and-bolts engineering stories to include softer sciences like psychology and sociology, and that the New Wave is an experiment in bringing a degree of literary-ness to SF, but this is too much of a thing.
A brilliant engineer-turned-hippie stumbles upon the principle of perpetual motion. In order to keep the discovery from being used for evil, he leaves his life of Bohemian idyll, cuts off his hair, and Makes it Big. Thus armored in respectability, he carefully manages the revolution's global introduction, ensuring peace and propserity for all humanity.
Upon returning to the backwoods town where he left his lady love and a life of languor, his erstwhile paramour chides him for selling his soul for progress when he could have had love.
This is the sort of story Lafferty or Davidson might have played more for laughs, Sheckley more for bitterness. Sturgeon presents it completely straight, and as always, he writes pretty well. His statement seems to be: rather than just be nice and preach love, actually do something to make the world better.
On the surface, he has a point. Free love is all very nice, but aren't those dirty hippies really just parasites on real working society? On the other hand, Sturgeon rigs the deck. His hero discovers the patently impossible after a few days' work. Moreover, there are plenty of believers in the hippie ethic who are working, giving, and improving the world. It's a mentality, not a nationality.
Sturgeon, who predates the Swinging Sixties, obviously bears some resentment toward the new crowd. Kicking straw men is not the answer.
Mr. Poole, executive of a powerful corporation, is in a flying-car accident. When he regains consciousness, he finds he is not a human at all but an "electric ant"—an android. Designed to be a figurehead, all of his memories are programmed, his life a lie.
He becomes determined to find the nature of his ongoing programming and discovers that there are no further limits on his thoughts and activities. He does, however, discover a punched tape spool that controls his sensory input. Poole begins fiddling with it, altering his subjective reality. His ultimate goal is to experience everything in the universe at once, something he thinks, as a robot, he can handle better than a human might.
Dick once again turns in a story about a middle-aged man going through an existential crisis. There is also the drug-use metaphor (Dick is into uppers, I understand). It doesn't make the most sense—the ant's reality is subjective, but the external universe also exists, so what, exactly does the tape spool control? Poole is determined to find out, taking himself on a psychedelic, 2001-esque journey whose mission is to prove or disprove Solipsism. I feel Dick takes the easy, the obvious way out, at the very end.
Niven returns to the realm of fantasy, but this time, with a completely new character and setup. Hanville Svetz is a hapless time traveler from more than a thousand years from now. Hailing from a polluted, dictatorial future, he has been sent back to 1200 AD to find an extinct beast for the Secretary General's zoo—a simple horse.
What Svetz actually finds, and the troubles that befall him on his quest are interesting and delightful. There is a deft, sardonic touch to this story, and room has been left for many follow-ups. I look forward to them.
Four stars.
Science Fiction for the woodpile
As with last month, the latest F&SF finished on the wrong end of the 3-stars mark. Though F&SF is the shortest of the SF digests, it took me the longest to finish. I just wasn't looking forward to it. I can see why my nephew, David, canceled his subscription a few years back. It's a pity that this twentieth anniversary issue is so dismal compared to the ones that came out when the magazine was young. That said, hope springs eternal, and I would hate to miss stories like Get a Horse!.
I just wish my job would let me skip the stories I don't like…
1969 continues to disappoint on the genre cinema front, at least in the UK. So here we have a middling horror picture, and a very good picture which is sort of SF, if you squint at it right.
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
Poster for Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
After too long an absence from Hammer, it’s good to see Terence Fisher back at the helm of another Peter Cushing Frankenstein movie. This one sees the eponymous Baron on the trail of his former assistant Brandt (George Pravda), who has been confined to a lunatic asylum somewhere in Mitteleuropa. Frankenstein plans to extract from Brandt the secret of preserving brains on ice, in a homage to Frankenstein’s conviction in the first movie that he could use his technology to indefinitely prolong the lifespans of geniuses by transferring their brains from body to body. Frankenstein inveigles his way into the lives of a young doctor at the asylum, Holst (Simon Ward), and his fiancée, Anna (Veronica Carlson), using a combination of blackmail and psychological manipulation to gain their assistance. However, Brandt suffers a heart attack, meaning his brain must of course be transferred into another person’s body (Freddie Jones), and further violence and chaos ensues.
Hammer have clearly been taking notes from the recent success of Witchfinder General (1968), as the movie’s main strength is the psychological horror of the way Frankenstein encourages his victims on to more and more awful crimes. Frankenstein’s hold over Holst is that the latter has been secretly dealing narcotics in order to pay for medical treatment for Anna’s mother, a development which speaks to contemporary concerns about the ready availability of drugs and the moral questions surrounding their use. I should also warn viewers about a graphic rape scene which just about manages to stay within the bounds of being played for horror and not titillation, but is still rather disturbing.
Peter Cushing terrifies as the sinister Baron Frankenstein
Cushing is genuinely and credibly terrifying in the title role, giving the Baron a more physical performance while retaining the psychopathic coldness and inhumanity of the previous films. Fisher retains his fondness for startling but appropriate juxtapositions, for instance following Anna’s remark to the Baron “you’ll find it very quiet here” with a cut to a screaming madwoman in the asylum. There’s a nice bait-and-switch early on regarding the Baron’s identity (and one which seems like a callback to the familiar saw about the Baron really being the monster), and we also get a suitably comic morgue attendant at one point. Production values are high for a Hammer film, with some very good creature makeup and a pyrotechnic ending.
Freddie Jones as The Creature cuts a pathetic figure
Nonetheless, the movie suffers from some annoying plot holes and character contrivances, as well as an opening scene which goes nowhere and adds nothing to the plot, and a resolution which I found lacking in credibility and, indeed, closure. There are also a number of Dickensian coincidences (a doctor at the very lunatic asylum the Baron wants to get into having a fiancée who runs a boarding house, for instance), which might be forgiveable as an element of the genre but do tend to grate. I would place this as the third best of the franchise, after Curse of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Created Woman: however, in a year where decent horror movies have been thin on the ground, it’s a welcome relief. Three and a half stars.
The Italian Job
Poster for The Italian Job
The Italian Job is a joyous heist comedy and a welcome counter to some of the divisive language finding its way into British social and political discourse. Britons from all walks of life—Cockneys, aristocrats, homosexuals, immigrants, professors and others—come together to pull off a clever theft and raise the proverbial two fingers to rivals on the Continent.
When his Italian partner in crime meets a surreal end on a mountain road courtesy of the Mafia, Charlie Coker (Michael Caine) enlists the help of Bridger (Noel Coward), a mastermind who doesn’t let a long-term prison sentence stop him from running a criminal empire, by appealing to his patriotism. Coker and a diverse variety of colorful associates plan and carry out a daring raid on a secure convoy carrying $4 million in gold, under cover of a traffic jam and an England v Italy football game. After a delightful set-piece involving red, white and blue Mini Coopers racing through, above and below the streets of Turin, the criminals seem to have gotten away with it—but have they?
Criminals from all walks of British life, in a planning meeting
The movie is technically SF, in that it contains a scene showing the way in which a computer might be compromised using a piece of malicious software on a magnetic tape—which, when introduced into the Turin traffic system, interferes with the cameras and allows our protagonists to conduct their raid. Happily this seems to be only a theoretical possibility at this point, but it’s an intriguing idea. The movie also draws liberally on the surreal comedy of recent television series like The Prisoner and The Avengers, which are often considered at least nominally science fiction.
The movie’s strengths lie in its pace, its spectacular driving set-pieces and its humour, which manages to be simultaneously proud and self-deprecating. Coker’s motley crew are variously dim-witted, incompetent, oversexed and lacking in foresight, and yet they manage to pull off a daring raid against the clearly much more organised Italian Mafia. The movie also makes satirical comments on the connections between crime and the Establishment in both Britain and Italy, and there’s a suggestion of Tati’s playful anti-technology message in the way in which the traffic system is brought to a standstill and joyous chaos erupts in its wake.
The Minis! They're amazing! They go everywhere!
It's a little sad, though, that all this joy and unity comes at the expense of disliking our neighbours. Given that the current political situation suggests we need to join the Common Market, the jocular but nonetheless pointed sense of Britain isolated, fighting against Europe and, indeed, the world, could strike a worrying note. I also observe that Coker’s crew contains no one from the Celtic Fringe of this country (relatedly, women also seem to be excluded from the merry band, except as sex objects). However, to be fair, Coker’s raid is initially planned as a joint Italian-British enterprise, the money is coming in to Fiat from China, and there’s a long speech about the relevance of the Italian immigrant community in Britain. So perhaps I’m reading too much into it.
I suspect joining Europe is an inevitability for the United Kingdom. If so, it’s good that we’re coming in with a clear sense of common identity and national pride, showing everyone that we can laugh at ourselves and drive our tiny cars alongside the best of them.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair 1969 will live on in fashion for hundreds of years. Truly, this little festival of love is already making waves within weeks of the event. Like other artist-driven movements before it–the Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, and Primitifs, to name a few–the Hippie Movement will inspire again and again, living on in infamy as the pinnacle of rebellion, freedom, and youth.
Ossie Clark Aeroplane, 1969 by Jim Lee.
Let us then take a moment to appreciate that we are living in a moment of great aesthetic change. If French Rococo had come from the cobblestone streets instead of the marble steps of the palace, this is what it might have felt like. Wondrous, confident, inclusive, worldly… Let us fall into our own naturalistic dream through a cacophony of colors and patterns, divine geometry, and just the exquisite mess of it all.
Without further ado, here are three les créateurs du jour to celebrate and thank for the vibrant fantasy that is 1969.
Ossie Clark has said that this photograph is meant to comment on soldiers that fool around and don’t take the war seriously. Celia Birtwell represents a peasant girl being sexually assaulted by a soldier holding a gun to her thigh while wearing one of Ossie’s floral dresses, 1969.
Ossie Clark is making the biggest splash of his career right now, and for good reason. Photographer Jim Lee helped bring his vision to life for the editorial series entitled 'Vietnam', a brutal commentary on both the realities of the war and his ardent hope for peace. His other photoworks with Jim Lee depict a similar combination of violence and vibrance that feel both glamorous and political. 'Target' uses the same bright, primary palette, but is reminiscent of suicide bombers. Ossie Clark has mentioned that his intent with the photo was to make it appear as if Celia Birtwell had survived a nosedive unscathed.
Celia Birtwell wearing an Ossie kaftan dress in parti color yellow and green. Interestingly, the fourth attempt at this photograph left the detonation expert badly burned.
Ossie Clark would not be complete, however, without his life and design partner, Celia Birtwell. Her Botticelli print has inspired much of Ossie’s fashion this year, making its way onto trousers, peasant tops, kaftans, and gowns. She is the mastermind behind the “floating” textiles that make his designs so bold and nymph-like.
The “Botticelli” print by Celia Birtwell on Ossie Clark’s chiffon and satin trouser suit, 1969.
The “Floating Daisy” and “Poppy” prints by Celia Birtwell on Ossie Clark’s crepe and chiffon evening dress and coat, 1969.
Zandra Rhodes is another exceptional designer with an eye for color that simply glows with life. Her first collection came out this year, titled “The Knitted Circle.” The stand-out piece from her very first collection is the jaw-dropping Butterfly Coat. This coat made of golden wool with a quilted collar that curls away from the neck like butterfly wings, dragged towards the ground with elegant beaded cords. The bodice’s embroidery is a trompe l’oeil print, which keeps its volume and shape from becoming too heavy. And the skirt’s rose and diamond print is reminiscent of gardens and tea in a charming, youthful way.
The Butterfly Coat’s skirt is a full circle gathered into a fitted bust, emblematic of the circular tailoring theme that Rhodes uses across the entire collection, 1969.
Other garments in the collection are ethereal and frothy, following the theme of full circle cutting in the skirts and balloon sleeves. The circular motif is inviting but powerful. When combined with Rhodes’ deft hand at color, it speaks to the energy of young women and their audacity to be happy as themselves.
Detail of the Butterfly Coat by Zandra Rhodes, 1969.
Let us end this little tour with a man of many talents. Giorgio di Sant’Angelo has apprenticed under Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney, worked as a textile designer for furniture, and studied industrial design. His personality is big and his look cherubic. Most stunning, though, is that his work embodies it all.
Sant’Angelo in 1968 photographed with a model draped in his scarves.
The scarf wall at the Phoenix Art Museum.
Sant’Angelo is daring and bold, but there’s an inherent softness to his work. He combines organic subjects with psychedelic color, and geometry with hand-drawn repetition rather than precision. There’s a speculative element to his work that makes one think he wishes to drape you in dreams rather than necessarily create clothing.
Even his heavier textiles maintain the dreamlike crossroads between geometry and mysticism. For his photoshoot with Veruschka for Vogue in 1968, he supposedly took only fabrics and jewelry, draping each frame by hand. The result is a mesmerizing dance of triangles and circles.
The above photographs are from the Vogue desert photoshoot, photographed by Franco Rubartelli.
Enjoy these watershed years, my friends! We are seeing the future being shaped as we live and breathe. What will the Hippie movement lead to next? Fops and dandies? Peasant dresses and pastorales? It will seep into our daily lives, of that there is no question.
[And now, for your reading pleasure, a clutch of books representing the science fiction and fantasy books that have crossed our desk for review this month!]
by Victoria Silverwolf
Ye Gods!
Two new fantasy novels, both with touches of science fiction, feature theological themes. One deals with deities that are now considered to be purely mythological, the other relates to one of the world's major living religions. Let's take a look.
Fourth Mansions, by R. A. Lafferty
Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon.
The title of this strange novel comes from a book written by Saint Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Christian mystic of the sixteenth century. This work, known as The Interior Castle or The Mansions in English, compares various stages in the soul's spiritual progress to mansions within a castle. From what I can tell from a little research, the Fourth Mansion is the stage at which the natural and the supernatural intersect.
(I'm sure I'm explaining this badly. Interested readers can seek out a copy of Saint Teresa's book for themselves.)
I understand that Lafferty is a devout Catholic, so this connection between his latest novel and what is considered to be a classic of Christian literature must be more than superficial. Be that as it may, let's see if we can make any sense out of a very weird book.
Our hero is Fred Foley, a reporter who is said to be not very bright, but who seems to have some kind of special insight or perception as to events beyond the mundane. (A sort of Holy Fool, perhaps.) He gets involved in multiple conspiracies of folks, who may be something other than just ordinary human beings, out to change the world.
There are four such groups, said to be not quite fit for either Heaven or Earth. Each one is symbolized by an animal.
The Snakes, also known as the Harvesters, are a group of seven people who blend their psychic powers to influence the minds of others. They are intent on bringing about a sort of hedonistic apocalypse. Their connection to Foley and other characters allows for telepathic communication, and sets the plot in motion.
The Toads are folks who are reincarnated, or somehow take over new bodies. (It's a little vague.) Foley's investigation into one such person starts the novel. They intend to release a plague, wiping out most of humanity and ruling over the survivors.
The Badgers are people who are something like spiritual rulers of a kind of parallel world that most ordinary people can't perceive. Foley pays a visit to a couple of these seemingly benign people for information. In one case, this involves a trip to a mountain in Texas that shouldn't be there.
The Unfledged Falcons are would-be fascists, military leaders trying to take over the world by force. Only one such person appears in the book, a Mexican fellow named Miguel Fuentes. He gets involved when the Snakes try to influence an American named Michael Fountain (see the connection in names?) and wind up entering his mind by mistake.
I would be hard pressed to try to describe all the bizarre things that happen. Lafferty has a way of describing extraordinary events in deadpan fashion. (We're very casually told, for example, that one character brought a dead man back to life when he was a boy. One very minor character is a demon, and another one is an alien.)
The book's combination of whimsey and allegory is unique, to say the least. There's a lot of dialogue that sounds like nothing anybody would ever say in real life. Did I understand it all? Certainly not. Did I enjoy the ride? Yep.
Four stars.
Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny
Cover art by James Starrett.
Zelazny's recent novel Lord of Light offered a futuristic twist on Buddhism and Hinduism. This one makes use of ancient Egyptian gods, as well as a bit of Greek mythology. There are also a lot of original concepts, making for a very mixed stew indeed.
The time is the far future, when humanity has settled multiple planets. Don't expect a space opera, however.
We begin in the House of the Dead, ruled by Anubis. He has a servant who has lost his memory and his name. Anubis gives him the name Wakim, and sends him to the Middle Worlds (the physical realm) to destroy the Prince Who Was A Thousand. Meanwhile, Osiris, who rules the House of Life, sends his son Horus on the same errand.
You see, Anubis and Osiris keep the population of the Middle Worlds in balance, bringing life and death in equal amounts. The Prince threatens this system with the possibility of immortality. Although the two gods have the same goal, they are also rivals, so their champions battle each other as well as the Prince.
This is a greatly oversimplified description of the basic plot. A lot more goes on, with many equally god-like characters. There's a sort of scavenger hunt for three sacred items, with the protagonists hopping around from planet to planet in search of them.
Zelazny experiments with narrative techniques, from poetry to a play. There's some humor, as demonstrated by a cult that worships a pair of shoes. (They actually play an important role in the plot.) The pace is frenzied, with plenty of purple prose.
Full understanding of what the heck is really going on doesn't happen until late in the book, when we learn the actual identities of Wakim and the Prince. Suffice to say that this requires a lengthy description of apocalyptic events that took place long before the story begins.
Some readers are going to find this novel disjointed and overwritten. Others are likely to be swept away by the richness of the author's imagination. I'm leaning in the latter direction.
Roger Zelazny’s been busy this month! His new novel Damnation Alley expands his novella of the same name into an action piece which is exciting enough but ultimately unsatisfying, a sort of postapocalyptic pony express with futuristic vehicles and implausible characters.
Cover of Damnation Alley by Jack Gaughan
The story is set in a relatively near-future USA after a nuclear war which has split it into isolated states within a radiation-ravaged wasteland, the only relatively safe passage through which is a corridor known as Damnation Alley. There are pockets of radiation, giant mutant animals and insects, tornadoes and killer dust storms. The descriptions of these is the book’s real strength, with some of them verging on the genuinely poetic. Our protagonist is Hell Tanner, a former Hell’s Angel who is offered a pardon for his crimes by the State of California, if he’ll deliver a shipment of vaccines to Boston, which has been hit by an outbreak of plague. Of course, this necessitates driving through Damnation Alley, but never fear, Tanner is also driving a super-tough vehicle bristling with weaponry.
The whole thing is almost laughably macho in places, and I say that as someone who really quite likes both cars and adventure stories. Tanner is that implausible archetype, the bad guy who nonetheless somehow has other people’s best interests at heart. However, there’s also some nice contrasts set up between Tanner and the criminal world he inhabits and the much more normal parts of society he encounters on his journey, where people seem to be on the whole generally decent and kind, making Tanner’s casual violence seem all the more out of place.
The book has a lot of problems. Some are clearly the result of padding it out to novel length, with several episodes which go nowhere and add little to the story. The characterisation of everyone aside from Tanner is weak to nonexistent. In particular, the main female character, Cordy, is a frustrating cipher: she is a woman who Tanner essentially abducts, and yet she shows none of the emotions one might expect under the circumstances, while Tanner seemingly comes to think of her as his girlfriend despite neither of them making any moves in that direction.
However, the biggest problem is that there are too many holes in the story for it to stay afloat. Despite the devastation of the land around it, the state of California somehow still has the resources to build giant armoured cars bristling with every kind of weapon from bullets to flamethrowers. Only two human beings are apparently capable of making the trip from California to Boston, which is surprising given the aforementioned level of technology and that there is clearly no shortage of young men with a death wish. Tanner makes it almost to Boston before encountering anyone who makes a serious effort to steal the vaccines, which I also find somewhat implausible. And so on, and so on.
Damnation Alley held my attention for the duration of a train journey and had nicely surreal, well-paced prose in places, but it was just too unbelievable for me to really enjoy it. Two and a half stars.
by Brian Collins
Since he returned to writing some half a dozen years ago, Robert Silverberg has tried to reintroduce himself as a more “serious” writer. This is not to say his rate of output has slowed down in favor of more refined work; if anything the past few years have been the busiest for him since the ‘50s. This year alone we have gotten enough novels from Silverberg that a bit of a catch-up is in order. The first on my plate, Across a Billion Years, hit store shelves a few months ago, from The Dial Press (I believe this is Silverberg’s first book with said publisher), and it seems to have flown under the radar—possibly because there’s no paperback edition, and also it might be aimed at younger readers. The second book we have here, To Live Again, is from Doubleday, and it too is a hardcover original; but unlike Across a Billion Years, To Live Again is a new release, fresh out of the oven.
It’s the 24th century, and humanity has not only spread to other worlds but encountered several intelligent alien races along the way. Tom Rice is a 22-year-old archaeologist on an expedition to find the ruins of a bygone race called the High Ones, who apparently lived a billion years ago (hence the title) but who have since vanished. Whether or not the High Ones have gone extinct is one of the novel’s core mysteries, although Silverberg takes his time raising this question. The novel is told as a series of diary entries, or rather messages Tom sends to his sister Lorie. In a curious but also frustrating move, Lorie is arguably the most interesting character in the novel, yet we never see or hear her, as she’s not only away from the action but stuck in a hospital bed for an indefinite period. Lorie is a telepath, and enough people are “TP” to make up their own faction, although telepathy only works one-way and Tom himself is not a telepath. The one positive surprise Silverberg includes here is finding a way to tie telepathy together with the mystery of the High Ones, but obviously I won’t say how he does it.
As for bad surprises, well…
Even taking into account that Tom is a young adult who also has personal hang-ups (his father wanted him to enter real estate), his treatment of his colleagues is abhorrent in the opening stretch. He dismisses the aliens on the team as mostly “diversity” hires and has a standoffish relationship with Kelly, the female android on the team, whom he more than once compares to a “voluptuous nineteen-year-old.” Why someone of Tom’s age would make such a comparison is befuddling…unless you were really a lecherous man approaching middle age and not a recent college graduate. There are a few other humans here, but the only human woman present is Jan, whom Tom gradually takes a liking to—just not enough to do anything when he sees Leroy, a male colleague, sexually assault Jan near enough that he could have intervened. This happens early in the novel, and I have to admit that Tom’s indifference regarding Jan’s wellbeing, a weakness in character he never really apologizes for, cast a cloud over my enjoyment of the rest of the novel. I kept wondering when the other shoe would drop. That Tom and Jan’s relationship turns romantic despite the former’s callousness only serves to rub salt in the wound. The bright side of all this is that while some of Silverberg’s recent work has bordered on pornographic, Across a Billion Years is relatively tame, almost to the point of being old-fashioned.
Indeed, this feels like a throwback to an older era of SF, even back to those years when Silverberg (and I, for that matter) had not yet picked up a pen or used a typewriter. In broad strokes this is a planetary adventure of the sort that would have been serialized in Astounding circa 1945. We’re excavating alien ruins on Higby V, a distant planet where High Ones artifacts have been supposedly found. During a drunken escapade one of the alien diggers stumbles upon (or rather breaks into) a piece of High Ones technology, something akin to a movie projector, not only showing what the High Ones look like but revealing a clue as to the location of their homeworld. This should sound familiar to most of us, and I suspect Silverberg knows this too, because this novel’s biggest problem and biggest asset is how it uses perspective. We’re stuck with Tom as he sends messages to Lorie, recounting events in perhaps more detail than he has to, knowing in advance that his sister won’t receive these messages until after the fact. As with a disconcerting number of Silverberg protagonists, Tom can be annoying, and honestly quite bigoted; and since he is the perspective character we’re never relieved of his oh-so-interesting remarks. But, and I will give Silverberg this, he does put a twist on the epistolary format very late in the novel, which does the miraculous thing of making you reevaluate what you had been reading up to this point.
In other words, this is not an exceptional novel, but it does have its points of interest, and with the exception of an early scene and its ramifications (or lack thereof), nothing here made me want to throw my copy at a nearby wall. For the most part this is inoffensive—possibly even decent. Three stars.
Those who want a bit more sex with their science fiction can do worse than this one, which looks to be the fourth (or maybe fifth—I’ve lost count) Silverberg novel of 1969. It’s the near-ish future, and the good news is that for those with enough money, death is not necessarily the end. Courtesy of the Scheffing Institute, a person can have their memories stored periodically, making copies or “personae” of themselves, which can be transplanted to the brain of a living host. The host and the persona will cooperate, lest the latter erase the former’s personality and become a “dybbuk,” using the host’s body as a flesh puppet.
The infamous businessman Paul Kaufmann has recently died, with his persona waiting to be claimed. Paul’s nephew, Mark, and Mark’s 16-year-old daughter Risa each see themselves as ideal candidates for Paul’s persona, but one of the rules at the Institute is that close family members can’t host each other’s personae: the implications of, for example, a teen girl hosting her grandfather’s persona, would be…concerning.
While we’re on the lovely topic of incest, let’s talk more about Risa, who must be one of the thorniest of all Silverberg characters, which as you know is a tall order, not helped by the fact that Silverberg describes, in almost poetic detail, every curve of this teen girl’s nude body—and she does strut around naked a surprising amount of the time. Risa is such a depraved individual, despite her age, that she at one point tries seducing an older male cousin and rather openly has an Electra complex (they even mention it by name), which Mark is understandably disturbed by—with the implication being that Mark has lustful thoughts about his own daughter. This is the second Silverberg novel I’ve read in two months to involve incest, which worries me.
The only other major female character is Elena, Mark’s mistress, whom Risa sees as a rival for her father’s affections and who (predictably) starts conspiring against Mark. Not content to ogle at just 16-year-olds, Silverberg also takes to describing the nuances of Elena’s body in wearying fashion, which does lead me to wonder if he was working the typewriter one-handed for certain passages. It’s a shame, because there’s an intriguing subplot in which Risa acquires her first persona, a young woman named Tandy who had died in a skiing accident—or so the official record claims. Tandy, or rather the persona of Tandy, recorded a couple months prior to her death, suspects foul play. Of the women mentioned, Tandy is the least embarrassingly written, but then she is only tangentially related to the plot and, what with not having a physical body, Silverberg is only able to ogle at her so much.
I’ve not even mentioned John Roditis and his underling Charles Noyles, business rivals of Mark’s who are clamoring for Paul’s persona. You may notice that this novel has more moving parts than Across a Billion Years, and certainly it’s the more ambitious of the two, the problem being that its shortcomings are all the more disappointing for it. Silverberg raises questions that he can barely be bothered with answering, and he alludes to things that remain mostly unrevealed. Much of To Live Again is shrouded in speculation, which is to say it uses speculation as a night-black cloak to cover things we sadly never get to see.
Another rule at the Institute is that a persona has to be of the same gender as its host, a rule that characters mostly write off as bogus. And indeed why not? Why should a male host and female persona not be able to coexist? Or the other way around. The prohibition has to do with transsexualism, which is certainly uncharted water for the most part. There has been very little science fiction written about transsexualism or transvestism—the possibility of blurring and even crossing gender lines. Unfortunately the novel does little with the ideas it presents. There are multiple references to religion and mythology (the word “dybbuk” refers to an evil spirit in Jewish mythology), including lines taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s a minor subplot about white Californians appropriating Buddhist practices, in connection with the Institute, but this is so tangential that the reader can easily forget about it.
Finally, I want to mention that I was reminded eerily of another novel that came out this year, Philip K. Dick’s masterful and deranged Ubik, which I have to think Silverberg could not have known about when he was writing To Live Again. Both take cues from the Buddhist conception of reincarnation, although in Dick’s novel people who have died are kept in a state of suspended animation called “half-life,” whereas Silverberg’s characters die the full death, or “discorporate,” only that their personalities (up to a point) are kept intact. Not to make comparisons, but given that Silverberg’s novel is longer than Dick’s I have to say he does a fair bit less with the shared material. Of course, these are both talented writers, who at their best do very fine work indeed. Silverberg has become a major writer, but sadly he is not firing on all cylinders with either of the novels I’ve covered.
This book made me think of a Bulwer-Lytton novel for the Space Age.
This book could make Damon Knight take back everything he said about van Vogt.
This book made me long for the complexity of Commander Cody shorts.
This book’s style is so out of date that I think it fell out of the TARDIS.
This book wishes it had the character depth of a Lin Carter work.
And yet, I can't hate it the way I hated Light A Last Candle. That book was one mass of forgettable hate, but The Glass Cage is not hateful. It's incompetent at every turn, from line editing to plot development (I really don't know how it got the hardcover copy I received), but the overall effect is an oral record of a children's game.
There's this guy, Stephen, he’s twenty! He's a neophyte to the priests of the computer, TAL! It keeps life going in the city beneath its glass dome! Stephen is a perfect physical specimen, and his only flaw is being too curious about things. But that's because he’s secretly a spy for the Rebellion outside the glass dome!
The sentences are short and rarely have the benefit of internal punctuation. The characters are, generally, exactly how they appear — wicked characters with their close-together eyes, good characters with their strong jaws, straightforward manner, and perfect blonde hair. If this is chosen for adaptation, Tommy Kirk is made for the lead part.
The treatment of nuclear power seems to come from another time, where the leaders of interstellar development are in the Baltimore Gun Club rather than NASA. The giant computer, TAL, is attached to a nuclear bomb, to go off at a certain date, destroying the whole glass dome and the people within! No need to worry, though, Stephen and his various Rebellion people get most everyone out in time, except for the bad guy head priest of TAL, who is determined to die with his machine. Stephen and the gangster leader of the in-Dome Rebellion try to get him out, but to no avail! The nuclear bomb is about to go off, so the two of them hop on their air-sled, turn it skyward, and smash through the glass dome, just as the nuclear bomb goes off! Luckily, the nuclear bomb just pushes them a few miles away from the blast, where they are safe and unharmed.
One point of the book that is surprisingly forward-thinking is its treatment of one of the main characters being severely disabled. Despite being paralyzed from the neck down, he is a leader of the Rebellion, commanding through his immense psychic ability. But that cannot keep me from giving it…
Two stars
[A bit of a downer note to leave on, but at least there's some fine stuff upstream. See you next month, tiger!]
The streets of West Germany are currently plastered with campaign posters, because a federal election, the sixth since 1949, will happen on September 28.
This campaign poster by the conservative CDU reminds us that the chancellor is important.This SPD campaign poster features foreign secretary and vice chancellor Willy Brandt and asks people to vote for him so we can live in peace tomorrow.This SPD campaign poster features the popular secretary of the economy Karl Schiller, who promises a stable economy and secure jobs.This SPD campaign poster features social democratic floor leader Helmut Schmidt who promises to create a modern Germany with vigour and energy.The liberal party FDP forgoes the usual black and white headshot and promises to abolish antiquated customs and laws.
The posters are eerily similar across parties, usually consisting of a party logo, a slogan in Helvetica typeface and a black and white photo of a candidate. Hereby, the conservative CDU mainly points out that they provide the current chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and that he does a good job (which is debatable).
This SPD campaign poster features images of the modern West Germany they want to create and also reminds voters that the SPD "has the right men".
The SPD, meanwhile, has made "For a modern Germany" the focal point of their campaign, though the tagline "We have the right men" made quite a few woman voters grumpy. In response, the SPD launched a campaign where women – both celebrities like actress Inge Meysel and ordinary citizens like Johanna Lammers, miner's wife from Castrop-Rauxel – explain why they vote SPD.
Johanna Lammers, miner's wife from Castrop-Rauxel, poses with her sewing machine in this SPD campaign flyer and praises secretary of the economy Karfl Schiller for preserving mining jobs.Popular actress Inge Meysel explains why she votes SPD in this campaign flyer.
In general, it is notable that the SPD enlisted several celebrities, including writers Günther Grass, Siegfried Lenz and Heinrich Böll, actors Romy Schneider, Götz George, Marianne Hoppe, Sabine Sinjen, Inge Meysel, Horst Frank and Horst Tappert, TV personalities Peter Frankenfeld and Hans-Joachim Kuhlenkampf, directors Victor de Kowa and Wolfgang Menge and singer Katja Ebstein, to campaign for them, something that is common in the US, but almost unheard of in West Germany.
This SPD campaign poster lists all the celebrities who endorse the SPD.
A Small Step
But whatever the outcome of the September 28 election, it's very likely that the current great coalition of the conservative CDU and the social-democratic SPD will not continue.
Due to its large majority, the great coalition actually got a lot done in its three years in office, for better or for worse. Under "for worse", most people would classify the controversial and unpopular emergency powers act, which passed last year – in spite of massive protests.
On the positive side, there is the Great Reform of the Criminal Code, which passed in June and took effect on September 1, which got rid of outdated laws (many of which dated back to the Third Reich or even the Second German Empire) and brought particularly morality related offences more in line with our modern age.
Among other things, adultery is no longer a criminal offence in West Germany. The so-called "Kuppelei" paragraph, which under the guise of combating prostitution forbade landlords from renting apartments and hotels from renting rooms to unmarried couples, and prevented parents from allowing their adult children's boyfriend or girlfriend to sleep over, has been significantly modified.
But most importantly, homosexual relationships between men have been decriminalised, at least if both participants are over twenty-one and there is no employment or service relationship between them. Homosexual prostitution remains illegal.
These are small steps forward, especially since most of the legal limitations applied to homosexual relationships between men do not apply to heterosexual relationships or relationships between women. But they are important steps, because every year between two thousand and three thousand men are tried and convicted for consensual homosexual relationships on the basis of a law dating back to the Second German Empire and significantly tightened by the Nazis.
The end of WWII is often viewed as a liberation, but for homosexual men incarcerated by the Nazis it was anything but, for they remained in prison, while other victims of Nazi persecution were set free. And while the Federal Republic of Germany distanced itself from the Third Reich, it displayed the same zeal in persecuting homosexual men. In 1950, the public prosecution of Frankfurt on Main dragged some 170 men into court on homosexuality charges, based on the questionable statements made by a nineteen-year-old male prostitute named Otto Blankenstein, later revealed to be a notorious liar. Many of the accused were found guilty and jailed, six men committed suicide, others lost their jobs or were forced to flee Germany.
Otto Blankenstein, the nineteen-year-old male prostitute who set off an unprecedented persecution of homosexual men in Frankfurt on Main in 1950, when he ratted out his clients to save himself from prison.
In the light of events such as those that happened in Frankfurt nineteen years ago, the decriminalisation of homosexual relationships between consenting adults is an important step forward. And indeed, the immediate effect of the new law was not the sudden eruption of homosexual orgies in West German streets that conservatives feared but that many men who had been convicted under the old law were set free, because there was no reason to keep them in jail any longer.
More Treasures from the Pulps
But while old and outdated laws are best left behind, older fiction is often ripe for rediscovery. Particularly the pulp magazines of thirty to forty years ago contain many hidden gems and secret treasures just begging to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers. And thanks to the twin success of Lancer's Conan reprints and the Ballantine paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings, many other fantasy works from the first half of the century are coming back into print.
I recently got my hands on two paperbacks reprinting some fantasy gems that until recently could only be found in the crumbling pages of thirty to forty year old copies of Weird Tales.
The Last King of the Picts: Bran Mak Morn by Robert E. Howard
cover by Frank Frazetta
Nowadays, Robert E. Howard is mainly remembered as the father of what Fritz Leiber called sword and sorcery. However, Howard was also fascinated by history and wrote a lot of historical fiction, with or without fantastic elements. The Bran Mak Morn stories sit on the boundary between fantasy and history. The titular hero is the king of the Picts, a native tribe living in Scotland in ancient times.
Howard was clearly fascinated by the Picts, because they appear throughout his work. The best friend and frequent saviour of Kull of Atlantis is a Pictish warrior named Brule the Spearslayer. The Picts also appear in two Conan stories, "Beyond the Black River" and "The Treasure of Tranicos", where they are portrayed as fierce warriors and sworn enemies of Conan's people, the Cimmerians.
The Bran Mak Morn stories take the Picts out of fantasy and into history, though it must be noted that Howard's Picts bear scant resemblance to what little we know about the actual ancient inhabitants of Scotland. Mostly set in Roman Britain during the second or third century AD, the stories recount the conflict between the technologically superior Roman colonisers and the Picts, who at this point in their history have devolved into Neanderthal-like primitives. Their king Bran Mak Morn knows that his people are doomed, but he is not willing to go down without a fight.
Cororuc is about to meet an unpleasant fate in "The Lost Race" by Robert E. Howard-
Though the first story in this collection, "The Lost Race", does not feature Bran Mak Morn at all, but instead follows Cororuc, a traveller in Roman Britain, who is captured by Picts and taken to their underground lair. The Picts are described as diminutive – in Howard's time some historians believed they were pygmies – and the likely source of legends about dwarves and little people. They are quite hostile and want to burn Cororuc at the stake – after a history lesson delivered by their chief. But Cororuc's life is spared due to the intercession of a werewolf he'd saved earlier.
"The Lost Race" is one of Robert E. Howard's earliest stories, published in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales, when Howard was only twenty-one, and is clearly the work of a beginning writer. Three stars.
Bran Mak Morn does appear in "Men of the Shadows", though once again the protagonist is another character, a Norseman who became a Roman citizen and legionnaire. He's part of a squad sent north of Hadrian's Wall on a mysterious mission. The legionnaires are slaughtered in a series of battles with the Picts, until only a handful remain. The survivors try to make it back to safety beyond Hadrian's Wall, but are picked off one by one, until there is only a single survivor who is captured and brought before Bran Mak Morn himself. The Picts want to kill him, but Bran spares his life and also reveals the reason why the legionnaires were sent into Pictish territory, namely because a wealthy Roman had taken a liking to Bran's sister and wanted to take her for his own. Bran's refusal to kill the legionnaire leads to a staring contest between Bran and a Pictish wizard upset that Bran is forgetting the old ways. Bran wins the contest, whereupon the wizard launches into a lengthy explanation of the history of the Picts and also prophesizes the fall of the Roman Empire.
This story was never published in Howard's lifetime and it's easy to see why. It's a disjointed mess and Howard forgets both the plot and even the protagonist, once the wizard launches into the extended history of the Picts. We never even learn what happened to the legionnaire. Perhaps he was bored to death by the lecturing wizard. Two stars.
A ghostly Kull appears on the battlefield in the interior art for "Kings of the Night".
In "Kings of the Night", Bran Mak Morn is preparing for battle against a Roman legion marching on his land. Bran's Picts have joined forces with Gaels and Britons, but Bran also needs to persuade a group of Norsemen to join the battle. However, their chief has been killed and the Norsemen refuse to fight until they find a new leader. So the Pictish wizard Gonar casts a spell and conjures up none other than Kull of Atlantis, brought forward through time. Kull is understandably confused and mistakes Bran for his Pictish friend Brule the Spearslayer, implying that Bran is a descendent of Brule. However, he also agrees to lead the Norsemen into battle. But is the victory worth the price in blood?
First published in the November 1930 issue of Weird Tales, this is a highly enjoyable story and the return of Kull of Atlantis is most welcome, though it's interesting that Bran outbroods even the traditionally broody Kull. Four stars.
Bran Mak Morn confronts the witch Atla who wants his body in "Worms of the Earth".
"Worms of the Earth" starts with an incredibly visceral and brutal crucifixion scene. A Pict is executed for killing a Roman merchant who'd swindled him. Presiding over the execution is Titus Sulla, Roman governor of Eboracum (nowadays known better by its British name York), as well as a Pictish emissary. Unbeknownst to the arrogant Sulla, this emissary is none other than Bran Mak Morn in disguise.
Infuriated by the way the Roman colonisers treat his people. Bran vows revenge upon Titus Sulla and he is willing to go to great lengths to get it. And so against the warnings of the wizard Gonar, Bran enlists the aid of the titular worms, the remnants of a pre-human civilisation who may be descendants of the Serpent Men from the Kull stories. But in order to find the worms, Bran first has to consult the witch Atla, who is not entirely human herself, and whose price is nothing less than Bran's virtue. So Bran leans back and thinks of the Picts, while Atla has her way with him.
Bran finally locates the worms and they agree to help him get his revenge on Sulla. But things don't go the way Bran expects…
Published in the November 1932 issue of Weird Tales, this is a great story, which perfectly balances sword and sorcery, history and horror. "Worms of the Earth" is the highlight of this collection and worth the price of admission alone. Five stars.
"The Night of the Wolf" is another story which remained unpublished during Howard's lifetime. Set during Arthurian times, it's the tale of Cormac Mac Art, an Irish reiver who gets embroiled in a conflict between Vikings and Picts in the Shetland Islands, where Cormac tries to negotiate the release of an important prisoner.
"The Night of the Wolf" is a well written story full of action and excitement, but I'm not quite sure why it was included in this collection, because it is not a Bran Mak Morn story, even though the Picts appear. Four stars.
The statue of Bran Mak Morn gloomily looks on, as the kidnapped Irish maiden Moira is about the escape a forced marriage by the only means she can.
Bran Mak Morn does appear in "The Dark Man", at least after a fashion — because the story is set in the ninth century during the Viking invasion of Ireland, i.e. at a time when Bran is long dead. Instead, he appears in the form of a statue that is worshipped by the surviving descendants of the Picts.
Our hero is an Irish outlaw named Turlogh Dubh O'Brien who's on a mission to rescue his childhood sweetheart Moira, daughter of an Irish chieftain, who was kidnapped by Vikings. Turlogh comes across the statue of Bran and decides to take it along. He crashes the forced wedding of Moira to the Viking chief Thorfel and takes bloody vengeance. The statue of Bran, the titular dark man, comes in handy as well, for where Bran goes, or rather his statue goes, the Picts are not far behind and they are still formidable warriors.
First published in the December 1931 issue of Weird Tales, "The Dark Man" is another fine historical adventure story and unlike "The Night of the Wolf", it has at least some connection to Bran Mak Morn, albeit rather tenuously. Four stars.
I have to admit that I was very eager to finally get my hands on Robert E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn stories. Though I have no Scottish ancestry, I recognise the parallels between Bran and his Picts struggling against Roman rule and the history of my own homeland. For just like the historical Picts, my own ancestors, the Germanic tribes of Northern Germany, managed to kick the Romans out of North Germany and drive them back beyond the Limes Germanicus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.
Postcard of the Hermann Monument near Detmold, which reminds us that Arminius knocked the Romans out of their sandals somewhere around here.
The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest is extremely important to German history. The so-called Hermann Monument near Detmold, a 53 meter tall statue of the Cherusci chieftain Arminius a.k.a. Hermann, is a popular destination for school trips and much beloved. Whenever I'm in the area, I always pay a visit to good old Arminius, even if the statue is not even remotely accurate and the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest most likely did not take place anywhere near Detmold. Archaeologists are still looking for the actual location of the battle
Arminius is to the Germans what the Gaul leader Vercingetorix is to the French, a national hero who fought back against the arrogant Roman invaders. Unlike Vercingetorix, Arminius was victorious and lived to tell the tale. And just like the fictional Bran Mak Morn, Arminius was driven by vengeance, for according to legend he was an officer in the Roman army who turned against his former allies, when the Romans paraded his pregnant wife Thusnelda naked through the streets of Rome in triumph. The veracity of the tale of Thusnelda is debatable, but it is a compelling story and always made me sympathise with Arminius. Bran's story and motivation, though entirely fictional, are just as compelling and I'm sure that Arminius and Bran would find a lot to talk about over a jug of ale or mead.
For all that, the actual collection is a little bit of a letdown. Robert E. Howard just didn't write very many stories about Bran Mak Morn, so Dell topped off the collection with unpublished stories and fragments, poems, juvenilia and vaguely related stories that feature the Picts.
Nonetheless, "Worms of the Earth" is a top tier Howard story and most of the other stories are at the very least entertaining, even if Bran isn't actually in them.
Four stars.
Women's Lib, Sword and Sorcery Style: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore
The yellowing pages of Weird Tales contain treasures beyond the stories of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, whose work Arkham House is doing a good job of keeping in print. One of those treasures that I was extremely excited to get my hands on are the stories C.L. Moore wrote about the medieval French swordswoman Jirel of Joiry. At last the stories are available again for the first time in more than thirty years.
Jirel kisses the Black God in Margaret Brundage's cover art for the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales.
"Black God's Kiss" first appeared in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales and introduced Jirel of Joiry to the world. The story opens with the iconic and much imitated scene of the warlord Guillaume conquering Castle Joiry. The captured lord of the castle is brought before Guillaume in full armour. When Guillaume orders his captive's helmet removed, the Lord of Castle Joiry is revealed to be a lady, the red-haired firebrand Jirel. Guillaume is quite delighted by this discovery and forces a kiss on Jirel. Jirel is considerably less delighted and tries to bite his throat out.
The revealing of Jirel's gender is an iconic scene and remains impactful even thirty-five years later. I can only imagine how female readers in 1934 reacted to this revelation, even if the surprise was spoiled both by Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage and interior artist H.R. Hammond.
H.R. Hammond's interior art for "Black God's Kiss" sadly spoils the revelation of Jirel's gender.
For her troubles, Jirel is thrown into her own dungeon, but she quickly escapes, plotting revenge against the overbearing Guillaume. She has no illusions about what Guillaume will do to her, namely rape her and then either kill her or sell her into slavery. So she goes to see Father Gervase, the resident priest of Castle Joiry, to ask for his help and forgiveness. For in order to avenge herself on Guillaume, Jirel is willing to descend into hell itself. And luckily, there happens to be a passage to the underworld deep beneath the foundations of Castle Joiry. It's interesting how much this scene mirrors the scene in "Worms of the Earth" where Bran Mak Morn plots revenge against Titus Sulla. Both Bran and Jirel are willing to do whatever it takes, even if it means selling their soul (and in Bran's case, his body) and enlisting demonic aid. And in both cases, their spiritual advisors, respectively Gonar or Gervase, strongly advice against this course of action, noting that some weapons are too terrible to use.
Like Bran, however, Jirel is determined and so she descends into the underworld beneath the castle. The bulk of the story is given over to Jirel's journey through the underworld and the fantastic things she encounters there. It is notable that even though Jirel wears a crucifix which she has to discard in order to enter the underworld and has a theological argument with a Catholic priest earlier in the story, the dreamlike land underneath Castle Joiry does not resemble the traditional Christian depictions of hell in the slightest—it is much stranger.
Jirel finally finds the titular black god in a temple in the middle of a lake of fallen stars and begs him to give her a weapon against Guillaume. The black gods grants her this wish, but just like Bran Mak Morn in "Worms of the Earth", Jirel realises that the revenge she gets isn't what she wanted after all.
This is an amazing story that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best the sword and sorcery genre has to offer. Five stars.
Only two months later, in the December 1934 issue, Weird Tales published the sequel to "Black God's Kiss" entitled "Black God's Shadow". Jirel is still haunted by the events of the previous story. She's having trouble sleeping, the memories of Guillaume forcing a kiss on her keep resurfacing and by night, Jirel hears Guillaume's voice, begging her to save his soul from hell.
Jirel's feelings towards Guillaume are very conflicted. On the one hand, he was an overbearing pig who assaulted her, but on the other hand Jirel was also attracted to him. So she decides to descend into the underworld once more to save Guillaume's soul. But in doing so, Jirel will not only have to fight the black god, but also her own conflicted emotions and come to terms with what happened to her.
This story is more quiet and philosophical than its predecessor and the battles Jirel fights are purely in her mind. From a psychological standpoint, this story is fascinating, because Jirel's feelings and reactions mirror those of women who have been sexually assaulted or raped, suggesting that Guillaume did more than merely steal a kiss.
An unusual but excellent story. Five stars.
Not Jirel and Jarisme, but Margaret Brundage's cover art for "Avenger from Atlantis" by Edmond Hamilton.
"Jirel Meets Magic" first appeared in the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. The title is rather weak, especially since Jirel already encountered more than her share of magic in her first two adventures.
The story opens with Jirel leading the charge against a castle, whence the evil wizard Giraud has fled. Once again, the hotblooded Jirel is out for vengeance, because Giraud had ambushed and killed some of her men. However, as Jirel and her men comb the castle, Giraud is nowhere to be found. Bloody footprints lead to a window, which doubles as a portal into a fantastic world. Undeterred, Jirel climbs through the window in pursuit of Giraud and quickly finds herself tangling not just with the wizard, but also with his patroness, the sorceress Jarisme.
This story establishes what will become a pattern with the Jirel of Joiry stories, namely that Jirel keeps venturing into fantastic dream landscapes. "Jirel Meets Magic" is not quite as dark as the Black God duology, but still a great story. Five stars.
Not Jirel either, but a strikingly erotic cover for a Seabury Quinn story, courtesy of Margaret Brundage.
"The Dark Land" opens with Jirel lying in bed in her castle, mortally wounded in battle. Father Gervase is called in to give her the last rites, when Jirel abruptly vanishes. When she comes to, she finds herself in yet another fantastic dreamland called Romne. Its king Pav informs Jirel that he saved her from death, because he wants her to be his bride. Jirel has other ideas, especially once she learns what happens to Pav's discarded wives…
Jirel faces off against Pav in the interior art for "The Dark Land"
Published in the January 1936 issue of Weird Tales, this is a good story, but not quite as strong as the previous tales. Four stars.
"Hellsgarde" opens with Jirel on her warhorse outside the haunted castle of Hellsgarde. The castle, we learn, has been shunned and abandoned for two hundred years, ever since its previous lord stole a mysterious treasure and was tortured to death by those eager to take that treasure for themselves.
Jirel has come to Hellsgarde for just this treasure, though she doesn't want it for herself. No, a villainous nobleman named Guy of Garlot has taken several of Jirel's men hostage and demands the treasure of Hellsgarde as ransom.
Jirel faces the ghosts haunting the Castle of Hellsgarde
As the previous stories have shown, Jirel is perfectly willing to descend into hell itself and so she enters the haunted castle to face of the horrors awaiting her within. As for Guy of Garlot, he fares about as well as all overbearing men who try to force Jirel to do something against her will.
First published in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales, "Hellsgarde" is a very much a haunted house story, but what a haunted house story it is. Five stars.
Reading the Jirel of Joiry stories in the year of the lord 1969, it's hard to image that these stories are already more than thirty years old, because they feel so very modern, both with regard to Jirel's adventures in psychedelic dreamlands and her conflicts with overbearing men which many a modern feminist will sympathise with. Jirel is very much a heroine for the 1960s, a strong woman willing to brave even hell itself to get what she wants.
C.L. Moore only ever wrote six stories about Jirel of Joiry (one of which, a story featuring Jirel and Moore's interplanetary outlaw Northwest Smith, is not included in this collection) and sadly retired from writing altogether after the untimely death of her husband Henry Kuttner eleven years ago. However, the Jirel stories are so good that I hope that Moore will eventually return to writing and revisit this groundbreaking character.
If you are looking for the two-fisted adventures of Conan or the hijinks of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, this collection is very much not that. Jirel's adventures are internal conflicts given form in her journey through dreamlike and often nightmarish landscapes. Nonetheless, these stories are among the best the sword and sorcery genre has to offer. Five stars.
My local rag, The Escondido Times-Advocate, isn't much compared to, say, The Los Angeles Times. But every so often, they are worth the subscription fee (beyond the TV listings and the funnies). Take this article, for instance, which might well be at home in a Willy Ley column:
Basically, CalTech has a new timepiece with more precision, accurate to the hundredth of a second, so that when it is used in conjunction with a seismometer, earthquakes can be better mapped. More excitingly, the new clock weighs just eight pounds—less than a tenth that of the hundred-pound monster it replaces.
Transistors have made it to geology.
We hear all about small computers and more efficient satellites, but this story really drives home just how quickly the miniaturization revolution is diffusing to all walks of life. Is a computerized pocket slide rule or a Dick Tracy phone that far off?
Making waves
by Gray Morrow
A lot has happened this year at the old gray lady of science fiction, Galaxy. They changed editors. They lost their science columnist. And as we shall see from the latest issue, things are starting to change, ever so slightly.
Tomorrow Cum Laude, by Hayden Howard
by Jack Gaughan
The revolution does not begin with this piece, a direct sequel to "Kendy's World", which came out at the end of last year. If you'll recall, Kendy was a boy during the National Emergency, a time of civil and racial strife that rocked the nation into a semi-permanent police state. Kendy was recruited by a Mr. Smith, who gave him a scholarship at National University—which turned out to be a training camp for spies. "Tomorrow Cum Laude" details Kendy's first mission.
He is sent to the University of Southern California to take pictures of a biological centrifuge. Why he is sent on a domestic espionage mission when he has been trained in Russian is never explicitly stated. Moreover, the overarching mystery remains: why did the first cosmonaut to Mars chicken out after finding…something…on Phobos, and why are the Soviets building a secret base on the Moon? Did they find a monolith? Two?
All of this is background to Kendy's personal story, his slow, jerky maturation into adulthood. His growing feelings for his accidental roommate, the beautiful woman, Amani, from the southern Californian all Black city-state of Nairobi. His conflicted loyalties to the government of the United States.
Aside from an overuse of the word "amble" (hint: try sprinkling in a "saunter" or two), it's not a bad story, actually. It reads a bit like a juvenile except the subject matter is rather deep, and at one point, Kendy describes himself as, frankly, horny.
I'm enjoying this series more than his first one, about the Esks.
Three stars.
Truly Human, by Damon Knight
Here is where the change becomes noticeable. Knight, who predates but has embraced the New Wave, offers up this interesting piece about triune aliens, who can only think as trios. They abduct three humans to see if they can be adapted to their way of thought. The test is, unfortunately, not altogether scientific.
The beginning and end are the most interesting bits, creatively rendered. The middle part is wanly droll, though effectively conveyed.
Three stars.
The God of Cool, by J. W. Schutz
A smuggler is shot by fellow gang members on the steps of the hospital. As he had willed his body to the organ banks, he finds life after death in a myriad of don-ee bodies. There are three wrinkles:
The recipients of his organs end up being members of his gang;
The smuggler retains a degree of consciousness in his frozen state; and,
The smuggler retains a degree of control over his scattered parts…
The setup sounds a little silly, but I actually found it quite an effective story. It's not played for silly, as it might have been in F&SF, and it doesn't try to explain the psi in scientific terms, as might have happened if it had shown up in Analog. It sure wouldn't work in Niven's universe as detailed in "The Organleggers" and "Slowboat Cargo", though!
Cytheron is a young being on the cusp of adulthood. He fears maturity, afraid to lose his identity in the adult shared mind, so he flees to the edge of a quasar. There, he believes he is free from pursuit as no information can leave the gravitational warping of the dead star/collection of stars. But he is also trapped—and for him to be freed will require a minor supernova, one which might have an effect on a neighboring star system with a familiar number of planets.
It's a mildly cute story, but I am generally averse to Catastrophism in my science fiction. The universe seems to work by general rules; our Sun is not unique. In any event, the piece feels like a veneer of fiction on a science article Shaw happened to read recently, sort of how Niven's "Neutron Star" is based on an Asimov science fact article (I can't remember when it came out—probably '64 or '65).
Yet another tale of John Grimes, this one from early in his career when he was a Lieutenant in command of a tiny courier ship. It is, in fact, the direct sequel to "The Minus Effect", which came out just two months ago. Is a fix-up novel in the works?
In this tale, the exalted passenger isn't a chef-cum-assassin, but rather an amiable robot on a mission—to lead a mechanical movement that places humans on the bottom of the command chain for a change. Luckily for Grimes, not all computers think alike.
As always, pleasant but not particularly memorable. Three stars.
Ersalz's Rule, by George C. Willick
by Jack Gaughan
Two aliens have been playing a competitive sport for the last forty years. Their playing pieces are one human being each, born at the same time. The winner of the game is the one whose human survives longer.
At first, it seems one alien has all the advantages: his human can do no wrong, suffer no lasting malaise. He is, however, bored and reckless. The other alien's piece is a slob whom the breaks never favor. These circumstances lead to the rare invocation of Ersalz's Rule, which affords the possibility of the two pieces switching places. It's a Hail Mary gambit, but it's all the player's got at this point.
The problem with this tale, aside from its heavy handed clunkiness, is that everything is arbitrary. The rules of the game are introduced such that there are no real stakes, and the ending is just kind of stupid.
Two stars.
Take the B Train, by Ernest Taves
by Jack Gaughan
On a train trip through France with his distant wife, a fellow discovers that his garage opener doesn't just trigger his door—it also swaps out his spouse with parallel universe versions of herself. Investigating further, the man determines that the gizmo does a lot more than just that, and he ends up hip-deep in a temporal, spatial, and emotional trip from which he may never return.
This would have been a fantastic setup for a stellar novel, perhaps by Ted White. As it is, I still enjoyed the romantic and fulsome writing of the the piece. I also appreciated the protagonist's mixed feelings toward the various might-have-been marital partners. Taves never does explain how how our hero acquired the device, though there are hints.
Four stars, but a bit of a missed opportunity.
For Your Information (Galaxy Magazine, October 1969), by Willy Ley
At the beginning of the century, there were just 92 "natural" elements. Humanity has added 12 to the roster by dint of atom-smashing effort. Ley talks about them and provides tables describing their stability (or lack thereof).
Asimov would have done it better (though we might not have gotten tables in F&SF). Three stars.
Stella, by Dannie Plachta
A lonely man, perhaps one of the last, is sitting on the frozen surface of his world, watching as The Last Star rises. He is alone, as his estranged wife has sought shelter and warmth underground. Only a surgically implanted broadcast power receiver protects him from the elements.
Then Stella arrives on a dot of blue flame. She is invisible, but she describes herself as desirable, and her voice and touch certainly indicate that she is. When she begs the man for his receiver, he finds he cannot resist her entreaty, though it means his death.
It's all very unclear and metaphorical, and I suspect if I knew what Plachtas was trying to say, I might like it less than I did. Nevertheless, I found it moving. Maybe it's a Rorschach Test of a story and it hit me at the right time.
This was supposed to be the final installment of Dune Messiah, but the editor said he had just too much good stuff to fill the magazine. Hence Part 4 rather than Part Ultimate. Of course, having trudged through the prior three bits, I was not looking forward to yet another slog.
I was pleasantly surprised. Oh, it's still a series of conversations. Sure, not a whole lot happens. But we do have an interesting situation set up and then resolved: Hayt, the resurrected ghola of Duncan Idaho, is mesmerized by Bijaz the Tleilaxi dwarf and given a frightful compulsion. The tension of Part 4 is how this episode will play out, and Herbert manages it reasonably well.
Sure, there is way too much time spent on the now eyeless Paul and his frightening visions. Yes, I could give two figs about Chani, Paul's true love, destined to die for the last two installments. True, everything in the last 150 pages could probably be compressed to 50, and I'm still not sure if the payoff will be worth it.
That said, I was not disposed to skim, as had happened in each of the prior sections. For that, Frank Herbert, you get…
Three stars.
Aftershocks
Thus, nothing Earth-shattering. Nevertheless, there's a certain gestalt to this issue that feels a bit fresher than prior ones—even though almost half of the issue is devoted to continued serials! Maybe it's because those authors are finally turning in better work than they have in a while.
Perhaps we are finally witnessing a moment of change for this fading pillar of SFnal fiction. It would be pretty neat to see Galaxy transform itself into a leading magazine again.
Stay tuned!
Hopefully, the magazine will fare better than this Ocotillo Wells home that got damaged in last April's quake…
1967’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was an unforgettable experience for anyone who saw the film in the theatres. Sergio Leone’s towering Western adventure was one of the most thrilling experiences imaginable, with an astonishing level of craft in cinematography, score, acting, and, of course, the brilliant use of the wide screen.
Under Leone’s towering craftsmanship, Good Bad Ugly was an operatic exploration of betrayal, greed, and anger while also playing with the classic motifs of the tradition of the Western film, with its explorations of frontier justice, the impacts of the Civil War, and – perhaps most famously – with the idea of the lonely man without a name as a key protagonist.
Yes, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has been one of my all-time favorite films since I first saw it.
Sergio Leoone’s new film, Once Upon a Time in the West, is even better. This might just be my favorite film of the entire 1960s.
I was able to catch West on a quick second run at a local Seattle theatre after a limited release in 1968. And I’m happy to report that everything I loved about Good Bad Ugly is even better in West. The watch was an overwhelming experience for me, one which exists perfectly as both its own work of art and a smart postmodern take on the Western genre itself.
Let’s start with the acting here, because Ugly was the movie which really catapulted the old TV star Clint Eastwood into real stardom. West doesn’t feature Eastwood. But just as Ugly included luminary Western actors Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach in roles which emphasized their strongest qualities, West does so with some even more iconic actors.
Perhaps you know the work of some of the leads in this film. It stars leading men like Henry Fonda and Jason Robards in key roles. Charles Bronson, star of so many action films these days, is a brilliant antihero in this film. Three actors appear in the opening sequence who you probably know from classic Westerns: Jack Elam, Woody Strode and Al Mulock.
These actors all add a real heft and energy to the film and help to add to the themes Leone develops here.
But the most important character in the film isn’t one of the male characters. The most important character is a woman: Claudia Cardinale, playing Jill, is the character who truly evolves the most in the film and who drives the societal changes which are so much of what Leone and team are delivering.
Jill is a former New Orleans sex worker, now a wife and mother who moves to the small Arizona town of Sweetwater in the late 1800s. We first meet Jill as she steps off a crowded train (full of farm animals, Native Americans, and sundry other men and women in a characteristic Leone crowd shot). She looks around for her new family to meet her. But nobody is there for her. Jill steps into the station, and as she arranges her transportation, Leone’s camera majestically swoops over the top of the station house as Ennio Morricone’s score majestically swells and we get a widescreen view of a town in the middle of intensive construction, a frontier village in the middle of its boomtown days.
It’s an incredible moment, the equal of anything Leone has ever committed to screen – and yet, he almost tops that scene a moment later as Jill rides in a carriage through Monument Valley and right through a massive crowd scene of the railroad built through the sandy wilderness. Again the music swells, again Leone shows his intensive attention to detail, and again we get a moment which feels like a perfect realization of something we’ve only seen in old photographs.
As it turns out, Jill’s entire family has been massacred by a group of bad men (I won’t ruin any of the shock by telling you who led the massacre), so this single woman has to make her way alone in the west. And as she gathers allies and enemies, and intersects with all the petty, self-centered men who cross her paths, Jill almost single-handedly gives the sense of leading the civilizing of the West.
And it is in those themes that Once Upon a Time in the West becomes truly transcendent. As you can extrapolate from the title, this film is about more than mere fact and mere adventure. Oh sure, it has all that and more.
But what makes this film so special is that it is continuously in dialogue with the myth of the West. Sergio Leone is a huge fan of classic Westerns, and an attentive viewer will see visual and thematic references to classics such as Duel in the Sun, High Noon and Shane. All of that is intentional, but perhaps the most heartfelt references are to the films of John Ford.
Ford, of course, is the dean of Westerns, the director of classics such as The Searchers, My Darling Clementine and 1964’s fascinating revisionist Cheyenne Autumn. The French journals like Cahiers de Cinema venerate Ford as one of the great auteurs. Leone clearly agrees with that assessment; in fact, reports say that Leone demanded to film several segments of Once Upon a Time in Ford’s beloved Monument Valley.
Leone wants his film to resonate with both a physical and mythic vision of the West. Revenge is a great motivation for westerns so he gives us Bronson’s character, “Harmonica,” who has an especially vivid revenge story. He wants to give us true villains, as he does with the actor I won’t reveal. He wants to show shifting alliances, and small frontier towns, and brave heroes, and all the set pieces we want to see in a classic Western.
But Leone also wants to mourn the loss of that old West, the world of fights and revenge and pointless machismo. It’s no accident that one of the key characters of the film is Morton (played very well by Gabriele Ferzetti), a monumentally rich man whose body is crippled, who travels in a gilded rail car he can't really leave. Morton is ambitious but limited. He can barely see past the horizons of his own vision.
As it turns out, Jill’s late husband bought Sweetwater to build a train station on their property, and as the complex characters of this film ally with and fight against Morton in turn, the film becomes a fascinating exploration of myth, of the ability to grow and transcend, of how one person can stand up to authority and yet then become an authority herself.
Once Upon a Time in the West is ultimately about embracing the past and looking excitedly at the future, at how the myths of the past end and the hard realities of the future can begin. It’s about the hard work and the emotional and physical pain that go into civilizing a frontier, but Leone’s masterpiece is also about individual people who take on the feeling of myths. The final scene is so gorgeous and powerful, such a strikingly optimistic view of American progress, that I was brought to tears.
There is so much more to explore here, and I think one day someone can write a whole book about the themes and complexity of Leone’s tremendous film. I haven’t touched on the story arc of Cheyenne, the Robards character, nor on the majestic cinematography, or on the astonishing opening sequence.
But I think I’ve busted out the thesaurus enough to convince you to catch this film if you possibly can.
Having a teacher first as a mother, and now one for a wife, I think of the year as mirroring the school terms, with the new year beginning in September. But, looking at the newspapers, it doesn’t appear the world has changed much in the last twelve months.
On the home front, the troubles in Northern Ireland keep getting worse, with the presence of British troops now seeming to be resented by both sides. Meanwhile, The Conservative party base is pushing the party to take a harder anti-immigration line, and union chiefs clash with the Wilson government.
British Troops in Ulster, caught in the middle of escalating violence.
Peace talks over Vietnam are once again being held in Paris and apparently going nowhere, there are continued conflicts in the middle East and the Junta in Greece seems as unstable as ever. A harsh crackdown has just finished in Czechoslovakia and the Soviets are still making threatening noises at the rest of Eastern Europe.
Scenes from the streets of Prague, one year on from the Soviet Invasion.
But, whilst the depressing politics of our time continues, so does the regularity of publishing. As such another anthology arrived in the post for me to review.
We open with another tale from the ever-reliable Mrs. Damon Knight. Here Janet Matthews returns to her hometown of Somerset after working in medicine in New York, where she wishes to look after her disabled father. At the same time, a Dr. Staunton is in town to study dreams. Annoyed by his pomposity Janet decides to join in with the project.
This is beautifully described, albeit with some unusual turns of phrase, but it goes on far too long for my tastes, only really becoming more SFnal towards the end. There are also a lot of interesting concepts, but I am not convinced they are explored well enough here to justify their inclusion.
Three Stars
The Roads, the Roads, the Beautiful Road by Avram Davidson
Highway Chief Craig Burns loves his vast new road constructions and does not accept any argument to the contrary. However, one day he misses his turn-off and finds himself in a labyrinth of tunnels and cloverleaf interchanges.
This is the kind of joke story Davidson used to regularly publish when editing F&SF, a feature I have not missed. Add on to this my general dislike of vehicular tales and I was not well disposed to this at all.
Hector, A Jewish father is estranged from his daughter, Lorinda, because of her marrying a form of Martian plant-life named Mor. Months later, the parents receive a letter from her, saying she is pregnant and asking them to come visit her on Mars.
I believe this is the first story from a well-known fan (and wife of Terry Carr) and it marks a strong start. It follows the familiar routes you have likely seen on television programmes but they are not as common in the SF realm. In addition, this is told using a great tone of voice that makes it feel believable.
King Argaven XVII of Karhide is having a recurring visions of executing a crowd of protesters. This madness is attempted to be treated by physician Hoge, but what could be the real cause?
I was originally unsure if this planet is indeed meant to be Gethen from The Left Hand of Darkness, as it is only referred to as “Winter” and the gender changes in the book are not referenced here. However, its connections to the Ekumen seem to confirm that it does indeed take place on the same world.
I found this a confusing read. I started again four times and afterwards I was constantly jumping back and forth to try to get to grips with what was happening. It does not have the usual easy style of Le Guin, instead told through a series of “pictures”. Honestly, I am scratching my head over what to make of it.
Three Stars, I guess?
The Time Machine by Langdon Jones
Jones seems to be emerging as one of the great polymaths of English SF. He has been involved in editing New Worlds for a number of years now, writes prose and poetry, has produced photographic cover art, is helping the Peake estate put together new editions of the Gormenghast trilogy and has an original anthology coming out in a couple of months. Amazingly he still had time to sell this tale to Orbit.
In an unnamed prisoner’s cell sits a photo of Caroline Howard. We hear the story of his past relationship with her and the construction of a time machine to see her again.
This tale is told in a passive distanced voice with the connection of the four different situations not immediately obvious. As such, I imagine it will be alienating to some, but I found it quite beautiful and cleverly constructed.
The titular Time Machine is not a HG Wells type of mechanical construct but a strange device containing a Dali painting and creating a “concrete déjà vu”. This may actually mean that it does not really “work” as such but these are merely the memories and delusions of the prisoner. I believe the ambiguity is intentional on the part of the author and makes the tale all the stronger.
Some may find the conclusion and meaning of the tale a bit mawkish, but I liked it a lot.
John Miller goes to analyst Robert Rousse to resolve an obsession he has had for the last 25 years, to reach the mythical Northern Shore. In order to cure this desire, they sail there in dreams.
Whilst I am a fan of what Mr. Jones does, the same cannot be said of Mr. Lafferty. As such this may work better for other people, but I found it all a little silly.
Two Stars
Paul's Treehouse by Gene Wolfe
Sheila and Morris’ son has been in a treehouse since Thursday and is refusing to come down. As they work with their neighbour to try to get him out, disorder is spreading throughout the town.
This is probably the Gene Wolfe story that has impressed me most so far. Not that it is brilliant, but it is well told and has a solid theme. Hopefully the start of an upswing in his writing.
A high three stars
The Price by C. Davis Belcher
The millionaire John Phillpott Tanker is in a traffic accident that caves in his skull. Whilst his body is still alive, he is braindead. After several tests the doctors conclude he is medically dead and use his organs to save a number of people. Whilst this is controversial, journalist Sturbridge writes a number of articles to win the public around. However, in a surprising turn of events, the recipients of the organ donations sue the Tanker’s estate claiming they are still the living John Phillpott Tanker.
These organ transplant stories are becoming a subgenre in their own right, and, unfortunately, this is among the poorer examples. Lem told a better version of this story in three pages last month than Belcher told in 27.
A low two stars
The Rose Bowl-Pluto Hypothesis by Philip Latham
At a track-meet at the Rose Bowl, three athletes all ran 100 yards in less than 9 seconds. If this wasn’t surprising enough, a whole set of other new running records were set that afternoon. What could be happening?
This spends a lot of time doing pseudo-scientific explanations for something incredibly silly. I was annoyed at having read it.
One star
Winston by Kit Reed
The Wazikis buy the four-year-old child of geniuses as a status symbol. Whilst he has an IQ of 160 they soon grow frustrated he is not yet able to win crossword competitions or answer any trivia question they pose.
This story irritated me for a number of reasons. First off, there is more than a whiff of eugenics about the concept here, with the child of a college professor being inherently smarter than this family with a name we seem to be encouraged to read as Eastern European or North African. At the very least, the way the Wazikis are portrayed feels classist.
Secondly, the fact that smart people are selling children to less intelligent people seems to imply that earning potential and IQ are inversely related. But the Wazikis see Winston as an investment, so are they just meant to be stupid and bad with money?
And then the story is just unpleasant with the amount of child abuse taking place in it. Maybe I am overly sensitive, as I am from the gentler school of parenting, but I found it to be gratuitous instead of aiding the storytelling.
One Star
The History Makers by James Sallis
John writes to his brother Jim about his arrival on Ephemera, a planet where the inhabitants live on a separate time-plane to humanity.
Sallis gives us another epistolary tale which, as usual, is written in a literary style and full of artistic allusions (including, strangely, the second mention of the same Dali painting in this anthology. I blame Ballard). I am not sure this has the same depth as his other works but it is still a wonderfully atmospheric read.
The US military has a problem. Their war against a guerrilla insurgency in Asia is not going well and they want to use tactical nuclear weapons to sort it out. However, the public are squeamish about this sort of thing. The solution? Using a violence obsessed rock group The Four Horseman, to spread their message.
A biting critique of both the American military-industrial complex and the hippy groups selling out. Incredibly timely, clever and disturbing.
A high four stars, bordering on five. (I recently discussed this with some friends over at Young People Read SF if you want to see more of our thoughts.)
The Cycle Continues
Some of the same artists, still in UK charts a year on
And so we complete another Orbit anthology, with it feeling pretty similar to the last one.
The main difference is that there is more New Wave influence creeping in (having stories by two of the editors of New Worlds will do that) but many prior authors reappear, doing similar things. Some of it brilliant, some mediocre, the rest best forgotten.
Will either Orbit or our politics break out of this cycle by autumn 1970? Only time will tell.
And it was glorious. Thanks, Ozark SF Assn., particularly co-chairs Ray and Joyce Fisher, for your bid and your hard work. Apparently, the bid traced its beginnings all the way back to the Room 770 con party at Nolacon I (New Orleans 1951), the last of the small Worldcons—under 200 attendees.
What a contrast, St. Louis! This was the biggest, longest Worldcon ever held, with a reported attendance of 1534. Partying began Tuesday evening in the con committee suite, registration for the con began Thursday, programming ran to Monday, and the parties were still going the following Tuesday night. "Night", of course, is an arbitrary designation: Joe Haldeman was tending bar for the WSFA through 7:30AM on Friday.
Because the con was longer than ever, the price went up accordingly: $4 to show up, $3 to vote.
Aside from the slow elevators, one couldn't fault the facilities. The Chase Park-Plaza, billed as "the biggest and best con hotel west of the Mississippi", charged prices to match: $13 single, $18 double, suites starting at $35. That's if you could get in—the hotel oversold 20% on their reservations but only got 5% cancelations. Hundreds were turned away.
As you can see from the program, there were lots of interesting panels in addition to the permanent fixtures: the dealer room, the art show (10th annual International Science-Fantasy Art Exhibition) run by Bjo Trimble with Bruce Pelz, and (in a new addition) all night movies. Vern and Rita Coriell hosted the "Dum-Dum" of the Burroughs Bibliophiles. Janie Lamb supervised the N3F Hospitality Room.
Jack Gaughan was the first artist since Frank Paul in '56 to be the convention Guest of Honor. Harlan Ellison was the toastmaster, a job he's quite good at. A little longwinded, but always funny. On Friday, he auctioned off Bob Silverberg for $66 before Silverbob, in turn, auctioned Harlan off for $115 to a bunch of young ladies wearing Roddenberry sweatshirts.
Ellison took that opportunity to plump for "Clarion", a school for S-F authors, and since he had driven the bids up so much, he asked if the auction proceeds might be split, half to the con, half to Clarion. Ray Fisher said sure.
Later, Ellison said he was planning on leaving cons and the fan scene to focus on writing.
The Costume Ball on Saturday night was momentous for several reasons. First, a sample of the contestants:
Grand Prize and Judge's Choice went to Karen Anderson and her daughter, Astrid. The former turned the latter into a vampire, complete with gory, dripping blood. It was possibly the best performance at the Masquerade ever.
Most humorous went to Rick Norwood, who went as Charlie Brown (of Peanuts fame, not the famous fan). And thereby hangs a tail. A kite tail.
See, Rick was stumbling around a lot as part of his shtick. Near the end of the event, while folks were waiting for the results, he fell off the runway and plunged into the movie screen the con was renting from the hotel for $40 a day.
Rick Norwood as Good Ole Charlie Brown, just before he fell through the movie screen. Good grief, indeed. From Fanac
Harlan jumped into the fray, asking how much it would cost to replace the screen. $250 was the answer. So he walked the floor, soliciting donations so the convention wouldn't have to cop the bill. He collected $600! Then and there, he suggested that the excess go to Clarion. Ray countered with the proposal that the money buy a beer bust on Monday. The latter went over well.
Sunday night was the Awards Banquet, with a paid attendance of 660 (would have been more except that tickets were only sold until Saturday noon.) Dinner was great, as was the service, and Harlan did a bit of pre-show gab to get everyone in the mood.
Out of nowhere, Ellison announced (not proposed, not suggested) that the excess funds collected earlier were going to Clarion. The audience was not keen on this, especially since rumor had the screen repair going for $36 and the collection take $800. Harlan went on, belatedly, to justify the move, saying that the State of Pennsylvania was about to withdraw financial support for the workshop.
Elliot Shorter, a huckster from New York, drew himself up to his full eight feet (well, that's how he looked compared to Harlan) and said "Now, wait just one goll-darned minute, Harlan." He and Bruce Pelz led the protest. Ray Fisher tried to bail Harlan out, but Ellison's pride was wounded, and he called the crowd "stingy bastards." Ray tabled discussion until the business meeting the next day (it was decided that the extra money would establish a Worldcon Emergency Fund—just for things like emergency screen repair.)
At the banquet Lester Del Rey eulogized Willy Ley, who passed away in June. L. Sprague de Camp then read the text of a special plaque given by First Fandom to Willy's wife, Olga, in place of the First Fandom Award which Willy was slated to get this year.
Jack Gaughan spoke about his work in the art field, and Englishman Eddie Jones, winner of the Trans Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF) this year, also gave a speech.
Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin [Ace] Nova by Samuel R. Delany [Doubleday] Past Master by R. A. Lafferty [Ace] The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak [Galaxy Apr, Jun 1968; Putnam]
Not too much dissent here given the amount of overlap with our Stars picks. Indeed, we both picked the Brunner for the top spot (though, truth be told, I personally didn't get past page 100—I like my books short. Maybe I'm just old.) The Panshin is great, and the Delany is worthy, though some murmur under their breaths that it is more impressive than good. I can't comment on the Lafferty, as we didn't cover it. The Simak didn't get a Star or even an honorable mention, but it's a fine book. Indeed, it's possibly my favorite Simak novel.
Best Novella
“Nightwings” by Robert Silverberg [Galaxy Sep 1968]
Novellas are rare in SF and good ones even rarer, so it's not surprising that we at the Journey and those at the Worldcon liked much the same stuff. What's strange, however, is that the nominators chose two novellas that were later expanded to full serials—to wit, the Silverberg and the McCaffrey. "Sparrows" was on our Honorable Mention list.
Three hits and a miss—the Anthony is good…for Anthony, and the Wilson was roundly panned when Kris reviewed it. It's really a shame that so few slots are devoted to this length at the Hugos because there are so many stories to choose from.
Harlan and Larry made the Dean's list again, but not for the stories we'd have chosen. It's neat to see that fans are choosing tales from beyond The Big Five, although the Knight is weak. As for the Curtis, I have no idea how that one made the cut, especially given just how many great stories came out last year.
Best Dramatic Presentation
Winner: 2001: A Space Odyssey [Paramount] Directed by Stanley Kubrick; Screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick; based on the story “The Sentinel” by Arthur C. Clarke
Nominees
Yellow Submarine [Apple/Hearst/King Features] Directed by George Dunning; Written by Al Brodax, Roger McGough, Jack Mendelsohn, Lee Minoff and Erich Segal
Charly [ABC Pictures/Selmer] Directed by Ralph Nelson; Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant; based on the short story and novel Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Rosemary’s Baby [Paramount] Directed by Roman Polanski; Screenplay by Roman Polanski; based on the novel by Ira Levin
The Prisoner – “Fallout” [Everyman/ITC] Written and directed by Patrick McGoohan
For the first time Star Trek didn't make the ballot—not even with a single episode! That's a shame as there was plenty of good Trek last year, particularly "Is There in Truth No Beauty." 2001 was no surprise, but Rosemary's Baby is horror, and Charly was underwhelming. Interestingly, we picked an episode of The Prisoner ("The Schizoid Man") but not the last one, which was rather incomprehensible.
This year is just a reshuffling of last year's picks. I suppose they were somewhat starved for choice, as usual. One wonders if they might open up the selection to anthology series like Orbit.
I'm not sure why Jack keeps winning. Perhaps it's because he hobnobs with the fans more than the rest. Bodé is the newcomer, and his whimiscal style is charming. You mostly saw him around the Pohl mags. Freas, of course, does almost every Analog cover (which makes it surprising he didn't win). The Dillons do a lot of Ace covers, so they get a lot of eyeballs on their work. It's interesting because they have to fit their work in these small boxes due to the domino layout of the covers.
It's interesting that Trumpet got nominated on the strength of just one issue—but it is a highly professional fanzine. I expect they'll get nommed again this year (Niven has a great piece in the latest one).
Riverside Quarterly, like Science Fiction Review (né Psychotic) is an excellent literary criticism mag, and its pages are largely filled by pros. Warhoon, a similar, if less attractive 'zine, I avoid because they publish Walter Breen. Shangri L’Affaires is the house organ for the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society.
The hermit of Hagerstown has jumped from nominee to winner, and no surprise. His perzine Horizon has been a staple of FAPA (Fantasy Amateur Press Association, natch) since the '40s.
I see Richard Delap all over the place, mostly reviewing books. Banks Mebane runs the Washington (D.C.) Science Fiction Association. Walter A. Willis is a well-known Irish fan.
George Barr
William Rotsler
Tim Kirk
Doug Lovenstein
Vaughn's stuff was at Worldcon's art show this year. Like Gaughan, he has feet firmly in both the pro and fan worlds. He also did a cute comic that came out at the convention. Barr does cover art and also the comic "Broken Sword", which appears in the fanzine, Trumpet. Bill Rotsler, "The Amiable Bulldozer", has been everywhere and seen everything. He's also been doing covers since the '40s. Tim Kirk specializes in fantasy, particularly Lord of the Rings. I don't know Doug Lovenstein.
There was a pair of informal awards presented as well:
BIG HEART AWARD:
Presented to Harry Warner Jr. by Forry Ackerman (accepted by Bob Bloch)
and
The FIRST FANDOM AWARD:
presented to Murray Leinster by last year's winner, Jack Williamson (accepted by Judy Lynn Benjamin)
This year, Worldcon moved to a two-years-in-advance bidding tradition, which was actually convenient since next year, the event will be in Heidelberg, West Germany, which could have made the bid for 1971 difficult. As it turns out, '71's con (Noreastcon) will take place in Boston.
And that's that! I think we all deserve a rest after all of that drama. Time to crack into all of those great science fiction books that have been recommended by our pals at the World Science Fiction Society!
![[September 24, 1969] Murder, Madness, and Middle Age (<i>What Ever Happened To Aunt Alice?</i> And Its Predecessors)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690924aliceposter.jpg?resize=600%2C372)
![[September 22, 1969] Unsmoothed curves (October 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690922fsfcover.jpg?resize=658%2C372)
![[September 20, 1969] Cinemascope: Stitched from the past; schemed from the future (<i>Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed</i> and <i>The Italian Job</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690920posters.jpg?resize=521%2C372)
Freddie Jones as The Creature cuts a pathetic figure
Criminals from all walks of British life, in a planning meeting
The Minis! They're amazing! They go everywhere!
![[September 18, 1969] Neo-Rococo Dreaming](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/1_JimLee-OssieClark-Aeroplane1969_crop-800x450.jpeg-1.webp?resize=672%2C372)
![[September 16, 1969] September 1969 Galactoscope](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690916covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[September 14, 1969] More Gems from the Pulps: <i>Bran Mak Morn</i> by Robert E. Howard and <i>Jirel of Joiry</i> by C.L. Moore](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690914coracovers.jpg?resize=601%2C372)
![[September 12, 1969] Earthshaking (October 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/690912galaxycover.jpg?resize=397%2C372)
![[September 10, 1969] Once Upon a Time in the West: Best Film of the 1960s?](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/west-title.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[September 8, 1969] Another Orbit around the sun (<i>Orbit 5</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/O5-3.png?resize=312%2C372)
![[September 6, 1969] A hot time in the old town (Worldcon in St. Louis!)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/690904book.jpg?resize=603%2C372)
