Billions of years ago, the entire universe was smaller than the head of a pin. For an endless eternity, or perhaps just an instant, it remained in this state – and then it exploded outward with the force of creation, ultimately becoming all that we see today.
Until this year, this "Big Bang" theory was as yet unconfirmed. It had stiff competition in the "Steady State" hypothesis, which postulated that the universe is indeed expanding, but because of matter being constantly created. This was fundamental to the plot of Pohl and Williamson's recent novels set in the reefs of space at the edges of our solar system.
But last year, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey noticed an excess of radio noise in the receiver they were building, an excess that closely resembled the Cosmic Microwave Background predicted by physicists Ralph Alpherin, Robert Herman, and George Gamow. This extremely low level but pervasive energy is what's left of the heat of the primeval explosion, reduced to microwaves by the expansion of the universe.
The Murray Hill facility where the echoes of the Big Bang were discovered
Smaller Ones
Here on Earth, it seems our planet is anxious to imitate the violence of the universe at large. On September 28, the Taan Volcano off the coast of the Philippine island of Luzon exploded, killing hundreds of Filipinos.
And less of a bang and more of a blaaat, we've just finished ringing in the Jewish new year with the traditional blowing of a ram's horn.
The Littlest One
Meanwhile, editor John W. Campbell, Jr. seems content to not rock the boat, providing a mixed bag of diverting fare and stale garbage in the latest issue of Analog, a combination that is unlikely to knock anyone off their feet.
by John Schoenherr
Overproof, by Johnathan Blake MacKenzie
On a planet two hundred light years from home, a husband and wife pair of anthropologists come across a horrifying discovery. The native Darotha, an amphibian race resembling across between a cat and an octopus, are eating humans. At least, it seems that way – the Yahoos, apelike herd animals on their planet, bear a striking resemblance to homo sapiens. Are the Darothans really mass murderers? Or are looks deceiving?
by John Schoenherr
This is an interesting piece that Randall Garrett (under a pseudonym) has offered up. Unusually for an Analog story, the Darothans are a well-drawn alien race and not played for inferiority – indeed, they are treated with sensitivity not only by the author but by the Terran colonists on the planet, who see them as exciting as potential partners and as an example of non-human society. In the end, the story is essentially an inverse of Piper's Fuzzy stories, where the question is not whether the humanoid Yahoos possess the spark of humanity, but whether they don't.
It's not a perfect story. The conclusion is pretty obvious from the beginning, it meanders and repeats a bit, but it's more subtle than what I usually see in Analog, and it kept me interested.
Three stars.
The Veteran, by Robert Conquest
Humans from the future, who have forgotten the art of war, summon someone from the past to lead them in a war against alien nasties. Unfortunately for them, the person they've found is a devout pacifist. But luckily, the fellow discovers the battle lust within that he needs to fulfill his role.
Rather offensive, simplistic, and for some reason, the aliens conquer our solar system in reverse order of distance from the Sun even though it's unlikely that they'd all be lined up so obligingly.
Two stars.
Snakebite!, by Alexander W. Hulett, M.D. and William Hulett
For some reason, Campbell saw fit to include this high school science project discussing the use of snake venom to produce antivenom blood serum in rodents. As an actual article, it might have been mildly interesting, but in its current form, it's pretty pointless.
Two stars.
The Mischief Maker, by Richard Olin
by John Schoenherr
A story told in epistolary, Maker describes how a crackpot professor with a grudge stumbles across the great power of the Law of Analogy, which he uses to destroy the leaders of America through various bits of voodoo and witchcraft. Truth be told, my eyes glazed over when the author mentioned the Hieronymous Machine, that psychic amplifier requiring no power source that editor Campbell is so enamored of.
Last but not least, we have the continuation of Reynolds' serial that began last month. When last we'd seen the assassin impersonating Rog Bock, shareholder in the colonial venture on New Arizona, his masquerade had been discovered by at least one other shareholder.
Part 2 begins with the colony ship Titov landing on its virgin planet destination, so closely resembling Earth as to be a near twin. The rapaciousness of the shareholders' goal becomes clear as the 2000 colonists find they have virtually no rights, that the shareholders plan to sell the valuable resource rights to outside entities almost immediately, and that the crew of the ship largely comprise ex-military personnel to make them a ready police force to keep the settlers in line.
Unrest threatens to boil over as the colony teeters on the brink of collapse, reeling from colonist indolence and sabotage by unknown persons – but by the end of this installment, they all have bigger concerns to worry about…
Again, Pioneer has only the barest trappings of science fiction. Nevertheless, this is one of Reynolds' more deft tales, and I'm enjoying it a lot.
It did manage to beat out the disappointing Amazing (2.6), IF (2.3), and the truly awful Gamma (1.5), however.
There were just two and a half pieces written by women (one was co-written) out of 58: 4.3%. Surprisingly, the women-penned tales were all in the UK mags, which are usually all stag. No women authors were included in either of the "All Star" Galaxy and F&SF issues this month, which is a real shame. Where are Evelyn Smith and Margaret St. Clair?
Perhaps they are planning to return with a bang. I certainly expect to herald their next stories with fireworks!
Science fiction, as a cutting edge genre, often skirts the line of decorum, occasionally earning calls for banning of particularly sensitive works. Thus, it is appropriate that this month, I have three stories from West Germany for you that are connected to the freedom of the arts, enshrined in our constitution, and how it is sometimes challenged.
But first, some political news:
No Experiments
Even for his first re-election campaign as chancellor, Ludwig Ehrhard's face is not on the campaign poster, but that of his predecessor Konrad Adenauer endorsing Ehrhard.
The headline news this month was the West German federal election, the fifth since the founding of Federal Republic of Germany and the first where the candidate of the Christian conservative party CDU/CSU is someone other than Konrad Adenauer, namely his successor as chancellor Ludwig Ehrhard.
But except for the name of the chancellor, very little has changed. The CDU/CSU once again won the majority of the vote and will be able to continue the coalition government with the liberal party FDP. The opposition, the Socialdemocratic party SPD gained some votes, but not enough for SPD chancellor candidate Willy Brandt to replace Ludwig Ehrhard.
I have to admit that I never liked Konrad Adenauer. However, he and Ludwig Ehrhard have done a lot to rebuild West Germany after World War II and turn it into the industrial powerhouse it is today. Nonetheless, I feel that after sixteen years of a CDU/CSU/FDP government, it is time for a change.
Rolling Stones, Riots and Rebellion
The Rolling Stones arrive at Hamburg airport.
At least in the realm of pop music, change is in the air. The West German music charts are still dominated by the so-called Schlager genre of sappy pop songs sang in German. But while Schlager is still king with the over forty demographic, the young are increasingly turning to beat music.
The Rolling Stones recently finished their first tour of West Germany to the delight of their young fans and the disdain of conservative critics, who called the band "cavemen" and their music "primitive and unimaginative".
Young fans cheer on the Rolling Stones in Hamburg
The Rolling Stones concert in Hamburg erupted into violence, when more than two thousand young people, who hadn't been able get tickets for concert, decided to take out their frustrations on streetlamps, benches, planters, cars and election posters outside the concert hall. The police responded in kind and by the end of the day, forty-seven young people had been arrested and thirty-one people injured.
The Hamburg police clashes with rioting Rolling Stones fans.
But that was nothing against what happened the following day in West Berlin, where the Rolling Stones performed at the Waldbühne. Once again, the concert was sold out and once again, young fans who had not been able to get tickets showed up outside the venue. But since the Waldbühne is an open air arena, the youngsters were able to break through the police cordon and get in.
Things were initially quiet, but once the Rolling Stones came on stage, the young fans stormed the stage. The police managed to clear the stage, but once the Stones performed their latest hit "Satisfaction", there was no holding back and the fans stormed the stage once again. The band, fearful for their safety, broke off the concert and that's when the trouble truly started.
The Rolling Stones on stage at the Waldbühne in West Berlin.
The young fans demanded that the Rolling Stones come back and finish the concert. When the band didn't come back, they started demolishing the seats in the arena. The West Berlin police responded with excessive violence (eye witnesses report that the situation only escalated, when police officers started attacking a group of forty to fifty teenaged girls huddling near the stage) and the result was a riot which lasted several hours, caused eighty-seven injuries and left the Waldbühne in ruins. But the riot did not stop there. Because on their way home, many of the young West German fans decided to take out their frustrations on the trains of the S-Bahn light rail network, which is operated by the hated East Berlin transport authority. In the end, seventeen S-Bahn trains had been damaged, four of them so badly that they had to be taken out of commission.
Aftermath of a concert: The venerable thirty-year-old Waldbühne in Berlin is left in ruins.
East and West Berliners never agree on anything, but the newspapers in both parts of the divided city agreed that the Waldbühne riot was a disaster that must never happen again. The West German tabloid Bild compared the Rolling Stones concert cum riot to a witches' sabbath. Meanwhile, Neues Deutschland, the official newspaper of the Socialist Party of East Germany, not only reprinted the Bild article (which is unusual in itself, since Bild is explicitly anti-Communist), but also added some hyperbole of its own, comparing the rioting young fans to the Hitler Youth (even though the Nazis famously hated the very jazz and blues music which inspired the Rolling Stones) and claiming that the true aim of the Rollings Stones' music was to prepare the West German youth for World War III. Why a British beat band would even want to prepare young Germans for war is a question that not even the Neues Deutschland can answer.
Beats in Bremen
But even those West German beat music fans who did not make it to one of the Rolling Stones concerts got a chance to listen to their favourite music. For last Saturday, a brand-new music show named Beat-Club premiered on West German TV. I was watching with particular interest, not just because I like beat music, but also because the show was produced and filmed right here in my hometown Bremen.
Apparently, the idea of a TV show playing solely beat music is so shocking that announcer Wilhelm Wieben, at age thirty himself a member of the younger generation, explicitly apologised to older viewers who might not like beat music. Oddly enough, no TV announcer has ever felt the need to apologise for any other genre of music.
The smirk shows that TV announcer Wilhelm Wieben is very much looking forward to Beat-Club, even as he warns the older generation of viewers about the show.
Compared to the dire warnings that preceded it, the actual program was a lot of fun, but fairly harmless. The format is loosely based on the US show American Bandstand and the British show Ready, Steady, Go! Various bands play live music, while the young studio audience dances. The presenters are Gerd Augustin, discjockey at the Bremen dance hall Twen Club, where he also recruited the live studio audience, and Uschi Nerke, an attractive twenty-one-year-old architecture student with musical ambitions.
Uschi Nerke, 21-year-old architecture student turned TV presenter in Beat-Club
The Rolling Stones may have toured Germany barely a week before the premiere of Beat-Club, but producer Mike Leckebusch wasn't able to afford a band of that calibre yet. And so the opening number was "Halbstark" (a German slang term for young rowdies and rockers) by the Bremen beat band The Yankees, named for the Union Army Civil War era uniforms they wear on stage. Further acts included the British bands John O'Hara and His Playboys and The Liverbirds, an all-girl band from Liverpool who are already well known in North Germany for performing in Hamburg's Star Club, where the Beatles got their start not so long ago.
The girl band The Liverbirds also performed in Beat-Club
The first edition of Beat-Club may have been a little rough, but the program has a lot of potential. Were the apologies and dire warnings justified? In my opinion, no. But judge for yourself, cause thanks to the magic of Telstar I present you The Yankees performing "Halbstark" live at the Beat-Club.
Devil's Advocate
Finally, I want to report about a court case that concluded at the Hamburg district court last month. Why is this case important? Because what was on trial was nothing less than the freedom of the arts that is enshrined in the West German constitution.
Klaus Mann
Let's have some background: In 1936, Klaus Mann, son of Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann and older brother of occasional science fiction writer Elisabeth Mann Borgese, published a novel called Mephisto – Roman einer Karriere (Mephisto – Novel of a Career), while in exile in Amsterdam, because the Mann family were persecuted by the Nazis. Now the publisher Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung wanted to republish the novel in West Germany.
The 1936 first edition of "Mephisto – Novel of a Career" by Klaus MannThe 1946 Hungarian edition of Mephisto by Klaus Mann.
None of this would be remotely controversial, if not for the fact that Mephisto is a roman-à-clef about the German cultural and theatre world of the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, the protagonist Hendrik Höfgen is a thinly veiled portrait of actor and theatre director Gustaf Gründgens whose most famous role was Mephisto in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust. The novel chronicles Höfgen's rise from small time actor to director of the Prussian state theatre and favourite of Hermann Göring himself. Höfgen himself never believes in the Nazi ideology. Instead, he is portrayed as an opportunist who makes his own deal with the devil he is so adept at playing and uses every chance to gain advantages for himself (at one point even seducing Göring's lover and future wife), even as his former friends and colleagues are forced into exile.
Gustaf Gründgens in his most famous role as Mephisto in "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We do not know how Gustaf Gründgens felt about Mephisto, though we know that he knew the novel, because Klaus Mann made sure that Gründgens was sent a copy. Nor can we ask Gründgens, because he died two years ago of an overdose of sleeping pills. Klaus Mann cannot speak out on the case either, since he committed suicide in 1949.
However, Gründgens' adoptive son and heir (and, it is rumoured, lover) actor Peter Gorski was not at all happy about the plans to republish Mephisto in West Germany. And so he sued the publisher to have the publication stopped, because Mephisto supposedly libels the late Gustaf Gründgens and violates his human dignity.
Gustaf Gründgens and his adoptive son Peter Gorski as Faust and Mephisto in "Faust".
Now Mephisto is undoubtedly a roman-à-clef, even if Klaus Mann himself claimed otherwise in his afterword, and most of the characters are based on real people. However, it is also a fictionalised account and some events don't fit the historical record. The most notable of these is Höfgen's lover Juliette Martens. Because Juliette is a black woman, daughter of a German father and an African mother, this relationship is taboo in Nazi Germany. Juliette is one of the few characters in Mephisto who does not have an equivalent in the real world. Instead, the scandalous relationship between Höfgen and Juliette is a stand-in for the fact that Gustaf Gründgens was homosexual.
Is Mephisto a good novel? Well, I'm probably not the right audience for it, since I have to admit that the only member of the Mann family whose works I ever enjoyed is Elisabeth Mann Borgese. Furthermore, Mephisto requires a rather deeper knowledge of the German theatre and cultural world of the 1920s and 1930s than I have. And the portrayal of Höfgen's black lover Juliette is highly problematic, since Juliette is frequently described as savage and animal-like. It is obvious that Mann introduced Juliette to avoid the homophobic implications of portraying Höfgen as homosexual. But indulging in racism to avoid homophobia doesn't make it any less racist.
Was Mephisto intended as a jibe against Gustaf Gründgens? Certainly, especially since Mann and Gründgens not just knew each other, but were actually family, since Klaus Mann's sister Erika was briefly married to Gründgens in the 1920s. The Mann siblings and Gründgens also performed together in two plays written by Klaus Mann. It is also rumoured that the relationship between Klaus Mann and Gustaf Gründgens was a lot more intimate than just brothers-in-law, since both Gründgens and Klaus Mann were homosexual, whereas Erika Mann is lesbian. So the novel was likely the result of a family quarrel or lovers' spat.
Two couples: Gustaf Gründgens, Erika Mann, Pamela Wedekind and Klaus Mann on stage in the 1920s.
It is understandable that Peter Gorski is trying to protect the legacy of Gustaf Gründgens. However, Gründgens' legacy is not in question. He was able to continue his career unimpeded in postwar West Germany and is considered one of the greatest actors and directors of his generation. Furthermore, Gründgens did collaborate with the Nazi regime, so that part of Mann's novel is absolutely correct. And Mann explicitly did not mention Gründgens' homosexuality in the novel – not that it was a big secret, though homosexual relationships between men are sadly still considered a crime in West Germany.
The fact that the heir of a Nazi collaborator tries to block the publication of a novel by a victim of Nazi persecution should also leave a bad taste in everybody's mouth.
However, the question is not whether the novel defames Gustaf Gründgens, especially since Gründgens is too dead to care anyway. The question is whether the freedom of art, which is enshrined in the West German constitution, weighs higher than the right of a dead theatre director to keep his memory unsullied.
As a writer myself, I come down on the side of art in this case. Not to mention that one precedent could lead to further lawsuits. After all, people often claim to recognise themselves in novels. For example, the British-Hungarian architect Ernö Goldfinger believed that the villain in the eponymous James Bond novel was based on him (not without reason, for Ian Fleming was known to name villains after people he disliked) and also tried to block the publication, whereupon Ian Fleming offered to change the name of the character to Goldprick. As a result, Goldfinger abandoned his lawsuit and the novel was published (and filmed last year) as Goldfinger.
Such a solution is not possible in the Mephisto case, if only because both Mann and Gründgens are dead. But thankfully, the Hamburg district court agrees with me and rejected Peter Gorski's lawsuit. The case is not yet over, for Gorski has announced that he will file an appeal. However, freedom of art won for now and that is a very good thing.
Aerial view of the Hamburg district court, which rejected the lawsuit.
You may think that the Rolling Stones riots, the Beat-Club premiere and the Mephisto have little to do with each other. But they all demonstrate why freedom of the arts is so important. Because in all three cases, we had people complaining about and trying to ban art they don't like. And in all three cases, art won out in the end. It is a hopeful trend that our science fiction writers might do well to note in their predictions of the future.
After all the excitement about the Worldcon in London at the end of last month (I gather a good time was had by all!) we are back to normal this month.
The issue that arrived first in the post this month was Science Fantasy.
The cover by Agosta Morol hearkens back to mythology, as did the cover of the September-October 1964 issue. It’s clearly deliberate as the main story then, as now, was by Thomas Burnett Swann, who is by now developing quite a reputation for revisiting ancient myths and revising them for a modern-day readership.
After last month’s Guest Editorial by Brian Aldiss, this month the Editorial this month is by Kyril’s second-in-command. It rather makes me wonder what has happened to Mr. Bonfiglioni, although the top of the editorial states that he is away in Venice, stargazing – lucky thing!
Having said that, the Editorial is not that different to normal. Mr. James Parkhill-Rathbone begins in a roundabout way by talking of architecture and design before going on to make the point that because humans have a lack of logic then future trends are nearly impossible to predict accurately. I liked it – there’s an entertaining mix of anecdotal humour and serious point-age going on.
And so straight in with a bang. If you have been following my writings here, you may know that I really like Burnett-Swann’s re-imaginings of ancient myths and folklore. His story The Blue Monkeys was the first issue of Science Fantasy I reviewed here way back in September 1964, and since then his material has always entertained. So, having tackled Greek myths and Persian myths, this time he is telling a tale from Etruria. It is the story of two cultures – one human, the other mythological – and the difficult relationship the two groups have with each other. At the beginning there is a reluctant trade between the Etruscan people of the city of Sutrium and the many different species of the neighbouring Weirwood, where we have Centaurs, Sprites, Nymphs, Fauns and the like.
The main characters are Lars Velcha of Spina and his daughter Tanaquil. Whilst moving to Sutrium they stop at a lake, and Lars captures a young teenage Water Sprite called Vel to make him a slave for Tanaquil. When travelling troubadour Arnth visits Sutrium and is invited to stay at their house, he decides to free Vel and return him to his people of the lake. This involves Arnth going to the lake and negotiating with Vegoia, who is the sorceress of the Weir people. They return to Sutrium and end the story on a cliffhanger to be concluded in the second part next month.
Once again Burnett Swann entices with his expressive descriptions and context. His writing clearly shows an intelligent understanding of ancient myths. In this mystical land before the Romans he manages to eloquently and lyrically describe the different cultures. The Weir folk are appropriately unearthly, whilst the humans seem to reflect both the innocence and the avarice of human nature.
Although parts do read like a fairytale, it is definitely a story for adults. Whilst Thomas’s previous stories have always had an element of sexuality to them, The Weirwoods is perhaps the most explicit yet. There’s sex and a lot of nakedness and men in loincloths which may be too frank or even shocking to some readers – most of the men-slaves and the male creatures are naked, for example, and the author spends some time giving details of this. He doesn’t hold back too much on the youthful desire the virginal Tanaquil has for Vel and Arnth, either, or indeed the relationship of Arnth and the weir woman Vegoia. There’s also explicit scenes in the entertaining stories Vel tells his audience as part of his performances. Such aspects lend a certain degree of maturity to the story that, whilst not for everyone, add depth and detail.
It is a sign of confidence that the serial fills over 70 pages of the magazine’s 130 this month. As ever, literate and entertaining without being obtuse. 4 out of 5.
Ragtime, by Pamela Adams
A new name to me, and – good heavens! – a woman writer! (Actually, I think that both magazines have tried hard to include women writers in the last couple of years, although there is a noticeable dearth generally.) The story is really a ghost story told by a woman about the disappearance of her husband one night whilst staying on a river boat. There’s some “Be warned – I should tell you about the weird goings-on…” type of comments, but it is readable, if a tad predictable. 3 out of 5.
Green Goblins Yet, by W Price
Another new name. This month’s lightest tale is one of those jokey-style shaggy dog stories set in a diner, where a mysterious stranger immediately nicknamed ‘Egghead’ comes looking for a goblin after a newspaper story of sheep being savaged in the Kinder Scout area. After asking the locals in the diner for advice, Jigsy and Spike agree to help find it – which they do. A story in that category I normally think of that starts, “You’ll never believe it, but…” Entertaining enough. 3 out of 5.
The popular return of one of the old guard, E.C.’s story is about a man who begins to suspect that his wife, who he has been married to for more than fifteen years, is not who he thought she is. Is it the sign of a mental breakdown, or something more sinister? It is well told, but a lesser tale of paranoia and perception, one that slow-burns until the violent end. One for the Twilight Zone fans, I guess. (We still haven’t seen the television series here in Britain, by the way.) 3 out of 5.
The Foreigner, by Johnny Byrne
I said last month that Johnny has produced some very strange stories in the past, with varying degrees of success for me. This is another oddity, a story told by a man meeting his seemingly-eccentric new neighbour, who insists on trying to throw himself out of his window wrapped in a mattress plugged into the mains electricity. The reason for this is typical Byrne material, but I quite liked it. 3 out of 5.
Goodnight, Sweet Prince, by Philip Wordley
Philip last appeared in the May 1965 issue of Science Fantasy with Timmy and the Angel. This time his story (quoting Hamlet, literary fans!) is of a future where people can time-travel into the past. On this particular occasion film magnate Art Kirbitz and his crew have travelled to Shakespearean England to film an original version of Hamlet. Director Harry Gorrin goes in search of the original manuscript in Shakespeare’s own writing, but finds a letter being written by the Bard that puts a very different slant on the man. The twist in the tale at the end is nothing really new, but I quite liked this one, although the modern-day patois between the financier and his modern crew, full of “beefy cats” and “gonnas”, is a little too unsubtle for my liking. However, this is the best story I’ve read from Philip. 3 out of 5.
Summing up Science Fantasy
Any issue that has Thomas Burnett Swann makes me happy – entertaining storytelling giving us a glimpse into a different world. I’m pleased that this one doesn’t let me down and I’m already looking forward to next month’s continuation. The rest of the issue is a little more variable but, in the end, rather pedestrian. Not really a bad story there, but generally too bland for me. Overall then, a rather middling issue, dominated by the raunchy Burnett Swann.
After the Aldiss issue last month, we’re almost back to normal with this month’s arrival of New Worlds. This includes a dreadful uncredited cover.
This month’s editorial from Mike Moorcock is short and rather perfunctory. He points out that the stories this month are “closer to the imaginative fantasies of Kafka, Peake or Borges than, say, the work of Asimov or Heinlein” before then reviewing an issue of one of the semi-professional magazines and finally making the point that emotion is as important in sf as much as conceptual ideas. It feels like a mixed hodge-podge of ideas without too much thought.
Straight into the final part of Harry Harrison’s parodic serial, where hapless Bill finds himself in court for desertion. He is placed in prison to do hard labour for one year and then sent back to the battlefront on a reduced rank. The place Bill goes to reminded me of Harrison’s other recent novel, Deathworld, as it is a deadly planet, and the story seems much more serious at this point. He meets old friends and enemies there. The end of the story turns full circle.
I really want to like this story, and I know many that do, but despite trying I just can’t warm to it. This one seems to totally run out of steam. In addition, the creation of a character that is an “Arabic-Jewish-Irish con man” seems to be wanting to offend as many people as possible. Others however find it hilarious. 3 out of 5.
The Golden Barge, by William Barclay
The first of Moorcock’s vaunted allegorical stories. (William Barclay is actually Michael Moorcock in another of his guises.) Jephraim Tallow finds himself chasing a golden barge down a river. His boat runs aground on a sandbar. Floundering onto land, he meets Pandora, a strange woman with green eyes, who takes him home. She seduces him and he falls in love with her. However, this idyll is interrupted when a group of drunken revellers turn up. After some sort of orgy, Tallow realises that he must continue his journey on the river, but to do so means leaving Pandora. Pleading by Pandora to stay leads to a sad end.
I get that the story is really a tale of a man’s life-journey and how he must continue to travel through life, despite the distractions that come his way. At times, the story is quite lyrical, but otherwise it didn’t really do much for me. I suspect that some of the allegory is beyond me. 3 out of 5.
Heat of the Moment, by R. M. Bennett
Nuts-and-bolts salesman Chris Parker finds himself rescued out of a burning building to be abducted by Collectors of the Prime Government of the Second Planet of Rigel as a sample of the fauna of Sol Three. Despite the good intentions of the aliens, the situation doesn’t end well. A one-trick tale that seems fairly pointless. 3 out of 5.
Emancipation, by Daphne Castell
For the second time in two months we have that rare event of a story written by a woman. It is something that we should see more of in these magazines and Ms Castell takes her opportunity well. Emancipation initially reads like an old-style fantasy tale with seemingly primitive alien lizard-men keeping the seemingly less intelligent women of the tribe penned up and looked after as if they were animals.
With names like “Krug of Stok”, at first I thought that this was a parody of the Robert E Howard Conan stories, although we later discover that the Stokka are a seemingly primitive race living on the planet Stok. When Krug hears from Skag and Lopp, Lopp tells them of the technological gifts that space-faring Terrans from Sunward 3 bring to newly discovered planets. The Stokka men realise that in return for the setting-up of a space beacon and a Galactic Embassy they could gain technological power, wealth and status on their rather run-down planet. The aliens decide it would be a good idea to fete the humans, despite their cultural differences, and to show willingness re-educate some of the Stok women into the ways of the Terrans. This leads to cultural change previously unimagined by the men.
Another ‘comedy’ story, this time a comedy of manners and different cultures, based around the idea that how people see different cultures is funny. It’s really one of those old adventure stories where explorers act as missionaries to primitive tribes, but in a science fictional setting.
In the end, the story was better than I thought it was going to be – as comedy I enjoyed it more than Bill’s story, for example – but not a memorable one. 3 out of 5.
Jake in the Forest, by David Harvey
This story describes a series of lifecycles. Firstly, Jake travels through a forest, marvelling at the complex ways in which patterns and processes are present. Like in the Golden Barge, he meets a woman who feeds him and puts him to bed, after which he appears to be back in the forest in a different form. Approaching a megalith, he appears to be buried by it but instead takes another form, appears in a cavern by a lake and then the sea. Finally, he appears to be in bed in a forest cottage, gets up, washes, eats and drinks, and meets a beautiful woman. It appears that this cycle keeps him eternal.
Another allegorical story, quoting Ibsen but little more than a series of expressive set pieces. Poetic in its descriptions, but it did little for me. Seems to want to be Ballard. Despite Moorcock’s attempt in the Editorial to explain its purpose here in the issue – it is written “from a creative need to find fresh methods of telling a story and making a point” – it gives lots of description but the point is weak, not to mention unintelligible. Not for me. 2 out of 5.
The return of Bob Shaw after a long absence from this magazine is a good thing, although at first glance this one reads like a traditional sf space opera story. Lt. Col. John Fortune is commander of a military base at United Nations Planetary Defence Unit N186. Nesster spaceship Number 1753 looks like it is due to land at his base, and the unit is put on alert. The legendary ‘Captain Johnny’ is put on display to the press as a sign that all is well, as a hero of the Nesster War.
However, despite all of the surface sheen and bluster, behind the scenes the story is less rosy. Fortune’s friend and scientific genius, Bill Geisler, is asked by Fortune to try and find the guiding spaceship and shoot it down before it lands.
More so, Fortune’s personal life is falling apart. His wife, Christine, is clearly having an affair with charismatic youngster Pavel Efimov, something they barely seem to hide. The plot edges into a soap opera melodrama, rather than a space opera.
Nevertheless, all is resolved at the end.
An odd one this, in that Bob has taken a somewhat traditional sf plot and given it some modern, if unusual touches. Fortune is overweight and yet a figurehead hero, with a domestic life that is about as far from the American ideal as you’d expect. I liked the fact that it was set in Iceland, again somewhere different from the typical US missile base. There’s also some debate about what to do with the aliens, once seen as a threat and now possibly something more. On the downside though, at times the story can come across as a tale of macho-posturing which at times veers into near- hysteria. It’s good to see Bob back, but this is not one of his best. 3 out of 5.
Book Reviews and Dr Peristyle
In the review section, amusingly titled Self-Conscious Sex, only one book is reviewed this month. Charles Platt reviews Robert A Heinlein’s A Stranger in a Strange Land as “a remarkably dull book”, where “Stylistically, cloying American cliché and banter merge with a coyness…inconsistent with the self-consciously bold aim to be frank about sex…” Clearly not a fan.
In happier news, “Dr. Peristyle” (aka Brian Aldiss) is back. This month he holds forth on topics as wide-ranging as religion, the function of sf as ‘literature’, the importance of scientific accuracy and whether publishers are producing quantity rather than quality. It continues to make me laugh.
Summing up New Worlds
An issue with lofty ambitions but for me surprisingly mundane. The allegorical tone of some of the material is a worthy attempt to be different, but left me unimpressed. And whilst many readers will be sad to see Bill the Galactic Hero go, (see the ratings for the first part in issue 153 below), I won’t. Here’s to a fresh restart next issue.
Summing up overall
Although neither issue is an outstanding one, as you might gather, it is pretty clear which issue I enjoyed most this month. I appreciate what Moorcock is trying to do in New Worlds, but for me the more memorable read is Science Fantasy by far.
Just about a century and a half ago, the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history occurred on the island of Sumbawa, in what was then part of the Dutch East Indies. Mount Tambora exploded on April 5, 1815. Something like one hundred thousand people died as a result of the disaster, either by the direct effects of the eruption, or from disease and starvation due to the severe change in the environment. The volcano ejected so much material into the atmosphere that global temperatures were reduced to a significant degree for a year or more. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1816 is often known as the Year Without a Summer. Crop failures and famine resulted in Asia, Europe, and North America.
A map of the island, published in 1855. Note the large crater left behind by the explosion.
So what does this horrible tragedy have to do with with a cheap science fiction movie? Well, it's a long story.
Now is the Summer of Our Discontent
In the spring of 1816, Percy Shelley and his teenage girlfriend Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin paid a visit to Lord Byron, along with some other folks, at a mansion known as the Villa Diodati, near Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
Looks like a nice place for a vacation, if it weren't for the bad weather.
Thanks to Mount Tambora, the following summer was wet and cold. Instead of enjoying the outdoors, this group of literary intellectuals had to amuse themselves inside the house. Lord Byron proposed that they each write a scary story. Shelley and Byron only produced fragments, while fellow houseguest John William Polidori came up with The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story and a possible influence on Bram Stoker's famous 1897 novel Dracula. Far more important than this, however, was the classic work created by Mary Godwin (later married to Shelley, and better known to us as Mary Shelley.)
The Modern Prometheus
First published anonymously in 1818, the novel Frankenstein is too well known to require any description here. Suffice to say that it was an immediate critical and popular success.
The first edition.
As early as 1823, it was adapted for the stage by Richard Brinsley Peake under the title Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein. Shelley herself witnessed this production.
A playbill from the original staging.
It's Alive!
Many other versions of the story reached theaters in years to follow. The first cinematic adaptation arrived in 1910, in the form of a brief film from Edison Studios.
A still of Charles Ogle in the role of the Monster. This film is now thought to be lost, but maybe a copy will turn up some day.
Of course, things really got going with the famous 1931 movie starring Boris Karloff. Many sequels followed, as any fan of the syndicated television program Shock Theater can tell you. For the record, the series from Universal Studios consists of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), The House of Frankenstein (1944), and House of Dracula (1945). (Despite not being named in the title, the Frankenstein Monster does appear in the latter film.)
For some reason, the studio never completed the obvious trilogy with a film called House of the Wolf Man, but maybe some enterprising film maker will come up with something in the future.
Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein. The lady has style.
Things got a lot less serious with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). (Somewhere along the way, the name of the creator got mixed up with the name of the creation. The two comedians didn't actually meet the man called Frankenstein, but rather the Monster he created.)
Nearly a decade went by before the Monster was revived by the British studio Hammer, with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), followed by The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and The Evil of Frankenstein (1964). Meanwhile, low budget American productions showed up, including I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Frankenstein 1970 (1958), and Frankenstein's Daughter (1958).
Christopher Lee as Hammer's version of the Monster.
From Mars to Puerto Rico
For some reason they didn't give me my Space Shield Eye Protectors.
The latest film to cash in on Mary Shelley's creation, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, arrived in American movie houses just a couple of days ago. At this point, you may want to throw rotten fruit and vegetables at me, because I've made you suffer through my lengthy introduction for no good reason.
Neither Frankenstein nor his creature appear in the movie.
So why the title? I'll get to that in a moment.
We begin aboard an alien spaceship. The trailer for the movie claims they're from Mars, although this is not explicitly stated in the film itself. In command is a woman who is always addressed as Princess. (The end credits call her Princess Marcuzan, but this name is never mentioned in the movie.) In the tradition of women from outer space, she's a beauty, dressed in a skintight catsuit, a wispy cape, and an odd-looking hat.
Marilyn Hanold, Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month for June, 1959, as Princess Marcuzan.
Assisting her is a little fellow called Doctor Nadir. He seems to be in charge of destroying Earth missiles soon after takeoff. (This is conveyed to the audience through the use of stock footage of rockets blowing up. I'd say that at least half of this movie consists of stock footage.)
Lou Cutell as Nadir. It's nice to see someone who really enjoys his work.
There are a few other Martians on board as well, who share the same bald head and pointed ears as Nadir. Most of the time, you can't tell they're not Earthlings, because they wear very NASA-looking spacesuits and space helmets.
Back on Earth, an automobile full of military types and science types drives very slowly towards Cape Kennedy. We get to see a lot of space-themed businesses on the road, such as the Satellite Motel, the Polaris Motel, and a burger joint that has what looks like a map of Mars for an entrance. In an odd scene, one of the military guys asks our film's Lady Scientist how she's doing, and she says nothing at all. I have no idea what that was all about.
Anyway, after an excruciatingly long car ride, we arrive at a press conference, where we get introduced to astronaut Colonel Frank Saunders (does his first name suggest anything to you?) and a scientist with the very masculine name of Adam Steele.
From left to right, Military Guy, Lady Scientist, Astronaut, and Manly Scientist.
Things go OK at the press conference, until Frank answers a question from a reporter with a mild joke, followed by a wide grin. The film freezes, and we think that maybe something has gone wrong in the projection room.
Would you buy a used car from this man?
It turns out that Frank has frozen in place. The science types hustle him out of the room, and we see them open up his head on an operating table. Don't worry, you won't see any gore; Frank is actually a robot.
You see, because all those American rockets are blowing up, NASA wants to send a machine to Mars instead of a human being. (And you wondered where your tax dollars were going.) The one little flaw in this plan is that nothing prevents the Martians from blowing up Frank's rocket as well. He crashes on Puerto Rico, badly messed up by the accident in both body and mind.
Frank after the explosion. He's had better days.
Frank goes on a rampage, killing folks at random. In the movie's most gruesome scene, we see him attack a guy with a machete (off screen, thank goodness.) At some point, Lady Scientist says he's like a Frankenstein, in a feeble attempt to justify the movie's title.
Meanwhile, the Martian spaceship lands on Earth. An expository speech from the Princess to her crew (who should already know all this) reveals that a big war on Mars resulted in victory for her side, but left the planet without any females except herself. The plan is to kidnap nubile human females and use them for reproductive purposes.
The Martian spaceship, which looks way too small to hold all the folks we see inside it.
It probably won't surprise you to find out that many of these young ladies arrive wearing bikinis. Given this fact, a scene of a bunch of young folks dancing, and a recurring rock 'n' roll song on the soundtrack, you can classify this film as a Beach Movie.
The Princess inspects the first captive.
While this is going on, Lady Scientist and Manly Scientist track down Frank with some kind of electronic gizmo. This involves the two of them leisurely riding around Puerto Rico on a little motor scooter while a love song plays on the soundtrack. This suggestion of a romance between the two never really develops into anything.
Suddenly the movie turns into a travelogue.
They find Frank, and somehow change him from a homicidal maniac back into a nice robot. The pair foolishly split up, and Lady Scientist gets kidnapped by the Martians. She's locked up in a cage next to our Space Monster, the oddly named Mull. This critter is a skull-faced thing with big claws, and would make a pretty good Hallowe'en costume.
Would you buy a used spaceship from this monster?
A few minutes before the end credits, our pseudo-Frankenstein finally meets the Space Monster. You can probably guess how things turn out.
Obviously, this is a cheap, silly little movie, best enjoyed as a source of derisive laughter. I doubt it will be the last Frankenstein-related film we'll ever see, and it may not even be the worst. (Frankenstein's Daughter is a strong contender.) I understand there's even a Japanese-American co-production, already released in the Land of the Rising Sun, but not yet in the USA. Keep watching the movie listings in your local newspaper!
A scene from Furankenshutain tai Baragon, as the film is known in Japan.
We'll be discussing better movies, I hope, and more at our next Journey Show: At the Movies!
I picked up the latest Ace Double Novel at my local Woolworth's the other day, and had to share my opinions of the two novels with my fine science fiction friends.
On one side of the double was the deliriously wacky cover shown below, which actually is a scene in John Rackham's meandering but intriguing new novel. By my reckoning, this is at least the third Ace double this prolific author has delivered over the last two years, and though I haven't read either Watch on Peter or Danger from Vega yet, this slim novel – a true Ace double at 137 pages – makes me want to try them out too.
The main character of We, the Venusians is Anthony Taylor, a man who feels himself out of place on a future version of Earth. Though the timing of that future isn't revealed in the novel, it's clear he lives in a bit of a dystopian world. Advertising is pervasive and unavoidable, commerce and greed rule the world, and the arts are trivialized and mocked.
This all matters because Taylor is an accomplished musician and the owner of a small club in which he plays Liszt, Schubert, Bach and the other classical artists to an ever-diminishing tribe of listeners. He is truly a man on the outside of his time. That's why he has a mixed reaction when a strange man wanders into Taylor's club and offers an obscene amount of money to travel to the Terran colony on Venus to play music, Taylor is both intrigued and repulsed by the opportunity. He is intrigued by chance to get rich quick and the chance to make a new start. Taylor is also repulsed by the idea because he has a secret he fears will be revealed on his new home: though his skin appears human color, he is actually a Greenie, a green-skinned Venusian native.
Through a series of plot machinations, Taylor does end up journeying to Venus along with two other musicians, one of whom, named Martha Merrill, is a beautiful woman who possesses an unbelievable singing voice. They also discover that the human colonists have enslaved thousands of apparently mindless Greenies to do menial labor in order to keep the colony buzzing along. Taylor and Merrill escape the human domes into the native lands, and both performers literally go native – Martha is also secretly a Venusian.
Though Merrill soon dies, Taylor finds his destiny among his own people and ends up becoming a force for revolution among his adopted people against the colonists.
One of the most intriguing elements of the book is the beans which grow on Venus and provide nutrition and energy for the people living there. While the Venusians protect their precious resource carefully, the humans try to exploit the beans and export the incredibly valuable food back to Terra. This element of the plot had an intriguing post-colonial feel to it. It's easy for the reader to substitute tobacco or silk as the exploited resource in our own history. It's a smart choice by Rackham to bring in that idea, as it adds resonance and contrast to the human/greenie struggle.
We, the Venusians is full of interesting ideas, from its resonances to the Civil Rights movement of today to its treatment of Indians in the west to the ways pop music overwhelms classics. Rackham keeps his story focused on character, and that keeps the reader involved in this novel. I enjoyed reading how Anthony Taylor grows and changes as this book goes along, and that growth gives this book a lot of its energy.
That said, the book rambles and wanders a bit too much and seems to frequently lose its focus. I know it's anathema to us fans of Ace doubles, but another 20 pages of meat would have made this book's bones stronger.
Fred Saberhagen is another science fiction writer who has settled into a journeyman status at this point. He's appeared in a number of the science fiction magazines in recent years, and his "Berserker" stories have started to gain more attention from aficionados. My colleague David Levinson has praised Saberhagen's ability to pull off modern fiction within the framework of space opera, and that skill is well on display in The Water of Thought.
Like We, the Venusians, Saberhagen's novel takes place on an alien planet on which native peoples are in conflict with Terrans. The planet Kappa is a kind of garden of Eden, a paradise and perfect place for rest and relaxation for exhausted Space Force planeteers. It's also the home to native peoples and a type of water which provides amazing changes in people. When a planeteer named Jones samples the water, he goes crazy and disappears from the colony. Planeteer Boris Brazil must follow to investigate.
Jones becomes megalomaniacal under the influence of the "water of thought", and rapidly becomes an addict. Jones is constantly seeking his next drink, like a heroin addict looking for his next fix. When Jones forces Brazil to drink the water, it has a different effect on him. Brazil is nearly paralyzed and loses his free will while in proximity to Jones, but does not become addicted. The battle between the two men, and the story of the humans and natives caught in the middle, is an important part of the book.
Like We theVenusians, this book has a natural resource as a key point of conflict between humans and Kappans as the water is seen by some as a resource to be exploited for personal gain. The human mayor of Kappa sells the water as a drug, trying to earn a neat profit off of a local resource. Meanwhile a human scientist has slightly more noble goals: he believes the water may help the local hominid species gain intelligence and gain their freedom from slavery by the natives.
The Water of Thought is a more complex book than it seems at first glance, and reveals some of the shallowness of Rackham's world. Where Rackham draws a pretty clear line between humans and greenies on Venus, Saberhagen presents Kappa as a more complex world. Kappa is a place where the lines between hero and villain are somewhat unclear, where everybody is exploiting each other in some ways, and in which the precious natural resource has ambiguous effects.
This book adroitly shows Saberhagen's skills at mixing space opera elements with a psychological and philosophical elements. The Water of Thought feels contemporary for our year of 1965, a time in which the smartest people are embracing ideas of the past but providing new approaches to those ideas.
4 stars.
Gamma #5: The Worst Sci-fi Magazine Ever Published?
by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall
Back in the early 1950s, when the market was flooded with magazines, there used to be plenty of forgettable magazines that would crank out terrible stories. Whilst it may be possible my memory is cheating me, I cannot recall a single issue as awful as this issue of Gamma:
This terrible issue of Gamma starts as it means to go on with another lurid cover from John Healey. I had hoped the style from the last issue was just due to it being a special edition calling back to the 30s, apparently this is the direction the magazine is going, with it illustrating the lead novella.
John Healey himself is a talented artist apparently working on shows like Johnny Quest, so I more question the editorial choice than his skill.
Now, take a deep breath, and let us all work together to get through this issue:
Nesbit, by Ron Goulart
Taking up nearly half the magazine, the perpetually disappointing Ron Goulart returns as, apparently, the editors simply cannot resist his writing. Once again, I find my eyebrow raised at this assertion.
This novella follows an attempt to shoot a pilot for a “jungle series”. When the Hollywood lot turns out to be in use Tim McCarey goes to visit Vincent Belgraf’s estate, to convince him to let them use his transplanted jungle for the shoot. However, on arriving he cannot get ahold of Mr. Belgraf and the other residents tell him it is not for rent.
Tim believes something else is amiss and finds a gorilla running around the estate in a soldier’s outfit. It turns out that this is Nesbit Belgraf. After being attacked by his own private army he had his brain transplanted into that of a gorilla, so he will be strong enough to become emperor of the United States and battle the unseen forces secretly controlling everyone’s lives.
Whilst Tim does not agree with this fascist conspiracy-minded gorilla and his family, he agrees to help with his propaganda efforts in exchange for being able to use part of the jungle for filming. However, Nesbit is very emotional and has difficulty keeping his cool.
I have trouble working out what Goulart is trying to do with this piece. If it is a satire on fascism and right-wing conspiracy theories, it fails. For, apart from Nesbit being a gorilla, it feels more like a documentary piece, as I am fully aware of the existence of those who believe in Jewish-Communist conspiracies controlling the world. It never does anything to really contradict what the Brelgrafs say, nor even to particularly suggest that their plans to put all non-white people into concentration camps or exterminate them, is as horrific as it really is.
If it is trying to be just an adventure story, it also fails. Intelligent gorilla stories are two-a-penny in comic books but are usually mindlessly enjoyable. This is incredibly dull and padded, full of side details that another might make charming, yet Goulart makes unbelievably tedious.
I could imagine many interesting ways a more skilled writer could have taken this piece, but instead Goulart produces something truly dreadful.
An exceptionally low One Star.
Policy Conference, by Sylvia Dees and Ted White
Peter and The Chief meet in the latter’s office to discuss how they could improve “interregional relations” for their boss Old Nick (I offer no prizes for guessing who that actually is).
Whilst this story is more supernatural than science fictional it weirdly has the same conceit as the previous tale, of someone having to work on PR for a monster. It just helps highlight how unoriginal a concept this is. Mercifully, this one is very short.
One Star
We get the return of the unrelated sketches. Depressingly they are better than the actual text.
Auto Suggestion, by Charles Beaumont
Returning from the earlier issues of Gamma (publishing the best story in issue 1) The Twilight Zone writer brings a story of automobiles. Unfortunately, this is definitely not his best work.
Abnar Llewellyn, a nervous driver, suddenly finds his car talking to him and it encourages him to be a more aggressive on the roads. It also starts to interfere in other areas on Abnar’s life, asking out women for him and instructing him on how to commit crimes.
I have gone on record saying I am no lover of cars, and so tales like this generally leave me cold. However, even accounting for that, I felt the story was bad. It is painfully overwritten to the point of being juvenile:
A truck’s air horn began some car lengths away. A frightening sound, a terrible sound, like the scream of a wounded elephant, and it led other smaller cars to renew their anger, shrill now beneath the dump-truck’s might below, shrill and chittering, like arboreal creatures gone mad.
Even Lovecraft would probably tell him he needed to cut out some description!
It also ends up not doing anything particularly interesting, just being a story where the protagonist does unpleasant things and may or may not be insane.
One Star
Welcome to Procyon IV, by Chester H. Carlfi
This is not a new writer to these pages but, rather, another story by longtime editor Charles E. Fritch, contributing his 4th story to the magazine.
In this vignette, Jameson and his wife are the last people left alive on the dead world of Porycon IV, with humans having wiped out the natives and disease killing the rest of the human population. On his ancient radio Jameson hears a human expedition coming but when they come to in to his cabin they discover a terrible truth about Jameson’s wife.
This feels like a pale imitation of Ray Bradbury’s Martian stories. It is more competent than the previous two pieces in the magazine, but a lot remains heavily unexplained. Also including a genocide in one line without any further thought left a bad taste in my mouth.
One and a half stars
Interest, by Richard Matheson
Cathryn is to be married to Gerald Cruickshank, yet find his parents and their house terrifying. However, she cannot work out why that is.
As stated in the introduction, this is a Poe-esque tale, although the purpose of it escapes me. Feels more like a derivative work you would find in a bad fanzine.
One Star
Another sketch, holding my interest much more than Matheson’s story did.
Lullaby and Goodnight, by George Clayton Johnson
In the aftermath of a nuclear war, an outpost of shelters is setup outside of an unnamed city. Our narrator (also unnamed) talks about the trouble Sarah Hartman is having with trying to keep her baby Adam alive in the radiation-soaked world.
This vignette marks a short foray into the New Wave from the usually conservative Gamma. It is not the best example, but the melancholic atmosphere raises it above the rest of the stories here.
This is a reprint from New Detective Magazine from almost 19 years ago and, unfortunately, it shows.
It narrates the story of a haemophiliac author, named Rob, who keeps being sent sharp objects in the mail, in an attempt to stop his book from being published.
I know Bradbury is popular right now, but do we have to reprint everything he did in his early days? The truth is he has evolved as a writer and most of his work before 1950 is simply not that good!
This is not really a science fiction or fantasy piece, but I suppose it could be classified as uncanny horror. Unfortunately, it lacks anything interesting, it seems more like a sequence of unusual events, like reading someone’s disconnected nightmare.
The story is written in a pale imitation of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled style along with a second person narration. Whilst I do like experimentation this one fails for me.
Two stars
The Late Mr. Adams, by Steve Allen
Another reprint, this time from the publisher’s own collection, Fourteen for Tonight. This is my first experience with Mr. Adams' writings myself, although I hear he is big television personality in the United States.
This is a very silly life-story of a man who is always late. Really, that is all there is to it.
One Star
Wet Season, by Dennis Etchison
Etchison is generally a middling new writer. Shows promise but I am still waiting for a story that astounds me. Unfortunately, this is not it.
In a town there have been an unusually high number of drownings and the women seem to be acting strangely. At the same time rainfall levels are apparently increasing. After Madden’s daughter dies his Brother Bart comes to tell him of his suspicions.
Etchison really seems to like his Puppet Masters style stories and this is another one in that mold. I am willing to concede that it has a good atmosphere but that is all I am going to give.
A low two stars
I love this illustration. Why couldn’t this have been one of the pieces inside?
Summing Up
This issue of the magazine is truly terrible. Some stories are not as bad as the others, but it would be a stretch to say anything is actually good.
I am beginning to feel foolish that I took out a subscription from issue 2, as I have already paid for more of these. However, if the quality continues like this, I find it hard to imagine this magazine continuing much beyond that.
That's all for today, folks! Join us next month for another exciting Galactoscope!
and…
Our next Journey Show: At the Movies, is going to be a blast!
There's something compelling about things left incomplete – from Schubert's Unfinished Symphony to President Kennedy's first term. In the gaps of what could have been, we can fill in countless possibilities rather than just the one.
Hundreds of years from now, a war-ravaged, radiation-scoured Earth is little more than a colony of the blue-skinned Vegans who lease our planet out of historical curiosity. Humanity is much reduced, confined to the former backwaters of civilization.
Against this backdrop, we are introduced to Conrad Nomikos, head of the world's antiquities preservation bureau, who is tapped to escort a Vegan journalist as the alien gathers information for a travelogue of blasted Earth.
But there is far more to Conrad than he likes to let on. Something of a rogue, and possessed of pretenatural strength, skills, and psychic abilities, he is actually Konstantin Karaghiosis – mutated into a Methusaleh by radiation and erstwhile leader of a radical anti-Vegan colonial movement that had, decades before, spiked Vegan ambitions to take all of Earth.
Now Conrad finds himself embroiled in multiple intertwined plots as the Vegan journalist becomes the target of an assassination attempt, his mission to Earth having a more significant goal than just a John Gunther volume. Conrad, too, is personally imperiled, though who wants him dead and why are open questions.
This first part of a serial leaves off just as the second attempt on Conrad's life (if such they were; he cannot be certain) has failed. It looks as if Conrad may well have to resume the revolutionary mantle of Konstantin to navigate the crisis.
Zelazny can sometimes be a tough pill for me to swallow. One of the Journey's regular readers observed that he's done more than any current SF writer to bring Hemingway to our genre, and I feel that Roger sometimes trades readability for that stylistic choice. That said, after a somewhat plodding beginning, the fleshed out background and advanced storyline becomes quite compelling.
Call it three stars for now, but with potential for the ending (if and when it come) to raise things retrospectively.
Mirror, Mirror, by Avram Davidson
Milquetoasty fan of A. Merritt spends his spare hours scouring local second-hand shops for jade mirrors with which to escape our reality into something more fantastical and swashbuckling. What he doesn't count on is someone from another reality with a similar passion finding their way to his world.
As a premise, it's a fantastic mirror to works like The Incomplete Enchanter. As a vignette, however, it suffers for an overlong beginning (relative to the length of the piece) and the lack of a real resolution. In this case, unfinished means unsatisfying.
Three stars.
by Gahan Wilson
(here's a rather pointless doodle by Mr. Wilson, one that doesn't even pertain to our genre; the reason for its inclusion escapes me)
The Future, Its Promoters and False Prophets by E. Brandis and V. Dmitrevskiy, and Replies by Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury and Mack Reynolds
Here's an interesting piece: a critique of American science fiction by two Soviets followed by replies by the authors specifically mentioned (including reference to Asimov's foreword to More Soviet Science Fiction). It makes for a fascinating debate, one that is clearly ongoing. I hope F&SF continues to cover it.
Five stars.
No Jokes on Mars, by James Blish
A journalist is sent to the Red Planet to check up on a colleague whose work has become perfunctory and cynical. While on a tour of the Martian wilderness, her escorts poach a pomander from the pouch of a native dune-cat; the aromatic ball is of high value on Earth as a perfumed ornament, but its heist dooms the Martian creatures (who prove to be sentient) to a slow death. Can she make it off Mars with the story?
It's a good story, but it suffers both for its 1950s depiction of Mars and the extremely sudden ending, which I ended up reading several times, wondering if I'd missed a paragraph or two somewhere. Here, the unfinished nature left me wanting rather than dreaming.
Three stars.
The Glorious Fourth, by Jack Sharkey
Three astronauts from Earth land on an Eden teeming with an ecology so vigorous that its creatures refuse to die. One of the crew, despairing of service under the martinet captain, goes native – literally. And while the process is pleasant for him, the interaction between the remaining two and the planet's life forms is ultimately less enjoyable.
Jack Sharkey's byline is one I'm normally wary of, but he delivers a decent story here, and the vague ending, only hinting at the horrors the two spacemen will face (and the reason for their unpleasantness), is effective.
Three stars.
Minutes of A Meeting At The Mitre, by Robert F. Young
Old Nick meets Samuel Johnson. With a punchline telegraphed from the beginning, the only motivation for this piece seems to be Young's desire to do a Boswell pastiche.
Well, the story may have finished, but it's clear that the hoary "Deal with the Devil" subgenre of fantasy is not.
Two stars.
The Land of Mu, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor picks up where he left in his elementary physical particles, this time discussing the differences between electrons and mu mesons (muons). It's an absolutely fascinating piece, and it's very clear from its conclusion that there is still so very much we don't know about the universe's tiniest components.
A punctilious, nature-hating music professor crashlands on a deserted planet with only a clarinet and box of jazz music spools to keep him company. Well, not quite deserted: there is also a solitary shaggy alien with the ability to mimic music perfectly. Thus begins an interspecies friendship.
Perhaps intentionally, the ultimate story in this collection does have a definite ending, which is sadly to its detriment. Rather than building to some kind of revelatory peak offering some sort of interesting insight on the human condition, there is, instead, a pointless downer of a conclusion, better suited to a lesser episode of The Twilight Zone. Tilley, the piece's author, is also about 20% more wordy than he needs to be.
Three stars.
Endings?
I would say that this month's reliance on the unfinished story had mixed results. However, at the very least, I am now looking forward to the conclusion of the Zelazny piece; at most, I find my thoughts returning to the other uncertain endings, imagining the myriad outcomes that might have better resolved these otherwise unsettled lines.
Art reflects reality indeed!
Our next Journey Show: At the Movies, is going to be a blast!
Mop-tops and Munsters are on the rise, replacing the theoretical with the fantastical. With the end of pioneering anthology shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, television has transformed into a wasteland for science fiction. Gone are the prospective and predictive contents depicting the wonders of space, sea, and air. Instead, we have spies, saIlors, and sorceresses clogging our TV screens – with mixed results.
But there is hope for the science fiction aficionados of the world. Upcoming productions like Lost in Space and Star Trek hold promise for the revitalization of the genre on TV. My father and I are both eagerly awaiting this new dawn. However, Lost in Space is just starting, and Star Trek is at least four months away (there is rumor of it being a mid-season replacement starting in January 1966).
Luckily, there is a plethora of now-classic science fiction movies that came out in the last decade that we missed the first time around, but which are occasionally revived at theaters and drive-ins. These shows allow us to sate our viewing appetite while we wait for the TV crop to come in.
That's how we ended up in a dingy old theater on the edge of town watching a double feature billed as "They Came from 1951!" – The Day the Earth Stood Still and When Worlds Collide shown back to back. It was an interesting experience, to say the least.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
The story of The Day the Earth Stood Still is probably well known to everyone. However, since my dad and I managed to go in completely unaware of anything about the movie, other than what we could discern from the poster, here's a brief summary:
The Day the Earth Stood Still is a black and white film about an alien named Klaatu who comes to Earth in a flying saucer (those being all the rage in 1951) to deliver a momentous message to humanity. He looks just like us despite having traveled more than 250 million miles to get to the Earth.
To be fair, Klaatu could have picked a less menacing gesture to start with.
It's a good thing that tank crew had pistols!
After a hostile reception, Klaatu refuses to convey his message to anyone but an assemblage of all the world's leaders. When this proves impossible for primitive Earth to manage, Klaatu escapes military custody and tries to assimilate with human society so as to find an alternate solution.
Wow! Bill aids owner on foreclosure!
"Land sakes! There's an alien among us! Better not tell Opie – it'll give him nightmares…"
Hysteria ensues as the media report on the unleashing of a twisted, horrific alien monster on the streets of D.C. With the aid of a boy, his mother, and a scientist, Klaatu must find a way to connect with all of humanity, while dodging the agents of the U.S. Government, to prevent the destruction of our world – which will happen one way or another if Earth does not cease its warlike ways.
"I'd like to meet all of your assembled leaders." "Oh, you mean like a United Nations?" "Sure." "Nah. Too much trouble."
Ultimately, the film is a cautionary tale which left me with two overriding messages: "Don't shoot on sight" and "Listen to children, women, and scientists" (scientists can be of any gender).
"Are you a scientist?" "What gave it away?"
I actually appreciate what this movie was trying to say, but its execution was so heavy-handed, populated with more straw men than Iowa, it weakened the message. The US military is portrayed as so hilariously incompetent, it creates inconsistencies in the plot. I'm left wondering how the army can afford to send every jeep and tank in its arsenal to capture Klaatu but only leaves two men to guard his spaceship. What could have been a nuanced social commentary on the moral ambiguity of the U.S. Government's policies turns into a laughable mess.
"Night, Tom…Jerry. I'm sure you two will be just fine guarding that spaceship next to the big robot!"
There's the rest of the army. A bit too late…
The science is slightly better, though the idea there could be advanced life on other planets in our solar system feels incredibly old fashioned in light of the recent Mariner mission. [The distance he traveled suggests he came from Mars, but he may not be a Martian – there may simply be an alien outpost on Mars (ed.)]
However, the movie did get the special effects and set design right. I was particularly impressed by the slick interior of the spaceship. The glowing buttons and glass instruments are both beautiful and the embodiment of the science fiction aesthetic.
The latest in blinky light and glass chic!
I was also entertained by the design of Gort, Klaatu's all-powerful robot. While silver mittens and underwear over a metallic motorcycle suit would not have been my first fashion choice, it's charming none the less.
"I'd like to say it's been a pleasure, but…"
The acting and pacing were fine. I especially enjoyed the performance of Patricia Neal, the tough mother character, and also Michael Rennie (clearly inspired by Robert Oppenheimer). Young Billy Gray is good too, more remiscent of Kurt Russell than Ron Howard.
You know that awkward moment when you're stuck in an elevator with a stranger?
"I like this guy. He seems like a good guy. Find me more like him."
In total, the movie was a thoroughly OK experience. It could have done a lot better in many places, but in the end, it did make an effort, which is more than can be said for many SF films these days.
Three stars
When Worlds Collide
When Worlds Collide's title literally exploded across the movie screen with tongues of flames blazing in glorious color accompanied by a screeching score. No five year olds were wriggling in their seats anymore. With an intro like that, and with producer George Pal's name in big print, this move held real promise…
…and then the camera zoomed on a giant Bible, which flipped to a passage from the tale of Noah's Ark, to keep us from missing the theme of the movie.
Apparently, subtlety wasn't a widely known concept in the early '50s.
But I still had hope. After the dramatic introduction, the story began in a South African observatory in which an astromer glances through a telescope and realizes that, by God, he's confirmed the end of the world!
"You see it too, right, old chap?"
Dave Randall, professional aviator and the movie's protagonist, is ordered to deliver these findings in complete secrecy to an astronomer in the United States. Upon doing so, and meeting said astronomer's lovely daughter, he is let in on the secret: Bellus, a "star" (just twelve times more massive than the Earth) and its lone Earthlike planet, Zyra, are on a direct collision course with our world. We have only eight months to prepare.
"My, you are dull!"
I turned to my father, who is much more knowledgeable of orbital mechanics than I am, and asked, "Is that even possible?" To which he responded, "No." And then all the five year olds turned around and shushed us.
This was only the first of many such instances in this movie. Willy Ley, it isn't.
The astronomer presents this information to the United Nations and claims the only hope is building a spacecraft to fly to Zyra before Bellus destroys the Earth. The UN quite literally laughs in the astronomer's face, and thus he turns instead to private investors to make the Modern Noah's Ark a reality.
"Sit down, Mr. Addison! And shut that talking horse up while you're at it!"
New at Walt Disney's Tomorrowland!
Some of the investors provide their funds freely, but one rich man only backs the project after securing the promise of passage on the ark. The ensuing scenes of candidate selection for the engineering team and the commencement of ark construction are intertwined with a typical love triangle between Randall, the astronomer's colorless daughter, and her fiancee, Tony. These bits fall flat; indeed, by the end of the movie, Tony and Randall have far more chemistry with each other than the daughter. And you can imagine the dismay I felt at hearing the names "Tony" and "Randall," yet knowing that the person bearing both of those names was nowhere to be seen.
Tony & Randall: the sparks fly.
And that isn't the worst part of the movie! The story is progressively more convoluted and unbelievable (and worse, rather dull). The selection of the Ark's passengers becomes increasingly arbitrary despite the earlier emphasis given on relying on a random lottery. The science is atrocious, the characters shallow, the dialogue lousy.
"Sure, space is at a premium, but let's take this tyke and his dog!
"And this couple! I mean, they're in love and all!
"But this guy? I know he paid for all of this, but he's a jerk. He needs to die."
"Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!"
But the film's biggest fault, out of everything, is its lack of vision. If The Day the Earth Stood Still is a progressive film, When World's Collide is reactionary. The women passengers/technicians and the all-male engineer corps are always segregated. All of the passengers are strapping young college students. All seem to be of a similar class. And they are all white.
The audience at this point in the film.
I can understand wanting young candidates to weather the harshness of space travel, but to exclusively choose young colonists discounts the immense wisdom and knowledge held by the old. The men and women colonists are equal in number, but that has nothing to do with the scientific prowess of the women; rather, this is just to ensure that every man has a wife.
And even setting aside the morality of excluding all but the lily white from the candidate pool, it's a fatal mistake biologically. If a colony can only start with 40 people, it needs as diverse a gene pool as possible to prevent the perils of inbreeding.
Never mind that. What's important is that a small cadre of white, rich, Christian youngsters inherits the mantle of humanity.
When Worlds Collide is a celebration of the worst parts of society in the 1950s. I can look past the bad acting. I can look past the gratuitous religious imagery. And I can even ignore the fact that the completely alien world has perfectly breathable air. But I cannot excuse the lazy and offensive message this film chose to convey.
The only thing that keeps this movie from getting a one-star rank is its production values. The special effects are incredible, with some of the best painted backgrounds I have ever seen in a movie. The Earth's destruction sequences are also good, what little we get of them. For a movie about the end of our entire world, George Pal spent an awful long time filming the inside of a shaking office set… Nevertheless, judged on visuals alone, When Worlds Collide is impressive.
What we paid to see.
If only it weren't so terrible everywhere else.
Two stars.
Emerging into the Light
Kvetching aside, I don't regret watching either of these two movies. It gave me a great perspective on the history of science fiction on the silver screen, and it was interesting noting the impact of these two blockbusters on subsequent stories, both on television and in the movies. I'm particularly keen to see if any elements of these movies live on in upcoming releases, from Roddenberry's Star Trek to Kubrick's upcoming 2001 (formerly Journey Beyond the Stars). Only time will tell. Until then,
This is the Young Traveler, signing off.
We'll be discussing these movies and more at our next Journey Show: At the Movies!
As my esteemed colleague David Levinson recently noted, war is currently raging, as it so often does, in various places around the globe. Fortunately, voices are beginning to be raised against this lamentably common human evil.
Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, leads a group of folks protesting the conflict in Vietnam on a march to the United Nations in April of this year.
Whether these peace-loving people will have any effect on the escalating presence of American forces in Southeast Asia remains to be seen. Meanwhile, we can turn to the pages of the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow for a fictional look at an unusual way to change war into peace.
They Shall Beat Their Swords Into Plowshares
The cover reproduces, in shrunken and edited form, various illustrations from the pen of Virgil Finlay, subject of an article within the magazine. I recognize the one in the middle, showing the face of a ape-man, as coming from the January 1965 issue. Maybe some of you clever readers can tell me the sources of the others.
Illustrations by Gray Morrow. I don't know if that artist also came up with the rather eccentric, pseudo-archaic introductory paragraph shown here. Maybe it's the work of the author, or possibly editor Frederik Pohl. In any case, it's very odd, not really in keeping with the mood of the novel.
The time is the early twenty-first century. There are references to space travel within the solar system, but that's way in the background. We have the usual flying cars and such that we're used to in tales of the fairly near future.
Like I said, flying cars. Also, people wear capes and funny-looking hats.
Our main character — I can't really call him the hero — is one Lars Powderdry. I assume his peculiar name is an allusion to the phrase keep your powder dry, attributed to Oliver Cromwell. The intent must be ironic, as Lars does the exact opposite of getting ready for battle (the literal meaning) and is not otherwise prepared for future events (the metaphoric meaning.)
That requires some explanation. You see, Lars has a most peculiar job. He's a weapons fashion designer. This is even weirder than it sounds. It involves going into a trance, with the aid of mind-altering drugs, in order to enhance his natural psychic abilities. While in this state, he perceives images of complex designs for very strange weapons. These are passed along to military folks, who in turn give them to manufacturers.
Why, then, do I say that Lars is not keeping his powder dry? That's because the so-called weapons are nothing of the kind. The elites make the ordinary folks think they are, but in reality the designs are used to make unusual consumer products, generally of a trivial, frivolous nature.
Here's an example, taken from a sidebar in the magazine. Again, I don't know if this is the work of the author or the editor.
In order to fool the public, the manufacturers produce faked films showing the phony weapons in action. This situation came about because of a secret agreement between the two sides in the Cold War. The ignorant masses believe their governments are ready to attack the other side, while their rulers avoid the possibility of a real, destructive war.
An example of the deception in action. The zombie-like guys, supposedly criminals subjected to the mind-destroying guns shown here, are really robots.
Lars has a counterpart on the other side, a woman named Lilo Topchev. Although he doesn't know anything about her, having only seen a photograph so blurry that it doesn't reveal anything at all, he feels an unexplained attraction to her. (The author doesn't say, but maybe this has something to do with their extrasensory powers.)
There's another woman in his life as well. Maren Faine runs the Paris office of his weapons fashion house. She's also his mistress. They annoy each other much of the time, but there seems to be genuine affection between the two. Their relationship has a touch of sadomasochism to it. Maren enjoys mocking her lover, who is well aware that he's not as smart as she is.
Maren Faine. The artist nicely captures her personality. Intelligent, capable, self-assured, cynical, and maybe a little bit cruel.
While visiting her in Paris, Lars finds a device made from one of the ersatz weapons he dreams up in his trance states. The gizmo is a sphere that answers questions. For most people, it's just a toy, sort of like a super-fancy version of those Magic 8 Ball things most of us have fooled around with.
Did I have one of these things? Reply hazy, try again later.
Lars treats the sphere more seriously, asking it about himself. He gets some uncomfortable answers, discovering that his reservations about the way he's helping the elite deceive the public aren't really a matter of ethics, but due to his own fears of losing his psychic powers.
Lars and the mechanical oracle.
As if that were not enough of a painful look into his soul, Maren is a bit psychic herself, able to detect her lover's subconscious emotions. She knows about his obsession with Lilo, for example, explaining it in Freudian terms.
Things get complicated when satellites appear in orbit, not launched by either side. Robots sent to investigate the objects are destroyed. The assumption is that they are the work of hostile aliens. Faced with the possibility of an attack by extraterrestrials, the elite bring Lars and Lilo together in Iceland. Their mission is clear. Work together, using their psychic abilities to come up with a design for a real weapon, or face the consequences.
An agent for the other side shows Lars what the consequences will be.
There's lots of other stuff I haven't mentioned. In particular, an important subplot involves an unpleasant fellow named Surley G. Febbs, who is drafted to become one of the six average citizens who work with the military, dealing with the designs envisioned by Lars. It's not yet clear what part he'll play in the plot, but I suspect it will be a vital one.
Although not a comedy, there's a strong satiric edge to this novel. Both sides in the bloodless Cold War engage the services of the same private espionage agency, which gives them just enough information to keep them paying for more.
The many characters are complex and varied, with flaws and quirks that make them seem real. (A notable exception: There's one minor character whose only function seems to be to have the author describe her breasts.) I'm definitely interested enough to wonder what's going to happen two months from now.
Four stars.
Me, Myself, and Us, by Michael Girdansky
This nonfiction article deals with the connections between the two halves of the brain, and what happens when they are cut. The author goes on to describe a highly speculative way in which to give someone two separate personalities in one body, making reference to the well-known story Beyond Bedlam by Wyman Guin. The suggestion is that such a person would be the perfect spy.
Cover art by Emsh.
Although there's some interesting information here, I found it distressing to read. Not only is the suggested creation of a human being with two minds disturbing, but the author describes real surgical experiments on animals that are horrifying. Maybe that's only my squeamishness, but I wish he had just talked about those unfortunate people who have had the link between the hemispheres of their brains severed.
Two stars.
Last of a Noble Breed, by Mack Reynolds
Illustrations by Normal Nodel.
We begin in the city of Estoril, Portugal, a luxurious resort community. A couple married for only six months is there for business as well as pleasure. The husband, a nuclear engineer, is trying to win a position by meeting with various members of the European upper class.
In this future world, being an aristocrat is vital to one's success. Annoyed by the snobs and a little drunk, the man half-jokingly announces that his wife's grandmother was the hereditary Sachem of the Cherokees, which is true enough. This leads to a worldwide movement to have the United States government restore tribal lands to her people, even though the woman is only one-quarter Cherokee, at most. (Her grandmother, whom she met exactly once, might not have been one hundred percent Cherokee.)
Uncle Sam faces a problem. I'm not sure what that sign is supposed to say. Unfair to what? Queens? That doesn't make sense, as a Sachem is not at all a monarch.
This isn't the most plausible premise in the world, even for a comedy. There are some enjoyable bits of satire, and the author provides some accurate information about the Cherokee people, as far as I can tell. But the lighthearted mood doesn't match well with the truly tragic history of the Cherokees. The husband has a habit of calling his wife a squaw, which annoys me as much as it does her.
Two stars.
The Sightseers, by Thomas M. Disch
Rich people have themselves placed in suspended animation for thousands of years at a time, emerging to enjoy a lavish lifestyle for a while, then jumping back inside their time capsule. Oddly, things never seem to change. These time tourists stick to the fabulous hotels and restaurants that cater to them, which remain unaltered over millennia.
The only other people they encounter are the Nubians who serve their every whim. The suspension device breaks down, and a couple of the tourists, more curious than their much older consorts, investigate the world outside their sumptuous lodgings.
You'll probably predict the true nature of the Nubians, and why vast amounts of time appear to have no effect on the world. Although there are no surprises, the story is decently written. Disch has a knack for this kind of sardonic tale.
Three stars.
Virgil Finlay, Dean of Science Fiction Artists, by Sam Moskowitz
Here's a detailed biography and account of the career of a great talent. I don't know where the author dug up all of this information, but you'll learn a heck of a lot about the artist's life and work. There's only one problem.
No illustrations!
I know there are probably legal and budgetary reasons why this article doesn't include any examples of Finlay's drawings, but it's really frustrating to read about his artwork and not see it. In particular, Finlay's illustration for Robert Bloch's story The Faceless Gods, from the May 1936 issue of Weird Tales, is talked about quite a bit. We're told that readers were excited by it, and that H. P Lovecraft even wrote a poem about it. At least we get half of the poem, but we have no clue what the illustration looked like.
To save you from the same agony I underwent, I dug deep into piles of moldering old pulps and pulled out the drawing, as well as the complete poem. You're welcome.
Two stars.
Worldmaster, by Keith Laumer
Illustrations by John Giunta.
The narrator is the sole survivor of a huge space battle. Both sides were completely destroyed. It turns out that this was deliberate on the part of the admiral who directed his side of the battle. He held back his gigantic flagship, which would have won a victory without the loss of the other vessels in his fleet.
His plan is to return to Earth in command of the only remaining warship, and thus take control of the planet. (Apparently this takes place at a time when the Cold War has heated up, but only in space. We're told that planetary forces are of little importance.)
And there are flying cars.
He offers the narrator the opportunity to join him, but our hero refuses. A couple of goons try to kill him, but he overpowers them and manages to get back to Earth through trickery. What follows is a series of chases and fight scenes, as the narrator tries to stop the admiral's fiendish plan.
And there's a big fire.
Typical for the author in his action/adventure mode, this story moves at a breakneck pace, and features a protagonist who overcomes all obstacles with wits, fists, and not a little luck. It's an efficient example of that sort of thing.
We started off with peace disguised as war, and wound up with the aftermath of war. Was it worth fighting for? Well, Philip K. Dick's novel-in-progress definitely piques my interest, although I suspect it will not appeal to all tastes. The rest of the issue is something of a disappointment, like a hasty retreat after an inconclusive skirmish. At least the only casualties of the conflicts inside these pages are imaginary ones. There are far too many in the real world. I wish you all peace.
The design scrawled on this guitar case, spotted on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley this year, was created by British pacifist Gerald Holtom, as a symbol for the nuclear disarmament movement. It has since shown up a lot of places, as a sign for peace in general. I like it.
All summer long, the Traveler family's television tradition has included the game show, Password. Though it may seem odd that such a program should rival in importance to us such stand-outs as Secret Agent and Burke's Law, if you read my recent round-up of the excellent TV of the 64-65 season, you'll understand why we like the show.
Sadly, the September 9 episode marked the beginning of a hiatus and, perhaps, an outright cancellation of the show. No more primetime Password, nor the daily afternoon editions either. Whither host extraordinaire Allen Ludden?
Apparently, What's my Line! Both Ludden and his wife, Betty White, were the mystery guests last week; I guess they had the free time. They were absolutely charming together, and it's clear they are still very much in love two years into their marriage.
Speaking of anniversaries, Galaxy, one of the genre's most esteemed monthly digests, is celebrating its 15th. To mark the occasion, editor Fred Pohl has assembled a table of contents contributed by some of the magazine's biggest names (though I note with sadness that neither Evelyn Smith nor Katherine MacLean are represented among them). These "all-star" issues (as Fantasy and Science Fiction calls them) often fail to impress as much as ones larded with newer writers, but one never knows until one reads, does one?
So, without further ado, let's get stuck in and see how Galaxy is doing, fifteen years on:
The issue at hand
by John Pederson, Jr.
The Age of the Pussyfoot (Part 1 of 3), by Frederik Pohl
The editor of Galaxy has a penchant for providing a great deal of his own material to his magazines. Normally, I'd be worried about this. It could be a sign of an editor taking advantage of position to guarantee sale of work that might not cut the mustard. And even if the work is worthy, there is the real danger of overcommitment when one takes on the double role of boss and employee.
That said, some editors just find creation too fun to give up (yours truly included) and in the case of Pohl, he usually turns in a good tale, as he has for decades, so I won't begrudge him the practice.
Indeed, Pussyfoot is a welcome addition to the mag. A variation on the classic The Sleeper Awakes theme, in this case, the time traveling is done via the rather new technology of cryogenics. Indeed, protagonist Charles Forester, 37-year old erstwhile fireman, is one of the very first corpses to be frozen circa 1969, and wakes up in the overcrowded but utopian world of 2527 A.D.
by Wallace Wood
Feeling immortal (with some justification – no one really dies anymore; they just get put on ice until they can be brought back, often within minutes) and also wealthy (but $250,000 doesn't stretch as far as it used to) Forester takes a while to really come to grips with his new situation, always just a touch too clueless for his own good, and perhaps plausibility.
Very quickly, he learns that things are not perfect in the future: being immortal means one can be murdered on a lark and the culprits go unpunished. Inflation has rendered Forester's fortune valueless. He must get a job, any job. But the one he finds that will employ an unskilled applicant turns out to be the one no one wants: personal assistant to a disgusting alien!
There's some really good worldbuilding stuff in this story, particularly the little rod-shaped "joymakers" everyone carries that are telephone, computer terminal, personal assistant, drug dispenser, and more. I also liked the inclusion of inflation, which is usually neglected in stories of the future. It all reads a bit like a Sheckley story writ long, something Sheckley's always had trouble with. It's not perfect, but it is fun and just serious enough to avoid being farce.
The first editor of Galaxy started out as a writer, but even though he turned over the helm of his magazine four years ago (officially – it was probably earlier), he hasn't published in a long time, so it's exciting to see his byline again. Inside Man is a nice, if nor particularly momentous, story about a fellow with a telepathy for machines. And since machines are usually in some state of disrepair, it's not a very pleasant gift.
Three stars.
The Machines, Beyond Shylock, by Ray Bradbury
Judith Merril sums up Bradbury beautifully in this month's F&SF, describing him as the avatar of science fiction to the lay population, but deemed a mixed bag by the genre community. His short poem, about how the human spirit will always have something robots do not, is typically oversentimental and not a little opaque. And it's not just the font Pohl used.
Two stars.
Fifteen Years of Galaxy — Thirteen Years of F.Y.I., by Willy Ley
The science columns of Willy Ley comprised one of main draws for Galaxy back when I first got my subscription. In this article, Ley goes over the various topics of moment he's covered over the last decade and a half, providing updates where appropriate. It's a neat little tour of his tenure with the magazine.
Four stars.
A Better Mousehole, by Edgar Pangborn
Pangborn, like Bradbury, is another of the genre's sentimentalists. When he does it well, he does it better than anyone. This weird story, told in hard-to-read first person, said protagonist being a bartender who finds alien, thought-controlling blue bugs in his shop, is a slog.
Oh frabjous day! A new Instrumentality story! This one tells the tale of three unique humans sent off to pacify the gabbling, cackling cannibals of Linschoten XV: "Folly", once a beautiful woman and now a 11-meter spaceship; "SAMM" a quarter-mile long bronze statue possessing a frightening armory; and "Finsternis", a giant cube as dark as night, and with the ability to extinguish suns.
by Gray Morrow
Guest appearances are made by Casher O' Neill and Lady Ceralta, two of humanity's most powerful telepaths whom we met in previous stories.
I've made no secret of my admiration for the Instrumentality stories, which together create a sweeping and beautiful epic of humanity's far future. Three has a bit of a perfunctory character, somehow, and thus misses being a classic.
In Deer, a fellow makes a time machine, goes back to see the death of the dinosaurs, and discovers that aliens were rounding them up for meat… and that they might come back again now that humanity has teemed over the Earth.
A throwback of a story and definitely not up to Simak's standard. A high two (or a low three if you're feeling generous and/or missed the last thirty years of science fiction).
The Good New Days, by Fritz Leiber
On an overcrowded Earth, steady work is a thing of the past. Folks get multiple part time gigs to fill the time, including frivolous occupations like smiling at people on the way to work. Satirical but overindulgent, I had trouble getting through it. Two stars.
Founding Father, by Isaac Asimov
Dr. A was lured back into the world of fiction after an eight-year almost complete hiatus; apparently he can be cajoled into almost anything. In Father, based on this month's cover, five marooned space travelers try to cleanse a planet of its poisonous ammonia content before their dwindling oxygen supplies run out.
It's a fair story, but I had real issues with the blitheness with which the astronauts plan to destroy an entire ecosystem that requires ammonia to survive. In the end, when terrestrial plants manage to take root on the planet, spelling doom for the native life, it's heralded as a victory.
Bob Sheckley was a Galaxy staple (under his own name and several pseudonyms) for most of the 1950s. His short stories are posssibly the best of anyone's, but he eschewed them for novels that just didn't have the same brilliance.
Well, he's back, and his first short story in Galaxy in ages is simply marvelous. It involves a representative of a rapacious Terra who travels to a distant world to establish relations, said contact a prelude to its ultimate subjugation. But first, he has to establish meaningful communications.
Fiercely satirical and hysterical to boot, Talk is Sheckley in full form.
Mun, er, five stars.
Summing up
In the end, this all-star issue was, as usual, something of a mixed bag. Still, there's enough gold here to show that the river Gold established is still well worth panning. Here's to another fifteen years!
[Journey Press now has three excellent titles for your reading pleasure! Why not pick up a copy or three? Not only will you enjoy them all — you'll be helping out the Journey!]
The shape of the post-Ziff-Davis Amazing and the new publisher’s reprint policy become much clearer in this October issue. There are seven items of fiction here, and five of them are reprints, comprising about 55% of the magazine’s page count. If this issue is typical, Amazing is drastically shrinking as a significant market for original fiction.
The two new fiction items are the first part of a two-part serial by Murray Leinster, whose future seems mostly to have been behind him for some years now, and yet another Ensign De Ruyter short story by Arthur Porges. There is also another in the series of scientific hoax articles by Robert Silverberg.
There’s an editorial, this time by managing editor Joseph Ross, rather than by Sol Cohen, “editor and publisher” on the masthead. Ross shows himself to be as boring a writer as Cohen in his paean to Murray Leinster, the Dean of Science Fiction. The letter column, now just called Letters, reappears, with one very long letter praising the new Amazing by someone who has bought the first Cohen issue, but hasn’t actually read it. The point is elusive. The mediocre cover is by Frank Kelly Freas, probably bought at a rummage sale or something; Freas has never appeared on Amazing’s cover before.
by Frank Kelly Freas
With all these inauspicious signs, it’s a bit surprising that the contents of the issue are a considerable improvement over the previous one, the first of the Cohen/Ross regime.
As is my practice, I’ll withhold comment on Killer Ship, the Leinster serial, until it’s finished, pausing only to note that Leinster seems to have taken up a hoary theme: space pirates! And he begins on a determinedly vintage note: “He came of a long line of ship-captains, which probably explains the whole matter.” Hope struggles with trepidation.
The Eternal Eve, by John Wyndham
John Wyndham’s The Eternal Eve, from the September 1950 Amazing, begins as the protagonist Amanda sees a man approaching the cave she is living in and shoots him with her rifle. She then pushes his body over the nearby cliff to be eaten by the giant crabs that live on the beach below, this being Venus. From there, a flashback: Amanda has come to Venus for an 18-month job assisting an anthropological expedition. But Earth blows up, leaving nobody alive but the modest colony on Venus and those humans who were on Mars or in space at the time.
by Rod Ruth
Order starts to erode in the obvious ways, one of which is pressure for Amanda to pair off with one of the men. She’s not interested, and creates a diversion allowing her to slip off with her rifle and some supplies and set up housekeeping on her own, with the help of the childlike Venusian griffa. Eventually she realizes she can’t live happily completely outside human society, so she gives in and comes back, facilitated by the appearance of Mr. Right, but not before she shoots him too. Not fatally, though: think of it as romantic comedy, cordite replacing the flowers.
I’ve made this story sound a bit reactionary; not so. Wyndham is actually pretty sensitive to the dilemmas posed for independent-minded women by the demands of male-dominated society, even if he doesn’t solve them in this story. He's continued to chew on this theme in his later work, most notably the novella Consider Her Ways from the mid-1950s. He is also a much more capable writer at the word and sentence level than most Amazing contributors, new or old, making this story a pleasure to read. Am I really saying four stars? Guess so.
Ray Bradbury’s Chrysalis, from the July 1946 issue, is much better than the execrable Final Victim from the last issue, though considerably cruder than the stories he puts in his collections. Man here (Smith) has turned green and his skin has become a hard shell; also his metabolism has slowed almost to nothing. He is being watched over by Dr. Rockwell (the sensible and inquiring one), Dr. Hartley (the near-hysterical one), and Dr. McGuire (the nebbish of the bunch). Young Mr. Bradbury seems to have been spending a bit too much time at the movies, or else he’s aspiring to work for them, since the story proceeds mainly through scenes of these characters swapping reasonably sharp dialogue, while Smith continues being green and seemingly unconscious as strange transformations continue underneath the green shell. Dr. Rockwell broaches the possibility of superman, or super-something, and shortly, the story’s title is enacted, unfortunately a bit anticlimactically. The story is a bit too long, but the author moves it along capably. Three stars.
Jack Williamson’s first published story, The Metal Man, from the December 1928 issue, has not worn well. There’s a very lifelike metal statue of a man standing in the Tyburn College Museum—lifelike because it used to be Professor Kelvin of Geology, who got rich prospecting for radium. Now he has been delivered in his statuesque form to his old friend, the narrator, in a wooden chest, along (of course) with his manuscript. This recounts the Prof’s journey to El Rio de la Sangre, the River of Blood, which is highly radioactive. He’s looking for the source, resorting to a small airplane whose parts he assembles on-site when he gets as far as a boat will take him.
by Frank R. Paul
He winds up in a strange, colorful lost world. Very colorful. The river is like a red snake, and it goes underground and emerges in a mountain crater that holds a pool of green fire, extending to the black ramparts of the other side of the crater, while “the snow-capped summits about were brilliant argent crowns, dyed with crimson, tinged with purple and gold, tinted with strange and incredible hues.” A silver mist begins to descend. The green lake rises up to a shining peak, and from it emerges—“a gigantic sphere of deep red, marked with four huge oval spots of dull black,” its surface “thickly studded with great spikes that seemed of yellow fire”!
This is all in the space of a few paragraphs. After a brief respite, Prof. Kelvin finds his plane and himself covered with a pale blue luminosity, he is drawn down into the green (gaseous) lake to land, stumbles around and trips over a bird that has turned to metal, foreshadowing his own fate. He has more adventures (also very colorful, but enough of that) as he blunders around in this strange world created by lots of radioactivity, becoming more metallic as he goes. Unfortunately there’s not much more to the story than this parade of menacing wonders, made possible by the fact that back then nobody really knew that much about the effects of radioactivity. Two stars.
It should be noted that Williamson went on to produce The Green Girl, Through the Purple Cloud, The Stone from the Green Star, Red Slag of Mars, In the Scarlet Star, and Golden Blood, all within the next five years. The visible spectrum seems to have been a good career move for him.
The Time Jumpers, by Philip Francis Nowlan
by Leo Morey
Philip Francis Nowlan, perpetrator of the Buck Rogers Yellow Peril epics, is here in a lighter mood with The Time Jumpers (February 1934 Amazing), a mildly amusing period piece (albeit with certain period attitudes) about a guy who invents a time car and, with his platonic girlfriend, first narrowly escapes from marauding Vikings, possibly Leif Ericson’s outfit, then makes a longer foray into the Colonial period, narrowly escaping from marauding Indians, briefly meeting the young not-yet-General Washington, and then narrowly escaping from a French officer and his marauding Indians. Two stars.
Dusty Answer, by Arthur Porges
Dusty Answer is yet another of Arthur Porges’s tales of Ensign De Ruyter, notable chiefly for the excruciating tedium they achieve in relatively few pages. Their formula is clever Earthmen outwitting stupid and primitive aliens through elementary science tricks, this time the ignition of dust suspended in air. One star, if that.
The Kensington Stone, by Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg’s scientific hoax article, The Kensington Stone, concerns the finding and subsequent career of an inscription found in Minnesota which purported to show that the Norse Vinland settlement of Leif Erikson (yeah, him again, spelled a little differently) had sent an expedition as far as Minnesota. This one is just as well written as its predecessors, suffering by comparison only because the underlying story is less captivating, with no picturesque fraudster at its center. Three stars.
Summing Up
So: whatever one thinks about the new reprint policy at Amazing and Fantastic, new editor Ross has managed this month (or bi-month) to put together a decently readable issue. Question is how long he can keep it up.
[Speaking of books, Journey Press now has three excellent titles for your reading pleasure! Why not pick up a copy or three? Not only will you enjoy them all — you'll be helping out the Journey!]
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