Magazine

[January 14, 1965] The Big Picture (March 1965 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Science fiction writers often have to deal with things on a very large scale. Whether they take readers across vast reaches of space, or into unimaginably far futures, they frequently look at time and the universe through giant telescopes of imagination, enhancing their vision beyond ordinary concerns of here and now.

(This is not to say anything against more intimate kinds of imaginative fiction, in which the everyday world reveals something extraordinary. A microscope can be a useful tool for examining dreams as well.)

A fine example of the kind of tale that paints a portrait of an enormous universe, with a chronology reaching back for eons, appears in the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, from the pen of a new, young writer.


Cover art by George Schelling

World of Ptavvs, by Larry Niven


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan

Our story begins about two billion years ago. The character shown above is a member of a telepathic species with the power to enslave other sentient beings with their minds.


An example of a slave species that doesn't play much part in the story.


This slave species, on the other hand, has a big impact on what happens to its masters.

Kzanol the Thrint has a problem. On his way to the homeworld in his starship, the engine that allows it to make long-distance voyages explodes. The rest of the ship is unharmed, but Kzanol is stranded. Fortunately, he has a suit that slows time down to a crawl for the wearer. He can't reach his native planet with the power his ship has left, but he can crash into an uninhabited planet, where yeast is grown to feed slaves, after a couple of centuries. He stashes some valuables into a spare suit, puts on the other one, programs the ship for the slow journey, and goes into stasis, expecting to be rescued once enough time has gone by.


Kzanol in the stasis suit.

Cut to Earth, in a future of flying cars and interstellar travel. Larry Greenberg (now where have I seen that first name before?) is a telepath. Compared to an average Thrint, he has hardly any ability at all; but it's enough to get him a job communicating mentally with dolphins. This is really just a stepping stone to a real career of reaching the minds of aliens discovered on the planet humans call Jinx.

Scientists who have just invented a time-slowing device — sound familiar? — realize that the so-called Sea Statue, an ancient object found at the bottom of the ocean, is really an alien inside a similar stasis field. By placing it inside their own gizmo, they can deactivate it. Larry is along to pick up the thoughts of the alien. This works much too well.

Kzanol's mind takes over Larry's body. Although he still has human memories, he thinks he is really a Thrint, lost on a world of ptavvs (beings without telepathic powers.) He also believes that he is trapped in the body of a ptavv himself, because he is unable to control the inhabitants of the planet with his mind.


One of several genetically engineered species Larry/Kzanol remembers, adding greatly to the feeling of a richly imagined background. These are giant plants that use solar power as a defense mechanism.


These are dinosaur-sized, single-celled animals the Thrint use for food, feeding them on yeast. There turns out to be much more to them than meets the eye.


Racing animals, like horses or greyhounds on Earth.


The interiors of these trees act as rocket fuel.

At the same time, the real Kzanol escapes from his stasis suit. This leads to a wild chase across the solar system, as both Kzanol and Larry/Kzanol race to find the other stasis suit, which contains a telepathy-enhancing device that would allow the wearer to control all the minds on Earth. Both Earth-dwellers and the colonists who inhabit the asteroid belt head out after the pair. There's an economic cold war going on between Earthers and Belters, adding to the tension.


Kzanol thinks the other suit is on Neptune, but it turns out to be on Pluto, which used to be a moon of Neptune a couple of billion years ago.

This is a fast-moving, complex story with a richly imagined background. The author clearly did a lot of work creating his fictional universe and populating it with a wide variety of organisms. There are so many concepts thrown out that some readers may feel overwhelmed. Certain elements are not fully explored. (The slave that Kzanol throws into his spare suit seems to have no relevance to the plot. And what's going to happen to the colonists on Jinx? Maybe a sequel?) Overall, however, it's a fine novella, indicative of an important new talent.

Four stars.

Undersea Weapons Tomorrow, by Joseph Wesley

The first of a pair of nonfiction articles in this issue imagines naval warfare two decades from now. The scenario is similar to the Cuban situation, heated up quite a bit. The Good Guys set up a blockade of an unfriendly island. The Bad Guys use submarines to attack Good Guy shipping. The author considers the balance of wins and losses in this aquatic battle. (For example, how many ships do you need to sink to make up for the number of submarines lost in the process?)

He also discusses locating the enemy via spy satellites, very slow seagoing bases for aircraft, and porpoises as allies. It's a rather dry piece, with some interesting aspects.

Two stars.

Scarfe's World, by Brian W. Aldiss


Illustration by Gray Morrow

This starts like one of those corny old movies where cave people and dinosaurs live at the same time. There are a couple of odd things about this primitive world, however. Sometimes people just dissolve, and the male protagonist doesn't really understand why he wants to be near the female protagonist.

We soon find out that the humans and dinosaurs are miniature forms of artificial life, created for study. The process sometimes breaks down, explaining the dissolving, and the organisms don't reproduce, explaining the caveman's confused feelings.

There really isn't much to this story other than its basic concept. The last third returns to the point of view of the caveman, which pretty much rehashes what went on in the first third.

Two stars.

Phobos: Moon or Artifact?, by R. S. Richardson

Our second science article answers the question posed in its title right away. The author considers a Russian article from 1959 that suggested that Phobos is hollow, rejects it, and tells us why. The reasoning is highly technical. If I understand things correctly, when a moon is slowed in its orbit by something or other, it approaches the planet. Thus, although its velocity was decreased at first, it actually increases later.

Apparently Phobos increased its velocity due to this effect, but Deimos did not. One explanation for the observed effect would be if Phobos had an extremely low mass for its size; as if it were a hollow artificial satellite, for example. The author points out that there are several other explanations for the phenomenon, and that it really isn't that well established anyway. The whole thing will probably be of more interest to experts in orbital mechanics than the general reader.

Two stars.

By Way of Mars, by Ron Goulart

A guy falls for a girl, but she keeps standing him up at their dates. The Government Lovelorn Bureau tells him to forget her, but he doesn't give up that easily. Things rapidly get way out of hand, as the fellow gets in trouble with the cops, is shanghaied to Venus, escapes to Mars, and becomes the leader of a rebellion on the red planet.

I found the author's satiric portrait of a near future Earth, with suicide clubs and sex book plotters, more effective than the protagonist's interplanetary misadventures. The intent seems to be comic, although nothing particularly funny happens.

Two stars.

Pariah Planet, by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.


Illustrations by John Giunta

A spaceman kills a man in a bar fight on a planet with an odd system of justice. Although it was self-defense, he is convicted of murder, and transported to a prison planet. The underground society of this world is ordinary enough, with a couple of exceptions.

There are two groups of citizens. Type A people wear all different kinds of clothing, but Type B people must wear black at all times. Type B citizens are also required to repeat the crimes for which they were convicted, with the Type A citizens as victims. The protagonist, for example, is told to murder one Type A person each week.


The Type A people aren't really bald, as shown here, but the illustration sort of clues the reader in on what's going on.

This leads to a crisis of conscience, as the unspecified consequences of failing to commit one's assigned crime are said to be very serious indeed. As time goes by, the main character grows more and more fearful of what fate awaits him, and finds himself tempted to kill one of the Type A people, who seem like perfect victims.


The protagonist in a brooding mood.

The contrived situation reminds me of the sort of thing that used to show up a lot in Galaxy in the old days, with some aspect of society reflected in a funhouse mirror. Here, of course, it's crime and punishment. You'll probably figure out the nature of the Type A people, and how this eccentric system of justice is supposed to work, long before the end.

Two stars.

That's About the Size of It

After a big start, the second half of the magazine shrinks into a collection of disappointing little stories and articles. Maybe it's just the contrast between Niven's wide-ranging imagination and much shorter, less ambitious pieces. In any case, the publication is large enough to accommodate losers as well as winners. What do you expect for half a buck, anyway?


A big coin for a big magazine.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 12, 1965] Last Minute Reprieve (the February 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The Issue at Hand


Paula McLane

Well, what have we here?  A pretty decent issue of Amazing, not a common occasion at all, with some good and/or interesting material, one disappointing item by a big-name author, but no offenses against reason and decency!  Let us count our blessings, and proceed directly to their dissection.

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


George Schelling

Roger Zelazny’s two-part serial He Who Shapes concludes in this issue, and is the most pleasant surprise here: a capable writer taking on a substantial task and working hard to do a good job of it.  It features a psychiatrist specializing in neuroparticipation therapy: he projects hyper-realistic dreams into his patients’ minds and then stars in them, directing the action to the therapeutic end of his choice.  This is Render, the Shaper—a hokey note, but not misplaced, given the oratorical level of the whole. 

Neuroparticipation is a powerful tool, but sometimes double-edged: the therapist can lose control of the action and wind up in the patient’s movie, not his own.  Render is someone whose roots in his own reality are a little tenuous, by at least unconscious design: after the death of his wife, he maintains a determinedly superficial relationship with his mistress (sic) Jill, and a parental relationship with his son that is ostentatiously concerned (e.g., he changes the son’s school repeatedly) but seems emotionally arms-length.

So when another psychiatrist, brilliant, female, blind since birth, and of course also beautiful, asks Render to instruct her via neuroparticipation in visual imagery so she too can become a neuroparticipation therapist, the sophisticated reader can only think “Uh-oh.” I won’t go further; this is one that deserves to be read.  Not that it’s perfect by any means; unlike almost everything else in sight, it seems too short, and the end in particular seems rushed and underdeveloped.  But it’s a welcome sign both for the magazine and for the author, who seems to have moved from the “promising” column to the “delivering” one.  A strong four stars.

Far Reach to Cygnus, by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber’s Far Reach to Cygnus, a sequel of sorts to The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet from Fantastic of a few years ago, is labelled a short story but at 23 pages is as long as many novelets in this magazine.  It’s a rambling, low-intensity sort of thing, agreeable enough while reading, but it compares badly to Leiber’s tighter and sharper pieces like Mariana (Fantastic, 1960), A Deskful of Girls (F&SF, 1958), or for that matter the short novel The Big Time (Galaxy, 1958). 

Here’s another psychological theme, of sorts.  To open, our first-person narrator is racing eagerly to Dr. Dragonet’s redoubt in the Santa Monica Mountains, lured by Dragonet’s promise of “a drug that is to mescalin and LSD as they are to weak coffee.” Upon arrival there is some byplay involving the police, a beautiful young woman, and a possibly illusory black leopard.

Our hero then enters a sort of seance featuring another beautiful young woman, recumbent in a long white dress, and already drugged, describing a scene on an extraterrestrial planet featuring blue grass and inhabited by elvish blue people who ride unicorns.  Also present are a Professor, a Father, a Sister, “a handsome crophaired sun-tanned suavely muscled” young Hollywood man in all-white garb, who is “the newest and most successful Brando-surrogate and homegrown Mastroianni” of the media, and of course Dr. Dragonet.

The drug, or “psionic elixir,” is brought in by a third beautiful young woman (now we have a brunette, a blonde, and a redhead, all of them Dr. Dragonet’s nieces, if I am keeping score correctly).  But first, several pages of debate about the mind-body problem!  Finally, sixteen pages in, the characters start to take the drug, one by one, leading into several pages of drug effects, not badly done—the drug, as advertised, is psionic, so each character is seeing through the eyes of all of them.

And of course the drug effects become very palpable and menacing (mind-manifesting rather concretely, one might say) and are banished, and the Brando-surrogate, who it turned out was pretty dangerous, is psychically neutralized, and the white-garbed sort-of-medium recites some appalling developments on the blue planet (invaders with flamethrowers), and the police show up again briefly and comically, and much is made throughout about how fetching the young women are and how aroused and frustrated the narrator is (cheesecake without pictures, one might say). 

But all of these (slowly) moving parts don’t really add up to much (the police and blue planet subplots in particular go nowhere), and certainly don’t disguise the fact that the story is no more than a facile pot-boiler with some trendy furnishings.  Two stars.

The Answerer, by Bill Casey

New writer Bill Casey contributes The Answerer, the sort of story that might have appeared in Unknown in the early ‘40s—a fantastic premise developed like SF—except that editor Campbell wouldn’t have dared publish it.  Suddenly, prayers are being answered.  Everybody’s prayers.  So what happens?  As one of the characters puts it: “There can be nothing more dangerous than a personal god who actively interferes in the lives of men.” Hint: what if a lot of mental patients started praying?  It’s not the vignette one might expect to see on this theme, but an actual story, with a suitably sardonic ending.  Four stars.

Reunion, by David R. Bunch

David R. Bunch, who mostly hangs out in Fantastic these days, has his first appearance here in almost two years.  His short story Reunion is more lucid and less precious than his usual.  The language is also more straightforward though the preoccupation remains the same: the lives of humans whose bodies have been largely replaced with machinery (“new-metal” held together with “flesh-strips”; I think “cyborg” is becoming the fashionable term).  The unnamed protagonist is visited in his Stronghold by his twin brother, who “went with the big Paper Shield” (i.e., became a minister) rather than the metal one.  Protagonist is much troubled about their relationship and the prospect of meeting again, and considers shooting him, but in the end puts on the dog for him, mechanically speaking.  A moment of epiphany follows, but once the brother leaves—back to business as usual, war with the neighbors.  Three stars.

The Gobbitch Men, by Alfred Grossman


George Schelling

There’s a different flavor of the surreal in The Gobbitch Men by Alfred Grossman, who we are assured is “a novelist of some repute” responsible for Acrobat Admits and Many Slippery Errors, which I haven’t read, but which I gather could be described as black humor with anarchist tendencies.  So what’s he doing in Amazing?  I think writers use the term “salvage market.”

Grossman’s protagonist Irving is an ineffectual, incipiently alcoholic graduate student of the future, working on his thesis on the unbearably tedious, advisor-dictated subject of popular music of the late twentieth century, when he is delivered by mistake some spools titled Population and Catastrophe and the like.  He asks questions, learns how things really are in his world, is warned that he should keep on the straight and narrow or else, but the or else is imminent anyway.  Oh, the title?  The gobbitch men make a big racket with the cans, but that’s to cover their more sinister covert errand, which has suddenly become highly relevant to Irving.

This one is an interesting try, a heavy-handed dystopian satire in the mode of early Galaxy, cartoony and overdone, but still quite well written, as befits “a novelist of some repute.” Three stars, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Mr. Grossman slumming here again.

S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz soldiers on with the SF Profile series, this time with a less familar and more interesting subject than usual: S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple.  Wright is a particularly good subject for Moskowitz, who prefers writing about work of the ‘30s and ‘40s, since almost all of Wright’s SF work was published then or even earlier.  The best-known of his novels include The Amphibians (1924), The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928), Deluge (1928), Dawn (1929), The World Below (1929), Dream, or The Simian Maid (1931), The Adventure of Wyndham Smith (1938), and Spiders’ War (1954).

Titles to conjure with!  But not much else, since as far as I can tell, Wright’s SF is entirely out of print, at least in the US—suffering the fate of his ideas.  Wright, who is still around, 91 next month, is distinguished by his opposition to scientific progress generally and birth control in particular (no hypocrite he—he has ten children), and much of his work is dedicated to extolling the virtues of noble savagery.  Moskowitz’s denunciation of these views helps make this article rather livelier than many of its predecessors, and the unfamiliarity of his work lends it considerable interest.  Four stars.

Summing Up

So—not a bad issue of Amazing, something one doesn’t see more than once or twice a year.  There’s even a sort of unifying theme, psychology, if you count the ostentatiously neurotic protagonist of The Gobbitch Men.  Can Amazing do it again?  Maybe even make it a trend?  The public breathlessly awaits.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 10, 1965] A Little Breather (Doctor Who: The Rescue)

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By Jessica Holmes

Hello again! I hope everyone had a good time over the holidays. We’ve got a nice short serial to ease us into the new year, and thank goodness for that. I think another behemoth like The Dalek Invasion Of Earth would have killed me.

THE POWERFUL ENEMY

The Rescue is a story from David Whitaker. For some, that name may ring a bell. For me, that ringing is ominous and filled with doom. Why? Because the last time he wrote for Doctor Who, he gave us this little gem: The Edge Of Destruction.

So, that’s… encouraging.

We begin with a crashed spaceship. Admittedly I didn’t immediately realise that it was a spaceship, as the model looks far smaller. The ship’s split in two, and inside, there are two humans awaiting rescue: Vicki and Bennett.

Vicki’s just picked up a signal, and rushes to tell Bennett that their rescue ship has arrived. But how can that be? The rescue isn’t due for a few days yet. Bennett tells Vicki to double check with the rescuers, and warns her to watch out for someone called Koquillion, who will kill them if he finds out about the rescue.

Vicki is dismayed to find out that the rescue hasn’t actually arrived. But whose signal did she pick up?

Why, the TARDIS' of course. The Doctor’s having a nice little kip, much to the bemusement of Ian and Barbara, who’ve never seen him sleep through a landing. He’s acting quite oddly indeed, being terribly confused when they wake him up and inform him that they’ve landed. He decides to go out to have a look, and begins asking Susan to open the doors, before remembering that she’s gone.

There’s a moment where Susan’s absence is palpable, but it quickly passes and the group leave the TARDIS, emerging into a dark cave. His curiosity satisfied, the Doctor goes back inside for a nap.

No, you’re not alone in thinking this is weird. Ian and Barbara think so too. Ian suggests the Doctor’s age might be catching up with him, but Barbara counters that it’s more likely to do with Susan’s absence. Poor bloke’s going to need some time to deal with this big change. Amusingly, he hears the pair of them talking about him, and yells at them from the other side of the door. He might be getting older, but there's certainly nothing wrong with his hearing.

Ian and Barbara head off to explore, and it’s revealed that they weren’t alone in the cave. No, they were being watched, by a rather frightening-looking chap with claws absolutely everywhere. Even coming out of his face.

This is Koquillion, and he will be making a guest appearance in my nightmares tonight.

Ian and Barbara emerge from the cave onto a cliff, and spot the downed ship in the distance. They’re just about to go and fetch the Doctor when Koquillion shows up and asks them who they are, how they got here, and if they’re alone. Not suspicious at all. Not having much of a choice, however, Ian and Barbara give him an honest answer. Koquillion asks Ian to go and fetch the Doctor, after which he will escort them to the city. Not trusting him as far as they could throw him, Ian and Barbara try to both go back to the TARDIS, but Koquillion blocks Barbara’s way.

Brandishing a staff which seems to be some sort of weapon, he asks the obviously scared Barbara if she’s frightened of him, and assures her that he’s her friend…

…Right as he pushes her off the cliff.

Getting some mixed signals from you, Koquillion.

Back at the TARDIS, the Doctor is awake and having a little chat with himself. He’s been to this planet, Dido, before, and remembers it fondly for the very friendly people. Well, it looks like he might be in for a nasty surprise.

Outside, Koquillion blasts the cave with his staff weapon, causing a cave-in and trapping Ian and the Doctor inside. The Doctor comes running out at the noise, finding an unconscious Ian.

Meanwhile at the bottom of the cliff, Barbara’s not so well herself. She seems to have broken her fall with a branch, but she’s out cold, and somebody’s just found her. But is it friend or foe?

As he comes round and catches his breath, Ian tells the Doctor about his encounter with Koquillion. Thankfully it hasn’t left him too badly hurt, though I’m not really sure how the Doctor worked that out, as he admits that he didn’t get that degree. And I'm pretty sure he doesn't have x-ray vision. Well, let’s just hope Ian doesn’t drop dead of a bleed on the brain or a collapsed lung.

Back in the downed spaceship, Koquillion comes to interrogate Vicki about what she was doing outside the ship, having spotted her dragging something around outside. He seems to be holding her and her companion captive, while acting as if he’s protecting them from his people. He departs to speak with Bennett, and Vicki pulls back a pile of blankets to reveal Barbara, looking safe and sound and pretty good considering she just fell off a cliff.

Vicki explains her situation to Barbara. There used to be many more passengers aboard this ship. When they first crash-landed, the local people invited everyone aboard to a meeting. However, Vicki wasn’t well, so didn’t go. It turned out a lucky thing, because later that evening she heard an explosion, and Bennett was the only one who made it back. Not long after, Koquillion showed up, and has been keeping a tight hold on them ever since. They're just trying to survive long enough for the rescue to arrive.

In the cave, Ian and the Doctor are trying to find a way out. I have a question: why? The TARDIS can move through space, last time I checked. Why don’t they just move the ship?

Then again, with the Doctor’s piloting skills, they might just end up on Venus.

The Doctor is beside himself worrying about what happened to the people of this planet. Violence was utterly alien to them. They couldn’t afford to hurt each other; their population only numbered in the hundreds when he last visited.

At the crashed ship, Vicki mentions that Koquillion is the only one of his people she’s seen. She thinks the others are in a village not far away. Well, that sounds a bit fishy, doesn’t it?

Vicki hears someone coming, and rushes to hide Barbara, but it turns out it’s just Bennett, so she reveals Barbara to him. However, he doesn’t look too pleased to see her.

Back in the cave, Ian and the Doctor are edging along a chasm when they hear a deep roar, and shining their torch down, reveal a creature lurking below that looks sort of like a lobster and a scorpion had a baby. An ugly baby.

Where was this neat creature design back when we needed it with the Slyther (the Dalek pet from last serial)? It's cool, it's a bit scary, and most importantly it doesn't look like a sleeping bag. The noises it makes are also unearthly, ferocious, and quite unnerving. The sound department did a good job on this one.

They carry on, and find some handholds that were clearly man-made. That’s handy. However, Ian accidentally pulls one off the wall, revealing it to be a trap. Spikes emerge from the wall, penning him in. Then more start to emerge, pushing him towards the edge.

So, this is…fine. I don’t think there’s anything else to describe The Rescue. It’s just fine. It’s not stupid like The Edge Of Destruction but it’s not particularly clever or exciting so far either, so I don’t have an awful lot to dig in to or poke fun at. Let's press on, shall we?

DESPERATE MEASURES

So, what's a man to do when blades emerge from the wall, pushing him towards certain doom? Start stripping, of course.

Thinking quickly, the Doctor tells Ian to remove his jacket. By using the jacket to cushion the edges of the spikes, Ian is now able to climb around the spikes trapping him and rescue himself. Bit of a rubbish death trap, isn't it? And Ian's jacket doesn't even seem to have split a seam.

Back at the ship, Bennett informs Barbara that according to Koquillion, her friends are dead, but she doesn’t believe him. It takes more than a mountain falling on him to kill Ian Chesterton.

Barbara has an idea to set a trap to surprise Koquillion, but Bennett thinks it’s a bad idea. They just need to sit tight until the rescue arrives, because if they fail to subdue Koquillion he’ll kill them.

He then returns to his bed, refusing Barbara’s aid.

Back in the cave, the Doctor resets the trap, clearing the way. What’s it even there for? Is it for feeding the beast below? I thought these people were peaceful? Why in the world do these lovely kind pacifistic people have a death trap that belongs in some haunted tomb straight out of an old adventure serial?

Then they find a door, but can’t find a way to open it, so carry on along the edge. The Doctor hopes nobody comes through and starts creeping up behind them.

It’d be pretty dramatic and cool if someone did but… they don’t.

Why even bring it up, then?

Meanwhile, Vicki is lugging things around outside, but the scary lobster-scorpion thing is watching her. Barbara spots it, and rushes out with the flare gun to save her. Vicki screams at her to stop, but too late: Barbara shoots the creature. The poor thing makes a pathetic sound as it dies, apparently in great pain.

Vicki is furious. Why? Because that big ugly lobster-scorpion was her pet. It was called Sandy.

She’d trained Sandy to come to her for food. It was a herbivore, and perfectly harmless, if a bit scary looking, and it was her only companion besides Bennett, who spends all his time in his own quarters.

And Barbara killed it.

Barbara, you monster.

Ian and the Doctor arrive to a very tense situation.

Back in the cave, the mystery door opens and Koquillion emerges. I can’t help but think it would have been more efficient and also a bit sinister and interesting to have him emerge just after Ian and the Doctor passed the door. See, I really am starved for things to talk about beyond summarising, so my internal editor is emerging.

Back at the ship, the Doctor and Ian are telling Vicki that she looks a bit of a mess and to cheer up.

Wow.

For one thing, that's uncharacteristically insensitive.

And for another… well, to express the other, I'd have to use some rather family-unfriendly language.

Nobody looks good when they’re crying for heaven’s sake, and what does that even matter?

Look, you insensitive jerks, that thing was clearly her only source of comfort for however long she’s been here. I’d be really, really upset too if someone shot my pet. Good grief.

And everyone’s just so patronising towards her, ignoring all her requests not to do anything to jeopardise her rescue as if she’s just being a silly little girl.

She’s understandably very upset about all this, coming to the point of outright rejecting all their help. I just want to give her a hug, and stick up for her.

Ian and Barbara leave, but the Doctor beckons Vicki over, turning on full kindly grandfather mode. Looks like we’ve found a replacement Susan. That was fast.

He basically just tells her everything they’ve been telling her for the last few minutes, only now he’s doing it with every ounce of grandfatherly twinkle he can muster. And this time it works. For some reason.

She tells him that once the rescue comes, Bennett’s going to tell everyone on Earth that Dido should be wiped out, so Koquillion doesn’t get away with what he’s done.

We have a word for that, Bennett.

The Doctor says he’ll have a talk with Bennett (and hopefully knock some sense into him), so Vicki leads him through the wreckage of the ship. He tells her to go back and wait with Ian and Barbara while he talks. Vicki is not too eager to spend time with Barbara, but the Doctor tells her to give Barbara a chance. She’s nice.

Yes, Doctor, she is nice. I like Barbara. And I know she really didn’t mean any harm. I know that she genuinely thought she was rescuing Vicki. However, that doesn’t actually change the fact that she killed Vicki’s pet lobster-scorpion very painfully while Vicki screamed for her to stop.

The Doctor does explain all this to her, but really I do think Vicki is fully entitled to be upset with Barbara, and it doesn’t feel fair to be treating her as the unreasonable one.

Bennett responds to the Doctor’s knocking with a refusal to let him in, so being a reasonable person, the Doctor starts trying to break the door down.

Vicki returns to the other room, and Ian and Barbara come back in a little sheepishly.

Vicki apologises to Barbara for being upset with her, and Barbara apologises too, for shooting her pet in the face.

Can you tell that I’m ever so slightly taking Vicki’s side here?

Ian reassures her that he and Barbara do understand her loneliness. When they ask her when she left Earth, she tells them she left with her father after the death of her mother in 2493. Then they tell her that they’re from 1963. She’s astonished, as that makes them about 550 years old.

I’m sure they’re very flattered that she thinks the two of them are around 20.

But they explain that the Doctor is a time-traveller. She doesn’t know whether to believe it. Well, Vicki, it depends on what sounds more likely: that they have a fantastic skincare regimen and a penchant for vintage fashion, or got into a magic blue box.

The Doctor manages to break into Bennett’s quarters, finding them empty. Then who said he couldn’t come in? A tape recording.

Oh , and what’s more, there’s an intercom system allowing him to hear what’s going on in the other room. Vicki is criticising his fashion sense. To be fair, Doctor, you do dress as if Edward’s on the throne. One of them, anyway.

Then he finds a trap door…

Ian wonders where the Doctor’s got to, and goes to investigate. Hearing no response, he enters the cabin. However, the Doctor shut the trap door behind him, leaving the others none the wiser. Seriously Doc, why? Couldn’t you have left a note, in case you got hurt and were in need of rescue?

The Doctor explores the hidden passage, arriving at something resembling a temple. He hears Koquillion coming, and cool as a cucumber, invites him in for a chat.

The set for this room is impressively big and well-dressed, and there's lots of atmospheric mist around. The curious thing is that it doesn't actually seem abandoned, with everything well-kept and lit. The music also pulls its weight in creating a solemn, somewhat ominous atmosphere.

The Doctor comments that this used to be the people’s hall of judgement, which is fitting considering the circumstances, and asks Bennett if he’s aware that the robes and mask he’s wearing are only used on ceremonial occasions.

I admit I was genuinely surprised. I had assumed that the scary mess of claws was simply what the people of this world looked like. After all, the costume is about the same quality as the other alien costumes we've seen on this series. Perhaps even a little better.

I have to hand it to Whitaker: that was a genuinely clever move, counting on the audience's suspension of disbelief with the alien costume, then pulling the rug out from under us.

So, Bennett’s got quite a lot of explaining to do. Which he does, with a great deal of self-satisfaction. He explains that this whole ruse was to save his life. He killed a crew member on the spaceship, and was arrested, but the ship crashed before the crime could be reported back to Earth. He realised if he dealt with the other crew, he could avoid the consequences of his actions.

When the people invited the shipwrecked crew to a meeting, he arranged the explosion, killing both the inhabitants and crew. Remember how the Doctor said there were only a few hundred native inhabitants? Bennett wiped them out. A whole people.

The claws and the lobster-scorpion distracted us all from the only real monster in this episode.

He concocted the ruse so that Vicki would support his story when he got back to Earth. Now it's time to clean up the mess. The Doctor and Bennett fight, with Bennett getting the upper hand. Just when all hope seems lost for the Doctor, a pair of strange men turn up, and they don't look at all pleased with Bennett.

Cornered, Bennett releases the Doctor and cowers away, shuffling all the way to a familiar door as the men advance. He's so busy trying to avoid them that he doesn't pay attention to where he's going… and falls right into the chasm. Bye, Bennett. You will not be missed.

The Doctor wakes up back in the TARDIS, his friends having found him outside the cave. Who were the mysterious men who came to his rescue? Nobody seems to know.

The Doctor speaks with Vicki, who is despondent, now having absolutely nobody in the world. No friends, and no family. No ties to home. The Doctor, realising this, and considering his own loneliness, offers to take her with him in the TARDIS. They can go anywhere at all, and if she likes adventure, she’ll be sure to find it.

Well, you’ve sold me.

Vicki agrees, and gets her own ‘it’s bigger on the inside!’ moment.

Back at the downed ship, the rescue craft is attempting to get in contact, when the mysterious men from earlier turn up and destroy the communications equipment. It seems that a few of the native people survived Bennett’s butchery, and that they’d rather not have any more visitors for the time being.

Can you blame them?

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor has just made a safe landing… at the very edge of a cliff.

The others protest and tell him to move the wobbling ship, but before he can do so, it topples right over the edge.

Honestly. Parking is really not that difficult. Does this man even have a licence?

Final Thoughts

Well, here we are. How did I find The Rescue? Fairly unremarkable.

If I must, I will scrounge up a handful more words: it was mildly engaging, though it doesn't help that the most engaging part was the one I got most frustrated at. However, it is much, much better than The Edge Of Destruction.

We're welcoming a new companion aboard the TARDIS, in the form of Vicki, played by Maureen O'Brien. I quite like Vicki. She seems nice, and has a sweet and gentle nature. I do hope, however, that she does develop more defining characteristics than ‘sweet, kind and gentle’, because we don’t just want a replacement Susan, we want a fresh new character. Is she fresh? I really can’t tell yet.

I would certainly be grateful for less screaming at anything that looks scary.

In a way, I am glad for the general ‘okay’ness of The Rescue, and the brevity– I think we all needed a bit of a breather after the last. Still, I think we’re ready for something a bit meatier. Until next time!

3 out of 5 stars

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Science / Space Race

[January 8, 1965] The Skylark of Space (Britain's Skylark Sounding Rocket)

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by Kaye Dee

Hopefully Doc Smith will forgive me for borrowing the title of his famous story for my article, but I couldn’t resist because it fits so well. Since I began writing here, I’ve been wanting to talk about the Skylark sounding rocket, the first British rocket capable of reaching space (whether you go by the US Air Force and NASA definition of space beginning at 50 miles, or accept the Federation Aeronautique Internationale definition, based on the work of Theodore von Karman, of 100 kilometres/62 miles).


A different kind of Skylark reaching for the stars!

Hatching the Skylark

Sounding rockets, which can carry payloads into space, but do not have enough thrust to put them into orbit, are often neglected when discussing the Space Race. But they are perhaps more important (and certainly more often launched!) than satellites.

These suborbital rockets were still a relatively new technology a decade ago, and even by the end of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) only a handful of countries (including Australia, I’m proud to say) had developed a national sounding rocket capability. First announced in 1955, the Skylark sounding rocket was developed for the IGY by the UK Ministry of Defence’s Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), in collaboration with the Royal Society’s Gassiot Committee, which focuses on meteorology and upper atmosphere research.


Diagram showing the original design for the Skylark rocket. The design has been evolving ever since, improving the capabilities of the vehicle

The new rocket was originally called the Gassiot High Altitude Vehicle, which is a bit of a mouthful, and the story is that, in 1956, one of the engineers working on the rocket’s design at the RAE decided that he would like to see it named “Skylark”. I don't know if he was a fan of Doc Smith's work, but a class of UK rocket motors is named after British birds, so that was more likely his inspiration for the name. In any case, he apparently put up a paper to his superiors suggesting that the rocket should be renamed to something that would simpler and more memorable for public relations and offered a list of alternatives, none of which were particularly appealing except, very deliberately, Skylark. The plan worked, and the name Skylark was approved for the rocket.

Flying to Australia

Sounding rockets, like test missiles, need a lot of empty land on which to fall back to Earth; Woomera was the obvious place for Britain’s new scientific rocket to be launched. Skylark components and payloads are made in the UK and then flown to Australia by transport planes. These include a special dedicated “explosives” transport plane that carries the rocket engines to Australia fully-loaded with their solid propellant. The rocket motors are delivered directly to Woomera, while the payload parts arrive at the Weapons Research Establishment’s (WRE) Salisbury facility, near Adelaide (see June entry), where they are assembled by WRE technicians and British payload specialists and then transported to Woomera to be fitted to the launch rocket.


A Skylark instrument bay and nosecone being tested in a workshop at the WRE's facility in Salisbury, South Australia

Because of its slow acceleration, the Skylark needs a very long launch rail to ensure its stability in flight and this massive tower dominates Range E at Woomera, where the sounding rocket launches take place. It’s 80 feet tall and weighs 35 tons, so transporting it to Australia was quite a task. Interestingly, because of steel shortages in Britain when the tower was being designed, it’s actually made out of war surplus Bailey bridge segments!


View of Range E at Woomera where sounding rockets are launched. The massive Skylark launch tower dwarfs everything around it. Australia's first sounding rocket, Long Tom, also used this launcher initially

Skylark Acsending


An unusual philatelic cover from Uncle Ernie's collection marking a Skylark launch in 1958 – and British nuclear tests at the Maralinga range, adjacent to Woomera

The first Skylark launch took place in February 1957, before the official start of the IGY in July that year, with the first three flights being performance-proving flights. On its fourth flight, in November 1957, the Skylark showed that it could reach the space environment, soaring to an altitude of 79.5 miles. This flight was also the first to carry a suite of scientific instruments provided by British universities, including two experiments that have since been flown on many Skylarks: a ‘grenade’ experiment and a ‘window’ experiment. In the grenade experiments, grenades are ejected from the rocket during its flight and the explosions detected on the ground by microphones and flash detectors. From these measurements, temperatures and wind velocities at different altitudes can be determined. In the ‘window’ experiment, strips of radar chaff (also known as ‘window’) made from aluminium are ejected into the atmosphere to be tracked by radar, which provides velocity measurements of upper atmosphere winds.


I love this timelapse photo of a Skylark night launch, taken in 1958. SL04, the first Skylark to reach space, was also launched at night, although it seems that no-one thought to take a picture of that historic launch!

Of course, since 1957, the number and range of scientific experiments being flown on Skylarks has steadily increased, helping to provide a new understanding of the conditions in the upper atmosphere and the fringes of space. When the first experiment releasing sodium vapour into the atmosphere to study atmospheric density and winds flew in late 1958, people in areas hundreds of miles from Woomera thought that the strange sight of a reddish-yellow cloud might be associated with Sputnik III, the massive Soviet satellite that was in orbit at the time!


Clouds over South Australia, taken from above by a Skylark rocket in 1962, as part of a meteorological experiment

Skylark Improving

The original design of the Skylark rocket used a single Raven solid rocket motor. To increase its altitude and payload carrying capacity, different variants of the Raven have been used, and in 1960 the Skylark became a two-stage launcher, with the use of a Cuckoo motor for an additional boost on some flights. There have also been experiments with a parachute system, to try to recover some instruments or photographic plates intact, but so far these have not been very successful.


A Skylark rocket enhanced with a Cuckoo boost motor soaring into the stratosphere

Until very recently all Skylark flights were unstabilised, but just last year there were two experimental flights using Sun sensors to provide stabilisation. The development of this technique will make the Skylark more suitable for taking astronomical observations at high altitude, above the thickness of the atmosphere, and I’ve heard that there are plans for small X-ray and Ultra-violet telescopes and other astronomy payloads to be flown on future launches.

A Century of Skylarks


The Research Vehicles Group and others involved with Skylark at Woomera celebrate the 100th Skylark launch

At the end of September the Skylark notched up its 100th flight, which is perhaps not surprising as the launch rate has been steadily increasing. There were 19 flights in both 1963 and 64, and this year looks as if it will be even busier. The WRE has a section that manages the Skylark launches – the Research Vehicles Group: because of the high rate of firings and the time it takes to prepare each rocket for launch, there are four Skylark launch teams within the Group, each one dedicated to a specific Skylark flight.


Technicians from a WRE Skylark launch team preparing a rocket for firing in 1961

1964 also saw another new step for the Skylark, with two launches taking place for the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO) at Italy’s Salto di Quirra Range on Sardinia. This range was established in 1956 under the management of Luigi Broglio, who I mentioned last month as the mastermind behind Italy’s first satellite (see December entry). This Range is providing facilities to ESRO until its own sounding rocket facility near Kiruna in Sweden is completed.

Skylark looks set to become the workhorse of the European sounding rocket program, just as it is for Britain. NASA has even launched Skylarks out of Woomera: as part of a co-operative Ultra-violet astronomy programme with Australia, four ‘NASA’ Skylarks were launched at Woomera in 1961

Skylark in Orbit

Skylark rockets have also played a role in Britain’s Ariel satellite programme, helping to test out instrumentation and experiments before they were included in the satellites. Like Canada , Britain launched its first satellite, Ariel 1, in 1962 (see September entry), with help from the United States, which provided the satellite body in which the British experiments were installed, as well as the launch. In March last year, Ariel 2 was launched for Britain by NASA. In advance of both these flights, so much of the equipment was checked out beforehand on Skylark flights that I’ve heard that some wit described the satellites as “Skylark in orbit”!

Ariel 1

Britain's Ariel 1 and 2 satellites are almost identical. The scientific instruments on both were tested out on Skylark flights before being launched into space

It's been exciting to watch the progress of the Skylark programme and I expect that this versatile sounding rocket will be operational for many years to come. Australia has it's own sounding rocket program that has been designed to complement the Skylark research in many ways. I'll have to devote an article to it in the not too distant future

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Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 6, 1965] Plus C'est La Même Chose (February 1965 Galaxy)

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[If you have a membership to this year's Worldcon (in New Zealand) or did last year (Dublin), we would very much appreciate your nomination for Best Fanzine!  We work for egoboo…]


by Gideon Marcus

Things in Flux

I read an article yesterday about how America was retiring all of its first-generation nuclear missiles, the hundreds of Thors, Jupiters, Atlas Ds, Es, Fs, and Titan Is.  It's astonishing when you think how short their operational lifespan was.  The first Atlas D base came online in 1959; the first Titans were activated in 1962!  Yet there they go, replaced by just two types: the solid-fueled Minutemen and the liquid-fueled Titan IIs, both of which can be launched straight from atom-proof silos. 

It reminds me of the big science fiction magazine boom at the end of the 1940s.  After the War, Amazing and Astounding were among the few genre mags remaining in publication after the big pulp bust.  But around the turn of the decade, Fantasy and Science Fiction came about, and New Worlds and Galaxy…and the floodgates were opened.  By 1953, there were some forty magazines in more-or-less regular production.

Well, there wasn't enough talent to fill those pages, and probably not enough readers either (I remember struggling to keep up with seven mags in 1957), and by the end of the '50s, we were back down to six.  That number has grown a bit since then, but it's nothing like the old "glory days".

Even the magazines that still exist have changed substantially.  Astounding changed its name to Analog and went "slick".  F&SF is now on its fourth editor, and the quality of its contents is markedly diminished since last decade.  Amazing and its '50s born sister, Fantastic, not only got new management under Cele Goldsmith, but she recently got married and changed her name to Cele Lalli!

But Galaxy, my favorite since its establishment in October 1950, seems virtually unchanged.  Sure, it went to bimonthly in 1959, it's a little thicker, a little more expensive.  Fred Pohl, one of the magazine's primary contributors, now runs the show.

Nevertheless, Willy Ley still does the science column, the contents are still more thoughtful than technical (though less toward the extreme than F&SF), and the names remain familiar: Cordwainer Smith.  J.T. McIntosh.  James H. Schmitz.  Robert Silverberg (though he was in short-pants when the magazine first started.)

And quality-wise, I think it's still, pound-for-pound, the best sf mag on the market.  Is it perfect?  Hardly, but always worth a subscription.  Check out the February 1965 edition, and tell me if you don't agree.

An Island of Stability


A fascinating cover by newcomer "Wright" — it's not connected with any of the stories, as is common for Galaxy.

On the Storm Planet, by Cordwainer Smith

The neat thing about Smith's Instrumentality series, detailing an odd far future, is that it has been around long enough to have a near infinite number of plot threads.  In Storm Planet, we are reintroduced to Casher O'Neill, an exile from the planet Mizzer, who had previously searched for aid and arms on a planet of jewels.  Now, he has come to Henriada, a tempest of a world where cyclones run amok, and where once 600 million lived, just 40,000 remain — deterred by economic failure in the distant past. 


by Virgil Finlay

Upon arriving, Casher is offered a powerful cruiser by the planet's Administrator.  The price?  Casher must kill a girl.

Not just any girl.  She is an underperson, a rightsless animal shaped into human guise to be a servant.  Yet, somehow she is the most powerful person on the planet, someone who has resisted countless assassination attempts.

Who T'ruth really is, and why she holds such sway, are the central mysteries of this excellent novella, to which I find I must award five stars.

A Flask of Fine Arcturan, by C. C. MacApp

An interstellar whiskey company has a rather spectacular failure when the aliens responsible for the bottling go on an unplanned jag.  A cautionary tale against poor interdepartmental company communications, this epistolary is something of a throwaway.  Barely three stars.

Forerunners of the Planetarium, by Willy Ley

If you're of my generation, you grew up during the great planetarium boom, when every educational facility of merit was getting its own interior star chamber.  And over the last two decades, they've gotten cheap and portable enough that they're practically everywhere now.

Willy Ley does his usual competent job of explaining the origin of the planetarium and its ancestors, the orrery, the armilla, and the astronomical clock.

Four stars.

The Sixth Palace, by Robert Silverberg

The greatest treasure in the galaxy is guarded by a clever robot who, sphinxlike, demands correct answers to its questions.  Two men believe they have an ace up their sleeve that will let them prevail where others have failed: a little computer that knows everything.

Can it be that simple?

There's not much to this tale, but it's told very well.  Four stars, I think.

The Man Who Killed Immortals, by J. T. McIntosh


by Gary Morrow

McIntosh has already written about immortality, in his excellent Immortality for Some from five years ago.  This time, he adds an interesting twist.

Several hundred years from now, a costly operation enables those who undergo it to live forever — unaging, unchanging.  But the downside is enormous: they are unable to heal from any wounds.  These "elsies" (for LC or Living Corpse) accumulate great wealth, but they mostly use it to cocoon themselves in exquisite safety.

But someone who calls himself The Avenger, wants to change the status quo.  He's begun demanding millions of dollars of elsies lest he slice their vulnerable skin.

A fairly unremarkable whodunnit, it lacks the deep interest of his last story of immortals.  Three stars.

Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer, by Richard Wilson

Mr. Protagonist sells mental taps on four astronauts so that the American population can vicariously experience the first Mars Landing.  Unforseen events interfere.

This joke tale falls pretty flat, though I did appreciate this line:

The Marsbound astronauts…each had an I.Q. no lower than 130 and no higher than 146 (the NASA director's I.Q. was 147).

Two stars.

Fin's Funeral, by Donald H. Menzel

Frederick I. "Fin" Nolan is a brilliant physicist who passes away at the age of 68, just after coming up with a theoretical way to reverse the passage of time (something to do with Steady State expansion of the universe).  His will includes the curious request that his coffin be left sealed, and that, at his funeral, the dials on it be set just so.

I'm pretty sure you can guess what happens.  It's a pretty prosaic story, the sort of thing I'd expect of a first-timer who hasn't been reading our genre for decades.

(Interestingly, I understand the fellow is actually a brilliant theoretical astronomer — his nonfiction is probably pretty good; Funeral isn't badly written, just novice plot material.  Also, I'll put good money down that that the Steady Staters are going to lose to the Big Bangers.  Any takers?

Two stars.

Planet of Forgetting, by James H. Schmitz


by Jack Gaughan

Last up is a piece by an old pro.  Schmitz is inclined to storytell through exposition, which suits this first-person thriller.  It starts intriguingly enough, with a special agent awakening on a wilderness planet with only gradually returning memory of how he got there.  The novelette then meanders through a workmanlike adventure story of no particular interest, but the interesting ending brings things back into three-star territory. 

All's Right in the Galaxy

As you can see, Galaxy is amazingly consistent.  Any of these stories would have been suited to any of the issues over the last 15 years of publication.  I'd worry about stagnation, but with a 3.5 star aggregate rating, I don't mind things remaining as they are for a while.

Analog and F&SF, however…they could afford a little change!




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 4, 1965] Madness: 2, Sanity: 1 (January Galactoscope)

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[January's edition of the Galactoscope offers three novels in two books.  Be warned — there's madness afoot!]


by Victoria Silverwolf

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun

Now that you've got the Doublemint Gum jingle running through your head, allow me to explain my reason for annoying you. The Ace Double Series has been going for more than a decade, offering two novels in one. Two short novels, to be sure; some are really novellas. Others are short story collections, as we'll see in today's review. The pair of mini-books are bound in what the printing industry calls dos-a-dos. (Sounds like a square dancing term to me.) That is, each half of the volume is upside down, compared to the other half. Sometimes both parts are by the same writer, sometimes not.

Let's take a look at Ace Double M-109, featuring G. C. Edmondson's first novel, as well as several briefer pieces from the same pen.

Mister Edmondson or Señor Edmondson y Cotton?

I can come up with no better way to introduce the author than by allowing him to speak for himself, in the blurb that comes with the book in question.

I don't know how seriously to take all of that, but it certainly makes for interesting reading. I hope the novel (yes, I'll get around to it eventually) proves to be at least as fascinating.

Appetizers Before the Main Course


Cover art by Jack Gaughan

Stranger Than You Think is a collection of all the Mad Friend stories that have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to date. Because our Noble Host has already reviewed these tales, I won't go into detail.

Suffice to say that they all feature the narrator and his Mad Friend in rural Mexico, and deal with time travel, alien probes, reincarnation, and such things. The tone is very light, and the stories are about ten percent plot and ninety percent local color. They remind me, a bit, of R. A. Lafferty and Avram Davidson. In general, the series is inoffensive but forgettable.

The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream


Also by Gaughan

I told you I'd get around to it.

Our hero is Ensign Joseph Rate, commander of the good ship Alice, a unique vessel in the United States Navy of the modern era. You see, Alice is a wooden sailing ship, although she also has a diesel engine for emergency use. The idea is that she can engage in countermeasures against enemy submarines without making sounds that would reveal her position.

At the moment, Alice is engaged in testing new equipment, requiring the presence of an elderly meteorologist and his young assistant. Unknown to his motley crew, Rate is also supposed to investigate criminal activities aboard her.

All of this fades into insignificance, when lighting strikes Alice at the same time the ship's cook is messing around with a new way to distill illicit booze. (Believe it or not, this plays an important part in the plot.)

Full Speed Backwards

If you've read the title of the novel, it won't come as a big surprise to discover that Alice gets zapped back in time a millennium or so, as well as leaving the warm ocean area near San Diego for colder waters, somewhere between Ireland and Iceland. A battle with a Viking raider ensues, followed by a slightly less violent meeting with a merchant ship. Among the cargo she's carrying is a Spanish Gypsy, enslaved by the Norsemen. She winds up aboard Alice, and serves as the novel's main source of sex appeal. Besides that, she's also clever and a tough cookie, so I'll give the author some credit for that.

Here We Go Again

Skipping over most of the first half of the novel, we reach a point where Rate tries to duplicate the circumstances that led to this situation. This doesn't work out very well, because Alice doesn't return to her home, but instead jumps back another thousand years, and winds up somewhere in the Mediterranean.

After encountering Arab slave traders who temporarily take control of Alice, the time travelers eventually wind up on a rocky island, populated by goats and several naked young women, who are more than willing to supply the crew with plenty of wine and other carnal pleasures. There's an explanation for what seems like a sailor's fantasy, which involves another inadvertent visitor from the future, this time the madame of a brothel/speakeasy in 1920's Chicago.

A lot more happens before we reach the end of the novel, including battles with Roman warships and the misadventures of the only religious fanatic aboard Alice, a male virgin who finds himself in intimate situations with more than one alluring lady.

Worth the Voyage?

Although it's impossible to take the novel's version of time travel seriously, the plot doesn't stop for a second, always keeping the reader's interest. As you may have guessed, there's quite a bit of sexual content, which tends to be more teasing than explicit. There's also a lot of violence, given the constant attacks on Alice by just about every vessel that meets her.

The tone of the book ranges from darkly comic to intensely dramatic, with a bit of satire in the form of the religious fanatic. This character may raise some eyebrows among readers of faith, although his version of Christianity is clearly of the extremist variety. The ending raises the possibility of a sequel, but whether such a book will ever appear is up to the tides of time.

Three stars.

A Little Mental Illness for the New Year (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich by Philip K. Dick)


by Jason Sacks

This is the fourth Philip K. Dick novel released in the last several months, and I’ve read them all. Clearly science fiction’s most surrealistic writer is in the midst of an unusually fecund period, one in which his astounding fiction seems channeled directly from the writer’s brain onto the printed page. And while that unfiltered creativity makes for fascinating reading, Dick’s latest fiction shows him to be wrestling with some intense personal issues, including dislocation and mental health concerns.

Those recent works (The Penultimate Truth, The Clans of the Alphane Moon, Martian Time-Slip and his most recently published novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich) share a lot in common with each other. All three books demonstrate a mind in constant motion, continually distracted and probing, with ideas seeming to spark from every page in a cascade which starts out as thrilling, becomes tiring, and ultimately proves to be overwhelming. Ideas, interesting and odd, bonkers and basic, philosophical and dully grounded, seem to flow from Mr. Dick as freely as the sweat which constantly seems to be on the foreheads of each and every one of his neurotic protagonists.

Eldrich starts from a template similar to his Dick’s other novels. Most Dick novels feature a neurotic protagonist, and this book is no exception. This time he is named Barney Mayerson and he is a wealthy man in a low-numbered conapt building (a major sign of status) with a great job as the New York Pre-Fash consultant at influential company P.P. Layouts. But Mayerson has problems – oh nellie does he have problems. As the book begins, the businessman wakes up with a hangover, a strange woman in his bed and, most frightening of all, a draft notice which will cause the UN to send him to Mars. That sounds like the beginning of a film noir, but as we follow Mayerson, he slips into a different sort of darkness than the doomed protagonists of our darkest films.

To help him escape the draft, Barney has purchased a robot named Dr. Smile, intended to help Mayerson avoid the draft by making him even more neurotic than he seems. But even the robot isn’t perfect; it calls him by the wrong name and doesn’t seem to pay close attention to Barney, adding to the seemingly endless list of degrading events Barney experiences in the first few pages — and far from the final humiliation he experiences in the book.

Like so many lead characters in recent Dick novels – poor doomed Norbert Steiner in Time-Slip and lovelorn, oblivious Chuck Rittersdorf in Alphane pop immediately to mind – Barney Mayerson is a confused man. He is neurotic, uncertain, perhaps mentally ill. He has tremendous problems relating to the women most important to him, especially his wife. He even gives up all hope of avoiding the draft and instead volunteers to go to Mars, simply to get away from a source of tangled neurotic pain. It is tough to spend time with Steiner, Rittersdorf or Mayerson, because they are so uncertain of themselves despite their apparent success. These are so conscious of their own flaws, their own massive insecurities, that we can understand why these feel rejected by the worlds which surround them. As readers, we want to reject them as well, want to follow characters with some measure of self-assurance, like Trade Minister Tagomi in Dick’s 1963 masterpiece The Man in the High Castle.

Taken one at a time, each of the recent Dick books provide an intriguing portrait of men whose own demons sabotage their own best aspirations. Seen together as a collection of books, it’s hard not to see some authorial autobiography flowing through these characters. After all, if Mr. Dick is writing his books so quickly, how can he avoid writing himself into his stories?

If we take that assertion as fact as part of my essay (and I would be delighted to hear counterarguments in the letters page), then Palmer Eldrich is the most frightening of all Dick’s novels so far. Because at its heart, and in the great thrust of its cataclysmic conclusion, is a break with peaceful reality that actually makes me worry about the author.

Without going too deep into the reasons why – part of the joy of this fascinating book lies in the ways Dick explores his shambolic but complex plot – Barney ends up on Mars and discovers that nearly all the Martian colonists are miserable and drug-addled. Their experience on Mars is so wretched and soul-crushing that only psychedelic drugs, shared among groups of colonists, provide a brief break from their mind-numbing lives.

Barney is responsible for helping a new drug to come to Mars, cleverly called Chew-Z, which promises better highs and more transcendent experiences. But as readers soon discover, the new drug also creates a schizophrenic experience, one in which the terrifying Palmer Eldrich comes to dominate Martian society – and much more – in a way that terrifies everyone who considers it. Eldrich is a terrifying creature, with steel teeth, a damaged arm, and an approach to the world which builds misery.

In truth, Barney Mayerson has unleashed a demon, and it’s not spoiling much in this book to say that by the end you will feel the same fear Barney and the rest of society begin to feel.

Eldrich, thus, is a deeply unsettling book, and fits Dick’s recent output in a way which makes me feel concerned for the author. It is the third out of the four recent novels to deal explicitly with mental illness (in fact, mental illness provides the central storyline of Alphane and a key secondary storyline in Martian Time-Slip). It’s intriguing that Dick sees in science fiction the opportunity to put the readers in the mindset of a man experiencing a schizophrenic break, a psychotic episode, or battling debilitating depression, but the continual presence of such ideas suggests a man whose life is also battling similar breaks.

If Mr. Dick is obsessed with mental illness, does he see that illness in himself when he looks in the mirror? And if we readers purchase Mr. Dick’s books in which mental illness takes a central role, are we aiding his therapy or abetting his continual wallowing?

Palmer Eldrich is not an easy book to read, not once it gets going and we start to realize the depths of Meyerson’s, and Dick’s problems. The plot ambles and wanders and is dense with philosophy and allusion. For a 200-page book, this is no quick Tarzan or Conan yarn. Instead, it is a deeply upsetting, deeply complex look into the disturbed psychology of both its lead character and its author. After consuming so many Dick novels all in succession, I’m craving something much lighter. Neuroses are exhausting.

4 stars




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Science / Space Race

[January 2, 1965] Say that again in English? (Talking to a Machine, Part Two)

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by Gideon Marcus

A Matter of Time

We are now in the latter half of the 1960s, and computers have become a fundamental part of our lives.  I previously discussed how computers are really quite simple, only understanding ones and zeroes.  And yet, with a bit of ingenuity and a lot of patience, a computer can be instructed ("programmed') to do almost anything.co

Patience is the operative word.  As we saw last time, when programming in a language the computer understands natively, it takes six lines of computer language ("code") to add two numbers, and thirty just to have the computer use the Pythagorean Theorem to determine the hypotenuse of a right triangle.  Can you imagine doing advanced trigonometry that way?  Simple calculus?  How about advanced calculus?

If you're a scientist, you probably know advanced mathematics, but it's unlikely that you have any idea how to write machine language code.  And given that every computer speaks its own version of machine language, you certainly couldn't be expected know how to speak to all of them in their native tongue. 

But if you've got a thorny problem to solve, and the math is too complex (or more importantly, time-consuming) for you to handle on your own, you've got to be able to use a computer.  At that point, given the tools we've got thus far, your only option would be to employ a human translator to convert your problem into something the computer can understand.

People like this don't grow on trees!  It's not as if there are freelance software programmers out there who will take a coding assignment like piecework.  Computer tenders are full-time personnel employed by the institution that bought the machine.  Their time is precious.  They can't afford to write thousands of lines of program code every time an egghead wants to run a Fourier Transformation.  Moreover, they probably aren't scientists: would a computer gnome even know linear algebra from a serial circuit?

What's needed is a machine to talk to the machine.

A Language is Born

In 1954, a ten-person team led by IBM engineer, John Backus, developed the first robot translator.  Backus wasn't interested in plane tickets or phone bills; he simply wanted it to be easier for scientists to run math equations on a computer.  Sophisticated business applications could come later.


John Backus


Lois Habit, the lone woman on the team

Backus' team created FORTRAN: Formula Translator.  And it sparked a revolution.

FORTRAN actually comprised two elements: a new programming language for humans and a robot middleman for the computer.

First, the language.  FORTRAN, like any language, has a grammar and a vocabulary.  There are dozens of words, all of them more or less recognizable to an English speaker, though their definitions are highly specific.  Also, they must be entered in a grammatically rigorous fashion for them to work. 

But once one gets the knack, its orders of magnitude easier to program in FORTRAN than machine language.  For example, last time, we saw it took six lines of code just to add two numbers, and we had to include the numbers as part of the program.  What if we wanted a general program to add any two numbers?

It'd look like this:

PROGRAM ADD

C This program will add two numbers

INTEGER FIRST, SECOND, TOTAL

10 FORMAT(I5)
20 FORMAT(I6)

READ (5,10) FIRST

READ (5,10) SECOND

TOTAL = FIRST + SECOND

WRITE (6,20) TOTAL

END

Even without explanation, you probably were able to figure out how this program works, but here's some extra information:

Every FORTRAN program starts with PROGRAM (followed by the program's name) and ends with END.  At the beginning of every program, one declares their variables, informing the computer how to label any data it manipulates.  In this case, we're playing with integers, but variables can be real numbers or even strings of text.  FORMAT tells the program how many digits the variables can have (in this case, up to five for entry, six for the total).

When a line starts with a "C", any comment (generally explanatory) may follow.  What a boon for error-checking ("debugging") that is!

If you are lucky enough to have direct keyboard access to the computer to enter ("READ") the numbers to be added, and a CRT monitor on which the computer can display ("WRITE") the results, the interaction after the program is run will take seconds.  If you have to enter information with punch cards and view the results via printer, things will take a bit longer (and the numbers in the parentheses will be different).  But that's a topic for another article.

The whole program takes just 10 lines, one of which is optional.  Sure, it's half again as long as the equivalent machine code, but it can add any two numbers rather than two pre-coded ones.

Not only that, but that thirty line Pythagorean equation program can be done in just ten lines, too!  That's because FORTRAN includes a SQRT (square root) command.  Better still, there are commands for every trigonometric function (SIN, ASIN, COS, ACOS, etc.) so with just a few more lines, you can also get information on any triangle using the Law of Sines and Law of Cosines. 

Now you can see just how powerful a programming language can be!

Robot Middleman

Every computer comes with a kind of translator already hardwired into its permanent memory.  Otherwise, it couldn't interpret (for example) 101 as "Add" and 111 as "Print".  But, as we've discussed, they are incredibly minimal.  For a computer to understand the language of FORTRAN, it has to be programmed with an extra translator called a compiler. 

The compiler is a program input into the computer in machine language, of course (how else could it understand it?), but once entered, the compiler can be run to translate any FORTRAN program.  The compiler will completely translate ("assemble") the FORTRAN commands into a machine language program and execute it. 

This process is not instantaneous, just as a conversation between two people using an interpreter requires extra time.  Moreover, the compiler-assembled program is generally not as efficiently written (i.e. it takes more lines of code) as one optimized for brevity by an expert human. 

But because one saves so much time coding in FORTRAN, and because a human machine language expert isn't needed, the result is a tremendous net increase in efficiency.  In fact, programmers have been 500% quicker in their coding as a result, and they can focus on the problem they are trying to solve rather than the daunting task of talking in ones and zeroes or some arcane machine language.  That's worth the small price in computing time inefficiency.

Programming for everyone

FORTRAN was the first "higher-level" programming language, but it was quickly joined by many others.  They include LISP ("LISt Processing"), COBOL ("COmmon Business-Oriented Language"), and ALGOL ("ALGOrithmic Language"), each with their own specialized vocabulary and capabilities.  Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that a computer that can't read a higher-level language is almost useless; it's no surprise that FORTRAN was developed less than a decade after ENIAC, the first computer, came on-line.

But, as amazing as all of these languages are, their usage remains daunting.  FORTRAN et. al. are very good for the applications they were designed for, but not terribly flexible for anything else.

What this means is that, while FORTRAN might be useful to a physicist for making mathematical calculations, and COBOL is great for a corporate engineer to automate inventory control, there is no language for general application.  No introductory computing language that one (say, a college student) might learn to familiarize oneself with the theory of higher-level programming.

Moreover, most people don't have direct access to a computer, which means laboriously using a keypunch machine to put holes in punchcards (with one line of code per card), giving the stack to a technician, and waiting who-knows-how-long to get a result. 

The stage has been set for a simpler, even higher-level programming language that will allow anyone to dive feet first into coding — and that's basically what we'll be talking about in the next article in this series.




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Magazine, Serial

[December 31, 1964] Lost in the Desert (January 1965 Analog)

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[Today is your last chance to get your Worldcon membership! Register here to be able to vote for the Hugos.]


by Gideon Marcus

Wandering

Setting: The Sinai, after the Exodus

Aaron: Hey, Moses! We've been walking a long time!

Moses: Nu?

Aaron: Haven't we seen that rock before? Are you sure you know the way to the Holy Land?

Moses: Who's the Moses here? I know the way to go. The Sinai is only 150 miles across. It'll only take us…

Narrator: FORTY YEARS!

I cite this absolutely accurate historical vignette for two reasons. One, my daughter has decided to give the Torah a deep dive and analysis over Winter (I believe the gentiles call it "Christmas") Break. The other is, well, the next installment of Frank Herbert's Dune World saga has been staring me in the face for weeks, ever since I bought the January 1965 issue of Analog. I found I really didn't want to read more of it, having found the first installment dreary, though who am I to argue with all the Hugo voters?

And yet, as the days rolled on, I came up with every excuse not to read the magazine. I cleaned the house, stem to stern. I lost myself in this year's Galactic Stars article. I did some deep research on 1964's space probes.

But the bleak desert sands of Arrakis were unavoidable. So this week, I plunged headfirst into Campbell's slick, hoping to make the trek to the end in fewer than two score years. Or at least before 1965. Join me; let's see if we can make it.

The Issue at Hand


by John Schoenherr

It's Done with Mirrors, by Ben Bova and William F. Dawson

Our first step into the desert is deceptively mild. Amazing's science guy and his friend offer up the suggestion that the universe really isn't so big — all the billions of galaxies we see are really the light from a few thousand going round and round a small universe.

It doesn't sound very plausible to me, but I enjoyed the cosmological review, and the picture included was drafted by my nephew's astronomy professor at UCLA!

Three stars.

The Prophet of Dune (Part 1 of 5), by Frank Herbert

And now we sink waist deep.

The Prophet of Dune is not just the sequel to Dune World; it picks up right at the cliffhanger where the other left off. Unlike most serials, but similar to how it was done with Cordwainer Smith's The Boy Who Bought Old Earth, the story begins without explanation. You simply have to have Dune World fresh in your mind.

Otherwise, you won't know why Paul Atreides and his mother, Lady Jessica, are refugees from Baron Harkonen in the deserts of Arrakis. You won't know who the Padisha Emperor is or why his Sardaukar elite forces are dressed in Harkonen House garb. You won't know who Duke Leto Atreides was, or why he's dead; who Yueh was and why he defected from House Atreides to the Harkonens; the significance of Hawat the mentat…or even what a mentat is. The significance of the melange spice, which is the desert planet's sole export.

I'm not sure why (editor) Campbell didn't include a summary at the beginning, but unless you've read Dune World, you will be lost.

If you have, you'll be bored.


by John Schoenherr

I won't go into great detail since this serial will cover a ridiculous five installments before it is done, but suffice it to say that includes all the features I came to dread in the first serial. That is to say:

  • Characters declaiming in exposition.
  • Endless fawning over wunderkind Paul Atreides, who has the gravitas of his father, the ability to see all futures, and no weaknesses (or character) that I can discern.
  • Every other line is an internal thought monologue, usually unnecessary, flitting from viewpoint to viewpoint according to author Herbert's fancy.
  • Lots of sand.

Dune presents an interesting, well-developed world populated by uninteresting plots and skeletal characters. And it looks like I'm suck in its deserts for at least another half year.

Two stars.

A Nice Day for Screaming, by James H. Schmitz


by Kelly Freas

A momentary respite as we trudge out of sand and onto more solid ground…

Schmitz shows us the maiden voyage of a new space vessel, jumping not into overspace but to the quantum beyond — Space Three! But upon its arrival, a terrifying entity appears and invades the ship, wreaking havoc with its systems.

The nature of the encounter is not what it seems. I like a story that turns a horror cliche on its head.

Three stars.

A Matter of Timing, by Hank Dempsey


by Robert Swanson

A tingling in our mind distract us, and suddenly we are again ankle deep in the dunes.

Until I read the byline (I've never heard of Dempsey), I thought A Matter of Timing was an inferior entry in Walter Bupp's psi series, in which a secret organization keeps a cadre of esper talents on hand to deal with weird events. While Dempsey's introduces a lot of potentially interesting characters (all apparently quacks; the organization that handles them is the Committee for Welfare, Administration, and Consumer Control — CWACC), the story doesn't do anything with them.

Droll setup and no resolution. Two stars.

Final Report, by Richard Grey Sipes

From out of nowhere, there is a blast of hot wind, and we are inundated with a spray of stinging sand and…paper?

Told in military report style, complete with typewriter font and army-esque jargon, Final Report pretends to be the results of the test of a psionic radio system. In the end, despite the set's fantastic capabilities, it is rejected as a prank, especially as it's too cheap to even be government pork.

Heavy handed, highly Campbellian, and utterly pointless. One star.

The New Boccaccio, by Christopher Anvil

As we reel from the last blow, the clackety clack of machinery assails our ears, but at least we're walking on stable rocks again.

In The New Boccaccio, Anvil covers the same ground as Harry Harrison did a couple of months ago in Portrait of the Artist — an automatic creator is brought into a publishing house to replace a human artist.

The prior story was serious and involved a comic maker. Anvil's is comedically satirical and involves a device that writes literate smut. It's a bit smarter, I think, but not worth more than the three stars I gave the other story.

Finnegan's Knack, by John T. Phillifent


by Kelly Freas

Look! Off in the distance…is that a line of trees? Or is it just a mirage? Our pace quickens, but our boots keep sinking in the shifting sands.

John Phillifent's Finnegan's Knack involves the arrival of an alien ambassador. His race is so far in advance of ours that there's nothing we can do to impress him. A demoralized Colonel joins his rather lackadaisical Major friend on a fishing expedition to relate his woes. Along with them is a certain Private Finnegan with a knack for accomplishing the darndest things (landing fish with a boat hook; making a hover car pop a wheelie; make a call to a private number). Maybe he can impress the aliens with his illogical prowess?

Maybe. Certainly nothing in the story made any particular impression on me, and as with so many of the other stories in the issue, the lack of a solid ending killed whatever competent writing came before.

Two stars. Oasis lost.

Does not Compute


"Rhoda" the robot…signed by Julie Newmar, herself!

How can it be that the one-proud magazine that Campbell built can pour forth little but a torrent of desert dust? All told, the magazine earns an dismally low 2.1 stars, This is significantly below the 2.5 star mags (Amazing) and (Fantasy and Science Fiction) and far below IF (2.9), Fantastic (3.3), and New Worlds (3.5).

Maybe SF is suffering in general, if this month's distribution is any indication. Certainly, it was a sad month for female representation (2 stories out of 37). On the other hand, it's not all bad news: you could fill three magazines with the superior stuff this month.

Every desert has an end, even if it's just the desert of the sea. Perhaps, if we keep trekking, we'll find out way back to verdant lands.

You know — after four more months of this fershlugginer Dune installment…

Happy New Year anyway! Thank you for following the Journey!




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Magazine, Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial, TV

[December 29, 1964] Be Ye All of Good Cheer… New Worlds, January 1965

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by Mark Yon

Scenes from England

Hello again!

I hope Christmas for you was a good one. Christmas was good to me in that I received a copy of Charles L. Harness’s The Paradox Men. So far I’m really enjoying it as an over the top Space Opera. Why has it taken so long to be published here in Britain, though?

More good cheer: this month’s New Worlds editorial begins with a loud “Hurrah!”, announcing that both New Worlds and Science Fantasy are to return to monthly publication in 1965.

This is wonderful news for both New Worlds and Science Fantasy. Clearly the increased readership has paid dividends on both counts. Let’s hope this continues. More on this particular issue later.

News-wise, politics has been on its Christmas break. So not a lot to particularly report there.

The contest for the Number 1 single slot is always competitive, but Brits have a particular obsession for the Christmas Number 1 single. This year that enviable position was held by (unsurprisingly) The Beatles with another catchy tune – I Feel Fine.

Music-wise, most of the year’s reviews seem to have focused on the global domination of our Fab Four as they travel the world, permanently surrounded by screaming teenagers. Not only having the British Christmas single, they will also be pleased to know that their single Can’t Buy Me Love, is the single to have spent longest as Number 1 for a majestic 3 weeks, back in March and April. More seriously, it really has been their year and I can see 1965 carrying on in much the same way.

At the cinema I am pleased to write that I enjoyed our Christmas movie,  Father Goose, starring Cary Grant. A rather comedic role with a feel-good family tone. It’s not Cary's best, but it was pleasant enough. And in the middle of Winter, pleasantly tropical.

But be warned – My Fair Lady is due at the end of January. I know that you’ve had to endure this film already in the US – all 170 minutes of it – and the reviews have been quite good, but I still haven’t managed to come up with an excuse of sufficient importance to avoid it. Can I claim that I’m much too busy reporting to you to go? I doubt it, sadly. I may have to bow to the inevitable.

On a more positive note, on the television I am enjoying the latest Doctor Who, which seems to be regaining its confidence after a couple of so-so episodes, and hopefully that upswing should continue in 1965. Jessica’s already mentioned this, but the latest Dalek episodes are in my opinion the most enjoyable series yet.

The Issue At Hand

cover by Robert J. Tilley

This month’s cover shows that, as hinted at last issue, circles are ‘in’.

Personally, I still yearn for art with some detail, but am resigned to the current vogue, whilst at least appreciating that, despite being crude and simple, it’s still not as bad as Carnell’s last issues.

The Editorial, as shown earlier, is pleasingly upbeat. It is akin to a state of the nation address, showing us where we are in the current state of things artistic and literary. There’s mention of a new critical magazine edited by Messrs Aldiss and Harrison, which sounds intriguing.

To the stories themselves.

The Power of Y (part 1), by Arthur Sellings

The triumphant tone hangs over to this first part of a serial by Arthur Sellings, who is highlighted in the Editorial for producing “stories of a consistently high standard since he began writing.” To me this does sound a little like faint praise, though I must admit that the serial is one of the most enjoyable I’ve read for a while. Max Afford is an art dealer in a world where Transdimensional Multiplying, or Plying, allows an object such as a painting or a car to be borrowed from multiple universes. You want the original Mona Lisa? You can borrow it and have it in your home, for a price.  There are limits, however. It is a very expensive process and an object can only be plied to a maximum of twenty copies. Plying living objects, such as a beloved pet, is seen as impossible.

This is an intriguing concept, but one that becomes more complicated when Max suddenly finds that he can tell the difference between plied objects and the original simply by touching them.  The story then ends on a cliff-hanger involving the President of the Federated States of Europe.

It’s all written in a deceptively chatty style that Heinlein is so good at, a combination of charming bonhomie and sly digs at both the establishment and the world of art – although Sellings is clearly an author the editor Mike Moorcock prefers. Nevertheless, it read well and was entertaining, and most of all I’m intrigued to see where this one goes. The most negative thing I could find about it was the awfully childish art throughout the prose! A great start. 4 out of 5.


Childish art? I rest my case, m'lud. But perhaps it's intentional irony in a story about art…

The Sailor in the Western Stars , by Bob Parkinson

A debut author. You can tell from the artwork at the beginning that this is a story retold as if it were ancient myth, a folk-tale rather like a science-fictional Arabian Nights. I liked the romantic tone of this, that the main character is some sort of wandering pirate-trader destined to sail across space. It’s similar to Bertram Chandler’s Rim stories or even Poul Anderson’s David Falkayn /Star Trader stories, but deliberately more lyrical and enigmatic. Behind the poetic sheen there’s not a lot going on, admittedly, but I remembered it more than many stories. File under “Interesting”. It’s nicely done, but fairly inconsequential. 4 out of 5.

Tunnel of Love, by Joseph Green

And here’s the return of Moorcock’s friend, Joseph Green, after Single Combat in the July-August 1964 issue. The title suggests a cheap fairground ride, but it is actually an ethnologic study with a creepy twist. Two young graduates, realising a way to make money, attempt to make a movie on Procyon Nine, a planet known for its beautiful people but whose strict moral code is that visitors do not seduce them. The twist is that the would-be suitors of the girls have, as a rite of passage, to crawl through an interdimensional portal that connects Procyon Nine to the nuptial bed! This is not quite as outré as it sounds and there’s a big old twist at the end. I found it better than I thought it was going to be, an adventure story that also made me think of it as a raunchier take on Chad Oliver’s themes. 3 out of 5.

There’s A Starman in Ward 7, by David Rome

And now something a bit darker. Very pleased to see the return of this writer, last seen in the August 1963 of New Worlds. As far as the New Wave type stories go, this is actually one I liked.

It is the story of a psychotic murderer who is locked up in an insane asylum and who claims to have been in a ward with a new inmate – a Starman from Alpha Centauri. It’s written in a deliberately disjointed and irrational manner and is filled with those stylistic typing patterns and fragmented streams of consciousness that you may remember in Alfred Bester’s work. It is something that the New Wavers should love – and for a change, I also liked. Unlike most stories that try this technique I found that David’s story doesn’t lose its purpose or its narrative thread along the way.  4 out of 5.

Election Campaign, by Thom Keyes

Oh-oh. Here’s the return of Thom Keyes, whose last story, Period of Gestation, was in the September – October 1964 issue of Science Fantasy.  I really didn’t like it. But actually, Election Campaign is a more straightforward tale than I thought it was going to be. General Aldheyer is sent on a mission to secure the votes for the General Dynamics Party of an obscure and out of the way colony. Unfortunately, the brain-in-a-box space pilot malfunctions on the way and the only solution is to create a replacement pilot. Consequently, Aldheyer’s brain is transplanted into the ship.  There’s a lengthy description of the surgical process and the story ends with the spaceship’s arrival on the planet to begin its electoral campaign.

After our recent change of government, this story is perhaps surprisingly topical. Some politicians will do almost anything for power! I must admit that this was more enjoyable than Keyes’ last story, but the purpose of it seems a little pointless, other than to make the reader question what makes a machine human and vice versa. Anne McCaffrey’s done all this before, of course.  3 out of 5.

Space Drive, by Gordon Walters

We then get a lengthy chunk of the magazine concerned with reviews and non-fiction. Gordon Walters is a writer new to me, although you may know him better as George Locke.  This is an article that discusses the different means of travelling around science-fictional space that have been used by authors in the past. It’s a nice discussion that sums up concepts from a range of books and authors.

Books: Fancy and Imagination, by Michael Moorcock, James Colvin and Langdon Jones

As expected from previous comments there’s reviews of Charles L. Harness’s The Paradox Men and Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard. Michael Moorcock likes both.

The bulk of the reviews from Colvin (aka Moorcock, of course!) and Langdon Jones pick up a rag-bag of books. Honorary mentions go to Andre Norton’s Judgement on Janus, which is OK, James Blish’s A Life for the Stars, which is ‘better’ and Alan E. Nourse’s Scavengers in Space (good for children.) On the other hand, Poul Anderson’s Time and Stars and Damon Knight’s Beyond the Barrier both get a mauling. The second New Writings in SF anthology is ‘disappointing’, which probably means that I will like it.  The Best from F & SF is above average yet summarised as overpraised, but A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with stories from the magazine originally published between 1949-59, is 'excellent'.

There’s also the usual endorsement of J G Ballard, this time for the US publication of The Burning World, and praise for Anthony Burgess’s 'powerful and horrifying' A Clockwork Orange, which is one of the most unusual books I’ve recently come across.

Langdon Jones then positively reviews Arthur Sellings’ The Uncensored Man and C. M. Kornbluth’s The Syndic.

The Letters pages show that I Remember, Anita, published in the September-October 1964 issue, seems to have generated some controversy. There’s also a letter complaining about the return of illustrations, which shows that people are never satisfied.

Summing up

It may be the season, but I’m pleased to say that this issue of New Worlds was one I enjoyed more than I didn’t. I enjoyed the range of stories, but most of all I liked the actual stories, which were not anything particularly radical yet made me feel like it was worthwhile paying my money to read them. Last month I said that I was enjoying Science Fantasy more. If this is New Worlds’s response, then the differences between the two magazines might not be as much as I had thought. Science Fantasy may have a fight on its hands for my attention!

And with this in mind, next month I should have two magazines to review – New Worlds and Science Fantasy! It’ll be interesting to see which one turns up first.

All the very best to you and yours for 1965.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]

mall>

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[December 27th, 1964] No tears, no regrets, no anxieties (Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Parts 4-6)

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By Jessica Holmes

Hello, hello, everyone, I hope you’ve all had a lovely winter holiday. So, let’s recap: The Dalek invasion of Earth is well underway and everything is going wrong. That’s the gist of it. Can the Doctor and company make it right? Let’s see.

THE END OF TOMORROW

Tick tock goes the bomb, counting down the Doctor, Susan and David’s last few minutes. To make matters worse, the Doctor’s still woozy, and he passes out when he’s most needed, so Susan and David have to try and disarm the bomb themselves. David uses some acid from Dortmun’s acid-bomb to get through the casing of the device, melting through it in seconds flat. Once the casing is removed, David manages to remove the activation mechanism. Crisis averted.

Now they’re no longer about to be blown to bits, David takes charge, because…well, he’s the only available bloke, I suppose. Anyway, David decides that the Doctor should hide while he and Susan look for a way out of London.

Meanwhile, Barbara and Jenny are preparing a lorry. Suppose it’s handy they went to a transport museum!

Ian and Larry are on the road, and they spot a bunch of human slaves towing along a cart for the Daleks. Has all the coal run out or something? I know, I’m nitpicking the logistics of the Dalek invasion.

Ian and Larry get spotted by one of the workers, a man called Wells, who manages to cover for them with some quick thinking when a Roboman asks what they’re doing. The Roboman still demands they come with him, and hits Wells. Ian and Larry stop to help, but the Roboman orders them to desist. When they don’t, he says ‘You must obey orders!’ to which Ian snaps back, ‘Get new orders.’

It seems to fry the robo-bloke’s head a bit. He’s still mulling it over as they escape. I don’t know why; perhaps the Robomen just aren’t very bright.

The Roboman eventually gets himself sorted out and comes to apprehend the men, only to be clobbered over the back of the head by Ian for his troubles. Safe for now, Wells tells the men about a smuggler called Ashton who might be able to help them get out of the work camp.

Back in London, Barbara and Jenny are taking their time getting out of the city. Jenny is frustrated that Dortmun would throw his life away just to prove a point. Barbara retorts that he sacrificed himself so they’d have a chance to escape and thwart the Dalek invasion. The Daleks seem to have assumed that Dortmun was alone, so haven’t come poking around. Because apparently the Daleks only have a couple of brain cells between them.

It seems like a bit of a weak justification for killing off the only disabled character, if you ask me. It’s almost as if it was just more convenient to kill him off. No need to keep lugging a wheelchair around. Sorry if I sound a bit cynical, but we wheelchair-users don’t tend to be included in adventures, and when we are? Things like this happen.

Later on Jenny and Barbara’s road trip, they come to a gang of Daleks blocking the road. Does Barbara stop? Try a different route? Nope. Barbara doesn’t even slow down. The Daleks tumble like bowling pins, and there isn’t even a scratch on the lorry! Poor Dortmun. Bloke works for years perfecting acid-bombs that don’t work, and some 20th-century lorry makes scrap of the Daleks.

On the Dalek saucer, they prepare to intercept. Hearing the saucer coming for them, Barbara and Jenny leap from the vehicle, just before a ray from the saucer turns it into a toy lorry which then blows up. Oh. Oh, sorry. Same lorry, bad model. My mistake.

Down in the sewer, Susan and David ran into Tyler, who warns them that the sewers are full of alligators. Yes, alligators.

He decides to lead the two back to the Doctor, and curtly informs Susan that he hasn’t seen Barbara or Ian. Susan laments his apparent lack of caring, and David explains that he resists getting at all close to people, because he’s known too much killing. Or maybe, Susan, he just has a bit more on his mind at the moment than exchanging pleasantries.

David assures Susan that one day the Dalek invasion will be over, and they’ll be able to have a fresh start.

Up in Bedford, Ian and Larry hear an unearthly growl, and we can see… something skulking in the back of the shot. It took me a moment to decide whether or not it was just part of the set. That was until it moved. It slithers away at Ian’s approach, leaving the men none the wiser as to what on Earth they just heard. The men head off, meeting up with Ashton the smuggler, a terribly friendly chap who greets them with a loaded pistol.

Luckily for them, Wells turns up and vouches for the pair. Ashton relents and they sit down to have some food.

Ian asks what the thing is outside. It’s called a Slyther, and is something of a pet to the Daleks. It eats people. Of course the Daleks like it. Where did it come from, though? Is it the only one of its kind? We will never know.

Meanwhile in the sewer, Susan almost gets herself eaten by a young alligator. It’s actually quite cute. Entirely the wrong takeaway from the scene, I know. Tyler fires on the alligator, and also manages to find the Doctor.


Look, he's only a baby.

Meanwhile, the blokes are finishing up supper when a rubbish prop… hand? Tentacle? I’m not sure. A prop whatever-it-is pops out and grabs Ashton.

It turns out that the Slyther was a lot scarier when we couldn’t really see it. It looks more like a bloke stuck inside a tattered sleeping bag than the monstrosity suggested by the excellent audio effects. To say it’s a letdown is an understatement.

The men make a run for it, but Ashton is lost to the Slyther. However, Ian and Larry don’t get far before coming to the edge of the quarry, and the Slyther is a quick eater.

THE WAKING ALLY

So, the Slyther’s closing in on Larry and Ian. Larry almost falls off the cliff, but catches himself on a conveniently placed waste bucket, which Ian hops into and helps him up. The Slyther hops over too, and there’s a little scuffle before it falls off, to its doom.

Well. That was a bit of a damp squib.

What is the point of teasing a scary monster if the monster turns out to be a) not scary, and b) defeated a couple of minutes after it turns up?

I suppose it was just there to pad out the runtime, but I would rather have no monster and a shorter runtime than a rubbish monster that couldn't even scare a baby. I doubt any of the kids watching stayed behind the sofa for very long once the Slyther appeared in the flesh, that’s for sure.

Larry wants to leg it, but Ian says no, because someone might have heard them. All the more reason to run, I’d have thought, but if they did that then the next bit of plot wouldn't happen. The waste bucket starts moving.

Down in London, the Doctor’s recovered, and the gang are being pursued by Robomen.

Once the Robomen catch up, we see why humanity is in such dire straits: the resistance is absolutely rubbish at fighting. Susan and the Doctor have to intervene to save David and Tyler from the Robomen, and the Doctor also saves one of the Robomen from Tyler, who was about to shoot him. Oh, you never take lives except when yours is threatened, Doctor? What about that cave man?

No, I’m never going to let that go.

Barbara and Jenny run across a woman and her daughter who have been scratching out a living making clothes for the slave workers. It’s not much of a living, as they’re starving and beside themselves with joy when Barbara offers to share her food. In return, the mother offers Barbara and Jenny a bed for the night. However, the daughter excuses herself and runs out on an errand. Suspicious.


And just look at Jenny's balaclava.

Meanwhile, Ian and Larry are on the long ride down the mineshaft. So long, in fact, it’s started to get noticeably warmer, and the pressure is increasing.

Back with the women, they’re chatting about London as the daughter comes back, with a Dalek trailing behind her. They’ve turned the women in, collaborating with the Daleks in return for some fruit and sugar.

Down in the mine, Ian decides to go  and see if he can find the main shaft, but a bunch of slaves being escorted by Robomen come along, so he and Larry decide to blend with the group.

However, a Roboman stops them, and Larry recognises him as his brother, Phil. Phil, however, doesn’t have a shred of humanity left within him. Larry tells Ian to run while he’s got the chance, before grappling with Phil as his brother turns his electric whip on him, electrocuting the both of them. Poor Larry. Poor Phil.

At least David and Susan are having fun. They’re in the countryside throwing fish at each other. What ever happened to just going on a date? All this fish-throwing must have an aphrodisiac effect, because before very long they’re kissing.

The Doctor turns up before the couple can corrupt the youth any further, and explains his hypothesis on the Dalek invasion: it’s to do with the mining operation. Well, duh. He then starts banging on about ‘controlling the flow of living energy’ and ‘tampering with the forces of creation’. So much for being a strict man of science.

Down in the mine, Ian is evading the Robomen when a slave patrol comes along, and he spots Barbara amongst them. Don’t worry, Ian. She’s not panicking.

In fact, she’s just realised she’s still got Dortmun’s notes. They’re a handy bargaining chip to get Barbara a meeting with the top Dalek brass, where she’ll tell them all about the rebel plans for attack.

Don’t worry. She’s got a plan… probably.

Now we get to meet the head honcho, the Dalek leader, the one with the creative name. It is called…the Black Dalek.

Because it is black. And a Dalek.

But now we’re going to find out the true purpose of the Dalek invasion.

The Daleks are going to blast open a fissure in Earth’s crust, which will blow a hole in it, and allow the Daleks to remove Earth’s molten core, removing the magnetic and gravitational effects. Why? So that they can fill Earth back up with a power source (because apparently the immensely hot ball of solid iron surrounded by liquid metal surrounded by lots of hot squishy rock wasn’t enough of a power source) which will enable the Daleks to pilot the Earth around like a spaceship.

Where do I even begin?

Well, Earth is in layers, so I’ll pick it apart in layers. I apologise in advance; I’m going to go on a bit. You might want to get comfortable.

The Crust Of The Matter

For one thing, England’s an absurd location to start digging. For another, you expect me to believe that manual labour dug all the way through a couple of dozen miles of rock, perhaps more? Just think of the heat and pressure the men working in our deepest mines today have to endure. Never mind the impossibility of digging through the semi-solid mantle, or the matter of what on Earth you’re going to do with all the liquid metal from the outer core, or the solid inner core.

And that’s just the logistics.

Spaceship Earth

Why. Just… why? You’re a technologically advanced civilisation, why not build your own planet-sized space station? And why Earth? Earth surely isn’t the only celestial body this side of the galaxy with a load of squidgy rock and metal in the centre. Why not go somewhere uninhabited and use machinery to mine?

Oh, and how is this Earth-ship even going to generate thrust?

This is giving me a headache.

Why, Oh Why, Oh Why?

Why do I care so much about the silly spaceship thing? Because it is a let-down.

It is such a disappointing a motive. Had this plot turned up in a different serial I think I would have appreciated how silly it is. I like silly sci-fi. However, here it’s created something of a mood whiplash, and watered down the story.

See, it really does seem completely absurd when you consider the fact that the Daleks are quite obviously based on the Nazis.


I don't think the symbolism could be any clearer.

The parallels to the Nazi regime and their occupation of Europe have been explicit and well done throughout the serial. For example, we have the genocide of large swathes of the human population, we have the survivors being imprisoned in forced labour camps, or being subjected to barbaric medical experiments. This parallel is what makes Daleks scary. I must give Nation credit, because he has clearly put a good deal of thought into it.

I can only suppose that Nation wanted to give us a more concrete reason for the Dalek invasion than ‘they want to get rid of us’, which is generally more satisfying in a narrative, but I think that weakens the parallel. Because sometimes conquering isn’t done for wealth or land or whatever material purpose, though those are bad enough. Sometimes it’s done in the name of getting rid of the people you feel are inferior, so you can claim supremacy. Isn’t that so much more powerful and horrifying?

It does make me wonder if someone higher up the food chain held Nation back from properly following through on the allegory he’s been building for the last few episodes. After all, it’s not exactly family-friendly. However, I do think that it would have been an important thing to show the children watching: the danger of ideologies based on supremacy and hatred going unchecked, and coming to their natural conclusion.

It's about applicability to real life. I don't think there are many people out there who want to scoop out Earth's insides and turn it into a space ship. However, there are many people out there, too many, who would gladly inflict unspeakable atrocities and indignities in the name of advancing their ideas of their own so-called superiority. There was an opportunity here to illustrate this in the Dalek invasion, but it wasn't taken.

Okay. I am done ranting. I promise.

So, where were we? Ah, yes. In the control room. They’re about to launch a device to blow the Earth open. And now, because we’re really getting quite silly, we see the device. Ian’s hiding in it. And of course, he gets trapped.

Bon voyage, Ian.

This is a weaker part of The Dalek Invasion Of Earth. The tonal issues are a real problem. We go from ‘a starving family betray their fellow man in exchange for food’ to ‘the evil plan to turn Earth into a spaceship’ in the space of a few minutes.

FLASHPOINT

Where do you think you're going? I have more to waffle about.

Ian manages a narrow escape from the capsule thanks to yanking every wire he can find, and starts climbing down the cable. However, the Daleks have caught on to his presence, and one severs Ian's escape route, sending him plunging into the mineshaft. Somehow, this doesn’t kill him.

Barbara and Jenny are brought before the Daleks, who now have everything they need, so they can go about enacting their ‘final solution’ and exterminate all the humans. See what I mean about the clear metaphor?

Barbara realises that if she could commandeer the communication device the Daleks use to control the Robomen (it’s basically hypnosis with a silly hat), she could give the Robomen new orders.

Now Barbara has to bluff. It took me a moment to realise what she was doing, but it’s pretty wonderful. She’s a history teacher by profession, remember? And the Daleks haven’t been reading up on theirs, so they’re oblivious as Barbara starts concocting a tall tale of a rebel attack, pieced together from snippets of Earth’s military history, from the Punic Wars to the American Civil War. I love her.

In a moment of distraction, Barbara tries to give orders to the Robomen, but the Daleks foil her and restrain the women.

Outside, the Doctor and Tyler are surveying the dig site. The Doctor gives Susan and David orders to use their remaining bombs to sever the cables carring things to and from the mine.

Deep in the Earth, Ian wakes up, and finds a way out of the mine shaft. Rather than make good his escape, he finds some discarded mine supports and uses them to block the shaft. This comes in useful moments later, when the Daleks fire the device. It becomes stuck on the blockage, preventing the Daleks' plan coming to fruition, and leaving them none the wiser.

The Doctor and Tyler make it down to the Dalek command, somehow. There was something about disabling the alarm systems. Seems a bit too easy if you ask me.

Then again, Daleks do seem oblivious, as they don’t spot the two hiding in their peripheral vision.


For heaven's sake, it looked right at him.

Soon enough the Doctor manages to rescue Barbara and Jenny. He’s aghast when Barbara tells him the ultimate goal of the Dalek invasion, because 'it’ll upset the entire constellation'. Earth isn't a star, Doctor. And constellations change. Because stars move.

I’m beginning to think that Nation is good at sociological stories, but maybe not the ‘science’ bit of science fiction.

I know. I am no fun.

The Doctor shows the women security footage of David and Susan working to destroy the mine cables, in the hopes of immobilising the Daleks.

However, a Dalek has spotted the Doctor and company, and is moving in for the kill.

Susan and David do their thing in the knick of time, which makes the Dalek overheat, for… some reason. I have to admit that the sight from the Dalek’s eyestalk as it approaches, with the Doctor staring it down, is pretty cool.

Barbara shows the Doctor the thing that controls the Robomen. I LOVE her Dalek impression. Oh, I have a little thing for you to try: shout directly into an electric fan. It makes you sound just like a Dalek and provides hours of amusement.

But Barbara doesn’t have time to have fun making silly voices . She orders the Robomen to turn on the Daleks. Vive la résistance!

Ian reunites with the gang, and on the surface, we see Robomen literally throwing Daleks around as everyone legs it out of the mine.

The Doctor is pretty sure that the Daleks’ plan won’t work with the bomb jammed, but it’ll still be a bloody big boom, so they’d better evacuate.

The music’s not bad here. It’s a bit basic, mostly just a repeating rising scale, but it does the job of creating tension quite nicely.

The device activates, and sure enough it is one heck of a bang. Through some pretty obvious stock footage, we see the gargantuan plume that billows from the mine, and the molten rock now surging to the surface.

And it turns out that the Dalek saucers were caught up in the plume, so they’re all gone. You're telling me every Dalek on the planet was hovering over Bedford? Whatever. I’m pretty sure that means that the blast should have killed the gang, who were watching from a nearby cliff, but let’s just enjoy the spectacle.

And with that, it’s all over. Well, the Dalek invasion of Earth is, anyway.

It looks like the TARDIS survived the firebombing, proving itself to be a sturdy little ship.

Susan, however, is quite morose. She doesn’t manage to spit out what’s upsetting her to the Doctor, but being her grandfather, he knows something’s wrong, and gives her a hug.

They have a little talk where there’s a lot more going on than what’s actually said aloud. It’s like they’re dancing around the issue, Susan all but screaming that she wants to stay, the Doctor realising that his granddaughter isn’t a little girl any more, all while on the surface they're talking about a broken shoe. The Doctor excuses himself to go check on the TARDIS and ostensibly repair Susan’s shoe, pausing for a moment to look back on her and David, together.

With the Dalek invasion over, David’s dreams of being able to build a new world have finally come true. He’s going to work the land, and he wants Susan to come with him. Poor Susan is on the verge of tears as David begs her to stay.

Her grandfather needs her. However, with David, she could have what she’s always wanted: her own place in the universe.

It’s a heart-wrenching dilemma, and well acted by Carole Ann Ford.

And it’s one the Doctor is all too aware of. In the end, he takes it out of her hands.

With Susan still outside, he shuts and locks the TARDIS doors. What follows is, in my opinion, one of the most wonderful speeches anyone in Doctor Who has ever given. It’s so full of love and confidence that Susan will thrive without her grandfather. It’s like the essence of growing up distilled into about thirty seconds of dialogue.

I will transcribe a few lines for you, because it is a special piece of dialogue:

One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.

Once the TARDIS is gone, Susan looks up in the sky, forlorn, as if hoping to spot that big blue box. David offers her his hand. She takes it, lets her TARDIS key fall to the ground, and they walk off hand in hand.

It’s a very bittersweet moment. Susan gets her time, her place, her love, but she has to leave the Doctor and her friends to build a new life on a planet scarred by the Dalek invasion. But in this grief comes the opportunity to create something new, and that’s quite beautiful.

Goodbye, Susan.

Final Thoughts

So, that was The Dalek Invasion Of Earth. What a serial! Though I must admit, I found the first half stronger than the second half, which would have been a bit disappointing had it not been for that wonderful speech.

I had planned to save the examination of the Nazi parallels for this section, but I found it more relevant earlier. I’ll just re-iterate the main points: the Daleks are clearly Nazis, and it’s not shy about showing the horrors of Nazi oppression. However, the silly thing with the Earth-spaceship dilutes the overall symbolism of fighting nationalist imperialism.

Of course, some might disagree with me, that giving the Dalek invasion an absurd goal actually undermines them, taking them (and fascists in general) down a peg or two. Or perhaps some may think going too far on the Nazi parallels may be too dark for teatime television, and that the earlier bits are enough. That’s fair.

Susan’s finally got some meaningful character development, but it did come at the cost of losing her from the TARDIS crew. I wonder how this will affect the group moving forward?

With Susan’s departure also comes the departure of the talented Carole Ann Ford. She really brought Susan to life, and I’m sad to see her go.

Here’s wishing her the best of luck in her future endeavours, and hoping that she pops back in from time to time for a guest appearance.

Until next time, then. See you all in the new year.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction