Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 18, 1965] The Prodigal Returneth (September 1965 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

It's Great To Be Back

Those of you who keep track of minutiae may have noticed that I haven't been around these parts for a while. Blame it on seismic changes in the world of magazine publishing. To wit, the fact that Fantastic will now be published bimonthly removed that magazine from the newsstands for a couple of months, in order to have it alternate with sister publication Amazing. I had to wait until the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow arrived on my doorstep before I could get back to the typewriter and churn out a review. Let's get started, shall we?

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder


Cover art by George Schelling, illustrating a macabre scene from Fritz Leiber's story

Maybe it's only because I haven't done this for a while, but I look forward to analyzing this issue with more enthusiasm than usual. Let's see if I retain my critical passion as we make our way through the crisp white pages of the youngest member of Frederik Pohl's family of publications.

Catch a Tartar, by Gordon R. Dickson

The hero of this lighthearted romp through the cosmos is one Hank Shallo, a jolly giant of a man, fond of beer and singing. When he's not belting out a tune or quaffing a brew, he works as a deep space scout, seeking out new planets for humanity. The woman who gives him his assignments is a certain Janifa Williams, a statuesque blonde who would like him to settle down on Earth with her.


Illustrations by Norman Nodel. This is not Janifa, by the way, but a no-nonsense physician who treats our hero for a hangover.

Janifa arranges to meet Hank on a colony world with a serious problem. It seems that the computer that controls the planet's environment, so people can live there, thinks it's a god. It demands a human sacrifice before it will go back to work. Hank is the lucky fellow who's supposed to be offered up to the mechanical deity. There's an escape plan, but Hank has a scheme of his own.


Hank arrives.

Complicating matters is the presence of the guy who created the computer, a mad genius who is in love with Janifa. Hank has to figure out a way to defeat the computer, save Janifa from the unwelcome advances of the scientist, and retain his happy-go-lucky lifestyle.


The madman, Janifa, and a few of her many admirers.

Hank is a likable rogue and something of a con artist, as he uses his wits to get the better of everyone. I found the story to be more enjoyable than most attempts at science fiction comedy, which tend to be full of sophomoric slapstick. The female characters are decorative, to be sure, but also intelligent, competent, and professional. It's not the most profound tale in the world, but worth reading.

An amused three stars.

The Light Outside, by C. C. MacApp

This strange little story consists of a series of messages, ranging from prayers to scholarly articles, over a very long period of time. (That's true in one sense, but not in another. Confused? That's how I felt when I started reading.) We eventually figure out that the beings responsible for these writings live at a much faster pace than those who are observing them, known as the Watchers. At the end we learn something more about the Watchers, and those who are watched.

The narrative structure tends to have a cold, distant feeling to it, so it's hard to connect with the story on an emotional level. On the other hand, the premise is original and interesting.

An intrigued three stars.

The Tinplate Teleologist, by Arthur Sellings


Illustration by Brock. I have been unable to find out anything about this artist, not even his or her full name.

Davie — more formally, DA 38341 — is an obsolete household robot, kicked out of his home when a more advanced model takes his place. He has a limited amount of time to find somebody to purchase him, at a price hardly anybody is willing to pay for an old machine. If he fails, he goes back to the factory to be turned into scrap metal.

The episodic plot follows Davie as he meets a sympathetic but powerless dealer in used robots, a bitter robot who plans to rob a human being, the elderly inhabitants of a retirement community who welcome his help, but can't afford to pay for him, and an impoverished painter who finally gives him the opportunity to save himself from the junkyard.

This sentimental yarn feels like a science fiction fairy tale. Davie is one of those meek, gentle characters who overcome all obstacles with quiet bravery. Mix a little Asimov with a little Bradbury and you might have something like this slick tearjerker.

A wistful three stars.

Theories Wanted, by Robert S. Richardson

The author presents various astronomical mysteries, offers hypothetical solutions, and suggests that amateurs might be able to help professionals figure things out.

I had to let out a weary sigh when the article began with the hoary old chestnut of trying to account for the Star of Bethlehem in scientific terms. To nobody's surprise, Richardson thinks a nova is the most plausible explanation, if any is needed. (I guess he's read Arthur C. Clarke's decade-old story The Star.)

I was more interested in the peculiar star Mira Ceti, which varies in brightness in irregular ways. It also has a much fainter companion star, difficult to observe, which presents a similar enigma. I would have preferred an entire article about Mira Ceti.

Other subjects include the Trojan asteroids, which occupy a stable point in Jupiter's orbit, and a comet known as P/1925 II. Like a smorgasbord, there are several items to choose from, and not all of them are tasty.

A highly variable three stars.

At the Institute, by Norman Kagan


Illustrations by Gray Morrow

This razor-sharp satire takes the narrator through the halls of a research institute full of eccentric scientists involved in outrageous projects. We get our first hint of how wild things are going to get when he has to ride a tank (see above) through a ring of solid uranium to get into the place. After encountering a number of researchers working on experiments as bizarre as anything found in Jonathan Swift's Balnibarbi and Laputa, he meets the director of the place.


The infantile director and the narrator, facing the institute's defense system. Please excuse the way I had to fold the magazine to show you the whole picture.

Although the narrator seems at first to be the voice of sanity, exposing the madness of so-called pure research, it turns out that his own more practical studies are equally insane. The author casts a jaundiced eye at all aspects of science and government.

The story moves at a breakneck pace, with jokes, puns, paradoxes, and lampoons of human foibles in nearly every sentence. The tone reminds me of the recent novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, in the way it mixes surreal comedy with a dark view of humanity's tendency to destroy itself.

A sardonic four stars.

Cyclops, by Fritz Leiber

Three astronauts set out on a journey to investigate why an interstellar vessel, under construction in orbit around the Moon, is out of communication with Earth. Similar problems in the past turned out to be minor, so the spacemen aren't too worried. During the voyage, they discuss the possibility of life existing in empty space. Since one of the astronauts is psychic, it's not a big surprise that their speculations turn out to be all too real.

Although the plot is predictable, this is an effective science fiction horror story, full of striking images. As you'd expect from Leiber, it's very well written. A minor work from a major author.

A frightened three stars.

Of Godlike Power (Part Two of Two), by Mack Reynolds


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan

Let's recap. Part One of the novel took us to a near future United States of flying cars and automated bars. More importantly, it's a place where most people are unemployed, but enjoy a reasonably comfortable life in a prosperous welfare state. The protagonist is the host of a radio talk show dealing with UFO's and other speculative stuff. His job leads him to an eccentric preacher who has the ability to prevent people all over the world from enjoying certain pleasures of which he does not approve. His miraculous power strikes first at female vanity, eliminating makeup, fancy hairdos, and fashionable clothing. The next targets are radio, television, and movies. The lack of entertainment for the jobless masses leads to chaos.

In Part Two, the radio host, one of the few people who know the reason for these sweeping changes, is forced to join a massive government project designed to investigate and solve the problem.


Forced, as in men with guns come to get him.

The guy manages to convince the authorities that the preacher is responsible. Meanwhile, almost all fiction and comic strips become unreadable, another sign of his power. (He leaves certain things alone, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pogo, proving he has good taste.)


An example of a distorted text. I think it says something like He took aim right at her . . .. I can't read the last word.

Our hero visits the preacher's rural community, which proves to be almost entirely self-sufficient. He is reunited with the preacher's daughter, whom he met in Part One, and romance blooms.


Her real name is Sue, and she's got other secrets.

When the real story reaches the public, the radio host has to save the preacher from an angry mob, then work out a compromise with him. In return for undoing at least some of his miracles, he'll get the chance to broadcast his socioeconomic message to the world.


Rescuing his future father-in-law.

Beneath the surface of a semi-comic plot, the author deals with a lot of serious issues. He considers overproduction, excessive consumerism, waste of natural resources, automation, shallow media, lack of meaningful work, mob violence, authoritarianism, and a bunch of other things. It takes a special kind of skill to mix all this stuff into an entertaining novel.

A thoughtful four stars.

Feasting on the Fatted Calf

(That's just a metaphor. I don't eat meat.)

I'm delighted to see that I came back to write about an above-average issue of the magazine. Everything was worth reading, even if not all of it was outstanding. There was a welcome variety, from comedy to horror, with a large serving of satire. You can choose among the breezy style of Dickson, the savage bite of Kagan, and the elegance of Leiber, to name just a few. All in all, it made for a very pleasant homecoming.


The first novel about Captain Horatio Hornblower. Good stuff.




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[July 16, 1965] To Fresh Woods (August 1965 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Shifting Vistas

The universe is changing.

One of the fundamental tenets of quantum physics is that one cannot observe the universe without fundamentally affecting it.  In ancient times, the stars and planets were objects of mystery.  They lay fixed in crystal spheres; they influenced human affairs with strange forces; they were Gods; they were little fires.

And then we observed them with telescope, and the fuzzy waveforms collapsed into particles.  The stars were just the Sun's brethren.  Planets were actually spheres of matter, and the Earth was one of them.  These discoveries did not make the celestial bodies any less interesting, but it did more narrowly confine the bounds of their possible natures.

Still, that left lots of wiggle room for imagination.  Why, Venus must be a primeval swamp or perhaps a vast desert.  Mars was clearly the home of an elderly civilization, huddling close to their dying canals.  Even the Moon might be home to a hardy lichen on its surface (and perhaps a society of aliens beneath it — perhaps they nourished themselves on green cheese).

Then came the Pioneers, Rangers, and Mariners.  The Pioneers told us that the Moon had no atmosphere at all, and the Rangers confirmed that Luna was a dead, cratered world.  Then Mariner 2 dashed our carefully wrought picture of Venus, revealing a searing inferno of a planet. 

Now Mariner 4, which zoomed just 6000 feet over the surface of Mars on July 14, has slain another fantasy land.  Preliminary data show that the Red Planet has a much thinner atmosphere than expected and no magnetic field.  Without significant erosion from wind and rain, and without a liquid core to drive vulcanism and resurfacing, Mars is probably a cratered wasteland like the Moon.  We'll know more when photos start coming in (look for an article on the 20th from Kaye Dee).

Again, this does not make Venus or Mars any less interesting…to science.  But for science fiction, the stories are yet again constrained.  They still exist: Niven's recent Becalmed in Hell takes place in the new Venus; perhaps he'll be the first to set a story on the new Mars.  But for the most part, increased knowledge has excluded our solar system from fantastic speculation. 

It's no surprise, then, that the very newest science fiction, that coming out in our monthly magazines, has turned to other settings: other dimensions and faraway stars.  Or focused closer to home, offering up cautionary and satirical stories of human, terrestrial society.

Though it cautiously stays on the safe side of the weird, more nuanced New Wave that has started to flood the pages of our books and digests, this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction offers a nice survey of the current frontier of science fiction:

The issue at hand


by Bert Tanner

The Masculinist Revolt, by William Tenn

At the dawn of the 21st Century, the feminist revolt is complete and there is, with one exception, complete equality between the sexes.  This doesn't sit well with one P. Edward Pollyglow, a clothier who finds that demand for his made-for-men jumpsuits has dropped to nil.  So he tries to restore le difference between the sexes by reviving that most manly of garments, the codpiece.  In so doing, he sets off a revolution that restores men's clubs, dueling, and other brands of overt masculinity. 

There are two major flaws in this story.  The first is that the piece has no real through line.  Things happen, get more ridiculous, and the masculinist revolt eventually overripens and collapses.

The second flaw is the doozy, however.  From the second page:

Women kept gaining prestige and political power.  The F.E.P.C. started policing discriminatory employment practices in any way based on sex.  A Supreme Court decision (Mrs. Staub's Employment Agency for Lady Athletes vs. The New York State Boxing Commission) enunciated the law in Justice Emmeline Craggly's historic words: "Sex is a private, internal matter and ends at the individual's skin.  From the skin outwards, in family chores, job opportunities, or even cloting, the sexes must be considered legally interchangeable in all respects save one.  That one is the traditional duty of the male to support his family to the limit of his physical powers–the fixed cornerstone of all civilized existence.

I'm sure everyone was fine until the part at the end (bolding added by me).  It straw(wo)mans the feminist movement.  What women want to day is equality, the freedom to pursue a life as unfettered in opportunity, as rewarding in ambition and compensation as that enjoyed by men.  I don't know any women espousing for equality in all fields and a free ride on the back of men. 

Thus, what could have been a piquant tale is a flop at the beginning and end, destroying the value of any droll cleverness inbetween.

One star.


I'm not sure how this month's Gahan Wilson piece does any more than fill a page.

Explosion, by Robert Rohrer

The starship Southern Cross, crewed by a mixed complement of Terrans and feline Maxyd, encounters an ancient missile that threatens to destroy the ship if its shields are not raised in time.  Unfortunately for two Maxyd, repairs had been underway when the Captain made his fateful decision, and they are killed.  The missile turns out to be a dud.

However, the ancient hatred between the two races of the crew, only thinly papered over since a brutal war in recent memory, flares brightly.  A mutiny ensues, completing what the ancient alien warhead could not.

In defter hands, I suppose this could have been something.  As is, Explosion is both heavy handed and forgettable.  Two stars.

Crystal Surfaces, by Theodore L. Thomas

In the future, Thomas posits, data will be stored not with chemical residue (pen/pencil) or magnetic charging (computer tape) but the careful positioning of atoms.  Thus, information will be stored and conveyed at the maximum possible density.

Neat idea.  Three stars.

Everyone's Hometown Is Guernica, by Willard Marsh

A starving painter adopts a scraggly kitten and, almost simultaneously, is consumed with an art idea he must commit to canvas.  As he pours his soul into his work, the kitten disappears, replaced by an alluring, independent woman who cooks and cleans for him, never saying a word.  I won't betray the ending, which is powerful, sad and poetic. 

This is definitely the standout piece of the issue.  Four stars.

The 2-D Problem, by Jody Scott

Things slip into mediocrity again with the subsequent nonsensical piece from Jody Scott.  Apparently, folks from Callisto have the ability to translate fiction into reality.  This becomes problematic when one Callistan, slated to be an ambassador of sorts to Earth, gets a hold of a comic book and brings Little Orphan Annie to life.  Flat life, but life nevertheless.

It's never explained how this power works, and the humor is about as flat as the story's subject matter.

Two stars.

First Context, by Laurence M. Janifer and S. J. Treibich

Speaking of Mariner, it is the subject for this punchline-focused vignette in which the human race gets fined by aliens for letting a probe go errant into a restricted zone.

First Context is like one of those four panel comics that should have ended on panel three.

Two stars.

Behind the Teacher's Back, by Isaac Asimov

A sequel of sorts to Asimov's article in the April issue on the uncertainty principle, Dr. A. describes the discovery of the third of the four presently known fundamental forces of the universe.  There's nothing in here I didn't already know, thanks to my time as an astrophysics major, but the energy version of the uncertainty principle is one of my favorite subjects.

You tell me if he succeeded in conveying what he was trying to convey.

Four stars.

A Stick for Harry Eddington, by Chad Oliver

By the turn of the 21st Century, retirement comes at 50 and boredom soon after.  What's left to do when one's salad days are in the rear view mirror, the kids are off to college, and the spouse fails to excite?  Have your mind exchanged with someone from a "primitive" culture, one which still values the important things in life!

Stick seems more a vehicle to denigrate the upcoming decadent, materialistic life we seem to be headed for.  On the other hand, the sting in the story's ending is pretty clever.

A solid three stars.

The Immortal, by Gordon R. Dickson

Hundreds of parsecs behind enemy lines, the ancient fighting ship La Chasse Gallerie, struggles its way home over a series of ten light-year hops.  Its pilot and sole crewmember, who left Earth a young man, is now a staggering two hundred years old.  Yet he continues to fend off enemy interceptors, always gustily singing one French shanty or another.

Back on Earth, it is concluded that this survivor, who has somehow pushed the boundaries of the human life span, might hold the key to immortality.  A risky penetration and rescue mission is executed.

The first ten pages of this story are rather dry and slow, and I can't help but think they could have been condensed into a page or two.  Also marring this piece is the melodramatic portrayal of the leader of the rescuing task force, a bitter battle-fatigued man with a death wish, and the geriatric specialist assigned to his ship.

But The Immortal eventually hits its stride, and if the end result is not perfection, it is not unsatisfying.

Call it a high three stars.

The New Frontier

Science fiction, like science, seems to be in a transitional stage.  As writers explore the new, as-yet unsurveyed realms of the universe, the resulting stories should only grow in quality and scope.  Until, of course, some new probe upends everything again!

What frontier's literary exploration do you look most forward to?




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 14, 1965] The New Dispensation (August 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Continuity and Change

Yeah, yeah, I know that’s the most boring headline since the last time Hubert Humphrey made a speech.  But that’s what everybody (well, somebody) wants to know: how is the new Amazing different, or not, from the old one?

Some things we already knew.  It’s still digest size, now bimonthly, with 32 more pages for a total of 162.  On the cover there is a piece of retro-continuity; the new regime has dropped the old title logo for the older title logo, the one used from October 1960 to December 1963, with very minor variations—an improvement, to my taste.  There’s a fairly generic cover by Alex Schomburg (I am certain the departed editor Lalli had a closet full of these) portraying, as you see, a guy in a loincloth brandishing a spear at a giant computer: Progress vs. Savagery, or Regimentation vs. Natural Freedom, as you prefer.  It is said on the contents page to illustrate Keith Laumer’s Time Bomb.  It does not.  There are a number of interior illustrations.  Coming Next Month has not returned.


by Alex Schomburg

And on the contents page . . . oh no.  The blazing insignia of continuity are . . . Ensign De Ruyter and Robert F. Young.  Forty-six pages of Robert F. Young.  Well, let us keep an open mind; here, brace it with this two-by-four.  Anyway, it’s a mistake to infer too much from this month’s fiction contents, since the new management will likely be burning off the inherited Ziff-Davis inventory for some months.

The non-fiction includes another of Robert Silverberg’s articles on scientific hoaxes, and Silverberg’s book review column—good signs if they are signs, but they too may just be what Lalli left behind.  Ironically, the review column is devoted entirely to reprints, ranging from Wells to Sturgeon.  There is also an editorial, in which Sol Cohen—listed on the contents page as Editor and Publisher—first demonstrates that he can be just as boring as his predecessor in editorializing Norman Lobsenz, and then offers a lame explanation of his plans regularly to publish reprints from old issues of the magazine. 

As for the reprints themselves, Cohen has gone for big names, with early short stories from Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury: respectively, The Weapon Too Dreadful To Use from the May 1939 issue, and Final Victim (with Henry Hasse), from February 1946.  Each is accompanied by an unsigned introduction, shorter and less bombastic than those by Sam Moskowitz for the “SF Classic” selections of the Ziff-Davis years.  The original illustrations are reprinted along with the stories.

Time Bomb, by Keith Laumer

Keith Laumer’s novelet Time Bomb begins with Yondor, the son of the chief, going over the mountain to look around.  And he sees—danger!  Wounded on the way back, he makes his way home and reports to the chief that their way of life is at risk and they must act!  But the chief doesn’t want to hear it—hey!  Wake up back there!  If you’re bored, do something useful, like listing all the stories you’ve read that begin with this particular cliche.


by Nodel

Anyway, these primitive characters are the descendants of a human outpost, now menaced by the evil alien Tewk, and Yondor gets away from their attack and into a machine with a transportation system requiring only that he sit in a chair and pull a lever and he’ll be somewhere else.  This is a convenient substitute for a plot, as Yondor blunders his way from place to place before learning enough to get back, rescue his people, and smite the bad guys.  As generic melodrama goes, it’s smooth and clever enough that it might be mildly entertaining, say, if one were stuck in an airport waiting for a late plane.  Two stars.

The City of Brass, by Robert F. Young


by Gray Morrow

On the other hand, remarkably, Robert F. Young’s The City of Brass is actually fairly amusing, and not offensively stupid like most of his other rehashes of myths, legends, testaments, etc.  Billings of Animannikins, Inc., has flown in his time sled back to the days of the Arabian Nights in order to kidnap Scheherazade, here rendered Shahrazad, bring her back to the present so his employers can work up a facsimile for public performance, and then return her to her fate.  But Billings kicks some wires in the sled out of place and they wind up stranded in the age of the Jinn (which proves to be about 100,000 years in the future), not far from the Jinn’s brazen city of the title.

Shahrazad is undaunted.  She doesn’t much like Jinn, and is in possession of a Seal of Solomon (here rendered Suleyman) with which she proposes to force all the Jinn into bottles and seal them up.  Billings considers this a reckless plan, and goes out to reconnoiter, setting in train a ridiculous plot involving ridiculous revelations about the Jinn, their origin, and what has happened to humanity in the intervening millennia.  This actually might have made it into John W. Campbell’s fantasy magazine Unknown if he had run short of material one month.  Young’s familiar sentimentality about beautiful women and the men who are captivated by them threatens to take over, but the story ends quickly enough not to ruin the comic mood.

Three stars.  I’ll put that two-by-four back in the shed.

The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use, by Isaac Asimov


by Julian Krupa

The reprints from Amazing’s past nicely illustrate the problems with reprinting from Amazing’s past.  Asimov’s The Weapon Too Dreadful To Use is his second published story and shows it, with stilted writing, cliched characters and dialogue, and a muddled point.  Humans have occupied Venus and are oppressing the natives, though supposedly racial discrimination and hostility have been eliminated on Earth.  (Not too plausible.) The protagonist and his Venusian friend Antil trek to the ruins of a Venusian city and visit the science museum, which is largely intact, but no one has looked at it in living memory.  (Even less plausible.) In a formerly sealed room, Antil finds the eponymous weapon, which can destroy people’s mental functions at interplanetary distances.  (Plausibility meter breaks.) Venus rebels, Earth sends troops, Venus destroys the minds of a lot of them, Earth backs down and grants independence.  It’s clear there’s a smart guy here trying to figure out how to write stories, but he’s not there yet.  Two stars.

Final Victim, by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse


by Hadden

Bradbury and Hasse’s Final Victim is much worse.  It is essentially a Bat Durston—a transplanted Western—about a bad deputy, excuse me, Patrolman, Skeel, who always kills the fugitives he is supposed to apprehend.  His superior Anders knows his excuses are no good but can’t do anything, until Miss Miller, the sister of Skeel’s most recent kill, who has proven to be innocent of the accusation against him, decides to go after Patrolman Skeel.  Anders, noting “the firm line of her chin, the trimness of her space uniform, the hard bold blueness of her eyes which he imagined could easily be soft on less drastic occasions than this,” decides to set her up to ambush Skeel herself out on the plains, I mean asteroids, and take revenge.  But when things get really tough, Miss Miller faints.  I stopped there.  Forget stars.  One mud pie.

The Good Seed, by Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges’s The Good Seed, as mentioned, is another in the series about Ensign De Ruyter.  As usual it has some Earth guys at the mercy of treacherous primitive aliens, and they solve their problem with a scientific gimmick that you might find in the Fun with Science column of a kids’ magazine.  One star.

John Keely’s Perpetual Motion Machine, by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg comes to the rescue in his article about a guy who managed to make a pretty good career out of the perpetual motion con, but ironically might have had a better one developing the means of his fraud in the light of day.  This is by far the best story in the issue, despite the fact that it is apparently true.  Four stars.

Summing Up

Well, that was dismal, wasn’t it?  Except for the Mitigation of Robert F. Young (can someone make a ballad out of that?) and Silverberg’s matter-of-fact competence at storytelling and -finding, nothing to see here, move on, move on.

[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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[July 12, 1965] A pair of Aces (July 1965 Galactoscope)

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by Rosemary Benton

A happy duo

The newest Ace Double is an absolute blast. On the one side is veteran writer John Brunner's new novel The Altar of Asconel, which was previously covered in serialization by David Levinson.  On the other side is the first solo project of science fiction fandom superstar – Ted White. Android Avenger! The very title of this book sings with promise of action and adventure, and while it certainly delivers I would say that it goes well beyond a short fun read.

Out of Place in Plain Sight

The story takes place in a future on Earth where maintaining sanity has become the objective of the human race. There is an orderly mundanity to everything, and deviation from this norm in any form, from rebellious fashion choices to antisocial tendencies, is punishable by death. Such executions are merged into the daily lives of the citizens of the metropolitan areas. Just like jury duty, anyone of legal age can be called upon to be part of the assembly that collectively pushes the button on the condemned's electric chairs.

Living his own mundane life is Bob Tanner, a resident of Manhattan who, oddly shaken and distracted after attending to his Citizen's duty as an executioner, has a mishap and gets his leg mangled in one of the city's moving walkways. Upon waking up to find that he is entirely healed from such a grievous injury, he overhears some disturbing information about the results of the scans that were run on him while he was unconscious – his bones are made of metal and he may not be entirely human.

Since extreme physical deviancy is also considered an unacceptable trait, Bob realizes that he must run for his life. Planning on journeying out into the countryside where there are fewer police and mental scanners, Bob manages to escape the hospital. Unfortunately his plans quickly careen off course when control of his body is seized from him. Piloted by unknown individuals for unknown reasons, Bob is made into the murderous pawn of one of the best kept secret societies in the city.

Ultimately our protagonist is put in the precarious position of balancing his human identity with the purpose for which an automaton such as himself was created. The story ends on a relatively upbeat note with Bob successfully regaining his autonomy, accepting his mission as an android, and still maintaining a precious, personal human identity. But after reading White’s book and thinking on it, one is still left wondering if technology unknowingly guiding humanity is such a good thing after all. 

A Little Background

Ted White is an extremely active member of the fandom community. He is a regular contributor, editor and a fanzine founder. He’s also got an impressive number of letters and essays reviewing, dissecting, and speculating on the numerous subgenres and authors out there.

Currently White is the assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. To date this opinionated author has four professional writing credits to his name: three collaborative stories (two with Terry Carr and one with Marion Zimmer Bradley) and of course, Android Avenger. With such a passion for the genre, it was only a matter of time before White began releasing his own lengthier original works of science fiction.

Breaking Down the Components

First and foremost, Ted White is to be congratulated on telling a compelling story of android self-realization mixed with a heavy dose of noir elements. The intensity of Bob Tanner's character as he struggles with his body betraying societal norms, his self doubt when he begins to question his own mind and consequently his basic sense of self – all of this speaks to the fatalism and moral ambiguity of noir. Yet it is encased in a science fiction paperback. 

This blend of genres in turn segues nicely into White's talent for writing action sequences that are clean cut and descriptive without being too wordy. The events of this book are fast paced. So much so that the reader, like the protagonist himself, might feel thrown and unable to get their feet under them before they are swept up in another scene. It’s destabilizing without being disruptive to the flow of the novel. It’s just enough to keep us guessing at what will happen next right there alongside Bob.

Finally, White is to be commended on the excellent job he does writing the protagonist's first person narrative. Successfully accomplishing this type of narration is no small feat for a writer. It's very easy for the tension to be sucked from a book if the storyteller is untrue to their inner voice, specifically in terms of their changing perspective and the information they are aware of at any given point in the story.

But in Android Avenger the reader is never given too little to work with, and even when the events get pretty surreal it's all brought back down to Earth with well written dialogue and succinct descriptions. It may not be the deepest intellectual exploration of humanity and technology, but judged on sheer enjoyability this book is well worth a five star rating.

That puts it well above what my colleague, David, rated Altar, but ACE Double M-123 is still well worth picking up!

Ace Books: Pirate Publisher?

Photo of Erica Frank
by Erica Frank

In addition to its usual science fiction double, this month, Ace is releasing the second and third books of Tolkien's famous Lord of the Rings trilogy. The first, Fellowship of the Ring, has been selling amazingly well at its new low price of 75¢, a scant fraction of the former hardcover price. Ratatosk 12 had a brief review of Fellowship:

I am not all that crazy about Jack Gaughan's cover (tho other, less critical Tolkienists have expressed satisfaction with it), and there is no mention that the title illo is borrowed from the d/w of the American edition b*u*t: illos are not a book, and the fact that the volume is now available at less than 1/6 of the original U.S. price is a Very Good Deal. The typography is clear, and I have as yet found no typos to stumble over in reading.

While professor Tolkien was adamant that his works not be published in so "degenerate a form" as paperback, it appears that Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of the U.S. hardcover editions, failed to properly copyright them — and so the works are in the public domain here.

Three book covers: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King

Feast your eyes upon either a stealth mission to evade the enforcers of a corrupt empire, or a dastardly attack against the rightful rulers of the text. You decide.
Photo by Gwydion M. Williams

Fanzine Focal Point 8 mentions a few of the details:

Houghton Mifflin, the hardbound publishers of the Ring Trilogy in the United States, was either too cheap or too stupid to have the finest fantasy epic of our century copyrighted in the United States; they ran, instead, a notice that the book was copyrighted in England, which only protected the work until it was published in the United States.

The way copyright law works, in this case: Nations that have joined the Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, agree to honor the copyrights of member states' works as if they had been published in their own country. So: a work copyrighted in the UK, is protected in the US; a publisher can't just grab a book and publish it here. However… once it's published here, it's subject to normal US copyright law, not the UCC. By publishing it in the US without a proper copyright notice, the work falls into the public domain. (Or so the claim goes. I am not a copyright lawyer. Don't quote me in court.)

So Wollheim gave up on trying to arrange licensing with Tokien and decided to meet the demand of the fannish readers, and all's well in the world of epic tales of elven adventures, yes?

…Perhaps not. Tolkien has protested the publication, claiming it is an infringement of his author's rights, and his publishers in the UK and the US are working to print a new authorized edition while he investigates his legal options.

So for now… buy quickly; these editions may not stick around for long.




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Fashion, music, politics, sports, TV

[July 10, 1965] "Since I fell for you" (a Young Traveler's crush)

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by Lorelei Marcus

Love. The fluttering of butterflies, entire acceptance of another, passionate desire, comradery, compassion, a word. Love is used so often and means so much that it's practically a cliché. I hear it applied to numerous names on the radio, such as "Johnny," "Wendy," and "my darling in Michigan." Nearly every man on television has a woman to love or fall in love with. And perhaps the most visible example at the moment is the squealing masses of girls my age who claim to be in love with the Beatles. I once, foolishly, saw myself above it all. Sure I like to date, and I love my parents, but those gooey feelings that seem to saturate every cranny of our culture were beyond me and my maturity.

That is, until America's most charming actor came along.

This is how I fell hard for handsome, clever, talented teen idol of the century: Tony Randall.

My first real encounter with Tony Randall (one Password game I don't remember aside) was his starring role(s) in Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. The movie itself was whimsical and fun, but it was certainly Randall's acting that made it a memorable experience. He blends into each of his seven roles perfectly, to the point that I first believed they were played by different actors!

He's at his best though, when he is playing Dr. Lao; specifically when he drops the stereotypical façade of a foolish Chinese man and becomes the traveled scholar underneath. Suddenly he is standing straight and tall, almost regal in his confidence. His voice is deep and carrying, but his demeanor is kind, wise, and gentle. He speaks in a perfect and precise manner and his words discuss the magical secrets of the universe. I hadn't known it at the time, but despite all the makeup and effects, this role was one of the closest to Randall's true self.

At this point, I was awed by Randall's performance in the movie, but felt little beyond that. Dr. Lao was a few thousand years too old for my tastes, and I had yet to see the man behind him more clearly. Then my father's and my weekly Password viewing happened to feature a very special guest. I was quite excited, not necessarily because it was Tony Randall on Password, but simply because it was an actor that I recognized and admired. At least, that's how it started.

I was folding laundry while watching the TV, and I found my attention frequently drifting away from my linens and to the man on screen (no, not host Alan Ludden.) Randall was fascinating to watch. He always sat with perfect poise and spoke with wonderful rich tones. And he was absolutely erudite, forcing me to pull out a dictionary a few times. His brilliance aided in his gameplaying as well, as I believe he is the only player in Password history so far to win four games in a row!

It was an experience. The feelings crept up on me and changed. I admitted later that night to my father that I may have had the teensiest tiniest insignificant little crush on Tony Randall. After a bout of laughter and teasing, suddenly our dining room table was covered in TV guides and movie schedules in a desperate search for a single starring name. This wasn't just a harmless crush anymore, but rather a crusade to expose myself to as much Tony Randall content as possible.

That's how the family ended up at the local theater watching one of the last viewings of Boys Night Out, a movie starring James Garner, Tony Randall, and a host of others. Three married men and one recently divorced make a plan to share a luxurious apartment where they can each escape from their lives at home with a beautiful girl for a night. Except the beautiful girl they find turns out to be a sociologist, so those nights don't go quite as expected. It was a cute film with hopeful messaging and a good ending. Not to mention how amazingly colorful the sets and costumes were.

Unfortunately the direction wasn't the best, making the movie a little boring in parts. It didn't help that Tony Randall was only in some of the scenes. Even when he was on screen he played a man meant to be weak, average, and unintelligent. Randall did a fantastic job portraying the character, down to the deliberate slouching, but it was infuriating to watch because he was playing the complete opposite of the man I wanted to see– himself! Sadly this would become a trend…

Next we found a drive-in playing a double feature revival night of Barbara Eden movies. Funny enough both films also happened to star Tony Randall. First we watched The Brass Bottle, your typical genie story. Randall plays a young up and coming architect (a role better suited for literally any other male actor in Hollywood) who accidentally frees a genie of near limitless power who now answers to his every whim. Of course the genie is a few thousand years out of date, so how he executes those orders varies from inconvenient to disastrous for Randall's character.

Overall the movie was terrible, even with Randall's superb acting (once again wasted on a slouching, sputtering fool.) The one good scene is when Randall gets to interact with the mule and has to ad lib. for part of it. Randall also executes quite a few fantastic girly screams. That's it though; otherwise it's a one star movie.

The second movie carried a little more promise: Will Success Ruin Rock Hunter? was Randall's breakout role into cinema, after all. Randall plays a young up-and-coming marketing executive – I'm noticing a pattern here – who accidentally seduces a movie star and is turned into the world's best lover overnight, causing chaos to ensue in his life. The movie had too much it wanted to do. It took time in the introduction and halfway through for comedic bits poking fun at television and marketing. Its main plot sacrificed character development for ridiculous slapstick that wasn't particularly funny, and ultimately the ending was thrown out too, to fit in a speech about the moral. Despite all these flaws, it was still a better movie than Brass Bottle. It was clever in a few parts, and watching Tony Randall be mobbed by teenage girls was hilarious.

Both films are a testament to Randall's acting skills. He takes these roles of such generic characters and plays them to a T. This means aside from some very brief moments where the mask slips, I don't actually get to watch the actor that I know and like. For instance, I know that Tony Randall started in stage productions and is a professionally trained dancer. Yet twice in Rock Hunter he is forced to dance poorly, going against all his instincts and training, and he succeeds (at dancing poorly)!

Randall has so much potential as an actor, and yet no one can seem to cast him in anything but comedic romps (excluding the unusual case of Dr. Lao)! It makes me wary of the new Fluffy movie that's just come out. Especially considering Randall himself had an unpleasant time filming with the lion. I will still see it of course – I have a duty to uphold – but I've found that Randall's name in the credits doesn't guarantee I'll enjoy a film he's in.

On the bright side, television has been kinder (both to him and me) than the movies. I got to see Randall on What's My Line? last week and he was as composed and well spoken as ever. I hear he'll also be on Password again in the next few weeks, so have something to look forward to.

I also hope to see him in one of his stage shows. With all the character and energy he brings to each role on the screen, I bet he really shines under the spotlight. Nevertheless, whatever he's in next, be it on film, video, kinescope, or (if I'm lucky) on a stage, I'll be there to watch it.

Because I have a big old crush on Tony Randall.

This is the Young traveler, signing off.

If you want to see more of the Young Traveler, come register for this week's The Journey Show! 

We'll be discussing the latest fashion trends of 1965, and we have some amazing guests including the founder of Bésame Cosmetics.  Plus, you'll get to see the Young Traveler show off her newest outfits!

DON'T MISS IT!




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Magazine/Anthology

[July 8, 1965] Saving the worst for first (August 1965 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Milestones

Galaxy has now finished 15 years of publication, two thirds of it under the tenure of H. L. Gold and the last five years with Fred Pohl as editor.  If Analog (ne Astounding) is representative of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and Fantasy and Science Fiction represents the literary fringes of the genre, then Galaxy is emblematic of Science Fiction's Silver Age. 

Now, in the editorial for this month's issue, Pohl notes that Galaxy has evolved with the times and is a different magazine from the one that debuted with an October 1950 cover date.

I'm not sure I agree.  The magazine still looks largely the same, there's still a Willy Ley article in the middle, and the contents still feel roughly within the same milieu: a bit "softer" than the nuts and bolts in Analog, a little meatier than the often light fare of F&SF.  Certainly nothing so avant-garde as what we're seeing from the "New Wave" mags in the UK.

In any event, Pohl undercuts his own assertion by trumpeting next month's issue, which will feature nothing but alumni from the early days of the magazine.  I'm quite looking forward to it, and clearly Pohl is, too.

And after reading this month's issue, boy can I see why…

Recipe for Disaster


by Gray Morrow

Do I Wake or Dream?, by Frank Herbert

The creator of Dune and other lesser titles dominates the current issue: a full 119 pages are devoted to this short novel.  I was dreading it last month, and my dread was well-founded.  Here's the premise:

A giant sphere of a ship, the Earthling, is headed out of the solar system toward Tau Ceti.  On board are six normal human crew, two thousand frozen and dehydrated people, and a thousand embryos.  The humans are all genetic duplicates (with full memories, natch) of actual people, and their main job is to tend the ship-controlling disembodied human brains of "defectives" that have been integrated and trained for the task since birth (a la McCaffrey's The Ship who Sang or Niven's recent series starring Eric the Cyborg).

One by one, the three brains go nuts and either commit suicide or have to be shut down.  Two of the tending crew are murdered in the process.  Now the remaining four have to decide whether to turn back or not.  Complicating the decision is the fact that running the ship without a built-in brain is virtually impossible — the ship has been designed to be extremely delicate to handle, even to the point of having artificial crises pop up just to keep the crew on their toes!

Ultimately, the crew decides to thaw a frozen doctor (so they have, you know, one woman in their ranks) and then, together, create an artificial computer brain to run the ship.

And if that's not enough random factors to juggle, it is also noted that the Earthling is the seventh ship to have its brains all give up.  So this problem has happened twenty one times (what is it that Einstein is reputed to have said about the definition of madness?) And the last time humanity tried to build a sentient computer, the computer, the installation in which it was developed, indeed the entire island disappeared off the face of the Earth into some other dimension, destination unknown.

Herbert is nothing if not ambitious.


by John Giunta

He is, however, also a lousy writer.  I said as much after reading the sprawling, tedious, and humorless Dune World and its second half, Prophet of Dune.  One of my readers suggested that Herbert's third-person omniscient perspective, switching viewpoint characters almost every line, accented by (often superfluous) musings in italics was a deliberate stylistic choice to render the telepathic resonance shared by users of the spice melange.  But he uses the exact same style in Do I Wake, and there is nothing supernatural in this book.

I also found the overt anti-woman prejudice annoying, with the woman doctor character starting out pumped full of anti-sex drugs to keep her from being too excited all the time (one of the men debates taking some, himself, because he worries he'll be too attracted to the doctor; he decides against it because they reduce intelligence.  Fine for her, though.) Even the drawing of the doctor features her tawdrily topless.

Then there is the endless technical jargon that is not only gibberish, but often archaic gibberish: describing the ship's computer's "relays" (as opposed to transistors or microcircuits) is anachronistic for modern times, more so for machines of the future.

So, not only is Do I Wake a distinct displeasure to read, but it also is utterly implausible every step of the way.  At the Journey, we attempt to review everything in the genre that gets put to print, but we refuse to do it to the point of mortification.  I gave up on page 40, and you should feel no shame if you follow suit.

One star.

Peeping Tommy, by Robert F. Young

Yet another Robert F. Young reworking of a fable.  It keeps you engaged until the end, which is typically terrible.

Two stars.

The Galactic Giants, by Willy Ley

The one bright spot in the issue is Ley's competent science article, the majority of which is devoted to giant stars.  The rest deals with tape as a medium for data storage.

Interesting stuff.  Four stars.

Please State My Business, by Michael Kurland

A traveling salesman from the future ends up in the wrong century.  High jinks ensue.  Well, given that the story starts with a sexual assault and ends with a whimper, the jinks are rather low.

Two stars.

The Shipwrecked Hotel, by James Blish and Norman L. Knight


by Gray Morrow

Seven hundred years from now, the Earth houses One Trillion Humans in relative comfort.  This piece details the unfortunate saga of the "Barrier-hilthon", a beach-ball shaped hotel loosely anchored in the South Pacific.  Thanks to some literal bugs in the system, it becomes unmoored, ultimately crashing into an undersea mountain.  A rescue follows.

Hotel could have made an excellent novel by Arthur C. Clarke — a cross between A Fall of Moondust and Dolphin Island.  As is, it's not only surprisingly amateur, but it's also just sort of lifeless, more plot thumbnail than story.

I was a bit surprised as Hotel's expository style did not feel like James Blish at all (I don't know who Norman L. Knight is).  Then I got to the end where it says the story was by James H. Schmitz and Norman L. Knight.  I'm not sure whether its Blish or Schmitz, but Schmitz makes a lot more sense.  Schmitz is often good, but he's also often not, and in just this sort of way.

Two stars.

Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys

I don't normally devote inches to the book columns. Nevertheless, I've given Budrys a long rope since he came on few months ago, and I can now say with certainty that not only is his judgment orthogonal to mine, but his writing is impenetrable, too.  This is a pity.  I've liked much of the fiction Budrys has written (at least long ago when he was writing consistently), and I used to greatly value Galaxy's book reviews. 

All Hope Abandoned

Wow.  That was just dreadful.  The only faint praise I can damn with is that the Herbert novel was so bad, it meant I didn't have to waste time on 80 pages of the magazine.  This is, without a doubt, the most worthless issue in the Galaxy series.

At least the bar to clear for next month is nice and low!

If you need to get the bad taste out of your mouth (and I know I do!) come register for this week's The Journey Show! 

We'll be discussing the latest fashion trends of 1965, and we have some amazing guests including the founder of Bésame Cosmetics.  Plus, you'll get to see the Young Traveler show off her newest outfits!

DON'T MISS IT!




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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 6, 1965] Same Difference (Dr. Who And The Daleks)

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By Jessica Holmes

Welcome to another round of my ramblings on Doctor Who, where this time I’ll be talking about something a bit different. I’ve had the opportunity to see the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan in full colour on the big screen, but not quite as you know them.

I’ve just previewed the new film (so new, in fact, that it doesn’t come out in the UK theaters until August) Dr. Who And The Daleks, Milton Subotsky’s adaptation of Terry Nation’s serial, The Daleks. Directed by Gordon Flemyng and starring Peter Cushing, this adaptation manages to be too much like the original and not enough, both to its detriment. How? Well, let me explain.

For anyone who didn’t see the original The Daleks, or missed my review back then, here’s a basic rundown of the plot. If you’re familiar with the original, you can skip this next bit. Aside from the setup, it is almost exactly the same.

Image description: Film poster. Top text: NOW ON THE BIG SCREEN IN COLOUR! Bottom text: DR. WHO & THE DALEKS, TECHNICOLOR TECHNISCOPE, PETER CUSHING, ROY CASTLE, JENNIE LINDEN, ROBERTA TOVEY.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 4, 1965]: Hoode Hoode Hoo (Doctor Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick)

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By Jason Sacks

With a Bang

Today is Independence Day, traditionally celebrated with a dazzling pyrotechnic display. And so it is appropriate that the book I'm sharing with you today deals with the biggest bang humanity can make: the atomic bomb.

Doctor Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick is an astonishing book.

I use astonishing in all its meanings: it's surprising, it's impressive, it's full of constant surprises, and Dr. Bloodmoney left me a bit breathless when I finished it.

This is also a weird book. Even for Philip K. Dick, who has written some of the oddest science fiction books in recent years (heck, just look at my review of his Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich for one very recent example), this book is… well, very strange indeed.

But that strangeness makes it endearing, and a compulsive page turner, and, oh heck, let's just dive into my uncategorized thoughts.

How We Got Along Before the Bomb

Many of Philip Dick's short stories and novels start after the atom bomb is dropped and mankind is looking to pick up the pieces. For instance, his outstanding Penultimate Truth delivers a post-atomic world of claustrophobic underground  burrows and vast overground demesnes.

Dick takes a different approach with Dr. Bloodmoney, setting up the world before the bomb drops with three chapters depicting what seem to be rather prosaic events. We witness a strange man visit a psychologist, see a vaguely annoyed salesman, watch a phocomelus achieve his dream job of fixing TV sets. All this scene setting feels  normal and yet also weirdly off-kilter, as if the world is about to change and as if all this seeming normalcy is about to get swept away and as if the characters, deep in their beings, need that normalcy to be swept away in a way that it will never be resurrected.

As always with Dick, however, that apparent normalcy is an illusion, a lie people tell themselves to prevent themselves from madness. Dick's characters are almost always miserable and complicated. They are obsessed with existential doubt and a general frustration at their positions in the world. For one relevant instance, the man going to the psychologist is named Bruno Bluthgeld, who has good reason to need help. As his psychologist realizes in a moment of epiphany:

This is Bruno Bluthgeld, the physicist. And he is right; a lot of people both here and in the East would like to get their hands on him because of his miscalculation back in 1972. Because of the terrible fallout from the high-altitude blast, which wasn't supposed to hurt anyone; Bluthgeld's figures proved it in advance.

The salesman, Stuart McConchie by name, is also deeply unhappy for reasons around envy, ambition and stymied luck due to race (McConchie is black, a fact the book dwells on to its detriment). Dr. Bloodmoney opens with McConchie sweeping the sidewalk in front of the shop he works at. All the while he ponders the misery of Bluthgeld and feels vague jealousy for the happiness of the phocomelus.

That Thalidomide baby is named Hoppy Harrington, and we soon find out he's one of the few characters in this novel who's not filled with miserable existential doubts. Hoppy seems to have telekinetic powers like Manfred Steiner in Dick's great Martian Time-Slip, and we see him fix appliances without having to use his cumbersome metal arms.  Hoppy's powers will take on more importance after the inevitable atom bomb drops.

How We Got Along During the Bomb

Dick's depiction of the events while the bombs are dropping is typical for him: weird, astonishing and striking for its subjective way of depicting the nuclear holocaust.

As the bombs are dropping over Dick's beloved Berkeley, we witness each character's reactions to the events. I was especially struck by this interior monologue from the psychologist Doctor Stockstill:

And then, in the middle of his cursing, he had a weird, vivid notion. The war had begun and they were being bombed and would probably die, but it was Washington dropping bombs on them, not the Chinese or the Russians; something had gone wrong with an automatic defense system out in space, and it was acting out its cycle this way — and no one could halt it, either. It was war and death, yes, but it was error; it lacked intent.

Even as people flee the city in terror, have a final, quick, end-of-the world-so-why-not sexual fling in the back of a car, and consider their futures, still it is clear to these characters that this calamity is the result of a simple accident. It seems to be random chance, a bug in the military's ENIAC that triggers the bombs. Considering we all have the near-death experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis in our recent memories, this "friendly fire" experience is even more terrifying.

And yet, this is a Phil Dick novel we're talking about here, so nothing is quite as simple as it seems.

How We Got Along After the Bomb

In the world after the bomb drops, the most astonishing thing is how normal things feel for readers — at least at the beginning of that segment of the story. It is seven years after E Day, as the people call the day of the holocaust, and the world has been changed in innumerable ways.  Rats are smart, cats gather in gangs, dogs can talk, and the people are barely getting by on a subsistence basis.

This section of the book focuses on a small community in Marin County which includes most of the characters from earlier in the book. McConchie is part of the town, still working as a salesman, and is miserable (we witness a deeply humiliating failure he has trying to buy electronics early in this segment of the story). Dr. Bluthgeld is in the town, under an assumed name, living with his existential misery. The couple who had furtive sex, Bonny Keller and Andrew Gill, also live in the area. Gill has become a kind of cigarette magnate while Keller has become a kind of civic leader. Bonny became pregnant during her tryst with Andrew, and she gave birth to a very strange set of twins who become central to the story's plot.

Hoppy Harrington is also in Marin, working as the town's all-around fix-up man. In a weird way, the Bomb has made Hoppy's disabilities more normal. In a world in which few people escaped deep scarring from the bombs, Harrington is no longer an outcast as a man with no arms or legs. Instead, as a trusted oracular figure, he's able to be content and grow arrogant in his place in the world. It's striking that one of the few characters in this novel – heck, one of the few characters in Dick so far – who is genuinely happy  turns out to be the antagonist of the novel.

Central to the novel is the one character outside of the small Marin County village. Walt Dangerfield had been on his way to Mars when the bombs fell. Trapped orbiting the Earth, his folksy way of speaking ("Hoode Hoode Hoo! Now let me give you a tip on how to store gladiola bulbs all through the winter without fear of annoying pests.") and love of sharing reading to a world desperate for entertainment, Dangerfield unites the world to listen to his voice like FDR used to unite us all with his fireside chats.

It's in this section of the novel that I found myself more and more enraptured in the world Dick creates. In his beautifully flat and unadorned style, Dick is brilliant at conveying character with just a few words. Emotions, motivations, passions and fears seem to radiate off the page from these characters. It feels like Dick wrote in a frenzy, these characters living in three dimensions in his vastly creative mind. Characters grow, change, evolve. McConchie slowly becomes content; Hoppy slowly becomes resentful; the twins grow from being an oddball curiosity to the moral centers of this tale. There's a sense of plot, character and setting oozing out between words, a parallel universe Dick sees through his imagination's gateway. Though this is a short book, it carries the heft of a book twice its length, and in the West Marin township, Dick slowly and shambolically leads to a fascinating conclusion in which Hoppy's ambitions prove to be his tragic fall like a Greek hero too filled with pride.

Some readers may not love the way the main plot of the story mainly wraps up offscreen, but the events leading up to it are rendered so beautifully by Dick that I scarcely cared. There is a scene near the end of this novel, depicted through the eyes of an owl, that was so lyrical that for a moment I thought I was reading Ray Bradbury instead of Philip K. Dick.

In The End

This is the fifth Dick book to be released in the last 18 months. It appears the man's work continues to improve. I was deeply moved and impressed by this novel. The characters are vivid, the events powerful, and Dick's wonderfully subjective way of showing action is unique in my experience. Dr. Bloodmoney is an astonishing achievement.

5 stars, and for me this is the leading candidate for the Hugo Award for Best Novel so far this year.

Above I described Dick's writing as beautifully flat and unadorned, and that's true, but this book also ends on a lovely note which speaks to the curious optimism and faith in the human spirit which runs throughout this book.

The business of the day had begun. All around her the day was awakening, back once more into its normal life.

In the wake of an atom bomb, life slowly returns to its new normal. Humanity will bounce back from even the worst we can imagine. It's hard to get more optimistic than that. In these troubled times, we all need to be reminded to be optimistic.

On the subject of books, please go to this article and give it a read. It's as important now as it was when it was posted — perhaps more. It's been a tough few months.




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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 2, 1965] Gallimaufry (August 1965 IF)

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by David Levinson

A gallimaufry is a kind of stew. Like any stew, it’s composed of a bunch of things thrown together and so has also come to mean any sort of hodge-podge. Since I haven’t been able to come up with some sort of overarching theme this month (and perhaps because, as I write this, I skipped lunch and it’s a couple of hours until dinner), let’s just look at the mish-mash of things that caught my eye (and ear) this month.

The British Invasion continues

On June 12th, the Beatles were named Members of the British Empire. That’s the lowest level of honor granted by the British government, but unsurprisingly a lot of old fuddy-duddies are unhappy with popular musicians being so honored. Member of the Canadian House of Commons Hector Dupuis complained, “British royalty has put me on the same level as a bunch of vulgar numbskulls.” According to my research, apart from seven and a half years in the Canadian Parliament, Mr. Dupuis’ main contribution to society is selling insurance. I’m not sure he’s the one who ought to be complaining about the comparison.


James P. McCartney, George Harrison, John W. Lennon and Richard Starkey showing their medals. You didn’t think his parents named him Ringo, did you?

Sticking with music for the moment, lately I’ve really been enjoying For Your Love by the Yardbirds. It’s a catchy little number that’s been moving up the charts the last few weeks and unusually features a harpsichord. The band took over as the house band at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, England when the Rolling Stones went on to bigger things and then acted as the backing band for Sonny Boy Williamson when he toured Great Britain in early 1964. They’ve had a bit of airplay with some old blues numbers, but this is their first real hit. Alas, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. One of their guitarists, a young man by the name of Eric Clapton, has left the band, unhappy with the move to a more commercial sound. He’s since been replaced by Jeff Beck. Let’s hope that Mr. Clapton is content with the relative obscurity of the blues scene.

The Miracles of Technology

On June 14th, a test planned by American and French doctors and communications experts sent an electrocardiogram from a ship at sea to a hospital in France. The ECG was taken from a passenger aboard the SS France in the Atlantic Ocean and transmitted via facsimile machine first to Cornell University hospital, then RCA Communications, Intelsat, D'Liaisons Radiotelephotographiques de France and then to Boucicaut Hospital in Paris. The image that arrived in France was clear enough for doctors to use for diagnosis. Look for this technique to be used in earnest in the future.


Facsimile technology has been used in meteorology for several years. Its use in remote diagnostic medicine shows promise.

Eppur si muove

The British journal Nature dated June 19th included a paper by astronomers Gordon Pettengill and Rolf Dyce titled "A Radar Determination of the Rotation of the Planet Mercury". They have determined that the planet Mercury is not tidally locked to the sun, but rather has a rotation period of approximately 59 days. That means a day on Mercury is about two-thirds as long as its year. Bad news for Larry Niven, whose very first story, “The Coldest Place”, hinged on the planet always showing the same face to the sun, but those are the breaks in the science fiction game.

An IFfy stew

Speaking of science fiction (and the magazine Niven first appeared in) what is Fred Pohl putting on our plate in this month’s IF? Let’s take a look at the ingredients.


Retief makes his way across town. Art by Gaughan

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Magazine/Anthology

[June 30, 1965] Every Day has its Dog (July 1965 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Hail the Sun God

Summer has officially begun.

On June 21, 1965, the northern hemisphere of Earth enjoyed its longest period of daylight (while in Australia, poor fellow traveler, Kaye Dee suffered through the longest night). The Summer Solstice is an event that once had great religious significance, but as the Mosaic religions spread across the globe, celebration of the day waned.

Today, with the rise of neo-druidism (the North American version of it having been related in articles by Erica Frank), the Solstice has once again become a holy day. And 1965's was particularly special: as the Fraternal Order of Druids gathered around Stonehenge, they were treated to the first uncloudy sunrise in 13 years.

With such an auspicious sign, one might expect that June (July cover date) would be a good one for science fiction magazines. Instead, what we got was a dreary muchness that was more akin to the overcast skies of prior Solstices. And no magazine more exemplifies this drabness than this month's Analog:

Noonday Overcast


by John Schoenherr

Trader Team (Part 1 of 2), by Poul Anderson


by John Schoenherr

Poul Anderson is the Cepheid variable of the science fiction genre: he pulses from brilliance to dullness with regularity. In the midpoints, he produces competent but longwinded stuff like the Van Rijn tales, which detail the exploits of a canny Terran trader trying to enhance his fortune in the Galactic "Polesotechnic League."

Trader Team features David Falkayn, a young cadet we last saw in the mediocre Three-Cornerned Wheel. Thanks to the ingenuity he displayed in that story, Falkayn has been tapped to be Van Rijn's apprentice, his first mission to open up trade on the backward planet of Ikrananka.

The story starts crackingly, introducing the four members of the crew of the Muddlin' Through: Falkayn, the young Captain; Chee, a furry, imprecation-throwing female from planet Cynthia; Adzel, the gentle saurian neo-Buddhist from Woden; and "Muddlehead", the ship's computer. The ship has been in virtual quarantine for several weeks as no representative of the planet's local feudal state will approach them.

Then, in the midst of an intense poker game, Falkayn espies a beautiful woman soldier fleeing from a troop of Ikranankan cavalry. He saves her and brings her aboard ship only to discover that he has given aid to a fugitive of the very polity he is trying to establish relations with!

So far so good, but the next thirty pages are a drag. There's some nice scientific worldbuilding, in which we learn Ikrananka is a one-face planet, that Stepha (the saved soldier) is one of the third generation of spacewrecked humans who now, as a race, hire themselves out as mercenaries, and that Ikrananka would make a nice planet for trade if only its disparate fiefdoms could be unified.

But the story itself meanders in that wordy, shaggy dog style that Poul defaults to when he's on autopilot. The scene in which Adzel gets roaringly drunk and then implicated in a human insurrection is played for laughs, but it's just tedious. When Chee is captured, too, the reaction it elicits is a yawn rather than concern.

And if I have to read another line about what Falkayn thinks of Stepha's physical form, I'll throw the book against the wall. It'd also be nice to see more non-romantic female characters in general (though I will concede that Chee being female is a step in the right direction).

A low three stars.

In the Light of Further Data, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

Data is an Anvil story in a Campbell-edited mag, so caveat emptor.

And your caution is justified. Data is a story in newspaper article excerpts of two intersecting threads. The first is the development of a miracle tissue regrowth process that quickly recruits millions of patients seeking replacements for lost teeth. The second is the battle between a professor who asserts that science is the foundation of truth, and the religious community who pushes back on the assertion.

In the end, said professor cheerfully gets a new mouth of choppers, just as it's determined that there is a fatal flaw in the regrowth technique. The punchline is he quits science and becomes a missionary.

The moral, I assume, is that those eggheads don't know everything. It's certainly a philosophy Campbell has flogged to death.

Anyway, it's a dumb story. Two stars.

Hands Full of Space, by Stephen A. Kallis, Jr.

We get a respite of sorts in the nonfiction article. It's about the difficulties of engineering for the intense harshness of space. Kallis tells us what happens to electronic components when exposed to zero pressure — they weld to each other, their surfaces vaporize and then coat other surfaces — and then there's the wear of hellish radiation and the danger from whizzing micrometeoroids.

It's all very informative and accessible, if a bit long and occasionally disjointed. When Analog's science piece is better than Ley's in Galaxy and Asimov's in F&SF, you know the world is truly inconstant!

Four stars.

Soupstone, by Gordon R. Dickson


by John Schoenherr

Here's another ingenue spaceman saves the day story. Soupstone is the sequel to Sleight of Wit, in which a clever human defeats an alien adversary largely by virtue of said alien being implausibly dim.

This time, Major Hank Shallo is sent to Crown World as a special trouble-shooter. The problem he must solve involves a crop of alien oversized grapes that would produce a most exquisite brandy in tremendous quantities if only they could keep them from rotting in the warehouses. It's all a matter of timing in the picking process, you see.

Shallo, an inept buffoon, is unable to solve the problem himself, but he is able to gather all the folks together who can solve the problem, and in doing so, sets them on their way to effecting the solution. And if you know the fable about making soup from a stone (I did) then you get the reference. And if you don't, don't worry — Dickson explains it for you.

Dickson is capable of much better than these "funny" stories, and once again, the ladies are included just for leering.

Two stars.

The Adventure of the Extraterrestrial, by Mack Reynolds


by John Schoenherr

It is rare that the science fiction and mystery genres overlap. Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw tales and Garrett's Lord Darcy series pretty much round out the list. In Adventure, Reynolds crosses SF with The Detective, the one and only supersleuth of Baker Street (though neither Holmes nor Watson are ever mentioned by name).

An octogenarian Holmes is engaged by the spendthrift son of a rich gentleman. The son is putatively concerned for his father's mental health as he has engaged in a Fortean obsession with aliens, which have taken up residence in London, he maintains.

Reynolds is a good writer, and he executes a fair homage to the Doyle style. But while I enjoyed the story, I found Watson's constant and repetitive harping on Holmes to be offputting. And there are only so many times I need to be reminded of Holmes' age through note of his "senility," "chortling," "blathering," "dribbling," "inanity," etc. etc. Virtually every line includes a reference, and it's overmuch.

Also, and this is a small thing, Holmes' client talks of his father's obsession with "flying saucers." The story is indisputably set in the mid-to-late 1930s. Flying saucers did not become idiomatic vogue until after the war, in astonishing concert with the arrival of jet planes and rocketships. The anachronism vexed.

Still, it's the best story of the issue. A high three stars.

Though a Sparrow Fall, by Scott Nichols

One of those conversation pieces in which the story progresses in party dialogue. Turns out that the human genetic code has been written, or at least tampered with, such that a message has been buried within. By whom, and for whom, it is not known.

There's an interesting germ of a story here, almost something Theodore L. Thomas might address in his little column in F&SF. It doesn't really go anywhere, though.

Three stars.

Delivered with Feeling, by Lawrence A. Perkins


by Kelly Freas

At last, Mr. Perkins offers up another "lone man solves the problems of an alien world" story. This one deals with a planet whose disunion into dozens of profession-castes has made it easy prey for alien raiders. Because the invading planet and Earth are party to a mutual non-aggression pact, our protagonist can provide no material aid. Instead, he simply gives them a rallying slogan, which because of the unique qualities of the subjugated race, proves sufficient to throw off the alien onslaught.

The kicker, of course, is how the protagonist hatched his scheme. It's one of those technical puzzle stories that has been the stale bread and butter of the genre for decades. It's readable and forgettable.

Three stars.

A Dim Augury

Just one magazine cracked the three-star barrier this month: Fantasy and Science Fiction with 3.2 stars. IF and Science Fantasy were inoffensive three-star issues whilst (as Mark and Kris might say) New Worlds stumbled in at just 2.7. As this month's Analog scored a 2.8, it barely misses out on being the worst of the bunch.

And what a meager bunch it is! Without Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow (they're bimonthlies) and since the former Goldsmith mags, Amazing and Fantastic were on hiatus this month, there really wasn't much to read. Worse yet, there was just one woman-penned piece out of the 27 fiction stories published this month.

That the magazines were all fairly unremarkable, save perhaps for the unusually decent F&SF, just goes to show that even when the Sun God makes an appearance, it doesn't always herald good fortune.

Ah well. The Sun sets, but it also rises, and each day brings promise anew…


Sunrise, Roy Lichtenstein's latest masterpiece — see, this month wasn't all bad…




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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction