Tag Archives: 1962

Magazine

[September 22, 1962] Cat and Mouse Game (October 1962 Fantastic)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Victoria Silverwolf

One of the most notable events this month, at least to those of us who look to the stars, was a speech by President Kennedy at Rice University.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

Fittingly, the second team of NASA astronauts was announced this month, captured here in a lighter moment.


Clockwise from top right are Frank Borman, John Young, Tom Stafford, Pete Conrad, Jim McDivitt, Jim Lovell, Elliot See, Ed White and Neil Armstrong.

Will one of these men become the first human being (or at least the first American) on the moon?  We'll have to wait some years to find out.

Meanwhile, back here on Earth, the airwaves are dominated by the smash hit, Sherry, by the Four Seasons.  Personally, lead singer Frankie Valli's falsetto makes me want to leave the planet myself.

A more practical form of escape can be found in the pages of the October 1962 issue of Fantastic.

Another fine cover by the great Emsh captures the mood of a major new story by one of the masters of imaginative literature.

The Unholy Grail, by Fritz Leiber

The author has published a number of tales relating the adventures of the red-haired giant Fafhrd and his much smaller companion the Gray Mouser since 1939.  This story takes place before the two met (although there is one line which suggests that the Grey Mouser caught a glimpse of Fafhrd during an encounter with pirates.)

Not yet known by his famous nickname, the hero is simply called Mouse.  He is the apprentice of a benign practitioner of white magic.  The local Duke hates all magicians.  His daughter secretly takes lessons from Mouse's master, and a gentle romance seems to be blooming between the two young persons.  The story begins with the Mouse returning from a long and difficult quest for the magician.  He finds his master dead and his home burned to the ground.  This is obviously the work of the Duke, and Mouse seeks revenge by turning to black magic.

The story vividly portrays the terrible price one must pay in order to make use of evil magic, and becomes at time a tale of horror.  There is a great deal of psychological depth to the characters.  The Duke is haunted by the memory of his dead wife, who was stronger and crueler than he is.  He tries to force his meek daughter to become like her. 

Leiber's female characters are usually charming and beautiful, but this time he explores the mind of the daughter to a greater degree than usual.  She is bitterly unhappy because of the way her father torments her.  She suffers even more when the Mouse blames her for betraying the magician.  During the climactic scene, when she plays a vital role in the Mouse's scheme of vengeance, she shows unexpected strength of character.
The way in which the naïve and nonviolent Mouse is transformed by tragedy into the cynical, sword-wielding Gray Mouser is sure to capture the imagination of the reader.  Five stars.

The Double-Timer, by Thomas M. Disch

A new author makes his debut with this tale of murder and time travel.  In the next century, special members of the police force are able to investigate crimes by projecting themselves into the recent past.  (The device works only back in time, and no more than eighteen hours.) The narrator is one such officer, who works out a plan to murder his wife and place the blame on the man whom he believes is her lover.  Things don't work out as he expects.  The plot is cleverly thought out, although this story might seem more suited to the pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which sometimes publishes crime fiction with science fiction elements.  Perhaps the author will follow the lead of Donald Westlake and John D. MacDonald and turn to writing thrillers.  In any case, he shows promise and intelligence.  Four stars.

Any Questions?, by Leo P. Kelley

In this brief story, aliens come to Earth disguised as humans and offer various people devices which allow them to create anything they desire.  The result is not surprising, but the tale is told in an efficient manner.  Three stars.

Nor Iron Bars a Cage, by Ron Goulart

This is a farce about the warden of an automated prison.  A glitch in the program (created in a very silly manner) causes him to be mistaken for a prisoner on death row.  The robot guards refuse to believe his story.  With only a few days until his execution, he must find a way out.  The ending of the story is as silly as the beginning.  The robot clergyman provides some mild amusement.  Two stars.

Presence of Mind, by Martin Armstrong

The Fantasy Classic for this issue is from the pen of a prolific British author of fiction and poetry.  It is taken from a 1934 collection of his short stories.  The protagonist takes a shortcut through a private garden on his way to an appointment, hoping to avoid notice.  When confronted by a servant, he tries to escape by pretending to be looking for the home of a man with the ridiculously unlikely name of Z. Q. Muggleton Spoffin.  To his astonishment, this is the name of the man who lives there.  In an attempt to get out of this absurd situation, he makes up a story involving people with other outrageous names.  Incredibly, all the imaginary people he creates actually exist.  As the story goes on, he even makes up an imaginary brand of lawnmower.  This is an eccentric story, which plays games with the nature of reality.  The mood is generally one of light comedy, although there is a subtle tone of uneasiness.  It is definitely better than the old pulp stories the magazine usually reprints.  Three stars.

The Teachers Rode a Wheel of Fire , by Roger Zelazny

A young writer who has already appeared in the publications edited by Cele Goldsmith a couple of times offers another very short story.  In this one, a primitive human (or humanoid) witnesses the arrival of a spaceship bearing two technologically advanced humans (or humanoids.) They try to teach him how to use simple tools of wood and stone by enticing him with food.  He doesn't seem to learn anything, but at the end of the story he gets an idea in an unexpected way.  It was never clear to me whether this was another planet, or Earth thousands of years ago being visited by aliens (or, possibly, time travelers.) Despite this vagueness, and the fact that we never learn why the advanced characters are trying to teach the primitive character, the story is of some interest.  I hope the author, who obviously has talent and imagination, goes on to write longer and more complex stories.  Three stars.

Autogeddon, by Geoffry Wagner

Here we have a fierce and violent satire of the modern automobile culture from a name new to me.  In the future, the United States is ruled by a dictatorship.  The entire nation has been paved over.  Cars zoom by at enormous rates of speed.  A license is required to be a pedestrian.  Even so, drivers have the freedom to run over any victims they find.  These murders are televised as entertainment.  The plot involves a college professor and one of his students who try to rebel against this bloody society.  This is a grim and powerful tale, which may make you think twice the next time you try to cross a busy street.  Four stars.

You may not be able to buy a ticket to the moon yet, but at least you can purchase a trip into the realms of wonder.

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TV

[Sep. 20, 1962] Out of this World (the British Summer SF hit!)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


By Ashley R. Pollard

The end of summer has come, and autumn is upon us.  The result of the Earth’s journey around the sun, and as my esteemed colleague Mr. Mark Yon said, the weather here has been wet.  Sometimes we get good summers, but this year was not one of those, the icing on the cake being a miserable August Bank Holiday weekend after the weekend before’s promising sunny day.  But, Whether the weather be fine, Or whether the weather be not, here on Galactic Journey we will weather the weather to bring you the latest Sci-Fi news from soggy Britain.

This coming Saturday will see the last episode of Out of this World, which has made staying in on a Saturday night something to look forward to, rather than something that indicates one has no friends or better things to do.  Though to be fair, I’ve been babysitting for my friend, which I enjoy doing.

As I mentioned before, this series was launched with Dumb Martian shown as part of the Armchair Theatre series.  The new series has a very spooky theme tune called The Concerto to the Stars, composed by Eric Siday, which plays against a background of moving microscopic tentacles that sets the tone for the show.  For those who are interested, Tony Hatch has expanded the theme tune into very catchy 45 record, available from all good record stores.

The format of the show has each episode introduced by Boris Karloff, who is disarmingly charming with his bon mots about the story to come.  There are two breaks for adverts, which is annoying, but this is commercial TV, so it is to be expected.  Then Mr. Karloff signs off the story with an announcement of the cast.

The first actual episode shown under the banner Out of this World was the Yellow Pill by Rog Phillips, which was a story that explored the nature of reality and delusions.  As someone who works in the field of mental health, this was of particular interest to me, and it was interesting to see an author’s take on the subject.  The paradoxical ending pulled the rug from underneath the viewers' feet.  It launched the series, pulling in eleven million viewers, which placed it as the eleventh highest rated show of the week.

Remarkable for any first episode of a series, let alone one advertising itself as science fiction.

The second story was an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Little Lost Robot, whose robot stories featuring Dr. Susan Calvin are some of my favourite SF reads.  While the adaptation is very good, it is a trifle over-cooked, and the ending of the story has been changed so that the robot kills the person who told it to get lost when it is found out.  This goes against Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and is a failure of Leo Lehman to understand the story.  Still, a compelling piece, despite this egregious ending.

The third episode is a much truer adaptation, based on the Cold Equations by Tom Godwin.  There’s not much I can tell you that you all don’t already know about this story of a spaceship with a stowaway.  The play has the rather suave Peter Wyngarde, who was seen earlier this year in the film Night of the Eagle aka Burn Witch Burn, acting alongside a very young actress called Jane Asher.  Her biography mentions that when she was a child she appeared in The Quatermass Xperiment. This was the Hammer Films adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s story that I have mentioned on several previous occasions.

Episode four’s story was Imposter by Philip K. Dick.  A famous piece that, again, should not need an introduction by me.  It’s a classic tale of paranoia adapted for television by Terry Nation, who I mention in passing because he contributes one of the two original stories for this series.  Judging by his story Botany Bay, which was transmitted the following week, he is someone to keep an eye on.

Botany Bay was a story with twists that were disturbing in their implication, set in a psychiatric institution.  The setting alone grabbed me from the start, and the central conceit of alien criminals transferring their minds into the minds of the patients in the asylum set the tone, making the sinister story feel like something from Philip K. Dick.  The denouement that this wasn’t Earth, and the intruders were from Earth, was shocking.

Medicine Show by Robert Moore Williams is a story about two doctors who are alien miracle workers who take payment from their patients in the form of seeds.  Again, this adaptation veers a little off course as it tonally makes it all rather more mystical than the original story, but it feels fresh, and I suspect it will appeal to younger people’s sensibilities.

Episode seven is an adaptation of Katherine Maclean’s, Pictures Don't Lie.  I loved this story of aliens spaceship travelling here, peacefully announcing their intentions and talking to the people on Earth, which then goes all horribly wrong, because of scale.  They’re really, really tiny, and are lost after they land in what they describe as a marsh.  The humans who go out to search for them fail to see the microscopic alien ship and tragically destroy the visitors from another world when they step on them by accident.

Vanishing Act by Richard Waring, is an original play for Out of this World.  It turns down intensity of the previous week’s tragedy by presenting a comedy (if one may call it that?) The protagonist, a conjuror in search of the late magician Great Vorg’s lost vanishing-cabinet, finds himself getting far more than he bargained for.

The next episode goes back to the more paranoid-conspiracy tone with an adaptation of Raymond F. Jones’s Divided We Fall.  I remember him as the author of This Island Earth — only from the film because I’ve not read any of his stories.  This play presents the intriguing problem of how to tell synthetic humans that are indistinguishable from everyone else.  It features the charming Ann Bell, an actress unknown to me, who I suspect will go far in her career.  Also, this story reminds me of the film The Creation of the Humanoids, reviewed here by fellow columnist Miss Rosemary Benton.

Episode ten, The Dark Star, by Frank Crisp was based on his novel Ape of London.  He’s better known for his children’s adventure books, but this is a credible story about what happens when people get superhuman strength from a disease that chooses its victims according to their standing in society.  I’ve not read the novel, so I can’t comment on how close to the original story this adaptation is.

Clifford D. Simak has not one, but two of his short stories adapted for Out of this World.  The first, Immigrant, is about the planet Kimon, a paradise where people go — never to return again.  A nice story that builds up the tension, ladles on despair, and finishes with an uplifting ending.

However, the second Simak story, Target Generation, based on his story Spacebred Generations, was my personal favourite.  It’s a generation-ship story where the descendants of the crew are ignorant of the fact that they are on a starship.  The hero has to figure what to do with a key that was handed down to him by father with the instructions "only to be used in an emergency."  With the help of a forbidden dictionary he has to learn how to land the ship.  Gripping stuff, even if it’s a well-worn story; seeing it televised just made it better than it had any right to be.

The final story of the series is on this coming Saturday and titled, The Tycoons by Arthur Sellings.  This is a pseudonym of Arthur Gordon Ley, who is a former scientist turned author, and also known as a bookseller.  I’ve only read this weeks Radio Times blurb, so all I can tell you is that it’s a story of three aliens coming here to make a weapon to take over the Earth, billed as a comedy.

Well, this was an excellent summer-time show, but as you know Irene Shubik and Sydney Newman have gone to the BBC, so I fear we will not see a sequel, which is a shame because every Saturday night it managed to knock me Out of this World for the hour it was on.  Perhaps the American audience will be lucky to see it imported, as I understand Supercar was this Summer, and Danger Man the Summer before.

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Magazine

[September 18, 1962] On the Precipice (October 1962 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

Are the times changing?

Summer threatens to change to Fall, and the kids are going off to high school and college.  Is this just another turn of the wheel, or are we on the verge of something different, what Historian of Science Thomas Kuhn might call a new "paradigm?"

I had this feeling once before.  In '53, right after Korea, and after Stalin died, America seemed poised on the edge of an unprecedented era of stability.  Well, really stagnation.  The pendulum had swung heavily in the direction of conservatism.  Black soldiers had come home from the war and were being treated worse than ever.  Ditto women, who had for a while gotten to enjoy some of the rights of men while they were off to war.  The swing music from the prior two decades had gotten overripe and shmaltzy, only somewhat mitigated by the western, blues, and latin music I was able to tune into on nights with clear reception.  The one truly bright spot was science fiction, which had been booming since the late '40s.

Then rock and roll hit, and boy was it a breath of fresh air.  Sure, you couldn't hear Black songs on White stations, but there's no color bar on the airwaves.  Fragile 78 records gave way to durable 45s.  The vacuum tube started to step aside for the transistor.  We were building the missiles that would soon blast us to orbit.  At the same time, sf started to wane.  We went from forty magazines to six over the course of the decade. 

This, then, has been the recent paradigm.  Here we are nine years later, but Elvis and the Everley Brothers still dominate the airwaves.  A new President has asked us what we could do for our country, not what it could do for us; tasking us to go to the Moon before the decade is out, but Black men must still fight even for the right to go to school or ride a bus in much of the nation.  There are now ten thousand Russian troops in Cuba and ten thousand American soldiers in South Vietnam, but are these transitory brush fires or the tip of a belligerent iceberg?

Are the 1960s going to be a continuation of the 1950s?  Or are we overdue for a new epoch?  You tell me.  I'm no soothsayer. 

I suppose in one way, the shift has already happened.  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction has become quite different since new editor Avram Davidson took over earlier this year.  It's not bad, exactly, but it has meandered even further into the literary zone.  This has rendered one of my favorite mags almost unreadable on occasion.  The October 1962 issue does not have this problem, for the most part, but it's not great.

Enough dilly-dallying.  Here's the review:

A Kind of Artistry, by Brian W. Aldiss

The son of a baroque and decadent far future Terra journeys across the galaxy to make contact with a most unusual alien intelligence.  Upon his glorious return, he must decide if he has the strength to break the stultifying conditioning of his inbred upringing.

Aldiss wishes he were Cordwainer Smith, and he just isn't.  Nevertheless, despite some rough patches, there are some good ideas here.  The extraterrestrial has a wildly implausible biochemistry, but the meeting of species is genuinely gripping.  Three stars.

There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, by Robert F. Young

Overpopulation continues to be the theme of many of our current science fiction stories.  A common concept is the idea that excess population can be shipped to the stars, but as any student of history knows, neither England, Spain, France, Portugal, nor any other country ever became empty as a result of colonization.  We can't expect spaceships to change that equation. 

Neither does Young.  His story is cute, if one-note, holding our interest for as long as the idea can be stretched.  Three stars.

Twenty-Four Hours in a Princess's Life, With Frogs, by Don White

What if all the fairy-tale princesses were pals, all living together in Hans Christian Andersonville with intersecting storybook plotlines?  Aurora, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel… the whole neurotic gang of them.  Don White explores that possiblity in a clever, funny piece that makes me hope that Disney never tries to combine its franchises.  What a mess that would be!  Four stars.

Inquest in Kansas (A Modern American Ballad) by Hyacinth Hill

The unknown Ms. Hill (I understand she may be Virginia Anderson) has a poetic piece about a woman seduced from her home and family by a unicorn.  Whether you find it horrifying or liberating depends on how you infer her life history.  Two stars, as it didn't grab me.

Measure My Love, by Mildred Clingerman

What a fascinating, almost excellent, but ultimately disappointing piece this was.  Dodie is a youngish spinster whose actress cousin, Althea, has a penchant for melodramatic love affairs.  When Althea's irresistible romantic nature meets the immovable, unwinnable affections of a married man, Dodie takes her cousin to the local witch, Maude, to cure her of her of broken heart.  Turns out the "witch" is more than meets the eye, but it's an open question whether or not her panoply of equipment can remedy Althea's condition. 

Clingerman is one of the most seasoned veterans our field, and her work has a pleasantly old-fashioned tone to it — appropriate both for the era (just post-war) and the protagonist portrayed.  The story moves you along the plot, slowly unfolding things to maintain your interest.  What hurt Measure for me was that, near the end, Maude mentions that she might also be able to cure Dodie's "little problem," hitherto undiscussed but strongly hinted at.  But then the problem turns out to be something completely different from what I expected (given the close relationship of the cousins, and Dodie's unending patience where things Althea-related are concerned). 

I wonder if I guessed wrong, or if the ending was changed at the editor's insistence for being a bit too…unconventional.  Either way, it turned a four-star story into a three-star one.  I'm probably being unfair, but unsatisfying endings sit poorly with me.

Slow Burn, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor touches on one of my favorite scientific topics — the theory of Phlogiston and how its research eventually led to the discovery of oxygen.  It's one of those fascinating models that almost but not quite got things right, like impetus theory in the 13th Century ultimately led to the concept of momentum.  I mentioned Kuhn's "paradigms" earlier, and Phlogiston is a perfect example of the concept.  Four stars.

The Unfortunate Mr. Morky, by Vance Aandahl

One of my readers once said that Mr. Aandahl really wants to be Ray Bradbury.  Surely, there must be loftier goals.  In any event, this incomprehensible piece about the connection between time travel and the profusion of milquetoast personalities isn't worth your time.  On the other hand, it's only a few pages, so you might as well see why I gave it only one star (and perhaps you'll disagree with me).

The Journey of Joenes (Part 1 of 2), by Robert Sheckley

At long last, Bob Sheckley has come back to us.  It's my understanding that he's been writing mainstream mysteries and such, which probably pays better than sf.  His latest work, which Editor Davidson says is a hacked up version of the novelized form due out later this year, follows the adventures of Joenes, an American ex-power engineer raised in Polynesia.  His pilgrimage to the Mainland to find his destiny is a series of satirical vignettes told from a foreign and futuristic perspective that turns the story into a kind of dark Canterbury Tales.

It's a fun read, though I hope there's light at the end of the tunnel.  Sheckley is better at short stories than novels, so the format plays to his strengths.  I do have to wonder why F&SF prints chopped up novels to fill up half of two consecutive magazines.  I expect that of Ace Doubles, not a high-end digest.  Three stars so far.  We'll see what happens.

And so we find ourselves on the other side of another issue.  On the face of things, it seems to reinforce the trend that F&SF is in a new and duller era.  Will we soon have enough data points to know if the larger world has changed, too?

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Movies

[Sep. 15, 1962] Communist Defector (Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Sun)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

Roger Corman, the Savant of Schlock is back with a most unusual motion picture.  With incredible puissance, Corman stretches a dime such that he makes "A" quality out of "B" films (q.v. House of Usher, Little Shop of Horrors, Panic in Year Zero, etc.) But Corman takes a different tack with his latest flick, Battle Beyond the Sun.  From what I've read, it was originally a Soviet film, which Corman then redubbed and edited for American consumption.  The result is…interesting, and not an unrewarding experience.

The film begins with a somewhat non sequitur narrated sequence displaying a host of spacecraft models.  These are of current and futuristic design.  While a pretty sequence, it is better suited to one of the NASA documentary films you see on TV.  The rather ponderous narration continues as the setting is introduced: in the near future, an atomic war devastates the planet and erases political boundaries.  Once the Earth recovers, it is divided into two rival states: North Hemis and South Hemis.  Interestingly, the former includes what was once the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.  The latter comprises latin Europe, South America, Africa, and most of Asia.

Now it is 1997, and both nations are on the verge of sending a manned mission to Mars.  The South Hemis spaceship Mercury, docked at the orbiting station, Angkor, is undergoing final preparations when a distress call is received.  It is a North Hemis spacecraft, the Typhoon, in need of repair.  The Angkor personnel, apolitical in their devotion to science, open their airlocks to their distressed adversaries. 

But when the North Hemisians learn of the Mercury's impending flight, they foolhardily depart with their half-fixed vessel in an attempt to reach the Red Planet first.  They run afoul of the sun's magnetic field along the way, crippling the ship and leaving it in a helpless spiral toward extinction. 

Of course, the self-sacrificing and noble South Hemisians cannot let the Typhoon's crew die, no matter their treachery.  So begins an exciting adventure as the Mercury sails off to rescue the Typhoon, finds itself in need of saving, too, ultimate success resting in the hands of a third, prototype spaceship.  Will they make it to Mars?  Can they get back?  You'll have to watch and find out.

The most striking aspects of this film stem from its Soviet provenance.  I recently reviewed the volume, More Soviet Science Fiction, and I note Battle shares the same grand stateliness with the first story of that collection.  Everything is larger than life.  The Director of Spaceflight sits virtually alone in an enormous control room, her voice echoing in the chamber.  Launchpads are giant, austere things.  The final scene is a sweeping pageant of clamoring humanity. 

There is, of course, the lackluster dubbing (par for the course if you've watched Japanese imports), and I imagine we lose a bit of the original plot.  But I was impressed with the lack of political bias.  Battle is a tale of the community of science winning out over personal or national ambition.  It was clearly a high budget film, with excellent use of matting, fine modelwork, and stunning costumes.

Technologically, it's a big of a mixed bag.  I liked the fact that ships had to turn over to decelerate, and I was impressed with the way the astronauts' couches reclined to always be perpendicular to the direction of thrust.  The filmmakers were obviously impressed with this effect, too — it gets shown a lot

In the demerits department, we have the fact that ships sail across the solar system in what appears to be a matter of hours.  With engines that powerful, one wonders how it's taken so long to get a person to Mars.  Also, the superfluous mid-movie fight between purple space monsters, advertised heavily in the trailers, is both nonsensical and was clearly created in post-production as a way to jazz up the film.

But the movie doesn't need it.  I fully expected Battle to be a ponderous mess, but it actually moves along quite nicely.  It was certainly much better than the Italian flick, Assignment: Outer Space. 

Three stars, and a keen desire to someday see the original.

—


by Lorelei Marcus

Strap in and recline your seats, because we're going on a space adventure! This week me and my father watched, “Battle Beyond the Sun,” a Soviet science fiction film brought to the U.S. I didn't have very high hopes going into this movie, but my dad promised purple space monsters, so, reluctantly, I agreed.

Surprisingly, the movie wasn't bad! It was actually quite interesting to compare a Soviet film to the (mostly) American films we've watched so far. The cinematography was different, but still quite good, and the space suits looked cool and realistic. The voice actors who did the overdub for the movie were sub-par to say the least, but it didn't take away from the movie too much. I noticed throughout the movie that all the actors had a certain 'closeness:' they were all simply closer together: Their faces were closer when talking, they had hands on each others' shoulders, etc. That's certainly different from the wide personal bubble we Americans prefer.

The story, on the other hand, wasn't too far off from what I would expect in a science fiction film. The movie was about the two halves of the globe, North Hemis and South Hemis, and their race to Mars. The South Hemis ship gets stranded on an asteroid orbiting mars, after rescuing the North Hemis ship. Then there's the odd and unnecessary scene of the purple space monsters fighting each other, which apparently wasn't added in until it made it to the U.S. It was really unnecessary, but I suppose it did get me to the watch the movie!

For most of the movie me and my dad thought that the U.S. And Soviet Union were in different nations. It wasn't until after the movie that we realized it was actually the opposite: Soviet Union and America in the North, and basically everyone else in the South. It struck me that they had purposefully done this to avoid labeling political sides, which was not something I would expect the Soviet Union would do!

Overall this was a pretty good movie. The effects were cool and the story was passable. The foreign influence also added a unique feel to the movie. I give this movie 3/5 stars and 1/5 purple space monsters (this movie either needed more or fewer purple space monsters.) I still recommend you watch this movie yourself, as it is an interesting contrast to the other science fiction movies I've seen so far.

Until next time…this is the Young Traveler, signing off.

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Magazine

[September 13, 2017] GRAZING THE BAR (the October 1962 Amazing)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by John Boston

Space!  Mankind’s dream!  Well, some people’s dream.  A lot of us seem to be more concerned with making a living, taking care of families, trying to keep a straight face at school, and other highly terrestrial activities.  But even in this small town in the boondocks, people mostly seem to take pride in the first human ventures off the planet, though you do hear the occasional grumble that all that money could be better spent right here on Earth.

I wasn’t so confident a couple of years ago, when I witnessed the second most remarkable thing I have seen here.  (First place is claimed by the man I saw walking a raccoon on a leash.  Raccoons do tend to have their own agendas.) I was downtown on a Saturday morning, which is when the farmers come into town to take care of their business.  The banks are open then, which I am told is not the case in larger cities.  The farmers come in their cars, their pickup trucks, and in some cases their horse-drawn wagons, all parked around the courthouse square.  On this Saturday, a man was preaching from the back of one of the wagons . . . against the evils of space travel.  “If Man reaches out to touch the face of God’s Moon,” he thundered, “God will BLAST HIM FROM THE EARTH!” But no one paid any attention, and I’ve heard nothing further about his prophecy.

I was reminded of this episode by the cover story of the October Amazing, Poul Anderson’s Escape from Orbit.  It’s another near-space epic like Third Stage from the February issue, also, like that one, illustrated by a Popular Mechanics-style cutaway depiction of guys in a space vehicle.  The situation: meteor destroys spacecraft, crew escapes in lifecraft without propulsion, now they’re stuck in Moon orbit with no one close enough to rescue them, and a solar flare due in 48 hours.  The only bright spot is that the ship’s big, heavy main air tank is nearby and retrievable, giving them enough to breathe until they get killed by the flare.  The air tank—that’s it!  In a paroxysm of arithmetic (work shown only at the end), the protagonist, second banana at Orbital Command on Earth, sees the solution. 

This five or six pages’ worth of story is stretched to 20 by extensive detail about our hero’s home and inner life, including his unsatisfactory wife, the woman he wishes he had married, his physical deterioration (he’s 34) and how he feels about it, his career anxieties, etc.  It takes five paragraphs to get from the early morning ringing phone to actually answering it, and several pages to get him out the door and on the road to Base.  Maybe somebody told Anderson he needed more human interest in his stories, or maybe he hoped to sell this one to Cosmopolitan (well, no, not with the complaints about the wife) or the Saturday Evening Post.  Whatever.  The whole thing is forced and clumsy.  Two stars.

This month’s “Classic Reprint” is The Young Old Man by Earl L. Bell, from the magazine’s September 1929 issue, which serves mainly to show how boring a story can be even if short.  Campers in the Ozarks encounter a storekeeper who looks about 45 but he’s obviously ancient, just look at his eyes.  The revelation is that immortality, which he received via thaumaturgist in the 11th Century, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.  How fortunate we are that most SF writers these days at least try to develop their ideas, rather than just laying them out like a dead fish on ice.  One star.

Things look up a bit after that one.  Ben Bova has taken a break from his article series and contributed a short story, Answer, Please Answer , about a couple of guys wintering in Antarctica (draftees in a war with the Soviets), who by coincidence are both astronomers.  So in their considerable spare time, they look for extraterrestrial signals from variable stars, and boy do they find them and are they sobering.  This is as much a one-gimmick story as Anderson’s, but it’s much better done by this guy with a decade’s less experience writing fiction.  It builds up smoothly, dropping in just enough background on the characters to make them characters, comes to its revelation, then stops.  Three stars for unpretentious cleverness and competence.

Jeff Sutton’s After Ixmal is readable but silly: a super-computer develops consciousness, albeit the consciousness of a petulant child, tricks humanity into destroying itself, lords it over the dead Earth for eons until it discovers a rival consciousness, and goes to war with it, just because.  As SF it’s barely thought through at all, and as fable or myth or whatever it lacks the necessary sonority, gravitas, etc.  Two stars.

The versatile Robert F. Young, who knows so many ways of being entirely too cute, is back with Boy Meets Dyevitza.  Captain Andrews of the United States Space Force, who thinks he is the first Earth-person on Venus, encounters Major Mikhailovna of the USSR, who is washing her stockings in a stream, having beaten him there the previous day.  As for conditions on Venus, hey, this is science fiction, so: “The data supplied by the Venus probes during the early 60’s, while inconclusive with regard to her cloud-cover, had conclusively disproved former theories to the effect that she lacked a breathable atmosphere and possessed a surface temperature of more than 100 degrees Centigrade, and had prepared him for what he found—an atmosphere richer in oxygen content than Earth’s, a comfortable climate [etc.].” See?  Science!  Extrapolation!  [And complete bollocks — Young should know better.]

Then the human indigenes show up, wearing brass collars; shocked by the Earthfolks’ naked necks, they later kidnap them and put brass collars on them, which can’t be removed by human tools and prevent them from getting very far from each other.  They are married, Venusian style.  But they discover they don’t really mind, and (to summarize brutally) the folks back home say “Awwww,” and—never mind.  Two stars for Young’s usual professional execution, heavily discounted for cloy.

The fiction contents are rounded out by Pattern, the second story in the SF magazines by the very youthful Robert H. Rohrer, Jr. (b. 1946), less slick but more interesting than Young’s polished artifact: a life form consisting of organized electricity tries to take over and consume the energy flows of human spaceship pilot Captain Brenner.  This is not exactly an original plot—see, or remember, van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle—but it’s much better worked out than, say, After Ixmal, with a nasty twist at the end.  Three stars and good if not great expectations for this new writer.

Sam Moskowitz’s SF Profile is The Secret Lives of Henry Kuttner—not one of his best.  Per his custom, he describes Kuttner’s early pulp stories in detail and gives very short shrift to his later and better work, emphasizing his pseudonyms and what Moskowitz thinks is his work’s derivative aspects (sometimes rightly and sometimes decidedly not), and summarizing his career: “Lured by opportunism, suffering from an acute sense of inadequacy, he refused to stand alone, but leaned for support upon a parade of greats: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Stanley G. Weinbaum, A. Merritt, John Collier, A.E. van Vogt, and, of course, C.L. Moore.” This about the man who by the early ‘40s had become one of the most capable writers in the field, who produced a disproportionate number of the best-remembered stories of the ‘40s and early ‘50s, and whose work was pored over by the likes of Sturgeon and Bradbury.  Terrible analysis, terrible judgment.  Two stars, being generous.

Frank Tinsley, it turns out, isn’t gone.  He’s here with The Nuclear Putt-Putt, an article about Project Orion, a proposed gigantic spaceship to be powered by a succession of nuclear bombs.  Small ones, to be sure, but still.  Especially since this insane behemoth is apparently supposed to launch from Earth.  Can we say radiation?  Fallout?  Not a word about how these are to be contained.  Two stars for overlooking a rather obvious problem.

And Benedict Breadfruit . . . is gone as of this issue.  His last bow is actually reasonably clever . . . unlike most of its predecessors.

So the magazine bumbles along.  The wearying thing is not how bad its worst stories are, but that the top of its range is still readable competence and little more.

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Magazine

[Sep. 10, 1962] Leading by Example (the terrific October 1962 Galaxy)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

Thirteen years ago this month, amidst the post-war boom of science fiction digests, Galaxy Science Fiction was born.  Its editor, H.L. Gold, intended his brainchild to stand above and apart from the dozens of lesser mags (remember those days of abundance?) with progressive and smart strictly SF stories.  He succeeded — Galaxy has showcased some of the best the genre has to offer, as well as a fine science fact column penned by Willy Ley.  The consistency of quality has been remarkable.

Two years ago, Fred Pohl, a bright authorial light already, took the helm from the ailing Gold.  If anything, he has improved on excellence, continuing to coax fine works from established authors and interesting pieces from new ones.  It helps that he, himself, can fill the pages with good material and often does….though I have to wonder if he gets paid when he does that.

If you were to pick any single issue to turn someone on to Galaxy (or to science fiction in general), you could hardly do better than to give them the latest issue (October 1962) of Galaxy.  Not only isn't there a clunker in the mix, not only does it feature a new Instrumentality story by the great Cordwainer Smith, but it includes part one of an incredible new novel by the editor.

Wow.  I think I threw in more superlatives in the last three paragraphs than I have in the last three months.  I guess it's time to show you what all the hubbub's about:

The Ballad of Lost C'mell, by Cordwainer Smith

Many authors write in a consistent world.  Some are developed following an individual through her/his life in a series of stories.  Others might take place in a common setting but feature different protagonists.  Smith has introduced his Instrumentality universe through oblique flashes.  Each piece involves wildly different places and characters, each with a limited view of things.  Only after reading several of them does one get an idea of the nature of Smith's creation.

Thousands of years from now, Earth has seen global empires rise and fall.  The current ruling entity is the Instrumentality, a council of pure-humans ruling over the people-citizens and genetically altered animal-subcitizens.  Technology caters to virtually every need; the world enjoys a purely service-based economy with the Underhumans providing the services.  For humans, Earth is a beautiful, magical place filled with strange wonders.  For the animal-people, enslaved to the pure humans, life is a struggle and punishments harsh.  We are beyond the familiar subtext of racism/male-chauvinism that suffuses Western stories – the relationship between the races hearkens to the rigid castes of Asia.  The animal-men may be cast in human mold, but their treatment is peremptory, inhumane.  And the humans are blithely unaware that their creations have the capacity to rebel…

C'mell is the most straight-forward of Smith's Instrumentality stories, and it gives the sharpest insight, to date, of the world he's created (though it by no means reveals all of its secrets).  As always, it displays Smith's mastery of the craft, mixing showing and telling, romance and austerity, far-future and relatability.  Smith is an author who doesn't put pen to paper unless it's for a four or five-star story, and C'mell is no exception.  Five stars.

Come Into My Cellar, by Ray Bradbury

We've seen the plot where intelligent fungus take over humanity through forced symbiosis in Aldiss' Hothouse stories.  Bradbury gives us a much more conventional setup, where the evil mushrooms send spores of themselves via mail-order catalog to be grown and ingested.  A nicely written but dumb story, and it has the same ending as All Summer in a Day, which is to say, Ray doesn't bother to end it.  Three stars – about as good as Bradbury (not really an SF author) ever gets.

The Earthman's Burden, by Donald E. Westlake

A competent if somewhat forgettable story of an arrogant, resurgent Terran star empire and the lost colony that promises to be more trouble than it's worth to conquer.  There's pleasant satire here, particularly of the buffoonish Imperials, but nothing we haven't seen before.  In fact, I rather expected to find this piece in Analog (you'll see why).  Three stars.

For Your Information: End of the Jet Age, by Willy Ley

A generation ago, propeller planes were the way to travel.  Now that they've been eclipsed by the jets, one has to wonder just how long our 707s and DC-8s will last before they are, in turn, replaced by the next mode of transportation.  Ley gives us an excellent preview of rocketplane travel in the 1980s as well as a spotlight on a living fossil and answers to readers' questions.  Four stars.

A City Near Centaurus, by Bill Doede

Speaking of series, Doede has a third story in his tale of teleporting humans , who have exiled themselves from Earth using subcutaneous matter transmitters that work at the speed of thought.  This latest piece involves a dilettante archaeologist who'll brave offending the Gods and even risk death to dig an ancient, abandoned site on Alpha Centauri II.  Another piece that shouldn't work (why does the native speak perfect English?), but Doede always pulls it off.  Four stars.

How to Make Friends, by Jim Harmon

Resigned to an 18-year hitch, the solo operator of a Martian atmosphere seeder resorts to building his own companions to preserve his sanity.  It's a little bit McIntosh's Hallucination Orbit (one wonders if the events of the story are really happening) tinged with Sheckley-esque satire and robotics.  But Harmon is not quite as skilled as either of these authors, and so the story ends up like most of Harmon's work, never quite hitting the mark.  Three stars.

Plague of Pythons (Part 1 of 2), by Frederik Pohl

How fragile our interconnected, technological world is.  How easy it would be for a few malicious demons, selectively possessing our bodies at propitious times, to utterly disintegrate our society.  Fast forward two years, after the world has reverted to feudal savagery.  Communities larger than the village are impossible.  Religion has revived in a last-ditch attempt to protect humanity from bodily appropriation.  One ex-engineer, name of Chandler, is on trial for a heinous assault he most assuredly committed, but which wasn't his doing.  What justice can he find in a world where the dispensers of justice can, at any time, cease being themselves?

Pythons is a brutal, uncomfortable story, crushingly bleak.  It's not the sort of thing I would normally go for, and I definitely caution against it if mind control pushes unpleasant buttons.  Yet Pohl executes the thing deftly, and he holds out the barest sliver of hope to keep you going.  I have no idea how Pythons will conclude, but if the latter half is as good as the first, we'll have a minor masterpiece on our hands.  Four stars (for now…)

Roberta, by Margaret St. Clair

Roberta explores the lengths one might go to erase the wrongness they feel exists in themselves – and the possibility that it is impossible to escape that wrongness.  It is the first story I've read that explores the concept of transsexualism, and while it is not a positive story, it is an interesting one.  Three stars.

Bimmie Says, by Sydney J. Van Scyoc

While we're on the subject of changing physical form, is it possible to be transCarnivorous?  In other words, what if cats and dogs can be made mutually intermalleable?  And if pets can be transformed, why not people?  Van Scyoc's story is clearly inspired by Keyes' hit, Flowers for Algernon, whose excellence it does not quite reach.  Still, it's not bad, and I'm glad to see Sydney's continuing her promising career.  Three stars.

Who Dares a Bulbur Eat?, by Gordon R. Dickson

Last up is the second in the adventures of the interstellar ambassadorial couple, Tom and Lucy Reasoner — a sort of Hammett's Nick and Nora meets Laumer's Retief.  In this installment, the Reasoners are tasked with attending a diplomatic banquet to find the weakness in the newly discovered Jacktal empire, a rapacious regime more powerful than the Terran Federation. 

It's a bit of a muddle, and the title fairly spoils the piece, but the conclusion is great fun and worth the price of admission.  Three stars.

All told, this comes out to a 3.5 star issue, none of it tiresome, much of it amazing.  I am also happy to see that F&SF will not have the monopoly on woman writers this month.  It's issues like this that buoy me through the lousy patches (like last month's Analog).  I mean, suffering for art is all well and good, but sometimes it's nice to have nice things to say!

Next up, let's see how the October 1962 Amazing stacks up.  See you then!

—

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, TV

[Sep. 8, 1962] Navigating the Wasteland (1961-62 in (good) television)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

The Fall season of television is nearly upon us, so it is appropriate that we pause to reflect on what the Idiot Box has brought us recently.  May of last year, Newton Minow, our (relatively) new FCC chief, described television as "The Vast Wasteland."  While it may have its moments of education, quality, and even sublimity, he argued, the majority of the stuff you see, network or syndicated, will turn your brain to mush.

I imagine anyone exposing themselves 24 hours a day to every game show, every variety act, every soap opera would make a similar assessment.  But what about the selective viewer?  The one who rewards only quality with her/his eyeballs?  And has there been improvement since Minow made his judgment?

Now, I normally restrict my reviews to things SFnal (science fictional for the non-fan), but over the last year, I've found myself in front of the small screen more hours than I'd normally care to admit.  And since a subsection of my followers are, perversely, as interested in my humdrum 1962 life as they are in my analysis, I thought I'd give you insight as to what shows keep the Traveller's tube aglow.

So here are the Galactic Stars, 1961-62 TV edition, covering the television season that ended back in June and has since been in summer reruns.  Many of these programs will continue into the Fall season, so consider this a Galactic TV Guide:

Route 66 1960-

Ever since Eisenhower paved the nation with the Interstate Highway system, Route 66, "America's Main Street" has declined in importance.  Nevertheless, this national artery will likely always hold a nostalgic hold on our consciousness.  It represents a path to anywheresville, an open road with no limits.  Where the destination isn't the state of Arizona or Iowa, but rather a state of mind, arrived at only after a long, contemplative journey.

On that road is a Corvette; in that Corvette are Todd Stiles, an erudite Yale ex-pat, and Buzz Murdock, a hard-knocked but soulful kid from New York.  Handsome wanderers (especially the latter!) trying to find themselves, in a myriad towns, a plethora of menial jobs.  They are Kerouac's Beat Generation set to celluloid, their dialogue filled with poetry and meaning.

There is a formula to the show, albeit one that has lent itself to infinite variation.  Each episode features a new town, a new occupation.  Usually, a local is in some kind of trouble.  Maybe it's physical danger.  Sometimes they just need to find where their head is at.  There are romances, comedies, hard-hitting dramas…the show runs the gamut.  But ever constant is the chemistry of the two leads, their individual charisma (again, particularly Murdock), the lyricism of the scripts, and the backdrop of our vast country. 

It can be maudlin, it can even sometimes be dull, but it's usually beautiful.  Always worth a watch.

The Twilight Zone 1960-62

Speaking of literary, Rod Serling pinned the quality bar to the ceiling with this sci-fi/fantasy/horror anthology, blowing the doors off inferior (but still appreciated) precursors like Karloff's Thriller and Dahl's Way Out.  Of course, this is a show we've covered extensively here at the Journey, but it's still worth noting what an impact Serling's creation had on television.  It represents an intersection of innovation, a showcase for writing, acting, cinematography, and scoring.  Even at its worst, it was still decent; at its best, there was no equal.

And now it's gone.  At the end of the third seaon, Rod decided he was "storied out," and left to take a professorship at Antioch College; producer Buck Houghton went off to work with television production company, Four Stars.  There's no sponsor in sight for Season Four. 

However, with nearly a hundred episodes in the can, there's no doubt that The Twilight Zone will find its way into syndication, where it can continue to inspire.  Perhaps there will be a revival someday.  If not, we can at least hope that future shows will strive to top Serling's bar, and television will be the better for it. 

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends 1959-

The Traveler watches cartoons?  Don't scoff.  Ever since the days of Warner Brothers, there has been animation aimed simultaneously at the young as well as the old.  Stuff that combines the rapid slapstick that kids like with witty repartee and sly entendres designed to entertain their parents.

Rocky is a variety show, filled with wacky characters, surprisingly funny puns, and a breakneck pace that will leave you winded.  Indifferently animated, it's superbly voice-acted.  Whether you're watching the serial antics of the title's flying squirrel and moronic moose, or the Silent Era-inspired tales of Mountie Dudley DooRight, or the often painfully punful Fractured Fairy Tales and Aesop and Son, you will definitely laugh out loud at least once per segment — probably more.  It may well be the cleverest thing currently on television.

The Andy Griffith Show 1960-

Now here's one I honestly didn't expect to have on my favorites list.  It sounds pretty awful on the face of it: a comedy set in a backwoods town that never quite got out of the 1930s, featuring a drawly sheriff and his bumpkin deputy. 

And yet…

There's something gentle and honest about this show.  It doesn't rush, it doesn't try too hard to make you laugh, and under Sheriff Andy Taylor's rustic aw-shucks exterior is surprising wisdom and intelligence.  Moreover, the interpersonal relationships are mature, healthy ones — even a bit subversively so.

Take, for instance, this (paraphrased) interchange between Andy and his precocious little boy, Opie:

Opie: Pa, I have something to tell you.  You promise not to be mad?
Andy: I can't promise that.  What is it?
Opie: Well, I put a ball through our neighbor's window the other day.  Are you mad?
Andy: No, I'm not mad.  Now I have something to tell you, and you promise not to be mad?
Opie: No, pa.
Andy: Well there won't be an allowance until the window's all paid up, do you understand?
Opie: Yes, pa.

No moralizing.  No mawkish father-knows-best.  Certainly no spankings.  Just a discussion between reasonable people.  And if you saw my review of the episode where Andy's girlfriend, the town pharmacist, runs for mayor, you know the show can be decidedly pro-feminist, too.  Now if they'd only tell where they keep the non-White people…

Other stand-outs include:

Mr. Ed 1960-: despite being overly rooted in conventional gender roles, one can't ignore Alan Young's charm, the fun of the barbed banter between Young's married neighbors, or the impressive way they make a horse appear to talk.

Supercar 1961-62: this British import is definitely kiddie fare, but it's still fun to watch Mike Mercury and his two scientist associates defeat criminals and triumph over natural disaster.  Of course, the acting's a bit wooden…

Then there's the rest…some watchable like Perry Mason (a lawyer/mystery show), The Real McCoys (Okies in Los Angeles), Ozzie and Harriet (dig that Ricky Nelson's singing), and Leave it to Beaver.  Others wretched like My Three Sons and the endless cavalcade of Westerns (Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, etc.) Not to mention the Game Shows like Password, To Tell the Truth, and What's My Line.

Hmmm.  Maybe Minow's got something there.  Still, there's at least ten hours a week of good TV (including the news and occasional Public Television specials like Jazz Casual and last year's documentary on homosexuality, The Rejected).

And if you're watching more than ten hours a week instead of reading that stack of sf books and magazines I've recommended, well…

…you deserve what you get!

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[Sep. 6, 1962] Unfunny Papers (The Second Coming and San Diego Politics)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Victoria Lucas

Erudition enshrined

Well, here’s something I hadn’t run into before.  I don’t spend much time in bookstores or newsstands because I can’t afford to go wild in them as I’d like.  Better to step away than to spend a mortgage-payment worth of money for a few books and/or magazines.

However, I couldn’t resist this one.  Drawn by a bookish magnet into a little cubbyhole crowded with books from floor to ceiling and overseen by a disheveled person near the front door with a cat on his desk, I stumbled onto a literary magazine I hadn’t seen before, apparently created while I was busy with school in 1961.  The Second Coming (not of Christ, of American intellectualism) is now on its third issue, or at least it was in June. 

On the June cover is an image of an American flag with hinges and on the first page is a photograph of MY typewriter, a Smith-Corona electric.  After another ad it flaunts its authors and artists, among whom are the following:  Herbert Blau, one of the founders and directors of The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco, whose work I saw when I was at Stanford, film critic Pauline Kael, writer James O’Connor, fiction writer Isaac Bachevis Singer’s (in translation), and Susan Sontag, who teaches “in the Department of Religion at Columbia University.”  It is a literary magazine in the tradition of the Paris Review and the Evergreen Review.

Glancing at back issues (reading copies only under the watchful eye of the man with the cat), I saw that Issue Number 2 in 1961 was the most exciting so far, with prose, not poetry, from Allen Ginsberg, poetry not prose from Frank O’Hara, and works by Kenneth Koch and Gunther Schuller.  That issue also sported drawings (not paintings) by Robert Rauschenberg, and a critique of reproductions of art by Jasper Johns, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko.  At the very back are (sigh!) advertisements for The Modern Jazz Quartet and WBAI FM Radio in New York.  (I learned to like Pacifica Foundation radio while at Stanford and heard programs from WBAI.)  The issue also reproduced letters from Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, Jacques Barzun, and (my favorite literary lion) John Simon, congratulating the editor on the first issue of the journal.

The one I went out the door with, though, having paid my mite and feeling dizzy from the intellectual heights (and perhaps the dust), was the March 1962 issue, with a cultural piece by Roland Barthes, fiction by William S. Burroughs, and articles on “The Eichmann Trial and the rule of law” and “Bankrupt Myth of a Free Economy.” 

I love little magazines, especially clever little magazines.  Perhaps someday, I shall have to try more of the ones the Traveller is always reviewing…

From doing the papers to being in the papers

Just a word about an upcoming San Diego, California election.  As part of the continuing reorganization and creation of California’s electoral districts, a 37th Congressional District has been formed.  Keep your eye on Democratic candidate Lionel Van Deerlin, who lost his last attempt at getting into the House of Representatives in 1958.  It’s rare to see a Democrat win in this area, which is heavily populated by members of and retirees from the military, as well as other retirees.
 
Van Deerlin does have the advantage of being a newsman.  He knows the angles; he knows the reporters; and he knows the politicians.  Whether this will give him enough of a boost to win will be interesting to watch.  


 
A native of Oceanside (just north of San Diego), Van Deerlin received his Bachelor’s in journalism from USC (University of Southern California) in 1937, and when in the Army in World War II he became a writer for Stars and Stripes.  He was city editor for the San Diego Daily Journal from 1946 to 1950, and was KFSD-TV news director until last year.  
 
He married Mary Jo Smith in 1940, and Mrs. Van Deerlin and their children were pictured in publicity shots for earlier campaigns and articles about his career in journalism, looking all very American family.
 
A friend in San Diego is keeping me posted, so more about this later!

[The district of the Traveller and family (the 35th) is also new, though we should be so lucky to have a Democrat as a contender.  Instead, the Republican, James B. Utt, is a shoo-in.  His politics are somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan, so he fits in perfectly with North County's sentiments.  Oh well.  As a grown-up, I shall not make derogatory comments about his thoroughly appropriate name…]

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Conventions/Performances

[Sep. 4, 1962] Differences of opinion (the 1962 Hugo Awards!)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

Once again, the best and the brightest of the fans (and many of the rest of them) congregated for the biggest SFnal shindig of the year: WorldCon.  This year, Chicago won the bid to hold this prestigious event.  The Pick-Congress Hotel saw more than 500 fen gather for a Labor Day weekend of carousing, shopping, costuming, and voting.

You see, every year these fans select the worthiest science fiction stories and outlets of the prior year to be recipients of the Hugo, a golden rocketship trophy.  It's the closest thing one can get to a curated list of the best SF has to offer.  Winning is a tremendous honor; even getting on the nominees ballot is a laudable achievement.  In fact, we have been informed that Galactic Journey was the Nominee-Runner Up this year in the Best Fanzine category — thanks to all of you who got us to one rank below the ballot.  Perhaps next year will be the breakthrough!


The Chicon III fanquet, where the award ceremony was held

So let's see what the fans decided was 1961's best, and in particular, let's compare it to my list of favorites, the ones I gave at the end of last year.

Best Novel

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein [Putnam, 1961]

Nominees

Dark Universe by Daniel F. Galouye [Bantam, 1961]
Sense of Obligation (alt: Planet of the Damned) by Harry Harrison [Analog Sep,Oct,Nov 1961]
The Fisherman (alt: Time Is the Simplest Thing) by Clifford D. Simak [Analog Apr,May,Jun,Jul 1961]
Second Ending by James White [Fantastic Jun,Jul 1961]


Robert Heinlein holding court

This line-up shouldn't shock me, given the pre-convention buzz, and yet it does.  Stranger has gotten a lot of attention, particularly from the mainstream edges of our fandom (probably because it dares to mention sex).  It has also earned its fair share of scorn.  It's a lousy, preachy book, but if we're judging by the sales, then it's won its trophy, fair and square.

Galouye's book was my #2, so I'm glad it was recognized.  The Fisherman was quite good.  The Harrison was no great shakes, especially compared to Deathworld, which it resembled.  I suspect these two made it to the top ranks thanks to their appearing in Analog, the most popular digest.

We weren't covering Fantastic last year.  Maybe Second Ending is excellent.  Someone tell me, please.

Short Fiction

The Hothouse series by Brian W. Aldiss [F&SF Feb,Apr,Jul,Sep,Dec 1961]

Nominees

Monument by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. [Analog Jun 1961]
Scylla’s Daughter by Fritz Leiber [Fantastic May 1961]
Status Quo by Mack Reynolds [Analog Aug 1961]
Lion Loose by James H. Schmitz [Analog Oct 1961]

Once again, Analog dominates, and once again, I cannot agree.  None of these stories won the Galactic Star last year (and that's even with me giving out far more awards than Worldcon does).  I did give a Star to the first story in the Hothouse series, but the quality of the tales went down over the course of the publication.  I understand they were novelized early this year, so Aldiss may get another bite at the apple.  He doesn't deserve it, though (the reviewer for UK sf digest, New Worlds, agrees with me).

As for the rest, Monument is a good story, and I haven't read the Leiber, but the other two nominees were wretched.  And where's Cordwainer Smith?  Zenna Henderson?  Or a host of more worthy authors?  Feh, Chicago.  Feh!

Best Dramatic Presentation

The Twilight Zone (TV series) by Rod Serling [CBS]

Nominees

Village of the Damned (1960) [MGM] Directed by Wolf Rilla; Written by Stirling Silliphant and Wolf Rilla and Ronald Kinnoch
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1961) [Warner Brothers] Directed by Karel Zeman; Screenplay by Frantisek Hrubin and Karel Zeman; based on the novel Face au Drapeau by Jules Verne
The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon (U. S. Steel Hour #8.13) [CBS, 1961] Teleplay by Jame Yaffe; based on the short story Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Thriller (TV Series) [NBC, 1961]

This is interesting.  Three of the five are television shows, and while Jules Verne won a nomination, it wasn't for any of the films I watched and nominated.  I have not seen Village, but Ashley Pollard spoke fondly of it.  Neither The Twilight Zone nor Thriller were stellar last year, but I suppose if that's what you tune into week-after-week, you're bound to be partial. 

I'd be keen to know how the Flowers for Algernon adaptation was.  It was based, of course, on an excellent story.

Best Professional Magazine

Analog Science Fiction and Fact ed. by John W. Campbell, Jr.

Nominees

Galaxy ed. by H. L. Gold
Amazing Science Fiction Stories ed. by Cele Goldsmith
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ed. by Robert P. Mills and Avram Davidson
Science Fantasy ed. by John Carnell


That's Cele Goldsmith, editor of Fantastic and Amazing, at the podium

Another set of rankings that shouldn't surprise me — Analog has far and away the biggest circulation numbers.  That said, it was pretty lousy last year.  Of course, we weren't covering Amazing and Fantastic, and Science Fantasy remains the last English-language magazine yet to be reviewed at the Journey. 

It seems the fandom feels Galaxy is of highly variable quality, sometimes showcasing the best stuff and sometimes the worst.  I hold an opposite opinion — for me, Galaxy is always good, but only occasionally stands out.  My feelings on F&SF are, of course, no surprise to the regular followers of my column.

Best Professional Artist

Ed Emshwiller

Nominees

Virgil Finlay
Mel Hunter
John Schoenherr
Alex Schomburg


Emsh is on the right

Kelly Freas appears to have fallen out of favor.  Emsh remains the favorite, and I can agree with that.  I think I'm going to have to start nominating my own set of artists for Galactic Stars, especially after the beautiful work Gaughan contributed for Vance's novella, The Dragon Masters (which almost assuredly will win a Star of its own, if not a Hugo).

Best Fanzine

Warhoon ed. by Richard Bergeron

Nominees

Cry ed. by F. M. Busby, Elinor Busby and Wally Weber
Yandro ed. by Robert Coulson and Juanita Coulson
Amra ed. by George H. Scithers
Axe ed. by Larry Shaw and Noreen Shaw

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Last up is the fanzines, which I don't generally have time to read — though I did pick up the latest copy of Rhodomagnetic Digest, and I now have a subscription to Axe and Science Fiction Times.  Fill me in on what I'm missing, folks?

So there you have it.  A markedly different list from what I would have chosen, but then I suppose there is merit to having more than one curated selection at your disposal.

What choices did you make?

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Magazine

[September 1, 1962] Facing East (a view from the UK: October 1962 New Worlds)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Mark Yon

Hello, all: greetings from Britain, again.

The October issue of New Worlds has arrived, so I guess that must mean that it is time to send my thoughts across the teletype.

Here things are turning Autumnal. We’ve had one of the coldest August Bank Holidays on record. The Meteorological Office tells us that it was the coldest in Kew (London) on record since 1888. Here it was just wet and rainy, which is how most Bank Holidays tend to go if I’m honest. It is perhaps ironic that we’ve got a tune by Carole King in the pop charts here called It Might As Well Rain Until September.

In pop music it seems that that catchy instrumental record, Telstar, by the Tornados is quite popular. It certainly sounds different, with that electronic sound giving it a real Space Age appeal to me. I was very pleased to see it reach Number 1 in the UK charts. I suspect it may do well with you across the Atlantic as well.

Film-wise, here’s a little heads-up. Earlier this week, I learned of a movie coming out which I guess will go down a storm in the US when it gets to you next year. I suspect queues will be quite long when it opens in early October.

It is the story of a secret agent called James Bond and the movie is called Dr. No. The movie looks great, especially the parts in the sunny Caribbean – miles away from rainy England! – and, as anticipated, there’s lots of fast paced action. The lead, a young actor named Sean Connery, is very charismatic. There is, of course, a foreign bad-guy with access to nuclear weapons threatening the world – guess what happens? However the pace is so fast and the setting so good I suspect we will see more of Mr. Bond in the future. The books, by Mr. Ian Fleming, are very popular here too. There are ten of those, so there’s plenty for the movies to have a go at!

On television I was sorry to see the end of the ITV s-f series that started at the end of August. Miss Pollard has mentioned this one as well, I think. Called Out of this World, it’s been essential viewing on Saturday nights for those of us with a television set. I guess that it is our British equivalent of your Twilight Zone. There’s been a good selection of s-f stories by Mr. Isaac Asimov (Little Lost Robot), Mr. Philip K. Dick (Impostor) and Mr. Clifford D. Simak (Immigrant and Target Generation) and, perhaps unsurprisingly to those of us who know of these writers, they have been very well received. I look forward to a second series, should it happen.

Enough preliminaries.  Now for this month’s look at New Worlds. Many thanks for your comments about the September issue: they were much appreciated.

The October issue continues the trend in covers mentioned last time. This month it is a fluorescent orange. Rather pumpkin-like, if truth be told, but perhaps more Autumnal than last month’s day-glo pink cover.

The October issue also continues another recent trend at New Worlds – that of using Guest Editors, although I’m sure Mr. Carnell is still involved in there somewhere. After the enthusiastic essay by fan Mr. John Baxter last month, we’re back to the use of s-f writers this time. Stepping up to the plate is Mr. Edward Mackin, from Blackpool, Lancashire. According to Mr. Carnell’s introductory profile, he is perhaps best known for his Hek Belov satirical stories, usually found in New Worlds’s sister publications, Authentic Science Fiction (now sadly defunct) and Science Fantasy.

His Editorial essay, Anything is Possible, is a little more serious than his stories would suggest. He does make the point that s-f reflects a broad spectrum of tastes and values which, despite what was said last month by the then-editor, means that there may still be a case for older-style s-f stories that have that sense of enthusiasm and wonder that the stories he first read years ago. He argues that if you wish to encourage new readers, then catching their initial interest at an early age is important, but you must also take into account the market you are selling to. He bemoans the lack of good quality female characters and suggests a need for less over-heated sex scenes, but not to the point of ignoring it, as has happened in the past. Instead Mr. Mackin points out that a balance in all things in s-f is needed, if it is to be credible. Things have got better in s-f writing but there is a need for tales that evoke a sense of wonder – alongside the deeper, more cynical and more stylistically cutting-edge stories, of course!

This is a view not as extreme as Mr. Baxter’s last month and seems perhaps a more sensible way of carrying both present readers, who are accepting change without breaking the ties to older stories from the past, and the new readers, who are expecting the old rules to be ripped up. I guess we’ll see how this transformation evolves over the next few years – watch this space!

No Postscripts letters section this month. I’m still interested to read what other readers thought of Mr. John Baxter’s mission statement editorial – perhaps next month.

Instead, we have the return of Mr. Leslie Flood’s reviews, and welcome they are too. There are four books reviewed by Mr. Flood: Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss, Pilgrimage by Zenna Henderson, The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction – 9th Series, edited by Robert P Mills and lastly Who? by Algis Budrys. All, with the exception of Mr. Aldiss, are given generally favourable comments.  In comparison, Mr. Aldiss’s novel is “tedious in its repetitious violence, casual wonder and the contrived terminology….”.

Remould, by Mr. Robert Presslie

Mr. Presslie is a New Worlds stalwart, last in the magazine a mere two issues ago. This is a big trek for survival novelette, which tells of humans forced to travel out of an alien-imposed Sterile Zone between 20 -60 degrees North of the Equator. This is about as far from the typical adventure stories where heroes made sacrifices for the benefit of the many as you can get. There is no real heroism here as thousands die, are drowned, trampled or left for dead. It isn’t pretty.  I guess in some ways it shows us how far s-f stories have developed less romantic ideas of chivalry and thus become more realistic. My main issue with the story was that the main reason for the migration seemed weak. There’s a nice little twist when the survivors meet the alien invaders but the ending happens all too quickly, giving the tale a somewhat unbalanced tone at the end. Nevertheless I suspect that this one will be popular with regular readers because it tries to be different. 2 out of 5 from me.

Schizophrenic by Mr. Richard Graham

The second novelette this month is thankfully a much lighter comedy of manners that deals with that old chestnut, time travel.  Much of the humour derives from the consequences of a 24th century holidaymaker who swaps places with John in the 20th century for a week. Unsurprisingly the traveller causes chaos by disregarding the rules of the 20th century, like going to work, paying for things in shops and bringing girlfriends home to meet the wife.  This is clearly good advice for any time traveller! For all that it has been done before, I preferred this novelette to Remould, so 3 out of 5.

A Question of Drive by H. B. Caston

I liked this one. A tale of a dodgy interstellar trade deal done between a human and an alien thief to get a revolutionary new space drive. Reminded me a little of Poul Anderson’s Nicholas van Rijn stories published in Astounding Magazine. 3 out of 5.

Jogi by Mr. David Rome

I did say that Mr. Rome’s story last month, Moonbeam, was satisfactory, though not his best.  I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed this one more. Jogi is a tale told from the viewpoint of a lost alien who feeds on something unusual. There’s a nice sense of ‘alienness’ here – it is cute, yet actually creepy – though the overall tale is slight. My favourite of the month, I think, though still 3 out of 5.

The Crack of Doom (part 2) by Mr. Keith Woodcott

Although I thought that the first part of this was nothing particularly special last month, I must admit that I have been looking forward to read how this story finishes. Last time we left the story on a cliff-hanger, with our cosmoarchaeologist Philip Gascon on his way to investigate goings on and the ancient artefacts of the Old Race on Regnier’s Planet, and a group of Psions trying to escape a potential pogrom from the cruel Starfolk. I did say that I thought I knew where this one was going and I’m a little disappointed that I was right. The story remains a well-told tale but with little new to offer – a novel which does not seem to fit the magazine’s determination to push the envelope. Nevertheless I enjoyed it, in that way that I enjoyed Mr. Graham’s Schizophrenic – you can enjoy old clichés reheated. Overall, 3 out of 5, the same as last month.

So, overall was the magazine as glowing as its orange cover? Not quite, although I’m giving it a score of 3 out of 5 overall. I actually enjoyed this issue more than last month’s if I’m honest, but there’s a lot of familiar ground being trodden here, albeit done reasonably well. It was good to read a David Rome story back on form, though Jogi is no Streets of Ashkalon.

And that’s it for this month. I wish you well as the nights draw in here, and things grow a little foggy – hoping that such things give you more time for great reading!

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