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Conventions/Performances

[April 21, 1963] Bully for Conventions (BullCon: The 1963 EasterCon)

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By Ashley R. Pollard

BullCon, was the 14th British Eastercon held this year in Peterborough, and as usual a celebration of all things fannish.  British Eastercons are, as the name suggests, held over the Easter weekend (though in days gone by they were held over Whitsun holiday weekend).  And, despite being the national SF convention, they are independent events run by fans.

I was, for the usual reasons, unable to arrange travel to attend, but I was able to rely on my friend, Rob Hansen, who compiled the reports of those who attended.

This was a big convention, with over a 130 fans in attendance.  Not the biggest Eastercon on record, but up from last year's 94. All things considered, this seems to be an indicator of a healthy interest in science fiction and fantasy.  An added feature of this year's convention was the presence of a film crew, who were covering the event for local and national press, and recording interviews with the authors and artists for television and radio.

How glamorous!

BullCon was also the fifth anniversary of the BSFA: the British Science Fiction Association.  As you may remember, money was raised at last year's convention to create an award to honour Arthur Rose "Doc" Weir, who before his death had been the secretary of the BSFA.

The Doc Weir award will be given annually to recognize someone who has contributed to fandom, but who is otherwise unsung.  The quiet fan who goes about doing the necessary work that keeps things running, and this year I can happily report that the cup was awarded Peter Mabey.

Peter, is a member of both the Cheltenham Circle, the BSFA, and a founder member of the Order of St Fantony, which became known to fandom at large in 1957 at the British Worldcon.  Like all things fannish, the description of the group depends on who you talk to: secret Masters of Fandom; a group formed to greet Americans who came to over the pond; or a cringeworthy jape: a fannish practical joke.

Whatever position one takes I'm sure the Order of St Fantony will be around for a number of years.  Anyway, regardless of fannish sensibilities, well done Peter.  I hope you get to to many more conventions in the future.

Like all large fan run events, there were issues with the time the events were meant to start versus the actual time they did start.  Not unsurprising given the size of the hall used for the main events and the quality of the public address system.

So the good/bad news is that next year the convention is again being run in Peterborough because the hotel management liked the fans so much it invited them back.  The bad news is the cost of eating in the hotel.  For those who plan to attend next year, the best eateries are either the Minster Grill or fan favourite The Great Wall Chinese restaurant.

Moving on, Ken Slater opened the convention and introduced Brian Aldiss who then went on to interview some of the guests of honours before the BullCon program proper started.

With humour and charm, Brian introduced on Saturday morning the Guest of Honour, the incredibly handsome Edmund Crispin, which for those who don't know is a pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery.  Our guest of honour also admitted to being a member of the BSFA, making him one of us.

His talk was titled, Science Fiction: Is it Significant?

The argument presented started by saying that SF genre certainly considers itself significant and or feels it's important to be seen as significant.  Especially in these times where mankind is taking its first steps into space and towards the stars.  However, he saw a danger in this because of the risk from being absorbed into mainstream literature.  He referenced crime fiction in the early thirties, to create a parallel for what happens when everybody starts writing in a genre they don't fully understand.

His second point led onto mainstream authors who have produced the occasional work of SF that were in his mind poor, for example, On the Beach by Nevil Shute.  His argument being that mainstream authors didn't understand the problems and conventions of the genre.  And this led to second-rate SF stories and the genre being labelled as bad.

His third point was the influence of television.

Here he was quite scathing saying, "there is little differentiation between merit and lack of merit."  In his opinion, the presence of aliens or spaceships is the only factor to differentiate TV SF from conventional moribund mundanity that is transmitted over the airwaves.

Mr. Crispin's fourth point was an observation that the idea of the cosmos had permeated the common culture, as evinced by the fact that even the Astronomer Royal had stopped saying traveling into space was foolish science fictional fantasy.  Which raised a chuckle at the inability of the British establishment to keep abreast of the times.

Finally, he drew his talk to a close by arguing that in SF, space travel is presupposed to be a fact or matter of course, not a theme in and unto itself.  He observed that SF authors crammed ideas into their short stories that would fill a novel in in other genres.  As an aside he said, "SF authors are generally underpaid," which raised a cheer of "Hear! Hear!" from author Harry Harrison.

He finished his interesting talk with a couple of observations.  The first that readers do not like to be told that people are unimportant, and that SF is a major revolution in the evolution of literature since the time of Shakespeare and Marlowe.

A question-and-answer session followed Mr. Crispin's talk, which touched upon the debasement of the SF genre in the eyes of the general public by mainstream writers.

The rest of the day was equally lively.  For example, one panel featuring a discussion about censorship, with an interesting number of anecdotes from the large number of SF authors in attendance.

Saturday evening was enlivened by the presence of a four piece band and the Fancy Dress Party.  The award for Best Monster went to Harry Nadler.  Janet Shorrock received a special prize for dressing up as a cat girl.  This year's convention theme was "After the End," so I shouldn't be surprised that Tony Walsh won first prize for dressing up as a sandwich-board-man with the slogans front and back, "Prepare to Meet Your Beginning" and "The Beginning is At Hand."  Some took their costumes out onto the streets to delight/scare the nonfans.

Another tradition at the Eastercon is the art competition.

This year the best colour work was won by Jack Wilson, runner up was Terry Jeeves.  Eddie Jones won the award for the best black and white artwork.  Terry Jeeves also garnered the award for best cartoon.  And, the backdrop used in the main hall, created by Marcus Ashby, was highly commended for contributing to the atmosphere that made the convention a success.

Parties.  There were a few.  One, run by Ella Parker and Ethel Lindsay attracted 53 people. All crammed into one small hotel room.  Allegedly, Harry Harrison caused a blast as he was forced to the floor but managed to keep hold of his drink.  Or so the story goes — the magnitude of the event is magnified in each retelling.

Sunday, besides the usual hangovers, the convention had a talk about the future of TAFF: The Transatlantic Fan Fund, presented by the current administrator Ethel Lindsay, with the support of Ron Bennet and Eric Bentcliffe.  A detailed discussion of the finances and cost were covered and whether reports were mandatory; it seems they're not.  But my feeling is that they are expected, and as we say over here, better late than never.

This was followed by the fifth anniversary AGM of the BSFA, where the chairman Terry Jeeves described the work and achievements of the organization over the last year.

There were two major crises. The first when the editor Ella Parker had to give up her post.  The second when the BSFA had to move the library to Liverpool.  Terry gave credit to all those whose hard work had carried the BSFA through this difficult time.

New members were being encouraged to join the BSFA.  When someone asked how, Brian Aldiss is reported to have quipped, "by thumbscrew," thereby cementing his reputation for being funny.

The Pro Panel was a special event this year due to the number of professional authors in attendance.  The first four speakers took a couple of questions from the audience, then tagged two other authors to come up and take their place.  The authorial equivalent of a relay teams.

First question: how do you write?

Harry Harrison makes notes when writing a short story, but novels involve long correspondences between him and his editor; Michael Moorcock said ideas often took up to two years going around in his mind before he wrote the story; Edmund Crispin reported that he tried to keep regular hours of 09.30 to 12.30, writing in long hand on lined paper.

Generally, he failed and by 11.30 he gave up and went to the pub. Clearly another "funny" guy.

Next a question was asked about sequels.

Harry Harrison responded that if a book is written "right" it doesn't need a sequel (of course that begs a definition of what is meant by "right"); Brian Aldiss' cryptic comment was, "for those in peril on the sequel;" and Edmund Crispin's opinion was that there are occasional exceptions to the rule about sequels (which, I infer, is don't).

Then the panel was asked a question about Russian SF.

Kingsley Amis stated that Russian SF lacked action driven by crisis because, "in a well-planned, well-run economy one does not find crises."  He told of Soviet stories in which aliens are intelligent and therefore socialist; Max Jakubowski, with, what I imagine, the benefit of having a Russian-British and Polish heritage, gave the pithy answer that Russian SF "is very heavy;" John Carnell drew parallels with early German SF; while Ken Bulmer and Mack Reynolds both spoke about about the importance of background in SF.

This was a very thought provoking panel, which ended because time had run out.  See my comments earlier on program problems.

Finally, the official programme was brought to a close with a film show.  This year two films were shown.

The first was Jean Cocteau's Orphee with English subtitles.  This was followed by Fritz Lang's Metropolis that was allegedly last shown at the Royal Hotel Festivention in 1951.  I say allegedly, because while it had been planned to be shown, the distributor instead sent a copy of the 1925 version of Lost World. Much hilarity ensued because Arthur C. Clarke ran the gramophone record player providing music to accompany the the dinosaur action.

So, watching Metropolis is considered a tradition, but in British SF fandom anything done more than once (even if the first time is a non-event) is considered a tradition.

It's also a British tradition for fans to provide sarcastic commentary on the acting of silent movies.  Depending on one's mood or level of inebriation, this can be tedious or exhilaratingly funny.  Funny things, traditions.

Lots of other stuff went on during the weekend, but the best thing that can be said about the event was the feeling that it could've gone on for longer, and let's do it all again next year.  I'm sure Ethel Lindsay will agree, as she was inveigled into running next years programme.

Anyway, next year I hope to attend the Eastercon.  We shall see if I manage the trip next time! 




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Book

[Apr. 19, 1963] One way Via (Wallace West's book, River of Time)

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by Gideon Marcus

Time travel.  It's been a fixture of science fiction ever since H.G. Wells wrote the seminal work, The Time Machine.  And what could be a more seductive topic?  Instead of being confined to our plodding day-by-day, one-way march to the future, one could take great leaps in any direction — forward and back.

Wells' book dealt only with trips to the far future, a feat that is both more technologically feasibly and less fraught with challenges than journeys to the past.  After all, it would just take a sophisticated suspended animation system and a timer, and one could sleep one's way to a different time.  Going backwards requires a direct confrontation with a host of physical laws. 

Moreover, any trip you take to the past brings you face to face with your own history.  Your very presence inserts a variable that wasn't there before, one with endless possibilities for destroying your present.  Take the classic Grandfather Paradox: You go back in time and kill your grandfather. before he has children.  How do you still exist?  And if you don't exist, how do you kill your grandfather?

Some books take the premise seriously.  John Brunner's Times without Number, for instance, has all the time jaunts causing an increasingly unstable timeline, ending in the un-invention of time travel, itself!  Such would seem the inevitable fate of any universe in which time travel is possible.

Wallace West's new book, River of Time takes a different, more fanciful tack.  Instead of needing a machine to sail the time stream, instead, the past and present have something of a symbiotic relationship.  When times are troubled, a gateway to the past is formed to a similar crisis in the past.  Resolution of one fixes the other.

So it is that Ralph Graves, an overweight, under-achieving 23 year old with a Master's in Physics and a lowly news-writing gig, ends up driving his car into the Revolutionary War.  The 1964 he left was in the midst of a Cold War on the verge of heating up.  This dire situation is mirrored in 18th Century America, where the rebels are in dire straits. Returning to the present, Graves channels Paine, writing a stemwinder of a speech that gets picked up and rebroadcast across the country, raising national morale.  The result: supplies reach the ragged colonials in time for them to withstand the onslaught of the Redcoats, and the Revolution is saved.

This is just prelude to the novel's main story-line, one that teams Ralph with thin and nervous chemist, Larry Adams, all-American fighter jock and engineer, Hugh Woltman, and temperamentally stable psychologist, Mary Peale.  Just as tensions snap between East and West and the bombs begin to fall, the mother of all time rents appears sending Ralph and his group back to a crisis of similarly great proportion: just after the assassination of Julius Caesar.  Can this misplaced modern squad save the Roman Republic and, thereby, the 20th Century?

First things first: River of time is a fun book, and if its premise be fantastic, so much the better.  West has a deft, light style that paints complete pictures with enviable economy of words.  The book moves.  The first third of the book comprises two enjoyable self-contained bits that were published as short stories in 1950 and 1954.  They're a lot of fun, and the second piece is remarkable in that it conceives an effect of time travel I've not seen before or since.

As good as the earlier sections are, the book really shines when present meets past on the steps of the Senate.  Our heroes cleverly parlay their collection of parcels from 1965 into a better order for the Mediterranean in a rewarding romp.  I particularly loved the abundance of strong female characters: level-headed Mary; Publia, canny wife of Cicero; and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile.  All are vital to the success of the enterprise. 

Alas, while I would love to give my highest rating to West's latest, I'm afraid there's a component that mars the package.  It is demonstrated early on that Mary Peale is highly susceptible to suggestion, and even though she does many important and vital things throughout the story, much of what she does, and her ultimate fate, are influenced by factors beyond her control.  I found her lack of agency disturbing.

To sum up, River of Time is a quick and enjoyable read, a worthy addition to the ever-growing library of time-travel related stories.  Four stars.

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Magazine

[Apr. 17, 1963] Would-be poetical (May 1963 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Science fiction has risen from its much maligned, pulpish roots to general recognition and even acclaim.  Names like Heinlein, MacLean, Anderson, Asimov, and St. Clair are now commonly known.  They are the vanguard of the several hundred men and women actively writing in our genre.

One name that comes up again and again on the lips of the non-SF fan, when you query them about the SF they have read, is Ray Bradbury.  Thoroughly raised in and part of the "Golden Age" of science fiction, he has remained as he always was — a writer of fantastic tales.  And yet, he's popular with the masses, and the reputation of our genre is greater for it.  Thus, it's no surprise that Bradbury was chosen to have this month's F&SF devoted to him.

That said, I don't like Bradbury.  Or, at least, I don't like what he writes.

Maybe it's because he insists that he doesn't write science fiction, which is true.  His stuff has the trappings of SF, but it follows none of the rules of science.  That kind of scientific laziness always bugs me.  The only person I feel who can get away with enjoying the benefits of our genre while dislaiming association is Harlan Ellison, whose writing really is that good.

Or maybe it's because, as Kingsley Amis put it (and as William F. Nolan quotes in his mini-biography included in this issue), Bradbury writes with "that particular kind of sub-whimsical, would-be poetical badness that goes straight to the heart of the Sunday reviewer."  I've never read a Bradbury story that I didn't think could have been better rendered by, say, Ted Sturgeon. 

Or maybe it's just sour grapes.  After all, Bradbury is two years younger than me and much more famous.  Heck, I've barely gotten to the point of accomplishment he was at twenty-three years ago!  On the other hand, I don't feel that resentment for, say, Asimov (another lettered colleague of similar age).

Anyway, I suspected an issue about Bradbury would be a bad one, and in fact, it's not a great one.  Still, there is stuff worth reading.  And if you're a fan of Ray's, well, this will be a treat:

Bradbury: Prose Poet in the Age of Space, William F. Nolan

Bradbury's Boswell is a minor SF writer, fairly recent to the scene.  Nolan became pals with Ray in his fandom days in the early '50s, and he is sufficiently versed with Bradbury's career to write a perfectly fine biography.  Worth reading.  Four stars.

Bright Phoenix, by Ray Bradbury

F&SF editor Davidson has apparently persuaded Ray to part with a couple of pieces of "desk fiction" — stuff that didn't sell, but which now has value since the author is famous.  Phoenix is the original version of The Fireman, set at the beginning of the government campaign to burn seditious (i.e. all) books.  The Grand Censor's efforts are thwarted by the grassroots project whereby library patrons take it upon themselves to memorize the contents of the books, thus preserving the knowledge.

It's a mawkish, overdone story, but at the same time, it accomplishes in less than ten pages what it took Bradbury more than a hundred to do in his later book.  Had I not known of The Fireman, and had I read this in 1948 (when it was originally written), I might well have given it four stars.  As it is, it's redundant and a bit smug.  Three stars.

To the Chicago Abyss, Ray Bradbury

This longer piece is a variation on the same theme.  An old man, one of the few who remembers a pre-apocalyptic past, continually runs afoul of the authorities by recounting fond memories to those who would vicariously remember a better yesterday.  It's another story that pretends to mean more than it says, but doesn't.  Three stars.

An Index to Works of Ray Bradbury, William F. Nolan

As it says on the tin — an impressive litany of Bradbury's 200+ works of fiction.  Look on his works, ye Mighty, and despair. 

Mrs. Pigafetta Swims Well, Reginald Bretnor

From the writers of the increasingly desperate Ferdinand Feghoot puns comes an amusing tale of an opera-singer bewitched by a jealous Mediterranean mermaid.  Told in a charming Italian accent, it is an inoffensive trifle.  Three stars.

Newton Said, Jack Thomas Leahy

New authors are the vigor and the bane of our genre.  We need them to carry on the legacy and to keep things fresh.  At the same time, one never knows if they'll be any good, and first stories are often the worst stories (with the notable exception of Daniel Keyes' superlative Flowers for Algernon). 

So it is with Jack Thomas Leahy's meandering piece, built on affected whimsy and not much else, of the face-off between a doddering transmogrifying elf and his alchemically inclined son.  One star.

Underfollow, John Jakes

This one's even worse.  A citizen of Earth, for a century under the thumb of alien conquerors, decides he's tired of the bad portrayal of humans on alien-produced television shows.  He tries to do something about it.  His attempts backfire.  I read it twice, and I still don't get it.  I didn't enjoy it either time.  One star.

Atomic Reaction, Ron Webb

Deserves a razzberry as long as the poem.  Two seconds should suffice.  One star.

Now Wakes the Sea, J. G. Ballard

British author Ballard has a thing for the sea (viz. his recent, highly acclaimed The Drowned World).  This particular story starts out well, with a man, every night, dreaming of an ever-encroaching sea that threatens to engulf his inland town.  It's atmospheric and genuinely engaging, but the pay-off is disappointing.  Colour in search of a plot.  Three stars.

Watch the Bug-Eyed Monster, Don White

Don White has a taste for the satirical.  Here, he takes on stories that start like, "Zlat was the best novaship pilot in the 81 galaxies," by starting his story with, "Zlat was the best novaship pilot in the 81 galaxies."  The problem is, a satire needs to say something new, not just repeat the same badness.  One star.

Treaty in Tartessos, Karen Anderson

Now things are getting better.  In Ancient Greece, the age-old rivalry between humans and centaurs has reached an unsustainable point, and an innovative solution is required.  A beautifully written metaphor for the conflict between the civilized and the pastoral whose only flaw is a gimmicky ending.  Four stars.

Just Mooning Around, Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor presents a most interesting piece on the tug of war over moons between the sun and its planets.  The conclusion, in which the status of our "moon" is discussed, is an astonishing one.  Five stars.

No Trading Voyage, Doris Pitkin Buck

A lovely piece on the troubled trampings of a dispossed starfaring race called humanity.  Four stars.

Niña Sol, Felix Marti-Ibanez

The Brazilian author who so impressed me a few months back has returned with an even better tale.  Writing in that poetic, slightly foreign style that one only gets from a perfectly fluent non-native speaker, Mr. Ibanez presents us a love story set in Peru between an artist and a Sun Elemental.  Beautiful stuff.  Maybe Bradbury should go to Rio for a few years.  Four stars verging on five.

If you're a Bradbury fan, then the emotional and fantastic character of this month's issue will greatly appeal to you.  And even if you're not, there's enough good stuff at the ends to justify the expenditure of 40 cents. 




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Magazine

[April 15, 1963] Second Time Around (June 1963 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

It's déjà vu all over again. — attributed to Yogi Berra

A couple of months ago the first issue of Worlds of Tomorrow offered half of an enjoyable, if juvenile, novel by Arthur C. Clarke, half a dozen poor-to-fair stories as filler, and one excellent work of literature.  The second issue is almost exactly the same, except for the fact that one of the six mediocre stories has been replaced by a mediocre article.

The Star-Sent Knaves, by Keith Laumer

We begin with a madcap farce from the creator of the popular Retief stories.  Great works of art disappear from locked rooms, without any signs of tampering.  The hero hides inside a vault full of valuable paintings and waits for the thieves to show up.  They appear from nowhere, inside a strange device.  The protagonist assumes it's a time machine.  Thus begins a wild chase, involving criminals, aliens, and humanoids from other dimensions.  The pace never lets up, and the story provides moderate amusement.  Three stars.

The End of the Search, by Damon Knight

This is a very brief story.  In the far future, a man searches for the final specimen of the last species that humanity has wiped out.  The plot is somewhat opaque and requires careful reading.  Many will be able to predict the story's twist ending, and some will not care for its mannered style.  I found it troubling and haunting.  Three stars.

Spaceman on a Spree, by Mack Reynolds

A future world government brings peace and prosperity to the planet.  A minimum guaranteed income for everyone means that nobody has to work to survive.  A system resembling the military draft selects people at random for various jobs, depending on their skills.  In return for their labor, they earn a higher income.  The protagonist is the only qualified astronaut.  (The implication is that the universal welfare system has made humanity less interested in dangerous exploration of the solar system.) When he completes his last mandatory mission, he plans to retire on his savings.  In order to keep the space program from dying out, two officials scheme to make him lose all his wealth, so he will have to return to service.  They way in which they do this offers no surprises.  The ending is something of an unpleasant shock.  The author's portrait of a semi-utopian future is interesting.  Three stars.

The Prospect of Immortality, by R. C. W. Ettinger

This is an excerpt from a privately printed book.  It discusses the possibility of freezing people at the time of death, in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive them.  The concept is a familiar one to readers of science fiction, and the author offers few new insights.  Two stars.

A Guest of Ganymede, by C. C. MacApp

Aliens establish a station on Ganymede.  In exchange for large amounts of a metal that they require, they will inject a human being with a virus that cures all ailments.  They absolutely forbid anyone to take this cure-all outside the station.  A criminal takes a blind man to the aliens.  While they restore his sight, the crook plots to smuggle the virus to Earth.  Things don't work out well.  This is a fairly effective, if rather grim, science fiction story.  Three stars.

The Totally Rich , by John Brunner

A prolific British author offers a story about immense wealth and its limitations.  The narrator is a scientist and inventor who works on a project in a quiet Spanish village.  He soon finds out that a woman with virtually limitless resources carefully manipulated him into accepting this position for her own reasons.  Even the village is an artificial one, created only to give him a place where he could work without distractions.  Richly characterized and elegantly written, this is a compelling tale of love, death, and obsession. It reminds me a bit of the work of J. G. Ballard, although the author's voice is wholly his own.  As a bonus, the story features striking illustrations by the great Virgil Finlay.  Five stars.

Cakewalk to Gloryanna, by L. J. Stecher, Jr.

A spaceman delivers valuable plants from one planet to another.  Multiple complications ensue.  I didn't find this comedy very amusing.  The detailed ecology of the plants is mildly interesting.  Two stars.

People of the Sea (Part 2 of 2), by Arthur C. Clarke

The adventures of our boy hero on a small island near the Great Barrier Reef continue in the conclusion of this short novel.  In this installment, his scientist mentor begins experiments to see if killer whales can be convinced to stop eating dolphins.  A hurricane strikes the island, destroying its medical supplies and radio equipment.  The boy must make a long and dangerous journey across the sea, with the help of two dolphins, in order to save the life of the scientist, who is dying of pneumonia.  Although episodic, and with some major themes brought up and never resolved, this is an enjoyable adventure story.  Young readers in particular will appreciate the author's clear, readable style.  Four stars.

Unlike love, as Bing Crosby reminds us, Worlds of Tomorrow may not be better the second time around, but it's at least as good.

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Magazine

[April 13, 1963] SCRAPING BY (the May 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Another month, another Amazing, and the persistent question: is this magazine worth reading?  Let’s check this May issue against the hopeful benchmark I announced last time: at least something unusually good, and nothing unusually stupid.

It flunks the second criterion right off the bat.  Robert F. Young is back and Biblical again.  His short story The Deep Space Scrolls is the supposed transcript of a Senate hearing involving astronauts who happened upon “Spaceship X,” which contains ancient documentation showing that it is actually Noah’s Ark (apparently the Flood was on another planet and Ararat is us).  What next?  Characters who turn out to be Adam and Eve?  The best that can be said is that Young does capture the bombast and logorrhea of some politicians—meaning the story is fairly tedious as well as dumb.  One star.

The lead novelet, Jobo , by Henry Slesar, seems promising at first.  In backwoods Tennessee, there’s this big strong guy Jobo with a funny face that everybody but his Ma makes fun of.  On the other side of the world, a professor and his sidekick are approaching Easter Island seeking the provenance of a small statue that looks just like the giant Easter Island monoliths but is made of some super-hard material unknown on Earth and impervious to metallurgists’ tricks.  The prof wonders if extraterrestrials could be involved.  His beautiful and brilliant daughter gets into the act on Jobo’s behalf, and the two stories continue in parallel, meeting considerably short of infinity and indeed short of any resolution not obvious and predictable.  Slesar is an experienced and facile writer, so it’s perfectly readable, but progressively less interesting.  Two stars.

Albert Teichner’s story Cerebrum in the January Amazing, I said, “takes a well worn plot device and fails to revitalize it.” Here we go again with The Right Side of the Tracks, which takes perhaps the most-worn plot device in SF—space travelers approach a planet to find out what’s going on there—and doesn’t do much better, though he tries hard.  The investigators are from the Galactic Glia, whose member planets are supposed to be in touch with all the others no less often than once an hour, and this planet Nodar has fallen entirely silent.  Arriving, the investigators are largely ignored and are told that the inhabitants are working on something that will “widen the scope of everyone everywhere” and the investigators are displaying bad manners; indeed, the locals spank them and send them away.  By that time, they have observed the Nodarans are not keeping their robots, machines, and facilities in very good repair, and have seen them frequently making seemingly pointless hand gestures, listening to music over earphones while they converse, and watching visual displays consisting of “blobs rapidly sinking toward the floor and similar patches reappearing near the ceiling while words, mathematical symbols, three-dimensional color patterns and other disconnected symbols streamed in and out of the confusion to add the final touch of chaos.” Anyone who has read Katherine MacLean’s 1950 novella Incommunicado —and many who haven’t—will recognize immediately that the Nodarans have developed new and superior means of thinking and perceiving, as the one sensible member of the ship’s party realizes on the way back home. 

The clumsily derivative premise is matched by Teichner’s incidental and slightly shaky invocation of standard SF notions, e.g.: “Then they were landing, the anti-gravity jets letting the Probe sink slowly into the waiting cradle. . . .” (Why would anti-gravity employ jets?) “They had spent a grueling three months at speeds far beyond that of light and were impatient to be finished with the assignment.” (Does he think travelling faster than light would be any more grueling than travelling at any other speed?) Is this guy paying any attention to what he’s writing, or just cutting and pasting?  This whole low-resolution mess, compared, say, to its distinguished antecedent by MacLean, recalls Mark Twain’s wisecrack about the lightning and the lightning-bug.  Or maybe I should invoke that old Thelonious Monk tune: Well, You Needn’t.” Two stars, mostly for effort.  Thanks for trying, fella, but . . . don’t bother on our account.

It is with palpable relief that I turn to The Road to Sinharat, a novelet by Leigh Brackett, who is definitely paying attention to what she’s writing.  Brackett is a distinguished practitioner of what might be called Chamber Pulp: standard-brand adventure fiction rendered with unusual clarity, precision, intelligence, and feeling.  This story is a pleasure to read at the word-and-sentence level, and would probably be an even greater pleasure to hear read aloud.  “Sinharat was a city without people, but it was not dead.  It had a memory and a voice.  The wind gave it breath, and it sang, from the countless tiny organ-pipes of the coral, from the hollow mouths of marble doorways and the narrow throats of streets.  The slender towers were like tall flutes, and the wind was never still.  Sometimes the voice of Sinharat was soft and gentle, murmuring about everlasting youth and the pleasures thereof.  Again it was strong and fierce with pride, crying You die, but I do not!.  Sometimes it was mad, laughing, and hateful.  But always the song was evil.”

That said, the story is, ultimately, relatively minor.  It’s set in Brackett’s now-obsolete slowly dying Mars of dry sea-beds, canals, and colorful factions of essentially human Martians.  The Earth-dominated government has a Rehabilitation Project to impound the planet’s remaining water and move the population to where the water will be; the ungrateful Martians are having none of it, believing that they know better how to manage the resources of their dying planet.  War looms, which the Martians will lose, and they will be slaughtered by the Earthers’ higher-tech weapons.  Renegade bureaucrat Carey, of Earth, with his Martian compatriots, must reach Sinharat, the forbidden city of the ancient Rama, who achieved near-immortality by taking the bodies of others.  The Rama archives will contain records that will show all the bureaucrats who won’t listen how survival on Mars really works.  So off they go, pursued by a Javert-ish cop, on a perilous (even grueling) journey across Mars, for a rendezvous with a rather perfunctory ending that wastes much of the dramatic tension Brackett has built up.  But still, it’s a luxury getting there.  Four stars.

The usual non-fiction suspect this month is Ben Bova, with Where Is Everybody?: if the galaxy is full of intelligent aliens, why haven’t we heard from them?  After reviewing the state of scientific thought, Bova proposes a variation on Charles Fort: we are not property, but are the subjects of research and surveillance.  Like all Bova’s articles, this one is perfectly readable, but a bit livelier than most.  Three stars.

There’s an unusual suspect here, too: A Soviet View of American SF by Alexander Kazantsev, a writer of SF himself, who has elsewhere proposed that the Tunguska detonation of 1908 was an extraterrestrial spaceship blowing up.  This is an edited translation of his introduction to a Soviet anthology of American SF containing Heinlein, Leinster, and Bradbury, among others.  It’s less ridiculous than some I’ve seen of this type; the author actually knows something about English-language SF; but it is still turgid and ritualistic in places.  E.g., he says of Heinlein’s story The Long Watch: “The story reflects a change for the better in American public opinion which was subsequently so strikingly manifested at the time of the visit by N.S. Khrushchev in America.  Heinlein, like many Americans who yesterday were still deluded, today believes, wants to believe, that crime may be prevented.” Dialectical, comrade!  Two stars, bright red of course.

So Amazing scrapes by another month on the strength of Brackett’s fine writing, Bova’s competence, and Comrade Kazantsev’s amusement value.  Hangman, slack your rope for a while.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[April 11, 1963] A Myriad of Musicks (the state of popular music in 1963)

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by Gideon Marcus

Humans like to categorize things.  Types of people, varieties of animals, kinds of music, boundaries of epochs.  As an historian, I find the latter particularly interesting.  The transition between ages is often insensible to those living in them.  After the fact, we tend to compact them into tidily bounded intervals.  The Gay '90s.  The Roaring Twenties.  The Depression.  The War Years. 

Decades from now, historians will debate when the "'50s" truly began and ended.  Did they start with the armistice in Korea?  Did they end with the election of Kennedy?  Looking around, it's hard to draw a sharp line between Ike's decade and the current one.  Things are changing, no doubt, but it's much of a muchness.  The battle for Civil Rights continues.  The Cold War endures. 

If anything, this year feels like an interlude, that time of uncertain winds before the clouds march confidently in a new direction.  You hear it in the political rhetoric.  You see it in the fashion, with the flared skirts of last decade still living (though decreasingly) alongside the pencil-cut of the '60s. 

And you particularly notice it in the musical trends.  For instance, many of the genres of '50s are still with us.  There are lots of new ones, however, competing for time on the airwaves.  The last time this happened, it was 1955.  For a brief time, swing, schmaltz, rock, and calypso competed for our ears' attentions.  Once more, we have an unprecedented level of sonic diversity:

Pop

Pop, as a genre, has been around for several years.  Ricky Nelson, Neil Sedaka, Bobby Darin were all big in the late '50s, and they're still tops today.  A couple of big changes have occurred over the last few years.  In 1960, we saw women entering the field more frequently.  Ingenues like Rosie Hamlin (who recorded Angel Baby just a few miles from my house, Linda Scott, Brenda Lee (straddling the country line), and Kathy Young.  Not to mention Little Peggy March (I will Follow Him) and Eydie Gorme…singing about the one Latin music form still popular in the States:


Blame it on the Bossanova, by Eydie Gorme

Individual girl singers seem to have peaked in popularity last year, though, giving way to Black girl-groups like the Chiffons, the Crystals, the Shirelles, and the Ronettes, which also began hitting the charts around 1960.


He's so Fine, by the Chiffons

Producer Phil Spector is a big force behind these groups, introducing a new concept in music called "The Wall of Sound" that loops in huge numbers of strings and layered vocals to weave a rich tapestry of music.  You can hear his work in hits like…


He's sure the boy I love, by the Crystals

And on the other side of the Pond, we have British artists that sometimes get airplay over here.  Occasionally, I hear an import from Cliff Richards, the crooner front-man for The Shadows.  His latest soundtrack topped the charts in the UK for a while, though it's since been knocked off by a newcomer band that is still virtually unknown in the States:


Please Please Me, by the Beatles

Motown

Both a style and a label, Motown is a Detroit-based record company producing a slick evolution of DooWop, Soul, and R&B feauturing hits like:


Let me go the Right Way, by The Supremes


Laughing Boy, by Mary Wells


Come and Get these Memories, by Martha and the Vandellas

I have a feeling this may be the next big thing…if it can break out of the Steel belt and the Negro stations.

Surf

Out of the prototypical instrumental music days of the late '50s, typified by folks like Duane Eddy and Link Wray, the genre has come full flower.  It started in 1960 with the Ventures and The Shadows, with their intricate renditions of standards like Ghostriders in the Sky and Apache.  Then someone figured out how to send strummy vibrato into a speaker (probably Dick Dale, the self-crowned "King of the Surf Guitar), and now the airwaves are filled with that fluttery, tubular, sound that's straight out of the ocean.  Numbers like:


Miserlou, by Dick Dale


Pipeline, by The Chantays


Surf Rider, by The Lively Ones

Country

With the recent death of the Queen of the Grand Ole Opry, Patsy Cline, it's worth taking stock of who our luminaries in the Country genre.  This is a genre I've been a fan of ever since The Sons of the Pioneers and Hank Williams were twanging Western and Honky Tonk. 


Patsy Cline's Crazy, written by Willie Nelson

Another country star who came out of the 50s and is still going strong is (my favorite), Wanda Jackson:


Whirlpool (sounds like a modern redo of Funnel of Love)

And you've probably heard Skeeter Davis' latest country-pop crossover hit:


The End of the World, by Skeeter Davis

Folk

Out of the culturally meaningful, commentary-laden folk songs of the 1950s, two main movements have formed.  The first, exemplified by new star, Bob Dylan, hews closely to its roots.  Dylan's voice is as friendly as a buzzsaw, and his guitar is unadorned.  But what he sings sounds like the truth.


Song to Woody by Bob Dylan

The second is the harmonious, still simple, but beautifully polished works by earnest bands like The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary, as well as more playful stuff, for instance by The Rooftop Singers. 


The New Frontier by The Kingston Trio


Puff the Magic Dragon by Peter, Paul, and Mary


Walk Right In by The Rooftop Singers

It's difficult to tell which school will in out in the end, but as the 1960s promise to be a turbulent decade, with the fight for Civil Rights and the wars in Indochina heating up, one can bet Folk will be with us throughout.

Jazz

Once king in the 30s and 40s, Jazz has become more of an aesthete's bag.  There are dedicated stations and a semi-regular TV show, Jazz Casual, and plenty of records, but Jazz is definitely not found on the popular airwaves.

Plenty of older artists, like Count Basie, Dexter Gordon, and Duke Ellington remain active, along with mid-rangers like John Coltrane, Earl Bostic, and Dave Brubeck. 


Cheesecake, by Dexter Gordon

The new big thing (though it's been around since the '50s) is "Free Jazz" or "avante-garde" which cares not for fixed chord progressions and time signatures.  At its free-est, it's almost incomprehensible, but tamed, it's exotic and vibrant.


Congo Call, by Prince Lasha

Straddling the jazz and Latin line is Cal Tjader, a '50s vibraphone phenomenon who continues to be popular (you should see my nephew, David, cut a rug to this stuff…)


Cuban Fantasy, by Cal Tjader

—

Of course, this is just a thumbnail sketch of what's out there, and I haven't even touched foreign movements like Jamaican Ska or Brasilian Bossanova.  With so many different genres struggling to catch the public's ear, it's hard to place bets on which ones will be ascendant in the years to come.  For now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the unrivalled musical diversity while it lasts. 

What's YOUR favorite genre/artist?

(If you want to hear these hits and more, tune in to KGJ — Galactic Journey radio plays the newest and the mostest!)
–

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Magazine

[April 9, 1963] IFfy… (May 1963 IF Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Every month, science fiction stories come out in little digest-sized magazines.  It used to be that this was pretty much the only way one got their SF fix, and in the early '50s, there were some forty magazines jostling for newsstand space.  Nowadays, SF is increasingly sold in book form, and the numbers of the digests have been much reduced.  This is, in many ways, for the good.  There just wasn't enough quality to fill over three dozen monthly publications.

That said, though there are now fewer than ten regular SF mags, editors still can find it challenging to fill them all with the good stuff.  Editor Fred Pohl, who helms three magazines, has this problem in a big way.  He saves the exceptional stories and known authors (and the high per word rates) for his flagship digest, Galaxy, and also for his newest endeavor, Worlds of Tomorrow.  That leaves IF the straggler, filled with new authors and experimental works. 

Sometimes it succeeds.  Other times, like this month, it is clear that the little sister in Pohl's family of digests got the short end of the stick.  There's nothing stellar in the May 1963 IF, but some real clunkers, as you'll see.  I earned my pay (such as it is) this month!

The Green World, by Hal Clement

Hal Clement (or Harry Stubbs, if you want to know the name behind the pseudonym) has made a name for himself as a writer of ultrahard science fiction, lovingly depicting the nuts and bolts of accurate space-borne adventure.  The Green Planet details the archaeological and paleontological pursuits of a human expedition on an alien planet.  The puzzle is simple — how can a world not more than 50 million years old possess an advanced ecosystem and a hyper-evolved predator species? 

Clement's novella, which comprises half the issue, is not short on technical description.  What it lacks, however, is interesting characters and a compelling narrative.  I bounced off this story several times.  Each time, I asked myself, "Is it me?"  No, it's not.  It's a boring story, and the pay-off, three final pages that read like a cheat, aren't worth the time investment.  One star.

Die, Shadow!, by Algis Budrys

Every once in a while, you get a story that is absolutely beautiful, filled with lyrical writing, and yet, you're not quite sure what the hell just happened.  Budrys' tale of a modern-day Rip van Winkle, who sleeps tens of thousands of years after an attempted landing on Venus, is one of those.  I enjoyed reading it, but it was a little too subtle for me.  Still, it's probably the best piece in the issue (and perhaps more appropriate to Fantastic).  Three stars.

Rundown, by Robert Lory

Be kind to the worn-out bum begging for a dime — that coin might literally spell the difference between life and death.  A nicely done, if rather inconsequential vignette, from a first-time author.  Three stars.

Singleminded, by John Brunner

In the midst of a ratcheted-up Cold War, a stranded moon-ferry pilot is rescued by a chatty Soviet lass.  The meet cute is spoiled, by turns, first by the unshakable paranoia the pilot feels for the Communist, and second by the silly, incongruous ending.  I suspect only one of those was the writer's intention.  Three stars.

Nonpolitical New Frontiers, by Theodore Sturgeon
ans. Al Landau, gideon marcus, hal clement, harry s
Sturgeon continues to write rather uninspired, overly familiar non-fiction articles for IF.  In this one, Ted points out that fascinating science doesn't require rockets or foreign planets — even the lowly nematode is plenty interesting.  Three stars.

Another Earth, by David Evans and Al Landau

When I was 14, (mumblety-mumblety) years ago, I wrote what I thought was a clever and unique science fiction story.  It featured a colony starship with a cargo of spores and seeds that, through some improbable circumstance, travels in time and ends up in orbit around a planet that turns out to be primeval Earth.  The Captain decides to seed the lifeless planet, ("Let the land produce…") thus recreating the Biblical Genesis. 

I did not realize that Biblically inspired stories were (even then) hardly original.  In particular, the Adam and Eve myth gets revisited every so often.  It's such a hoary subject that these stories are now told with a wink (viz. Robert F. Young's Jupiter Found and R.A. Lafferty's In the Garden).

Why this long preface?  Because the overlong story that took two authors (and one undiscerning editor) to vomit onto the back pages of IF is just a retelling of the Noah myth.  An obvious one.  A bad one.  One star.

Turning Point, by Poul Anderson

Last up, the story the cover illustrates features a concept you won't find in Analog.  A crew of terran explorers finds a planet of aliens that, despite their primitive level of culture, are far more intelligent than humans.  The story lasts just long enough for us to see the solution we hatch to avoid our culture being eclipsed by these obviously superior extraterrestrials.  Not bad, but it suffers for the aliens being identical to humans.  Three stars.

Thus ends the worst showing from IF in three years.  Here's a suggestion: raise the cover price to 50 cents and pay more than a cent-and-a-half per word?

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TV

[April 7, 1963] The Twilight Zone, Season 4, Episodes 9-12

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by Natalie Devitt

This past month on The Twilight Zone has been quite the experience. It has included anything from deals with the devil to time travel. It has also thrown in parallel universes and wish granting genies just for fun. If any of those things sound familiar, there may be good reason. The show does seem to be rehashing some old ideas. So, has The Twilight Zone finally run out of steam, or is it just offering new interpretations of some old classics? After four seasons one thing is for sure: anything is possible in The Twilight Zone.

Printer’s Devil, by Charles Beaumont

What is the price you would pay for one last chance at achieving a dream? That is the question that Douglas Winter, played by Robert Sterling, has to wrestle with in Printer’s Devil. Douglas is the editor of a failing newspaper called The Courier. Faced with the possibility of the paper, to which he has dedicated his life, folding, Douglas contemplates suicide. He drives himself out to a local bridge in the middle of the night, hoping to end it all there.

At the bridge, he meets a mysterious stranger named Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith is played by Twilight Zone favorite Burgess Meredith. Mr. Smith offers Douglas everything he needs in order to keep The Courier in business. In no time, the paper is beating its competition to the latest scoop. In this surprisingly strong update of Faust, Douglas begins to question if his paper’s success is worth the price he will have to pay Mr. Smith, who is really the devil in disguise.

A story about someone selling their soul to the devil is hardly a new one. The episode’s writer, Charles Beaumont, knows that and has fun with the cliché in his script. Mr. Smith even makes jokes about the rumors that violinist Niccolò Paganini sold his soul to the devil to become a virtuoso. In addition, the script does not waste time revealing that Mr. Smith is the devil. In fact, during his first scene on screen, Mr. Smith is shown lighting his crooked cigar with his fingertip, so the viewer is aware of Mr. Smith's diabolic nature from the get-go. The story spends most of the time focusing on the characters and their motivations, which I feel helps to make this version of a classic bargain work surprisingly well.

The story’s script is made even better by Burgess Meredith’s mischievous performance as Mr. Smith. He really seems to relish his role without being hammy as he tells Douglas that no modern man could possibly believe that he could sell his soul to the devil, and that the contract he drew up for Douglas’ soul was just him being an eccentric old man.

This episode offers a new twist on an old tale. I give it three and a half stars.

No Time Like the Past, by Rod Serling

Dana Andrews stars as Paul Driscoll, a man who thinks he has the solution for the problems that plague the world today. He uses a time machine in hopes of altering the past and preventing the world’s current problems. He tries going back to Hiroshima in 1945, just in time to warn people about the atomic bomb. There, he is dismissed as being crazy, so he then tries going back to Berlin in 1939 to assassinate Hitler. His plans are foiled, so he travels back to 1915 to stop the RMS Lusitania from being torpedoed by a German U-boat. Once again, things do not go as planned.

Douglas’ failed attempts to alter the past cause him to conclude that the past cannot be changed. He decides to time travel one last time, this time to Homeville, Indiana in the year 1881, where he says he plans to go, “to live, not to change anything.“ It is a place where he could be free of the all the problems in the present day. Only, once again, things do not go quite as well as he hopes.

It turns out that the good old days are not quite as good as he imagined they would be. Bad things continue to happen all around him, and he still is powerless to do anything. Even if he could change things, he considers the possibility that his actions cause a chain reaction for things to change for the worse. One thing is certain, though. Having come from the future, he can predict every historical event or disaster before it actually happens, which has its disadvantages.

This is another story with a familiar theme — the episode Back There tread similar ground. That said, this episode is not bad, but it takes a while to get going. At first, it jumps from time to time, with transitions not as smooth as they could have been. Once the story does stay for a while in a single time period, as it does in 1881, the episode improves dramatically.

This episode was a perfectly fine way to spend a Thursday night. It deserves three stars.

The Parallel, by Rod Serling

Robert Gaines, played by Steve Forrest, is an astronaut who has returned to Earth from space. He blacks out shortly before landing, but he somehow manages to get land and everything seems fine at first. As he tries to transition back into everyday life, he finds that life back on Earth is not quite the way he remembers it. His house is a little different, his wife seems uncomfortable when he shows her affection, his colleagues cannot remember his proper ranking at work, nobody knows that John F. Kennedy is president, and one day, his daughter tells him that she does not know who he is. Robert comes to the conclusion that he must have landed in a parallel universe, but not everyone agrees with him.

This is an episode that really uses the hour long length to its advantage. It uses the extra time to build suspense as the people closest to Robert begin to question his sanity due to all of his theories about parallel time. Additionally, a number of sequences, including one in a hospital and some at the space station, use a lot things like low key lighting and lots of shadows to intensify the atmosphere of fear and suspicion in a manner similar to that used in film noir and horror films.

Unfortunately, the ending was not quite as strong as the rest of the episode, but overall this episode was pretty good. It earns three stars from me.

I Dream of Genie, by John Furia, Jr.

I Dream of Genie tells the story of a perpetually unlucky nebbish named George Hanley, played by Howard Morris, who purchases an oil lamp. While trying to clean the lamp, he accidentally rubs it and releases its genie. Out of his lamp, the genie reveals himself to be a cranky old man, who does not look or act like your traditional genie. For example, he wears modern western clothing. The genie tells George that he will grant him only one wish. George works through his options in fantasy first, so as to make the best decision. He imagines himself married to a beautiful secretary from work, then being rich, and finally, becoming the President. Sadly, even in his dreams, he cannot seem to catch a break.

When I realized that this episode would be a comedy, I was excited about the possible change of pace. Perhaps it would provide some much needed relief from the darker and more serious tones of the previous episodes. I could not have been more wrong. The generally good acting can save even the worst episodes of this series, but that is not the case this time around. The acting was so over the top, and not in an entertaining way. This was especially the case in scenes where George is trying to win the love of his coworker, Ann. The fact that this episode was an hour long made it even harder to watch. To make matters worse, George’s final wish does not reward the viewer for not changing the station.

The Twilight Zone has made better episodes about lonely and down on their luck men who finally seem to get a chance to turn their lives around. Incorporating comedy into this series has been a risk that often does not seem to pay off. This episodes was sadly not an exception to that rule.

All I can give this episode is one star, which I hate to admit is probably being generous.

The Twilight Zone revisited some familiar stories and themes this time around, which actually seemed to work most of the time. It remains to be seen if this will continue to be the case. I will just have to keeping on watching to find out. I hope you'll join me — both misery and joy love company.



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Book

[April 5, 1963] The Best Laid Plans (Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth)

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by Victoria Lucas

Ten days after my 21st birthday last October, a 13-day “crisis” began that got people wondering anew whether the world would end soon, if nuclear bombs would start falling.  When the crisis (and not the world) ended, like others, I felt a sense of relief, but the Cold War wasn’t over, and it isn’t over now.  It most certainly isn’t over in Walter Tevis’s novel of the near future, The Man Who Fell to Earth.  A shadow of something big and ineluctable hangs over the book.

It is somewhat genre-bending, and I didn't recognize it as a work of science fiction when I started reading it.  But the first clue was the starkness of the prose.  The author has, as I understand it, been teaching English, but nevertheless it lacks a certain richness, contains a type of get-to-the-pointedness that I've come to associate with science fiction, even though I've read little of it.  "Let's just gloss over that" description, embarrassing fact, indescribable circumstance, not draw too much attention to details that would take a long time to explain and have no relevance to the plot.  "Just the facts, ma'am," as they say on Dragnet.

Of course my next clue was that, gradually, the main character, Thomas Jerome Newton, reveals that he is not from Planet Earth. 

Tevis is the man who gave us "Minnesota Fats" and "Fast Eddie," the author of the 1959 book The Hustler, made into a film 2 years ago.  That was his first novel, this his second.

This novel's characters answer the question: What if the aliens came (in this case only one) and H. G. Wells was right, disease was the cause of defeat, but it wasn't a physical disease in the same sense as the one that infected Wells's Martians, it was something that has been popularly regarded as a character flaw, as a funny stereotype?  Like alcoholism.  (Warning: There are no happy people in this book.)

I noticed that the catalog record shows "alcoholism" as a subject.  I wondered at that until I had read to a certain point in this cautionary tale of the best laid plans of mice and aliens.

At first it is noted that Newton “had only recently begun drinking wine, pleased to find that it had, apparently, the same effect on him as it did on men of Earth.” But when he meets Betty Jo, a woman who takes him in when he breaks both legs in an elevator because the G forces are too much for him, he sees that she is fond of gin—a little too fond, in fact—and he begins to join her. 

The first character to suspect that Newton is not human is Nathan Bryce, a college-level teacher of chemistry who quits to come to work for him, but "he smiled at himself, at the cheap, science-fiction level of his own private discourse.  If Newton were a Martian or a Venusian, he should, by all rights, be importing heat rays to fry New York or planning to disintegrate Chicago, or carrying off young girls to underground caves for otherworldly sacrifices."  Having taught at colleges, he would of course think of "science fiction" in this way because these are still common ideas among academics.  This is Bryce’s opinion, but Tevis must have seen a lot of such themes preparing to write short stories such as his "The Ifth Of Oofth" in a 1957 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.

Nevertheless, Bryce thinks Newton must be "either the world's most original inventive genius, or an extraterrestrial" and sets out to find out if his misgivings are true, in the process unconsciously undoing everything Newton has done toward his goal.  By the time Newton visits Bryce in his apartment when “the Anthean” (as Newton’s people are called) is well along in his project, Bryce observes early in the evening that Newton "had already finished his first gin drink and had poured himself another.  A drunken Martian?  An extraterrestiral who drank gin and bitters?"  It doesn't seem to occur to him that the "drunken Martian" has caught a fatal human disease, probably because Bryce himself drinks heavily on occasion.  The expression “it’s all downhill from there” comes to mind.

I was intrigued by the fact that in several places, Newton's thoughts allude to his race and humans having the same origin, or previous visits to Earth by his people that jump-started human development of language and religion.  My research indicates that there was a book in French published in 1960 by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (Les Matin des magiciens) that includes these ideas, but I have no indication that Tevis knows French.  Another possibility is that Tevis read H. P. Lovecraft (B-r-r-r-r-r!), some of whose work reportedly has this theme. 

Eventually, of course, we find out that Newton has come to the attention of the American government, despite hiding his project away in Kentucky (Tevis's home).  While the CIA seems more interested in studying his nervous system and psychology to find out whether they can coddle or torture weapons information out of him, the person whom Newton considers his best friend on the planet (Bryce) wants him to save the humans.

Curiously, it never seems to occur to the humans to save themselves.

What holds us back?  Tevis seems to me to put his finger on some factors restraining political problem solving.  They are incarnate in the characters of the cynical Bryce, who is selfish, greedy, and apathetic; Newton’s patent lawyer and business agent, also afflicted with selfishness and greed; his woman friend Betty Jo, a female stereotype of unselfishness who drowns any intelligence she might have in booze; and the government agents—as cynical and lacking in compassion as Bryce—who would have no qualms about using any sort of world-destroying weaponry they might tease out of Newton on our fragile planet.  A type of mental short-sightedness is endemic and finally culminates in Newton’s very real blindness that is nevertheless also symbolic.

Answering a question from Bryce about what he was trying to do, Newton says, “I was not at all certain what I was up to” because, although his project was to build a lifeboat to bring the surviving remnant of his people to Earth, “I’m not certain that my people will be able to stand your world."  But he did become certain that they would have nothing to do here but "wait for the bombs to fall."

All in all, I found it a depressing book.  But perhaps that’s only because, like Newton, I’m living under the shadow of the Cold War, and I take it seriously.  So aside from those who are curious about what else the author of The Hustler wrote, or about a possible future around 15 years hence, or about how aliens or alcoholics are portrayed, I think I would recommend this to anyone in the future who wants to know what it felt like to live through (?I hope) the Cold War.  The book has a few flaws, for which I would give it 3 out of 5 stars.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Movies

[April 3, 1963] Feathered Threads (Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds)

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by Gwyn Conaway


The Birds , directed by Alfred Hitchcock, premiered on March 28th, 1963.

Just yesterday I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s new film The Birds.  On its surface, the premise is quite simple — the avians in a peaceful locale suddenly turn murderous.  It's a superb piece of suspense from the unarguable master of such things.  As the sun rose this morning and I sipped my coffee, I wondered if the little songbirds in my garden could ever turn on me. What a chilling thought!

Of course, try as Hitchcock might to distract me with scenes of feathered terror, being me, I couldn’t help but notice the costume design. And while, the pre-release copy of the film I saw was in black and white, my privileged position at the studio let me observe the costumes in person (and in living color). With the film released, I can finally share what I’ve seen! 

Costume designer Edith Head masterfully combined the sleepy seaside palette with the elegance of the city through cut and fit. Lydia Brenner, played by the talented Jessica Tandy, is a great example of this harmony. Her fabrics are those that we associate with the country. Tweeds and contrast knits in particular are found throughout her design. However, her silhouettes are fresh and metropolitan. Head even mixes in fine silks to give her an air of sophistication. This combination also illuminates the teetering balance Brenner tries to maintain between a domineering and doting mother.


Lydia’s tweed cocoon coat is a beautiful example of how the fashion-forward city silhouette has creeped into Bodega Bay while maintaining the little coastal town’s country charm.


In this casual evening ensemble, we can see her motherly conundrum. Note the fine silk charmeuse blouse beneath the contrast knit cardigan. The “knit” side of Lydia’s personality is docile, while the “silk” side is conniving.

This subtle design emphasizes the obvious tension between Lydia and Melanie, played by Tippi Hedren, a socialite with designs on Lydia's son. Melanie is a city girl through and through. Her palettes play on this contrast. Her dress suit and fur jacket drip with metropolitan wealth.

When she borrowed a dinghy to sneak across the bay, I was struck with the direct comparison of the texture of the docks to her red fox fur coat. I realized that, in her own misguided way, she was using the natural texture of the fur to try helplessly to blend in with the little town; a detail that lends itself to her rather clumsy and charming game.

The star of the film was obviously her dress suit. The costume is an open jacket with small patch pockets that sit low on the hem and sleeve cuffs that fall just above the wrist. It’s cut to perfection with a single vertical dart from shoulder to bust that helps the jacket maintain a square yet smooth shape over the bust. The matching dress beneath is a sheath cut, sleeveless, with a three-inch wide self belt and an invisible zipper down the center back. What you can’t deduce from the release of the film, however, is that the dress suit is a tangy, energetic pistachio green!


Beautiful, isn’t it?

Draped in the color of spring, is it any wonder that Lydia feels threatened by the young and boisterous Melanie? Certainly not. However, I think the real source of Lydia’s uneasiness lies in Mitch’s wardrobe.

Lydia's son, Mitch Brenner, played by Rod Taylor (star of The Twilight Zone and The Time Machine, is a man caught between the slow-paced life of Bodega Bay and the bustling hubbub of the city. Although the seaside town is his escape, he is always destined to leave it for San Francisco.


Note that his styling, the ribbed fishing captain’s sweater paired with the paisley ascot, is that of a wealthy yachter rather than the resident of a coastal town.


Residents of Bodega Bay holed up in the local cafe with Melanie. The contrast in texture between her smooth dress suit and the local nappy textiles help her stand out among the crowd. Compare their looks with Mitch above for a similar effect.

At the same time, he follows his mother’s habits of using fashionable silhouettes with more textured fabrics. The suit he wears to his sister’s birthday party is an excellent example. A slender tie paired with a wide-gorge shirt collar and a high notch on the lapel of his suit jacket make for a very trendy man.

Rather than being concerned over the women in his life, perhaps Lydia is concerned for the patterns she sees within her son. Is he destined to forget her? Will he leave her like his father did before him?

The frenzy of the birds in Bodega Bay is a terrifying mystery. They seem to gather against humans without cause. However, I wonder if the answers don’t lie in Lydia’s fears. The birds crowd the town’s residents gradually and then strike with sudden ferocity. A similar feeling is commonly associated with anxiety. Lydia’s fears about her son are chronic with acute moments of panic. Could Lydia, in fact, be the subconscious cause of the birds?

I can only imagine that the connection is deliberate. Just as Edith Head wove the fabric of the costumes with the psyche of the characters, so Hitchcock wove a deeper theme into his film, elevating a "monster flick" into cinema for the ages.




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