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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 16, 1966] Getting There Is Half The Fun (March 1966 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Modes of Transportation


I hope that the Cunard Line will forgive me for stealing their famous slogan. By the way, isn't this a lovely advertisement?

In this modern world, there are all kinds of ways of getting around. There are luxury liners, as shown above. There are airplanes, complete with friendly attendants to cater to your every whim.


This ad is about ten years old. It must have come from a magazine in a doctor's waiting room.

There are, of course, automobiles, that you can either own or rent when you need them.


I do not, however, recommend jumping directly from a plane to a car.

In science fiction, we have lots of futuristic devices to send us from one place to another, from moving sidewalks to starships. The latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow features people transported through space and time in various ways. The lead novella includes a method of getting from Point A to Point B that I haven't seen before, and that I don't think I would enjoy.

Dying To Be Somewhere Else


Cover art by Gray Morrow.

The Suicide Express, by Philip Jose Farmer


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

We return to the planet known as Riverworld, where everyone who has ever lived on Earth is reincarnated into a young and healthy body. Our hero is, once more, the Nineteenth Century adventurer Richard Francis Burton. It turns out that anyone who dies on Riverworld is reincarnated again, but in a different location on the giant planet.

Burton discovers that his old nemesis, the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering, has been reincarnated in the same place he now resides, after Burton killed him. We'll find out later that the two enemies come back to life in identical locations more than once. There is some kind of bond between them, it seems, although why remains a mystery.

The enormous river that gives this world its name runs from the north pole, all the way around the planet, then back to where it started. That doesn't make geographic sense, of course, so it's clear that some kind of super-advanced technology is involved. There are tales of a bold explorer who spotted a vast tower at the head of the river, beyond impassible mountains. Determined to unlock the secrets of Riverworld, Burton sets out to find the tower. Because sailing all the way to the north pole, if it is even possible, would take many decades, he uses another method of travel.

He kills himself. Seven hundred and seventy-seven times, to be exact. The odds are low that he'll be reincarnated near the north pole, but he's willing to take the chance.

Meanwhile, the so-called Ethicals who created Riverworld are hunting down Burton, apparently because he seems to be the only person who was conscious, in some kind of storage area, before being reincarnated. There's also a rogue Ethical, working against the others, who claims to be protecting Burton.

Along the way we meet John Collop, a Seventeenth Century poet. Like Burton and Goering, this is a real historical figure, if not quite as famous. In Farmer's tale, he's a saintly fellow, who is an evangelist for a new religion, the Church of the Second Chance. We also witness the transformation of the guilt-ridden, drug-addicted Goering into what possibly might be a better human being.


Burton meets the Ethicals.

The plot moves swiftly, and there's always something interesting going on. Farmer has latched on to a premise that allows him a lot of room to bring in folks from all sorts of places, from the prehistoric past to the near future. My only quibble is that he raises more questions than he answers. I assume there will be more stories in this series. They might clear things up.

Four stars.

The Kindly Invasion, by Christopher Anvil

Let's see; a story by Christopher Anvil. Do I even have to read it to find out that it's about clever humans outwitting technologically superior but foolish aliens?

In this variation on his favorite theme, the extraterrestrials come to Earth bearing gifts. Among other blessings, they offer a serum that prevents aging. They communicate with humans via telepathy.

Our main character smells something fishy. He assumes the telepathy is really brainwashing. He's the big boss of an arms company, and he decides to sell an excellent firearm to the public dirt cheap, so that lots of people will buy them. (Can you see where this is going?)

Sure enough, the aliens turn out to be bad guys, and the heavily armed folks who didn't fall for their propaganda are ready to take them on.

I was really, really hoping that the arms dealer's suspicions would turn out to be unjustified. Instead, there is nothing at all surprising about the plot. This yarn would have found a more appropriate home in the pages of Analog.

Two stars.

The Super-Sleuths of Science Fiction, by Sam Moskowitz

In the previous issue, we had the first part of a look at crimefighters in SF. This section is exactly like the other. We get a long list of science fiction detective stories, most of which sound really lousy. At the end we get a quick look at modern examples, such as Asimov's robot novels.

My opinion has not changed. I admire the author's scholarship, but the resulting article is as dry as dust.

Two stars.

Like Any World of Gree, by C. C. MacApp


Illustrations by Peter Lutjens.

A bunch of stories about a resourceful hero fighting the slaveholding minions of Gree have already appeared in If. I'm not sure why this one appeared in its sister magazine, but maybe editor Frederik Pohl ran out of room for it.

Anyway, in this adventure we're on Earth. The home world is already occupied by the villains, but the good guys are coming to the rescue. There's just one big problem. Once the followers of Gree are defeated in a space battle, they'll wipe out all life on the planet. Our hero has to sneak in, disguise himself as a human bounty hunter working for the bad guys, work with the local resistance underground, and, as usual, sneak his way into the enemy compound.


Take that, Gree-loving scum!

The series as a whole has been a little repetitious. This one has the novelty of being set on Earth, but otherwise it's the same old espionage and sabotage plot we've seen before.

Two stars.

Umpty, by Basil Wells

A couple of hundred years from now, most folks are unemployed. Some of them eke out a living with subsistence farming, other are outlaws. The protagonist, a fellow hoping to get a job, rescues a woman from a gang of hoodlums. She claims to be from the past, with her mind transported into a body of the future. After some adventures, they find out what's really going on.

There really isn't much to this story other than the twist ending, which I thought was kind of silly. I suppose the background is mildly interesting, but that's about it.

Two stars.

Comets Via the VJSEH, by Robert S. Richardson

The author speculates about the origin of comets having orbits associated with Jupiter. He dismisses the idea that they were captured by the gravity of the giant planet, because there are far too many of them still around, considering their relatively short lifetimes. Did they emerge from Jupiter? No, because they could not possibly escape the immense gravitational pull. Instead, he promotes the hypothesis that they were ejected from Jovian moons, due to volcanic activity.

It seems to me that the argument falls apart if you accept the possibility that there's a steady supply of comets coming from deep in space, maybe beyond Pluto. In that case, there would be plenty of them for Jupiter to grab. The article also has some illustrations that are not reproduced very well, so I haven't bothered to photocopy them here.

Two stars.

Choice of Weapons, by Richard C. Meredith


Illustration by Gray Morrow

A motley collection of folks gets transported from all kinds of places on Earth, and from different times, in this yarn. There's the hero, an American (I presume) hunter of the present; there's a naked, seemingly comatose little girl; a royal woman of ancient Egypt; a huge fellow of prehistoric times; a woman from a decadent future; an ancient Roman soldier; an Asian woman who might be from just about any time; and a soldier from a brutal future dictatorship.

These very confused people find themselves in a metal room. Food appears from time to time, but the amount keeps shrinking. Given this threat to their existence, not to mention conflict over the affections of the sexually provocative woman from the future, it's not a big surprise when violence breaks out. (I forgot to mention that the hunter has his gun, the Roman has his sword, and the man from the future has his laser. The prehistoric man just has his body, which is enough of a weapon.)

There's an explanation for their situation, of course. It also turns out that the little girl, who does not respond to anything at all in any way until the end of the story, is the key to saving the lives of those who survive the ordeal.

I have very mixed feelings about this tale. The frequent killing, along with implied rape, make it disturbing to read. On the other hand, the way in which the author portrays characters from many different times and cultures is convincing. In particular, the half-intelligible language spoken by the woman from the future is fascinating.

Three stars.

Did You Have A Nice Trip?

The good ship Worlds of Tomorrow, under the command of Captain Frederik Pohl, set sail with streamers flying. Her first port of call was well worth the price of boarding. The rest of the voyage, maybe not. As we disembark, we may wistfully wonder if the excursion was really a vital one.


If it's a Galactic Journey, I have to say Yes!



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Serial

[December 31, 1965] Untermag (January 1966 Analog

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by Gideon Marcus

[Time is running out to get your Worldcon membership!  Register here to be able to vote for the Hugos next year.]

Ubermensch

There's no question that John W. Campbell's got an axe to grind.  Not too long ago, he wrote an editorial about how the bipedal humanoid form, the best, most efficient, most effective of body types, was the natural end result of evolution on an Earthlike planet.  In another screed, he opined that slavery warn't so bad, and that Black Americans did better ante-bellum than we think.

These aren't anomalies: from what Isaac Asimov and others have said (I've never met John personally), the editor of Analog has some very fixed views of the world, and they include a belief in a hierarchy of races, a natural superiority of some to others.

Because of this, the stories in his magazine tend to reflect this view, one way or another.  Either John adds these elements in post-production, or his authors know to include them as a way to guarantee a sale. Analog is a prestige publication, after all.

And lest you think that's John's quaint views are simply emblematic of the less-than-enlightened times we live in, I will simply point out that we review all science fiction mags at the Journey, and Analog definitely is the odd man out.

Anyway, this month's magazine is a particularly egregious example of the Campbellian Mystique.  Let's dig in, shall we?

Sein Kampf


by Kelly Freas

Second Seeded, by R. C. FitzPatrick


by Kelly Freas

In FitzPatrick's earlier story Half a Loaf, we were introduced to a revolutionary institute whose surgeons could transplant a healthy mind from a ruined body into the healthy body of a mental vegetable.  The story explored some of the ethical concerns involved and, while it didn't hit it out of the park, it was pretty interesting.

The sequel is dreadful.

A Marine Major, name of Adams, is killed along with his wife in action in Borneo.  Their infant son becomes brain dead from hypoxia, all hope of regaining cognitive functions lost.  Around the same time, the infant son of two concert pianists is in a car accident that kills his parents and leaves him a quadriplegic.  Thus, the stage is set for a human brain transplant; the new wrinkle is that the patient won't have memory of the event, will be raised by the extended Adams clan.

This would be fine, even interesting save for the endless screeds in favor of eugenics that come out of the mouths of the protagonist.  The basic argument is that there aren't enough "Great Men" in the world as it is (women, explicitly, don't count) so saving as many as possible through this surgical technique is of utmost importance.  Beyond that, it's vital that the transplanted infant brain be an Adams because the Adams family is amazing and has been so since the time of the Revolution.  As an "Adams," the pianist boy will not only be an exemplary person because his parents were prodigies, but his gonads will house Adams sperm, which will ensure the Adams genes continue.  The espouser of this view gets a bit vague and contradictory when asked if it's the actual genetics or simply the continuity of family that ensures the Adamses produce a Great Man every generation, but it's clear he tends toward the former (and this is borne out by events in the story). 

Two stars rather than one, because it's not badly written.  But yech.

Now, since I had to pay to read FitzPatrick and Campbell's offensive rant, you can get mine for free.  In my experience, all human beings are of roughly equal potential.  Sure, there are smart ones and stupid ones — abilities distribute in bell curves — but whether a person will be smart or stupid does not correlate to genetics.  This means that everyone, given resources and opportunity, can develop to the fullest of their physical capabilities.  They can be as smart, strong, and talented as is possible for them. 

There are almost three billion people on this planet.  Some of them are stupid.  Most of them are average.  Some of them are brilliant.  If we want more "Great Men", there are much better ways of growing them than cherry picking a few children with presidential surnames. 

One is to raise the standard of living for everyone so that all children have the ability to develop to their full potential.  LBJ has the right idea with his Great Society; I expect the next generation will see a lot more geniuses (and happiness) in Appalachia. 

Another is to broaden the pool from which "Great Men" are drawn.  Here's a crazy thought: what if women weren't excluded from the pool?  Wouldn't that, in and of itself, double the number of Great "Men"?  And indeed, that's just what's started to happen already.  I have written about the women scientists and engineers involved in space exploration.  Their work has been critical to the success of our space-related endeavors, and there is no guarantee that their contributions would have (or could have) been made by anyone else, at least at that juncture in history.

So I disagree with the the theme of Second Seeded.  Like all bad philosophies, it collapses in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary.  And on a related note, I disagree that future Presidents of the United States will all have to have socially acceptable WASP names like Adams, Lincoln, and Jackson (as one of the characters opines in the story).  Does anyone remember the fellow with the funny name of "Eisenhower"?  Or the Irish Catholic name of "Kennedy"?

I fully believe that we'll have a President in my lifetime with the "exotic" name of Takahashi, Singh, or Okoye.  Perhaps her first name will be Mildred.

Untropy, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

Shaggy dog tale about a trading vessel that gets lost in hyperspace in a zone where the laws of probability leave nothing to chance.  The way they get back is obvious, and the story is rather trivial, but it's not bad reading.

Three stars.

A Bit Player, by Lyle R. Hamilton

All about the evolution of telemetry and its application to missiles and space travel.  Long, engaging, but way too high level for me (and I majored in astrophysics!) it will probably go over your head as well.

Three stars.

Kelvin Throop Rudes Again!, by E. Silverman

My outspoken nephew, David, has a habit of dashing out discourteous memos when he's peeved.  He calls them "nastygrams".  In Throop, new author Silverman offers up a collection of memos (it's not really an epistolary story as there's no story) of a middle manager kvetching at subordinates and vendors.

Not science fiction.  Not good.  One star.

Beehive (Part 2 of 2), by Mack Reynolds


by Kelly Freas

And, at last, the conclusion of Beehive, which began last issue.  Genetics takes the fore again when we learn that the enemy "Dawnworlders" have divided themselves into rigid castes, and in so doing, have thus been able to progress to tremendous technological heights.  Of course, if non-caste human beings had been given millions of years to accomplish the same feats, I'm sure we could have…

Anyway, the second half of the story is just as glib and silly as the first, with lots of speeches and exposition.  I did appreciate that there was some self awareness that Section G of the United Planets is as much a dictatorship as Phrygia, home of Baron Max, the would-be galactic Mussolini.  This was alloyed by the constant reinforcement that the protagonist's sidekick is an Indian.  He's referred to as "the Indian" and he uses the words "squaw," "scalp," and "firewater," whenever he can.

This isn't the first time Mack Reynolds has had trouble with this particular ethnicity.

Anyway, there are some interesting Laumeresque bits, but for the most part, this is a Reynolds that can be skipped.

Two stars.

Calculating the damage

Feeding the pages of the January 1966 Analog into the Star-o-meter (and setting the machine to "destroy copy after processing") I get a result of 2.3 stars.  Depressingly, I'm sure this will be one of the more popular issues of the magazine this year.

How did the other mags fare this month?  Well, Worlds of Tomorrow and New Worlds both scored 3.3 stars.  The less daring Science Fantasy got 2.8 as did IF, even though the latter was buouyed by the new Heinlein serial.  Fantasy & Science Fiction turned in a disappointing 2.5 star performance, and the mostly reprints Fantastic barely got 2.4.

They were still all better than Analog.

Speaking of shallow selection pools, women continue to be barely represented, producing two of 36 fiction pieces for a whopping 5.5% share.  Better than the 0% of last month, I suppose.  All told, the truly good stories this month would struggle to fill the pages of IF, much less a bigger mag like Galaxy. 

Well, tomorrow is a new year.  Perhaps Janus will favor us with auspicious auguries, and our fortunes will turn around.  And hey…Campbell won't live forever.

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Magazine

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

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by Gideon Marcus

Hail the Sun God

Summer has officially begun.

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

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

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

Noonday Overcast


by John Schoenherr

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


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A low three stars.

In the Light of Further Data, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four stars.

Soupstone, by Gordon R. Dickson


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

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

Two stars.

The Adventure of the Extraterrestrial, by Mack Reynolds


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

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

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

Though a Sparrow Fall, by Scott Nichols

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

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

Three stars.

Delivered with Feeling, by Lawrence A. Perkins


by Kelly Freas

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

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

Three stars.

A Dim Augury

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

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

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

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


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




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 12, 1965] The Number of the Bests

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by John Boston

The Collectors

SF anthologies are not neutral vessels.  They are shaped by editors with agendas.  Sometimes these are as simple as “what can I throw together to make some money,” but usually they advance the editor’s conception of what the field is, or should be. 

The first “best of the year” compilation in SF was the well-received The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, published by Frederick Fell in 1949 but containing stories from 1948.  The Bleiler-Dikty anthologies spawned a companion series, TheYear’s Best Science Fiction Novels (i.e., novellas), which ran from 1952 through 1954.  Bleiler left the project in 1955, to the detriment of its quality, and the series died with a final single volume from Advent, a small specialty publisher, in 1958.


by Frank McCarthy

There was abortive competition along the way.  Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books, a long-time anthologist, published Prize Science Fiction (McBride, 1953), containing 1952 stories supposedly comprising the winners and runners-up for that year’s Jules Verne Prize, an award and a book title that were not heard of again.  The next year August Derleth, another veteran anthologist, published Portals of Tomorrow (Rinehart, 1954), collecting stories from 1953 and pointedly subtitled The Best of Science Fiction and Other Fantasy.  The editor described it as “covering the entire genre of the fantastic: not only supernatural and science-fiction tales, but also every kind of whimsy and imaginative concept of life in the future or on other planets,” apparently distinguishing it from the Bleiler-Dikty series without mentioning it.  There was no second volume.

But Judith Merril achieved ignition, and kept it.  Her series of annual anthologies shows no signs of flagging after nine years.  The first, SF: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, appeared in 1956, with 1955 stories, from the SF specialty publisher Gnome Press, in an unusual publishing arrangement: a Dell paperback edition appeared in newsstands, drugstores, etc., more or less simultaneously with the publication of the Gnome hardcover, rather than after the usual year or so interval before paperback publication.  After four volumes, as Gnome tottered towards oblivion, Merril jumped to Simon and Schuster, which published the fifth through ninth books.  We await the tenth, slated for December.


by Ed Emshwiller

Merril’s angle from the first was good SF as good literature, accessible to the non-fanatical reader, with emphasis on character—not necessarily character-driven, but more concerned with the perspective and experience of recognizable human individuals than much SF.  Her taste in cherry-picking the SF magazines was near-impeccable.  She also looked beyond the SF magazines and the writers identified with them.

The latter practice has been both a strength and a weakness, bringing to the SF-reading public many worthy stories that they otherwise would never have heard of, but also including some items that seemed trivial or misplaced but came from a prestigious source or with a prestigious byline.  As a result, the Merril series has become woolier and more diffuse in focus over the years.  Her last volume included stories from Playboy (two), the Saturday Evening Post, the Saturday Review of Literature, the Peninsula Spectator, The Reporter, and the Atlantic Monthly, and such large literary bylines as Bernard Malamud and Andre Maurois, the latter with a novelette that may have been the best of 1930, when it was first published.  Oh, and three cartoons.  Of course it also included, as always, a large and solid selection of indisputable SF and fantasy, both from the genre magazines and from other sources.

Merril’s agenda is clear.  Let her tell you about it.  In her introduction to the last of the Gnome volumes, she wrote:

“The name of this book is SF.
“SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy).  Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy) is really an abbreviation too.  Here are some of the things it stands for. . . .
“S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity. . . .
“F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-will; Figuring, Fact-seeking, and Fancy-free.
“Mix well.  The result is SF, or Speculative Fun.”

English translation, if you need one: What she thinks the SF field is, or should be is . . . not really a field.  That is, not categorically distinguishable in any clear-cut way from the general body of literature, though having a somewhat different set of preoccupations than the typical contemporary novel or short story.

You can debate her argument, but I’m not inclined to.  I think if Merril did not exist it would be necessary to invent her, or someone similar, to help rescue the field (that word again!) from excessive insularity.  I am also glad to have her book to read each year, exasperating as some of its contents may be. 

Yin and Yang

But not everyone feels that way, and it is not surprising that there is once again some competition.  Donald Wollheim is back for a second try, with co-editor Terry Carr, a long-time SF fan and shorter-time author now working at Ace Books, with that publisher’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965, a chunky original paperback with a distinct “back to basics” air about it, though there’s no comment at all about Merril’s book and nothing that can be read as a disguised dig at it.

So what’s the more overt angle, besides “here are some stories we think are good”?  First, the title does not include “Fantasy,” a word which for Merril covers a multitude of exogamies.  And the “World’s Best” in the title is not ceremonial; the editors make much of having scoured the world, and not just the US, for stories.  The back cover says “Selected from the pages of every magazine regularly publishing science-fiction and fantasy stories in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the rest of the world. . . .” The yield: five non-US stories, of seventeen in the book.  Two of these are from the British New Worlds, which is not exactly news, but the others are from less familiar sources, though they are closer to the Anglo-American genre core than some of Merril’s catches.

First of these three is Vampires Ltd., by Josef Nesvadba, a Czech psychiatrist and well-known SF writer, the title story of his recent collection, about the current preoccupation with fast automobiles; the protagonist accidentally gets his hands on an especially fine one, and per the title, finds out that it doesn’t really run on gasoline.  We reach that denouement by way of a surreal and hectic series of events which makes little pretense to plausibility.  But that is beside the author’s point, which is satire.  It’s an interesting look at a different notion of storytelling than you will find in the US SF magazines.  The Weather in the Underground, by Colin Free, best known for his work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, from the Australian magazine Squire, is more consistent with US conventions.  It takes place in an underground habitat where part of humanity has fled for safety, leaving the rest to freeze in a new ice age.  This life is made tolerable by constantly renewed psychological conditioning, but our protagonist’s conditioning never quite took hold, so he’s miserable and maladjusted, leading to banishment and a sorry end.  It’s a strikingly vehement story, very tightly written and forceful, and one of the best in the book.

The third non-US/UK offering is What Happened to Sergeant Masuro?, by Harry Mulisch, from The Busy Bee Review: New Writing from the Netherlands.  Mulisch is apparently a notable Dutch literary figure, with eight books published.  Sergeant Masuro was a soldier in a Dutch patrol in Papua New Guinea; one of the other soldiers raped a native girl, or tried to; the headman was later seen skulking around; and Sergeant Masuro began to undergo a terrible transformation.  The story is the report to headquarters by the patrol’s superior officer, who recounts both the events and his own anguish at some length.  Amusingly, the plot—white men go into the jungle, transgress against the natives, and are cursed—is a long-familiar pulp plot of which dozens of examples could no doubt be exhumed from Weird Tales, Jungle Stories, and the like.  The literary gloss doesn’t add much to it.

Aside from these foreign trophies, the book is a stiff gust of de gustibus.  Of the five stories which one of us at Galactic Journey thought worthy of five stars (excluding several outright fantasies from Fantastic), none are included.  Nor are any included from our longer end-of-the-year Galactic Stars list.  Of the stories that are in the book, only two were awarded four stars, and one—Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow—fled the wrath of Gideon with only one star.

And much of what is here is remarkably pedestrian or worse.  The editors seem determined to reproduce the genre’s weaknesses as well as its strengths.  Starting the book is Tom Purdom’s Greenplace, which features such lively matters as a psychedelic drug and a man in a wheelchair being beaten by a mob, but is essentially an extremely contrived and implausible warning about a genuine problem: how democracy can survive, or not, as psychological manipulation becomes more sophisticated.  Next, and proceeding downhill, Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis’s Men of Good Will is an equally implausible, but more trivial, story built around a scientific gimmick that’s not even entirely original (remember Jerome Bixby’s The Holes Around Mars?). 

This is followed by Bill for Delivery, by that faithful purveyor of contrived yard goods Christopher Anvil, about the problems some salt-of-the-earth spacemen have carrying a cargo of unruly and dangerous birds from one star system to another.  At this point, a reader who bought the book thinking it was time to check out this “science fiction” stuff people are talking about would probably start to think “How can anybody possibly be interested in this?” and toss it or leave it on the bus.

There’s more of this ilk later on: C.C. MacApp’s weak and gimmicky For Every Action, and Robert Lory’s The Star Party, an annoyingly slick rendition of an original but silly idea.  And Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow answers the question that hardly anyone is asking: “What does a talented author do when he can’t think of anything of substance to write?”

But that’s the bad news.  The good news is a number of worthwhile stories.  Four Brands of Impossible by new writer Norman Kagan is at once an amusing picture of aspiring math and science brains in their element, and a chilling one of the uses to which their talents may be put, wrapped around an interesting mathematical idea.  William F. Temple’s A Niche in Time is a smart time travel story that goes off in an unexpected direction.  John Brunner’s The Last Lonely Man (one of the New Worlds items) develops a clever piece of psychological technology in the author’s earnest and methodical way.  Edward Jesby, another new writer, contributes the stylish and incisive Sea Wrack, which starts out as a tale of the idle and decadent rich in a far future where some humans have been modified to live undersea, and and turns into a story of class struggle, no less. 

Philip K. Dick’s Oh, To Be a Blobel! is a sort of slapstick black comedy updating Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  Thomas M. Disch’s Now Is Forever is a sharp if overlong piece of sociologizing about the effects of wide availability of matter duplicators, which kick the props from under everyone’s getting-and-spending way of life.  New writer Jack B. Lawson’s The Competitors is a breezy rearrangement of stock SF elements that reads to me like a facile parody of the genre, probably done with A.E. van Vogt in mind.

To my taste the most striking item here is Edward Mackin’s New Worlds story The Unremembered, a sort of religious fantasy framed in SF terms.  In the automated and urbanized future, lives have been extended for hundreds of years, but the show seems to be closing from sheer ennui: the birth rate is falling and the youth suicide rate is rising, and older people are queueing up at the euthanasia clinics.  Apparitions of people are appearing and disappearing seemingly randomly, because (it is hinted) the human span has become divorced from its natural length.  The elderly protagonist becomes one of the apparitions, and his consciousness takes a Stapledonian journey through the cosmos before arriving at the final revelation.  C.S. Lewis would appreciate this one if he were still around.  It is quite different from anything I’ve seen from Mackin before, or from anybody else for that matter.

But that’s the only really strikingly memorable story here; closest runners-up are the Colin Free and Edward Jesby stories, based mainly on their intensity in presenting relatively familiar sorts of material.  The writers who are pushing the SF envelope in notable ways are not here—no Lafferty, no Zelazny, no Ellison, no Cordwainer Smith.  And there is too much overt dross.

So, the bottom line: a pretty decent book with much solid material, but it mostly fails the “Surprise me!” test.  Maybe the next one will be more startling.  Meanwhile, Merril will be back to argue with in a few more months.

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




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Magazine

[May 28, 1965] Heavyweight's Burden (June 1965 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

How the Mighty have Fallen

Since 1953, Sonny Liston has been a big name in boxing.  Liston's spectacular career, marred by a prison hitch and rumored connections with organized crime, reached its pinnacle when he defeated Floyd Patterson in 1962 to become the world heavyweight champ.

He kept the title for two years, losing it in an upset to newcomer Cassius Clay.  In last week's rematch, Clay, now named Muhammad Ali, beat Liston even more handily.  Ali looks like he'll be keeping his title for a long time.

John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding was the heavyweight champion of science fiction magazines in the late 1930s, standing head and shoulders above its pulp competition.  It retained this title all through the Golden Age of SF, which lasted through the 1940s.

For the last fifteen years, Astounding (now called Analog) has maintained the highest circulation numbers, by far, of the science fiction digests.  It survived the mass extinctions of the late 1950s.  Campbell is still at the tiller.

But there are signs that the old champion could become easy pickings for a scrappy newcomer.  A recent flirtation with the "slick" format and dimensions was a dismal failure. The contents of the once-proud magazine have been staid for a long time.  Then, of course, there's Campbell's personal weirdness, his obsession with fringe sciences, his odious opinions on race relations.

That's not to say Analog is an unworthy magazine, but it's got its problems.  Exhibit A of Analog's vulnerability: the latest issue.

Handicapping the Reigning Champion


Did Campbell forget his is a science fiction magazine?

If I were a gambling house, I'd want to give my champion a thorough vetting, analyzing all of its strengths and weaknesses, and coming up with odds of victory accordingly.  Let's imagine the June 1965 issue as a kind of exhibition bout and see how it does.

The Muddle of the Woad, by Randall Garrett


by John Schoenherr

The bell rings, and our champion is looking good.  Randall Garrett is back with his third Lord Darcy story, a magical mystery series set in an alternate 20th Century in which England and France are united, Poland is the big adversary, and sorcery exists alongside technology.  The Lord Detective, along with his tubby Irish spell-casting sidekick, Sean, solve the murders of the Empire's most prestigious citizens.

In the deliciously pun-titled case, Lord Camberton of Kent is found dead in a coffin intended for someone else, his body dyed blue with woad.  Suspicion immediately falls on the Albion Society, a group of druids who reject Christianity.  But is this a red herring?  As with any good mystery, the cast of suspects is limited, and the ending involves the classic summoning of all to a room for a final deduction of the culprit.

Good stuff, as always.  A fine story and a rich universe.  Four stars.

Glimpses of the Moon, by Wallace West


by John Schoenherr

Oh, but now the champion is faltering.  Wallace West, who wrote the rather delightful River of Time offers up a clunker of a tale.  It is the late 1960s, and a three-way race to the Moon between American, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain has ended in something of a tie.  While the representative of the U.S.A. clearly landed first, the Soviets claim that the Moon is the property of whichever country whose skies it happens to be in at any given time.  Thus, ownership cycles with every day.  In the end, it turns out that a fourth power has a much earlier claim on the body.

It's all very silly, but not in a particularly fun way.  Two stars.

Hydrogen Fusion Reactor, by Edward C. Walterscheid

Last month, there was an article on magnetohydrodynamics — the use of magnetic bottles to contain thermonuclear reactions.  This month, the science fact article is exclusively on nuclear fusion.  Indeed, so proud is Campbell of this piece that he gave it the cover.

I was eager to learn about the state of development of this promising power source. Sadly, Walterscheid has not yet learned how to subdivide his points. Or write interesting prose. The result is an impenetrable wall.

Hmmm.  Perhaps the article could be repurposed to line the walls of tomorrow's fusion reactor…

Two stars.  Folks, the champion is staggering!

The GM Effect, by Frank Herbert


by Robert Swanson

Oh boy. Dune author Frank Herbert is back, and with another talking head story.  Unlike his last one, which involved a congressional hearing on a widely distributed superweapon, The GM Effect is about a drug that allows takes to experience former lives.  When it is discovered that this reveals all sorts of unsavory and forgotten tidbits of history (including that a Southern senator is one-quarter black), the drug's developers decide to cancel production.  Then the military comes in, shoots the drug creators, and appropriates their creation.

Not only is the story rather pointless, it's distasteful.  Herbert seems to be gleeful that Lincoln was personally no great lover of black Americans, and when the murdering general describes the erstwhile scientists as "N*gg*r lovers," I get less the sense that the utterer is supposed to be the bad guy and more that the author was delighted to be able to squeeze the word into a story.

One star…and our champion is down, folks!  He's down!

Duel to the Death, by Christopher Anvil


by John Schoenherr

Nearly 30 years ago, Analog's editor wrote Who Goes There.  One of the genre's seminal stories, it details the infiltration of an Antarctic base by a body-snatching alien, one that spreads via touch.  The result is that one cannot tell friend from foe anymore.  It's a chilling premise that has since been used to great effect, for instance by Robert Heinlein in The Puppet Masters..

Duel is a fairly straight entry in the genre.  A spacer on a new planet has his suit punctured by some sort of dart, and he quickly succumbs to alien control.  The purloined body becomes Ground Zero of an alien invasion that quickly takes over a nearby space fleet.  Thus ensues a race against time: can the Terran Navy defeat this scourge before it absorbs the whole of humanity?

Most of this story is quite good, with some very interesting story-telling, often from the point of view of inanimate objects: the space suit of the first victim, the ship's sensors of the investigating fleet, the communications devices employed by the humans.

But, to distinguish Duel from its predecessors, the author ends the piece with a twist that doesn't quite work.  I understand it, I think, but I don't quite buy it.

Three stars — good enough to bring our champion back to his feet, but flawed enough that he leaves the ring dazed.

Summing Up

Running our champion's performance through the Star-O-Vac, we come up with a rating of just 2.5.  That's pretty bad.  In a head-to-head against the other magazines of this month (and there was a bumper crop), how would Analog have fared?

Not well, it turns out.  Partly, it's because the competition was quite strong: Fantasy and Science Fiction ended up on top with an impressive 3.5 rating.  Worlds of Tomorrow garnered 3.2 stars and Galaxy got 3.1.  Both Amazing and New Worlds got three stars, while Fantastic and Science Fantasy finished at a sub-par 2.8.

Only If ranked lower than Analog, meriting just 2.2 stars (sorry David!)

So, a disappointing performance by Campbell's mag augurs poorly for it. Will there be a Muhammad Ali of science fiction publications?

(P.S. Women wrote six of the 55 fiction pieces this month; none appeared in Analog — connection?)




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Magazine, Serial

[May 2, 1965] FORWARD INTO THE PAST (June 1965 IF)

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by David Levinson

Science fiction is generally considered to be literature that looks ahead. Much of Western culture also seems to be fairly obsessed with the miracles of progress and moving into a brighter future. Even communism, though less materially oriented, talks a good game about a better tomorrow. But there are also those who look to the past for better times, longing for the “good old days.” We can see the clash of these two world views in one form or another nearly every day in the newspapers. Perhaps the most obvious example can be seen in the Old South, where progress is resisted with fire hoses and police dogs. There, at least, we can hope that the moral arc of the universe is rather shorter than is its wont.

Looking Backwards

Details are still sketchy, but it appears that a coup was prevented last month in Bulgaria. Emboldened by the fall of Nikita Khrushchev and possibly influenced by the rhetoric of Mao Tse Tung, hardliners in the Bulgarian military and Communist Party denounced General-Secretary Todor Zhivkov for revisionism and opportunism due to his de-Stalinization of Bulgarian communism. Arrests between April 8th and 12th, as well as at least one suicide by a high-ranking general, seem to have prevented a major step back into the bad old days of Stalinism in Bulgaria. State-controlled media, of course, are denying the whole thing, but rumors abound.

Inside Baseball

On April 9th, the Houston Astros inaugurated their new stadium in an exhibition game against the Yankees. “Who?” you ask. For the last three seasons, they’ve been known as the Colt .45s. Now the sole owner, Judge Roy Hofheinz changed the name to the Astros to reflect Houston’s important role in America’s space program, and the new stadium will be called the Astrodome. What’s so noteworthy about all this? As you might have gathered from the name, the Astrodome has a roof. Over 700 feet in diameter, the dome consists a grid of semi-transparent panes of Lucite, and the field is covered with grass specially bred to be able to grow under the lower light conditions.


The Eighth Wonder of the World may be Texan hyperbole, but it is impressive

As any science fiction fan will tell you, innovations often produce unexpected consequences. That’s what half the stories in the field are about. As Victoria Silverwolf reported a couple of weeks ago, the problem in this case is that on bright, sunny days – and Houston has a lot of those – the glare from the roof panels and the grid of shadows caused by the support structure are causing players to lose routine fly balls. The decision has been made to paint the Lucite panes white, and a couple of sections have already been covered. The question now is if the grass will still get enough light to grow.

There was another experiment at the Astrodome that seems unlikely to be repeated. A catwalk structure hangs from the top of the dome. I don’t know how far above the field it is, but the peak of the dome is 208 feet above the playing surface. On April 28th, Mets radio broadcaster Lindsey Nelson was persuaded to call the game from the gondola. He was too scared to stand up until the seventh inning, getting the play-by-play via walkie-talkie from his producer. When he finally did get to his feet, he realized he couldn’t tell one player from another or a pop fly from a line drive. He refused to go up again, and it seems unlikely that anybody will follow in his footsteps. It might offer an interesting angle for a television camera, though.

Space Opera and Superscience

Lately, it has felt like science fiction has been doing a fair bit of looking back, too, what with the Edgar Rice Burroughs revival, Sprague de Camp putting Conan back in print, John Jakes’ Conan pastiche Brak, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. The three magazines under Fred Pohl’s leadership, in particular, seem to have been on a real space opera kick for a while. This month’s IF is no exception.


This supposedly illustrates Skylark DuQuesne. If so, it’s not a scene in this month’s installment. Art by Pederson

Skylark DuQuesne (Part 1 of 5), by E. E. Smith, Ph. D.

Dick Seaton, hero of the previous three Skylark books, is enjoying an evening at home with his family, when they are interrupted by the thought-projected simulacra of the ablest thinkers of the galaxy. It seems that the clever ploy which he used to imprison the evil thought entities and the disembodied mind of the villainous Dr. Marc C. “Blackie” DuQuesne at the end of Skylark of Valeron is doomed to imminent failure. Seaton’s partner Mart Crane is brought in, and a plan is hatched in which a thought message is sent out, which can only be received by beings who are of good will can help in the situation.

The scene shifts to the home world of the “monstrous” Llurdi on the edge of the universe. The leaders are discussing Project University, in which the best minds of their human slaves the Jelmi are given everything they could need or want in the hopes that they will produce new technologies for the Llurdi. The proceedings are interrupted by a suicide attack by 30 Jelmi attempting to give their fellows the opportunity to escape. They fail. No one is even killed on either side. Supremely logical, the Llurdi pack the revolting Jelmi into a spaceship and allow them to “escape”.


The Jelmi (background) confront their oppressors, the Llurdi. Art by Gray Morrow

Aboard the ship, the Jelmi deduce that they are being tracked, and that the Llurdi will give them free rein for a couple of generations, then swoop in, re-enslave their descendants and gather up anything new that’s been invented. They decide to seek out a world with sufficient sixth-order (I believe that means thought energy) forces to screen them from Llurdi scanning. The planet they choose: Earth.

Next, the scene jumps to a previously unknown Fenachrone fleet. The Fenachrone were the bad guys of Skylark Three, and Dick Seaton vaporized their home world at the end of that book. In Skylark of Valeron, Seaton learns of a secret colony ship, which he then hunts down and destroys. Now we find out that there’s yet another secret fleet composed of the evilest evil-doers of an evil people. In any case, the Fenachrone stumble upon a system containing two inhabited planets, one Llurdi and one Jelmi, whereupon the Fenachrone leader orders the vaporization of those two worlds. This draws the attention of the Llurdi, who proceed to destroy 16 of the 17 Fenachrone ships and capture the flagship.

Cut lastly to the ship containing the disembodied minds mentioned earlier. They have decided that Blackie DuQuesne doesn’t have what it takes to be one of them. They set him up with a ship capable of getting him to Earth and stick him back into his body. After a brief interlude in which the Seatons and the Cranes (both with infant children) as well as Crane’s former manservant Shiro and his new wife Lotus Blossom board the Skylark of Valeron, we cut back to DuQuesne. He is somehow detected by the Llurdi, but manages to evade them with his powerful mind blocks. Realizing how formidable the Llurdi are, DuQuesne sends out a call to Dick Seaton. To be continued.

Disclaimer: I do not care for the works of Doc Smith. I tried rereading the original Skylark five or six years ago, and flung it across the room in disgust about a quarter of the way through. On the other hand, I did rather enjoy The Imperial Stars last year, so I tried to approach this with an open mind.

When an English teacher, a critic, or even an author who has written what is very obviously science fiction condemns the genre with a wave of the hand, this is the kind of stuff they’re talking about. At best, it’s the genre’s juvenilia and is utterly unrepresentative of what science fiction is today. Line by line, there is some decent writing here. The opening paragraph is lovely. Too bad nothing that follows is worthy of it.

But my biggest problem is with the main protagonist. Firstly, Dick Seaton is racist. He would no doubt be shocked by this statement and point out that some of his best friends are green. I don’t mean he’d be likely to burn a cross on anyone’s lawn or join the Friends of Bull Connor, but the casual ease with which he tosses out phrases like “a Chinaman’s chance” or “If that’s true, then I’m a Digger Indian” (and what do you want to bet that phrase was cleaned up for publication) say a lot about how he views fellow humans who aren’t quite like him. Secondly and more importantly, Dick Seaton is a war criminal. He turned the Fenachrone world into a ball of expanding incandescent gas, and when he found out there were survivors, he hunted them down and killed them, too. When the Fenachrone leader destroyed those two worlds, we’re told he did it without remorse. If Seaton felt a twinge of remorse, that doesn’t make what he did any better.

Anyway, it’s hard to judge this as a whole, since the whole thing is really Smith just setting up the pieces, but it’s pretty bad. A low two stars, just because of that opening paragraph and the fact that I was able to get through the whole thing without too much effort. Even if you’re overcome with nostalgia, I doubt it could get all the way to three.

Simon Says, by Lawrence S. Todd

Lieutenant Nestil Lagotilom, an eight-foot tall reptilian (it’s not clear if he’s a mutant or an alien), is a member of the Terran armed forces, serving in a war against the Birds. Thanks to his brilliant tactical mind, he’s been ordered to take part in an experimental operation involving a new device called SIMO (Subelectronic Integrator for the Manipulation of Objects). Contrary to what it sounds like, it’s not a robot arm, but rather a device that will allow Nestil’s mind to be imprinted on some 2,000 Terran soldiers, and, once the action is over, all their experiences will be pumped back into his head so he can write a detailed after-action report. Thanks to a series of mishaps, Nestil’s consciousness winds up imprinted not only on the Terran troops, but the Birds and the local natives who aren’t happy about either group being there. Chaos ensues.


Lt. Nestil about to have his consciousness expanded. Art by Giunta

We go from the man who’s been at the science fiction game the longest to the newest. Larry Todd is this month’s IF first, though he’s not a complete newcomer. He’s had a few cartoons published, mostly in the late Imagination, but this is his first story. It shows. It rambles a bit, and the tone is a little too light for some of the things that happen. Even so, it was decent up to the final paragraph, where the author wrecked the whole thing by explicitly comparing events to the game Simon Says, and Nestil saying that he used to rig the game as a child (how does that work when you aren’t Simon?). He’s telling, not showing. Fix that and drop the “N” from the title and it’s a good story. As it is, a high two stars.

High G, by Christopher Anvil

James Heyden, head of the Advanced Research Projects Division at the Continental Multitechnikon Corporation, has just received a memo from his boss telling him to cut back on projects that might interest the government and focus on science kits for kids. Congress isn’t willing to pay for anything revolutionary at the moment. This is part of a fairly regular pendulum swing on his boss’s part between gung-ho government research and piddling commercial stuff. Makes it hard to keep good research engineers working for the company. Just then, one of his engineers comes in with a working anti-gravity device. Throwing caution to the winds, Heyden decides that the only way to convince his boss and a stingy Congress that this thing needs to be built is for him and his engineers to fly to the Moon. Through massive misappropriation of company funds and tons of overtime, the race is on to get to the Moon before the boss gets back from a company trip.


Engineers call something cobbled together like this spaceship a “kluge.” Art by Gaughan

Christopher Anvil tends to be a very uneven writer, sometimes up, sometimes down. This one is right in the middle of his range. Sadly, he tends to be down a little more often than he’s up. For the second month in a row, I find myself wondering why a story is here rather than in Analog. Anvil often writes for Campbell, and this one is right up the editor’s alley: stupid bureaucrats stupidly getting in the way of progress. It might have fared better there, but here it’s too long and filled with pointless minutiae. Do we really need to follow lengthy discussions about the pricing of those kiddie science kits? A high two stars.

The Followers, by Basil Wells

Balt Donner is part of the three-man crew of the exploration ship Avalon. Small, plain and timid in real life, his job calls for him to take mental control of a seven-foot tall robot covered in bronzed pseudoflesh. The ship is currently on the planet Hald, which is inhabited by a people who, though noseless and with elongated ears, are otherwise quite human. Each Halden has a twin, an oddly doglike, eight-limbed creature known as a Follower. The crew of the Avalon is trying to figure out the odd lifecycle of the planet which allows such disparate beings to be born from the same mother.

Their time in space is getting to the crew. Senior crewman Ernest Lytte fights off space madness with ever increasing doses of drugs, while Jeff Carney gets by with alcohol and forbidden carousing on planets with humanoid races. Up to now, Balt has managed to stay sane, but he has begun to fall for a native woman named Alno. She is an outcast, because her Follower died, and has fallen for Balt (in the form of the robot Cass), who appears to her to be an outcast as well. As the other crewmen squabble over procedure, Balt learns that Alno is going to be given a new Follower. Eventually, the biology of Hald is explained, and the ship lifts for the next stop on their long journey back to Earth.

This one is pretty good, though rather dark. Basil Wells has been cranking out stories in a variety of genres for a quarter century, and his prose style reflects that. It’s a little pedestrian, without being pulpy, but the story he tells here is neither. It’s much more in a modern mode, and an author more attuned to that mode – a Brunner or a Zelazny, say – could have turned this into a four, maybe a five star story. As it is, it’s a solid three stars and the best in the issue.

No Friend of Gree, by C. C. MacApp

Steve Duke is trying to figure out why a Gree ship-of-the-line and a small exploration ship are in a backwater binary system. There is a single planet, Terrestrial in nature, but too close to the blue-white companion of the red giant. It is also tidally locked to the star it orbits, always showing one face to its star. There are no signs of technology, so when the Gree ships fire a salvo of missiles to sterilize the planet, Steve wants to know what’s going on. He diverts the missiles and produces enough fake evidence to convince the Gree ships that their mission is accomplished.

Once the Gree slaves leave, Steve lands with two B’lant crewmen to investigate. Searching the Gree camp, they find the hastily dug grave of a Gree slave and are interrupted by the arrival of a vaguely humanoid creature covered in mud and debris. The three of them go wandering across the world, struggling through dense grass that grows higher than their heads and encountering a variety of enormous insectoids. First, one B’lant goes missing and then the other. Eventually, the answers to the puzzles he’s found are revealed to Steve (through no doing of his own). Will he follow the Gree’s lead and sterilize the planet, or has he found a potential weapon for the war against the Gree?


Steve and one of the B’lant see something strange and disgusting. Art by Nodel

When I saw there was a Gree story in this issue, I made a bet with myself that Steve would go behind enemy lines and infiltrate a Gree base by pretending to be walking wounded. Rarely have I been so glad to lose a bet. This is a darn sight better than the previous two stories in this series, though not as good as the first. However, it could probably have been cut by a third. A lot of the difficult slog through the dense vegetation is, well, a difficult slog for the reader. Also, Steve continues to be little more than a cardboard cut-out of a character. A high two stars.

Summing Up

Returning to the beginning, science fiction is, ostensibly, the literature of tomorrow. (Of course, it’s really about today or, at most, later this afternoon, but I digress.) But as I noted above, we’re seeing a lot of revivals, rehashes and regressive pastiches. Fred Pohl, in particular, seems to be on something of a space opera kick of late. Don’t get me wrong. It’s certainly possible to tell a good, modern sort of story within the framework of space opera. Fred Saberhagen certainly pulls it off with his Berserker stories; John Brunner does it quite often (though not always); Roger Zelazny has turned out some beautiful work in the old planetary romance settings.

Most of the time, though, that’s not what Pohl is serving us. We’re getting stuff that could easily have appeared back before the War. Sometimes it seems like a problem story in the good, old Campbellian style is the most modern thing we can hope for. And now we’re going to be saddled with the great-granddaddy of them all for months (and don’t be fooled by that “Part 1 of 3” in the table of contents; a contact at Galaxy Publishing says to expect more like 5). Judging from the comments in the letter col, lots of readers have been eagerly awaiting this Doc Smith novel ever since Fred announced it a year or so ago. Maybe it’s a fit of nostalgia. After all, they say the Golden Age of science fiction is 12. But it’s a sad day when a professional baseball team is more forward-thinking that one of the leading science fiction magazines.


Van Vogt and Schmitz seems like an… odd pairing

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Magazine

[April 30, 1965] Back-door uprising(May 1965 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Pirates of the Caribbean

The Dominican Republic, half of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, has never been a beacon of democracy.  The Trujillo dictatorship lasted three long decades, ending only in 1961 after his assassination.  The nation's first democratic elections, in 1963, brought Juan Emilio Bosch Gaviño to the Presidency.  In the same year, a military junta removed him from power, elevating Donald Reid Cabral to the position.

Reid was never popular, and on April 24, military constitutionalists and Dominican Revolutionary Party supporters launched a coup, José Rafael Molina Ureña taking the top post.  He lasted all of two days.  A counter coup restored the Reid government to power, although Reid, himself, had fled the country.

Meanwhile, the American military worked to evacuate some 3,500 U.S. citizens living in the country.  Just this morning, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division landed at San Isidro Air Base, on the outskirts of Santo Domingo.  Their mission is to enforce a ceasefire and guide the country back to democracy.

Thus, our nation is now involved in stabilizing missions on both sides of the globe.  Will this action mark a long term involvement?  Or, in the absence of a Communist menace (Haiti is not North Vietnam!) and with the aid of other O.A.S. nations, will this be a quick exercise to hasten Caribbean democracy?

Only time will tell.

Insurgency in the Old Country

At the very least, we can be certain that the Dominican involvement has no chance of developing into a nuclear confrontation (unlike Vietnam, where Sec. Def. MacNamara did not rule out that possibility).  So it's a conventional affair for now.

Appropriately, we now turn to the most conventional of science fiction magazines, the oft-hidebound Analog.  Like the Dominican Republic, it has been under a single strongman for several decades.  And yet, like that island nation, we occasionally see signs of progress.  Indeed, this latest issue has some refreshing entries, indeed.


by John Schoenherr

Trouble Tide, by James H. Schmitz

On the world of Nandy-Cline, herds of sea cows are abruptly and mysteriously disappearing from the costs of the Girard colonies.  Danrich Parrol, head of the Nandy-Cline branch of Girard Pharmaceuticals, teams up with Dr. Nile Etland, head of Girard's station laboratory, to find the cause of the vanishing food animals.  They suspect foul play from a rival company, Agenes.  The poisoning of a herd of mammalian but native fraya seems somehow connected, too.  The two embark on a forensic adventure that takes them across a thousand miles of coast and under miles of ocean.


by John Schoenherr

There are many features that make Tide stand out.  What a delightful story this is, with an interesting pair of protagonists and a cute scientific solution.  I appreciated the depiction of a planet as a big place, big enough to support many economies, colonies, and criminal activities.  I also particularly liked the appearance of female characters.  Indeed, Dr. Nile Etland is an equal partner in the investigation and is not a romantic foil — simply a competent scientist.

Why is this remarkable?  I had become so inured to the lack of female characters in my science fiction that I'd almost started to challenge my convictions.  Was it really fair of me to judge fiction (at least in part) by whether or not it included female characters?  Isn't modern SF just a reflection of the male-dominant society we live in?  Can we blame authors for writing "what they know?"

Yes, yes, and yes.  The erasure of women in any kind of fiction, particularly one that projects present trends into the future, is inexcusable.  Any portrayal of a world where women play minor roles or none at all isn't just unrealistic, it propagates a kind of ugly wish fulfillment.  That's why, when I get a story like Tide with realistic and positive representation of women (and, indeed, Schmitz has always been good in this regard) it's such a breath of fresh air.  Ditto the British import show, Danger Man, which regularly features competent professional women who are integral to the episodes.

It's what I want to see.  It's what I should be seeing.  That I'm seeing it in Analog of all places gives me hope.

Four stars.

Planetfall, by John Brunner


by Alan Moyler

A young Earth woman eagerly greets a young astronaut man, an ecologist on the crew of a starfaring colony with 2,500 residents that is making a brief stop.  She's set on falling in love with and departing with this exotic fellow, who represents freedom, the exotic, and most of all, purpose in life. 

He, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to jump ship, to escape the stultifying space-kibbutz life, to experience the beauty of humanity's Home.

Each of them poison each other's greener grass, and the encounter is an unhappy one.

If there's such a thing as a "meet cute," then this is a "meet ugly," but it's quite poignant.  Brunner does good work.  Four stars.

Magnetohydrodynamics, by Ben Bova

I really wanted to like this nonfiction article.  After all, it's about a genuinely scientific topic, a revolutionary one.  MHD allows the generation of power without moving physical parts, instead using magnetic fields and plasma.  It's the kind of technology required if we ever want to build fusion power plants.  Plus, Asimov likes the guy.

But boy is this piece dull.  It's not quite as dry as reading a patent, but it's in the same ballpark.  I've heard similar reviews of Bova's work in other magazines, so I can't be the only one who feels this way.

Anyway, two stars.

The Captive Djinn, by Christopher Anvil


by John Schoenherr

Captured human on a planet of cats at a 19th Century technology level outwits his jailers through the use of basic chemistry and the exploitation of the felines' stupidity.

If there were an award for "Story that best exemplifies Chris Anvil's work for John Campbell," this would win.  Two stars.

Beautiful art by Schoenherr, though.  He's definitely going to get a Galactic Star again this year!

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

And now we come to the greatest coup of all, the finale of the longest serial I've ever read in a magazine.

Technically, Dune is two serials, and there have been other five-part novels.  But Prophet of Dune is not a sequel to Dune World but the latter "novel's" conclusion.

It's been a long trek. It started with Duke Leto Atreides acquiring the fiefdom that included Arrakis, a desert planet and the only source of the spice melange. This cinnamon-smelling spice is an anti-agathic and also conveys a limited form of precognition.

For the Empire's rich, it livens food and lengthens lives.

For the Navigators' Guild, the spice allows its specialists to navigate the hazardous byways of hyperspace.

For the Bene Gesserit, a religious order of women, it facilitates their plans to manipulate history through the deliberate mixing of blood-lines; their hope is to eventually produce the "Kwisatz Haderach," a sort of messiah, a man with the powers of the Bene Gesserit.

Duke Leto was not long for his reign.  The Harkonnen family from whom Arrakis was transferred immediately schemed to regain it, attacking the planet, killing Leto, and forcing Leto's concubine, the Bene Gesserit Jessica, and their son, Paul, to go into hiding among the native "Fremen."  So ended the first serial.


by John Schoenherr

Baron Harkonnen installed a ruthless nephew on Arrakis with the goal of fomenting a rebellion. His plan would then be to take personal control, relax the tyranny, and turn the Fremen into the greatest army the Empire had ever seen, even more fearsome than the Saudukar, the Imperial guard.

Out in the desert, Paul spends a harsh two years learning the ways of the desert. Moisture is priceless, and all sand-dwellers wear water-recycling "still-suits."  The voracious sandworms are both a constant threat and a valuable commodity, for it is their waste that is refined into spice. 

While among the Fremen, Jessica becomes a Reverend Mother, transforming poisonous sandworm effluence into a substance that allows her to commune with all of her brethren, living and dead.  Because she does so while pregnant, her unborn daughter, Alia, gains the wisdom of a thousand women and is born an adult in a child's body.

Paul is initiated into Fremen culture, eventually assuming the mantle of Muad'Dib, savior of the desert people.  Under his leadership, the Fremen are united.  They will revolt, as Harkonnen expected, but the event will not unfold as the Baron desires.

In this final installment of Dune, Paul launches his attack even while the Padishah Emperor, himself, has visited the planet with five legions of Saudukar, and all of the great families have surrounded Arrakis with warships.  But the hopeless position of Muad'Dib turns out to be unbeatable: for Paul controls the production of spice.  Without it, the nobility is crippled, space is unnavigable.  Thus young Atreides emerges utterly triumphant with virtual control of the Empire, a bethrothal to the Emperor's daughter, and freedom for the people of Arrakis.

I have to give credit to Frank Herbert for creating a universe of ambitious scope.  There's a lot to Dune, and the author clearly has a penchant for world-building.  He takes from a wide variety of sources, particularly Arabic and Persian, creating a setting quite different from what we usually see in science fiction.  The result is not unlike the landscapes generated by Cordwainer Smith, whose upbringing included time in China, or Mack Reynolds, whose writing is informed by extensive travel behind the Iron Curtain and in the Mahgreb.

But.

There's plenty not to like, too.  Herbert is an author of no great technical skill, and his writing ranges from passable to laughably bad.  There wasn't so much of his third-person omniscient and everywhere-at-once in this installment, but it wasn't completely absent, either.  The writing is humorless, grandiose (even pompous), and generally not a pleasure to read. 

Beyond that, the work is highly reactionary.  I was originally pleased to see several female characters in the story.  Lady Jessica often is the viewpoint, though given Herbert's love of switching perspective every third line, that's not quite so noteworthy.  But in the end, even the most prominent women are limited to their medieval roles, that of wife and bearer of greatness.  Dune is a man's world. 

Then there are the fedayken, the people of the desert clearly modeled on the Arabs.  And who should lead them to freedom?  Not a local son, no; only T. E. Lawrence Jesus Atreides can save them. 

It's an unsettling subtext in our post-colonial times: a galactic empire, decadent and crumbling, requires an infusion of European boldness to restore it to vigor.  Is it any surprise that this novel came out in Analog?

So, on the one hand, I give this installment four stars.  It kept me interested, and I appreciated the intricacy of the conclusion.  Looking over my tally for the other seven parts of this sprawling opus, that ends us at exactly three stars. 

I think that's fair.  Some will praise the book for its vision and be undaunted by the quality of the prose or the offensiveness of its underpinnings.  Those folks will probably nominate it for another Hugo next year.  Others will give up in boredom around page 35.  I read the whole thing because I had to.  I didn't hate it; I even respect it to a degree.  But I see its many many flaws.

Let the adulatory/damning letters begin!

Running the Numbers

Once again, Analog finishes at the top of the heap; at 3.3 stars, it ties with Science-Fantasy.  It's been a good month for fiction overall, with New Worlds and Amazing scoring 3.2. 

Fantastic gets a solid 3 stars, and IF just misses the mark at 2.8. 
Fantasy and Science Fiction disappoints with 2.7, though its Zenna Henderson story may be the best of the month.

While women may be making a comeback as fictional characters, as writers, they're still conspicuously absent.  Only 2 of the 38 fiction pieces were written by women.

Perhaps it's time for a coup.  Summon the 101st Airborne!

Our last three Journey shows were a gas!  You can watch the kinescope reruns here).  You don't want to miss the next episode, May 9 at 1PM PDT, a special Arts and Entertainment edition featuring Arel Lucas, Cora Buhlert, Erica Frank…and Dr. Who producer, Verity Lambert! Register today and we'll make sure you don't forget.




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Magazine

[February 12, 1965] Mirabile Dictu, Sotto Voce (March 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

It’s an age of minor miracles.  Nothing to shout about, but last month’s pretty good issue of Amazing is followed by another one that’s not bad either. 

The Issue at Hand


by Gray Morrow

Greenslaves, by Frank Herbert

This March issue opens with Frank Herbert’s novelet Greenslaves, a rather startling, if not entirely amazing, performance.  In the future, Brazil and other countries are making war against insect life, since it’s a disgusting reservoir of disease and a source of damage to crops.  (The U.S. is an exception, owing to the influence of the radical Carsonists; the reference is presumably to Rachel, not Kit or Johnny.) But the campaign seems to be backfiring, with insects mutating, and epidemics.  The events of the plot are cheerfully bizarre, but the message is similar to that of the more ponderous Dune epic: attend to ecology.  Things work together and if you mess with the balance, you may harm yourselves.


by Gray Morrow

Unlike the more dense and turgid Dune serials, though, this story is crisply told and moves along quickly and vividly to its point.  It also recalls Wells’s story The Empire of the Ants—not a follow-up or a rejoinder, but a very different angle on the premise of that classic story.  Four stars for this striking departure both from Herbert’s and from Amazing’s ordinary course.

The Plateau, by Christopher Anvil

The ground gained by Herbert is quickly given up by Christopher Anvil’s The Plateau, which if it were an LP would have to be called Chris Anvil’s Greatest Dull Thuds.  Actually, my first thought was that it should be retitled The Abyss, but then I realized it is over 50 pages long.  Maybe—following our host’s example in discussing Analog—it should instead be called The Endless Desert.  It’s yet another story about stupid and comically rigid aliens bested by clever humans, which no doubt came back from Analog with a rejection slip reading “You’ve sold me this story six times already and it gets worse every time!”


by Robert Adragna

The premise: “Earth was conquered. . . .  At no place on the globe was there a well-equipped body of human combat troops larger than a platoon.” Except these platoons seem to have an ample supply of mini-hydrogen bombs and reliable communications among numerous redoubts at least around the US, as they bamboozle the aliens in multiple ways, including a cover of one of Eric Frank Russell’s greatest hits: making the aliens believe the humans have powerful unseen allies on their side.  The whole is rambling, hackneyed, and sloppy (late in the story there are several references to the aliens as “Bugs,” though they are apparently humanoid, and then that usage disappears for the rest of the story).  Towards the end, a sort-of-interesting idea about the nature of the aliens’ stupidity emerges, leading to a moderately clever end, though it’s hardly worth the slog to get there: it’s the same sort of schematic thinking that Anvil typically accomplishes in Analog at a fifth the length or less.  So, barely, two stars.

Be Yourself, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer’s Be Yourself is a little hackneyed, too, but at six pages is much more neatly turned and much less exasperating and wearying than the Anvil story.  Alien invaders have figured out how to duplicate us precisely; how do we know which Joe Blow is the real one?  No one who has read SF for more than a week will be surprised by the twists, but one can admire their execution.  Three stars.

Calling Dr. Clockwork, by Ron Goulart

Ron Goulart’s Calling Dr. Clockwork is business as usual for him, an outrageous lampoon, this time of hospitals and the medical profession.  The protagonist goes to visit someone in the hospital, faints when he sees a patient in bad condition, and wakes up in a hospital bed, attended by various caricatures including the eponymous and dysfunctional robot doctor, and it looks like he’s never going to get out.  Three stars for an amusing farce, no longer than it needs to be.

Wheeler Dealer, by Arthur Porges

The difference between an amusing farce and a tedious one is limned to perfection by Arthur Porges’s Wheeler Dealer, in which his series character Ensign De Ruyter and company are stranded on a nearly airless planet inhabited by quasi-Buddhist humanoids with giant lungs who can’t spare time to help the Earthfolk mine the beryllium they need to repair their ship before they run out of air.  Why no help?  Because the locals are too busy spinning their prayer wheels.  So De Ruyter shows them how to make the wheels spin on their own and thereby gets the mining labor they need.  Porges, unlike Goulart, is, tragically, not funny.  The story (like the previous De Ruyter item, Urned Reprieve in last October’s issue) is essentially a jumped-up version of a squib on Fascinating Scientific Facts that you might find as filler at the bottom of a column in another sort of magazine.  It does not help that the plot amounts to the simple-minded offspring of Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God.  Two stars.

The Man Who Discovered Atlantis, by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg provides another smoothly readable and informative entry in his Scientific Hoaxes series, The Man Who Discovered Atlantis, about Paul Schliemann, grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of the buried city (cities) of Troy.  The younger Schliemann wasn’t able to accomplish much on his own, so he exploited the fame of his grandfather to perpetrate a hoax about the discovery of Atlantis, or at least of its location and confirmation of its existence.  Silverberg succinctly recounts the origin and history of the Atlantis myth as well as the charlatanry over it that preceded Paul Schliemann’s, and suggests that had Plato known what would come of his references to Atlantis, he probably wouldn’t have brought it up.  Four stars.

Summing Up

So . . . two pretty decent issues of this magazine in a row!  One very good story, two acceptable ones, and quite a good article, and the other contents are merely inadequate and not affirmatively noxious.  Do we have a trend?  One hopes so, but . . . promised for next month is another of Edmond Hamilton’s nostalgia operas about the Star Kings.  We shall see.

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




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Magazine, Serial

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

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


by Gideon Marcus

Wandering

Setting: The Sinai, after the Exodus

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

Moses: Nu?

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

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

Narrator: FORTY YEARS!

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

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

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

The Issue at Hand


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

Three stars.

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

And now we sink waist deep.

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

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

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

If you have, you'll be bored.


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

Two stars.

A Nice Day for Screaming, by James H. Schmitz


by Kelly Freas

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

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

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

Three stars.

A Matter of Timing, by Hank Dempsey


by Robert Swanson

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

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

Droll setup and no resolution. Two stars.

Final Report, by Richard Grey Sipes

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

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

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

The New Boccaccio, by Christopher Anvil

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

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

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

Finnegan's Knack, by John T. Phillifent


by Kelly Freas

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

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

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

Two stars. Oasis lost.

Does not Compute


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

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

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

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

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

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




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 19, 1964] December Galactoscope #2

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[The second Galactoscope for this month features a pair of new novels we felt we could not in good conscience leave unreviewed, particularly the latter. Enjoy this last review of books before the New Year!


by Victoria Silverwolf

The Day the Machines Stopped, by Christopher Anvil


Cover art by Ralph Brillhart

The Anvil Chorus

Christopher Anvil is the pseudonym of Harry C. Crosby, who published a couple of stories under his real name in the early 1950's. After remaining silent for a few years, he came back with a bang in the late 1950's, and has since given readers about fifty tales under his new name. His work most often appears in Astounding/Analog.

A typical Anvil yarn is a lightly comic tale about clever humans defeating technologically advanced but naive aliens. Perhaps his best-known story is Pandora's Planet (Astounding, September 1956), the first of a series of humorous accounts of the misadventures of lion-like aliens trying to deal with the chaos caused by those unpredictable humans.


Cover art by Frank Kelley Freas

The Day the Machines Stopped is his first novel. (At only 120 pages of text, I'm guessing it's well under 40,000 words, so it might be considered a long novella.) With its near-future setting, lack of space travel or aliens, and almost entirely serious tone, it's quite different from his usual creations.

The Eternal Triangle in the Science Lab

The first page of the book sets up a romantic conflict. Brian Philips, our protagonist, is a chemist for a research corporation. Carl Jackson is an electronics expert for the same company. They are both interested in Anne Cermak, who works with Brian. Carl is bigger, richer, and more used to getting his own way than his rival. Brian is a nicer guy, of course, and has the decency to admit that it's up to Anne to choose which of the two men, if either, she prefers.

Before we get too deep into this soap opera plot, we get our reminder that this is a science fiction novel. A news report on the radio reveals that a Russian scientist has defected to the West. He claims that an experiment in cryogenics at a Soviet facility in Afghanistan threatens civilization. It isn't very long before he proves to be right.

Who Turned Out the Lights?

Somehow or other, the experiment causes electricity to fail. Fully charged batteries provide no power. Automobiles stop dead in their tracks. (Diesel trucks still operate, but only when their electric starters are replaced by another kind of technology.) Working together despite their rivalry, Brian and Carl explore the surrounding area on bicycles. Things are the same all over, it seems.

The president of the research corporation, James Cardan, sees bad times coming. He manages to assemble firearms, provisions, and other supplies. His plan is to take his employees and their families, in a caravan of diesel trucks, to the northwest part of the United States, which he assumes will be safer than more populated areas.

Two Against Chaos

Without giving too much away, let's just say that circumstances cause Brian and Anne's father to miss the caravan. They set out on their own on bicycles, hoping to catch up to the others. (Due to frequent roadblocks caused by stalled cars, this isn't too unlikely. The diesel trucks are also slowed down by frequent stops for repairs.)

As expected, the breakdown in technology leads to bands of armed bandits, desperate for survival, battling over food. After many dangerous encounters, the pair of two-wheeled adventurers join Cardan's group.

Duking it Out

The caravan runs into a large, heavily armed, well-organized army, under the command of a man wearing a silver crown. He proclaims that the surrounding countryside, now known as the Districts United, is under his protection. He will punish those guilty of killing, arson, robbery, and bushwacking. (These specific crimes are listed under the acronym karb.) He calls himself the Districts United Karb Eliminator, or Duke. (This bit of satiric wordplay is one of the few traces of wit in the novel.)

Obviously, he's a megalomaniac, but he's a smart and effective one. Many survivors of the disaster are willing to place themselves under his dictatorship, given the alternative of fighting violent criminals. Brian, having few other choices, winds up working for the Duke, rebuilding steam engines, biding his time until he can escape with the rest of Cardan's group.

Worth Reading by Candlelight?

Anvil's style is plain and straightforward, so the book is very readable. His depiction of what would happen if electric power vanished is convincing, although the scientific explanation for why this happens is vague. The romantic subplot is less believable. The hero sometimes comes across as a ninny, given his willingness to trust someone who has already betrayed him. The ending comes as something of a deus ex machina. Overall, the novel is worth spending four dimes and two hours reading, but it's unlikely to become a classic.

Three stars.

By Rosemary Benton

The Other Human Race by H. Beam Piper

I could not be more happy with science fiction nowadays. On television we have shows like The Twilight Zone that are stretching the boundaries of story telling, and exploring new topics in a science fiction setting. In literature we have authors like H. Beam Piper who integrate a veritable cornucopia of academic fields into their stories about human exploration.

This is not the cut and dry kind of science fiction where it's us or them in a race for survival. Piper's books approach space exploration with a touching level of humanity and compassion. Alien and human language, diet, population demographics, social structures, and more are all examined and dissected by Piper's characters. His burgeoning "Little Fuzzy" series, following the success of his 1962 novel "Little Fuzzy", is a brilliant example of the ability Piper has to consider the humongous ramifications and complications of humanity contacting alien civilizations.

Fuzzies, Fuzzies Everywhere

"The Other Human Race" picks up mere weeks after the explosive conclusion "Little Fuzzy". Having been granted the universal recognition of "sapient", the fuzzies' home world of Zarathustra has been granted independence from the Chartered Zarathustrian Company. Word of the sensational trial has begun spreading like wildfire throughout human colonized space. But the fuzzies' new found notoriety has brought both altruistic and enterprising humans to Zarathustra.

On one side are the people who want to integrate the fuzzies into the wider galactic civilization while keeping their dignity and safety  in mind. This includes linguists, psychologists, nutritionists and other "Friends of the Fuzzies" who see value in the fuzzies as people, not animals. In contrast are those who would exploit the naive little people, as well as those who want to fill the power vacuum left by the CZC. Worst of all is the pressing concern about the kidnapping and enslaving of fuzzies to sell as pets in an illegal off-planet black market.

Things Just Got More Complicated

Piper balances that marvelous rush of scientific discovery in "Little Fuzzy" with a a weighty maturity in "The Other Human Race". While our protagonists take immense satisfaction with their continued study of the fuzzies, they bear a weighty responsibility. It inevitably comes down to them to make sure that the fuzzies’ quality of life is not sacrificed in humanity's drive to conserve the species.

Now that fuzzies have been made known to the universe, they face predators more devious and cunning than the native species of the planet. How can the Commission of Native Affairs go forward with plans to have humans adopt fuzzies and still protect them once a fuzzy is situated with a new human family?

The issue of the fuzzies' high infant mortality rate is also complicating things. To study why this is happening the group stationed on Zarathustra have to keep a miscarried fuzzy for study, despite the distress this causes the local fuzzy population. Their limited diet and off-balanced internal biology are also a tricky problem to study since the team can't just cut into a fuzzy and study its internal organs. Nor can they subject a fuzzy to a battery of tests to see how it reacts under certain stressors.

That same maturation is present in the character arcs of the cast. Those who were opposed to the recognition of the fuzzies as sapient in the first book are not permanently cast as evil. Instead, they change their attitudes towards the fuzzies with exposure to the little aliens. For instance, Victor Grego very early on in "The Other Human Race" comes across a fuzzy who has been scrounging around in his company's headquarters. After spending time with a member of the species that cost him access to the valuable resources on Zarathustra, Victor comes to realize that fuzzies are actually wonderful companions.

Our protagonists, including Jack Holloway and Ruth van Riebeek, must go through their own paradigm shift regarding those who were once their enemies. The grace with which some of these characters accept their former enemies as allies is laudable. Those employees of the now-charterless Zarathustra Company were acting in the interest of protecting their investments and livelihoods. But if they are willing to adapt and redeem themselves then, CZC or not, they should be congratulated and welcomed for their change of heart.

A Fragile New Sentience

H. Beam Piper's writing is altogether very touching. It's optimistic, but realistic in its acceptance that once something has been put in motion it will become infinitely more complicated. At the same time he seems to adhere to an inevitable sense of justice in his written worlds. Like a progressive modern scientist, Piper strongly advocates for the naturally given right people have to happiness and safety. All of his characters are entitled to it, and those who abuse or try to take away that right from others always get their just deserts.

Piper's writing continues to impress, and seems to be gaining more and more depth with each new novel. His "Little Fuzzy" series in particular has a lot of promise, and I hope to see more installations in the near future.

Five stars for Piper's well written sequel and masterfully built world.

[We are sad to have learned of H. Beam Piper's tragic passing just a few weeks ago. The genre has lost one of its brightest lights.]

[Holiday season is upon us, and Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963) contains some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age. And it makes a great present! A gift to friends, yourself…and to the Journey!]

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