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[December 16, 1967] Long Distance Travel (December 1967 Galactoscope)

December 16, 2022 Kris Vyas-Myall 6 Comments

by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Whilst reading the Times a couple of months I was surprised to see a mention of my favourite SF periodical turn up.

Is New Worlds doomed? 3rd Paragraph: "He part-finances the magazine himself by taking three days off on occasions to write hack adventure novels with titles like The Jade Man, The Jewel in the Skull and Twilight Man. He has written 21. 'They're Tokienesque things I sneak out and hope nobody here notices. They're an embarassment to me.'" — Source: The Times 28th September 1967

As regular readers of the publication will know they have managed to get a new publisher (Stonehart) and are continuing on with only a single month’s break to reorganize. What interested me most was the third paragraph, that there were some more adventure stories he was writing specifically for the US market. I have not come across The Jade Man yet but The Twilight Man actually is the book form of his The Shores of Death already released.

And I was able to discover that The Jewel in the Skull was coming out in America in December.

Now Moorcock’s adventure stories are a mixed bag. For every Elric there is a Michael Kane. But with such an anti-endorsement from the writer himself, how could I not want to read it?

The Jewel in the Skull by Michael Moorcock

In one of my favourite kind of settings, post-apocalyptic fantasy, the world has returned to a state of medieval kingdoms fighting each other, with modern technology treated as ancient sorceries people struggle to understand.

This book is primarily set in the Europe of this future, where the dark empire of the Granbretans is attempting to conquer the continent in the name of its King-Emperor. The powerful kingdom of Kamarg remains independent with Count Brass and his fortress of Castle Brass. Baron Meliadus of Kroiden attempts to gain their support for the empire but is thrown out when he attempts to rape the Count’s daughter Yisselda. Swearing an oath by the Runestaff to control the count and seize his daughter for himself he concocts a plan to do so.

In the dungeons of Londra is the rebellious Duke of Köln, Dorian Hawkmoon. He gives Hawkmoon an offer he can’t refuse, granting him his lands back and his freedom if he goes to Castle Brass, kidnaps Yisselda and brings her back to London. As additional motivation, a black jewel is implanted in his skull. This will allow the Granbretans to monitor him at all times and they can also use it to destroy his mind whenever they choose. And so Hawkmoon rides to Castle Brass on this fraught mission.

When I first opened this book I was worried this was going to be another Barbarians of Mars, with some incredibly overwritten descriptions and cod-Shakesperean dialogue. Thankfully, the style soon settles down and we get something much thicker than the Sub-Tolkien fantasy at first suggested. In fact there are some wonderful choices of imagery, a kind of combination of the gothic and the psychedelic.

As you can probably see from the description, this is not a setup where there are any easy heroes. It is also fascinating to see a tale where the British are explicitly setup as “The Dark Empire”, with people regularly suggesting the entire nation has gone insane and our representative of them a manipulative rapist. Instead, our lead character is a German, the inverse of what you will see whenever you go to the cinema.

This is only the first story in a series, so there is a lot left to be told, but, overall, this is an interesting and entertaining fantasy.

Four stars

by Victoria Silverwolf

Synchronicity

As fate would have it, I recently read two new science fiction novels featuring psychiatrists named Paul. In addition to that, both protagonists are involved with women who have a hard time pronouncing that name. Other than this odd coincidence, the books have little in common, except that they both involve people who have traveled a long distance.

A Far Sunset, by Edmund Cooper

Uncredited photographic cover art.

Split Personalities

The first mental health professional we'll meet is Paul Marlowe. He's a psychiatrist aboard the starship Gloria Mundi. (Given the familiar Latin phrase containing those words, that seems like asking for trouble.)

When the novel opens, he's in prison on an alien world. Two other members of the crew, captured at the same time, are dead. Before all this happened, the nine remaining folks aboard the ill-fated vessel disappeared while exploring the planet. For some reason, the locals have supplied him with a concubine, even in prison. That's the woman who can't pronounce Paul correctly. Her name, by the way, is Mylai Tui.

Meanwhile, Gloria Mundi destroys itself, as it's programmed to do when all the crew is gone for a certain amount of time. Sounds like a design flaw to me, but the idea is to keep it from falling into the hands of hostile aliens.

With no way to return to Earth, Paul Marlowe decides to fit into his new world. He does this by creating a second self, in a way. When acting like one of the locals, he calls himself Poul Mer Lo. This mental exercise allows him to control his emotions when witnessing things like child sacrifice.

(I couldn't help wondering if this was a sly allusion to Poul Anderson, whose first name is famously difficult to pronounce unless you're Scandinavian.)

Paul pretty much accepts Mylai Tui as his wife, although he was already married to one of the missing crew members. The marriage was one of convenience, mostly, although the two were fond of each other. Paul left his true love back on Earth, because he wanted to travel to the stars so badly. Be careful what you wish for!

A parallel to Paul's double identity is found in the local god-king, a young man who often takes on a second persona as a peasant, in order to speak freely with Paul in a way he can't as a divine ruler. Their relationship, in which the god-king is eager to learn Earth ways from Paul, may be the most intriguing part of the book. It also creates some suspense, as the god-king is only allowed to rule for a year, after which he is ritually killed.

The plot really begins when Paul and some local companions make a dangerous journey through enemy territory and deadly jungles to an ice-covered mountain. He makes an extraordinary discovery, learns what happened to the missing crew members, and even finds out why the inhabitants of the planet are very similar to Earthlings but have only four fingers on each hand.

The alien culture is interesting and vividly portrayed. Paul is not a very sympathetic protagonist. He beats Mylai Tui when she struggles to pronounce his name correctly, for one thing. The latter half of the book turns into a quest adventure, which is fine if you like that sort of thing. The revelation at the end of the trek to the mountain strains credibility. Overall, a mixed bag.

Three stars.

Quicksand, by John Brunner

Cover art by Emanuel Schongut.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Our next psychiatrist is Paul Fidler. He works at a mental hospital. You'll get to know him well, because much of the book consists of his interior monologues. They're set off from the rest of the text in the manner I'll demonstrate in the next paragraph.

–I hope the editor likes this article.

Paul has doubts about his career and his marriage. He also has a habit of imagining the way that things might have gone badly in the past. It's kind of the opposite of the wistful thinking we probably all do. You know, something like If only such-and-such had happened. Besides all this, he hides the fact that he had a nervous breakdown some time ago from everyone, even his wife.

After spending some time with this sad fellow, the plot gets going when a badly injured man staggers into a pub. He claims a naked woman attacked him. Could it be one of the inmates at the hospital?

Nope. Paul soon runs into the woman, a tiny little thing, sort of like the diminutive Sister Bertrille. Don't worry, she doesn't fly.

As I've indicated, she has trouble saying Paul correctly. She speaks an unknown language, but manages to indicate that her name is Arrzheen. That gets distorted into Urchin by the folks at the hospital, which fits her pretty well.

Much of the book deals with Paul's attempt to solve the mystery of Urchin. What was she doing naked in the woods on a cold, rainy night? How did such a small woman, who hardly seems out of her teens, severely injure a much bigger man? (We'll find out later it was self defense.) Why can't expert linguists identify her speech or her written language? Why does she seem baffled by ordinary objects?

A strange form of mental illness, or something else? (Hint: this is a science fiction novel.)

Urchin proves to be extraordinarily intelligent, and she picks up English quickly. Paul's marriage falls apart completely. Through the use of hypnosis, he learns more about Urchin. He tries to help her adjust to the outside world.

Let's just say that things go a little too far. After some misleading hints about Urchin, we find out the truth at the very end. Don't expect a happy ending.

As with the Cooper's novel, the protagonist is not always very likable. What he does at the end may disturb you. The book seems almost like introspective mainstream fiction, with a science fiction premise forced into it. It's more to be admired than loved, I think.

Three stars.

by Gideon Marcus

The fourth book for this Galactoscope turns out to be another kind of fourth book: Emil Petaja has written the fourth (and final?) book in his science fiction translation of the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala. It's an unusual novel in that it stars a villain, of sorts. Let's learn more about the…

Tramontane

Kullervo Kasi is a most unlovely man. Born of the chance interaction between a rent in the universe and a random act of sex, he is half human/half evil energy. Physically, he is a gnome-like character, though not without a strong back. Humans instinctively recoil from him. When we first meet him, he is on one of the thousands of colonies of humanity, the race exiled to the stars after their home world had been exhausted. Kullervo is bullied near to death, from which he escapes by a jump into a chasm to (he believes) his doom.

But Louhi the star witch has other plans. She takes Kullervo under her wing, unlocks the intelligence lying dormant in his genes as the reincarnation of the ancient Kalevalan anti-hero, Kullervo, and sends him to the wasted Earth. His mission: to destroy any remnants of humanity–the Vanhat race–that may yet survive on the ruined world.

This is for whom we should be rooting?

Well, yes. It's hard not to feel sorry for Kullervo. He was born with a handicap; his human tormentors have no such excuse. Once he arrives on Earth, and through cunning, endurance, and not a little (if grudging) selflessness, surmounts obstacle after obstacle, one can't help admiring the guy. In the end, if he is not exactly the hero of the story, he certainly is the catalyst for a great good.

Such an unusual protagonist is refreshing, indeed. Plus, Petaja really can spin a quill, offering a neo-pulp adventure with a mythical base. His depictions of the rusting supercities, the floating junk islands, and the recovering crags of Scandinavia have a rich, Burroughsian flavor. I particularly enjoyed Kullervo's adventures with Billyjo, a renegade coast-dweller. Their run-in with the pirates of the roving islands, and Kullervo's short-term subjugation to Queen Fiammante, reminded me somewhat of my favorite Baum book, John Dough and the Cherub. I also found interesting the implication that Kullervo, hideous as he was, had a strange appeal to women–both Fiammante and Louhi make him their lover, and the people who treat Kullervo poorly are invariably men.

Tramontane is not a great book: for one thing, it's not science fiction, but space opera. It's also not consistently written: the middle third is excellent, but the last third lags a touch and is quite literally a deus ex machina situation. Still, it is a thoroughly enjoyable book, and it stands well enough alone (I haven't read any of the other books in the series: Saga of Lost Earths, The Star Mill, or The Stolen Sun.)

Three and a half stars.

(Note: Tramontane comprises one half of Ace Double H-36; the other half is Moorcock's The Wrecks of Time, previously reviewed by Mark Yon. The Ace version has apparently been butchered to fit the format, the greatest casualties being the naughty bits.)

by Cora Buhlert

Sex in the Real World

The most shocking film of the year is currently playing in West German cinemas. It's called Helga – Vom Werden des menschlichen Lebens (Helga – About the Development of Human Life) and has caused scores of cinema goers to faint.

But what exactly is so shocking about Helga? Well, Helga is a movie about – gasp – sex. The plot is simple. An interviewer asks pedestrians in the street about sex education and birth control. Next we meet the protagonist: Helga (newcomer Ruth Gassmann), a naïve young woman pregnant with her first child. Like many women, Helga knows very little about her body and what is happening inside her womb. Luckily, a kindly gynecologist explains the mechanics of conception and pregnancy to Helga and the viewer. The movie then follows Helga through her pregnancy and also documents the birth of her child. It's this birth scene – shot in full, gory detail – that makes particularly male viewers faint in the cinema… and hopefully think twice before impregnating a woman.

In spite of the frank scenes, Helga is not pornography, but an educational film intended to teach West Germans about human sexuality. Shot in a pseudo-documentary style and interspersed with animations showing the human reproductive system, Helga does what parents and schools all too often fail to do, namely teach young and not so young people about their bodies. The film was produced by West German Secretary of Health Käte Strobe, a sixty-year-old lady from Bavaria and unlikely champion of sex education.

West German Secretary of Health and champion of sex education Käte Strobel

But don't take my word for it. Because American International has purchased the distribution rights for Helga, so you can soon see it in a theatre near you.

Sex on an Alien World: Outlaw of Gor by John Norman

I wasn't enamoured with John Norman's debut novel Tarnsman of Gor and didn't plan on reading the sequel. However, December 6 is St. Nicholas Day and since St. Nick was kindly enough to put a copy of Outlaw of Gor into my stocking, I of course felt obliged to read and review it.

When I reviewed Tarnsman of Gor earlier this year, I noted that John Norman was obviously inspired by the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. This influence is even more marked in Outlaw of Gor, for while Tarnsman opened with protagonist and first person narrator Tarl Cabot, Outlaw uses a Burroughs type framing device and opens with the statement of an attorney named Harrison Smith, who describes at great length his relationship with Cabot, Cabot's physical appearance, his mysterious disappearance and reappearance.

Years later, Cabot and Smith rekindle their acquaintance. Eventually Cabot hands Smith the manuscript for Tarnsman of Gor and vanishes again. Smith publishes the manuscript, as the law of framing devices demands, as well as the sequel, which he finds waiting for him on his coffee table.

It is helpful to briefly recapitulate the previous book in an ongoing series for the reader, but the statement of Harrison Smith goes on for pages upon pages. Nor does the novel need a framing device, because this is 1967, not 1912, and readers are accustomed to fantastic adventures in alien worlds by now.

A Gorean Travelogue

The story proper finally starts with Tarl Cabot giving us an extended description of the Gorean scenery, customs, flora and fauna. One of my complaints about Tarnsman was that the opening third of the novel was a dull and interminable lump of information, because Norman was an inexperienced writer uncertain how to present information about his world to the reader. I had hoped that Norman's writing skills would have improved by his second book. Sadly, they have not.

After a trek through the wilderness, Tarl Cabot finds his hometown Ko-Ro-Ba destroyed by the Priest-Kings and its people, including Cabot's father and his mate Talena, scattered to the four winds. Cabot himself is now an outlaw and decides to avenge himself on the Priest-Kings. Again, the parallels to Burroughs are notable, because John Carter also found himself separated from his hometown and wife upon his return to Barsoom and forced to deal with overbearing godlike beings in The Gods of Mars back in 1913. Indeed, many things in Tarnsman and Outlaw of Gor only happen to Tarl Cabot because they happened to John Carter first.

Before meeting the Priest-Kings, Cabot pays a visit to the city of Tharna, which is remarkable for two reasons. One, all Goreans, regardless of their origin, are welcome in Tharna. Two, Tharna is ruled by a woman and – unlike the rest of Gor – women are revered in Tharna and not treated as slaves or possessions.

It's a Women's City… or is it?

The position of women and the institution of slavery on Gor played an important role in Tarnsman and crops up again in Outlaw. And indeed, the descriptions of Gorean slave girls seem to be what attracts many readers to these books. As a modern man of the Sixties, Tarl Cabot abhors slavery and the oppression of women in general, though it is not clear, if the author shares these views, since the narrative repeatedly notes that the slave girls are happy with their lot after initial resistance and that the free women of Gor, who are kept locked up and only venture outdoors in heavy veils, comparable to practices in many Muslim countries, which are thankfully modernising, secretly envy the slave girls their relative freedom. These aspects make the Gor books more disturbing than a simple Burroughs pastiche should be.

Compared to other Gorean cities, Tharna is described as a grey and depressing place full of grey and depressed men. Apparently, treating women like human beings tends to make cities grey and men depressed. In general, Cabot seems inordinately concerned with cities and their appearance, at one point comparing the run-down New York City unfavourably to Gorean cities. I wonder if Cabot (and his creator) blames women for the sorry state of New York City, too.

Revenge of the Masked Lesbians

Cabot has only been in Tharna for a few hours, when he is approached with an offer to kidnap the Tatrix Lara, the city's ruler. He refuses, finds himself framed for a crime and condemned to die in the arena for the amusement of the Tatrix and the haughty masked women of Tharna. Cabot also learns the reason why Tharna is uncommonly hospitable towards strangers – because they are enslaved to labour in the fields or mines. What is more, men are viewed as little more than animals in Tharna and the women are forbidden from loving men, though encouraged to love each other.

Cabot manages to escape with the help of his tarn, the giant bird creatures warriors of Gor ride into battle. However, rather than continuing his journey to see the Priest-Kings, Cabot instead decides to liberate Tharna from the haughty masked lesbians. Needless to say he succeeds and decrees that what the masked lesbians of Tharna need is a man and some good old fashioned Gorean slavery to teach them how to love. Reader, I puked.

Honestly, just read Burroughs

Tarnsman of Gor was mildly spicy Burroughs pastiche. But while John Norman's fascination with slavery, whips, hoods and shackles was already evident, I did not sense anything prurient or anti-feminist in Tarnsman.

Outlaw, however, is another matter. Particularly the second half of the novel and its anti-feminist conclusion gave me the same creepy crawly feeling that Piers Anthony's Chthon did. Worse, since Cabot has neither found the Priest-Kings nor his true love Talena by the end, I fear there will be at least one more Gor book. However, I will not read it.

If you like swashbuckling adventures on alien worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs' entire catalogue is back in print and the excellent planetary adventures of Leigh Brackett are easy enough to find as well. If you like the spicier aspects, there is plenty of sleaze to be found in the paperback spinner racks, some of it – so I am reliably informed – written by genre stalwarts such as Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison under pseudonyms.

However, don't bother with Outlaw of Gor or its predecessor.

One star.

St.Nicholas and his helper Knecht Ruprecht deliver treats and presents to kids in Bremen's historical Schnnor neighbourhood

by Jason Sacks

Secret of the Marauder Satellite, by Ted White

There's a new novel out by Ted White, the longtime assistant editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Despite its goofy title, the new Secret of the Marauder Satellite is a wonderful quick read with some clever turns of phrase and interesting insights into its lead character.

Our lead is a young man named Paul Williams, recently graduated from "space cadet" school (as he half-dismissedly calls it) and ready for his first major assignment, aboard a satellite orbiting the Earth which also works as a staging site for mankind's further trips through the Solar System.

As you might imagine from a book like this, Paul is a bit of a prodigy in a space suit. He receives a plum assignment, as a roving salvage man assigned to pick up space junk and haul it back to the station for recycling. With resources short on the station, such a job is extremely useful and important. But during his second mission in that role, Paul makes a fateful and surprising discovery which indicates mankind might not have been the first race to orbit Earth's moon.

White separates his prose from his peers with its vividness of description and clever ways he brings common events to life. For instance, he explains why rocket launches require countdowns in the kind of matter-of-fact detail that had me nodding my head, and his explanation of gravitational inertia is as elegant as it is concise.

But the element that really elevates this book is the way White explains Paul's inner life. We learn early on that Paul is an introvert and has trouble talking with people. But White takes pains to show readers Paul's vast intelligence and his completely broken childhood, with Paul's arrogant unfeeling parents seldom giving their small child more than a smidge of attention as they slept and drank their ways through their hedonistic lives. With this background, it becomes clear why Paul was motivated to be a high achieving astronaut, but it also explains why he had trouble with peers and with members of the opposite sex.

Secret of the Marauder Satellite packs a lot into its short length, and every word was necessary. This book teases at the potential for Ted White to deliver a masterpiece, but its brief length does work against the story. The story moves at a breakneck speed but that rapid pace doesn't quite give the reader enough time to consider all the impacts of its events. Ignore the goofy title and spend an enjoyable couple of hours with Paul White.

3½ stars

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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 18, 1967] We Are The Martians: Quatermass and the Pit, Bonnie and Clyde, The Day the Fish Came Out and The Snake Pit and the Pendulum

October 18, 2022 Fiona Moore 2 Comments

by Fiona Moore

This month sees the release of a film I’ve been anticipating for a long time: Quatermass and the Pit, the final instalment in Hammer Film Productions’ adaptations of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy. With a whole new cast of actors and a very different look and feel to Hammer’s earlier movies starring Brian Donlevy, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957), this represents a concerted effort to bring Quatermass into the 1960s.

While reportedly this film was considered as another outing for Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir as Quatermass and Julian Glover as Breen provide great interpretations. Keir is the most likeable of the Quatermass actors, while still managing a bitter world-weariness in keeping with the character. Rising star Glover is a bold choice as Breen, being considerably younger than Anthony Bushell in the TV serial, but this casting shifts the interpretation from an old officer too set in his ways to acknowledge the impossible, to an immature, overpromoted man falling back on rigid denials to cover the fact that he is out of his depth. Barbara Shelley as Barbara Judd is more sexy than the usual Quatermass women, wearing outfits that one would think not very sensible for an archaeologist.

Likeable: Andrew Keir as Quatermass and Barbara Shelley as Miss Judd

The basic narrative has had only a few updates. For instance, rather than a new building, the construction work which revives the ancient horrors is the digging of a new Underground extension, something which many Londoners are having to put up with right now. The story has been compressed from six half-hour episodes to a lean 97 minutes, meaning that the plot cracks along at a ripping pace without every feeling overpadded, and we lose most of Kneale’s excruciating working-class stereotype characters. On the more negative side, the film lacks the slow buildup of tension that the TV serial had. Crucially, the themes of the original are all present. Perhaps because Kneale is here adapting his own screenplay, we do not lose the sense of anger at military proliferation, colonialism, and humanity’s self-destructive tendencies.

Colonel Breen, representing humanity's negative side.

One aspect which remains unchanged, however, leads to a rather specialised criticism I have of this movie, speaking as an anthropologist. While in 1959 the dominant theory about human evolution was, indeed, that large brains would precede upright walking, more recent discoveries by Louis and Mary Leakey in East Africa are starting to move the consensus more towards the idea that the opposite was true.

The colour film and production values give the film a much more lavish feel than the austere Donlevy movies, but are a mixed blessing. The alien spacecraft is a thing of beauty compared to the crude cylinder of the serial, but this makes the idea that it could be initially thought to be a German V-weapon less credible. The simple ground-shaking effect in the TV serial when Sladden (played here by Duncan Lamont) accesses his primitive side was somehow more terrifying than the wild poltergeist activity seen here. However, the climax of the film uses its production values to build on the sense of terror as humanity succumbs to the Wild Hunt: we have a chilling scene where a group of people surround a man and beat him to death telekinetically with stones and masonry. Rather than concluding with an explanatory speech by Quatermass, the film simply lingers on the image of Quatermass and Barbara sitting among the ruins, shattered by what they’ve experienced.

Hammer's take on the Martians.

Quatermass and the Pit provides evidence both that the themes of the original Quatermass stories remain fresh and relevant almost a decade later, and that Hammer are still capable of producing a decent horror film without relying on gore and nudity to bring in the shocks. It’s a shame there’s unlikely to be a Quatermass 4.

Four out of five stars.

by Jason Sacks

Bonnie and Clyde

And while Fiona praises Quatermass and the Pit for its lack of gore, I have to praise Bonnie and Clyde for its copious use of gore.

You're probably aware of this newest film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. In the two months since its New York premiere, perhaps you've seen the numerous newspaper articles focusing on the highly violent nature of Bonnie and Clyde, or articles which have condemned the idea that the film makes heroes of its bankrobbing protagonists.

Or perhaps you've read the rhapsodic review of Bonnie and Clyde in the latest issue of The New Yorker by their new critic Pauline Kael and possibly dismissed it because of your annoyance with Kael's now legendary condemnation of The Sound of Music three years ago in McCall's.

I've had the most amazing experience since I saw Bonnie and Clyde last weekend after it premiered at the Northgate Cinema: I've been raving nonstop to my friends about this film.

Like Kael, I was thrilled to see a film which is so bold, so intense and somehow so contemporary feeling. Despite–or perhaps because of–its setting in during the Great Depression, this film feels like a deconstruction of the myths we have told ourselves about the past. Bonnie and Clyde makes villains out of the brave federal men who chase our heroic criminals. This isn't an episode of The FBI. This is an inversion of what it means to be a hero. And in that inversion I saw myself in the faces of people who lived and died 35 years ago.

Because the world in which Bonnie and Clyde live feels like a real world. It's dusty and ugly and people wear worn clothes. Some banks have collapsed and others are near collapse and peoples' lives are miserable. In that misery, ordinary people are desperate for someone, anyone, who is able to triumph against all odds, even if the fate of those heroes seems horribly preordained.

Like all of us, the characters in Bonnie and Clyde are deeply flawed. I was especially swept up in Clyde's foibles. We're all used to seeing Warren Beatty as the smooth handsome lover in movies like Promise Her Anything and Splendor in the Grass, but here Beatty plays a man who's just not interested in love, or maybe more truthfully Clyde is a man who gets his thrills from robbery and not from women. Faye Dunaway is thus not quite Beatty's girlfriend on screen as much as she is his accomplice, fascinatingly contrary to what we expect.

With its echoes of the French New Wave and its shattering of cliche and audience expectations, Bonnie and Clyde feels like a revolution–a harbinger of the types of films I hope to see as the new decade dawns.

4½ out of 5 stars

by Victoria Silverwolf

Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts

Filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis had an international hit with Zorba the Greek a few years ago, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won three. With that success behind him, I guess he figured he could do just about anything he wanted. He decided to do something different.

The Day the Fish Came Out

The film starts with an unseen narrator telling us about the tragic incident last year when a B-52 bomber collided with a tanker during mid-air refueling, killing most of the crew. Four nuclear bombs fell out of the doomed aircraft, three of them landing near the Spanish village of Palomares and one falling into the sea. Since this movie is a black comedy, this frightening story is accompanied by three flamenco dancers.

They also have the ability to sing with subtitles, giving away the plot.

In the future year 1972, a plane carrying a pilot, a navigator, two atomic bombs, and a mysterious metal box crashes near a tiny Greek island. The unfortunate pair of flyboys lose their clothing, and spend most of the film in their underpants.

Colin Blakely (left) and Tom Courtenay (right) offer a little beefcake.

A bunch of military types, pretending to be folks interested in building a hotel on the island, search for the bombs and box. They get the bombs back, but it seems a local fellow found the box and thinks it has a treasure inside. Unfortunately for him, it's sealed tight and can't be opened except by a laser or a special chemical. (Keep that latter possibility in mind.)

Meanwhile, a bunch of tourists, attracted by the rumor of an upcoming hotel, flock to the island. Like almost everybody else in this movie (not including the locals or the barely dressed airmen), they wear clothes that would be rejected by Carnaby Street as too extreme. They also dance a lot.

In fact, if you get a chance to watch the trailer for this movie, you'll think it's a beach movie.

After more than an hour of this stuff, the plot gets going with the arrival of Electra Brown, played by Candice Bergen, the beautiful daughter of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. She's supposed to be an archeologist, but the way she behaves with one of the military guys makes me think she's more interested in human biology. Bergen made her film debut as a lesbian in the classy soap opera movie The Group, but here she is very heterosexual indeed.

Electra Brown in one of her more conservative outfits.

Electra has this weird device that uses a special chemical (sound familiar?) to cut through metal in order to make replicas of ancient objects. (No, that didn't make much sense to me either.) Long story short, the guy who found the box steals the gizmo, opens the box, and . . .

Well, without giving away too much, let's just say that the depressing ending finally explains the title. This movie badly wants to be Dr. Strangelove and it fails miserably. The comedy isn't funny, the satire falls flat, and there are long stretches where nothing much is happening.

Two stars, mostly for the wacky costumes.

Stay away from this one unless you want to laugh at it. Read a book instead.

Maybe not this one.

by Cora Buhlert

Horror in the Real World

1967 is certainly turning out to be a year of disasters.

Belgium has barely recovered from the devastating fire at the À l'Innovation department store in May and now two express trains and a local passenger train collided near the village of Fexhe-le-Haut-Clocher in the French-speaking part of Belgium on October 5, leaving twelve people dead and 76 injured.

FEXHE LE HAUT CLOCHE traincrash — Aftermath of the train crash of Fexhe-Le-Haut-Clocher in Belgium.

The photos of the wrecked trains bring back memories of another terrible railroad disaster that happened only three months ago in East Germany. A barrier at a railroad crossing near the village of Langenweddingen malfunctioned. As a result, a passenger train crashed into a tanker truck, setting the train on fire. 94 people died, 44 of them school children en route to a holiday camp. The Langenweddingen train crash is the worst railroad accident not just in East Germany, but in all of German history.

Langenweddingen train crash — Aftermath of the devastating railroad crash in Langenweddingen, East Germany. Note the burned out train cars.

Horror on the Silver Screen: Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (The Snake Pit and the Pendulum)

Compared to the many horrors of the real world, watching a spooky movie in the theatre feels almost cathartic. And so I decided to get away from the real world by watching the new West German horror movie Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (The Snake Pit and the Pendulum) at my local cinema.

As the title indicates, the film is a (loose) adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum". Of course, we already had a very good (loose) adaptation of that story by Roger Corman only six years ago. And indeed, The Snake Pit and the Pendulum intends to be West Germany's answer to Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, the UK's Hammer horror films and the lurid horror films from Italy, all of which are popular, if not necessarily critical successes in West German cinemas. So how does The Snake Pit and the Pendulum hold up?

Snake Pit and the Pendulum 1967 — Judge Richard von Marienberg (Lex Barker in a wig) setnences Count Regula (Christopher Lee) to death.

Pretty well, it turns out. The movie starts with a bang, as a bewigged judge and a scarlet-masked executioner visit Count Regula (Christopher Lee) in his cell. The judge informs Count Regula that he is sentenced to death for murdering twelve virgins in his quest for immortality. However, the immortality elixir requires the blood of thirteen virgins and the final virgin managed to escape the Count's clutches and alerted the authorities.

Snake Pit and the Pendulum — The bodies of the twelve murdered virgins are arranged in a censor-friendly way, covering up any stray breasts.

The death sentence is to be executed immediately and a most bloody sentence it is, too. First, a bronze mask lined with spikes is nailed onto Count Regula's face – reminiscent of Mario Bava's 1960 horror movie La Maschera del Demonio a.k.a. Black Sunday. Then Count Regula is led onto the market square of the fictional town of Sandertal – portrayed by the Bavarian town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which is famous for its medieval architecture – where his body is torn apart by four horses. Of course, we have seen similar scenes in Italian and French historical and horror movies many times, but by the rather tame standards of West German cinema, this is a remarkably bloody opening.

Snake Pit and Pendulum — The executioner is ready for action.

The movie continues in the same vein. For true to form, Count Regula has vowed bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, not only on the judge who sentenced him to death and that pesky virgin who escaped his clutches, but also on their descendants.

Vengeance from Beyond the Grave

The story now jumps forward by thirty years, from the early nineteenth century into the 1830s. A mail coach is traveling to Sandertal. The passengers are the lawyer Roger Mont Elise (Lex Barker), Baroness Lilian of Brabant (Karin Dor), her maid Babette (Christiane Rücker) and Fabian (Yugoslav actor Vladimir Medar), a highwayman masquerading as a priest. Roger and Lilian have both been summoned to Castle Andomai via mysterious letters. Roger, who is an orphan, is supposed to learn more about his parentage, while Lilian is supposed to receive the inheritance of her late mother. Both letters are signed by Count Regula, the very same Count Regula whose bloody execution we just witnessed.

Schalngengrube und das Pendel — The woods around Sandertal are certainly spooky.

En route to the castle, the coach and its passengers must not only travel through a spooky forest where the bodies of hanged men are dangling from every tree, but are also assailed by bandits intent on kidnapping the two women. Roger and Fabian manage to fight off the bandits. But even more trouble awaits them at the castle, where the undead Count Regula and his equally undead servant Anatol (played by the delightfully creepy Carl Lange) are about to make good on the Count's dying threats.

For unbeknownst to them, Roger and Lilian are the descendants of the judge who sentenced Count Regula to death and the virgin who escaped the Count's clutches (and clearly did not remain a virgin). A gruesome fate awaits them at the castle, a fate that involves a pit full of snakes and a razor-sharp pendulum.

The Snake Pit and the Pendulum is not quite up to the high standards set by Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations on the one hand and the Hammer movies from the UK on the other. However, it is an enjoyably spooky film that will send a shudder or two down your spine.

Harald Reinl is a veteran of the Edgar Wallace, Dr. Mabuse and Winnetou movie series and probably the best director working in West Germany right now. His skills are on full display in this movie and he uses existing locations such as the medieval town of Rotenburg ob der Tauber or the Extern Stones in the Teutoburg Forest to great effect.

The cast is excellent. Christopher Lee has graced many a Hammer movie and now brings his horror skills to West German screens. Carl Lange has specialised in playing dubious characters and outright villains for a long time now and his performance as a hangman forced to execute his own son in Face of the Frog is unforgettable. I'm always stunned that Lex Barker never got to be the A-list star in Hollywood that he is in Europe, but their loss was our gain. That said, at 48 Barker may be getting a little too hold for hero roles. Finally, I'm very happy to see the always reliable Karin Dor back in a West German production and with her natural brunette hair after the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice wasted her talents on a cliched femme fatale role and foisted a terrible red wig on her, too.

Almost fifty years ago, the horror film genre was born in Germany. But like so many other things, horror film making in Germany died with the Weimar Republic. Let's hope that The Snake Pit and the Pendulum heralds a revival of a film genre that was pioneered here.

Four stars

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Science / Space Race

[August 16, 1967] Boxes, Big Steel Boxes: The Rise of the Shipping Container

August 16, 2022 Cora Buhlert 6 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

A Strangely Familiar Monk

A few days ago, Der Mönch mit der Peitsche (The Monk with the Whip), the latest movie in the Edgar Wallace series, premiered in West German cinemas. Director Alfred Vohrer delivers the best colour film in the Wallace series to date (the series switched to colour last year) and creates striking visuals as a scarlet robed monk stalks the fog-shrouded grounds of an exclusive girls' school. The organ-heavy score by Martin Böttcher contributes to the eerie atmosphere

However, the plot seems strangely familiar, probably because we've already seen this very same film one and a half years ago under the title Der unheimliche Mönch (The Sinister Monk). Star Uschi Glas even played a supporting role in the earlier movie.

Monk with the Whip: Uschi Glass — Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) and Inspector Higgins (Joachim Fuchsberger) comfort Ann Portland (Uschi Glas) after a run-in with the monk.

So has it finally happened? Has the Edgar Wallace series run out of ideas after a stunning twenty-nine movies in the past eight years? On the other hand, Edgar Wallace was a very prolific writer and much of his work remains unadapted. So maybe there is life in the old warhorse yet?

However, not just the Edgar Wallace movies have switched to colour. West German television will begin broadcasting in colour later this month to coincide with the Internationale Funkausstellung (International Radio Exhibition) in Berlin.

Magic Boxes

Meanwhile, a revolution just as significant as the switch from black and white to colour is quietly happening in a completely different sector. At the centre of this revolution is an unassuming 20 x 8 x 8.5 foot box of aluminium or corrugated steel: the shipping container.

Cargo ships may not be as glamorous as the big ocean liners and cruise ships or as impressive as a Navy destroyer or aircraft carrier, but they are the backbone of international trade. Pretty much every product from overseas, whether it's cars from Japan, import paperbacks and comic books from the US, coffee from Brazil, tea from India, canned pineapples from Hawaii or even that fanzine mailed from America, comes to you by cargo ship, because air freight is much too expensive and only reserved for the most urgent of cargos.

However, shipping cargo from one port to another takes time. Now unless there is a revolution in engine technology, which is currently not in sight, the speed of a modern ship has reached a maximum. The SS United States set The Blue Riband record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic fifteen years ago, and this achievement is not likely to be broken anytime soon.

But the actual sea voyage is only a part of cargo transport. Freighters spend a large chunk of time in ports, because loading and unloading the cargo takes a lot of time and manpower (roughly twenty longshoremen are needed to load or unload a single freighter). Hereby, a large part of the problem is that cargo comes in all shapes and sizes. Cars are different from sacks of coffee, which are different from cans of pineapples, which are different from bales of cotton, which are different from boxes of books, which are different from bags of mail. All of these differently sized cargos must be individually unloaded, with the help of cranes, where necessary.

Loading the MV Rothenstein in Port of Sudan — Longshoremen are loading bags aboard the MV Rothenstein in Port of Sudan in 1960.

Bags being unloaded in the port of Bremen — Bagged cargo is being unloaded in the port of Bremen.

Cotton bales being unloaded in the port of Bremen — Bales of cotton are being unloaded in the port of Bremen.

Damaged coffee bag — Another drawback of breakbulk cargo is that the cargo can get damaged, such as these coffee beans spilling out of a bag in the cargo hold of a freighter.

Father of the Modern Shipping Container

The slow loading and unloading process is a constant source of frustration for shipping companies. Among the frustrated was a man named Malcom McLean, co-owner of a trucking company from North Carolina. Some thirty years ago, McLean had the brilliant idea that instead of the current time-consuming process, it would be much quicker to just load a trailer with the cargo onto a ship and then unload trailer and cargo at the destination and connect it to a tractor unit.

Eventually McLean refined his idea to load not entire truck trailers onto a ship, but simply transport the cargo in boxes of the same size that are easy to load, unload and stack, whether they contain books or shoes or sacks of coffee or bales of cotton or canned pineapples or bags of mail. And thus, the shipping container was born.

Malcom McLean overlooks his empire in Newark in 1957.

Initially, the shipping industry was sceptical about McLean's idea – after all, a box would add extra weight and reduce the available payload – and he had problems finding backers. So in 1955, he sold his share in his trucking company, bought a steamship company he named Sea-Land Corporation Ltd. and two decommissioned US Navy tankers, which he had converted for transporting containers. The first of these two ships, the SS Ideal X, disembarked on its first voyage from Newark to Houston on April 26, 1956.

Container aboard the Ideal X — Containers being loaded aboard the Ideal X for its first voyage in 1956.

The breakthrough for the shipping container and a lucrative contract for Sea-Land finally came with the Vietnam War, because McLean's containers turned out to be ideal for transporting supplies to the US troops in Vietnam.

The Container Comes to Bremen

But while McLean and Sea-Land were slowly revolutionising cargo shipping in the US, European and particularly West German shipping companies remained sceptical of this new-fangled container idea. And so it took until May of last year for Sea-Land to start a regular transatlantic cargo service and for the first container vessel, the MV Fairland, to come to Europe.

The Fairland's first port of call was Rotterdam. Her second port of call was my hometown of Bremen and this is why I was lucky enough to see the Fairland and her cargo of miracle boxes in person. A friend of mine works as an engineer at the AG Weser shipyard and was asked to stand by with a team of technicians and electricians in case there were any problems while unloading the Fairland's cargo of containers. He invited me along to serve as an interpreter in case of language issues.

Fairland in Bremen port — The MV Fairland moored in the port of Bremen last year.

And there definitely were problems unloading the Fairland, because the port of Bremen is not set up for the handling of containers and German trucks turned out to be not all that well equipped for transporting containers with American dimensions. And because containers are still very new in Europe, things like corner castings and twist-locks, which keep the container in place aboard a ship or on a truck bed, are unknown here.

Another look at the MV Fairland in the port of Bremen last year. Note the containers on deck.

The first of the 226 containers on board was unloaded without a hitch. However, disaster struck when the second container, a refrigerated unit called a "reefer container", carrying frozen chicken legs from Virginia, slipped from the hook of the on-board cargo crane of the Fairland and crashed down onto the driver's cab of a brand-new truck waiting below. Thankfully, the driver was not seriously injured. The container survived the fall as well, as did the chicken legs, though the truck did not.

While the Fairland was being unloaded, several Bremen merchants and representatives of West German shipping companies were watching the proceedings with great interest. Initially, the merchants and shipping companies were highly sceptical and the accident during the unloading of the second container did not help matters. However, when the Fairland was fully unloaded after only sixteen hours and two shifts rather than the customary several days or even weeks, depending on the size of the ship and the type of cargo, the gentlemen were intrigued.

The Container Revolution

The Fairland would not remain the only container freighter to moor at the port of Bremen. But while there was still a lot of scepticism towards the metal box, Bremen senator of harbours Georg Bortscheller (nicknamed "Container Schorse" for his championing of container shipping) and Gerhard Beier, head of the Bremer Lagerhaus Gesellschaft, the company which manages the loading, unloading and storage of cargo in the harbours of Bremen and Bremerhaven, were both convinced by Malcom McLean's idea and also saw great potential for Bremen's harbours in the introduction of the shipping container. Because if Bremen's harbour was better set up to handle containers than competing harbours like Hamburg, Rotterdam or Antwerp, container ships and the resulting business would go here. And indeed, the United States Line and the Container Marines Lines now have a regular container service to Bremen in addition to Sea-Land.

Senator Bortscheller — George Bortscheller a.k.a. "Container Schorse", Bremen's senator of harbours.

As a result, the first specialised container bridge was installed in Bremen harbour in October 1966, only five months after the arrival of the Fairland. Now container vessels could be unloaded even faster than before. Last months, the 100,000th container was unloaded in Bremen harbour, a remarkable number considering that the first 100 containers were unloaded from the Fairland only a little more than a year ago.

First container bridge in the harbour of Bremen — The first container bridge in the port of Bremen began operations in October of last year.

But West German shipping companies were also taking note. The first container vessel built in West Germany, the Bell Vanguard, was launched in March 1966 in Hamburg, two months before the Fairland arrived in Bremen. But though the Bell Vanguard was commissioned by the West German shipping company Jürgen Heinrich Breuer of Hamburg, it was chartered out to the Irish shipping company Bell Lines and it currently in service between Ireland and continental Europe.

Meanwhile, two of the biggest West German shipping companies, the Hamburg-Amerika-Linie a.k.a. Hapag of Hamburg and the Norddeutscher Lloyd of Bremen are also getting into the container business. Initially, Hapag had some of its fast freighters of the Westfalia und Nürnberg classes converted to be able to transport containers in addition to regular breakbulk cargos, while the Norddeutscher Lloyd is doing the same with Burgenstein class vessels and the brand-new fast freighters of Friesenstein class. My friend, who works at the AG Weser shipyard, is in charge of these conversions and is currently overseeing the freighters being outfitted with twist locks, plugs for reefer containers and rails to allow for moving and storing containers on deck.

HAPAG's MV Alemannia, retrofitted for container transport.

The Norddeutscher Lloyd's MV Bayernstein, retrofitted for container transport.

MV Birkenstein — The Norddeutscher Lolyd's MV Buntenstein, retrofitted for container transport.

But both companies have even bigger plans and the long-time rivals are cooperating to make them a reality. For Hapag and the Norddeutscher Lloyd are planning to order four dedicated container vessels of their own and will jointly operate them under the name Hapag-Lloyd. The first two of these ships, the MV Weser Express and MV Elbe Express, are expected to go into service next year. This is good news, particularly for the troubled Hapag, since one of their ships, the freighter MV Münsterland, is currently stuck in the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal due to the Six Day War. It is unknown when the Münsterland will be able to return to Hamburg.

Freighters trapped in the Suez Canal due to the Six Days War — Hapag's MV Münsterland and several other freighters stuck in the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal due to the Six Days War.

Will the container revolution continue or will it fizzle out? So far, the future is still up in the air. However, the rapid growth of container turnover in the harbour of Bremen, the fact that Senator Bortscheller has announced that a brand-new container terminal will be built in the harbour of Bremerhaven as well as the fact that big shipping companies such as Hapag and the Norddeutscher Lloyd are jumping into the container business indicate that the shipping container is not a passing fad, but here to stay.

The container does have its drawbacks. For example it endangers the jobs of many longshoremen, but overall the world will profit from the rise of the container and the faster turnover times it makes possible, because it means that goods from overseas, whether coffee, tobacco, cotton, canned pineapples, Japanese cars and radios, frozen chicken legs from Virginia, books and magazines, and yes, even the postage for that fanzine mailed from the US, will become more plentiful and cheaper. And this is something that will benefit us all.

Freighters may be the backbone of the shipping industry, but the glamour still plays a role as well, as exemplified by the Norddeutscher Lloyd's flagship, the beautiful MV Europa, which is offering both liner service between Bremerhaven and New York as well as cruises.

MV Europa in the foggy outer Weser — The MV Europa on the foggy outer Weser. However, she'll soon reach sunnier climes.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 18, 1967] Highs and Lows (July Galactoscope #2)

July 18, 2022 Gideon Marcus 7 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

We've had a bit of a backlog of books here at the editorial desk, and the only remedy was to have two back-to-back Galactoscopes. Luckily, summer is slow season for TV, and thus the schedule opens up a bit. Sometimes, our book review column comprises a clutch of mediocrities. This time around, the disparity in quality was abnormally high–mostly thanks (no thanks!) to the debut novel by one Piers Anthony…

Chthon, by Piers Anthony

Imagine a world where genetic modification has created a monstrous race of humans. The women are near-immortal semi-telepaths, but they suffer from an emotional inversion: they only feel love and joy when men express hate and pain. You can imagine how warped the ensuing society must be, the females doomed to solicit violence from their partners, the men compelled to express their every animalistic whim on them. One woman of this race escapes this planet, but, a slave to her make-up, cannot escape her wretched fate. Thus, she marries a man wracked with guilt from the death of his first wife in childbirth. When his love for the alien woman becomes unalloyed, she must leave, but not before she bears a child.

But the alien woman still requires love, twisted, painful love, to live. So she seduces her own son, thus ensuring his passion for his mother will always be the appropriate mix of pleasure and pain, and they can live happily ever after.

In-between these episodes, the story takes place on Chthon, the hellish underground garnet mine whence the son is sentenced for murder. Naked and toolless, he must devise an escape, resorting to treachery, violence, rapine, and cannibalism. Of course, we know he will escape because author Piers Anthony elected to tell the story in a ping-pong flashback/flashforward style, starting and ending with scenes on Chthon.

This is a terrible book.

The premise, fundamentally implausible, seems tailored to indulge a male id-fantasy. We already have a problem in our current society whereby women are "othered" into a different species: vain, frivolous, subservient, sinister, yet desirable. With Chthon, Anthony comes up with a scientificititious explanation for why his starring woman must be that kind of creature. Not that the other women in the novel fare much better, consisting of a slave and vicious fellow Chthonian prisoners.

I'm sure Anthony would say that the book is unpleasant because it bares the human (i.e. male) soul, revealing the sordid mess underneath we'd rather not acknowledge. That all men desire to possess our mothers, rape our partners. That hate is really the purest kind of love.

Mr. Anthony needs professional help. Chthon is an odious turd, and I suspect its author is, too. One star, and winner of this year's "Queen Bee" award.

by Cora Buhlert

Like our esteemed host, I also had the misfortune of reading Chthon. I spotted the paperback in my friendly local import store and was intrigued enough by the unusual title to pull it out of the spinner rack. And while I have not read much by Piers Anthony – and am now unlikely to ever read more – he is one of Cele Goldsmith Lalli's discoveries and she normally has a good eye for authors. The blurb on the back of the slim paperback – promising a tale of an inescapable space prison and a man sent there for pursuing a forbidden love affair – sealed the deal, because I am a sucker for space prison stories.

The scenes set on Chthon, the hellish prison planet cum garnet mine, are indeed the one redeeming grace of this novel. Genuinely atmospheric and visceral, they immediately drew me in. However, even these scenes are marred by what will become a recurrent problem, namely the fact that every single woman protagonist Aton Five meets wants to have sex with him, while Aton manfully refuses, because there can only be one woman for him: Malice the forbidden minionette (i.e. his mother, though he doesn't know that yet).

Scenes of Aton's life leading up to his incarceration are interspersed with the scenes on Chthon. Again, there are some interesting ideas here, such as hvee flowers which Aton's family cultivates and which can detect true love. And once again, the good ideas are marred by off-putting sex scenes, such as fourteen-year-old Aton trying to have sex with a thirteen-year-old neighbour girl and failing because human girls have anatomy and fluids, unlike his idealized vision of minionettes.

When Aton rapes a woman on Chthon, the book came close to hitting the wall and I only prevailed because I had promised to review it for the Journey. The book did actually hit the wall – and considering how expensive import paperbacks are, that's saying something – once we got to the planet of the minionettes, genetically engineered to be masochists and enjoy pain, and of course the final twist of just why Aton has been so obsessed with Malice since he was seven years old and that their "love" is forbidden for a very good reason.

Honestly, this is a terrible book. The sexual revolution and the New Wave have made it easier for science fiction to address formerly taboo subjects like sexuality. But just because authors can write about sex now, doesn't necessarily mean that they should foist their sexual fantasies upon unsuspecting readers, particularly the kind Piers Anthony appears to harbor.

Zero stars. Stay away!

Belmont Double 5F0-759

Belmont Publishing has decided to take on the Ace Double is a flaccid sort of way by combining two novellas (calling them "two complete novels") in one thin volume. This is the first result.

Peril of the Starmen, by Kris Neville

First up Kris Neville's 1954 story, Peril of the Starmen, which first appeared in the magazine Imagination. You're welcome to give it a read if you like.

The Flame of Iridar, by Lin Carter

Considering how harsh I was on The Star Magicians, I was surprised to find that Lin Carter's The Flame of Iridar, published as an Ace Double knock-off by Belmont together with Peril of the Starmen by Kris Neville, reprinted from the January 1954 issue of Imagination, was the better of the two books I read this month. Not that this is a high bar to clear, considering how utterly terrible Chthon was.

That said, Lin Carter's writing has improved since last year's The Star Magicians. True, his prose is still overly purple – thews are inevitably iron and mighty, blood and pain are inevitably scarlet, and female breasts are inevitably described by inappropriate adjectives – and Carter is still oddly preoccupied with lovingly describing his protagonist's manly physique. However, at least Carter remembers who his protagonist is this time around.

The protagonist is one Chandar of Orm, a deposed prince turned pirate on ancient Mars, when it still had oceans. If this setting seems familiar, that's because it is, borrowed wholesale form Leigh Brackett's much superior 1949 novel Sea-Kings of Mars, better known as The Sword of Rhiannon, the title under which it was published as the very first STF Ace Double back in 1953 together with another excellent fantasy adventure, Conan the Conqueror by Robert E. Howard. And indeed, Carter acknowledges this influence and dedicates The Flame of Iridar to Leigh Brackett and her husband Edmond Hamilton.

The opening of the novel finds Chandar of Orm in deep trouble. After a successful career as a pirate, he has been captured by the evil warlord Niamnon (occasionally spelled Niamnor in what I hope is not indicative of the quality of Belmont's copy-editing), the man who slaughtered Chandar's entire family in front the then twelve-year-old boy's eyes, and has been sentenced to die in Niamnon's arena, a fate Chandar himself imagines as follows:

A few more hours of darkness, and then the blinding morning sun on the arena sands… a few moments of scarlet pain… and he would rest… forever.

However, before it can come to that, Chandar and his comrade-in-arms Bram are freed by the enchanter Sarkond of K'thom, advisor to none other than King Niamnon himself. Sarkond also helpfully reveals Niamnon's plans of conquest and promises to take Chandar back to his pirate comrades. And in return, he only asks for a little favour. Use the Axe of Orm, a magical weapon that can only be wielded by a member of Chandar's family, to pierce the enchanted Wall of Ice that surrounds the magical realm of Iophar. What can possibly go wrong?

To no one's surprise, Sarkond double-crosses Chandar as soon as Chandar has fulfilled his purpose and hacked through the Wall of Ice. However, Chandar is saved by Meliander, exiled brother of the villainous King Niamnon.

What follows is an epic clash of the forces of good and evil. Chandar also gets revenge on Niamnon and his throne back. Furthermore, he gets entangled with two women, the witch Mnadis, whose breasts are "high and proud", and Llys, Queen of Iophar, whose breasts are "sweet and virginal". Three guesses with which of the two ladies Chandar ends up.

In many ways, The Flame of Iridar feels like the sort of swashbuckling planetary adventure that might have been found in the pages of Planet Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories twenty years ago. It's not as good as Leigh Brackett or Edmond Hamilton at their best, but then who is?

An entertaining adventure that feels like a throwback to the pulp era. Three stars.

by Gideon Marcus

And to continue our positive mood (because after Chthon, a double dose is necessary), let's all dig on Ted White's latest novel:

The Jewels of Elsewhen, by Ted White

Arthur Ficarra, an exhausted ex-beat cop-cum-desk-sergeant, just wants his subway ride to end so he can go to sleep after an overlong shift. But when he responds to the death rattle of a fellow passenger, he discovers to his horror that the stricken man, and everyone on the train but one, is just a mannequin, the train a cardboard model. Only Arthur and a young woman named Kim remain human. Indeed, it turns out they are now the only living things in all of New York City.

But this is not the Big Apple they remember. It is subtly changed, freshly painted, with hollow buildings. Almost a model of itself. And it is disintegrating…

Escape takes them on a whirlwind tour of alternate timelines, the common element of which is that the people speak some variety of Italian. There also is the sense of deliberate manufacture, as well as a shepherding of world events by a secret society of cloaked individuals. Arthur and Kim must solve the riddle of these artificial universes before they are captured and dispatched by these caretakers.

I came in without knowing what to expect. Sure, Rose Benton gave White's last book, Android Avenger, a whopping five stars, but I'd never gotten a chance to read it. All I really knew about the author was that he doesn't like Star Trek (per his column in the latest issue of the Yandro fanzine), he helps edit Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he's chair of the NyCon 3 committee.

I really dug this book. It's written in a punchy but understated style well-suited to mainstream fiction; indeed, I have to wonder if White makes most of his money out of the genre. He's certainly good enough. Arthur and Kim are compelling, strong characters, and the divergent timetracks are nicely detailed. I was in recent correspondence with Ted, and I mentioned that the book reminded me a bit of Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium books. He replied that the resemblance was intentional, and that Laumer had a strong influence on him.

If anything, I like White's even better! Four stars.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[June 6, 1967] Blood in the Streets of West Berlin: The Shah Visit and the Shooting of Benno Ohnesorg

June 6, 2022 Cora Buhlert 2 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

Aftermath

Last month, I reported about the devastating fire at the À l'Innovation department store in Brussels, which completely destroyed the historic Art Noveau building and cost the lives of more than three hundred people.

Recovery work and investigations regarding the cause of the fire are ongoing. The exact number of the dead is still not known and identifying the victims of the fire is difficult, since many were burned beyond recognition. The unidentified dead were interred in a mass grave on a Brussels cemetery.

Victims of the Innovation fire being buried — Unidentified victims of the À l'Innovation fire are being buried in a mass grave in Brussels

On May 30, a memorial service for the victims of the fire was held at the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur church. The young Belgian King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola attended the service. Earlier, King Baudouin had also visited the site of the fire only a few minutes from the royal palace.

King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola of Belgium attend the memorial service for the victims of the À l'Innovation fire.

King Baudouin at the stire of the Innovation fire — King Baudouin of Belgium visits the site of the À l'Innovation fire

I had hoped to have a more cheerful article for you this month – especially since I found Lin Carter's latest novel Flame of Iridar in the spinner rack of my local import store. However, this was not to be, because not quite two weeks after the Brussels fire, another terrible event struck West Germany, specifically West Berlin.

Fairy Tale Princesses and Dictators

On May 28, 1967, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and his third wife Farah Diba arrived in West Germany on a state visit. Normally, this would not be particularly remarkable, since foreign heads of state regularly visit West Germany.

However, the West German tabloid press has a particularly interest in the royal house of Iran, for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's second wife Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary is the daughter of the Iranian ambassador to West Germany and his German wife, grew up in Berlin and was educated in Switzerland. And when the barely eighteen-year-old Soraya married the Shah in 1951, the tabloid press eagerly reported about "the German girl on the peacock throne".

Shah and Soraya — Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his second wife Princess Soraya and Princess Shanaz, the Shah's daughter from his first marriage.

Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary after her divorce

The marriage did not last long and the imperial couple divorced in 1958, when Soraya failed to produce an heir, which did not diminish the tabloids' interest in her at all. However, the gossip press also quickly focussed on her successor, Farah Diba, another young western educated Iranian woman from an upper class background.

Shah and Farah Diba — Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi marries his third wife Farah Diba in 1959.

Again, this is not particularly remarkable, because the tabloid press likes to print gossip about royalty. However, most of what West German citizens know about the Imperial State of Iran is gossip of questionable veracity about its royal house, filtered through the eyes of two privileged western-educated upper class women. What these gossipy articles – a remarkable number of which are published in the magazines and newspapers of the Axel Springer Verlag – ignore is that Iran is not just a fairy tale land of princesses and peacock thrones. It is also a brutal authoritarian state, ruled with an iron hand by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, especially since the coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, which was backed by the US and the UK, because Mossadegh intended to nationalise the Iranian oil industry, cutting out British and US oil companies.

One of the rare critical articles about the Iranian regime appeared in the June issue of the student magazine konkret, where Ulrike Meinhof, a brilliant young investigative journalist, penned an open letter to Farah Diba criticising the situation in Iran in response to a fawning interview with the Iranian Empress in the gossip magazine Neue Revue. This was not the first frank article Meinhof has written about the Iranian regime. Three years ago, she reported about a hunger strike of Iranian students in West Germany to protest human rights violations in their homeland as well as a state visit of West German president Heinrich Lübke to Iran.

Ulrike Meinhof konkret — Journalist Ulrike Meinhof at her desk at the student magazine konkret

Students versus the Shah

In 1960, Iranian students in West Germany founded the Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS), a leftwing group critical of the Shah and his government. Encouraged by his friend, writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger (whose former wife and brother are members of the leftwing Kommune 1 and were responsible for the disgusting pamphlets about the À l'Innovation fire), CIS co-founder Bahman Nirumand published a critical book about the Imperial State of Iran entitled Persien, Modell eines Entwicklungslandes oder Die Diktatur der Freien Welt (Persia: Model of a Developing Country, or Dictatorship in the Free World) earlier this year. While the book received little notice among the wider West German society, it was widely read among politically interested students and together with the open letter to Farah Diba in konkret galvanised the students of the Free University of (West) Berlin.

On June 2, the Shah and his wife were due to visit West Berlin. Therefore, the student parliament of the Free University organised a panel discussion about the Iranian regime on the day before. Among those invited to speak at the meeting was Bahman Nirumand. The Iranian embassy in West Germany was incensed and demanded that the panel discussion be cancelled. However, the chancellor of the Free University refused, citing the rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. This is not the first time that the Iranian government has tried to suppress criticism in West Germany, by the way. They have also repeatedly invoked a lese-majeste law dating from the days of the Second German Empire (which ended fifty years ago) in order to have unfavourable news articles retracted.

Bahman Nirumand Free University Berlin — Iranian activist Bahman Nirumand speaks at the Free University of (West) Berlin.

In the days running up to the panel discussion and the state visit, pamphlets condemning the Shah appeared on the campus of the Free University, including a Wanted poster accusing the Shah of murder. The Kommune 1 felt compelled to interrupt their cheering about the deaths of more than three hundred people in Brussels to publish a pamphlet in which they threatened to pee on the Shah, which is a step up from threatening to throw pudding at US Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. In another pamphlet, the Kommune 1 also condemned other leftwing groups for not being radical enough. Anti-Shah pamphlets had also been distributed by students at a protest in Munich during the Shah’s visit there.

Pamphlet Wanted poster — An anti-Shah pamphlet in the form of a Wanted poster accusing the Shah of murder.

Kommune 1 pamphlet — The Kommune 1's pamphlet about the Shah visit mostly criticises other leftwing organisations of being not radical enough.

The leftwing student organisation Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) had been planning a protest against the war in Vietnam on June 3. However, Nirumand's speech during the panel discussion at the Free University of Berlin galvanised the roughly five thousand students in attendance and it was spontaneously decided to bring the planned protest forward by a day and protest against the Shah's visit. Because – as radical student activist Rudi Dutschke said – fighting against oppression in Iran is also a fight against the war in Vietnam.

No Worries

Among the five thousand students at the panel discussion inside the Audimax auditorium on the campus of the Free University was also Benno Ohnesorg, a 26-year-old student of German and Romance languages and aspiring writer. Ohnesorg had only just married his girlfriend Christa six weeks before and the couple were expecting their first child. Like many students present, Benno Ohnesorg had read Bahman Nirumand's book and was galvanised by the man's speech at the panel discussion.

Benno Ohnesorg and Uwe Timm — Happier times: Benno Ohnesorg and his friend Uwe Timm in Hannover.

Benno Ohnesorg was politically interested, a pacifist and member of the Lutheran student church. He had only attended a single protest in favour of education reform before. However, Nirumand's speech persuaded Ohnesorg to take part in the protests planned for the following day. His wife Christa was worried, because there were reports about increasing police brutality during political protests. Ohnesorg (whose surname means "without worries" in German), however, dispelled her fears. It certainly wouldn't be that bad. And so the young couple agreed to attend the protest.

Shah and Heinrich Albertz in We — Shah Mohammad Rez Pahlavi and West Berlin mayor Heinrich Albertz walk past a parade of West Berlin police officers upon the Shah's arrival in West Berlin.

Cheering Persians

However, the students of the Free University of Berlin were not the only ones planning a rally on the occasion of the Shah’s visit to West Berlin. A pro-Shah group of Iranian expats filed for permission to hold a rally outside the Schöneberger Rathaus, where the Shah and his wife were due to sign West Berlin’s official visitor book. This group was remarkably well organised and bussed in some 150 Shah supporters, many of them young men in dark suits. They were carrying placards and portraits of the Shah attached to wooden sticks. It later turned out that these Shah supporters were not regular Iranian expats at all, but members of the Iranian secret police SAVAK who had been explicitly flown in. Others had been paid to attend the rally and cheer for the Shah. The press has since called them "Jubelperser", i.e. cheering Persians.

Meanwhile, the student protesters were also congregating outside the Schöneberger Rathaus, on the very same spot where John F. Kennedy held his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech almost four years ago. Several of the students wore paper bags with stylised portraits of the Shah and Farah Diba over their heads. Also present were many overwhelmingly elderly Berliner housewives hoping to catch a glimpse of the tabloid empress Farah Diba.

Elderly ladies and student protesters — Elderly ladies hope to catch a glimpse of Farah Diba outside the Schöneberger Rathaus, while student protesters unroll a banner criticising the torture of political prisoners in Iran.

Student protesters 1967 — Student protesters stage a sit-in outside the Schöneberger Rathaus, wearing paperbags with stylised portraits of the Shah and Farah Diba over their heads.

The key to managing protests by rival groups is to keep protesters and counter-protesters separated to prevent clashes. The West Berlin police completely failed in this, even though they had orders to keep Shah supporters and anti-Shah protesters apart. Furthermore, the West Berlin police were on edge, because there had been rumours about a planned attempt on the Shah's life as well as the Kommune 1 threatening to pee on the Shah. And so the John-F-Kennedy-Platz in front of the Schöneberger Rathaus quickly descended into scenes of pandemonium.

Student protesters and housewives — Students protesters and spectators mingle outside the Schöneberger Rathaus.

When the Shah and his wife arrived, the cheering Persians did what they had been hired to do and cheered on the Shah. The student protesters countered by chanting "Murderer, Murderer", while the elderly housewives still hoped to catch a glimpse of Farah Diba. So far, it was still a normal, if lively and noisy protest.

Cheering Persians versus student protesters — The cheering Persians begin to clash with the student protesters.

But then, the Shah supporters tore the placards from the wooden sticks, broke through the police lines and started beating up the student protesters, seriously injuring many protesters and even bystanders, while the West Berlin police stood by and did… absolutely nothing. The only people arrested were five student protesters. None of the cheering Persians were arrested. There even are reports that some police officers cheered on the battering Persians and started beating up students themselves.

Cheering Persians attack protesters — The cheering Persians show their true face and attack students protesters with wooden sticks.

Cheering Persians and student protesters clash — The cheering Persians attack the student protesters outside the Schöneberger Rathaus.

Up to this point, I had been fairly neutral about the Shah of Iran and his visit to West Germany. Make no mistake, the Shah is a dictator, but there are many terrible regimes and dictators in the world and when they chance to visit West Germany, they have to be treated like any other head of state. However, when a foreign politician visits West Germany, they also have to accept that we have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly here and that yes, there might be angry protesters chanting unpleasant things.

West Berlin traffic cop escorts elderly lady to safety — A West Berlin traffic cop escorts an elderly lady who was injured during the riot outside the Schöneberger Rathaus to safety.

But once I saw footage from the riot outside the Schöneberger Rathaus and heard reports from a friend who was there, I found myself seething with rage at the Shah and his cheering Persians. For while no one in West Germany can stop the Shah and his secret police from beating up protesters in Iran, they have no right to beat up protesters here in West Germany. The West Berlin police should have arrested those cheering and battering Persians and put them on the next plane back to Iran. And they should have sent the bloody Shah and his wife back as well, since royalty or not, even a Shah can't just flaunt our laws.

But things got even worse…

Fox Hunting Outside the Deutsche Oper

That evening, the Shah and his wife were due to attend a performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute at the Deutsche Oper opera house together with West German president Heinrich Lübke and West Berlin mayor Heinrich Albertz. Given Lübke's nigh legendary lack of education, I would almost have felt sorry for the Shah and Farah Diba for having to endure such a stupid man, if not for the terrible scenes in front of the Schöneberger Rathaus.

Shah and Farah Diba in Schloss Charlottenburg — The Shah and Farah Diba at a reception of the West Berlin mayor in Schloss Charlottenburg

Shah, Farah Diba, Lübke and Albertz inside the Deutsche Oper — The Shah, Farah Diba, West German President Heinrich Lübke and his wife as well as West Berlin mayor Heinrich Albertz enjoy a performance of "The Magic Flute" at the Deutsche Oper, while all hell breaks lose outside.

The student protesters congregated outside the Deutsche Oper, among them Benno Ohnesorg and his wife Christa. The West Berlin police were also there in force to cordon off the area in front of the opera house, so the honoured guests could enter without being troubled by chanting students. Shortly before the Shah himself appeared, the cheering Persians arrived at the opera house in two rented busses, once again remarkably well organised for an expat group that had only been founded one day before.

Student protesters outside the Deutsche Oper — Student protesters behind a police barrier outside the Deutsche Oper

The student protesters chanted slogans and some of them threw eggs and tomatoes taken from a van parked at the curb as well as rubber rings "borrowed" from a building site onto the road outside the opera house, though none of the missiles even came close to hitting the Shah or any of the other opera guests. The cheering Persians started a counter chant, as the Shah and his wife entered the opera.

Police and student protesters — Student protesters argue with the West Berlin police outside the Deutsche Oper

This time around, the West Berlin police did not just stand by and do nothing, but actively grabbed individual student protesters, alleged ringleaders, from the crowd to beat them up on the street, a tactic that the West Berlin police had also employed during previous protests. Infuriated, some students started hurling stones from a nearby building site at the police. A police officer received a cut to the scalp, which bled heavily.

Police officers carry off a student protester — West Berlin police officers carry off a student protester outside the Deutsche Oper.

West Berlin police beats up protester — West Berlin police officers beat up a student protesters on the Bismarckstraße in front of the Deutsche Oper.

Once the Shah was inside the opera house, many of the students prepared to go home, since the performance would take three hours and few wanted to wait so long for the Shah to emerge. Among the students heading home was also the five months pregnant Christa Ohnesorg, who was appalled by the violence and feared for her safety and that of her unborn child. Her husband Benno stayed behind. It was the last time Christa would see him.

Around this time, rumours spread that a police officer had been stabbed by a protester. This rumour was false, but nonetheless all hell broke loose, as the police decided they would go "hunting foxes" as they put it.

Student falls over barricade while trying to flee — A student falls over a barricade, while trying to flee the aggressive West Berlin police.

Student in chokehold — West Berlin police officers arrest a student protester outside the Deutsche Oper, holding him in a choke hold.

The police officers surrounded the students and began indiscriminately beating up the protesters with the cheering Persians joining in. Hereby, the West Berlin police did not care whether the students were ringleaders or bystanders, male or female, whether they were aggressive or cowering in fear. They beat everybody they could get their hands on with their truncheons. Even passers-by who had not been part of the protest at all were attacked, when they tried to help injured or fallen students or simply if they got in the way of the police officers. Not even nurses and paramedics trying to help the wounded were safe from attack. Meanwhile, protesters who were taken to hospital often found themselves subjected to further abuse, particularly young women, who were called "sluts" for daring to wear short skirts, the mini-skirt apparently still being a new and shocking thing in the isolated enclave of West Berlin.

Bleeding student — A bleeding young woman who was injured during the protest.

Pollice officer escorts bleeding woman — A police officer escorts a bleeding young woman, whether to jail or hospital is unknown.

Erich Duensing, a former officer in Hitler's general staff who is now chief of the West Berlin police, cynically described the actions of his officers as "liverwurst tactic" – puncture it in the middle and the contents will be squeezed out on the sides. Cynical as it is, this is also an accurate description of what happened. Horrified by the violence, the student protesters ran away and the police gave chase, beating anybody they could grab hold off.

Erich Duensing and Ernst Reuter — Erich Duensing, former Nazi officer turned chief of the West Berlin police, with former mayor Ernst Reuter.

A Shot in the Night

Among the students who ran away was also Benno Ohnesorg. Together with other students, Benno Ohnesorg found himself driven into a narrow street opposite the opera house called Krumme Straße (Crooked Street). He witnessed police officers grabbing a student and carrying him off into a backyard just off the Krumme Straße, beating him all the way. Together with other students, Benno Ohnesorg followed in order to help or at least try to persuade the police to leave the student alone.

Police officers beat up student protesters — Police officers beat up fleeing students.

One of the reporters on site noticed the group of students following the police officers into the backyard and informed other police officers – whether maliciously or out of genuine concern for everybody's safety is not clear. At any rate, the police cordoned off the backyard, trapping the students, including Benno Ohnesorg. Then they began beating up their prey. Nine-year-old Hansi B., who witnessed the entire scene from his bedroom window, later reported that it was like a real life game of cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians.

According to eye witness reports, Benno Ohnesorg hung back and did not attack or provoke the police officers. He then attempted to flee, but was held back and beaten up by the West Berlin police. Benno Ohnesorg raised his hands and on a tape recorded by the radio station Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk SWR, someone – likely Ohnesorg himself – can be heard saying, "Please don't shoot." Then, around half past eight, a shot rang out in the Berlin evening, and Benno Ohnesorg collapsed onto the pavement of the backyard off the Krumme Straße. The young witness Hansi B. said that only when "the man in the red shirt" did not get up again, did he realise that what he'd just witnessed from his bedroom window was not a game of cops and robbers at all, but deadly serious.

On the SWR tape, the voice of a police officer can be heard shouting "Are you crazy shooting in here?" "It just went off," another voice answered. This voice, as we now know, belongs to Karl-Heinz K., a 39-year-old plainclothes officer of the West Berlin police. "Go to the back. Quickly," the first voice ordered.

While the police officers were arguing, Friederike Dollinger, a 22-year-old student of history and Latin, bent over the fatally injured Benno Ohnesorg, put her handbag under his bleeding head and yelled at the police officers to call an ambulance, a scene that was caught on camera by photographer Jürgen Henschel.

22-year-old student Friederike Dollinger holds the dying Benno Ohnesorg in her arms.

Police officers stand around Benno Ohnesorg — West Berlin police officers, among them shooter Karl-Heinz K., stand around the dying Benno Ohnesorg and refuse to help.

Police officer and nurse load Benno Ohnesorg into an ambulance — A police officer and a nurse carry the fatally wounded Benno Ohnesorg into an ambulance. The nurse was beaten up for her attempts to give Benno Ohnesorg first aid.

The police officers refused to call an ambulance and even attacked a nurse and a medical student, who attempted to give first aid to Benno Ohnesorg. And so it took twenty minutes after the fatal shot, until an ambulance finally arrived to take Benno Ohnesorg to hospital. And because two nearby hospitals were already filled to capacity with injured protesters, it took forty-five minutes until Benno Ohnesorg finally arrived at the Moabit hospital. By that time, he was dead.

Lies and Cover-ups

The death certificate of Benno Ohnesorg lists a basal skull fracture, sustained as he fell to the pavement, as the cause of death. However, a post-mortem carried out the following day revealed a bullet wound in the back of Benno Ohnesorg's head, fired at a distance of approximately one and a half meters. During the post-mortem, it was also discovered that a part of Benno Ohnesorg's skull, the part with the bullet hole, had gone missing during the night, most likely to cover up the true cause of death, though the bullet itself was still stuck inside Ohnesorg's brain.

Meanwhile, police officer Karl-Heinz K. came up with a new explanation for why he shot an unarmed man in the head every other hour. Initially, Karl-Heinz K. claimed that he had fired a single warning shot, then it was two warning shots, then one warning shot and a second shot, which accidentally went off. Finally, Karl-Heinz K. claimed that several students were threatening him with knives, whereupon he drew his gun, fired and hit Ohnesorg. However, according to Hansi B., probably the closest thing to a neutral witness in this case, there were no students armed with knives. Instead, "the man in the suit [Karl-Heinz K.] drew a pistol and shot the man in the red shirt [Ohnesorg]".

The West Berlin police, aided and abetted by the West Berlin senate and the tabloid press, tried to portray Benno Ohnesorg as a ringleader and aggressive radical, who brought his fate upon himself. Once again, this is demonstrably wrong, since everybody who knew Ohnesorg described him as a quiet pacifist, politically interested but not a radical. And even if you don't want to believe the people who actually knew Ohnesorg, the fact that he was shot in the back of the head belies claims that he threatened Karl-Heinz K.

Students in West Berlin and all of West Germany were understandably furious both at the police violence and at what many of them consider a political murder. Protests and solidarity marches were held in many West German cities, except for West Berlin itself, where the police and the courts banned all public protests. They also tried to ban meetings and protests on the campus of the Free University, but once again the chancellor and several deans refused, citing the fact that freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are guaranteed rights in the West German constitution.

Student protest in Muncih following the death of Benno Ohnesorg — Students in Munich protest the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg.

A Dark Day

June 2, 1967 was a dark day for the Federal Republic of West Germany. Not only were peaceful protesters beaten and attacked by the very police force supposed to protect them, but the secret police of a foreign country was also allowed to run riot in the streets of a West German city. Even worse, a 26-year-old young man, an aspiring writer and teacher, a new husband and father-to-be, senselessly lost his life.

There are fears that the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg will further radicalise the student movement. These fears are not without justification. Because more and more students realise that their protests are not only ignored, but met with violence. So far, those who call for more radical actions are fringe elements, like the Kommune 1. But their numbers might well grow.

Furthermore, West Germany needs to rethink its relationship with dictators like the Shah of Iran. Because right now, even the worst dictator is welcomed with open arms, as long as they are not communist and have something to sell that West Germany wants or needs, oil in the case of Iran. Foreign heads of state must also accept that when they visit West Germany, they are bound by our laws and cannot just have protests banned or have their own secret police beat up West German citizens in the streets of a West German city.

We also need to tackle the problem of former Nazis in positions of authority in West Germany more than twenty years after the end of the Third Reich. It is well known that the West Berlin police force, probably the most militarised in the country, consists to more than fifty percent of former Wehrmacht members and officers who already served during the Third Reich. And the fact that many of the student protesters reported that police officers hurled not just anti-communist but antisemitic slurs at them shows that these leopards have not changed their spots.

Moreover, we need to discuss the role of the tabloid press, particularly the newspapers and magazines published by the conservative Axel Springer Verlag, in both fawning over the Shah and his wife and demonising the student protesters as Communists, terrorists or worse.

Finally, the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg must be investigated thoroughly and without bias and police officer Karl-Heinz K. must stand trial for shooting an unarmed man in the head. Because only justice for Benno Ohnesorg will calm the enraged Left in West Germany.

Students in Muncih place a wreath at the monument for the victims of the Nazis — Students in Munich place a wreath for Benno Ohnesorg as well as a banner calling him a victim of police terror at the official monument for the victims of the Nazi terror.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[May 26, 1967] Flames over Brussels: The À l'Innovation Department Store Fire

May 26, 2022 Cora Buhlert 5 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

Comic Shopping in Brussels

Regular readers of the Journey may remember that I occasionally visit Belgium, particularly the beautiful cities of Antwerp and Brussels, on business. Whenever I'm in Brussels, I try to find the time for a stroll along the Rue Neuve/Nieuwe Straat, the city's main shopping street and home to trendy boutiques, elegant movie palaces and luxurious department stores.

Rue Neuve, Brussels — The Rue Neuve a.k.a. Nieuwe Straat in Brussels, looking towards Place de la Monnaie a.k.a. Muntplein.

The foremost of the department stores along the Rue Neuve and also the most beautiful is À l'Innovation (For Innovation), "Inno" for short. Built in 1897 by the famous architect Victor Horta, the À l'Innovation store is a stunning Art Noveau building with a glass-covered façade. Inside, the various departments are arranged around an open atrium that is crisscrossed by walkways and topped by a skylight.

The À l'Innovation department store on Rue Neuve in Brussels shortly after its opening in 1897.

Interior of À l'Innovation store in Brussels — The atrium of the À l'Innovation department store in Brussels with skylight.

A l'Innovation atrium — A more recent photo of the atrium of the À l'Innovation department store.

The last time I was in Brussel in April, I stopped at the Standaard Boekhandel book shop directly across the street from À l'Innovation to pick up the latest comics. The venerable weekly comics magazine Tintin has launched a slew of new strips to keep up with the competition of Spirou and particularly the French comics magazine Pilote. Several of the new series are promising such as Bruno Brazil, a James Bond inspired spy adventure by Greg a.k.a. Michel Régnier with artwork by William Vance a.k.a. William van Cutsem, Howard Flynn, a Horatio Hornblower style naval adventure set in the 18th century by Yves Duval and William Vance, and Bernard Prince by Greg and Hermann a.k.a. Hermann Huppen, which combines spy and sea adventures. Tintin even has a new science fiction comic called Luc Orient, also written by Greg with artwork by Eddy Paape, which seems to be inspired by the Flash Gordon comics of the 1930s.

A selection of TinTin issues — A selection of recent issues of Tintin.

After I bought the comics, I headed across the street to À l'Innovation for a stop at the marble-tiled bathrooms. Then I went to the top floor restaurant to flip through my new purchases under the Victor Horta designed skylight, while enjoying a remarkably good meal for a department store restaurant. Little did I know that this would be the last time I'd ever see this store.

Inno neon sign — The neon sign on the expansion of the À i'Innovation store, "Inno" for short.

Smoke over Brussels

For when I switched on the evening news on May 22, I was greeted by footage of the rooftops of Brussels engulfed in smoke. A massive fire had broken out around lunchtime at the À l'Innovation store and completely gutted not only the beautiful Victor Horta building, but the neighbouring Priba supermarket and the entire city block as well. The final death toll is not yet known, as firefighters are still combing through the wreckage and many victims are still fighting for their lives in Brussels hospitals, but more than three hundred are feared dead.

In the end, the beautiful Art Noveau architecture, which I had always admired so much, was what doomed the building and the more than three hundred souls who perished. The polished wooden floors and wall panelling not to mention the merchandise, much of which was flammable, burned like tinder, while the stunning atrium acted like a chimney and fanned the flames. And since the building was seventy years old, it was not equipped with modern fire-suppression measures like a sprinkler system. There were fire extinguishers, of course, and standpipes, but the standpipes did not function and the fire extinguishers were not sufficient to stop the fire. And so the grand staircase with its ornate banisters, which I had walked up and down so often, was engulfed in thick black smoke within minutes, making escape impossible for those on the upper floors.

Burning A l'Innovation department store — The burning À l'Innovation store, seen from the Rue de Pont Neuve.

A l'Innovation fire — The blazing À l'Innovation store and the firefighters, viewed from the upper floors of a building across the street.

The Brussels fire brigade was quickly on site and more than 150 firefighters risked their lives to fight the flames and rescue those trapped inside the burning building. However, there were many challenges such as the non-functioning standpipes or the fact that the Rue Neuve is a narrow street, which makes manoeuvring difficult for large fire trucks, particularly the ladder trucks that were so vital to saving those trapped on the upper floors.

Fire fighter at the a L'innovation store — Firefighters attacking the blaze inside the Inno department store.

Fire fighters on the facade of the burning A l'Innovation store — Two firefighters walk along a ledge outside the burning À l'Innovation store.

Fire fighters fighting the Inno department store fire. — Brussels firefighters tackling the blaze inside the À l'Innovation store.

À l'Innovation ground floor in flames — The blazing ground floor of the À l'Innovation store seen from the relative safety of a shop across the road.

Scenes of Horror

Eye witnesses describe horrifying scenes. People burst out of the exits with clothes and hair on fire, molten synthetic fabric fused with their skin. A woman who had been shopping with her young daughter grabbed the girl's hand and ran for the exit. She managed to escape, but once she stumbled onto the Rue Neuve, she turned around and realised that the child whose hand she was clutching was not her daughter at all.

Children being rescued from the À l'Innovation fire — Young children are evacuated from the in-store nursery of the À l'Innovation department store.

The most terrible scenes, however, happened on the upper floors, where hundreds of shoppers and staff were trapped by fire and smoke, unable to escape. In desperation, people broke the window panes of the glass façade on their quest to flee the flames. Many were rescued by firefighters with ladders, but others fell or jumped to their deaths, including a woman and her three young children. A few lucky souls managed to make it to the roof of the store and scrambled to the safety of neighbouring buildings, from where they could be rescued.

People waiting for rescue on the roof of À l'Innovation — People waiting for rescue on the upper floors of À l'Innovation.

People climbing onto the roof of À l'Innovation — People scrambled to safety onto the roof of the burning À l'Innovation store.

Fire fighters evacuating people from the burning À l'Innovation store — Firefighters evacuate people trapped on the upper floors of the blazing Inno store.

Firefighters rescue elderly woman — Firefighters escort an elderly lady to safety.

In spite of the best efforts of the Brussels fire brigade, the blaze also spread to the neighbouring shops, which had to be evacuated as well. Robert Dehon, a clerk at the Priba supermarket next to Inno helped survivors to safety and only narrowly escaped himself, when the fire reached the supermarket. Meanwhile, the staff of a furrier's shop desperately tried to save their merchandise from the flames, throwing expensive fur coats from the upper floors to the Rue Neuve below, into the waiting arms of fire fighters and civilian helpers.

Woman dangling from window of the À l'Innovation store — A man holds on to a young woman who is precariously dangling from a ledge.

Woman hanging from wire. — A woman is hanging from a wire, which some of the people trapped inside the burning store used to escape the inferno.

Man on wire — A man sliding down a wire to escape the fire, while an injured woman is carried to safety.

Woman with handbag jumps — A man is holding on to a wire, while a woman jumps from a window of the burning building. She survived and is now being treated in a Brussels hospital for a broken leg.

Because the fire broke out around lunchtime, the top floor restaurant under the glass skylight was bustling with shoppers and diners. The fire alarm was not heard by many people in the busy restaurant or they were reluctant to leave the food and drink they had paid for behind. And by the time the smoke and fire reached the restaurant it was too late for most. In fact, it was here – in the very restaurant where I had lunch while flipping through the latest comics barely a month ago – that many of the victims died.

Firefighters rescue injured people from the burning Inno store — Firefighters rescue injured people from the upper floors of the burning Inno store.

Remains of the Inno restaurant — The remains of the À l'Innovation restaurant, viewed from the Rue de la Roses. This part of the building completely collapsed.

Protests and Sparks

So far, it is not certain what caused the fire. In fact, is not even certain, where it started. There are conflicting reports by survivors and since the building was completely gutted, fire investigators have difficulties locating the exact ignition source. Most survivors agree that the fire was first spotted in the children's department on the first floor, though some also claim that it started in the camping department on the third floor and that exploding butane gas cylinders fuelled the flames. Yet others report that the fire started in the kitchen of the top floor restaurant

À l'Innovation steel frame facade — After the fire, only the steel frame of the Victor Horta facade is left standing.

Inno courtyard after the fire — A look up at the burned out atrium of the À l'Innovation store.

Gutted interior of A l'Innovation — The entire interior of the store was gutten by fire.

Burned out Inno store — A look down Rue Neuve at the burned out Inno store. To the left, you can see the Priba supermarket, which also was destroyed.

Burned out Pribe supermarket — Inside the burned out offices of the Priba supermarket.

Staircase to nowhere — In the ruins of the À l'Innovation store, a staircase leads to nowhere.

But no matter where exactly the fire started, a very dark picture is beginning to emerge regarding its cause. For though the Brussels police and fire brigade are investigating all possibilities, including a gas leak, an overheated light bulb or faulty wiring in the old building, there is a good chance that this devastating fire that cost the lives of more than three hundred people was due to arson.

In early May, À l'Innovation launched a special promotion called "US Parade", where American products such as jeans, barbecue equipment and toys were offered for sale. Such promotions are nothing unusual, many European department stores run them to showcase products from a specific country. They are also popular with shoppers, because it is a chance to purchase international products that you cannot normally get.

US Parade decoration at Inno department store — Firefighters enter the burning À l'Innovation department store. The stars and stripes decoration for the "US Parade" promotion which so incensed the protesters is clearly visible.

Stars and stripes burning — The stars and stripes decoration in the display windows of the À l'Innovation store on fire.

However, the US is not exactly popular in Europe at the moment due to the ongoing war in Vietnam. As a result, some people viewed a promotion campaign called "US Parade" not as an exciting shopping opportunity but as a provocation. And so anti-war protesters took to picketing the store and distributing pamphlets. Why those protesters felt that picketing a department store selling American goods would be more effective than protesting outside the US Embassy only four Metro stations away is a question only they can answer.

The overwhelming majority of those anti-war protesters were peaceful, if noisy. And indeed, most of the young protesters were horrified at the scenes unfolding before them, as the store went up in flames. Some protesters had firecrackers, which according to Inno staff members kept going off on the Rue Neuve outside and sometimes even inside the store. In fact, a surviving sales clerk later reported that she had become so used to the cries of protesters and the sound of firecrackers in the street that she initially mistook the cries for help and the crackling of the fire for yet more firecrackers and yelling protesters.

Burning mannequins and collapsed letters spelling out "US" inside the À l'Innovation store

As everybody should know, firecrackers need to be handled carefully and kept away from flammable materials. Did one of the protesters enter the store, ignite a firecracker and accidentally set the building ablaze? Or – worse – did someone deliberately set the fire inside the store? At any rate, survivors report seeing a man inside the store crying, "I'm giving my life for Vietnam," when the fire broke out. Furthermore, store manager Willy Bernheim reported that À l'Innovation had been receiving bomb threats.

As someone who opposes to the Vietnam war, I agree with the message of the protesters, if not their methods, since harassing shoppers and department store employees will certainly not stop the war in Vietnam. Therefore, I was horrified when I first heard about speculations that the fire my have been due to arson.

"Surely it was an accident," I thought, "An idiot playing with firecrackers, who intended to cause a small nuisance and had no idea what he or she wrought. Surely nobody dedicated to peace would deliberately burn down a building filled with hundreds of people."

And then I saw the latest pamphlets published by the Kommune 1…

The Kommune 1 and Their Shocking Lack of Empathy

The Kommune 1 is a group of leftist activists who believe that the nuclear family is the root of fascism and therefore want to experiment with alternative forms of communal living. This group–eight young men and women, as well as two of their children–moved together into an apartment in West Berlin earlier this year.

This experiment in alternative living was political from the start and so the Kommune 1 quickly became notable for their creative but also extreme protests such as scaling the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church to throw pamphlets and Mao Bibles onto the street below or the plan to hurl pudding at US Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey during his visit to West Berlin last month, which brought them to the attention of the police.

Rainer Langhans being arrested — Kommune 1 member Rainer Langhans is arrested by the West Berlin police, following the foiled plot to throw pudding at US Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey

The members of the Kommune 1 claim to have been in contact with the organisers of the protests in Brussels, a Maoist group named "Action for Peace and Friendship between Nations", and their spokesperson Maurice L. And so a pamphlet published by the Kommune 1 two days after the fire quoted Maurice L. who admitted not only to organising the protests, but also to setting off firecrackers inside the store to "accustom the staff to explosions and screams" and sending bomb threats to the store management to gauge police response. In fact, the pamphlet implies that the fire was no tragic accident, but a meticulously planned attack.

All this is very disturbing, but even more disturbing is the reaction of the authors of the pamphlet (credited to Dagrun Enzensberger, former wife of writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger and mother of a nine-year-old daughter, and her former brother-in-law Ulrich Enzensberger) who fail to show any empathy at all for the more than three hundred victims of the fire. Instead, the pamphlet proudly notes that the effect of the "great happening", which is how they refer to the protest, exceeded expectations.

The next pamphlet, published on the same day, was even worse. Herein, the Kommune 1 explicitly cheers about the deaths of more than three hundred people (referred to as "overfed bourgeois consumers"), because "a burning department store with burning people will provide – for the first time in a European metropolis – that prickling Vietnam sensation (being there and burning) that we in Berlin are still missing."

To say I was disgusted is putting it mildly. In fact, the members of the Kommune 1 should count themselves lucky that I only received the pamphlets in the mail from a friend who lives in West Berlin (and was just as horrified by their content as I was), because otherwise I might well have rung the doorbell of the apartment on the corner of Stuttgarter Platz and Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße and punched whomever opened the door in the face.

Kommune 1 at home — At home with the Kommune 1. Hard to imagine that these people can cuddle their own children, while cheering the deaths of other young children in Brussels.

But it gets even worse, because the Kommune 1 did not stop at cheering about the deaths of more than three hundred people, they apparently enjoyed the horrifying TV footage of the fire so much that their next two pamphlets explicitly call for setting department stores in West Berlin on fire or maybe blowing up a military base or causing the collapse of a stand in a sports stadium filled with spectators. There were also threats against the Shah of Persia, who will be visiting West Germany in early June.

Now I have sympathy for the frustration felt by anti-war protesters that their peaceful protests seem to have little impact, though more and more people around the world are turning against the war in Vietnam. However, violence is not the answer, let alone violence on such a horrifying scale as what happened in Brussels. And calling for violence, even if meant satirically, as the Kommune 1 claimed once the West Berlin police knocked on their door, is utterly despicable, especially since someone might take those calls seriously and cause the next large-scale fire.

Let's be clear, so far no one truly knows what happened at À l'Innovation and what caused the fire. It's quite possible that the mysterious Maurice L. is blowing hot air or that he is merely a figment of the Kommune 1's imagination.

However, no decent human being, let alone someone who considers themselves on the left or anti-war, should ever cheer about the deaths of others. And make no mistake, the more than three hundred people who died at the À l'Innovation were innocents. They were people who were at work or shopping or having lunch. Many of them may well have been opposed to the war in Vietnam themselves. Several of the dead were young children, about the same age as the daughter of Dagrun Enzensberger, or even younger.

This whole thing is utterly disgusting and I do hope that the broader Left will make it very clear to groups like the Kommune 1 or the ironically named "Action for Peace and Friendship between Nations" that such behaviour is neither acceptable nor welcome. I also hope that if the À l'Innovation fire was indeed due to arson, the perpetrators will be caught and brought to justice soon.

Twisted wreckage — Twisted steel beams after the À l'Innovation fire.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 16, 1967] A Matter of Life and Death (Why Call Them Back From Heaven? by Clifford D. Simak; Tarnsman of Gor, by John Norman)

March 16, 2022 Victoria Silverwolf 2 Comments

[Two VERY different books for you today on the Galactoscope…]

by Victoria Silverwolf

Wonder Stories From Wisconsin

Science fiction readers hardly need an introduction to the works of Clifford D. Simak. Born in Wisconsin in 1904, and working for the Minneapolis Star newspaper since 1939, he published his first story, The World of the Red Sun, in Wonder Stories in 1931.

Getting your name on the cover with your first story is quite an achievement. Art by Frank R. Paul.

His best known work may be City (1952), a book consisting of eight linked stories. It won the International Fantasy Award that year.

Cover art for the first edition by Frank Kelly Freas. There have been many other editions since.

He also won the Hugo Award for Best Novel with Way Station (1963), serialized in two parts in Galaxy as Here Gather the Stars.
(The Noble Editor gave the serialized version a mediocre three star rating. I read the book version and loved it. Chacun son goût!)

Cover art by Ronald Fratell.

Simak has a reputation as a gentle, humane pastoralist. His stories often celebrate nature and the outdoors, particularly the wilds of Wisconsin, and show compassion for all living beings. His latest novel displays this side of his character, to be sure, but it also has a darker, pessimistic mood that may not be as familiar to his readers.

Here's the author with his Hugo, looking just as friendly and optimistic as you'd expect.

Cold War

Cover art by Robert Webster.

In the year 2148, society is dominated by the Forever Center, a private company whose headquarters are located in a mile-high skyscraper. Their function is to store the frozen bodies of the recently deceased, in order to revive them into young, healthy, nearly immortal bodies in the near future. The catch is that they haven't quite figured out how to do this yet.

(If this reminds you of a proposal made by R. C. W. Ettinger, and discussed in a few issues of Worlds of Tomorrow, go to the head of the class. Simak explicitly mentions Ettinger in the novel.)

R. C. W. Ettinger. He also published a couple of science fiction stories some years ago.

In the real world, freezing people in the hope of reviving them has already begun. James Hiram Bedford, a professor of psychology, died on January 12 this year. His body was immediately chilled far below zero and placed in storage.

Bedford's body is injected with dimethyl sulfoxide, as part of the preservation process.

Nobody yet has the slightest clue about how to bring people like Bedford back to life. Besides that little technical problem, there's also the dilemma of where to put all these people when they're thawed out, if this process ever gets under way big time. Simak addresses that very issue.

The novel says there are about one hundred and fifty billion frozen corpses by the middle of the 22nd century, and a world population of one hundred billion! That seems very hard to believe, but it's a minor quibble. Simak tell us that food is provided through some kind of matter transformation rather than farming, so maybe that explains, to some extent, the gigantic population.

Humanity has achieved interstellar travel, but has not yet found livable planets for the huge number of expected revived folks. One possibility is terraforming these hostile worlds, but obviously that's going to be very difficult.

Another strategy, even more implausible, is to invent time travel, and send these people back millions of years into the remote past. The brilliant mathematician who is working on this problem vanishes, providing an important subplot.

The third suggested method, and the only one that seems remotely possible to me, is to cover the Earth with gigantic buildings, each one the size of a city.

Do you get the feeling that the Forever Center didn't really think things out too well? I believe that's part of Simak's satiric point, that the practicalities of freezing and resurrecting the dead have escaped those who are promoting it.

Despite these difficulties, the Forever Center virtually rules the world. People avoid risks and minimize spending, in order to have some wealth in their new life. Most people have transmitters near their hearts, so that when they die, rescue teams rush to carry their bodies into cold storage. Some people even choose to die, rather than wait for the Grim Reaper, in order to save money and make sure they're frozen safely.

The only folks who object to the Forever Center are the so-called Holies, who believe that humanity is giving up the hope of spiritual immortality for the promise of physical resurrection. The Holies are the ones who provide the book's title, writing that phrase on walls as a protest slogan.

A Man Alone

The protagonist is Daniel Frost. (An appropriate name!) He works in the public relations department of the Forever Center. A shady part of his job, which is not even known by his boss, is to exert a subtle form of censorship on the media. Anything that might make the company look bad is suppressed.

By sheer accident, Frost obtains a document that exposes corruption within the Forever Center. He doesn't even know what the document means, but it makes him the target of the company's head of security. Frost is knocked out and dragged into a kangaroo court, where he is convicted of treason to humanity, and given the second most dreaded punishment in the world.

(The worst punishment is to have your right to freezing and resurrection taken away. This happens to one of the novel's secondary characters, just because a mechanical breakdown of his vehicle prevented him from taking a dead person to the storage facility in time. His lawyer, who unsuccessfully tried to defend him against the judgement of a computer jury, becomes the protagonist's ally. She also serves as the love interest. Fortunately, Simak handles the romantic subplot in a more mature fashion than some writers.)

Frost is ostracized. Three circles are tattooed on his face, to warn people that they are not to have any relationship with him at all. (This is what gives the book its rather abstract cover image.) He is doomed to scavenge what food he can from garbage cans, and find shelter in ruined buildings.

(This part of the novel reminds me of Robert Silverberg's excellent story To See the Invisible Man, from the first issue of Worlds of Tomorrow.)

This portion of the book reads like one of Keith Laumer's more serious action/adventure/chase novels. Frost eventually winds up at a farm, now abandoned, where he vacationed as a boy. In what struck me as a wild coincidence, the missing mathematician — remember her? — happens to be there as well. She reveals a discovery that changes everything.

Although there's a happy ending for the main characters, with the good guys winning and love blooming, the book ends on a somber note. A fervently religious hermit provides the novel's last lines, and they aren't very hopeful.

The main plot is interrupted by chapters dealing with minor, often unnamed characters. These provide the reader with more details about this future world, and how the people in it react to the promise of physical immortality. There's a priest who has a crisis of faith, because he's chosen to be frozen and revived. There's an author who's written a carefully researched book exposing the Forever Center, but who can't get it published.

In addition to a traditional suspense plot, Simak provides philosophical musings about death and immortality. Although he's clearly on the side of the Holies, he avoids making things black and white.

I could quibble that parts of the story are implausible. (In a world with such a huge population, there are still tracts of unspoiled wilderness.) Some science fiction themes seem out of place. (The mathematician gets her inspiration from ancient alien records.) Overall, however, it's a thoughtful and serious book, well worth reading and pondering.

Why Call them Back from Heaven gets four stars.

by Cora Buhlert

A Ponderous Professor Among the Barbarians: Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman

During my last visit to my trusty local import bookstore, the trusty paperback spinner rack yielded a book that looked promising. I had never heard of John Norman nor did I have any idea what a Tarnsman is or where Gor is, but the blurb on the back promised an Edgar Rice Burroughs style adventure on an unknown planet.

I took the book home and eagerly cracked it open, only to find myself faced with a lengthy and very dull opening in which our narrator, one Tarl Cabot, holds forth about the origins of his name (from the Italian, though his family hails from Bristol), his family history (father vanished, mother dead), his education (Oxford, naturally) and his position as a professor of English history. The diction and plodding pacing are more reminiscent of justly forgotten Victorian novels than of a thrilling adventure tale.

Frustrated by the demanding duties of a college professor such as grading term papers, Cabot goes camping and finds a glowing envelope with his name on it on the ground. Inside, Cabot finds a signet ring as well as a letter from his missing father. Shortly, thereafter a spaceship arrives and whisks Cabot away to the planet Gor, which shares the orbit of Earth but sits on the opposite side of the sun, rendering it indetectable. The similarities to Mondas from the Doctor Who serial "The Tenth Planet" are notable, but likely a case of both stories drawing on the same discredited cosmology.

Cabot learns all this from his estranged father, who seems genuinely touched to see his son, only to immediately begin lecturing him on the history and society of Gor, on the importance of Home Stones and on the all-powerful Priest-Kings who may be aliens or gods. Of course, neither Cabot nor we have seen anything of Gor yet, so we have no reason to care about Home Stones or Priest-Kings. The dialogue is stiff and unnatural and the lecture portions read like a particularly dull college textbook. John Norman is apparently the pen name of a professor of philosophy, which explains a lot.

Tarl Cabot spends the next few chapters learning about "the history and legends of Gor, its geography and economics, its social structures and customs, such as the caste system and clan groups, the right of placing the Home Stone, the Places of Sanctuary, when quarter is and is not permitted in war" and sadly, so must the reader. The one bit of all this lore that will be relevant later is that Gor has a rigid caste system and practices slavery. As a man of the Sixties, Cabot is horrified by both.

Slaves, Chains and Adventures

The story picks up when Cabot is initiated into the warrior caste and given a tarn – a giant bird of prey – to ride. Cabot is also given a mission, to steal the Home Stone of the rival city Ar. Unfortunately, this raid will also cost the lives of two women, the slave girl Sana and Talena, daughter of the warlord of Ar. Cabot is not happy with this either.

He frees Sana and returns her home, manfully resisting her offer of some very physical gratitude. Then Cabot flies off to steal the Home Stone of Ar. He manages to acquire the stone as well as an unwanted hostage in Talena, who clings to the saddle of his tarn in an attempt to save the stone. Talena succeeds and manages to hurl Cabot from the saddle. He is saved by an intelligent, talking giant spider in one of the few surprising twists of this tale.

Talena's triumph does not last long. The tarn dumps her and takes off, carrying the Home Stone of Ar with it, leaving Cabot to deal with Talena, who alternately needs to be rescued and tries to kill Cabot.

The story now settles into the pattern of capture, deathly peril and escape familiar to readers of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books and similar fare. With the Home Stone gone, the people of Ar turn on the warlord and want to execute his entire family, including Talena. So Cabot and Talena are stuck with each other now.

To avoid recognition, Cabot pretends to be a wandering warrior and passes off Talena as a new slave he has captured. They join a merchant caravan and prickly Talena becomes more submissive, as she falls for Cabot, who returns the feeling.

Compared to the barbarians of Gor, Cabot views himself as an enlightened man of the twentieth century. That said, his relationship with Talena and the focus on hoods, shackles, collars, leashes, whips and stripping her off her garments is unpleasantly reminiscent of the less savoury entertainment found in certain bars in Hamburg's famous redlight district St. Pauli. The phallic implications of the Goreans' favourite execution method impalement cannot be ignored either. Robert E. Howard's Conan, who actually is a barbarian, treats his female companions with far more respect than Tarl Cabot.

Night clubs on Große Freiheit in Hamburg's famous redlight district St. Pauli by night

Jungmühle Hamburg — Jungmühle's Hippdrome in St. Pauli, where you can ride horses and donkeys and camels and watch naked ladies wrestling in the mud.

St. Pauli by Day — St. Pauli's famous Reeperbahn is not quite as enticing by day, though these youths protesting the war in Vietnam in front of a topless bar are causing quite an uproar.

The novel ends, as such stories must, with Tarl Cabot uniting the warring cities of Gor. He rescues Talena from execution, marries her and finally does what has only been alluded to so far. Then… Cabot wakes up in New Hampshire again, even though there is no reason for this except that the same happened to John Carter.

Just Read Burroughs

The parallels to Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars are obvious. But even though A Princess of Mars is already more than fifty years old, it offers more adventure and entertainment than Tarnsman of Gor.

Once the story gets going, it's fun enough, though not up to the standards Burroughs, let alone Robert E. Howard or Leigh Brackett. But the entire first third of the book is devoted to endless lectures. Even in the later portions, Norman interrupts a scene where Cabot is about to be executed in some awful way by having him discuss philosophy at great length with the villain who just sentenced him to death. Maybe Cabot tries to escape by boring his executioners to death, but given how otherwise earnest this novel is, I seriously doubt it.

Rating this book is difficult. On the one hand, it is less ridiculous than Lin Carter's The Star Magicians. On the other hand, The Star Magicians was also highly entertaining, while large stretches of Tarnsman of Gor are just dull.

One and a half stars

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 14, 1967] Three Facets of Conan: Conan the Warrior by Robert E. Howard

February 14, 2022 Cora Buhlert 7 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

Winter in the City and the Park

An aerial view of the Bremen Bürgerpark with the luxurious Park Hotel and the Holler Lake.

It's cold a wet February here in my hometown of Bremen, but the first signs of spring are already visible and audible in the form of the red and white pavilions and the shouts of the barkers of the Bürgerpark tombola.

Bürgerpark Kaffeehaus am Emmasee — The modernist coffee house at the Emma Lake in Bremen's Bürgerpark opened only three years ago, replacing a building which was destroyed in WWII.

The Bürgerpark (citizen's park) is a roughly 200 hectare big park in the heart of Bremen, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. The park contains several lakes, a luxury hotel, a restaurant, a coffee house, a theatre, a small zoo as well fountains, bridges, benches, statues and lots of beautiful scenery. Beloved by the people of Bremen, the upkeep of the park is financed almost entirely by donations as well as the Bürgerpark tombola, a charity raffle that has been going on every year since 1953 in the late winter and early spring.

Dromedary Bobby — The dromedary Bobby is one of the most popular inhabitants of the zoo in the Bremen Bürgerpark.

Llamas and Zebra in the Bürgerpark — The llama Chacca and her baby Roland, who was born en route from South America to Bremerhaven, are the newest inhabitants of the Bürgerpark zoo. A longtime inhabitant, the Zebra Timmy, looks on.

Whenever I chance to find myself in the city center at Bürgerpark tombola time, I inevitably buy a few tickets. After all, it's for a good cause and you can win some great prizes such as cars, holiday trips, sports tickets or cruises. Though so far, all I won was a packet of rice.

More from the Cimmerian Barbarian

But even though I only won an underwhelming prize from the Bürgerpark tombola, I did hit the reading jackpot this month with yet another great collection of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories from the 1930s courtesy of Lancer Books.

After Conan the Adventurer, which I reviewed last month for the Journey, I cracked open the purple edged pages of the follow-up collection Conan the Warrior with a mix of excitement and apprehension. For while I was happy to spend more time with the Cimmerian, I was also worried that this collection would be a let-down, compared to the high quality of the previous installment.

However, I need not have worried, because Conan the Warrior is even better than Conan the Adventurer, collecting one good and two excellent stories.

Red Nails

Weird Tales July 1936 — Margaret Brundage's striking cover illustrates a pivotal scene in "Red Nails"

The novella "Red Nails" was serialised in Weird Tales from July to October 1936 and has the distinction of being the last Conan adventure that Robert E. Howard completed before his untimely death in 1936. And what an adventure it is.

Once again, the story opens not with Conan, but with another character, Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, a female pirate and mercenary, who had to go on the run when she killed an officer of the army in which she had enlisted, after he tried to rape her. Now Valeria makes her way through the uncharted jungles of the Hyborian Age equivalent of Africa. Unbeknownst to Valeria, Conan, who served in the same mercenary army, has fallen for Valeria and followed her into the jungle, quietly dispatching any other pursuers.

Weird Tales August 1936 — Not Conan or Valeria, but an illustration for Edmond Hamilton's "The Door Into Infinity"

Valeria is a marvellous character, a warrior woman who is Conan's equal in many ways. "Why won't men let me live a man's life?" Valeria laments at one point. "That's obvious," Conan replies with an appreciative look at Valeria's body. Robert E. Howard is usually considered a writer of masculine fiction and Conan is clearly a man's man, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety and competence of the female characters in these stories. Not every women in these stories is as impressive as Valeria or Yasmina from "The People of the Black Circle", but they are all characters with personalities and lives of their own and every one of them is given a chance to shine.

Weird Tales October 1936 — This hellish scene by J. Allen St. John illustrates not "Red Nails", but "Isle of the Undead" by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach

At first, Valeria is not too pleased to see Conan, but this quickly changes when Valeria and Conan find themselves pursued by what they call a dragon, but which twentieth century readers will quickly recognise as a dinosaur who has survived the extinction of its brethren. Now I was not expecting to see Conan and Valeria fighting a dinosaur, but my inner ten-year-old who loved dinosaurs was delighted.

Red Nails Hugh Rankin — Conan and Valerie fight the "dragon", as imagined by Harold S. DeLay

Together, Conan and Valeria manage to kill the dinosaur, but fearing there might be more in the jungle, they flee into the desert, where they spot yet another mysterious and seemingly abandoned city on the horizon. However, Xuchotl, which is not so much a city but a giant enclosed maze, is far from abandoned. Instead, it is home to two rivalling factions who are engaged in a generations long blood feud to the exclusion of all else. The title refers not, as I had initially assumed, to women's fingernails, but to copper nails which are hammered into a column to keep a tally of enemies killed.

Red Nails Harold S. DeLay — Conan and Valeria meet the people of Xuchotl, as imagined by Harold S. DeLay

In spite of their best efforts, Conan and Valeria cannot avoid getting dragged into that feud. But other dangers lurk in Xuchotl as well, including a treacherous king, a vampiric queen with an unsavoury interest in Valeria and a mad sorcerer.

Robert E. Howard clearly enjoyed writing stories about mysterious cities in the desert inhabited by drugged out or otherwise insane inhabitants and monsters both human and supernatural, since no less than five of the seven stories in these collections include a variation on this theme. "Red Nails" is the best of these and it almost seems as if the previous stories were practice runs for this one.

Red Nail Harold S. DeLay — More "Red Nails" interior art, courtesy of Harold S. DeLay

Howard also contrasts the madness and inhumanity of Xuchotl's inhabitants and their endless feud with the warmth and humanity of both Conan and Valeria. There is a wonderful moment where Conan's interrupts the pompous King Olmec's victory speech with a gruff "You'd best see to your wounded." We also see Conan and Valeria taking care of each other and treating each other's injuries. Fantasy fiction rarely pays attention to the physical cost of battle, but the Conan stories repeatedly show that characters, including Conan, can and will be wounded. Robert E. Howard's father was a Texas country doctor, so Howard knew a thing or two about injuries.

Another amazing (and very bloody) adventure with a heroine who's Conan's match in every way. Five stars.

The Jewels of Gwahlur

This novelette appeared in the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales and finds Conan still (or once again) in Africa, climbing the sheer walls of a cliff surrounding the ruined city of Alkmeenon. Inside this city, there rests a legendary treasure of priceless jewels known as the Teeth of Gwahlur.

Weird Tales March 1935 — Margaret Brundage's evocative cover for the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales illustrates not "The Jewels of Gwalhur", but "Clutching Hands of Death" by Harold Ward

Conan is eager to get his hands on this treasure and has ingratiated himself with the King of Keshan in order to steal the jewels, which happen to be sacred to the people of Keshan.

However, Conan isn't the only one who's after the jewels. There's also his rival Thutmekri and his accomplice, the fake oracle Muriela. Furthermore, the city of Alkmeenon once again is not nearly as deserted as everybody believes, but is still being stalked by the monstrous servants of its former masters.

Jewels of Gwalhur interior art — Muriela is assaulted by an offensive racial stereotype, while an uncharacteristically blonde Conan intervenes.

So far in this collection, we've seen Conan the mercenary, Conan the warlord and Conan the pirate. This story adds a new dimension to the Cimmerian and gives us Conan the con man, who is literally running a long con to get his hands on the jewels. The city of Alkmeenon, located in the center of what a modern reader will recognise as an extinct volcano, is a very evocative setting. Though unfortunately, the descriptions of the black characters who appear in the story are once again dated and no longer appropriate to the civil rights era. The heroine Muriela is no Valeria either, but closer to the stereotype of the clinging and whimpering damsel.

A fun heist story starring Conan. Four stars.

Beyond the Black River

Weird Tales May 1935 — This rather dull Margaret Brundage cover for the May 1935 issue of Weird Tales illustrates "The Death Cry", an adventure of scientific detective Craig Kennedy by Arthur B. Reeve

This novella was originally serialised in the May and June 1935 of Weird Tales and is set on the northern edge of Aquilonia, the Hyborian age equivalent of France and also the kingdom Conan will eventually come to rule. Aquilonia has recently expanded its borders northwards into the wilderness inhabited by the barbarian Picts. The Picts are understandably not happy about this.

Beyond the Black River interior art Hugh Rankin — A giant snake wreaks havoc on a Pictish village that is seemingly inhabited solely by naked women in the interior art by Hugh Rankin for Part I of "Beyond the Black River"

The historical Picts were a people who lived in what is now Scotland during the late Roman era and the early Middle Ages. Little is known about them and so Howard uses a lot of poetic licence to turn his version of the Picts into analogues for American Indians, setting up a frontier conflict. The Picts are very much depicted as offensive stereotypes here, though Howard also wrote several stories chronicling the struggles of a Pictish chieftain named Bran Mak Morn with the Roman Empire, where the Picts are portrayed in far more sympathetic light.

Once again, the novella opens not with Conan, but with a young man named Balthus who has come to Aquilonia's newly opened frontier, lured by promises of cheap and abundant land. However, Balthus quickly encounters the Picts and is saved by none other than Conan, who has come to Fort Tuscelan to serve as a mercenary. Since Conan's homeland Cimmeria borders on Pictish territory (though the Cimmerians and the Picts are ancestral enemies), the Fort's commander puts Conan's wilderness skills and knowledge of the enemy to good use by sending him on scouting missions.

Weird Tales June 1936 — Margaret Brundage is back on form with this striking cover for the June 1935 issue of Weird Tales, which illustrates "The Horror in the Studio" by the unjustly forgotten Dorothy Quick.

Conan is convinced that Aquilonia's expansion plans will eventually fail, when the various Pictish tribes rally together to kick out the invaders. After all, that was what the Cimmerians did when Aquilonia attempted to annex their territory. Balthus has heard stories of that legendary battle for the Aquilonian Fort Venarium and asks Conan if he was there. "Yes," Conan says and calmly tells Balthus that he fought on the Cimmerian side as a fifteen-year-old. So Conan fought the very people at the age of fifteen that he will come to rule as a king some twenty-five years later and sees absolutely no contradiction in this.

Conan's prediction proves to be accurate, for the Pictish wizard Zogar Sag has rallied the tribes and is gearing up for an assault on Fort Tuscelan. Conan and a party of scouts, including Balthus, sneak into Pictish territory to take out Zogar Sag. But they are ambushed and only Conan and Balthus survive. However, the attack on Fort Tuscelan has already begun and all Conan and Balthus can do is to warn the Aquilonian settlers, so they can flee before they are slaughtered.

Hugh Rankin Beyond the Black River — Conan fights a demonic creature in Hugh Rankin's interior art for part 2 of "Beyond the Black River"

Of all the Conan stories I've read so far, this one is the bleakest, since it literally ends with everybody except for Conan dead. This includes Balthus who makes a heroic last stand together with a feral dog named Slasher to allow the settlers to escape to safety.

Now I'm very much not a dog person and Slasher, who went feral after the Picts murdered his owner and now takes revenge on the slayers in his own fashion, is very reminiscent of the slobbering and barking menaces that chased after me behind much too low fences when I rode my bicycle to school as a kid. That said, Slasher is a marvellous character in his own right and the mix of total savagery towards the Picts and affection towards Balthus rings so true that I wonder if Howard owned a dog. I'm not someone who cries at movies or books and managed to sit through all of Doctor Zhivago without shedding a single tear. However, the heroic sacrifice of Slasher and Balthus made even me misty-eyed.

"Beyond the Black River" also showcases Howard's versatility, since he plops Conan into what is basically a western. And considering Howard grew up in Texas at a time when the so-called Old West was still within living memory, it seems only natural that he would draw on the frontier era in his fiction.

To someone from West Germany, the Old West is just as exotic as the Hyborian Age. Nonetheless, I connected to this story, because I noticed many parallels between the Cimmerians and later the Picts kicking the Aquilonians out of their respective homelands and my own ancestors, led by the Cherusci chieftain Arminius, kicking the Romans out of Northern Germany in the battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

"Beyond the Black River" also ends with what is probably one of Howard's most famous lines: "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural; it is a whim of circumstance… And barbarism must always ultimately triumph!"

A bleak and grim story that will stick in your mind for a long time. Five stars.

A Multi-faceted Barbarian

So far, I have read a few of the Conan stories in scattered reprints in magazines and collections as well as two of Lancer's new paperback collections and I'm struck by the variety of settings and themes in the stories that Robert E. Howard wrote about this character. But even though the various stories reveal different aspects of the Cimmerian, Conan always remains recognisably the same character.

Those who have heard of Conan, but have not read the actual stories featuring him, inevitably cite Conan's violence, his physical strength and his womanising as his most notable characteristics. Nor are they wrong, because Conan is clearly a violent man. Those at the receiving end of his sword or his fists usually deserve their fate, but it's also difficult to overlook that Conan outright murders the pirate captain Zaparavo in "Pool of the Black One" to take over his ship and also murders a rival in "Drums of Tombalku" to usurp his position.

A lot of people also think that Conan is stupid, an illiterate Barbarian, big of muscle and small of brain. They could not be more wrong, because the Conan depicted by Robert E. Howard is actually a very intelligent man. He speaks, reads and writes multiple languages. He is a also a brilliant military strategist and tactician and – at least in "The Jewels of Gwalhur" – a clever con man.

As for the womanising, like many men, Conan does think with the dangly bit on occasion. In "Red Nails", Conan literally walks across half a continent in order to go after and protect the woman he has fallen for.

In the seven stories collected in Conan the Adventurer and Conan the Warrior, Conan is without female companionship in two of the stories and with a different woman in the each of the remaining five. And even though most Conan stories end with Conan walking off into the sunset with his current lover, the woman in question is usually nowhere to be seen in the following story. This is a pity, for while some of the female characters in these stories are insipid non-entities like the woman clinging to Conan's leg on Frank Frazetta's cover for Conan the Adventurer, Conan is also paired with some remarkably strong women like Valeria from "Red Nails" or Yasmina from "People of the Black Circle".

But then, Conan is extremely charismatic. He may be a loner and wandering outlaw for much of his career, but Conan never has problems persuading people to follow him. In "Drums of Tombalku", Conan goes from prisoner marked for death to leader of the warriors who have captured him within the space of a few days. And in "Pool of the Black One", Conan steals the crew of the pirate captain Zaparavo from under his nose by gaining their loyalty. Even though those stories haven't been reprinted yet, it's easy to see how Conan will wind up becoming King of Aquilonia, the very country whose warriors he helped to kick out of his native Cimmeria at the age of fifteen.

Though for Conan, loyalty is not a one way street. In fact, the most notable of Conan's traits that appears in story after story is his deep loyalty towards friends, lovers, comrades in arms and people he feels responsible for. In "People of the Black Circle", Conan's main goal throughout the story is freeing the seven of his men who have been captured by the authorities of Vendya. Nor will Conan abandon the people he has adopted, even after they try to kill him. And when one of his friends is killed, as happens in "Drums of Tombalku" and "Beyond the Black River", Conan swears bloody vengeance on the killers.

Closely linked to Conan's deep loyalty towards people he feels responsible for is a trait that is not often brought up in connection with a violent Barbarian warrior, namely his compassion. For these stories demonstrate again and again that Conan deeply cares about people, whether it is his budding friendship with Balthus and Slasher in "Beyond the Black River", his protectiveness towards Valeria in "Red Nails" or Conan freely foregoing the great treasure he has been chasing after for the entire story in order to save a life at the end of "The Jewels of Gwalhur". Indeed, it is when pitted against a merciless and utterly inhuman opponent, whether it's the wizards of Mount Yimsha in "People of the Black Circle", the blood-mad inhabitants of Xuchotl in "Red Nails", the apathetic pleasure seekers of Xuthal in "The Slithering Shadows" or the murderous Pictish warriors and wizards in "Beyond the Black River", that Conan's humanity shines most brightly.

Now that Lancer is reprinting all the stories, you owe it to yourself to get to know the real Conan, this fascinating and multi-faceted character that Robert E. Howard created more than thirty years ago.

Three fabulous tales of the Cimmerian Barbarian. Five stars for the collection.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 22, 1967] The Return of the Cimmerian: Conan the Adventurer by Robert E. Howard

January 22, 2022 Cora Buhlert 4 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

1967 is off to a cold and wet start here in West Germany, so it's the perfect opportunity to stay indoors and read. Thankfully, I have a plethora of magazines to keep me company.

Bravo January 1967 — Teen magazines Bravo profiles Uwe Beyer, who plays Siegfried in the upcoming fantasy epic The Nibelungs, this month.

Für Sie January 1967 — The women's mag Für Sie offers costume and make-up tips for the upcoming carnival season.

Das Motorrad January 1967 — Motorbike magazine Das Motrrad tests the new Honda CB-250.

What is more, during my latest visit to my local import bookstore, the trusty spinner rack yielded not one but two treasures: Conan the Adventurer and Conan the Warrior by Robert E. Howard.

The Cimmerian Barbarian and the Texas Pulpster

The untimely death of Robert E. Howard thirty years ago is one of the great tragedies of our genre. The lifelong Texan Howard had his first story, the prehistoric adventure "Spear and Fang" published in Weird Tales in 1925, when he was only nineteen years old. In the following eleven years, Howard published dozens of stories in Weird Tales as well as in long forgotten pulp magazines such as Oriental Stories, Fight Stories, Action Stories, Magic Carpet Magazine or Spicy Mystery. In the introduction to Conan the Adventurer, editor L. Sprague de Camp calls Howard "a natural story-teller, whose tales are unsurpassed for vivid, colorful, headlong, gripping action."

In 1936, tragedy struck, when Howard's beloved mother was about to succumb to tuberculosis. Overcome with grief, Howard took his own life. He was only thirty years old.

Howard's most famous creation is undoubtedly Conan the Cimmerian, a barbarian warrior whose adventures in the so-called Hyborian Age some twelve thousand years before our time Howard chronicled in eighteen published and several unpublished stories in Weird Tales between 1932 and 1936. At the time, the unique mix of pseudo-historical action, adventure and supernatural horror that Howard pioneered in the Conan stories had no name. Some thirty years after the appearance of the first Conan story, Fritz Leiber finally bestowed a name on this nameless subgenre: sword and sorcery.

It was the fate of many pulpsters, including popular and prolific writers, to be forgotten as the pulps faded. Howard, however, was never forgotten in the thirty years since his untimely death. His fiction has inspired authors like Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock and Lin Carter. There is a club devoted to his works, the Hyborian Legion, and the popular fanzine Amra started out as a Howard fanzine before branching out to cover the entire subgenre now known as sword and sorcery, a subgenre Howard created out of whole cloth in his parents' house in Cross Plains, Texas.

However, until now the actual stories of Robert E. Howard have been unavailable outside the yellowing pages of thirty-year-old copies of Weird Tales. There have been occasional magazine reprints, and Gnome Press reprinted the Conan stories in several hardcover collections in the early 1950s, but those editions are almost as difficult to find as vintage copies of Weird Tales.

Luckily for all of us sword and sorcery fans, Lancer Books has decided to reprint all the Conan stories in paperback format with striking covers by last year's Hugo winner Frank Frazetta. I was a little sceptical about Frazetta's Hugo win last year, since at the time he was mainly known for his Edgar Rice Burroughs covers. However, now that I've seen his take on Conan, I'm a fan.

Howard wrote the Conan stories, which follow the Cimmerian from his time as a thief in his late teens to his time as King of the Aquilonia in his forties, out of order, but editor L. Sprague de Camp has rearranged them into chronological order for the Lancer editions. For reasons best known to themselves, Lancer began its Conan reprints with two volumes set in the middle of Conan's career, during his time as a mercenary and warlord.

The People of the Black Circle

Weird Tales September 1934 — Margaret Brundage's take on the Devi Yasmina and the Master of Mount Yimsa

Conan the Adventurer begins with "The People of the Black Circle", a novella that was serialised in the September, October and November 1934 issues of Weird Tales.

The story opens not with Conan – and indeed, it is a pattern with these stories that they open with other characters, before the Cimmerian appears – but with the King of Vendya, the Hyborian Age equivalent of India. The King is dying. In a moment of clarity, he tells his sister, the Devi Yasmina, that wizards have drawn his soul out of his body. Should he die in this state, his soul will be doomed forever. However, now that his soul has briefly managed to return to his body, the King begs Yasmina to kill him to save his soul from eternal damnation. Sobbing, Yasmina stabs him.

After a beginning like that, who could not read on? And so Howard leads us into a fabulous adventure that follows several competing factions as they vie for control over the Hyborian Age equivalents of India, the Himalaya and Afghanistan (thankfully, there is a handy map at the beginning of the paperback).

Weird Tales interior art — Hugh Rankin's interior art for Weird Tales feature Yasmina, Conan and a giant snake.

The Devi Yasmina, unsurprisingly, wants revenge for the death of her brother and her chosen instrument of vengeance is none other than Conan. The mercenary Kerim Shah wants to kidnap Yasmina and conquer Vendya on behalf of his employers, the neighbouring kingdom of Turan, and has conspired with the wizards of Mount Yimsa to murder the King. One of those wizards, Khemsa, is not satisfied with being merely a tool. He wants to overthrow both the wizards and the Devi with the aid of his lover Gitara, one of the Devi's handmaidens. Conan, finally, who is a warlord of the Afghuli hill tribes at this point in his life, merely wants back seven of his men, who have been captured by the forces of Vendya.

Weird Tales October 1934 — The second installment of this story appeared in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, whose striking cover by Margaret Brundage illustrates C.L. Moore's story "Black God's Kiss", which I'd love to see reprinted.

Things come to a head, when Conan infiltrates the palace to negotiate the release of his seven hill chiefs with the governor of the Vendyan province of Peshkauri. Yasmina happens to blunder into the governor's study at just this moment and Conan winds up kidnapping her and going on the run. Conan intends to use Yasmina as leverage to secure the release of his men, while Yasmina still hopes to use him to avenge herself on the wizards of Mount Yimsa. Only one of them will get their will.

What follows is a glorious adventure. Conan finds himself faced with treachery from those he thought his allies, as well as unexpected alliances with enemies, as he takes on the wizards of Mount Yimsa and falls for Yasmina in the process.

Weird Tales November 1934 — Margaret Bundage's striking cover for the November 1934 issue of Weird Tales.

After reading "The People of the Black Circle", I understand why Lancer and de Camp chose this particular story to reintroduce us to Conan. This story has it all, adventure and romance, political manoeuvrings and the blackest of magics. Conan's loyalty to the people whose leader he has become and his determination to rescue his captured men make him an incredibly likeable character for all his faults. And even though she was created more than thirty years ago, Yasmina is the sort of strong woman that is still all too rare in contemporary fantastic fiction. One of the most story's most memorable scenes occurs as the Master of Mount Yimsa forces Yasmina to relive all her previous lives, subjecting her to the violence and pain that women have suffered across time. I was surprised to see such insight from a male author.

Fellow traveller Victoria Silverwolf reviewed this story, when it was reprinted in the January 1967 issue of Fantastic and gave it three stars. I enjoyed this story a lot more than Victoria did.

A fabulous adventure by a writer at the height of his powers. Five stars.

The Slithering Shadow

Weird Tales November 1933 — Margaret Brundage's illustration of Thalis whipping Natala, while the slithering shadow lurks in the background, was Weird Tales' most popular cover of all time.

This story originally appeared in the September 1933 issue of Weird Tales, which featured one of the most popular covers Margaret Brundage ever created for the unique magazine. But even though Brundage's predilection for painting scantily clad women in suggestive poses is well-known, the cover accurately illustrates a scene from this story.

"The Slithering Shadow" opens with Conan staggering through the desert of Kush in the Hyborian Age equivalent of Northern Africa, after the mercenary army in which he fought was defeated and wiped out. He is accompanied by Natala, a blonde woman he rescued from the slave market and made his companion.

Conan is at the end of his line and he knows it. He and Natala are out of water and there is no end to the desert in sight. Conan considers mercy-killing Natala to spare her the pain of dying of thirst, when they spot a mysterious city on the horizon.

However, the city Xuthal turns out to be just as deadly as the desert. And so Conan and Natala face Xuthal's drugged out inhabitants and the treacherous Stygian (the Hyborian equivalent of Egypt) Thalis who takes a liking to Conan and subjects poor Natala to the whipping that Margaret Brundage so memorably illustrated for the original Weird Tales cover. Finally, there's also Thog, a Lovecraftian horror (Howard and Lovecraft were pen pals) and the Slithering Shadow of the title who preys on the people of Xuthal…

Another great adventure. Not quite as good as "The People of the Black Circle", but then what could be? Four stars.

Drums of Tombalku

This novella is brand-new, based on an incomplete draft that was found among Howard's papers after his death and was completed by editor L. Sprague de Camp according to Howard's outline.

Like "The People of the Black Circle", "Drums of Tombalku" opens not with Conan, but with a young mercenary named Amalric. Conan and Amalric were comrades, until their mercenary army was wiped out (the armies in which Conan enlists sure tend to be unlucky). They fled into the desert, were attacked by raiders and separated. Amalric believes Conan dead, though the reader knows that the Cimmerian is still alive.

The novella opens with Amalric resting at a water hole with two bandits whose band he has joined, when the leader appears, bearing a young woman he found unconscious in the desert. The bandits plan to rape the young woman, but Amalric discovers his sense of chivalry and kills his companions.

This opening scene, which was presumably written by Howard, is the one point in Conan the Adventurer where the fact that these stories were written more than thirty years ago becomes apparent. For the bandits are black men and the physical descriptions of these characters are dated and downright uncomfortable to read in this era of progressing civil rights. And the fact that these bandits want to rape a (white) woman is unpleasantly reminiscent of Southern fears of sexual violence committed by black men. Though it is notable that Conan himself does not seem to suffer from racial prejudices and befriends people of all races. Indeed, both Conan and Amalric explicitly state in this story that white people are just as capable of both good and evil as black people.

Amalric attempts to return Lissa, the young woman he rescued, to her home and finds himself in yet another mysterious city in the desert whose hopped up inhabitants are stalked by the monstrous god Ollam-Onga. Clearly, this was a theme Howard loved, since it appears several times in his Conan stories.

Amalric slays Ollam-Onga and makes his escape together with Lissa, the god's worshippers in mad pursuit. He is reunited with Conan who is not dead after all. Instead, Conan was captured by the raiders of the desert metropolis Tombalku, but has risen to their captain by now, since Tombalku's king is an old friend of Conan's from his days as a pirate on the coast of what is now Africa.

Conan takes Amalric and Lissa to Tombalku, where racial tensions between the vaguely Middle Eastern and black population come to a head. The fact that Amalric slew the god Ollam-Onga, who is worshipped by Tombalku's inhabitants, does not help either.

Sometimes, stories are left unfinished for a reason and this was probably the case here. For Amalric is simply not as interesting as Conan and the first half of the story is very reminiscent of "The Slithering Shadow" (and Howard may well have reused ideas from this unfinished story).

As evidenced by his novels Lest Darkness Fall and The Tritonian Ring, L. Sprague De Camp is a very different writer than Robert E. Howard. He makes a decent effort to match Howard's style, but while Conan's dialogue does ring true most of the time, De Camp's action scenes don't have the energy of Howard's. Nor does De Camp have Howard's poetic sensibility and some of his word choices like "condottiere" don't match the prehistoric milieu of the Hyborian Age.

The weakest story in this collection, but nonetheless entertaining. Three stars.

The Pool of the Black One

Weird Tales October 1933 — Margaret Brundage's stunning cover for the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales

This story originally appeared in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales and opens quite spectacularly with Conan clambering dripping wet aboard the pirate ship Wastrel in the middle of the Western Sea (we call it the Atlantic Ocean) after a fallout with the Barachan pirates. The Wastrel's captain Zaparavo is not particularly pleased with the mysterious stranger who boarded his ship, though he grudgingly makes him part of the crew. Meanwhile, Zaparavo's lover Sancha is fascinated by Conan.

As we've seen in "The People of the Black Circle" and "Drums of Tombalku", Conan is very charismatic and a natural leader and so he quickly wins the respect of the Wastrel's crew. He is also clearly aiming to become captain of the Wastrel, just as he became warlord of the Afghuli hill tribes and captain of the raiders of Tombalku.

Conan gets his chance to take over the Wastrel, when the clearly insane Zaparavo takes the ship to a mysterious island far off the coast in search of some great treasure. What he finds instead is death at the business end of Conan's sword.

But the island is not as deserted as it seems and soon Conan has to defend Sancha and the pirate crew against its inhuman inhabitants and their strange and terrible rites…

"The Pool of the Black One" starts off as a pirate adventure-–and indeed, this makes me question De Camp's chronology, for in "Drums of Tombalku" it is clearly stated that Conan's pirate days are in the past-–but takes a turn into Lovecraftian territory, once the Wastrel reaches the nameless island. The horror of the island, a mysterious pool which turns people into figurines, is certainly a unique idea, but Howard never fully explores it.

Another enjoyable adventure of the Cimmerian barbarian. Four stars.

There's Gold in Them Pulps

Sword and sorcery has been undergoing something of a revival ever since Michael Moorcock introduced Elric of Meniboné in the pages of Science Fantasy and Cele Goldsmith Lalli rescued Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser from oblivion and also gave the world John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian and Roger Zelazny's Dilvish the Damned in Fantastic. Furthermore, the enormous success of Ace's (unauthorised) paperback editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings has shown that fantasy has the potential of being just as successful as science fiction.

However, until now it has been very difficult to read the original stories of Robert E. Howard as well as other sword and sorcery writers of the 1930s such as C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner or Clifford Ball that started it all.

I have read a few of the Conan stories in scattered reprints in magazines and collections and my own Kurval sword and soccery series was directly inspired the novel The Hour of the Dragon a.k.a. Conan the Conqueror, which features Conan as King of Aquilonia. But in spite of scouring used bookstores, I have never been able to track down all of the stories. Therefore, I'm grateful to Lancer and L. Sprague De Camp for reprinting the Conan stories, including the ones that Robert E. Howard never got to finish. I hope that sales are good enough that they will complete this project.

Furthermore, I hope that the Conan reprints are only the beginning of a movement to bring the fantasy of thirty years ago back into print. For while there was a lot of dross published in the pulps, there also were a lot of wonderful stories that deserve rediscovery. For example, I would love to see some of the other characters Robert E. Howard created for Weird Tales such Kull of Atlantis, the Puritan avenger Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn, last King of the Picts, back in print. C.L. Moore's stories about the interplanetary outlaw Northwest Smith and the medieval swordswoman Jirel of Joiry from Weird Tales also deserve to be rediscovered as do the lyrical and truly weird fantasy and horror stories of Clark Ashton Smith. Finally, I also hope to see all of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories collected eventually, including the early ones that were published in Unknown some twenty-five years ago.

Conan the Adventurer is an excellent collection of what we now call sword and sorcery fiction and also serves as a great introduction to the author and the character who gave birth to the subgenre.

Four stars for the collection.

But what about Conan the Warrior, the second Lancer Conan collection, you ask? Well, stay tuned, cause I will be reviewing that one next month right here at Galactic Journey.

Snow in East Berlin in 1967 — Winter has come to East Berlin, giving children the chance to get out their sleds.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[December 18, 1966] The Manchurian Colonel: Space Patrol Orion, Episode 7: "Invasion"

December 18, 2021 Cora Buhlert 1 Comment

by Cora Buhlert

Tragedy in the Aegean Sea

On the North and Baltic Sea as well as on the Mediterranean Sea, dozens of ferries shuttle people, vehicles and cargo across the waves every day. By now, they have become such an integral part of the transport network that envelops Europe that we often forget that these ships are not without risk.

On December 7, 1966, the ferry SS Heraklion left the port of Chania on Crete, Greece, en route to Piraeus. In spite of harsh winds and heavy weather, it was to be a routine trip for the seventeen-year-old vessel and the 264 people aboard.

The Heraklion is a so-called roll-on/roll-off or RoRo ferry, i.e. it has been fitted with two doors in the hull, allowing cars and trucks to drive via a ramp directly into the hull. This is much easier than hauling vehicles on board by crane and allows for quicker loading times. However, such vessels have the drawback that there are large cargo doors in the hull near the water line, which can easily sink a ship, when not properly secured and watertight. And it was this feature which doomed the Heraklion.

According to witnesses, one of the vehicles aboard the Heraklion was a refrigerated truck. The truck was late to arrive and was loaded hastily and likely not properly lashed. Due to the heavy storm, the truck tore itself loose and shifted around inside the hold, until it banged against one of the cargo doors. The door failed, the truck fell into the ocean and water flooded the cargo hold, causing the Heraklion to capsize and sink within thirteen minutes.

The crew sent out an SOS and began passing out life vests and lowering the lifeboats, but several boats could not be lowered due to the vessel's heavy list and mechanical problems. There are also reports that the captain abandoned the ship early contrary to tradition. Furthermore, the heavy weather impeded the rescue efforts. In the end, only forty six of the 264 people aboard survived. Ironically, the refrigerated truck which caused the disaster was found floating in the Aegean Sea the next morning.

SS Heraklion lifeboat — A lifeboat carrying survivors of the SS Heraklion disaster.

This is not the first time a RoRo vessel has sunk in heavy weather. In 1953, the British ferry MV Princess Victoria sank during a storm with the loss of all 133 souls aboard and one year later, typhoon Marie sank five RoRo vessels in Japan, causing the loss of more than a thousand lives. RoRo vessels are practical, but we will need to rethink their safety, particularly during storms.

Disaster in Space

"Invasion", the final episode of series 1 of the West German science fiction TV series Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffs Orion (Space Patrol: The Fantastic Adventures of the Spaceship Orion) also starts out with a desperate SOS call. The space cruiser Tau en route to the outpost Gordon is battered by a severe lightstorm, and the crew are about to abandon ship. The Tau is a ship of the Galactic Security Service GSD, and on board is none other than GSD head Colonel Villa (Friedrich Joloff) and his staff.

Commander Lindley of the GSD cruiser Tau

Just before the crew abandons the Tau, Colonel Villa manages to send a message to Commander McLane (Dietmar Schönherr) and General Wamsler (Benno Sterzenbach). Villa believes that Tau did not fall victim to an ordinary lightstorm but to alternating gravitational fields. Something similar happened to the Orion 7 in episode 1 during a run-in with the Frogs. Contact with the Tau breaks off and all on board are believed lost.

Villa aboard the Tau — Colonel Villa (Friedrich Joloff) aboard the Tau

At the Starlight Casino, McLane and security officer Tamara Jagellovsk (Eva Pflug) raise a glass to the memory of Colonel Villa, "a pacifist among generals", as McLane calls him, when they receive word that Villa and his staff have been found alive, though the crew of the Tau perished.

Tamara and McLane — Tamara (Eva Pflug) and McLane (Dietmar Schönherr) raise a glass in memory of Colonel Villa

What Happened to Villa?

McLane is summoned to a meeting with the general staff to discuss the fate of the Tau. Colonel Villa remarks that he and his staff were lucky to survive the lightstorm that destroyed the Tau. McLane points out that Villa himself reported that the Tau was attacked by alternating gravitational fields.

Colonel Villa, however, claims not to remember any alternating gravitational fields. He also claims to have been suffering from shock – a diagnosis confirmed by psychiatrist Dr. Requardt (Konrad Georg) – so he may well have been babbling nonsense.

Dr Requardt — Psychiatrist Dr. Requardt (Konrad Georg) confirms that Villa is suffering from shock.

Regular viewers know that Colonel Villa is not given to babbling nonsense. Not to mention that he seemed completely sane when he sent the final message from aboard the Tau. And so McLane is sceptical of Villa's explanation and requests permission to take the Orion to Gordon to investigate. However, he is denied permission and the Orion is ordered to do routine maintenance work on the sensor satellites of the early warning system instead.

Orion reflections — Mirrored generals: General Wamsler (Benno Sterzenbach), Colonel Villa and their reflections.

It is difficult to make "talking head" scenes visually interesting – and Orion has a lot of those. However, this particular boardroom scene is brilliantly shot with Villa's face reflected in the glass conference table, creating a mirror effect and making Villa appear sinister. Many West German directors working today are still influenced by the expressionist cinema of the Weimar Republic era and Space Patrol Orion uses the visual techniques pioneered forty years ago to great effect.

Suspicious Minds

Just before the Orion 8 is due to launch, their order is cancelled. A GSD vessel will perform the maintenance of the sensor satellites, even though this falls outside their scope of responsibility.

Orion McLane and Tamara — Tamara informs McLane that their mission has been cancelled.

The Orion crew laughs, because resident womanizer Mario de Monti (Wolfgang Völz) has just been rejected by a young lady as "too old for her". Mario is not amused.

Tamara and McLane share a drink at the Starlight Casino, where they meet Colonel Mulligan (Wolf Rathjen), the officer in charge of the undersea launch bases. Mulligan had been commended for his exemplary service only days before, but now he was relieved from duty without any warning. Instead, the GSD will take over control of the launch bases.

Orion Colonel Mulligan — Tamara and McLane meet Colonel Mulligan (Wolf Rathjen)

All this is very suspicious. Why does an intelligence agency like the GSD suddenly take over routine but vital tasks like maintaining the sensors of the early warning system or controlling the launch bases for space fleet vessels?

"If I didn't know better…" McLane muses, "…I'd say that Villa was planning a coup."

The idea that the staunchly loyal Colonel Villa might be planning a coup seems ridiculous. On the other hand, Villa has been acting strangely ever since his return from Gordon. And there are unanswered questions about how Villa and his staff managed to survive the disaster that destroyed the Tau. What if Villa was captured and brainwashed by the Frogs, like Alonzo Pietro in episode 4?

These suspicions are disturbing. But luckily, McLane has a direct line to the GSD in the form of Tamara. And so he asks Tamara – who clearly was hoping for something more exciting from an evening in McLane's bachelor pad than discussing conspiracy theories – to go to Villa and request a meeting for McLane. And while Tamara is already at GSD headquarters, she can take the opportunity to snoop around a little.

Spy Trap

Tamara is not happy about spying on her boss, but she agrees to do it for McLane's sake. Villa seems his usual self and also agrees to see McLane, which is a good sign. Villa also implies that he knows that the relationship between McLane and Tamara is no longer purely professional, but then Villa is smarter than the average general in this show.

After her meeting with Villa, Tamara sneaks into an empty office and calls up the files from Villa's trip to Gordon on the computer. However, before she can access the files, Villa's face suddenly appears on the screen. He knew all along what Tamara was planning and let her snoop around to see what she and McLane know. As I said, he is smarter than the average general.

Orion Tamara — Tamara is caught while snooping around GSD headquarters

Tamara is arrested and interrogated. "So it's true?" Tamara exclaims, "You are planning a coup." In response, Villa laughs and it is a truly bone-chilling laugh. "Coups are for little boys and military officers," he replies, "I have much bigger plans such as an invasion, so Earth can finally be ruled by truly intelligent lifeforms." These truly intelligent lifeforms are of course none other than the Frogs.

Villa and Tamara — Villa and one of his subordinates interrogate Tamara.

Over the past seven episodes, we have come to know Colonel Villa. During the many scenes featuring the general staff, Villa was invariably the smartest person in the room. Thankfully, he also had a conscience. When war-mongers like Sir Arthur (Franz Scharfheitlin) and Marshall Kublai-Krim (Hans Cossy) wanted to shoot first and ask questions later, Villa was truly "a pacifist among generals" to quote McLane.

Evil Villa, on the other hand, is terrifying. He is still as smart as ever, but utterly without scruples. When his subordinates want to kill Tamara, he icily orders them to lock her up instead, because she might still be of use as leverage against McLane.

Brainwashing and turning a previously loyal person into an enemy agent is one of the great fears of our age, expressed in works such as Richard Condon's 1959 thriller The Manchurian Candidate and its 1962 film adaption or this year's brilliant science fiction thriller Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. Orion already addressed this theme in "Deserters", but for "Invasion" the show dials up the paranoia inherent in such tales.

We watch Villa and his robot-like staff discussing the invasion plans, which involve disabling the deep space sensors, disrupting communications with Space Patrol headquarters, recalling all space cruisers to Earth and blowing up the undersea launch bases, so no ships can start.

A Traitor on Board

Villa and McLane — Villa meets with McLane.

In order to maintain his cover, Villa meets with McLane and also authorises him to take the Orion to Gordon. Moreover, Villa helpfully sends along the engineer Kranz (French actor Maurice Teynac) to equip the Orion with a forcefield to protect it against Frog attacks.

Orion Kranz — Engineer Kranz (Maurice Teynac)

However, Villa also informs McLane that Tamara will not be along for the mission, since she is attending a training course. McLane is once again suspicious, for Tamara never mentioned a training course.

On their way to Gordon, Helga Legrelle (Ursula Lillig) detects a fleet of Frog ships headed for Earth. The Orion attempts to hail Space Patrol headquarters to warn them, but due to Villa's machinations neither the Orion nor any other space cruiser can reach them, because all calls are rerouted to the GSD.

Orion Helga — Helga Legrelle (Ursula Lillig) makes an alarming discovery.

Orion Frog fleet — A Frog invasion fleet is headed for Earth.

McLane also disarms Kranz – just to be on the safe side. One of his calls finally reaches Colonel Villa's office, but of course Villa is now working for the Frogs. He orders McLane to relinquish all weapons to Kranz or he will kill Tamara. "And just in case you're thinking that the greater good justifies some sacrifices…" Villa says chillingly, "…I will order my men to use the HM3 gun which will cause a particularly painful death."

If the past six episodes have shown one thing, it's that McLane's first priority is always saving lives, especially when someone he cares about is in danger. Nonetheless, McLane does not make the decision alone and asks his crew for advice. Everybody immediately agrees to surrender and save Tamara – even Helga, who doesn't particularly like her. This scene illustrates better than anything how Tamara's role on board has changed since the first episode. She is one of the crew now and they will do everything in their power to save her.

Spring-Brauner to the Rescue

While Villa threatens Tamara, she manages to press the intercom button, so that Villa's conversation with McLane is broadcast directly to Space Patrol headquarters. General Wamsler's aide Liteutenant Spring-Brauner (Thomas Reiner) is dozing on duty, but the word "invasion" wakes him up and he raises the alarm.

Wamsler sends a squad led by Spring-Brauner to arrest Villa and his staff and rescue Tamara, but it is too late. Villa's plan has entered the next phase. His goons have recalled all space cruisers to Earth and also blow up the undersea launch bases in an impressive special effect. The Supreme Space Command can't launch any ships to stop the invasion.

Meanwhile, the Orion is still on course to Gordon, but now under the control of Kranz. "It will be like falling asleep," Kranz describes the fate that will befall the crew on Gordon, "And when you wake up, you will see everything in a completely new light."

Kranz may be an engineer, but he has no experience with space drives. And so Hasso Sigbjörnson (Claus Holm) fakes an engine problem that requires the Orion to fly at half speed.

Stop the Orion

Back on Earth, the assembled generals, Spring-Brauner and Tamara watch the invasion fleet closing in. Automated ray gun batteries decimate the fleet, but there are still too many Frog ships and Earth has no way to stop them.

Orion frog invasion fleet — Automated ray gun batteries cannot stop the Frog fleet

Eventually they realise that the Frog ships are powered via a beam from Gordon station, which is why they don't deviate from their course even when faced with heavy fire. Take out Gordon station and the invasion fleet will be left adrift.

However, the only spaceship which has a fighting chance to reach Gordon is the Orion and she is still under Kranz's control. Tamara notices that the Orion is flying at half speed and deduces that Hasso must have sabotaged the drive to stall Kranz. A distraction would give the crew the chance to take out Kranz and regain control of the ship.

So the space cruiser Hydra under the command of General Lydia Van Dyke (Charlotte Kerr) is ordered to attack the Orion and provide that distraction. The ploy works, too, because once the Hydra fires on the Orion, McLane and his crew use the confusion to overpower Kranz. The Orion heads for Gordon and destroys the outpost with the Overkill device, which was introduced in episode 4.

Happy Endings

The episode ends as it began, with a meeting of the general staff. Luckily, only Villa and his staff, Kranz and the Gordon crew were under Frog control, but psychiatrist Dr. Regwart has no idea how to fix them. And though the invasion was repealed for now, the Frogs are still out there, waiting and biding their time.

However, the first series ends on a hopeful note. Due to his repeated heroism in fighting the Frogs, McLane's demotion is rescinded and he is assigned to the Fast Space Fleet Command under Lydia Van Dyke again. Even better, McLane has been promoted to Colonel, as General Wamsler gleefully lets McLane know, though he is clearly loath to lose his best man.

The generals file out of the conference room and the Orion crew heads to the Starlight Casino to celebrate McLane's promotion with Wamsler and Lydia Van Dyke. Only McLane and Tamara linger behind. For now that McLane has his old job back, there no longer is any need to assign a GSD officer to the Orion to keep him in check. However, to McLane's surprise – though not to anybody else's – McLane does not wish to leave Tamara behind. She is part of his crew now… and more than that.

McLane and Tamara discuss their initially rocky relationship, while McLane declares that he will not accept his promotion unless Tamara can stay aboard the Orion. They also address the kiss they shared on Chroma back in episode 5, when they thought they were about to die, a kiss never mentioned again afterwards. However, it was a good kiss, so McLane promptly kisses Tamara again.

Their smooching is interrupted, when the big viewscreen in the conference room activates and Helga's face appears. She informs McLane that she bet with Mario de Monti (Wolfgang Völz) that McLane wouldn't even wait until they'd left the general staff's conference room to kiss Tamara. Helga has won a crate of champagne, though she still thinks McLane is a scoundrel. Mario is disappointed as well – after all, he lost his bet.

McLane and Tamara don't care; they kiss again.

West Germany Makes its Mark on Science Fiction

Raumpatrouille Orion is certainly the best work of filmic science fiction I have ever seen come out of West Germany. Not that this is a high bar, for until now West Germany produced very little in the way of science fiction.

However, Raumpatrouille Orion is also one of the best works of filmic science fiction I have ever seen, period. Maybe Doctor Who or the new US show Star Trek will eventually eclipse it, but for now Orion is my favourite science fiction TV show of all time. I love everything about it – the visuals, the actors, the characters and their interplay. Who would have thought that West Germany was capable of producing something this good?

TV seasons are shorter in West Germany and so the first series had only seven episodes. Though unlike many other TV shows, which tend to forget what happened only a week ago, Orion actually refers to previous episodes and works as a serialised whole.

So far, there has been no word if there will be a second series of Raumpatrouillle Orion, but I hope that we will see the Orion 8 and her valiant crew again. After all, series 1 ends with so many questions unanswered. Will Earth ever fully defeat the Frogs? Will Colonel Villa be restored to his old self? What adventures will the Orion have, now they are part of the Fast Space Fleet Command again? And how will the relationship between McLane and Tamara develop?

I hope the answers will soon come to a TV set near me.

An amazing capstone to a great series.

Five stars

Bravo Pieree Brice 1966 — How will you celebrate the holidays? Maybe with French actor Pierre Brice, star of the Winnetou movies, seen here on the cover of a teen magazine Bravo.

Fix and Foxi Christmas 1966 — Or maybe you'd rather celebrate with comic characters Fix and Foxi?

James Last Christmas Dancing — How about some swinging holiday music courtesy of James Last (real name Hans) and his latest record, "Christmas Dancing"?

Weihnachten mit Rudolf Schock — Or maybe your taste runs more towards the traditional such as Christmas with tenor Rudolf Schock (my father calls him rabbit face).

My Aunt Metel from East Germany sent me the record Weihnachten im Erzgebirge (Christmas in the Ore Mountains) and I will certainly give it a listen.

Jacobs Kaffee Christmas ad — But however you celebrate, always make sure to have enough Jacobs Coffee at hand.

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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction