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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[March 14, 1967] Family Matters (April 1967 Amazing)

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Today is the LAST day you can nominate for the Hugos.  Please consider voting for Galactic Journey for Best Fanzine.  And here are all the other categories we and our associates are eligible for this year!


by John Boston

The April Amazing splashes an impressive array of marquee names on the cover: Hugo winners Frank Herbert and Philip K. Dick, the well-remembered sardonic satirist William Tenn, and Richard Matheson and Jerome Bixby, famous not only from the printed page but from celebrated Twilight Zone episodes made from their stories.  The once prominent David H. Keller, M.D., is relegated to the inside of the magazine.


by Frank R. Paul

This blaze of celebrity serves to distract from the cover itself, which looks like it emerged from one of Frank R. Paul’s off days, though that is partly the fault of the present editorial regime; the picture is drastically cropped from its first appearance on the back cover of the July 1946 Fantastic Adventures, where it was considerably more impressive, though still far from the artist’s best.

This is one of the magazine’s accidental theme issues; I can’t speak for the serial yet, but the majority of the short fiction is at least partly preoccupied with domesticity, its meaning and its travails.

The Heaven Makers (Part 1 of 2), by Frank Herbert


by Gray Morrow

Frank Herbert’s The Heaven Makers is a two-part serial, and as usual I will wait for the end before commenting.  The blurb says it “offers the chilling hypothesis that all the world really is a stage with each of us . . . its players.” How many times have we read that one?  To be fair, new ideas are scarce these days, and treatment is all; it’s not the meat, it’s the motion, as a salacious old blues song has it.  A quick glance at the first page reveals the dense and turgid writing for which Herbert has become known.  To be fair (again), his virtues sometimes take longer to announce themselves than his faults.

The Last Bounce, by William Tenn


by Henry Sharp

William Tenn’s The Last Bounce, from the September 1950 Fantastic Adventures, is a remarkably bad story for the writer who at the time was several years past the classic Child’s Play and whose almost as well-known Null-P was a few months away.  It’s a tale of stellar exploration, complete with mystery planet, deadly monsters, scientific mumbo-jumbo, and clichéd characters and dialogue.  There’s even an embarrassing spacemen’s anthem, which shows up more than once.  And domesticity (or its absence) rears its head!  There is considerable musing about Why Men Risk All to Brave the Unknown and Why Their Women Put Up With It and Wait for Them.  It would be nice to be able to read this as satire, but I can’t convince myself.  More likely, Tenn made a barroom bet that he could write the most hackneyed piece of tripe he was capable of and some editor would buy it.  You win!  One star.

A Biological Experiment, by David H. Keller, M.D.

David H. Keller, M.D., is here with A Biological Experiment, from Amazing, June 1928—his third published story.  The blurb says, correctly, that it anticipates 1932’s Brave New World.  (You know the one about tragedy and farce?  Here it’s the other way around.) Here is a veritable epic of domestic relations.  Like Keller’s first story, Revolt of the Pedestrians, this one posits an extreme departure from our natural (well, familiar) social arrangements followed by a drastic reaction and restoration of the traditional.  Unfortunately there’s entirely too much talk here, and the action that follows it is cartoonish.


by Frank R. Paul

In the far future everyone is sterilized at an appropriate age; marriage is “companionate,” easily terminable, and babies are made in factories and provided to couples who apply for and obtain the necessary permit.  But Leuson and Elizabeth, a couple of young rebels, want to go back to the old ways.  Why?  Because no one is happy!  Love has disappeared from the world! 

So says Leuson, towards the end of a seven-page monologue.  (Elizabeth says, midway through: “Tell me again why they are not happy.  I have heard you tell it before but tell me again.  I want to hear it out here in the wilderness where we are alone—together.”) Leuson has stolen some books from the Library of Congress, where he works, to learn the history and how to survive the old-fashioned way.  The happy couple elopes (a word Leuson discovered in his research) to live happily in a mountain cave, along the way capturing a goat to milk.  Unfortunately, far from modern medicine, Elizabeth dies in childbirth (good idea, that goat).  Along the way it has been revealed that this was a covertly sponsored rebellion; the couple’s parents have subtly nudged them along towards this destiny.

And now, the plan’s consummation, at the annual meeting in Washington of the National Society of Federated Women!  “Five thousand leaders of their sex had gathered for the meeting and every woman in the nation was listening to the proceedings over the radio.” Leuson appears, carrying a basket, and reprises his seven-page lecture.  “On and on he talked and as he talked there arose in the hearts of the women who listened a strange unrest and hunger for something that had once been their heritage.”

And at the end of this spiel . . . “He reached down into the basket and, picking up his daughter, held the baby high above the heads of the five thousand women and showed them a baby, born of the love of a man and a woman in a home.” The finale: “And as they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, the women of the nation cried in unison: ‘Give us back our homes, our husbands, and our babies!’” Fade to black.

Whew!  Two overripe stars, barely.

Little Girl Lost, by Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson’s Little Girl Lost (Amazing, October/November 1953) is a capable potboiler, efficiently recycling with stock characters a stock plot of the 1940s and ‘50s—domesticity upended by the weird and threatening.  Young Tina disappears in her living room; her parents Chris and Ruth can hear her but not see her or figure out where she is.  What to do in the wee hours with an invisible child but call Chris’s friend Bill, “an engineering man, CalTech, top man with Lockheed over in the valley.” Bill quickly susses it out: “I think she’s in another dimension.” (Later, he adds, “probably the fourth.”) Meanwhile, in the spirit of the times, Ruth is more or less continuously hysterical.


by Ray Houlihan

And so is the dog, but to better effect.  He’s whining and scratching to be let in, and when he is admitted—to keep from waking the neighbors—he runs straight to the dimensional hole the people can’t see, and now little Tina has company.  Soon enough, Chris blunders partly into the hole, grabs kid and dog, and Bill pulls him out by his legs, which are protruding into our dimension.  Domestic tranquility is restored, and they switch the couch and the TV so if anything goes through again it will be Arthur Godfrey.  It’s facile and economical, and perfectly fashioned for TV; it made one of the better Twilight Zone episodes five years or so ago.  Three stars.

Small Town, by Philip K. Dick


by Bernard Krigstein

Philip K. Dick’s Small Town (Amazing, May 1954) is equally domestic, but not quite as domesticated, as the Matheson story.  Here, the strains of a bad marriage exacerbated by an oppressive job burst out into the larger world.  Verne Haskel doesn’t get along with his wife, hates his job, and finds comfort only in his basement, where, starting with an electric train layout, he has built a scale model of the entire town and tinkers with it constantly.  As his frustrations build, he begins tearing things out of his faithful representation and remaking the model town, culminating in ripping out Larson’s Pump & Valve, the site of his torment, stomping it to pieces, and replacing it with a mortuary.  And, of course, it turns out reality (or “reality”—this is after all PKD) now conforms to the fruits of Haskel’s tantrum—and things end with a suggestion (this is after all PKD) that there’s a higher power than Haskel keeping an eye on things.

Three stars, more lustrous than Matheson’s to my taste.

Angels in the Jets, by Jerome Bixby


by Paul Lundy

The issue winds up with Jerome Bixby’s Angels in the Jets (Fantastic, Fall 1952).  At least one person likes this story; Frederik Pohl anthologized it in his 1954 anthology Assignment in Tomorrow.  I disliked it when I read that book, and it hasn’t improved much since.  Intrepid space explorers land on an inviting planet; one crew member is inadvertently directly exposed to its atmosphere, which renders her psychotic; she contrives to expose everyone else; and the protagonist, who has been out exploring while all this was going on, returns to the prospect of living in isolation as long as his bottled air holds out, or giving up, joining the crowd, and becoming psychotic right away.  (Not much domesticity here, except for the hints of the deranged social order, or disorder, emerging among the psychotics.) A story that starts out at a dead end and consists of reaffirmations that it’s a dead end is not much of a story to my taste.  But at least it’s well written.  Two stars.

Summing Up

Hey, it's been worse in this bottom-of-the-market magazine.  We have pretty readable and competent stories by Dick and Matheson and an amusing bad period piece by Keller, balanced against lackluster pieces by Tenn and Bixby; and the brooding prospect of Frank Herbert at length looms over it all as final judgment is postponed.  Redemption?  Maybe. To paraphrase generations of disgruntled baseball fans: Wait till next issue.

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Magazine, Serial

[July 31, 1966] Dimmed lights (August 1966 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Blackout

This morning, Janice noted sparks coming from the socket by her typewriter desk.  With great swiftness, she unplugged the lamp and radio.  There was a respite, but only briefly, and soon the wall was spurting flame again. 

I heard her calm bellow, "Gideon, hit the circuit breaker.  Now."  You never saw someone descend a flight of stairs so fast (at least in control of their feet).  She called an electrician – fortunately the phone company have a separate power supply – and we went out for breakfast until the fellow could arrive.

That afternoon, we got a stern lecture on overloading our poor house's circuits.  We thanked and paid the fellow and were back to work by 1 pm.

Whereupon the entire neighborhood's power went out.

And that, dear readers, is why this article was typed by the light of the window rather than artificial incandescence!

Flicker, flicker

It was fitting that we should be failed by the men and women of our investor-owned, business-managed electric light and power company just as I turned to write about this month's Analog.  It's not that the stories were horrible, but I've definitely seen better in these pages.


by John Schoenherr

Too Many Magicians (Part 1 of 4), by Randall Garrett

To date, the Lord d'Arcy stories, set in an alternate 1960s with Victorian technology but replete with magic, have all been novellas or shorter.  This latest piece is the first full length novel.

A naval courier has been killed, perhaps while bearing crucial intelligence.  The Anglo-French Empire's most renowned magical detective is contracted to get to the bottom of the case.  Meanwhile, Sean O'Lochlainn, d'Arcy's sorcerer assistant, is thrown in the Tower after witnessing a second death at a wizards' conference; this locked-room murder has a similar murder weapon to the first.

And so, the setup for a magical who/howdunnit.  As with the rest of the series, Garrett's tale compels (though none engage so thoroughly as the excellent first d'Arcy adventure.) If I have a complaint, it's that Garrett is starting to rely a bit too much on pastiche: d'Arcy gets more like Holmes with every installment.  Indeed, his cousin, the Marquis, is Mycroft in all but name.  I half-expect our hero will take up the violin and acquire a cocaine habit.

Four stars so far, but we'll see.

Spirits of '76, by Joe Poyer


by Leo Summers

A representative from the UN pays a visit to a lunar squatter, who has illegally laid claim to a piece of the Moon's surface and established a distillery.  After a great many homebrewed drinks, the agent decides that free enterprise and private ownership are actually just fine.

I suspect maintaining an independent habitation on our airless neighbor will be a lot harder than this story would have us believe.  Still, the libertarian spirit of the piece surely tickled Campbell's capitalist heart.

It'll go in one eye and out the other, but it's harmless, at least.  Three stars?

One MOL Step Forward , by Lyle R. Hamilton

Hamilton opens up this non-fiction article with a promise to explain how the X-20 "Dynasoar" spaceplane was killed by paperwork.  Instead, he offers up a meandering piece, told largely in contractor interviews and press releases, which culminates in a description of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory.  This budget space station, serviced by an Air Force Gemini, is the current DoD space project of size.

I suppose there's useful information in the piece, but not much point.  I've gotten much better insight from my subscription to Aviation Week and Space Technology.

Two stars.

Psychoceramic, by John W. Campbell, Jr.

The fearless editor follows Hamilton with a shorter piece on a ceramic that can apparently extract pure oxygen and produce power at the same time.  Typical Campbellian kookery, or is he onto something?  I guess only time will tell.

Two stars for the unnecessary smugness and having cried wolf too many times.

By the Book, by Frank Herbert


by Kelly Freas

An aged troubleshooter is summoned from retirement to fix a big beam.  It's some kind of launching laser that propels seed packets (vegetable and human) toward colony worlds.  Problem is, it keeps killing technicians trying to service it.

I had many problems with this story, the biggest of which was the devotion of so many words to setting up a technical problem whose resolution I had no interest in.  A real snoozefest of gizmo-speak.

One star.

Technicality, by Norman Spinrad

The MPs have arrived, fearsome conquering aliens whose greatest strength is their ability to vanquish whole armies without firing a shot.  But does their nonviolent rapaciousness hide an Achilles Heel?

While the gimmick falls a little flat, Spinrad tells this no-blood-or-guts tale with fine detail and not a little subtle satire.

Three stars.

Light of Other Days, by Bob Shaw


by Kelly Freas

A quarreling married couple touring the Scottish Highlands come across a purveyor of "slow glass."  This remarkable substance passes light so slowly that, after ten years of absorption, will replay the scene that played across it for the next decade.  Thus, a city dweller might install one of these wonder panes and enjoy ten years of a view of the rugged north of Scotland rather than local squalor.

The technical bits felt a little overdone, but Shaw tells the story with a light, domestic touch that reminds me of Cliff Simak.

Three stars, and eagerness to see him tackle a longer subject.

Something to Say, by John Berryman


by Leo Summers

Last up, the fellow who gave us the Walter Bupp psychic stories gives us, instead, one of his more nuts-and-bolts tales.  The Earth Federation (apparently an evolution of the UN) has reason to believe that Soviet-aligned agents have infiltrated a primitive world to poison the natives against the West.  Said planet has a breathable atmosphere some six times as dense as Earth's.  This affords a far more airborne ecology, and even the indigenes have Bronze Age flying machines.

A troubleshooter is dispatched to thwart the Soviet plot, but is overpowered by a Communist.  The two crash land and are taken prisoner.  The Sovworld agent seems to have the leg up, as she is fluent in the indigenous tongue, but our plucky hero has an ace up his sleeve: an encylopedic knowledge of gliders.

There is a good story lurking in here, with a great setting and a decent setup.  It is hampered by its truly insufferable and two-dimensional characters.  As well, Berryman seems to have forgotten much that he's learned about pacing.

An uneven three stars.

After the lights go out…

2.7 stars is not a great score, though it's actually the median for this year's crop of Analogs.  And also for the month.  Coming in below it are IF (2.6), Galaxy (2.5), Worlds of Tomorrow (2.2), and Amazing (1.9).  Note that three of those four are Fred Pohl's triplets.

Ahead of Analog are Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.1), New Worlds (3.2), and Impulse (3.4)

There was exactly one woman-penned new story this month, and four/five-star stories would have barely filled two slim magazines (and one of them is a reprint of Make Room, Make Room!).

Ah well.  At least there's only one more month of summer, after which, ironically, things should get brighter!

Have you gotten your copy of Rosel George Brown's new hit novel, Sibyl Sue Blue?  If not, get down to your local newsstand and pick it up!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 22, 1966] Ridiculous! (August 1966 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The Sublime Don’t Work Here No More

. . . Not that it showed up very often when it did.  But the previous issue, which at last attained the status of “not bad,” raised hopes, now dashed again.

The theme of this August 1966 Amazing is plainly announced on the cover, a crude and silly-looking image by James B. Settles, from the back cover of the July 1942 Amazing, titled Radium Airship of Saturn.  You might also think that it doesn’t make much sense, but you’d be wrong!  What you see is actually the top two-thirds of the 1942 version; what you’re missing is the surface of Saturn, and a caption: “The motor in this air-ship is a disintegrating rocket-blast caused by the breaking down of a copper core by a stream of powerful radium rays concentrated on it.  It acts like a giant fireworks rocket.” It’s science!


by James B. Settles

Inside, the theme is carried forward with the conclusion of the Murray Leinster serial begun in June, a new novelet by Philip K. Dick, and five reprinted stories, particulars below.  The brightest spot in the issue is the absence of an editorial, though the usual brief and praiseful letter column is present.

While the editor misses no chance to bad-mouth the magazine’s prior regime, directly and through his selection of letters to publish, one thing has remained constant, and has seemingly intensified: the abominable proofreading.  (“Strickly speaking,” indeed.)

There's also a different sort of difficulty facing Amazing and Fantastic now.  It's been rumored for a while that they are not paying the authors for the reprinted material, which is now confirmed for those not plugged into the more authoritative gossip channels.  Kris Vyas-Myall has helpfully flagged the new issue of the fanzine Riverside Quarterly, in which the editor mentions that he confirmed with Kris Neville that he did not get paid for his recently reprinted story, and confirmed with Damon Knight, president of the newly constituted Science Fiction Writers of America, that this is the general practice. 

I suppose this may reflect the publishing practice prevalent in earlier years of buying "all rights" (sometimes simply by so noting on the author's check, with no more formal contract than that).  So maybe it's legal, but it stinks.  Knight has called on the members of SFWA to boycott the publisher until it changes its ways, and editor Leland Sapiro suggests that readers do the same with the magazines.  I'd take that advice, but duty dictates otherwise.

Stopover in Space (Part 2 of 2), by Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster’s latest Western treads a familiar path.  There’s a new sheriff, but he’s not really quite in town yet, because somebody doesn’t want him there, and it probably has to do with the stagecoach full of gold that is expected to arrive any day now.  It seems like business as usual from the author of Kid Deputy, Outlaw Guns, and Son of the Flying ‘Y’.

Oh, wait.  Sorry.  Wrong rut.  Trying again:

In Murray Leinster’s latest space opera, Lieutenant Scott of the Space Patrol is on his way to take over his first command, Checkpoint Lambda, a station orbiting the star Canis Lambda, whose system is of no special interest except that no fewer than six space lanes cross there.  (Didn’t know space has lanes?  People established them, I suppose so no one will get lost.) En route, Scott learns that several passengers had been supposed to leave Lambda on a ship recently, but didn’t, under peculiar circumstances—and one of them was “a girl.” This bears repetition, to the author and to Scott; a few pages later, Scott is reviewing the available facts, and notes that “passengers—including a girl—hadn’t left the checkpoint when they should.”


by Gray Morrow

Now, what could be happening?  Scott doesn’t know, but he does know the Golconda Ship is expected to show up at Lambda in the near future.  That ship is owned by a bunch of guys who went somewhere nobody knows and came back with a load of “treasure” which made them rich, and they go back for more every four years or so.  What kind of treasure?  Gold, platinum, radioactives, miracle cures from an unknown planet, the secret wisdom of an ancient civilization?  Doesn’t say, now or at any other point until the end of the story.  For the author’s purposes, you don’t need to know.  It’s just a game piece.

So what seems to be going on here?  Owlhoots!  Er, sorry.  Gangsters!  Scott is strongly discouraged from debarking onto Checkpoint Lambda, but insists, and finds himself going through the motions of normality with some slovenly types pretending to be the station crew.  He meets their nominal mastermind, one Chenery, who pretends to know Scott—and, before too long, he encounters the real power, whom Chenery recruited, and who is known as—Bugsy!  He is there to provide and direct the muscle, er, blastermen.*

* No, Bugsy and the Blastermen did not play at last Saturday’s sock hop.  That was somebody else.

So, here are the pieces in play: a good guy, some bad guys, treasure to be fought over, “a girl” to be protected.  What else do we need?  Oh yes, an external menace.  How about the Five Comets?  The Canis Lambda system has no planets—they all blew up eons ago, and the Checkpoint is attached to one of the bigger pieces—but it has some really fine comets, and they are all going to arrive at about the same time, right athwart the Checkpoint’s orbit—and there’s no astrogator, except for Scott!  (One might ask why the powers that be wouldn’t put the Checkpoint in some other location than the entirely predictable convergence point of multiple comets, but one would be wasting time to do so.)

The “girl”—an adult woman, of course—does have a name, Janet, though no others are disclosed.  Her full name would have to be (apologies to Alfred Hitchcock) Janet S. MacGuffin (“S” for Secondary), since she drives a part of the plot.  One of Scott’s challenges is to keep her safe from . . . well, let her tell it.  She says that Chenery “did keep the others from—harming me.” Such an eloquent dash! 

But clearly, as in last year’s Killer Ship, women have no role in tough situations other than to create the need for men to protect them.  At one point, Scott parks Janet for safekeeping in one of the Checkpoint’s lifeboats, gives her a snap course in operating it if necessary, and reassures her: “It’s not a very good chance.  But there aren’t many women who could make it a chance at all.  I think you can.” She doesn't have to try.  Later, though, Scott gives her something to do—maneuver the station to avoid comet debris while he’s busy elsewhere—and she blows it.  But he promises himself not even to hint at criticizing her, and at the end, after all is safely resolved, she is performing women’s other function in Leinster’s fiction as she and Scott get better acquainted.

This one is a little less vapid than Killer Ship, and considerably less irritating, since it lacks the constant reminders that interstellar travel will be just like the eighteenth century.  It’s just as verbose as Killer Ship, but the padding is a little better connected to what is actually going on in the story, and there is a bit more cleverness to the plot.  So, two stars for this played-out and left-behind author. 

Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday, by Philip K. Dick

The other new story is Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday, by the more-prominent-every-day Philip K. Dick, which once more vindicates my warning: when big names show up at the bottom of the market, there’s a reason for it.  This is a story about time running backwards.  It starts with a guy getting up in the morning (wait a minute—morning?), getting some dirty clothes to put on, and picking up a packet of whiskers to glue evenly onto his face, presumably to be absorbed over the course of the day.  So where do these whiskers come from, and who puts them into packets, and how are they distributed?  What happens if you run out?  And why does anyone bother with them?


by Gray Morrow

It goes on.  People begin conversations with “good-bye” and end with “hello,” but they don’t talk backwards in between.  Et cetera.  Sorry, it doesn’t work.  PKD’s specialty is making preposterous ideas at least momentarily plausible, but this one is too long a stretch.  It’s not enough for the reader to suspend disbelief; for this story you’d have to shoot it out of a cannon.

There’s more, of course, but not better.  Dick does have enough knack as a storyteller to keep things readable as the reader fumes over the contradictions, so, two stars.

The Voice of the Void, by John W. Campbell, Jr.

The Voice of the Void was John W. Campbell, Jr.’s fourth published story, from the Summer 1930 Amazing Stories Quarterly, and at first it’s sort of refreshing: the story of humanity’s quest for survival as the sun is burning out, first disassembling large parts of the solar system and moving pieces closer to the sun, then looking for a new home around a younger or longer-lived star. 


by Hans Wessolowski

The story is about 98% character- and dialogue-free, though the astronomer Hal Jus has several cameos along the way.  Instead, it chronicles a long course of human discovery and problem-solving, grandiose and grave in equal measure.  It is a little reminiscent of Edmond Hamilton’s Intelligence Undying of a few issues back, if that story had been administered a mild sedative.

But things turn dark soon enough.  Humanity wants Betelgeuse for its new home.  But it turns out there’s no vacancy there—that system is inhabited by energy beings who don’t take kindly to human invasion.  Allegedly they are not intelligent, but their facility at fatally repelling unwanted visitors suggests otherwise.  Now, Betelgeuse is not necessary to human survival.  There’s another star handy; it doesn’t have planets, but the human fleet is so large that humanity could hang out for a few years in orbit and build some suitable planets.  But we want Betelgeuse!  So the indigenes have to go, and are exterminated in a siege of human-devised energy rays.

Well, that puts a damper on things.  Gratuitous genocide can ruin one’s whole reading experience.  Two stars with clothespin on nose.

The Gone Dogs, by Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert’s The Gone Dogs (November 1954 issue) is a slightly more interesting bad story than many, rather crudely written—surprisingly so, since it appeared only a year before Herbert’s much more capable and ambitious Under Pressure a/k/a The Dragon in the Sea.  On the other hand, it’s free of the turgidity of his current work, especially the characters’ internal monologues about the motives and intentions of one another.  Pick your poison. 

In the story, an artificially mutated virus is killing off all the world’s dogs, abetted by the fact that humans carry the virus; how to save the species?  One solution, highly unauthorized, is to give the last few to the Vegans, who are trying to breed dogs, or something like them.  Matters are enlivened along the way by a psychotic dog lover who’s determined to grab one of the last living dogs for herself (and will kill it with the virus she’s carrying).  At the end there's a slightly silly and anticlimactic twist.

One thing that’s annoying here is the hyper-facile and acontextual (thoughtless, for short) deployment of standard components from the SF warehouse.  At one point the main character needs to dodge a congressional subpoena.  What better way than to flee to Vega?  All by himself, with a forged pass to a faster-than-light spaceship which any idiot, or at least a biologist, can apparently navigate solo across interstellar distances, without notice and whenever the need arises.  There’s no reason in the rest of the story to believe in this capability.  This sort of thing was common in ‘50s SF but that doesn’t make it more palatable.  Two stars.

The Pent House, by David H. Keller, M.D.

David H. Keller, M.D., is in the position, unusual for him, of providing the least ridiculous story in the issue, chiefly because he essays so little.  The Pent House, from the February 1932 Amazing, is a minor exercise in benign crankiness.  A rich guy who is also a doctor discovers that humanity is about to be wiped out by the spread of a cancer germ, so he sets up a nice sealed-off apartment on top of a tall building, makes arrangements for a generous supply of life’s necessities and amenities, and advertises for a couple who really like each other to take on a lucrative job for five years.  The lucky winners persuade him to stay with them in the (large) apartment. 


by Leo Morey

Blissful years pass.  The woman of the couple is not feeling well, so the old rich doctor goes in to look at her and some hours later tells the husband, “It’s a girl.” He hadn’t noticed his wife’s pregnancy.  Maybe this is not the least ridiculous story here after all.

More time passes, the five years are up, and the old guy goes downstairs to check things out.  Turns out the cancer epidemic was thwarted by medical science.  So things are the same?  No—noisier, dirtier, generally less civilized (to summarize an extensive rant).  “It seemed to me that the world has escaped the cancer death so it could die from neurasthenia,” pronounces the doctor.  He’s ready to pay the couple the fortune they have earned and bid them adieu, but the wife says forget it, just order up some more supplies and let’s lock the door for another five years of "Heaven in a penthouse."  Two stars for competent rendering discounted for triviality.

The Man Who Knew All the Answers, by Donald Bern

The Man Who Knew All the Answers, from the August 1940 Amazing, is bylined Donald Bern, who was actually Al Bernstein, who has half a dozen or so credits in Amazing and Fantastic Adventures in 1940-42, and nothing else in the SF magazines.  Frankly, just as well.  This is a silly story about a nasty guy named Scuttlebottom, who stumbles (literally) into Ye Village Book Stall, and encounters the proprietor (“He wore a pince-nez.  He looked exactly like a person who wears a pince-nez.”), who sells him a book called The Dormant Brain.  The book teaches him to become telepathic, so now he knows what everybody thinks of him, which is unpleasant, and he then comes to a contrived bad end as a result of his new talent.  One star per the ground rules, despite this story’s utter lack of any reason for existing. 

The Metal Martyr, by Robert Moore Williams

Robert Moore Williams’s The Metal Martyr, from the July 1950 Amazing, is a mildly clever but overall pretty silly story about a robot, named Two, who develops the delusion that he is a man—this in the far future, long after a rumored rebellion by robots against humans, and the fall of human civilization.  Two flees the robot enclave to avoid having its brain dissolved and replaced, and comes across a couple of humans, named Bill and Ed, never mind the intervening millennia.  Two visits them at their home cave, but some of the humans get scared and threaten it, so Two flees deeper into the cave.  There it discovers the remains of an ancient mining site full of machinery, skeletons, and books explaining the past and how things got to their present metal-poor state—and showing no robots, revealing that humans once did just fine without them.  Two recovers from its delusion of humanity.  After giving the humans their past back (although they, unlike robots, can’t read), Two heads back to robotdom and its rendezvous with the acid vat.


by Edmond B. Swiatek

Williams was once a titanically prolific contributor to pulps of all genres, but most frequently SF and fantasy, and within them, most frequently to Ray Palmer’s Amazing and Fantastic Adventures, where he was part of the regular crew that filled those magazines with juvenilia.  Palmer was gone before this one appeared, but it is true to the tradition.  Two stars, charitably.

Summing Up

There’s not much to say.  The last issue finally achieved consistent readability, a first for the Sol Cohen regime.  Now, back into the murk and muck.




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[July 8, 1966] South Pohl (August 1966 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

The Big Bang

The Americans and Soviets have signed onto a Partial Test Ban Treaty, restricting nuclear tests to deep underground. The Chinese and French are under no such obligation, however.  Not only have the Chinese detonated two (or was it three?) atomic devices in the open air, but now the French have begun their own series of above-grown tests.

These big bombs are being burst on the French Polynesian atoll of Moruroa.  I don't know what the indigenous South Seas population thinks of the blasts, but I imagine their opinions will sour as quickly as their strontium-90 laced milk.

The Big Fizzle


by Gray Morrow

The French may be making a big noise in the Southern Hemisphere, but Fred Pohl, editor of IF, Worlds of Tomorrow, and the formerly august Galaxy, has barely been squeaking by.  Indeed, the August 1966 issue of Galaxy is the most feeble outing I've read in a long time.

The Body Builders, by Keith Laumer


by Nodel

Opening things up, Keith Laumer extrapolates a future that is a straight-line evolution of our current boob tube culture.  Since so many of us are content to live vicariously, eyes plastered to the small screen, why not take things a few steps further?  And so a large portion of humanity lives flat on their backs, plugged into life support machines.  Their senses are hooked into humanoid surrogates of plastic and metal, optimized for task, emphasized for beauty. 

Our protagonist is a prize fighter, or at least, he remote controls a synthetic boxer.  Another artificial being provokes our hero into a duel while he's inhabiting his sport model body rather than his brawler suit.  So he goes on the lam.  Troubles, high jinks, and happy endings ensue.

Elements remind me of Robert F. Young's Romance in a Twenty-First Century Used-Car Lot (shuttling around in personally molded chassis) and Steel (human boxer steps into the ring against a robotic opponent), but this is a nice new spin.

Three stars.

Heresies of the Huge God by Brian W. Aldiss

A giant creature, thousands of miles long, crashes into the Earth.  Its bulk causes tremendous damage, alters our seasons, and thoroughly discombobulates our society.  This after-the-fact chronicle of the millennium following the alien's arrival is both unsettling and rather funny.

Four stars.

For Your Information: Scheherazade's Island by Willy Ley

This month's science column details the unusual creatures that inhabited Madagascar until quite recently: Big birds, giant lemurs, and other exotics.  They may, indeed, yet live there in remote areas of the enormous island.

Interesting topic but bland presentation.  Three stars.

The Piper of Dis by James Blish and Norman L. Knight


by Gray Morrow

Authors Blish and Knight return us to the overcrowded world of 2794 on which ten trillion humans live.  In this installment, the asteroid Flavia is headed toward Earth, where it will cause tremendous damage.  Millions of North Americans must be evacuated to the spare town of Gitler.  There are two wrinkles: 1) a convention of the Jones family is currently occupying the city, and they must be evacuated out before refugees can be evacuated in; 2) an insane criminal member of the Jones family, Fongavaro, doesn't want anyone in the city lest he be extradited back to his home in Madagascar.

Actually, there's another wrinkle: it's a dreary potboiler of a story in an implausible world.  I hope this is the last piece in the series.

Two stars.

Among the Hairy Earthmen by R. A. Lafferty

What if the Renaissance was really the work of bored aliens?  In this typically whimsical piece, a band of seven humanoid cousins arrive at medieval Europe and make history their plaything. 

This one of those tales that's all in the telling, and the telling is pretty charming.  Three stars.

The Look, by George Henry Smith

Women, hare-brained slaves to fashion that they all are, succumb to trends so horrendous that no man can bear to look at them.  It's the plot of a pair of homosexual fashion designers to ensure they have all of mankind to themselves.  Or so we're meant to think.  The "twist" is that it's actually a ploy of Alpha Centaurians to depopulate the Earth.

If we had a negative counterpart to the Galactic Stars, this would win the prize. One star.

Heisenberg's Eyes (Part 2 of 2) by Frank Herbert


by Dan Atkins

Last issue, we were treated to the first half of Frank Hebert's latest short novel.  It takes place in a far (like tens of thousands of years from now far) future in which the human race has completely stagnated in technology, society, and biology.  The "Optimen", sterile ubermenschen who are essentially immortal, rule over the mostly sterile humans whose offspring are all produced out of womb and with scrupulous surgical control.

Last installment, the Durant couple had stolen their embryo from under the noses of the Optimen with the help of the Cyborgs, a competing sub-race of humanity that has traded their emotions for computerized sturdiness.  The Durant embryo, due to some unexplained quirk, is the first bog-standard human to be spawned in millennia.  Able to reproduce, it may hold the key to toppling the static society of humanity.

This installment begins with the Durants stealthily escaping the megalopolis of Seatac. This takes up most of the part, and is ultimately pointless as the triumvirate of rulers is aware of their attempt the entire way.  The Durants, their assisting Cyborgs, as well as Svengaard, the surgeon they had taken hostage, are summoned before a full council of the Optimen for punishment.  Violence breaks out.  Two of the triumvirate are killed.  Calapine, the impulsive, simpering woman of the ruling trio, is both outraged and excited by the new feeling of mortality.  Nevertheless, she is committed to destroying her captives before they destroy the current order.

Until it is pointed out that the order is just its own kind of death, a sentence of eternal boredom.  In any event, it's doomed to failure since even the immortals need increasing doses of enzymes to stay alive, a situation that is quickly becoming untenable.

There is a solution!  It turns out that being implanted with an embryo produces all the enzymes one needs to stay alive indefinitely.  So women (and men) can be installed with pre-tykes that are made to gestate for thousands of years, and that will keep them alive forever.  Thus, humanity can return to some sort of natural (if prolonged) rhythm.

Never minding the utter implausibility of, well, everything about this book, all of the above could probably have been written in about 20 pages.  But when you're paid by the word, and you're one of the hottest authors in the genre (I can imagine a half century from now that Dune will replace The Bible as the most-read book in the world; there ain't no justice), I suppose sentences must flow.

Two stars for this part, two and half for the whole book.

Who Is Human? by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

Starting in medias res, we have the latest story of the Esks: people who look like Eskimos, but are actually born in a month and raised to adulthood in five years.  In this installment, which really does not stand alone as a separate story, we learn that the Esks have been artificially created by alien visitors.  We are meant to believe that 1) the Esks pose an intolerable risk to the human race as we will soon be outbred and replaced by them, and 2) no one will actually believe our protagonist, Dr. West, when he explains the true nature of the Esks.  Everyone maintains they're just plain ol' Eskimos.

This is the silliest, most contrived set of premises.  The Esks are already starving due to overpopulation, and thus applying for relief.  Once free food starts being doled out, the unnatural increase in population will be known.  This may spell adversity for the real Inuit (and the Canadian budget) but it hardly threatens world domination.  And it's not like we have a Puppet Masters situation here; the Esks don't possess other humans.  They just live alongside them. 

Maybe there will be a better explanation down the road.  Two stars.

Summer Slump

It's a pretty sad affair when Galaxy clocks in at a bare 2.5 stars.  On the other hand, as Michael Moorcock informed us last month, it is not uncommon for magazines to save their weakest material for the summer, when readership is at its lowest.  Let us hope that's what is going on here!

Ah well.  At least the summer music is good:

Tune in to KGJ, our radio station!




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[May 31, 1966] Worth Remembering (June 1966 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Decoration Day

First the war, then the licking of wounds.  Not all wounds are physical.  After the Civil War rent this nation in two, spring became a time for remembering the dead, their blood shed in almost incomprehensible numbers.  In 1868, the ritual honoring of fallen veterans became an official holiday known as Decoration Day (for the decoration of graves).  Over time, the name changed to Memorial Day, and last month, President Johnson proclaimed the custom's birthplace to be Waterloo, New York, the event first occurring a century ago.

The last Civil War veteran passed away in 1956, but this year's Memorial Day still found us licking our wounds.  Indeed, last week marked the bloodiest seven days for American soldiers since Korea: 966 casualties in Vietnam alone, 146 of them fatal.  Will next year's day of remembrance be worse?

The Issue at Hand

A cute segue would be in poor taste at this juncture, so I'll simply proceed to the review.  The latest issue of Analog drew my attention with its striking astronomical cover.  Let's turn the page and see what delights and disappointments Herr Campbell has for us this month.


by Chesley Bonestell

The Ancient Gods (Part 1 of 2), by Poul Anderson

In the letter column, Poul Anderson talks about discovering a beautiful painting by Chesley Bonestell.  It depicts a the night sky as seen from a planet perhaps 200,000 light years north of the Milky Way.  I would guess that this painting, as well as perhaps a viewing of last year's film, Flight of the Phoenix, provided the inspiration for the author's latest tale. 


by John Schoenherr

I shall give nothing else away save that those who know me know I'm a sucker for astronomically correct tales of exploration, and that Flight of the Phoenix got my nomination for the Best Dramatic Hugo.

Four stars so far.

Early Warning, by Robin S. Scott


by Stan Robinson

Lee is a big man, a skilled man, a man whose job is to throw monkey wrenches into supposedly foolproof systems like the D.C./Kremlin Hotline and Pentagon intelligence computers.  Is he a double-agent?  A mole?  Or something more?

There's really not enough to this story to engage; it feels more like a fragment of a Joe Poyer thriller than a complete piece.  Just some workmanlike action writing and a smug, Campbell-pleasing sting. 

Two stars.

CWACC Strikes Again, by Hank Dempsey


by Gray Morrow

"Hank Dempsey" (I have it on reliable information that this is a pseudonym for Harry Harrison, apparently trying to make the big lucre by pushing all of Campbell's buttons) is back with CWACC: the Committee for Welfare, Administration, and Consumer Control, last seen last year.  Pronounced "Quack," the goal of this two-person operation is the support and representation of eccentric inventors.  You see, to the scientific community, they're just kooks, but we all know that those industrious garage inventors produce way more of the world's innovation than the anonymous folks in white coats.  Right?

Anyway, in this episode, CWACC's administrator teams up with an enemy, the local kook-catching flatfoot, to rescue a CWACCer, whose invention is being used by con artists to sucker in, of all people, the police commissioner.  Along the way, "Dempsey" gets some pseudo-scientific shots in, like the assertion that the common cold can be defeated by sufficient vitamins in one's diet. 

Vaguely readable garbage.  One star.  I hope it was worth selling your soul for four cents a word, Harry!

Live Sensors, by Carl A. Larson

This nonfiction article started auspiciously, promising to compare the biological sensors with which animals are naturally equipped to the most refined artificial detectors.  The overall package is lacking, however.  There are lots of interesting tidbits on the capabilities of creatures, but they are interspersed with larder passages that don't do too much.  Never do we find out how we might utilize or at least learn from natural sensing devices. 

It would also help if Analog employed subheadings.  Three stars.

Stranglehold, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

My nephew David rang me the other day (on Sunday, when the rates are lowest) to tell me how much he enjoyed the new Chris Anvil story.  This may be a ringing endorsement (ha ha!) but I always take David's recommendations with a grain of salt, especially where Anvil is concerned.

A scout team following up on a lost comrade lands on a planet despite receiving a warning that such would be dangerous.  Once planetside, they find themselves subjected to illusion after terrifying illusion, only their unshakeable monitors telling the truth about reality (why wouldn't their perception of the monitors also be changed?)

Turns out the inhabitants have some kind of telepathy and can change their perception of reality and those of others.  After the team escapes with their rescued friend, they determine that a race with psychic phenomena cannot develop science since they fudge the results to their liking.  Contrarily, a race that chooses a scientific path atrophies psychic phenomena because…well, just because.

Therefore, all races, including humanity, have psychic potential, and it's only because we chose the path of science that spoonbending isn't more prevalent.  Q.E.D.

Gee, I wonder how this story got published.

What I really don't understand is what possible advantage the alien trait of mass hallucination affords.  If it were real transmutation being employed in this story, there might be something to it, but there isn't.  A being that thinks it is having its physical needs met when it is not quickly becomes a sick and/or dead being.  Maybe it's more of a reality enhancer, as in the first Cugel the Clever story, which I guess would make more sense.

Anyway, Stranglehold feels like what would happen if Bob Sheckley ever wrote for Campbell.

Two stars.

Escape Felicity, by Frank Herbert


by Kelly Freas

In Frank Herbert's latest, a lone interstellar scout plunges his ship deep into a nebulous cloud.  He is determined to fight off the "push" that causes all of his corps to return to Earth after a certain point.  But is the compulsion programmed in by BuPurs to keep scouts from going native?  Or is there an external agency involved?

I found this one of Herbert's more compelling pieces, though it falls apart a bit at the end.  And it feels like the title is a pun in search of a story; I can't figure out its applicability to this one.

Three stars.

Doing the Math

Thus, Analog ends up near the bottom of the pack with a 2.6 star rating, only beating out the mostly-reprint (and consistently lackluster) Amazing 2.5.  Ahead of Campbell's mag are New Worlds (3.1), Galaxy (3.1), Impulse (3.0), IF (3.0), and Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.8).

Worthy material comprised about an issue-and-a-half out of six this month.  Women produced 11.25% of the new fiction, at the high end of the usual range.

All told, June 1966 may not be remembered in times to come, particularly as impressive as last month was.  But, as noted at the beginning of the article, sometimes having to remember is painful.

Until next month…

If you need a mood-lifter now, tune in to KGJ, our radio station!  Nothing but the newest and best hits!




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[May 10, 1966] Rocky Jaunts (June 1966 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Real-life Adventures

Out in the southeast corner of California is a hidden treasure, a beautiful national park known as Joshua Tree, named for the surreal plants that characterize the region.  And in the heart of a tiny, unincorporated community there, resides the place called Space Cowboy Books.

Jean-Paul Garnier, the Space Cowboy, invited us out to see the spring bloom in the wilderness.  We were able to take him up on his offer too late to see the flowers, but we did see some amazing petroglyphs and water/wind eroded facades.  Even better was the absolute quiet of the place, the aural equivalent of a dark sky (which they also have there).

Of course, it was a several hour trip up Highway 395, over Highway 60 to Interstate 10, and then up Highway 62, which terminates at Joshua Tree. 

But we had beautiful scenery, each other for conversation, and a brand new 8-track player in the car for music.

I also had the newest issue of Galaxy, which I was able to read while the Young Traveler drove.  Ah, the luxury of having children!

And so, a tour of the trips I went on while on a trip:

Fictional Adventures


by Gray Morrow

Heisenberg's Eyes (Part 1 of 2), by Frank Herbert


by Dan Adkins

Frank Herbert is back.  Hooray.

Actually, the setup's not too bad: It's the far future, and humanity has complete control of its genetic destiny.  Society is divided between the dronish "Sterries" (sterile humans), the occasional persons who can have potentially viable offspring, and the immortal (but also sterile) Optimen, who run everything, a triumverate's administration lasting a century.

Children cannot be borne the natural way; for an embryo to make it to maturity, a doctor's intervention is required.  So begins Eyes, on the eve of a "cutting" that will turn the artificially united progeny of a Mr. and Mrs. Durant into a human being — perhaps even an Optiman.

But before the horrified gaze of the assigned surgeon, some external force modifies the fertilized ovum, making the modification to immortal perfection impossible.  An expert is called in, who salvages the embryo, but in the process causes it to become that rarest of beasts: a nascent human that can reproduce on its own.  Such a thing is strictly forbidden, yet the expert and his accomplice nurse take pains to ensure that the contraband embryo's nature is hidden from the world.  Or so they think.

This takes up about half of this installment, and so a quarter of the book.  I have to give credit to Herbert's ability to spew a half dozen pages of medical jargon and keep it interesting. 

Things slow down in the second half, when we meet the ruling trio and discover that the plot has wheels within wheels.  It also involves an underground race of Cyborgs, who have been biding their time for tens of thousands of years to regain ascendancy over the planet, though they are as clueless about how the modification of the Durant's child occurred as everyone else.  Part 1 ends with the first shots being fired in a renewed war between the Optimen culture and the Cyborgs.

A couple of issues: Eyes is written in typical Herbertian style, which is to say in this weird third person omniscient viewpoint that switches characters every sentence and overuses italicized depiction of internal monologues.  Perhaps, as one of the oligarchs states in Eyes, "Efficiency is the opposite of Craftsmanship," but I still think the story could have been a lot better at half the length in the hands of someone else.  Like Dune.  Also, no society remains static for tens of thousands of years — not Egypt and not the weird world of Eyes.  And then, of course, there's the pseudo-telepathy the Durants enjoy that involves a code of finger presses.  It reminds me of shows where a paragraph of Morse code can be deduced from four dots and a dash.

Anyway, three stars for now.  Herbert's done worse, and I've yet to see him do much better.

Priceless Possession, by Arthur Porges

In the depths of space, the 23rd Century equivalent of the ambergris-bearing whale is the anenome-like "Star Sailor" or "S-2."  Its micron thin sail, produced over thousands of years, is the most valuable commodity in the universe.  On board a particular merchant ship, an Ensign and a Lieutenant find their cupiditous designs hindered by a captain who believes he is in telepathic communication with the current prey.

It's not a happy story, but it's pretty good.  Three stars.

For Your Information: Brownian Motion, Loschmidt's Number and the Laws of Utter Chaos, by Willy Ley

Beginning with an explanation of the word 'gas' (which is as deliberately coined as 'radar' or 'Kleenex'), Ley goes on a whirlwind trip through the history of fluid dynamics.  It's one of Ley's better pieces, though a little rushed and occasionally following the pattern of the Brownian Motion he ultimately explains.

But then, that's history for you.  Four stars.

The Eskimo Invasion, by Hayden Howard


by Jack Gaughan

Out in the wilds of Canada, an anthropologist has made a terrible discovery: a tribe of "Eskimos" are really something else, the female of their species infinitely appealing…and able to have children every month.  And they worship the Great Bear, a Cthulhu-esque entity that will devour/conquer/lead the world.  Can Dr. West make it back in civilization to warn humanity?

This is a well-written tale, but the premise is so dumb that I found myself irritated with it after a night's contemplation.  Two stars.

Galactic Consumer Report No. 2: Automatic Twin-Tube Wishing Machines, by John Brunner

The second in Brunner's Consumer Report series (the last dealing with budget time machines), this piece offers recommendations for and cautions against various models of "Wishing Machines," which are supposed to be able manufacture anything.  Not as amusing as the last one, but diverting enough.

Three stars.

This piece is followed by Algis Budrys' books column, which I am increasingly enjoying.  I read this latest one, describing Sheckley's Tenth Victim, Wilhelm and Thomas' The Clone, and Brunner's The Squares of the City for its humorous commentary and the illustration of the signs of good and bad editing and publishing.

When I Was Miss Dow, by Sonya Dorman

On a planet of amorphous proteans, a young, sexless being destined to become Warden of its people, takes on a human female form in order to more easily interact with the Terran mission to the planet.  As Miss Martha Dow, said creature falls fake head over custom-built heels with an elderly biologist — and ultimately, the feelings are reciprocated.

I found myself really enjoying this unrestrainedly emotional piece, intertwining human and alien feelings in a vivid manner.  This is the first published piece by Dorman using her full first name (previously, she had simply been "S"), and I'm delighted that she finally feels comfortable enough to use it.  I know I always look forward to her byline!

Four stars.

Open the Sky, by Robert Silverberg


by Gray Morrow

At long last, we come to (what I believe to be) the conclusion of Silverberg's Blue Fire series.  It's been a long trip, with five entries spanning more than a half-century of history.  We've seen the Vorster religion arise, a spiritualist cult of the atom worshiping the blue flame of a cobalt reactor.  We've watched as the cult schismed and the green-robed Harmonists made their sect more overtly religious and converted the colonists of toxic Venus.  Last installment, the Harmonist martyr, Lazarus, was ressurected by Vorst for purposes unknown.

Now we know why: on Venus, the genetically modified human espers have developed faster than light teleportation.  Vorst wants to use them to power the first interstellar starship.  To do this, he needs to reunite the religions — and Lazarus owes him a favor.  Luckily, Vorster knows this will all work out: he is a precog, after all…

The writing of this final installment is as good as ever, and it's nice to see all of the pieces fall into place.  However, the story as a whole suffers from the common failing of all stories involving precognition.  When you know how a story will, nay, must end, the tension is gone.  All that's left is the exposition.

By itself, Open the Sky will be confusing and unengaging to the new reader.  As the capstone to an epic, it serves its purpose adequately but not stunningly. Thus, I award three stars for the section, and four stars for the work as a whole, treating it as the serialization of a novel whose publication is as inevitable as Vorster's trip to the stars.

Journeys' End

All in all, it's been a good weekend, both in the real world and within the world of fiction.  While Pohl's magazine could not quite consistently offer the spectacle that Jean-Paul of Joshua Tree treated us to, nevertheless, it did end up on the positive end of the ledger.

In any event, two trips for the price of one is a good deal!  Why don't you take the June Galaxy along with you on your next jaunt and enjoy the same experience?

And while you're on your journey, tune in to KGJ, our radio station!  Nothing but the newest hits!




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[March 10, 1966] Top Heavy (April 1966 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Stacked

For as long as I can remember, American culture has really liked people who have extra on top.  Whether it's Charles Atlas showing off his wedge-shaped physique or Jayne Mansfield letting herself precede herself, we dig an up front kind of person.

So I suppose it's only natural that this month's issue of Galaxy put all of the truly great material in the first half (really two thirds) and the rest tapers away to unremarkable mediocrity (though, of course, I'm obligated to remark upon it).

Dessert first


by Jack Gaughan

The Last Castle, by Jack Vance


by Jack Gaughan

Millenia after the Six-Star war, Earth has been resettled in a series of citadels by a league of aristocrats.  Their stratified society disdains the wretched nomads who remained on the birthplace of humanity, instead living an effete life served by a variety of caste-bound aliens: The ornamental Phanes, the laboring Peasants, the conveying Birds, and the technician Meks. 

That is, of course, until one and all, the Meks rebel.  They sabotage the human equipment and begin a methodical campaign to destroy all of the castles.  Presently, only mighty Hagedorn remains.  Can our race survive?  Should it?

In the Algis Budrys' review column this month, he laments that Frank Herbert could have made a real epic out of Dune if someone had told him they don't have to be 400+ pages long.  After all, the Odyssey, the original epic, is less than 200.  And Jack Vance has created a masterfully intricate and beautiful epic in just 60. 

There is sheer art in beginning a story in medias res, then retelling the opening scene with further detail, and then elaborating still further on this scene once more, and the result being utterly compelling.  Storytellers take note: Jack Vance knows his craft.  Not since The Dragon Masters (also Vance's) has there been such economy of impact.

Five stars.

The Crystal Prison, by Fritz Leiber

The Last Castle is a hard act to follow.  Luckily, the aforementioned Budrys column forms a refreshing interlude.  I don't always agree with Budrys, but the instant article is passionate and poetic.

Leiber's piece is rather throwaway, about two ardent striplings barely in their thirties, suffocating under the oppressive ministrations of their several century-old great-grandparents.  He is forced to wear a padded suit, and She must wear a virtual nun's habit.  Both are required to have eavesropping electronics on their persons at all time.  Oh, the old biddies mean well, but is that living?

The young'ns don't think so, and thus they hatch a plan to get away.

Three stars for this trifling cautionary tale.

Lazarus Come Forth!, by Robert Silverberg


by Jack Gaughan

Ah, but then back to the meat.  We've now had three tales in Silverberg's Blue Fire series, involving a pseudo-scientific cult (reminiscent of Elron Hubbored's, in fact) having taken over the Earth circa 2100.  Author Silverbob clearly intends making a book out of all of these, and Editor Fred Pohl is probably delighted to be able to stretch out a thinly disguised serial in his magazine. 

In this latest installment, which features lots of characters we've met before, we finally get to see Mars of the future.  The Red Planet has chosen neither the cobalt-worshipping Vorsterism of Earth nor the heretical Harmonism sect that is taking Venus by storm.  But the individualistic Martian culture is thrown for a loop when they discover the tomb of Lazarus, founder of the Harmonists.  According to legend, Lazarus had been martyred.  Actually, he is simply in cold sleep, and the Vorsterites now have the ability to restore him.

But is this merely providence or part of old man Vorster's long range plan?

By itself, I suppose it might only merit three stars, but I really like this series, and I was happy to see more.

So… four stars.

The Night Before, by George Henry Smith

When the world is going to pot, and atomic annihilation seems a button press away, it's natural to seek out wiser heads to right things.  And when all of humanity has gone nuts, your only option is to look elsewhere for guidance.

And hope they aren't in the same boat…

Smith is a new name to me, though my friends assure me he appeared in the lesser mags in the '50s and that he maintains a decent career outstide the genre.  Three stars for this somewhat inexpert yet oddly compelling story throwback of a story.

For Your Information: The Re-Designed Solar System, by Willy Ley

One of the fun things about being a science writer for decades is being able to compare the state of knowledge at the beginning of your career to that at the current moment of writing.  Ley was penning articles back when Frau im Mond debuted, more than 30 years before the first interplanetary probes.  In this latest piece, he talks about how our view of the planets has changed in these three decades.

Good stuff, interspersed with pleasant doggerel.

Four stars.

Big Business, by Jim Harmon

And now, after admiring the impressive pectoral, the well formed abdominal, and the fetching pelvic zones, we arrive at the sickly thighs, the slack calves, and the flat feet.  What remains is serviceable — after all, the body still stands — but little more can be said of these lower extremities.

Jim Harmon's piece is one of those overbroad talk pieces.  In this one, a man from the future and an extraterrestrial compete against each other for the patronage of a rich old cuss who'll see humanity burn if he can keep warm by the fire.

It's not very good.  Two stars.

The Primitives, by Frank Herbert


by Wallace Wood

Speaking of throwbacks, this is the tale of Conrad "Swimmer" Rumel, a man of surpassing intelligence but brutish appearance who, as a result, turns to a life of crime.  He ends up blowing up a Soviet sub to steal a Martian diamond, but the only one who can cut the thing is a four-breasted Neanderthal stonecutter from 30,000 B.C.  Can the neolithic Ob carve the diamond before the mobster fence's impatience proves Rumel's undoing?

Herbert crams a lot of science fiction canards into this short story (which is still half again as long as it needs to be).  It's got the same writing crudities that plague the author, but somehow I stayed engaged to the end. 

A low three stars.

Devise and Conquer, by Christopher Anvil

A joke story in which the American race problem is solved by the simple expedient of making it impossible to know what race anyone is.

Less annoying than when he appears in Analog — another low three.

Twenty-Seven Inches of Moonshine, by Jack B. Lawson


by Jack Gaughan

Finally, we peter our with this nothing "non-fact" article about fishing on the Moon in the 21st Century.  Maybe I'd have enjoyed it more if I were a rod and reel man.  Or if it were science fiction.

Two stars.

Shave a little off the bottom

Of course, the ironic thing about all this is that if you took out the subpar stuff, you'd still have a full issue's worth of material.  Ah, but people already grouse about having to pay that extra dime (Galaxy is 60 cents; the other mags are 50) for 194 pages.  They'd scream their heads off if Galaxy went to 128.  So, we end up with a mag that looks great from the waist up, but less good as you gaze goes down.

Ah well.  You can still do a lot, even with half a loaf.  Or a pair of pastries.

The Journey is once again up for a Best Fanzine Hugo nomination — and its founder is up for several other awards as well!  If you've got a Worldcon membership, or if you just want to see what Gideon's done that's Hugo-worthy, please read his Hugo Eligibility article!  Thank you for your continued support.

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

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by Gideon Marcus

Milestones

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

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

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

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

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

Recipe for Disaster


by Gray Morrow

Do I Wake or Dream?, by Frank Herbert

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

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

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

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

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

Herbert is nothing if not ambitious.


by John Giunta

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

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

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

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

One star.

Peeping Tommy, by Robert F. Young

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

Two stars.

The Galactic Giants, by Willy Ley

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

Interesting stuff.  Four stars.

Please State My Business, by Michael Kurland

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

Two stars.

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


by Gray Morrow

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

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

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

Two stars.

Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys

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

All Hope Abandoned

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

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

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

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

DON'T MISS IT!




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Magazine

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

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by Gideon Marcus

How the Mighty have Fallen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handicapping the Reigning Champion


Did Campbell forget his is a science fiction magazine?

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

The Muddle of the Woad, by Randall Garrett


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

Glimpses of the Moon, by Wallace West


by John Schoenherr

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

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

Hydrogen Fusion Reactor, by Edward C. Walterscheid

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

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

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

Two stars.  Folks, the champion is staggering!

The GM Effect, by Frank Herbert


by Robert Swanson

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

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

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

Duel to the Death, by Christopher Anvil


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

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

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

Summing Up

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

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

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

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

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




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Magazine

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

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by Gideon Marcus

Pirates of the Caribbean

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

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

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

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

Only time will tell.

Insurgency in the Old Country

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

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


by John Schoenherr

Trouble Tide, by James H. Schmitz

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


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

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

Four stars.

Planetfall, by John Brunner


by Alan Moyler

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

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

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

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

Magnetohydrodynamics, by Ben Bova

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

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

Anyway, two stars.

The Captive Djinn, by Christopher Anvil


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


by John Schoenherr

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

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

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let the adulatory/damning letters begin!

Running the Numbers

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

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

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

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

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




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