Tag Archives: Frederik Pohl

Book, Magazine, Serial

[February 6, 1965] Too much of a… thing (March 1965 IF)

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by Gideon Marcus

Monthly Muchness

We're at a bit of a lull here in early February.  Not that things haven't been exciting, but they've been familiar headlines.  For instance, Sheriff Clark and his merry men locked up nearly 3000 Afro-American demonstrators who were marching in Selma, Alabama for their voting rights.

In Laos, one of the two right-wing factions supporting the neutralist government tried to coup the neutralist government.  It was defeated by the other right-wing faction.  Meanwhile, the Pathet Lao Communists continue to fester in the margins.

And China, a new member of the nuclear club, maintains its fracture with its Communist brethren to the north, the USSR (although the current meeting of Soviet Foreign Minister Kosygin and Chinese Head of State Zhou Enlai may thaw things).

Similarly, the March 1965 IF offers nothing particularly outstanding, as has been the case for several months now.  I really think editor Fred Pohl should consider returning IF to a bimonthly schedule.  Or perhaps Worlds of Tomorrow needs to be retired so that IF can get choicer stories.

In any event, come read what you've missed:

The Issue at Hand


by McKenna

Stone Place, by Fred Saberhagen

First up is the latest in Saberhagen's Berserker tales.  If you've been reading IF for a while, you know that this series involves enormous, sentient battleships that hate life, destroying human fleets and colonies wherever they can.  The author has done a good job developing the unearthly logic of the alien destroyers as well as written good yarns about the victories Terrans have managed to pull off against them.

Stone Place is the final battle.  The Berserkers have pulled together all two hundred of their ships scattered throughout the galaxy.  In counter, the Terrans have assembled a nearly equivalent armada.  The problem is that the human ships do not all owe allegiance to a central government, and there is friction aplenty.  Can humanity unite for long enough to defeat a threat to the entire species?


by Jack Gaughan

A few things make this latest outing a comparative disappointment: the beginning is slow, the politics are frustrating, and the cruelty of the Berserkers shockingly lurid.  Moreover, the tactics employed against the Berserkers are somewhat glossed over, making the ultimate result feel informed rather than earned.  I wish such a momentous chapter in the saga had been given a novel's worth of development.  Without the nuance and cleverness of the prior stories, and because of the heightened nastiness, three stars is all I can award Stone Place.

Meeting on Kangshan, by Eric Frank Russell

On an interstellar cruise liner, one of the veteran ship's officers makes the acquaintance of a grizzled, cantankerous marine.  Conversation ensues.

And that's about it.  I'm not sure what the point was.  Two stars.

All We Unemployed, by Bryce Walton

Written as half screenplay, half epistolary, All We Unemployed details the horrors of being the last employees in a automated factory that has decided that human elements are undesirable.  It's a pretty dumb story, saying nothing new (and in fact, feeling queerly familiar).

One star.

Of One Mind, by James Durham


by Gray Morrow

James Durham is the novice writer of the issue.  He offers up a piece in which humanity discovers barrier-less telepathy before it is ready, with disastrous results.  Very few survive the ensuing massacre, including the protagonist, an astronaut on his way to Mars.

There are some nice bits in Mind, particularly its realistic portrayal of space travel.  But on the whole, it doesn't hang together well at all.  It might make a decent novel, if the writer develops his chops some more.

Three stars

Million-Mile Hunt, by Emil Petaja

By contrast, Petaja is an old hand, a veteran of the pulp era.  However, he's been on hiatus for more than a decade…and it shows.  Hunt, about an ornery space prospector and the odd alien who dogs him mercilessly, just trying to help, is outdated stuff.  The solar system is home to half a dozen alien species, and people zip from setting to setting as if driving from block to block of a city.  The revelation at the end is weird and not particularly well-joined with the narrative.

Two stars.

Starchild (Part 3 of 3), by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson


by Gray Morrow

And finally, we come to the end of this three-part serial, sequel to The Reefs of Space.  At last, we will find out who the mysterious Star Child is, and how the rebels living in the reefs that gird our solar system have been able to subvert Earth's authoritarian Planning Machine and even blink out the Sun.

Except, we don't.  Instead, we're treated to forty pages of exposition that tell us that the ultimatum made to Earth (by whom?  some mystical stellar force centered about the star, Deneb?  it's not clear) to overthrow the Plan of Man involved dozens of years of perfect timing that indicate the outcome was predestined.  See, before the Sun went out, all of the nearby stars winked in succession.  Since light travels at a finite rate, that meant the scheme required not only synchronization of efforts on a galactic scale, but also knowledge that it would work (since they only made plans to do it once). 

Plus, it was apparently child's play for the Denebians(?) to take over not only the Planning Machine on Earth, but its copy that was sent to the reefs on the Earth vessel, Togethership.  In any event, none of the characters are given anything to do but watch.  Not Boysie Gann, the putative protagonist.  Not the stubborn Earth general bent on recovering the Togethership.  Not Quarla, the young woman from the reefs who sails from plot point to plot point on her seal-like fusorian, as the story requires.

It's the worst kind of pulp space opera.  Not even the settings are interesting, and setting is all we have at this point.  The first story of the series was fair, with an exciting middle.  This second installment had promise but quickly went to the dogs.

One star, and please let's not have another.

Summing Up

Wow, that was a stinker.  It's clear Pohl is shoving all of his junk into one drawer, including the stuff he probably couldn't sell anywhere else (Starchild).  And Pohl is touting that we've got novels from Schmitz and Doc Smith to look forward to.  Given that those two produce stuff in the same vein as Starchild, I am really not looking forward to the next several months.

Perhaps it's time I passed on the mantle.  Any volunteers?




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Magazine

[January 26, 1965] Down the Rabbit Hole…Again (February 1965 IF)

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by Gideon Marcus

TV Triplets

Back when the Young Traveler and I were watching The Twilight Zone, we accidentally picked the wrong time to turn on the set and ended up getting introduced to Mr. Ed, Supercar, and The Andy Griffith Show, in that order.  It made for an amusing night, and we learned a lot about the prime-time schedule for that season.

Recently, we once again fell down the rabbit hole, though not quite by accident. 

It all started with an amazing new import form England.  You may have seen the American rebroadcast of Danger Man back in the summer of '61.  It was a smart spy show starring NATO agent, John Drake, played by Patrick McGoohan.  Well, he's back, and this time his episodes are a full hour rather than just half.  It's gripping stuff, albeit a bit heavier and more cynical than the first run.  Realistic, idealistic, and respectful of women, it's a delightful contrast to the buffoonish Bond franchise.

So gripping was the show that we ended up somehow unable to change the channel when Password came on.  This game show is sort of a verbal version of Charades where a contestant tries to get their partner to say a word using single-word clues.  Play goes back and forth until one team gets it right.

It's kind of a dumb show for the viewer because we already know the answer.  On the other hand, the contestants always include celebrities, and it's fun to watch them struggle through the rounds.


Gene Kelly looked like he wanted to kill his partner.  The whole time!


Juliet Prowse, on the other hand, was adorable and funny.

After half an hour of that, we had summoned enough energy to reach toward the television remote…until we heard the bugle strains heralding the arrival of Rocky and Bullwinkle (and friends).  It had been my understanding that the show had completed its five year run, but it has apparently gone into reruns without missing a beat.  Since we had missed the first couple of years, well, we couldn't turn off the television now!

The only thing that saved us was the subsequent airing of Bonanza, a show I am only too happy to turn off.  Who knows how long we'd have cruised The Vast Wasteland otherwise.  Of course, now we're stuck watching all three shows every week (homework permitting).

Print Analog

Science fiction magazines are kind of like blocks of TV shows.  They happen regularly, their quality is somewhat reliable, but their content varies with each new issue.  This month's Worlds of IF Science Fiction defined the phrase "much of a muchness".  Each (for the most part) was acceptable, even enjoyable, but either they were flawed jewels, or they simply never went beyond workmanlike.  Read on, and you'll see what I mean:


This rather goofy cover courtesy of McKenna, illustrating Small One

The Replicators, by A. E. van Vogt

Steve Maitlin is an ornery SOB, a Marine veteran of Korea who knows the world is all SNAFU, especially the moronic generals who run the show.  Not only does this attitude make life miserable for those around him, but it also brings the Earth to the brink of interstellar war.  It turns out that the alien BEM Maitlin shoots one day on the road to work is just one of an infinite number of bodies for an IT, and the replacement body ends up with Maitlin's cussedness as part of its basic personality.

Said IT also has the ability to replicate any weapon the humans throw against it, but magnified.  Shoot at it?  It builds a big-size rifle.  Bomb it?  It comes back with an extra-jumbo jet and a bigger nuke.  In the end, Maitlin is the only one who can stop the thing, which makes karmic sense.  But can the vet change his nature in time to meet minds with the alien?


by Gray Morrow

This story doesn't make a lot of sense, but Van Vogt is good at keeping you engaged with pulpish momentum.  Three stars.

Reporter at Large, by Ron Goulart

In a future where mob bosses have replaced politicians (or perhaps the politicians have just more nakedly advertised their criminal nature!) power is entrenched and hereditary.  Only an honest journalist can bring about a revolution, but when any person has his price, only an android editor's got the scruples to speak truth to power.

Ron Goulart writes good, funny stories.  Unfortunately, while I see that he tried, he failed at accomplishing either this time out.  Two stars, and the worst piece of the mag.

Small One, by E. Clayton McCarty

A young alien has exiled himself as part of its first stage of five on the journey toward maturity.  Its isolation is disturbed when a tiny bipedal creature lands in a spaceship nearby and finds itself trapped in a cave.  The child-being establishes telepathic contact with the intruder (obviously a human) and an eventual rapport is established.  But everything falls apart when the Terran's rapacious teammates land and fall into conflict with the alien's infinitely more powerful family…


by Jack Gaughan

I am a sucker for first contact stories, especially when told from the alien viewpoint.  This one is good, but it suffers from a certain lack of subtlety, a kind of hamfisted presentation of the kind I normally see from new writers.  That makes sense; this is his (her?) first story.

Three stars, and my favorite piece of the magazine.

Blind Alley, by Basil Wells

A year after settling the planet of Croft, the human colonists and their livestock all become afflicted with blindness.  Against the odds, they survive, shaping their lives around the change.  But can their society take the shock when a new arrival, generations later, brings back the promise of sight?

Blind Alley treads much of the same ground as Daniel Galouye's excellent Dark Universe from a few years back.  The question is worth asking: when is a "disability" simply a different way to be able?  That said, Wells is not as skilled as Galouye, and the story merits three stars as a result.

Gree's Commandos, by C. C. MacApp


by Nodel

On a thick-atmosphered planet, Colonel Steve Duke assists a race of Stone Age flying elephants against the interstellar aggressors, the Gree, and their mercentary cohorts.  It's a straight adventure piece with virtually no development, either of the characters or the larger setting.  Somewhat similar to Keith Laumer's latest novel (The Hounds of Hell, also appearing in IF), it doesn't do anything to make you care.  Sufficiently developed, it could have been good.

Two stars.

Zombie, by J. L. Frye

Here is the second story by a brand new author…and it shows.  In the future, it becomes possible to transplant a personality in the short term to a physically perfect body.  Said transfers are used almost exclusively for espionage and sabotage — it's not much fun living in a shell of a form that can't really feel or enjoy anything other than the satisfaction of a job well done.  Indeed, the only people willing to endure the hell of personality transfer (back and forth) are the profoundly crippled.

This story of a particularly hairy mission has its moments of poignance, but again, Frye is not quite up to the challenge of a difficult topic.  Plus, he needs more adjectives in his quiver; I count seven times he used "beautiful" to describe the sole female character.  Even Homer varied between calling Athena "grey-eyed" and "owl-eyed".

Three stars.

Starchild (Part 2 of 3), by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson

Last up is the second installment of three (that number again!) in this serialized sequel to The Reefs of Space.  It's a short one, barely long enough to cover the harsh interrogation of Bowsie Gann.  Gann was the loyal spy servant of The Plan, returned to Earth at the same time the star-reef-dwelling Starchild began to turn off the local suns to scare Earth's machine-run government.


by Nodel

It's a most unpleasant set of pages, with lots of torture and cruelty (something Fred Pohl does effectively; viz. A Plague of Pythons).  That said, Pohl and Williamson can write, and I am looking forward to seeing how it all wraps up.

Three stars.

Stay Tuned

Like much of the Idiot Box's offerings, IF continues to deliver stuff that's just good enough to keep my subscription current.  I'd like editor Fred Pohl to tip the magazine in one direction or another so I can either stop buying it or enjoy it more…

Until then, I guess my knob stays tuned to this channel!

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Magazine

[January 14, 1965] The Big Picture (March 1965 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Science fiction writers often have to deal with things on a very large scale. Whether they take readers across vast reaches of space, or into unimaginably far futures, they frequently look at time and the universe through giant telescopes of imagination, enhancing their vision beyond ordinary concerns of here and now.

(This is not to say anything against more intimate kinds of imaginative fiction, in which the everyday world reveals something extraordinary. A microscope can be a useful tool for examining dreams as well.)

A fine example of the kind of tale that paints a portrait of an enormous universe, with a chronology reaching back for eons, appears in the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, from the pen of a new, young writer.


Cover art by George Schelling

World of Ptavvs, by Larry Niven


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan

Our story begins about two billion years ago. The character shown above is a member of a telepathic species with the power to enslave other sentient beings with their minds.


An example of a slave species that doesn't play much part in the story.


This slave species, on the other hand, has a big impact on what happens to its masters.

Kzanol the Thrint has a problem. On his way to the homeworld in his starship, the engine that allows it to make long-distance voyages explodes. The rest of the ship is unharmed, but Kzanol is stranded. Fortunately, he has a suit that slows time down to a crawl for the wearer. He can't reach his native planet with the power his ship has left, but he can crash into an uninhabited planet, where yeast is grown to feed slaves, after a couple of centuries. He stashes some valuables into a spare suit, puts on the other one, programs the ship for the slow journey, and goes into stasis, expecting to be rescued once enough time has gone by.


Kzanol in the stasis suit.

Cut to Earth, in a future of flying cars and interstellar travel. Larry Greenberg (now where have I seen that first name before?) is a telepath. Compared to an average Thrint, he has hardly any ability at all; but it's enough to get him a job communicating mentally with dolphins. This is really just a stepping stone to a real career of reaching the minds of aliens discovered on the planet humans call Jinx.

Scientists who have just invented a time-slowing device — sound familiar? — realize that the so-called Sea Statue, an ancient object found at the bottom of the ocean, is really an alien inside a similar stasis field. By placing it inside their own gizmo, they can deactivate it. Larry is along to pick up the thoughts of the alien. This works much too well.

Kzanol's mind takes over Larry's body. Although he still has human memories, he thinks he is really a Thrint, lost on a world of ptavvs (beings without telepathic powers.) He also believes that he is trapped in the body of a ptavv himself, because he is unable to control the inhabitants of the planet with his mind.


One of several genetically engineered species Larry/Kzanol remembers, adding greatly to the feeling of a richly imagined background. These are giant plants that use solar power as a defense mechanism.


These are dinosaur-sized, single-celled animals the Thrint use for food, feeding them on yeast. There turns out to be much more to them than meets the eye.


Racing animals, like horses or greyhounds on Earth.


The interiors of these trees act as rocket fuel.

At the same time, the real Kzanol escapes from his stasis suit. This leads to a wild chase across the solar system, as both Kzanol and Larry/Kzanol race to find the other stasis suit, which contains a telepathy-enhancing device that would allow the wearer to control all the minds on Earth. Both Earth-dwellers and the colonists who inhabit the asteroid belt head out after the pair. There's an economic cold war going on between Earthers and Belters, adding to the tension.


Kzanol thinks the other suit is on Neptune, but it turns out to be on Pluto, which used to be a moon of Neptune a couple of billion years ago.

This is a fast-moving, complex story with a richly imagined background. The author clearly did a lot of work creating his fictional universe and populating it with a wide variety of organisms. There are so many concepts thrown out that some readers may feel overwhelmed. Certain elements are not fully explored. (The slave that Kzanol throws into his spare suit seems to have no relevance to the plot. And what's going to happen to the colonists on Jinx? Maybe a sequel?) Overall, however, it's a fine novella, indicative of an important new talent.

Four stars.

Undersea Weapons Tomorrow, by Joseph Wesley

The first of a pair of nonfiction articles in this issue imagines naval warfare two decades from now. The scenario is similar to the Cuban situation, heated up quite a bit. The Good Guys set up a blockade of an unfriendly island. The Bad Guys use submarines to attack Good Guy shipping. The author considers the balance of wins and losses in this aquatic battle. (For example, how many ships do you need to sink to make up for the number of submarines lost in the process?)

He also discusses locating the enemy via spy satellites, very slow seagoing bases for aircraft, and porpoises as allies. It's a rather dry piece, with some interesting aspects.

Two stars.

Scarfe's World, by Brian W. Aldiss


Illustration by Gray Morrow

This starts like one of those corny old movies where cave people and dinosaurs live at the same time. There are a couple of odd things about this primitive world, however. Sometimes people just dissolve, and the male protagonist doesn't really understand why he wants to be near the female protagonist.

We soon find out that the humans and dinosaurs are miniature forms of artificial life, created for study. The process sometimes breaks down, explaining the dissolving, and the organisms don't reproduce, explaining the caveman's confused feelings.

There really isn't much to this story other than its basic concept. The last third returns to the point of view of the caveman, which pretty much rehashes what went on in the first third.

Two stars.

Phobos: Moon or Artifact?, by R. S. Richardson

Our second science article answers the question posed in its title right away. The author considers a Russian article from 1959 that suggested that Phobos is hollow, rejects it, and tells us why. The reasoning is highly technical. If I understand things correctly, when a moon is slowed in its orbit by something or other, it approaches the planet. Thus, although its velocity was decreased at first, it actually increases later.

Apparently Phobos increased its velocity due to this effect, but Deimos did not. One explanation for the observed effect would be if Phobos had an extremely low mass for its size; as if it were a hollow artificial satellite, for example. The author points out that there are several other explanations for the phenomenon, and that it really isn't that well established anyway. The whole thing will probably be of more interest to experts in orbital mechanics than the general reader.

Two stars.

By Way of Mars, by Ron Goulart

A guy falls for a girl, but she keeps standing him up at their dates. The Government Lovelorn Bureau tells him to forget her, but he doesn't give up that easily. Things rapidly get way out of hand, as the fellow gets in trouble with the cops, is shanghaied to Venus, escapes to Mars, and becomes the leader of a rebellion on the red planet.

I found the author's satiric portrait of a near future Earth, with suicide clubs and sex book plotters, more effective than the protagonist's interplanetary misadventures. The intent seems to be comic, although nothing particularly funny happens.

Two stars.

Pariah Planet, by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.


Illustrations by John Giunta

A spaceman kills a man in a bar fight on a planet with an odd system of justice. Although it was self-defense, he is convicted of murder, and transported to a prison planet. The underground society of this world is ordinary enough, with a couple of exceptions.

There are two groups of citizens. Type A people wear all different kinds of clothing, but Type B people must wear black at all times. Type B citizens are also required to repeat the crimes for which they were convicted, with the Type A citizens as victims. The protagonist, for example, is told to murder one Type A person each week.


The Type A people aren't really bald, as shown here, but the illustration sort of clues the reader in on what's going on.

This leads to a crisis of conscience, as the unspecified consequences of failing to commit one's assigned crime are said to be very serious indeed. As time goes by, the main character grows more and more fearful of what fate awaits him, and finds himself tempted to kill one of the Type A people, who seem like perfect victims.


The protagonist in a brooding mood.

The contrived situation reminds me of the sort of thing that used to show up a lot in Galaxy in the old days, with some aspect of society reflected in a funhouse mirror. Here, of course, it's crime and punishment. You'll probably figure out the nature of the Type A people, and how this eccentric system of justice is supposed to work, long before the end.

Two stars.

That's About the Size of It

After a big start, the second half of the magazine shrinks into a collection of disappointing little stories and articles. Maybe it's just the contrast between Niven's wide-ranging imagination and much shorter, less ambitious pieces. In any case, the publication is large enough to accommodate losers as well as winners. What do you expect for half a buck, anyway?


A big coin for a big magazine.

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Book, Magazine, Science / Space Race, Serial

[December 5, 1964] Steady as she goes (January 1965 IF)

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by Gideon Marcus

A tale of two missions

Mariner 4, launched November 28, 1964, is on its way to Mars.  Shortly after launch, the smart folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (some of whom I met last weekend!) determined that Mariner was going to miss its destination by some 200,000 kilometers.  So they calculated the nudge it would take to deflect the ship toward a closer rendezvous with the Red Planet.  This morning, the little spacecraft was ordered to fire its onboard engines for a 20 second burn, and it now looks like Mariner will come within just 10,000 kilometers of its target!

On the other side of the world, the Soviets have informed the world that their Zond 2 probe, launched two days after Mariner 4, needs no course correction.  On the other hand, on Dec. 2, it was reported that the probe is only generating half the power it's supposed to.

Similarly, in the science fiction magazine world, no fewer than three magazines got new editors this year (Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, and New Worlds), and two of them have the same editor with a different name (Amazing's and Fantastic's Cele Goldsmith is now Cele Lalli).

But in Fred Pohl's trinary system of Galaxy, Worlds of Tomorrow, and IF, not only is leadership unchanged, but so is content.  Nowhere is that clearer than in the January 1965 issue of IF, which like its predecessors, is an uneven mix of old and new authors, old and new ideas, and generally inferior but not unpleasant work. 

In other words, on course, but running on half-steam.

The Issue at Hand


by Gray Morrow

In many ways, this is not the issue Pohl wanted on the news stands.  The cover doesn't illustrate any of the contents of the issue; it's supposed to go with Jack Vance's novel, The Killing Machine.  But since that story ended up in book print before it could be serialized, it was pulled from appearing in the magazine.  Instead, we got the sequel to Fred Pohl's and Jack Williamson's The Reefs of Space, which had the virtue of being an IF-exclusive series and co-written by the editor. 

It's a good thing Pohl had it in his back pocket!

Starchild (Part 1 of 3), by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson


by Gray Morrow

Hundreds of years from now, the solar system is ruled by the Plan of Man, a computer-led collective in which everyone's lives are ordered, and dissent is rewarded with a quick trip to the body banks for organ harvesting.  But out in the stellar outskirts, in the frigid birthplace of comets, the steady creation of matter in the universe provides rich feeding grounds for the fusorians.  These cosmic plankton eaters in turn create vast reefs in space, homes to the seal-like spacelings and their predators, the dragonesque pyropods.  These reefs have also become shelters for Terran dissidents yearning to be free.  The Reefs of Space told the tale of their first human visitors.

Starchild is the story of Machine Major Boysie Gann, a spy sent to Polaris station to suss out traitors to the Plan.  He ends up kidnapped to the Reefs and then made a messenger to the Planner, the human liaison with the Planning Machine.  Mysteriously teleported back to Earth, Boysie bears with him The Writ of Liberation: if the Plan of Man does not end its attempts to subjugate the free people of the Reefs, the "Starchild" will blacken the Sun…

I was a bit chary of this serial at the beginning.  Williamson is a pulp writer from the way-back, and it shows.  Pohl can be brilliant, but Reefs was more pedestrian (except for the gripping middle section).  But Starchild kept me going the whole way, sort of a Cordwainer Smith "Instrumentality" story, though with less poetry.

Four stars so far.

Answering Service, by Alma Hill

A Boston fan and writer, Hill is new to my ken but has apparently been published since 1950. Service shows us a world where the SPCA has won, cats and other "aggressive" animals are tolerated only in zoos, and mice are overrunning the world without check.  One man is determined to reverse this situation.

Utterly forgettable.  Two stars.

The Recon Man, by Wilson Tucker


by Nodel

A young man wakes up from an amnesiac coma with a push to his back out the door of a house.  Onto a Heinlein moving road he goes, along with dozens of other male commuters to some mysterious labor destination.  A spitfire, himself, the other drones are so many zombies.  Only the pink jumpsuited women have any personality; they seem to run the show.

The man is harnessed to a machine, tasked with creating bacon by conceptualizing it so it can materialize in front of him.  He soon gets bored with this role and makes neckties and carpentry tools instead.  This shuts down the assembly line early, and one of the female supervisors takes him home to see what's wrong with him. 

Slowly, memories of a fatal car crash, centuries before in 1960, coalesce in the man's mind.  How did he get to this strange world?  For what purpose?  And how long does he have to live?

Recon Man is a neat little mystery with a truckload of dark implications.  I liked it a lot.  Four stars.

Vanishing Point, by Jonathan Brand


by Gray Morrow

This is the second outing by Brand, his first being a disappointment.  He fares better with this one, a space story within a bedtime story (the framing is cute but not particularly necessary) about Earth travelers on the first emissary mission to an alien race.

The place chosen for first contact is a sort of mock-Earth made by the aliens, a beautiful park of a world stocked with all sorts of game.  It even has a centenarian, human caretaker.  But neither the park, nor the old man, are what they seem.

Not bad.  Three stars.

The Heat Racers, by L. D. Ogle

Then we come to our traditional IF "first", the piece by a heretofore unpublished author (or at least an unpublished pseudonym).  This one is a vignette about a race of anti-grav sailboats.  I think.  The motive force and levitative technologies are never really explained.

Another trivial piece.  Two stars.

Retief, God-Speaker, by Keith Laumer


by Jack Gaughan

And last up, we have yet another installment in the increasingly tiresome saga of Retief, the diplomatic superspy of the future.  This one involves a race of money-grubbing, seven-foot, theocratic slobs, and the diminutive, subterranean aliens they mean to wipe out like vermin.  Can Retief establish formal relations with the former while saving the latter?

By the end of the novelette, you probably won't care.  This is easily the goofiest and most heavy-handed entry in the series.  I think it's time for Laumer to cut his losses.

Two stars.

Summing Up

All told, this month's issue is more "half a loaf" than "curate's egg".  The parts I liked were lots of fun, and as for the dreary bits, at least they made for quick reading.  I've said before that Pohl doesn't really have enough good material for three mags, but he could have a dynamite pair.

On the other hand, IF is a place to stick new authors and off-beat stories.  I just wish they were more consistently successes!

Maybe 1965 will be the year IF gets a mid-course correction…

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 9, 1964] Shall We Gather At The River? (January 1965 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

You Only Live Twice


Cover art by Richard Chopping

I trust that the spirit of the late Ian Fleming will forgive me for stealing the title of the last James Bond novel to be published during his lifetime. (Rumor has it that at least one more may be published posthumously.) Those evocative four words bring to mind the notion of life after death.

Since the dawn of consciousness, human beings have pondered the possibility of an afterlife. From reincarnation to oblivion, from Paradise to Gehenna, countless visions of an existence after death have filled the imaginations of poets, prophets, and philosophers.

But what about science fiction writers?

Few SF stories dealing with the subject come to mind. There are, of course, many tales of fantasy about survival beyond the grave, often comic versions of Heaven or terrifying visits to Hell. Science fiction, with its disdain for mysticism (despite a weakness for pseudo-scientific premises that are just as fantastic) generally ignores the question.


This 1962 novel is a rare exception.

It is remarkable, then, that almost half of the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow consists of a novella with a large cast of characters who have all died and been resurrected, without the need for a supernatural explanation.


Cover art by George Schelling.

Wanted: Dead or Alive

In fact, a few of the other pieces in the magazine feature characters who may have died, and who may have come back to life, although these are more ambiguous than the lead story.

Day of the Great Shout, by Philip Jose Farmer


Illustrations by Virgil Finlay.

A man who knows he died finds himself alive, nude, hairless, in a young and healthy body, floating in empty space, surrounded on all sides by countless others in his condition. After falling through the void and having a dream about an encounter with God, he wakes up on a new world.

(The author never gives this planet a name. The fact that the stars are different, along with other details, make it clear that it's not Earth. For convenience, let's call it Riverworld, based on the most notable physical feature of the place.)

All around him are other naked, bald people, mostly in a state of panic. One can't blame them, since this afterlife doesn't resemble anything they imagined. When they calm down a bit, it becomes clear that they are now in the valley of a wide river, surrounded on both sides by impassible mountains. A curious device, obviously making use of extremely advanced technology, provides them with food, and even luxury items such as tobacco and lipstick.


A fellow who has an unfortunate encounter with the device proves that it's possible to die a second time.

By this time, we find out that our protagonist is the famous Victorian adventurer Richard Francis Burton. It might be a good idea to list the other characters who play major roles during his adventures on Riverworld.

Dramatis Personae, in order of appearance:

Monat Grrautuft, an alien who died on Earth during the Twenty-First Century.

Kazzintuitruuaabemss, an ape-man who died sometime during the dawn of humanity. Fortunately for the reader, he'll be called just Kazz for the rest of the story.


Kazz in battle.

Peter Frigate, a writer born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1918. If that sounds familiar, that's because his time and place of birth are identical with the author's. Given that he has the same initials, it's clear that's he meant as a fictionalized self-portrait. He died during the same incident that led to the death of the alien.

Alice Pleasance Hargreaves, the woman who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Alice in Wonderland.

Lev Ruach, a man who also died at the same time as Frigate and the alien. (It turns out that a grave misunderstanding between aliens and Earthlings led to both being wiped out. The main reason for this apocalyptic incident, I think, is so the author doesn't have to deal with people from the far future. Everyone who has ever died on Earth is now alive on Riverworld, so limiting the timescale from prehistory to the Twenty-First Century makes his job a little less daunting than it might be.)

Gwenafra, a seven-year-old girl who died in ancient Gaul. We find out later that children who died before the age of five are somewhere else, not specified.

These are just the good guys. After some time passes, given the nature of humanity, war and slavery develop on Riverworld. Burton and his companions battle the forces of the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering and Tullios Hostilios, a legendary king of Rome, long before it became a Republic and then an Empire.

After this violent conflict, our heroes find out that a man is not what he seems to be, and we learn something about the origin and purpose of Riverworld.


The discovery involves the ability of Kazz to see things that the others can't detect.

The premise is a fascinating one, and Farmer develops the setting in convincing detail. There's plenty of action, and a generous number of science fiction concepts to hold the reader's interest. My only complaint is that the story is open-ended, with Burton ready to continue exploring Riverworld. I suspect that a sequel or two is in the works, perhaps leading to a full novel.

An anticipatory four stars.

Field Weapons Tomorrow, by Joseph Wesley

The first of two nonfiction articles in this issue imagines what the equipment used by an ordinary foot soldier of the near future might be like. Sensitive radar detects enemies, and small missiles of various kinds serve to identify and destroy targets. The author makes use of a couple of fictional characters to demonstrate the technology, enlivening a rather dry subject.

An interested three stars.

Retreat Syndrome, by Philip K. Dick


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Starts with a guy stopped for speeding in his futuristic vehicle. This mundane beginning soon turns weird as the fellow moves his hand through the dashboard of his one-wheeled car as if it weren't there. We're firmly in the territory that the author explored in previous works; what is reality?

Flashing back reveals that the man remembers killing his wife with a laser gun when she threatened to reveal plans for a revolution against Earth by colonists on Ganymede. His psychiatrist advises a visit to the woman, who is apparently alive and well on Earth.


Did this happen or not?

The guy thinks he's been brainwashed, and that he's not on Earth at all, but still on Ganymede. A mind-altering drug may be involved.

The truth is a little more complicated than that. The fellow winds up committing what promises to be an endless cycle of attempted murders that might not be real.

Touches of what Simone de Beavuoir might call (sexual) 'oppression' make reading an otherwise intriguing story uncomfortable. We're told that the woman intended to betray the revolution out of petty spite and female bitterness. Another direct quote from the protagonist:

Like all women she was motivated by personal vanity and wounded pride.

That's a pretty wide-sweeping indictment of half the human race, even if we accept the fact that the main character isn't in his right mind. Trying to ignore this unpleasant part of the story, I found it to be compelling, with one of the author's more accessible plots.

A slightly offended four stars.

The Pani Planet, by R. A. Lafferty


Illustration by Norman Nodel.

The commander of a military expedition on an alien planet dies. The only native inhabitant who bothers to speak to the humans offers to fix the broken man. Rejecting this as ridiculous, the new leader buries the dead officer, who treated the aliens decently, and initiates a new, harsher policy. You won't be surprised to find out that the deceased commander returns to life. Of course, not all is what it seems to be.

Typical for the author, this story combines whimsy with tragedy. There's comedy in the broken English of the alien, and the tale ends with a joke, but there's also torture and death. The details of the plot are gimmicky, but it's worth reading.

An ambiguous three stars.

Stella and the Moons of Mars, by Robert S. Richardson

Our second nonfiction article rehashes material that appeared in the December 1963 issue of the magazine. Once again, we go over the remarkable fact that Jonathan Swift seems to have predicted that Mars would prove to have two moons, long before they were discovered, in his satiric classic Gulliver's Travels. After talking about the history of the sighting of the satellites, and discussing their known and speculative properties, the article half-seriously suggests that Swift might have seen them through a telescope and slyly announced the fact in the pages of his book. At least the author is honest enough to admit that this hypothesis is impossible, given the limitations of telescopes in Swift's time. We learn a little about the moons of Mars, but the rest is old hat.

An overly familiar two stars.

The Dead Ones, by Sydney van Scyoc

Once again we have death and revival, of a sort. A man is horribly injured in an industrial accident, and is presumed to be near death. Not much later, he turns up perfectly fine. His son-in-law smells something fishy, and finds out the truth about the mysterious health care system of this future world. There's a twist ending you may see coming.

This story features some of the most implausible happenings I've ever read. First of all, you have to believe that one secretive company controls all health care. Secondly, you have to accept that nobody minds the fact that they experience loss of memory during routine physical exams. Thirdly, you have to presume that the hero is the only person who has ever questioned the fact that many people approach death from disease or injury, yet are completely healed right away in some unseen manner.

A skeptical two stars.

Manfire, by Theodore L. Thomas


Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

The bizarre, and probably imaginary, phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion becomes a worldwide plague in the near future. (The author calls it pyrophilia, but that seems like a very misleading term. The victims of this horrible death certainly don't love it!) Governments make use of all possible resources in an attempt to solve the problem.

Off to secure the remains of a victim.

The United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare contacts an eccentric, reclusive genius to see if he can help.


Our hero.


A victim.

The fellow investigates things in his own way, eventually setting up a team of experts to work on the mystery from a strictly theoretical viewpoint.


He also makes sure that they have plenty of booze.

Other than some gruesome scenes of people being consumed by flames coming out of their bodies, and investigators collecting the grisly remains for study, there isn't much to this story other than the main character's method of attacking the problem. The point seems to be that throwing a bunch of highly intelligent people in a room and having them come up with speculative hypotheses is superior to the methodical collection of data. I'm not sure I agree with that, since both are important. The explanation for the rise in spontaneous combustion reveals some ingenuity on the part of the author, but is rather anticlimactic.

A disappointed two stars.

Can These Bones Live?

Like people, most stories have a limited lifetime. A lucky few gain something like immortality, reprinted in anthologies that survive when others fade away. The two authors named Philip have a good chance of seeing their creations resurrected from the pages of the magazine, into new bodies in the form of books. The other writers, maybe not as much. Only time can tell, and, like the afterlife, nobody really knows anything about the future.

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 8, 1964] It's War! (The October 1964 Galaxy and the 1964 Hugos)

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[We have exciting news!  Journey Press, the publishing company founded by the team behind Galactic Journey, has just launched its first book.  We know you will enjoy Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), a curated set of fourteen excellent stories introduced by the rising stars of 2019. 

If you enjoy Galactic Journey, you'll want to purchase a copy today — available physically and virtually!]


by Gideon Marcus

It's a War, Man

No matter which way you look these days, fighting has broken out somewhere.  Vietnam?  War.  The Congo?  War.  Yemen?  War.

Worldcon?  You'd better believe it's war.

Back in May, the committee putting on this year's event (in Oakland, called Pacificon II) decided that Walter Breen would not be allowed to attend.  For those of you living in a steel-plated bubble, Breen is a big-name fan in the SF and coin-collecting circles with a gift for inciting dislike in direct proportion to one's proximity.

Oh, and he's also a child molester.

Now there has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the draconian action taken by the Pacificon committee, likening the arbitrary action to McCarthy's witch trials of the last decade.  As a result, fandom has largely resolved itself into two camps, one defending the attempt to evict Breen from organized fandom, the other vilifying it.

I know we're a kooky bunch of misfits and our tent should be pretty inclusive, but ya gotta draw the line somewhere, don't you?  And what may have been fine for Alexander doesn't hold in the 20th Century.  I guess it's clear which side I fall on.

Well, despite the protests and the boycotts that tainted the Worldcon (which were part of what deterred me from attending this year), they still managed to honor what the fans felt was the best science fiction and fantasy of 1963.  Without further ado, here's how the Hugos went:

Best Novel

Here Gather the Stars, by Clifford Simak (63 votes)

Nominees

For the first time, the Journey had reviewed all of the choices for Best Novel before the nominating ballots had even been counted.  While we didn't pick the Simak for a Galactic Star last year, it's not a bad book, certainly better than the Heinlein and the Herbert, probably better than the Norton.  I suspect the reason the Vonnegut finished so low is that, as a mainstream book, fewer had read it.  Or perhaps just because it was so weird.

Short Fiction

The No Truce with Kings by Poul Anderson (93 votes)

Nominees

We got all of these this year, too.  The Anderson was our clear favorite, being the only one on the list to rate a Galactic Star.  The rest are in the order we had rated them.  Sadly, because this category encompasses so many stories, a great number got cheated out of recognition.  Perhaps they will divide the categories by length in the future.

Best Dramatic Presentation

None this year — insufficient votes cast for any one title to create a proper ballot.

I bet this will change next year what with so many SF shows coming out this Fall season (Rose Benton has got an article coming out in two days on this very subject!)

Best Professional Magazine

Analog ed. by John W. Campbell, Jr. (90 votes)

Nominees

It looks like people voted for the magazines in rough proportion to subscription rates, though F&SF did disproportionately well.  I am happy to say that this is the year we start covering Science-Fantasy…in its new incarnation under the editorship of Kyril Bonfiglioli.

Best Professional Artist

Ed Emshwiller (77 votes)

Nominees

Book covers are showing their influence on the voting — Krenkel and Frazetta don't do the SF mags. 

Best Fanzine

AMRA (72 votes)

Nominees

  • Yandro (51 votes)
  • Starspinkle (48 votes)
  • ERB-dom (45 votes)
  • No Vote (52 votes)
  • No Award (6 votes)

(isn't it interesting how close the ERB fanzine's tally is to Savage Pellucidar's…)

I was glad to see that Warhoon, which is full-throatedly in favor of Walter Breen, was not in the running.  Starspinkle, which makes no secret of its disdain for Breen, is the only one of these I read regularly.

Also, while Galactic Journey was not on the ballot again (for some reason), we did get a whopping 88 write-in votes.  So, unofficially, we are the best fanzine for 1964.  Go us!

Best Publisher

Ace Books (89 votes)

Nominees

  • Pyramid (79 votes)
  • Ballantine (45 votes)
  • Doubleday (35 votes)
  • No Vote (25 votes)
  • No Award (11 votes)

I should keep track of who is publishing what for next year.  The problem is, I usually read novels in serial format.

And that's it for my Hugos report.  It'll be interesting to see if fandom's scars heal at all by next year.

Veterans of Foreign Wars

Given the turmoil in the papers and in fandom, it's not surprising that war is a common theme in science fiction, too.  In fact, the October 1964 issue of Galaxy is bookended by novellas on the subject; together they take up more than half the book.  They also are the best parts.


by George Schelling

Soldier, Ask Not, by Gordon R. Dickson

Centuries from now, after humanity has scattered amongst a dozen or more stars, the species has splintered to specialize in particular traits.  The eggheads of Newton focus on scientific advance while the Cassidans make the building of starships their trade.  The mystical Exotics have devoted their lives to nonviolent pursuit of philosophy.  The Dorsai, of course, are renowned galaxy-wide for their military prowess.  And the hyper-religious "Friendlies" are committed to faith.

Our story's setting is the wartorn Exotic world of St. Marie, where Dorsai mercenaries have been employed to topple the Friendly mercenaries who had conquered the world years prior.  Newsman Tam Olyn has learned that the Friendlies' mission is a forlorn one, and he hopes to leverage that information to force the Christian zealots to do something desperate, illegal, to win the fight.  For Olyn has a grudge to settle with the Friendlies, having watched them slaughter without mercy an entire company of surrendered soldiers several years back.


by Gray Morrow

Set in the same universe as Dickson's prior Dorsai stories, Soldier is a more mature piece, asking a lot of hard questions.  Is Olyn's zeal any less than that of the Friendlies, any more laudable?  If Olyn's actions cause the destruction of an entire sub-branch of humanity, can the species' collective psyche withstand the loss of one of its vital components? 

Of course, the situation turns out to be far more complex than Olyn thought, with the Friendly commandant and the Dorsai commander proving to be independent variables beyond his control.  In the end, nothing goes as planned.

Soldier is not perfect.  It's overwritten in places, although since the tale is a first-person account written by a war correspondent, I wonder if this was intentional.  The omniscience of the Exotic, Padma, who has an understanding of events and factors that would make even Hari Seldon jealous, is a bit convenient as a storytelling device.  The idea that humanity has evolved in a few centuries, not just societally but mentally, such that vital components of our minds have been bred out of existence, is difficult to swallow.

But Dickson is a good writer, and I found myself turning the pages with avid interest. 

Four stars.

Martian Play Song, by John Burress

A variation of patty-cake that will make you chortle.  Three stars.

Be of Good Cheer, by Fritz Leiber

The first of two robot stories, this is a letter from Josh B. Smiley, Director-in-Chief of Level 77's Bureau of Public Morale to one Hermione Fennerghast of Santa Barbara.  It seems she just can't be happy living in a mechanically run world, where robots ignore the people, where people seem to be increasingly scarce, and where both the indoors and outdoors are being reduced to dull grayness.  Smiley does his best to reassure her that all is for the best, but the Director's verbal smile increasingly comes off as forced.

It's cute while it lasts, forgettable when it's over.  Three stars.

The Area of "Accessible Space">, by Willy Ley

Mr. Ley offers us a list of near-Earth celestial targets that could be reached in the near future by rockets and probes.  The author is quite optimistic about our prospect, in fact: "There can hardly be any doubt that a mission to a comet (unmanned) will be flown before a man lands on the moon."

Anyone want to lay odds?

Three stars.

How the Old World Died, by Harry Harrison

Robot story #2: computerized automata are programmed with one overriding desire — to reproduce.  Soon, they take over the entire world, having deconstructed our buildings and machines to make more of them.

The twist ending to the story is not only ridiculous, but it also is in direct contradiction to events described earlier.  Sure, perhaps the narrator (a crotchety grandpa who remembers the good old days) is not reliable.  But if that be true, then 90% of the story is invalid, and what was the point of reading it?

Two stars.

The 1980 President, by Miriam Allen deFord


by Hector Castellon

Have you noticed that every President of the United States elected in a year ending in zero ultimately dies in office?  Perhaps that's why, in 1980, the two big parties have nominated candidates they wouldn't mind losing (though they'd never admit it publicly).

A cute idea for a gag story, I guess.  Except, in this case, the parties have been maneuvered into their actions by alien agent, The Brown Man, and his goal is racial harmony and equality.

Yeah, I found the whole thing a bit too heavy-handed for my tastes, too.  I've liked deFord a lot, but her work lately has seemed kind of primitive, more at home in a less refined era of science fiction.

Three stars, barely.

The Tactful Saboteur, by Frank Herbert


by Jack Gaughan

From bad to worse.  This unreadable piece involves a government with a built in Department of Sabotage to ensure things don't run too smoothly.  I guess.  Maybe you'll get more out of it than I did.

One star.

What's the Name of That Town?, by R. A. Lafferty

A supercomputer is tasked with discovering an event not from the evidence for its existence, but from the conspicuous lack of evidence.  Lafferty's piece is an inverse of deFord's — a great idea rather wasted on a feeble laugh. 

Another barely three-star story.

Maxwell's Monkey, by Edgar Pangborn

What if the monkey on your back was a real monkey?  This monkey is a clunker.

Two stars.

Precious Artifact, by Philip K. Dick

Humanity emerges victorious from a war with the "proxmen", and Milt Biskle, a terraformer on Mars, is granted the right to return to Earth.  He does so only reluctantly, subconsciously dreading a trip to his overcrowded homeworld.

Once there, he is wracked with fears that the teeming masses of people, the burgeoning skylines are all imaginary.  Underneath, he is certain, lies nothing but ruins, smashed by the proxmen — who were actually triumphant and project this illusion to keep the few remaining humans sane.

But there is a level of truth even deeper…

A minor effort from a major author, Dick's latest warrants three stars.

The Children of Night, by Frederik Pohl


by Virgil Finlay

Lastly, Galaxy's editor picks up the pen to deliver a tale of marketing in the early 21st Century.  It's a topic near and dear to Pohl's heart, he having started out as a pretty successful copywriter, and it's no surprise that he often returns to this subject in his stories.

In this particular case, Pohl's protagonist is "Gunner", a fixer for the world's most reputable (and infamous) publicity firm.  They're the kind who'd even try to reform Hitler's image if the were enough Deutschmarks in the deal.  And in 2022, Moultrie & Bigelow's client is no less than the Arcturan insectoids who tried to wipe out humanity in a decade-long interstellar war.  I mean, how do you sell the public on a bunch of stinky bugs who killed indiscriminately and conducted experiments on children that would make Mengele blanch? (Who am I kidding — the bastard would take notes.)

Unlike many of the author's other marketing stories, this one is played straight; and while I don't know that I buy the ending, no one would argue that Fred Pohl can't write.

Four stars.

Picking up the Pieces

At times, the latest issue of Galaxy feels like a battlefield, with definite winners and losers.  In the end, though, this kind of war is a lot more palatable than the other ones going on in the world. 

At four bits, that's affordable and welcome R&R.

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Magazine

[June 16, 1964] Strangers in Strange Lands (August 1964 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

We've probably all felt out of place from time to time, like the philosophical private eye Philip Marlowe quoted above. I'll bet that the Rolling Stones, a British musical group newly introduced on this side of the pond, felt that way when they made a very brief appearance on the American television variety show The Hollywood Palace this month. Their energetic version of the old Muddy Waters blues song I Just Want to Make Love to You lasted barely over one minute. The sarcastic remarks made about them by host Dean Martin took up at least as much time.


Here are the shaggy-haired troubadours at a happier moment, shortly after their arrival in the USA.

In Tears Amid the Alien Corn

Similarly, the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow is full of characters who aren't where they belong, along with a couple of authors who might feel more at home elsewhere.


by Gray Morrow

I trust that the shade of John Keats will forgive me for stealing a few words from his famous poem Ode to a Nightingale, because they movingly evoke the emotions of those far from where they feel at home. The stories we're about to discuss may not have many tears, but they've got plenty of aliens, as well as, unfortunately, quite a bit of corn.

Valentine's Planet, by Avram Davidson


by Gray Morrow

Better known, I believe, as the current editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a fact that does not endear him to all readers, Davidson may seem a bit out of place as the author of a long novella of adventure in deep space. Be that as it may, his story takes up half the issue, so it deserves a close look.

We start with mutiny aboard a starship. The rebels kill one of the officers in a particularly brutal way, sending the others, along with a few loyal crewmembers, off to parts unknown in a lifeboat. They wind up on an Earth-like planet, inhabited by very human aliens. (There's one small hint, late in the story, that the natives came from the same ancestors as Earthlings.) The big difference is that the men are very small, no bigger than young boys. The women are of normal size, so they serve as rulers and warriors. (There's a male King who is, in theory, the source of all power, but he's little more than a religious figurehead, living in isolation from the world of war and politics.)

The survivors of the mutiny get involved with local conflicts, while they try to find a source of fuel so they can make their way home in the lifeboat. Things get complicated when the insane mutineer in command of the starship lands on the planet, intending to plunder it. After a lot of hugger-mugger, and a dramatic final confrontation with the rebels, the Hero gets the Girl, achieves a position of power, and is well on his way to reshaping the local matriarchy into something more to his liking.

As you can tell, I was not entirely comfortable with the implication that replacing a woman-dominated society with a male-dominated one is a laudable goal. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt, and assume he was aiming at nothing more than escapist entertainment. On that level, it's a pretty typical example. The feeling of the story changes from space opera to science fantasy halfway through, and the transition is a little disorienting. Davidson avoids most of the literary quirks found in many of his works, although he indulges in a little wordplay now and then. (I lost count of how many times he told us that the armor of the Amazon warriors was black, scarlet, black and scarlet, scarlet and black, black on scarlet, scarlet on black, etc. He also gives names to a large number of the political factions on the planet, apparently just to amuse himself.)

Two stars.

What Weapons Tomorrow?, by Joseph Wesley

A nonfiction article, among a bunch of tales of wild imagination, may seem, as the old song goes, like a lonely little petunia in an onion patch. In any case, this is a rather dry piece, imagining what the tools of war might look like in 1980. The author describes satellites that could rain destruction from above, and energy beam weapons that could defend against them. He then explains why neither of these methods is practical. It's informative, if not exciting.

Two stars.

The Little Black Box, by Philip K. Dick


by George Schelling

This strange, complex story begins with a woman who is definitely not where she belongs. She's an expert on Zen Buddhism, sent to Cuba in an attempt to distract the Chinese Communists living there from their political philosophy. This quickly proves to be a deception, as she's really there so a telepath can read her mind and track down a religious leader. It seems that the woman's lover, a jazz harpist so popular that he has his own TV show, is a follower of the enigmatic mystic Wilbur Mercer.

Mercer is a mystery. He broadcasts an image of himself walking through a desert wasteland on television. His devotees use devices that allow them to experience his sensations, primarily his suffering as he approaches his death. Both sides of the Cold War consider him a danger. There is speculation that he may not even be human, but some sort of extraterrestrial. The United States government declares the empathy machines illegal, driving the Mercerites underground. The story ends in what seems to be a miraculous way.

Like most stories from this author, this peculiar tale contains a lot of a characters, themes, and subplots. Sometimes these work together as a whole, sometimes they don't. It certainly held my interest throughout, even if I didn't fully understand what Dick was driving at. Your enjoyment of it may depend on your willingness to accept that some things have no rational explanation.

Three stars.

We from Arcturus, by Christopher Anvil

Everything about this story makes it seem as if it fell out of the pages of Astounding/Analog and landed in a place where it doesn't belong. That's no big surprise, since Anvil has been a regular in Campbell's magazine for quite a while. You also won't be startled to learn that it's a comedy about hapless aliens who fail to invade Earth. The author can write that kind of thing in his sleep by now, so he pulls it off in an efficient manner.

A pair of shapeshifting scouts from another planet suffer various misadventures as they try to prepare the way for their leaders to conquer the world. Five such teams have already disappeared, so the new duo is cynical about the chance of success. (Like in many of these stories, even when it's human beings making the attempts, you have to wonder why they don't just give up.) One big problem is that the aliens get all their ideas about Earthlings from television. Eventually, they find out why the other scouts vanished, and the story ends with a mildly amusing punchline.

It's refreshing to have a comic science fiction story that doesn't degrade into crude slapstick, and Anvil has a light touch that can provide a few smiles. It's a pleasant enough thing to read, even if it will fade from your memory as soon as you finish it.

Three stars.

The Colony That Failed, by Jack Sharkey


by Jack Gaughan

Here we have not just one person in the wrong spot, but a whole community. Colonists disappear, one by one, from an agricultural settlement on a distant world. Norcriss, a fellow we've seen before in the so-called Contact series, arrives to take care of the problem. As in previous stories, he uses a device that allows him to enter the mind of other beings. One problem is that, in this case, he doesn't know what mind to enter. Adding a touch of what seems to be the supernatural is the fact that the coffin of a dead woman burst open, her body went missing, and other colonists heard her voice after she died.

The author provides a scientific solution to the mystery that is interesting, if not extremely plausible. The story accomplishes what it sets out to do, without anything notable about it. At least Sharkey wasn't trying to be funny.

Three stars.

Day of the Egg, by Allen Kim Lang


by Nodel

Talk about being in the wrong place! This story was supposed to be in the April issue, but because of some kind of goof it's only showing up now. I can't say that its disappearance was a bad thing.

This is a silly farce, set in a solar system where stereotyped British folks rule one planet, stereotyped Germans rule another, and bird people rule another. The protagonist, Admiral Sir Nigel Mountchessington-Jackson (are you laughing yet?), competes with his nemesis, Generalfeldmarschall Graf Gerhard von Eingeweide (still not laughing?), to sign a treaty with the birds. The egg containing the new monarch of the avian planet hatches, and the baby chick thinks the German is her mother. The Englishman comes up with a scheme to turn the tables on his opponent.

I found the whole thing much too ridiculous for my taste. The way in which the British guy wins the day was predictable, and the jokes fall flat. The author makes Anvil look like the master of sophisticated wit.

One star.

Not Fitting In

Reading this issue made me feel like I should have been somewhere else, doing something else. The stories range from poor to fair, with only Philip K. Dick rising above mediocrity. Even his unique story fails to be fully satisfying, and seems to have been shoved into a place where it doesn't quite belong.  As science fiction fans in the mundane world, I'm sure we can all identify with that situation. 


This newly published book provides a fit metaphor, but don't bother reading it. It's all about the pseudoscience of matching people to their proper careers through physiognomy.

Nevertheless, we're also a hardy breed, and we know that even when times are rough, something good is right around the corner.  Like this month's Fantastic…

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Magazine

[April 20, 1964] Play Ball! (June 1964 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Opening Ceremonies

Howdy, sports fans!

Baseball season just opened up here in the good old USA.  The New York Mets, relative newcomers to the sport, faced the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first game held at Shea Stadium, their new stomping grounds.


The first day, and already the scoreboard is broken

The Mets lost, 4 to 3.  I know the young team has a pretty bad win-loss record, but that's got to hurt.  Opening day at your brand new stadium and the visitors beat you by one run.

Like a baseball team, the latest issue of World of Tomorrow features nine men.  (No women.) I'm counting editor Frederik Pohl as one of the players, as well as the coach and manager, since he provides the magazine's editorial — it's an interesting essay about C. P. Snow's book The Two Cultures and a Second Look, and how science fiction can build a bridge between science and the humanities.  After he provides a few practice swings, let's get down to the real ballgame.

Batter Up!


cover by Gray Morrow

On Messenger Mountain, by Gordon R. Dickson

A reliable player steps up to the plate with a tale of war and survival in deep space.

The men (no women) of the starship Harrier are having a really bad day.  After discovering an Earth-like planet, they run into an alien vessel.  In this dog-eat-dog picture of the future, the two ships immediately try to destroy each other.  Many men and aliens die, and both vessels have to make crash landings.


by Gray Morrow

The few human survivors find themselves at the foot of a gigantic mountain.  One of the aliens attacks them right away.  They manage to kill it, but not without more casualties.  The aliens are able to alter their body structures rapidly to accommodate changing conditions.

As if that were not enough of a threat, the men have no way to signal for help without carrying a piece of equipment to the top of the mountain.  Three of the crew set out on a long, difficult, and hazardous climb.  Adding to their woes is the fact that there may be another alien alive, and it might be able to disguise itself as a human being. 

Dickson creates a great deal of tension and suspense.  The mountain climbing scenes are vivid and full of realistic details.  The icy environment and shapeshifting aliens remind me of the classic story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr. (but not The Thing From Another World, the movie loosely based on the story.) Dickson's aliens are described in more detail than Campbell's, and their ability to change their bodies is believable.

I could quibble with the assumption that first contact with aliens must inevitably lead to conflict, or with the story's ending, which promotes humanity as unique and superior.  These aspects of the story make it seem intended for the pages of Analog.  Overall, however, it's a very good adventure story.

Four stars.

The Twerlik, by Jack Sharkey

Batting second is a player who often strikes out, particularly when he's trying to be funny.  Sometimes he connects with the ball solidly, when he takes off his jester's cap and gets down to serious business.

The Twerlik is a very strange alien.  Its flat, monomolecular, multifilamented body extends over an area of ten square miles, but it only weighs one pound.  It survives on its cold, dark world by absorbing light from the planet's distant sun.  Humans arrive, bringing sources of light far greater than anything the Twerlik has ever known.  Grateful for the gift of energy from the strangers, and for all the new concepts it learns from them, it gives them what they most desire.

Although the themes of be careful what you wish for and the road to Hell is paved with good intentions have been used many times before, Sharkey handles them in a new way.  The alien is fascinating, particularly in the way it picks up novel ideas from the humans.

There's a small hole in the plot logic.  The alien does not even have the concept of self until people show up.  Why, then, does it think of itself as a Twerlik after they arrive?  The humans don't call it that, or even know that it exists.

Despite this tiny flaw, this is the best story by Jack Sharkey that I have ever read.

Four stars.

Short Course in Button Pushing, by Joseph Wesley

Instead of a seventh inning stretch, we get a break from fiction with this article from a writer who has published a handful of stories, mostly in Galaxy.  It starts off with a question that seems simple enough.

What is the range of one of our latest supersonic anti-air warfare Naval missiles?

The author goes on to show how a large number of variables make this impossible to answer.  Atmospheric conditions, the nature of the target; the factors involved are incalculable.  The article has a single point to make, and does it in an efficient, if not intriguing, manner.

Three stars.

Stay Out of Our Time!, by Willard Marsh


by Nodel

Back to the game with this satiric, semi-comic time travel story.

Hiram Wetherbee is a meek little fellow living in the late Twentieth Century.  In his time, it's as easy to visit the far future or the distant past as it is to take a trip to a vacation spot.  However, certain future centuries ban visitors from the past, blaming them for the way they ruined the future.  Hiram, a painter of mediocre talent, intends to travel to 1902, in order to impress the unsophisticated locals with modern art.  (His real motive is to seduce the women of the time, as he's not exactly a big success with the ladies.) A mix-up lands him in one of the forbidden centuries of the future, without enough funds to make his way back.  After some misadventures with the authorities, he gets a guided tour of the time from some friendly folks who find him a remarkable specimen.

I was never quite clear what the author was trying to say, in this portrait of a future without imagination.  Very few people have jobs.  Euthanasia is encouraged.  Abstract art flourishes, but realism is dead.  Hiram talks in clichés, and the people of the future think he's brilliant.  The story is readable, but wanders all over the place and never quite grabs the reader.

Two stars.

Lucifer, by Roger Zelazny

Next in the batting order is a player who is making a name for himself in the writing game.

A man returns to a city that lost all its inhabitants in some unexplained disaster.  He goes into the vast building that provided its power and restarts the generators.

That's the entire plot of this story, which has only one character.  Obviously, the author isn't going for pulse-pounding action.  It's all mood, description, and psychological insight.  On that level, it works very well.

Four stars.

The Great Doomed Ship, by J. T. McIntosh


by Gaughan

Up to the plate comes an old pro with a checkered career.  Although he always swings hard at the ball, he rarely sends it flying over the wall.

The biggest and fastest starship ever built is about to set out on her maiden voyage.  Because it is scheduled to leave exactly two hundred years after the Titanic disaster, some people think it is doomed.

There are other reasons to worry.  This is a time when some folks have premonitions about the future, although these are not always reliable.  A few people have vague feelings of impending disaster about the planned voyage.  Most troubling of all, the designer of the vessel is in a mental institution, having gone into a catatonic state.  Our hero, an investigator with some psychic ability, finds out that the mad engineer deliberately set the ship to blow up when it reaches a certain speed.  He fails to prevent the vessel from taking off, and there is no way to communicate with it.  Complicating matters is the fact that the investigator's sister, who also has extrasensory powers, is aboard.

As I was reading this story, I kept picturing it as a big budget Hollywood spectacular, in Technicolor and Cinemascope.  The characters all come from Central Casting.  Besides the hero, his sister, and the madman, we've got the stubborn head of the starship company; the hard-drinking co-designer of the ship; the sister's no-good boyfriend; the brave young captain of the vessel, who wins the affections of the sister; and so on. 

I have problems with some of the things McIntosh says about women in his stories, yet, paradoxically, he creates complex female characters who are often more capable than the men are.  The sister is a prime example.  Although she's in a destructive relationship with a faithless lover, her weaknesses never prevent her from winning the reader's sympathy. 

This cinematic epic was enjoyable, if hardly profound, until the end.  It falls completely apart, with an anticlimax that depends on a trivial change in the meaning of a certain premonition the sister has about her fate. 

Two stars.

The Realized Man, by Norman Spinrad

Here's a rookie with only a few credits to his name.  Is he ready for the big league, or should he go back to the minors?  Let's find out.

Derek Carmody is a man who has been mentally and physically enhanced to an extraordinary degree.  His purpose is to arrive alone, without special equipment, on a planet inhabited by primitive aliens, and prepare them for later human colonists.  He does this by becoming chief of the local tribe and offering them technological advantages over their rivals.  It all leads up to a final gesture that will make him a god in the eyes of the natives.

Although the way in which the protagonist uses his superpowers is quite interesting, the story suffers from a lack of suspense.  The author tells you in advance what the character is going to do at the end, and then he does it.  I was a little disappointed that the confident superman didn't get his comeuppance.

Three stars.

What the Dead Men Say, by Philip K. Dick


by Virgil Finlay

We go into the final inning with a novella from a prolific, award-winning, but sometimes controversial author.

Louis Sarapis may be the richest person in the solar system.  So rich, in fact, that not even the tax collectors know how much he's worth.  He is also dead.

In this future, that's not a huge handicap.  By keeping the recently deceased extremely cold, it's possible to temporarily preserve a low level of brain activity.  The so-called half-lifers can communicate with the living, albeit in a limited way.

Attempts to revive the mind of the dead man fail, for unknown reasons.  That would seem to be the end of the matter, except for one thing: messages that seem to be coming from the deceased arrive on Earth from deep in space.  Eventually they take over all forms of electronic communication.  You can't listen to the radio, watch television, or pick up the phone without hearing the dead man's voice.

The deceased's heir is his granddaughter, formerly a drug addict.  Because her grandfather is legally dead, although apparently quite active, she now runs his vast business empire.  She follows his orders from beyond the grave.  In particular, she promotes the political career of a politician who formerly failed to become President of the United States, convinced he can make a comeback and win the office.

There is much more to this long and complex story than I've indicated.  Many subplots appear, along with a wide variety of richly defined characters.  The author avoids his tendency to have disparate elements, not fully integrated, in his works.  The plotting is tight, with all of the seemingly mystical elements explained in a logical way.

(One trivial observation remains.  In passing, the story states that Richard Nixon revived his political career in the 1970's.  I know science fiction writers are supposed to come up with wild speculations, but that's really stretching things.)

Five stars.

The Box Score

Coach Pohl puts his big hitters at the front and back of the magazine, making up for a slight slump in the middle.  With all bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, slugger Philip K. Dick hits a home run.  It makes you want to root for the underdogs.  Go Mets!

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




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Magazine

[March 9, 1964] Deviant from the Norm (April 1964 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

It's Spreading

25 years ago, a group of fen met in New York for the first World's Science Fiction Convention.  Now, conclaves are springing up all over the nation (and internationally, too).  Just this weekend, I attended a small event ambitiously titled San Diego Comic Fest.  It was a kind of "Comics-in," where fans of the funny pages could discuss their peculiar interests: Is Superman better than Batman?  Are the X-Men and the Doom Patrol related?  Is Steve Ditko one of the best comics artists ever?

I was there as an invited guest to speak on the current state of comics and science fiction.  I understand that the proceeding was filmed and may even be broadcast on local television.  When that happens, I shall be sure to give you a heads up.

Slinging my new color camera, I took photos of some of the new friends I made.  There was also excellent space-themed decor, which I had to capture for posterity.  Many thanks to my friends with the private dark room who developed these prints so quickly for publication:


Posters lining the bar at the Lunar Lounge


Mercury meets Sputnik


The Young Traveler (initials L.E.M.) poses with a mock-up of the Apollo LEM


Alvin of the Chipmunks (his name really is Alvin!)


The artist known as Napoleon Doom


The Traveler with a familiar face


A beautiful, newly commissioned drawing of Dr. Martha Dane, the Journey's unofficial mascot

While the con possessed many superlative qualities, I think my fondest memories involved reading the latest issue of Galaxy, sitting in the lobby of the event hotel, listening to one of the fans play an endless medley of classic and new tunes on the piano.  With that, I suppose it's appropriate I tell you about what I read…

The Issue at Hand


Cover by Sol Dember illustrating Final Contact

The Boy Who Bought Old Earth, by Cordwainer Smith

For years, Cordwainer Smith has teased us with views of his future tales of the Instrumentality, the rigid, computer-facilitated government of Old Earth.  We've learned that there are the rich humans, whose every whim is catered to.  Beneath them, literally, are the Underpeople — animals shaped into human guise (a la Dr. Moreau) who live in subterranean cities.  A giant tower, miles high, launches spaceships to the heavens, spreading the Instrumentality to the hundreds of settled stars of the galaxy.  All but one, the setting of Smith's newest book.

Old North Australia stands alone, an island in an Instrumentality-dominated sea of space.  On that grey, dusty world, its inhabitants still pledge fealty to the Queen of the British Commonwealth (she and that confederation dead some 15,000 years).  What enables this world, dubbed "Norstrilia," to stand alone?  Like Frank Herbert's Arrakis, Norstrilia is the sole producer of the longevity drug, stroon.  This has made Norstrilia fantastically wealthy, able to produce the most lethal of defenses (including Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons).

Our viewpoint in Boy is Rod McBan, a protagonist with a problem.  The scion of one of Norstrilia's oldest and richest families, he has been barred from achieving adulthood for his inability to communicate telepathically with his peers.  Four times the boy has lived to the age of sixteen; three times, he has had his memories erased in the hopes that Rod might develop the appropriate mental gifts to participate meaningfully in society.  Failure to do so a fourth time means judgment by tribunal and possible sentence to death.

How Rod escapes this fate and turns around his fortune so entirely (figuratively and literally) such that he becomes possessor of the Manhome, Old Earth itself, is an interesting tale I shan't spoil.  I can, however, share my thoughts on the story's execution.

Smith is one of the more unusual authors out there.  Having been raised in pre-Communist China and then employed by intelligence agencies, Smith has much more experience with non-Western cultures.  This shows up in his writing, with the Instrumentality and its denizens a fair bit further from the norm of SF societal depictions. 

The author is hampered, however, by choosing Norstrilia as his setting.  The planet is prosaic, deliberately so by choice of the inhabitants.  Missing is that lucid dream-like quality Smith has imparted his other Instrumentality stories.

Moreover, the novel is very short, and it ends abruptly just as it's getting interesting.  I suspect the piece has been cut for space.  The result is just two thirds of a story arc.

For these reasons, I give Boy 3.5 stars and hope that a fuller rendition comes out in proper book form.  Perhaps, like Heinlein's Starship Troopers, this will turn a flawed gem into a masterpiece.

Earth Eighteen, by Ernst Mason

After finishing the serious, humorless piece that was Boy, it was quite a jolt to be thrown into this comedy article, a tourguide for aliens visiting a ruined and mostly depopulated Earth.  Thus, it took me a while to slow down and get into the thing, but once I did, I found moments of genuine cleverness.  The Gaughan pictures are cute, too. 

Three stars.

For Your Information, by Willy Ley

The non-fiction article this month deals with statistical bell curves: the phenomenon whereby any set of things (height of people, size of noses, width of beans) falls within boundaries with the most common incidence being right in the middle.  It's not a bad piece, but it's short and ends abruptly. 

Three stars.

The End of the Race, by Albert Bermel

If you've read the recent novel (soon to be movie) Fail-safe, then you know the ending to this story, a farcical piece about negotiated disarmament between the superpowers.  It was better when it wasn't played for laughs, and not very good laughs at that.

Two stars.

Final Encounter, by Harry Harrison

Now here is the real gem of the book, and a real departure from the norm.  Ship's captain Hautamaki, of the race of Men, takes aboard a married pair of more conventionally human anthropologists, Gulyas and Tjond.  Their mission: to make first contact with aliens.  The extraterrestrials have left tantalizing clues of their existence, beacons on various worlds pointing to one star in the galaxy.  Friction quickly erupts amongst the crew.  Tjond, the sole woman, finds Hautamaki's insistence on nudity disturbing.  And she cannot comprehend at all the society of Men, which includes no women, involves marriage, love, and production of children by homosexual union alone. 

Worse yet, Hautamaki insists on jettisoning all weaponry and adopting a completely peaceful posture when approaching the aliens.  His reasoning is that the threat of violence could jeopardize the contact, and if the aliens prove hostile even in the face of no provocation, well, the next mission will be so alerted.

I absolutely loved this story.  It possessed that well-executed strangeness that I'd sort of expected from the Smith.  I appreciated that it was the Man who was the gentle pacifist.  And, as in Evelyn Smith's They Also Serve, a homosexual man is key to a peaceful first contact.  But unlike Smith's story, this is the first instance in SF (aside from Sturgeon's The World Well Lost from 1953) where the homosexuality is explicit — and completely unapologetic.

How times have changed.  Five stars.

At the Feelies, by Jack Sharkey

At the con, I had a discussion with a fellow who mused on the future of movies.  After silent films came talkies.  Then color, 3-D, "Sens-o-rama," and so on.  It was timely, then, that I read this piece right after.  It's a (fictional) review of Gone with the Wind redone such that the audience can feel and smell from the point of view of the actors — a technology with mixed blessings, as you can imagine.

It's cute.  Three stars.

Soft and Soupy Whispers, by Sydney Van Scyoc

Van Scyoc offers up a typically macabre piece about a mentally disturbed man whose insanity is kept under control through the installation of a mental companion.  In essence, the fellow is made sane through schizophrenia.  It's subtle and interesting, but a bit obtuse and more artful than plausible.

Three stars.

The Blasphemers, by Philip José Farmer

Last up is another piece from left field, this one dealing with a race of centaurs that possesses four sexes, all of which are necessary to produce (and capable of bearing) children.  The aliens are an advanced, starfaring race.  Highly religious, they venerate the spirits of their ancestors, holding sacred the statues of their elders.  One iconoclast leads his mated quartet to a shrine and proceeds to make love amongst the monuments.

He is caught and brought before a judge, but instead of being sentenced to immolation, he is congratulated for his heresy and informed that the state religion is bunk, actually a tool to justify the conquest of planets: one of the faith's tenets is that an early ancestor left statues of himself on planets to be colonized by the race; such statues were actually carved recently by advance scouts.

Our protagonist is then made a ship's captain and dispatched to colonize as many worlds as he and his companions can, until common sense prevails over faith and the old order is toppled.

Particularly interesting about this piece is the assertion that religious faith is instilled by nature, not nurture.  Like sexual preference, one can't help one's feelings on the subject, the story says.

Ambitious and laudable as Farmer's goals are in this piece, his execution is workmanlike.  Ted Sturgeon once called Farmer an author who always almost gets it right, and that record continues with The Blasphemers.  I suppose Harrison can't write all the iconoclastic tales.

Three stars.

Summing Up

With just one very short clunker in the mix, and despite the (relative) disappointment of the Smith novel, the April 1964 Galaxy is a welcome departure from the standard.  I'm impressed.  What wonders await us in two months?

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 17, 1964] Breaking Taboos (April 1964 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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[Due to an oversight (clearly!), Galactic Journey was not included on Locus' Awards Ballot this year.  If you're a fan of the Journey, we be grateful if you'd fill us in under Fanzine!]


by Victoria Silverwolf

Until a decade or so ago, science fiction rarely dealt with erotic themes in an open way.  That began to change with Phillip José Farmer's famous story The Lovers (1952), which deals with a love affair between a man and a female humanoid.  Her alien reproductive system, described in detail, is the key to the plot.

Equally groundbreaking was The World Well Lost (1953) by Theodore Sturgeon.  This gentle, beautifully written story depicts homosexuality in a sympathetic way.

SF writers are now free to look inside the bedroom.  But are they ready to peer into the bathroom?  The lead novella in the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow represents a first step inside.


Cover by Paul E. Wenzel

The Dark Light-Years, by Brian W. Aldiss

By sheer chance, humans and aliens arrive at almost the same time on an uninhabited world.  The aliens look like hippopotamuses with six limbs and two heads.  The humans kill most of the aliens at first sight, taking two prisoners.  (Right away, we know that the author is going to depict the human species as violent and xenophobic.) Not only are the aliens repulsive to human eyes, their behavior is offensive in the extreme.

(Sensitive readers may wish to skip the rest of this review.)

The aliens live in their own excrement, considering this the most important part of their culture and religion.  All attempts to communicate with the aliens fail, partly due to the disgust they elicit from their captors.

The plot is more complicated than I've made it sound, starting with a man who has lived on the aliens' home world for many years.  A long flashback describes the first encounter between the two species.

The point of view shifts to that of the aliens, and we learn their history.  The climax returns to the beginning, and ends in tragedy. 

This sounds like a very grim story, but it's also full of satire and dark humor.  The author offers a couple of scatological puns.  It would be easy to dismiss this as a schoolchild writing naughty words on a blackboard, but the intent is more serious than that.  Despite a jumpy narrative technique, the story powerfully portrays the impossibility of understanding between radically different beings.

Four stars.

Package Deal, by James Stamers

A married couple retire to another planet.  Their alien hosts provide what they need in the form of boxes that change into everything from booze to houses.  Things don't work out well.

That's all there is to the plot.  The absurd concept is played for laughs, and doesn't achieve any.  The two women in the story are a fat, nagging shrew and a teasing sexpot.

One star.

The Apprentice God, by Miriam Allen DeFord

In free verse, the author describes how a tentacled being accidentally damaged a tiny world while studying it.  The knowledge that it contained sentient creatures leads to profound remorse.  Although the outcome of the poem is inevitable, the style is elegant and stately.

Three stars.

The Urban Hell, by Tom Purdom

This article describes the ways in which large cities might exist in the future, and compares this to science fiction's visions of tomorrow's metropolises.  Giant residential skyscrapers surrounded by parks?  Horizontal cities designed for automobiles?  Downtowns consisting of low buildings, with a mixture of houses, shops, and factories?  All of these ideas are presented in an interesting and informative way.

Four stars.

Name of the Snake, by R. A. Lafferty

A Catholic priest journeys to a planet of aliens who claim to be without sin.  (I wonder if this is a response to James Blish's 1958 novel A Case of Conscience, which has the same theme.) He admits they lack human vices, but discovers they have new evils of their own.

The author manages to create a serious theological fable that is also full of wit.  The ending, in particular, makes use of a cliché from magazine cartoons in a new and meaningful way.

Four stars.

Under the Gaddyl, by C. C. MacApp

Alien invaders have ruled Earth for many years.  Most human beings are slaves.  A privileged few are free, allowed to struggle for survival in primitive conditions.  When escaped slaves steal an alien weapon, even free humans are in danger.  The hero and his family make a hazardous journey to escape the vengeful aliens.  Mutant humans show up at one point.  They play an important role in the story, but seemed forced into the plot.

This is a typical science fiction adventure story.  It is competently told and holds the reader's attention, but there is little new to be found here. 

Three stars.

Summing Up

Publishing a story that is certain to offend many readers shows boldness on the part of editor Frederik Pohl.  The other contents of the magazine are far less daring, although most of them are worth reading.

Those of you with sharp eyes will notice that Day of the Egg by Allen Kim Lang, announced on the front cover, does not appear.  That's not the only error.  My copy has many of the pages in the wrong order, making reading a chore.  I hope the habits of the aliens in the Aldiss piece didn't shock the designers and printers into forgetting how to do their jobs.




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