The last quarter of 1968 had the newsmen on tenterhooks. After the flight of Zond 5, many suspected the Russians would try for a flight around the Moon. Would they get there before the hastily rescheduled Apollo 8?
They did not, and now it seems they are taking a different tack, trying to progress in endeavors closer to home. On January 14, the Soviets launched Soyuz 4 into orbit carrying a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Shatalov. This was ho hum stuff—the putatively multi-man Soyuz was once again carrying a single occupant. Ah, but on the 16th, Soyuz 5 took off with cosmonauts Boris Volnyov, Aleksey Yeliseyev, and Evegenii Khrunov, the first three-seat flight since Voskhod 1, four years ago.
More than that, the two craft docked in orbit, the first time two piloted craft have managed the feat. Then Yeliseyev and Khrunov donned space suits, opened their hatch, and walked next door. They weren't visiting for a cup of borscht; they were there to stay, and they bore gifts: newspapers and letters from after Shatalov had taken off! The next day, Soyuz 4 landed with the two new passengers. As of this article's going to press, Volnyov should have landed his Soyuz 5—safely, I trust.
The Soviets are already beging to hail the mission as the construction of the first station in space, and there's no doubt that a lot of firsts have been scored. On the other hand, the two Soyuz craft were only linked for a few hours, and there was no easy way to get between the two craft. Really, they haven't done anything that couldn't have been done during our Gemini program.
That said, this may only be the beginning. Unlike Voskhod, which only comprised a couple of flights, there have been a number of Soyuz missions, both manned and unmanned, so it's probably only a matter of time before a truly ambitious trek is managed, perhaps a real space station.
What's more impressive? American boots on the Moon, or a permanent Soviet presence in near Earth orbit? You be the judge.
Mail's in!
The latest issue of F&SF offers a myriad of treats that are, in some ways, as exciting as today's space news. Let's dive in:
Another splurty cover by Russell FitzGerald
Attitudes, by James H. Schmitz
Azard is one of the Malatlo, the group of peaceniks who have divorced themselves from the Federation of the Hub. Years ago, the Malatlo were given their own planet, far away, but next door to the Raceels, an up-and-coming race, so that the separatists might not be too lonely.
Now war has destroyed both worlds, and Azard is being escorted by three representatives of the Federation to a new world. It's a magnanimous mission…so why is Azard contemplating the murder of his benefactors? And is all really what it seems?
I found the telling of the story a bit talky and stilted, and yet, when I was done, I found the thing stuck with me, some of the scenes vivid in the extreme. So, four stars for a fine opening piece.
by Gahan Wilson
The Cave, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Per Sam Moskowitz' introduction, this is the tale of the end result of Communism as envisioned by a dissident writer in 1920 Leningrad. As winter sets in, an impoverished citizen in the "equal" society wrestles with the urge to steal wood from an advantaged neighbor. Soviet Marxism thus results in reversion to Stone Age sensibilities.
An interesting curiosity. Three stars.
Nightwalker, by Larry Brody
Frank Whalen is a super-spy with a secret: his body shoots off electricity at will. He also has a super suit, which confers stealth, but also has the annoying side effect of causing an all-over itch. This tale rather straightforwardly details an adventure Whalen has behind the Bamboo Curtain, and how he escapes from a Red Chinese jail.
Probably the first in an ongoing series, there's not really enough of Whalen yet to hang on to, character-wise. If you like superhero comics, you'll probably enjoy this one, in a superficial sort of way.
Saxton is an English author whose work generally fails to resonate with me, but this time, she channels her inner Pam Zoline with this beautiful, stream-of-consicousness story. It deals with a prematurely old widow struggling with inexplicable migraines, deep depression, and an uncaring medical system that seems tailor-made to perpetuate the problem with useless nostrums and a callous ear.
The solution? Wine and a bit of angelic help.
It's a beautiful, moving piece, and it was well on its way to five stars before the typically British, bummer ending. Still four stars.
Drool, by Vance Aandahl
Justice Stewart once observed (essentially) "I can't tell you what pornography is, but I know it when I see it." Aandahl proves that, "when correctly viewed, everything is lewd" (thank you Tom Lehrer) in this effective vignette.
Four stars.
Twin Sisters, by Doris Pitkin Buck
A short poem personifying the rain. I liked it. Four stars.
Pater One Pater Two, by Patrick Meadows
Two 21st Century disasters combine to doom the 24th Century: a doomsday weapon renders all of the Earth uninhabitable save for Greece and Asia Minor, and a birth control initiative backed by technology has gone awry, preventing all new births. It's up to Jacson and Marya from the island of Xios to topple the remnants of the past to save the future.
An interesting, innovative tale. Four stars.
Uncertain, Coy, and Hard to Please, by Isaac Asimov
For this piece, I felt it was important to have a female perspective—you'll understand why…
by Janice L. Newman
Asimov’s most recent “Science” article is on feminism. He never uses the word, but feminism is what it argues: that men and women are inherently equal, and that it is only cultural and artificial distinctions that keep them from being equal. It’s an excellent screed. For many women it would be a revelation, particularly if they have had no prior contact with feminist ideas.
Some might take exception to the description of the male/female relationship as slavemaster/slave, but I do not. For too long women have been considered property, unable to own anything: not money, not land, not their own work and discoveries, not even their own bodies. Even today a woman cannot open a checking account at the vast majority of banks without her husband’s or father’s signature. Consider how crippling this is for an independent person in modern society.
I can’t agree with every argument Asimov makes. While I concede that courtly love is an artificial construct, one need only look to the animal kingdom to find plenty of animals that mate for life, and which become despondent if one of the pair is removed. Nor can I dismiss fatherly love as purely cultural. Children look like their parents, after all, and men who cared for partners and offspring were more likely to have children that made it to adulthood.
However, these are minor quibbles. Overall the piece is well thought-out and logical and usually right, and I believe it should be required reading for all fen…indeed, all persons.
Including its author.
Asimov is well-known for groping women at conventions: grabbing their backsides or their frontsides, even seizing and kissing women who had approached him in the hope of getting an autograph. I am certain that he thinks such behavior is flattering–indeed, he lists the "smirk and the leer" as among the petty rewards of being a woman in today's society. I cannot speak for all women; likely some did feel flattered by such attentions. But having talked with some of his victims, I know that this was not so in many cases.
I have never met Asimov in person. Perhaps friends have deliberately kept me away from him at conventions to protect me. At this point, it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever meet him. But if I ever do, I would like to say to him, “You, too, wield the power of the slavemaster. The very ‘silliness’ that you decry as an artificial defense mechanism is exactly what is coming into play when you kiss a woman and she blushes and laughs awkwardly. Hers is a conditioned response born, at its heart, out of fear.”
Perhaps it is not surprising that Asimov apparently can’t make the extra leap to apply his reasoning to his own behavior. As excellent and revelatory as this piece is, it seems to come entirely from Asimov’s mind without any discussion with actual women. In fact, it’s unlikely that he’s had much opportunity to see things from a ‘feminine perspective’, considering the vast majority of media is from a male point of view. Not surprising, but it is saddening and frustrating.
I don’t know if I could convince him that he is not exempt, that however unthreatening he may think himself, society nonetheless places the slavemaster’s whip firmly in his hand. But perhaps, someday, he can: I think the man capable of writing such an important feminist piece could learn from his own words.
Five stars.
by Gideon Marcus
After All the Dreaming Ends, by Gary Jennings
A simple boy meets girl episode in wartime, just before the boy is to ship off to the European Theater of Operations. Except the girl isn't there—she's dying in a hospital bed 25 years later. To sleep, perchance to dream…and what a beautiful, romantic dream.
A sweet, wistful piece. I'm a sucker for love stories. Five stars.
A pleasant recounting
Well now—not a clunker in the bunch, and some Star material to boot. Indeed, this is the first 4-star issue of F&SF in the history of our reviewing the magazine! That's exciting news in the skies above and on the ground, and definitely enough to keep us renewing our subscription—to F&SF AND Aviation Weekly.
Star Trek has given us some great episodes this season. Sadly, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was not one of them. It was ineptly written, poorly directed, and both ham- and heavy-handed in its delivery.
The story opens with the Enterprise coming across a stolen shuttlecraft on the way to Ariannus, a planet which urgently needs ‘decontamination’ else millions will die. The shuttlecraft is in distress, and the crew bring the vehicle aboard and treat its lone passenger. The scene with the shuttle bay opening and closing is a good effect…but would have been even more so if they had edited out the “1701” across its side.
The latest rage: All Federation shuttlecraft have the Enterprise's serial number
The scriptwriter here makes the first of a number of blunders. Over-eager to ‘explain’ the strange black-white coloration of the alien, the author penned an awkward conversation between Doctor McCoy, Captain Kirk, and Mr. Spock about how such a being might have come to exist. The problem is that this explanation is unnecessary and feels forced. The audience has seen plenty of strange aliens thus far and almost never has there been a need to ‘explain’ how they came about. Furthermore, the explanation doesn’t explain anything. Spock and McCoy write off the divided coloration as being a totally unique mutation, while Kirk nonsensically opines that “…he is the result of a very dramatic conflict.”
They got blue people and green people but this guy looks weird? And no one suspects it's not a cosmetic affectation?
The alien’s name is Lokai. He takes umbrage at the assertion that he ‘stole’ the shuttlecraft, both implying that he was only borrowing it and outright stating that his great need justified taking it. When Kirk attempts to interrogate him further, he becomes uncooperative and refuses to answer any more questions.
Kirk is called back to the bridge when an alien ship shows up—or doesn’t show up, as the case may be. The sensors are picking it up, but it doesn’t show up on any of the screens. It’s on a collision course with the Enterprise and ends by disintegrating against the hull and depositing one alien onto the bridge in the process.
This entire scene was awful. It’s a little tricky to put into words what made it so bad, but it had me groaning and hitting my head against a pillow repeatedly, so I will try.
First, the camera repeatedly did an extra-dramatic zoom in and out and shake effect on the red alert light. It drew laughs from the watching crowd, feeling more like something out of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea than Star Trek. The entire sequence is contrived and unnatural, existing only to get the characters where the writer wanted them. Efforts to ‘explain’ the ship and its fate, like the prior conversation about mutation, serve only to highlight how silly it all is.
The new alien is named Bele, and in direct contradiction to the previous conversation about one-of-a-kind mutations, has the same half-black and half-white coloration as Lokai. He states that he’s “chief officer of the Commission on Political Traitors” on his planet, and has come to claim Lokai. Kirk challenges him, but agrees to let him see the other prisoner.
"Riddle me this, Captain: what's black and white and insufferable all over?"
Bele and Lokai proceed to react to each other with pure vitriol. Lokai claims that he is a revolutionary, fighting for the rights of his people. Bele calls him a loathsome murderer. Lokai turns to Kirk and demands political asylum, while Bele demands to be taken to their home planted, Cheron, immediately. Kirk tells them both that Starfleet will sort it out after the Enterprise finishes their decontamination mission, as millions of lives are at stake. Bele states that this is unacceptable, just before the Enterprise takes a new heading, seemingly all by itself.
Maddeningly, Kirk doesn’t connect the misbehavior of his ship with the presence of the aliens aboard until just before Bele outright claims responsibility. Lokai and Bele have another confrontation on the bridge, both of them ignoring the fact that “millions of lives” on Ariannus are at stake. Kirk orders both of them to the brig, then shot at with phasers set on stun, neither of which are effective against the aliens’ “personal shields”.
The rarely seen "tickle" setting of the phaser
Contrived, contrived, contrived. I felt the hand of the scriptwriter turning and moving the ship like a child with a toy. The scriptwriter didn’t want Bele or Lokai thrown in the brig or knocked out, so they were given invincibility. The creator of the story wanted certain things to happen, and so forced them to happen in the bluntest and most direct ways possible.
However, Kirk’s response to Bele did lead to a scene I actually liked. Kirk tells Bele that the ship will fulfill its mission to Ariannus or he will destroy it. Bele tries to call his bluff, and Kirk initiates the self-destruct sequence. This was perhaps a little drawn out, and the codes for self-destruct could have been more complex than variations of, “one, code one, one A”. Still, Kirk’s defiance and unwillingness to surrender his ship is great, very in-character, and the scene actually managed some genuine tension.
"This starship will self-destruct in five seconds…"
Kirk’s never tolerated threats to his ship well, so it’s a little jarring that he chooses to give them free run of the ship after that. On the other hand, how could he stop them? They’ve been shown to be invincible and Bele is both able and willing to take over the ship, even at the cost of “millions of lives”. Kirk has exactly one possible counter-move, and it’s one that would lead to a Pyrrhic victory indeed.
Lokai begins making friends among the crew, making his case to them. He says something interesting here that could have been great if the writer had bothered to follow up on it: “Do you know what it would be like to be dragged out of your hovel into a war on another planet? A battle that will serve your oppressor and bring death to you and your brothers?”
This tantalizing hint of actual background is once again casually ignored by the rest of the story. We cut to Bele, drinking with the Captain and trying to win him to his side much the same way that Lokai is doing with the crewmembers. It is in this conversation that we come to the crux of the episode, a point delivered with a sledgehammer. Bele is amazed that the captain and Spock can’t see his superiority. He is, after all, black on the right side, while Lokai is white on the right side.
Wow, this racial metaphor is so nuanced and clever!
A punchline not worth waiting for
Well, perhaps in more skilled hands, it might have been. There is certainly a simplicity to the message, to the point where even a child could understand it. We the viewers are shocked by what appears to us to be such bizarre and extreme racism over a minor difference. We are meant to take it to heart, to apply it to our own lives and question our own prejudices.
The problem is, the message becomes muddled despite itself. I will leave going into detail as to why the portrayal of the two aliens undermines and even contradicts the episode’s theme to the other writers on this piece. Suffice it to say that the “revelation” of the source of the racial differences elicited more groans than gasps from the watchers in my house.
Ariannus is successfully decontaminated, and Bele takes control of the Enterprise again, this time burning out the directional and self-destruct circuits first. (In other words, the scriptwriter’s hand once again descended upon the ship and turned its course to Cheron.)
The ship arrives at Cheron and finds that the people on it have destroyed each other (presumably fairly recently, since there are still bodies on the planet). Bele chases Lokai through the corridors of the Enterprise, with Kirk doing nothing to stop them. Pursued and pursuer beam themselves down to the dead planet, presumably to try to kill each other. Kirk leaves them there, and we are spoon-fed the other Important Message of the episode:
SPOCK: To expect sense from two mentalities of such extreme viewpoints is not logical.
SULU: But their planet's dead. Does it matter now which one's right?
SPOCK: Not to Lokai and Bele. All that matters to them is their hate.
UHURA: Do you suppose that's all they ever had, sir?
The ashes of Detroit still smolder after 50,000 years
Well. That was a mess of poor writing, inept directing, and Shatner’s own particular brand of scenery chewing. And as much as I appreciated the messages the writer so desperately wanted to convey, it would have been more effective if the plot could have settled on one of them instead of trying to cram in both. If you want to watch a good episode about the dangers of racism, irrational hatred, and unchecked violence, wait for a re-run of Day of the Dove.
One and a half stars (the half almost entirely for the self-destruct sequence.)
Bones beneath the fat
by Lorelei Marcus
At a sacrifice in Ancient Greece, Prometheus once slaughtered an ox and offered up two piles for Zeus to choose from. One contained the meat and much of the fat. The other was a pile of bones artfully arranged under a layer of glistening juices so as to look like the more appetizing pick. Zeus chose the latter, and was so angered by this deception that he withheld fire from humanity.
From the unsubtle makeup to Lokai's stirring speech against Bele in Sick Bay, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" presents itself as a racial narrative in favor of Black rights. Yet, somewhere along the way, it loses that thread and ultimately concludes with a different message: If we continue to hate one another, we will only destroy ourselves.
This is quite a turn which clashes spectacularly with Lokai's initial characterization. Of course, Lokai is bound to hate the group which subjugates and ghettoizes his people. His revolutionary vigor seems justified when he is fighting for "basic dignity", a trait Kirk has often associated with humanity's freedom when dealing with alien enslavers and oppressors.
However, the finale would have you believe that Lokai's hatred is unjustified, or at least, excessive. Therein lies the true sin of the episode, because to achieve the dramatic final theme, it must gut its initial framing of racial injustice and the characters that metaphorically represent it.
Lokai is consistently unlikable. He arrives as a suspected criminal, refuses to communicate or cooperate, and he is quick to anger. Regardless of how noble his initial goals, or how genuine his pleas for amnesty, he is never truly taken seriously by the Enterprise crew and therefore, we also see no reason to sympathize. Throughout the episode, he is termed a firebrand, a troublemaker, and even a murderer, with no redeeming actions to prove otherwise. He also reveals a prejudice, not just against his oppressors, but also the monocolored humans and audience, further alienating him and his cause.
Bele's character, in contrast, while evil by default, is treated with respect, making Lokai look worse still. Bele is quickly established as the oppressive, bigoted, authority. He also commits heinous acts like hijacking the Enterprise from a critical, planet-saving mission for his own selfish purposes. But isn't he justified because he has toiled for nearly 50,000 years to capture his criminal, a mass-murdering fanatic? And after all, he does eventually allow the Enterprise to finish her mission, so can he really be so bad?
Well, yes, and the ending would even like to remind us of that: even with his whole planet destroyed, Bele is doomed by his own hatred to forever chase Lokai across their barren world. But first, he is allowed to roam the ship like an esteemed guest and even dine finely with the Captain. Even certain emissaries have not had so high an honor, but I suppose there are special treatment regulations for starship hijackers.
"Well, in compensation for our not immediately flying you to Havana, have some brandy."
While Bele's motives are prejudiced and unsympathetic, this kid-glove treatment affords him some respectability, furthering Lokai's appearance as irrational in comparison.
This brings me to my conclusion. Lokai and Bele both ultimately come across as incomprehensible extremists. Lokai is logical in motive, but not in action; Bele is logical in action, but not motive. Tragically, their extreme hatred seems to be a microcosm for their whole planet's struggle—they appear as figureheads of the two sides. Thus, the episode becomes a cautionary tale against extremism.
Yet, the shroud of the race-relations narrative remains, literally expressed by the ever-present alien makeup. So the two themes join, linking extremism with the race struggle and its leaders. This, in turn, undermines both causes. If Lokai's genuine issues can be disregarded with the justification that he is unlikeable and dangerous, then what implication does that have for the black man? Did the riots not begin because pacifist pleas for change fall time and time again on deaf ears?
The episode is so self-righteous about stopping hatred that it sours the positive social message it could have had, and instead, vilifies the struggle it claims to represent.
And so, some of the fire in my passion for Star Trek diminishes. To describe the episode in a word, I'll quote Mr. Scott: "Disgusting."
One star.
An end to war
by Jessica Dickinson Goodman
24 men died on the USS Enterprise yesterday, another 85 injured as a rocket exploded onboard; 11 planes were also destroyed. Those young men were on that ship in service of a war many had no right to vote for just seven short months ago. The Enterprise herself has touched many conflicts — Vietnam, Cuba, Japan, the Middle East — and was preparing for her fourth deployment to Vietnam. This is the fourth time a U.S. aircraft carrier had caught fire in 15 years, accidents that killed 537 sailors in total according to The New York Times; of the four, only one involved enemy fire.
I was thinking about the ways in which war destroys the people who wage it while watching “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” Rather than an atom-powered football field-sized carrier ferrying fighter jets to bomb a country that barely has an air force, the war in this episode is reduced to two men; a binary pair. Their hatred is made irrational, and while other reviewers found it ham-handed, I found it operatic.
We have the sense of scale conveyed by a few terse lines — millions in danger; 50,000 years of pursuit! We have the stentorian arias given by Kirk, Spock, and our two representative combatants — where Kirk and Spock could have been Purcell tenor roles with their clear, short, decisive words, Lokai and Bele were all Mozart at his muddiest and most secretive, all Sarastro lecturing Pamina in coded Masonic lessons about how the world works with none of the delicacy or lightness of the Queen of the Night’s aria to lift us up again afterwards. We also have the oversized tragic ending — not just these two men killing each other, as they've been trying to do all episode long, but their entire world dead, corpses left on the ground unburied, and them doomed to chase and haunt each other amongst the moldering wreckage of their hatred forever more, like the ending of a Noh Play written for Tom and Jerry.
But what of Lazarus?
With the bright light of the teleporter and the offstage decision makers driving the plot, it reminded me of nothing so much as the end of Puccini’s Suor Angelica, where the former-aristocrat-and-current-nun learns her child out of wedlock has died and she kills herself. Obviously the plot is not the main parallel; Suor Angelica is mostly women’s roles, making it a favorite of mixed gender opera programs around the world, and Star Trek is sometimes pressed to include 2 speaking women per episode, much less a dozen. It is the feeling of the ending as an audience member that is the same. In my favorite productions of Suor Angelica, as she sings her final aria, begging Mother Mary to save her after she’s poisoned herself — “Madonna! Madonna! Salve me, salve me!” complete with its glorious high A's — a bright light floods down on center stage, a transporter beam from the Madonna herself, bringing Suor Angelica up with her to heaven to reunite with her child.
For me, there is something likewise satisfying about the ending of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” These two men have wreaked havoc across the galaxy for centuries, trailing their hatred like plague corpses, disrupting societies, destroying lives as they whirl and swirl and clash against each other. And as of the end of the episode, they cannot. They are planet-bound, returned to the home they both thought they were fighting for, deprived of the tools to hurt anyone but themselves. Trapped, forever, in a Hell of their own making, reunited and secure in their hatred.
Real war is nothing like opera or science fiction. It is famously boring until it’s not, and mostly kills people who had no say in its arrival or its leaving. Many who die in war and no small number who fight in it fervently wish that each clash would be their “last battlefield”; after all the useless deaths of sailors the real life Enterprise and of families who are Vietnamese, Nigerian, Palestinian, Eritrean, Guatemalan, Rhodesian, Laotian, Irish, and so many more who are suffering war today. It was nice, for a little less than an hour, to see a world on my screen where no matter how bloody, some wars end.
Three stars.
You've Come a Long Way, Baby
by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele
Ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes have been playing over the past several episodes. Women sneaking away to smoke and getting caught, with an emphasis on how outdated the idea is. Thanks to the suffragettes we see, women won their rights in 1920. Modern women can vote and smoke! It's fashionable to applaud that movement, and from this side of history, relatively easy. None of the ads have mentioned the much more recent Voting Rights Act, though, which passed among significant backlash just a few years ago.
Part of Star Trek's appeal is that it offers a future that upholds ideals of equality. Most of the time.
The most important scene, to me, is not the final moments of pursuit against a backdrop of destruction. It is instead, a conversation held almost off-camera as Spock listens from behind a door.
LOKAI: I act the madman out of the anger and frustration he forces upon me, and thereby prove his point that I am a madman. [….] How can you understand my fear, my apprehension, my degradation, my suffering?
CHEKOV: There was persecution on Earth once. I remember reading about it in my history class.
SULU: Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century. There's no such primitive thinking today.
Except, prejudice is there when McCoy casually insults Spock for his biology and culture, or when crew members disregard his authority after he acts in accordance with Vulcan philosophy.
"Preach it, Lokai."
The message is tucked away from the rest of the ship and the rest of the episode. It's easy enough to make broad statements decrying hate. It is harder to face up to the part that we ourselves might play, to confront the systems that allow hate to act with authority. As fans of science fiction, many of us like to think of ourselves as more open-minded, more accepting. It's only logical. The true test is when those standards are challenged, when equality extends “too far”. Yes, yes, rights for women – but not too many. Freedom of religious expression – for some.
How many people today will support the cause of the oppressed, and yet sit and break bread with the oppressors under the guise of “civility”? Bele admitted his people's culpability in the crimes Lokai accused him of, and still was treated better than some of the diplomats the Enterprise has been charged with carrying.
Kirk tells Bele, “I cannot take sides.” He can, and by his own moral standards, he should. He may have limited power against an alien who can take control of the ship with his mind, but that has never stopped him from speaking his piece before.
Lokai is loud and angry, he insults the crew even as he asks for help and asylum. Nothing about his behavior is particularly endearing to his cause. And that, whether the rest of the episode discusses it or not, is important. The Federation, represented by the Enterprise, has standards of justice, and none of those standards are based on being well-mannered. What is right does not depend on what is easy or palatable. The meanest, rudest individual still deserves rights, because rights do not depend on being likable.
3 stars
Rich Tale to Poor Tale
by Joe Reid
“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, the second episode of Star Trek for the new year, drew out of me thoughts both praise and derision, with feelings of familiarity and futility. This episode at first took a simple message and elevated it with meaningful layered acting, only to become so utterly absurd, undermining said message.
The Enterprise encountered a stolen shuttle with a man in need of help. Aid was rendered by the crew to ensure that the alien man survived to answer questions. Things quickly went downhill as the half white half black alien, named Lokai, awoke in the infirmary with a suspicion on his face as was accused by Kirk of theft. Lokai objected only to being further pressed by Kirk on the matter, which led to no questions being answered by the two-tone alien as he refused to continue being interrogated. The brief exchange revealed that Lokai had a purpose for “using” the ship, which he was willing to face consequences for. Also, that he had been disappointed by “monotone humans” in the past.
This scene to me felt different than others on TV—the difference being that the character with the hidden cause in custody is often Negro or some other race. I felt a familiarity with Lokai’s circumstances. To be thought of as a criminal before trial. To be frustrated by a lack of or even willingness by some to understand my situation. Lokai served up a lot in this short scene. I found it interesting that the performance was carried out by a white actor portraying an alien who was neither black nor white. If the character were black like me, I might’ve identified with his plight and sympathized with his frustration at authority and the evasiveness it brought about. Since Lokai was not black, his position as a victim required proof, and the frustration that he expressed required justification to be seen as righteous. There is an old proverb that says, “Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” (Pro 13:10). Lokai clearly had a sickness of the heart making him unpleasant. We are willing to forgive sickness in others only if we identify with their hopes. Lokai appearing as he does, made that challenging and interesting.
Later we were introduced to another alien man who’d been pursuing Lokai for fifty thousand years. Bele, also two-toned half black and white, appeared on the bridge of the Enterprise without warning. Unlike Lokai, Bele was not accused of anything although he invaded the bridge in what could’ve been seen as an attack. He demanded the “cargo”, Lokai, be handed over to him. Not frustrated in his interactions with Kirk as Lokai was, Bele was mildly irritated to have to defer to Kirk and challenged the captain’s authority repeatedly. His interaction with Lokai established that they were at odds for reasons of class and privilege.
The role of Bele was played by another white actor. Though two-toned himself, the duo considered themselves different based on which side of their bodies were black or white. Black on the right side was dominant and Bele was domineering in every way. Taking control of the Enterprise twice. Although Bele’s actions were resisted, he was never held accountable by Kirk. He was even allowed a pleasant social dinner with the captain after his first hijacking attempt.
Bele and Lokai obviously represent the color-based stratification of the U.S. Choices that were made by casting and the actors themselves in how they personified those roles, took an American reality and obfuscated it to detach it from our world. I was pleased by this execution, until the third act.
Then the Enterprise arrived at the home of the dual-toned men, the planet Cheron, devoid of life due to war. The episode was saying that we could be doomed to suffer the same fate due to our own hatred. The final act featured interlaced footage of burning buildings, possibly from the riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Happy memories of traipsing through the streets of Dresden
Social messages, especially simple ones, are better delivered if you don’t break the obfuscation in the telling of the story. Allow the message to speak through the story, and not scream over it. The ending displayed poor choices for what could have been a meaningful tale. It cheapened the emotional depth witnessed in the early part of the story and replaced it with shallow visual exposition just in case the audience was too simple to understand nuance. It was a poor choice.
Two stars
[Come join us tomorrow night (January 17th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
We've got a whopping ten titles for you to enjoy this month. Part of it is the increased pace of paperback production. Part is the increased number of Journey reviewers on staff! Enjoy:
From the author of Stand on Zanzibar, and also a lot of churned-out mediocrity, comes this mid-length novel. Can it reach the sublimity of last year's masterpiece, or is it a rent-payer? Let's see.
The band "Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" (great name, that) have a bit of a Be-in on a deserted beach south of London. Their frivolity is marred by the appearance of a flight-suited zombie, half his face eaten away.
Strange happenings compound: the lushy Mrs. Beedle, who lives in a wreck of a home by the beach, suddenly starts appearing in two places at once. Those who encounter her find themselves doused with some kind of acid. Meanwhile, Rory, a DJ on the pirate radio ship Jolly Roger, hauls up a fish on his line that transforms halfway into a squid before breaking free.
The local constabulary, as well as the scientific types in the vicinity, are increasingly alarmed and then mobilized, as the true nature of what they're dealing with is determined: an alien or mutated being with the power to digest and mimic anything it encounters.
In premise, it's thus somewhat akin to Don A. Stuart's (John W. Campbell Jr.) seminal "Who Goes There". In execution, it's not. The rather thin story is developed glacially, with lots of slice-of-life scenes that are not unpleasant to read, but don't add much. Indeed, one could argue that it is possible to unbalance things too far in the direction of "show, don't tell"—Double, Double is written almost like a screenplay, with endless little cliff-hangers, and always from the point of view of the various characters.
Beyond the writing, the premise is fundamentally flawed: digestion is never 100% efficient. Heck, I don't think it's 10% efficient. And this creature can not only digest but duplicate, down to memories? Color me unconvinced. Also, we are lucky that it chose to come to land as quickly as it did—if it had just stayed in the sea, all of the sea life in the world would have been these… things… in very short order.
All told, this is definitely a piece written for the cash grab, perhaps even a recycled, rejected script for the TV anthology Journey to the Unknown. It's not a bad piece of writing, but I'll be donating it to my local book shop when I'm done.
Three stars.
by Brian Collins
For my first book reviews as part of the Journey, I got some SF and fantasy in equal measure. Neither are really worth it, but here we can see the difference between a deeply flawed novel and one that is virtually impossible to salvage.
I know it’s only been a few months since Piers Anthony hit us with his second novel, Sos the Rope, but he has already given us another with Omnivore. That’s three novels in two years! For all his faults, you can’t say he’s lazy. It’s quite possible that in thirty years there will be more Piers Anthony novels than there are stars in the sky.
Omnivore is a planetary adventure, not dissimilar from what Hal Clement or Poul Anderson would write, but with some of those “lovable” Anthony quirks. Here’s the gist: A superhuman agent named Subble is sent to investigate three explorers who have returned to Earth from the “dangerous but promising” planet Nacre, each with his/her trauma and secrets as to what happened. Why did eighteen people die while exploring Nacre prior to these three, and what did they bring back with them? There’s Veg, who as his nickname suggests is a vegetarian; Aquilon, an emotionally fraught woman who now has a case of shell shock; and Cal, gifted with a brilliant intellect but cursed with a frail body. Veg and Cal love Aquilon and Aquilon loves both men. Romantic tension ensues. Anthony pulled a similar love triangle in Sos the Rope, but for what it's worth this one is not quite as painful.
Nacre itself is the star of the show, and it would not surprise me if Anthony were to return to this setting in the future. It’s a fungus-rich planet in which the land is covered in an unfathomable amount of “dust”—spores from airborne fungi. There’s so much airborne fungi, in fact, that the sun has been more or less blocked out, and the animal life has adapted not only to low-light conditions but to move about with only one (big) eye and one limb. Clement would have surely treated this material with more scientific enthusiasm, but Clement sadly is no longer producing his best work and this novel is a serviceable substitute for the not-too-discerning.
Omnivore is Anthony’s best novel to date; unfortunately it’s still not good. There are two crippling problems here. The first is that Anthony simply cannot help himself when it comes to writing women unsympathetically, and the first section of the novel (there are four, each focusing on a different character) is the worst. Veg, while heroic, is unfortunately a woman-hater. I don’t necessarily have an issue with characters having unsavory flaws, but the problem is that this dim view of women bleeds into the rest of the novel to some degree. It should come as no surprise that Aquilon, the sole female character, is also the only one driven purely by emotions as opposed to intellect. Subble himself may as well be a robot, but Anthony writes him as a human so that he can a) take drugs, and b) seduce Aquilon.
The second is that it’s clear that this novel is About Things, but I can’t figure out what those Things could be. There is obvious symbolism at work. The trio of explorers play off of elements (herbivore/carnivore/omnivore, brains/brawn/beauty, and so on), but I’m not sure what statement is being made here. This is especially glaring in a year where we got many SF novels that are About Things; indeed 1968 might’ve been the year of SF novels that try to say Something Very Important. Omnivore might’ve been fine in the hands of a Clement or Anderson, but rather than be true to itself (an Analog-style adventure yarn), it has delusions of importance. It doesn’t help that Anthony gives us a puzzle narrative, but then takes seemingly forever to tell us what the puzzle actually is. The solution, thus, is unsatisfying.
At the rate he’s progressing, Anthony may be able to pen a decent novel in another few years. Two out of five stars, maybe three if it had caught me in a very forgiving mood.
Swordmen of Vistar, by Charles Nuetzel
Cover by Albert Nuetzell
Now we have the latest in what's proving to be an avalanche of heroic fantasy releases, and this one is simply painful to read. We know something is amiss just from looking at the title; to my recollection Nuetzel never used "swordman" or "swordmen" in the novel itself, which leads me to wonder what he could've been thinking. The writing between the covers is no less clumsy.
Thoris is a galley slave, in an ancient world not far off from the mythical Greece of Perseus and Pegasus, when he and the princess Illa find themselves possibly the only survivors of a shipwreck. Thoris falls in love with Illa before the two have even had a full conversation together. They first arrive at an island of cannibals before escaping, only to fall into the clutches of the tyrannical Lord Waja and his sword(s)men of Vistar. Also imprisoned is the wizard Xalla, who is father to a woman named Opil whom Thoris had saved earlier. With no other options, Thoris makes a deal with Xalla to vanquish Waja and then free the wizard—on the ultimate condition that Thoris also take Opil as his bride.
The back cover compares Thoris to Conan the Cimmerian and John Carter of Mars, and indeed Swordmen of Vistar is supposed to be a rip-roaring adventure with a damsel in distress, a morally ambiguous wizard, and a giant snake. One problem: the prose is some of the most ungainly I've ever laid eyes on. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were not tender in their use of the English language, but they had a real knack for plotting which Nuetzel lacks. This is a 220-page novel and surprisingly little happens in it. I hope you still like love triangles, because this novel also has one. Lord Waja and his top henchmen are defeated by the end of the eleventh chapter, but we still have two more to go with Opil as the final obstacle. We need to pad out this already-short book, obviously.
With how much I've been reading about love triangles, I think God may be telling me to try acquiring a second girlfriend. If I were Thoris I would be stuck with a tough choice. Do I pick the tough-minded woman who clearly appreciates my swordsmanship, or the haughty princess who's been degrading me for much of the novel? Sure, the former threatens to kill me if I refuse her, but nobody's perfect.
By the way, Nuetzel may be excusing the awkward prose by stating in the preface that the Thoris narrative is a translation of an ancient manuscript that some academic had written up and given to him. Unfortunately academics, by and large, are terrible writers with no ear for English, and this shows in the "translation." It doesn't help that yes, this is derivative of the John Carter novels, along with a few other things; and while Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are often About Something, Nuetzel doesn't really have anything to say. If you've read hackwork in this genre then the good news is that you've already read Swordmen of Vistar, and so can save yourself the trouble of buying a copy.
Basically worthless, although the illustrations (courtesy of Albert Nuetzell) are at least decent. One out of five stars.
Bill Jarrett is a galactic adventurer, a man who spans the stars to find excitement, glory and money. He’s a flirt and a fighter and the kind of guy who can work himself out of situations. But when Jarrett gets abducted, has a mind-controlling creature strapped to his head, and is sent to overthrow a man who he’s told is a dictator, Jarrett finds himself in a situation he might not be able to win.
Well, yeah, of course, Jarrett does end up winning in the situation he finds himself in, with the help of his friends and a few mechanical contrivances. Because of course he does. As a galactic adventurer, that’s what you might expect from him.
The Star Venturers is an entertaining Ace novel, a quickie star-spanner with a handful of ideas which might stick to your brain. Author Kenneth Bulmer occasionally throws in a small element of satire or self-awareness which enlivens the plot; there’s a bit of a feeling of the author kind of winking at us as he tells this story. But there’s not nearly enough of that stuff to make this book stand out.
Bulmer does play a bit with an interesting concept, the sort of self-learning machine, a kind of artificially intelligent creature called a frug (which Jarrett nicknames Ferdie the Frug) which is placed on a person’s forehead like a headband and which compels the person to follow orders lest they feel horrific agony.
Mr. Bulmer with his wife Pamela
Bulmer takes pains to imply that the device is both mechanical and semi-sentient, a kind of uncaring vicious machine which Jarrett sometimes reasons with and almost treats like a pet – if the pet was a giant tumor which could only cause pain, that is. This idea of artificial intelligence dates back at least to the first robot stories, but the author gives the idea a fresh coat of paint here, and that concept is a real highlight for me.
Other than that, this is a pretty basic space fantasy Ace novel, which is entertaining for its two hour reading time but which will have you quickly flipping over to read the novel by Dean Koontz on the other side. At least it’s not About Things or Very Important. Instead The Star Venturers is just forgettable.
On the other hand, the flip side of this Ace Double is pretty memorable. Dean R. Koontz, an author new to me, has delivered a fascinating satire of a world which is easy to imagine and just as easy to dread.
In the near future, post apocalyptic America, television rules our world. All the people in America live for a special show which all can experience viscerally. That TV show, called The Show, has seven hundred million subscribers. Those subscribers watch a continuing story, kind of a soap opera, about the characters on the screen. But they don't just watch the characters, they also feel the same emotions as the characters. They feel empathy and pain for the characters. In a real way the characters and viewers are bonded.
Because the actors are so well known, so much a part of their audience's lives, even the act of replacing an actor can be tremendously fraught with stress and worry. The act of leaving The Show can be freeing but also terrifying. And when lead actor Mike Jorgova leaves The Show, it makes his life much more complicated. He becomes untethered, is trained to become part of a revolution, and discovers the deeper frightening truths behind a world he scarcely understood.
Young author Dean Koontz delivers a clever and exciting story which shows tremendous potential. He does an excellent job of creating his world in relatively few words, delivering character in just a few broad strokes and creating memorable villains and settings. The end action set-piece, for instance, is built with real suspense and ends with a thrilling struggle which is filled with energy.
Dean Koontz
Along with that aspect, young Mr. Koontz delivers two more elements which separate this book from many of its peers.
First, he paints a fascinating future which seems like a smart extension of McLuhan's concept that "the medium is the message." Koontz creates a TV show which feels like reality, in which the characters live in some semblance of real life while engaging in exaggerated, bizarre actions. That's a concept which feels all the more possible these days, with controversies about the Smothers Brothers and Vietnam dominating headlines about television in 1969.
Koontz also delivers a series of philosophical asides which discuss human evolution from village to society and the ways mass media both shrinks the world and expands our horizons. Nowadays we know everything about people who live across the world but nothing about the people who live next door to us, and that gap only promises to get wider. As our social networks grow, the strengths of our connections only shrink.
This is heady stuff for an Ace Double – and I've only touched on a few of the many ideas shared almost to overflowing here. In fact, the book is chockablock full of ideas but the ambition is a bit high for their achievement. Like many a new author, Koontz has many, many ideas he wants to explore but there are a few too many on display. Nevertheless, despite its thematic density, The Fall of the Dream Machine reads like a rocketship, hurtling ahead until it lands gracefully, sharing a thrilling journey for the readers.
Keep your eye on Mr. Koontz. I predict great things from him.
Poetry has always had a strange place in science fiction. Long before appearing in Hugo Gernsbeck’s magazines, poets have been attempting to explore fantastic themes. However, in spite of their regular presence in almost every SFF periodical, and many fanzines, they rarely seemed to be talked about, nor are they represented in either the Nebulas or the Hugos (although we here give out Galactic Stars to them).
Enter John Fairfax and Panther publishing, who have put together this anthology of responses to the space age. The selection inside is varied. Some are original and some are reprints. Some are SFnal, some are fantastical, others closer to reality. And, as the editor puts it:
Some poets are optimistic about the space odyssey, others view it with cynicism…and other poets do not care if man steps into space or the nearest bar so long as human relations begin with fornication and end with death.
As this book contains almost 50 separate pieces, I cannot hope to cover them all here; rather I want to give an overview and highlight some of the best.
Possibly due to my natural cynicism, Leslie Norris’ poems were among my favorites. He is willing to engage deeply with the future, but believes the same problems we have down here will continue there. For example, in Space Miner we hear of the fate of those travelling to distant worlds for such a job:
He had worked deep seams where encrusted ore,
Too hard for his diamond drill, had ripped
Strips from his flesh. Dust from a thousand metals
Stilted his lungs and softened the strength of his
Muscles. He had worked the treasuries of many
Near stars, but now he stood on the moving
pavement reserved for cripples who had served well.
Just a small part of one of his moving poems that raise interesting questions about where we are headed.
Closely related is John Moat’s Overture I. His works concentrate less on the science fiction but still wonder if we are heading in the right direction:
That twelve years’ Jane pacing outside the bar,
Offering anything for her weekly share
Of tea; those rats now grown immune to death –
I ask you, in whose name and by what power
Have you set out to colonize the stars?
This is only an extract and continues in that fashion. It ponders if what we are bringing to other planets is something they would care for.
Not all are so negative. Some, instead, write about the wonder and artistic possibilities of space travel. Robert Conquest (who SF fans may know from his anthologies or short fiction in Analog) produces a Stapledon-esque epic among the stars in Far Out:
While each colour and flow
Psychedelicists know
As Ion effects
Quotidian sights
Of those counterflared nights.
Yet Conquest still asks within, what is the value of these views to the artist? A complex piece for sure.
There are probably only two other names you have a reasonable chance of recognizing inside: D. M. Thomas and Peter Redgrove, both for their occasional appearances in the British Mags. As you might expect these are among the most explicitly science fictional. For example, in Limbo Thomas gives us a kind of verse version of The Cold Equations, whilst Redgrove’s pieces are trains of thoughts of two common character types of SFF.
However, it should not be thought others have written repetitively on the theme. These poems include such diverse topics as the difficulties of copulation in space, how to serve tea on a space liner, the first computer to be made an Anglican bishop, and explorers getting absorbed into a gestalt entity.
The biggest disappointment for me are the poems from the editor. It is to be expected Fairfax would have a number of pieces inside but, unfortunately, they are among the most pedestrian. For example, his Space Walk:
Around, around in freefall thought
The clinging cosmo-astronaut,
Awkward and expensive star
Dogpaddles from his spinning car.
The poem has nothing inherently wrong with it, but it does not feel insightful, nor does it do anything experimental. It more feels like what would win a middle-school poetry competition on the Space Race. Probably deserving of a low three stars but little more.
I feel, at least in passing, I need to point out we have the recurring problem of the British scene. In spite of the number of poems contained within, none of the poets appears to be woman. There are no shortage of women poets, either in the mainstream or within the fanzines, so I find it hard to believe there were no good pieces available. Hopefully, this can be remedied in a future volume. The Second Frontier, perhaps?
Either way, this is still a fabulous collection. Of course, it will not be for everyone. Poetry is probably the most subjective form of literature, and not everyone likes to sit down to read more than forty poems in a row. However, the selection here is a cut above what we tend to see from our regular science fiction writers (looking at you, de Camp and Carter) and I hope it helps raise the form to higher standards and recognition.
Four Stars for the whole anthology with a liberal sprinkling of fives for the poems I have called out.
Four new novels suggest the seasons, at least for those of us living in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Let's start with the traditional beginning of the year, as opposed to our modern January.
Cover art by Margery Gill, who also supplies several interior illustrations.
The first thing you see when you open the book is musical notation. The melody is said to be a very old French tune, and it plays a major part in the plot.
Those of you who can read music may be able to whistle along with the boy.
Christina, known as Kirsty, is a schoolgirl whose mother died a while ago. Her father remarried, this time to a much younger woman. Like many stepchildren, Kirsty resents her.
An opportunity to escape the awkward situation for a while comes when Kirsty gets a job picking fruit in Norfolk. She moves away from her home in Suffolk and lives with a kindly elderly couple.
Strange things start to happen when she hears music coming from an empty room next to her attic bedroom. She meets a local boy who experienced amnesia and sleepwalking when he stayed in the house. More alarmingly, he almost drowned when he walked toward the sea in a trance.
In addition to this mystery, which involves the supernatural, there are multiple subplots. Kirsty has to learn to get along with her young stepmother. A schoolfriend has no father, an alcoholic mother, smokes, admits to having tried marijuana, and is later arrested for shoplifting. One of her two young brothers suffers an accident.
Despite all this going on, and a dramatic climax, the novel is rather leisurely. The author captures the voice of her young narrator convincingly, and never writes down to her readers. There's a love story involved, and the book might be thought of as a Gothic Romance for teenage girls. In addition to this target audience, adults and even boys are likely to get some pleasure from it.
Two young men are hiking when they get lost in a storm. They wind up in a tiny village with only a handful of people living there. It seems that a dam under construction is going to flood the place, so most folks have moved out.
They spend the night in the home of an elderly couple whose son was killed in World War Two. (That may not seem relevant, but it plays a part in the plot.) The other inhabitants of the doomed village are an ex-military man, his adult son and daughter, a somewhat shady fellow, and the former showgirl who lives with him.
Things get weird when this quiet English village develops a tropical climate overnight. Bizarre plants, some like hot air balloons and some like birds, show up. The surrounding countryside changes into a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. What the heck happened?
We soon find out that people from a time thousands of years from now use time travel to transport folks hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Why? Because the future people face an all-encompassing disaster, and want to start human life all over again in the extreme far future.
(They only select folks in the past who were going to be wiped out of history anyway. The village was just about to be buried under a huge landslide, leaving no evidence behind.)
The rest of the book shows our reluctant time travelers exploring, figuring out a way to survive, and fighting among themselves. The two young women pair up with a couple of the men, but not in the way you might expect.
Near the end, the plot turns into a murder mystery, which seems a little odd. The conclusion is something of a deus ex machina. Otherwise, it's an OK read. The characters are interesting.
Fall is a time of nostalgia and anticipation. We gaze at the past, and ponder the future. Our next book features a lead character who has a lot to look back on, and plenty to concern him coming up.
The book takes its title from a famous painting by 19th century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.
The artist created several versions of the work. This is one of them.
Francis Sandow, our narrator, started off as a man of our own time. (There are hints that he fought in Vietnam, or at least somewhere in Southeast Asia.) He went on to travel on starships in a state of suspended animation, so he is still alive many centuries from now. In fact, he's one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy.
(Some of this is deduction on my part. The narrator only offers bits and pieces of his life throughout the text. The same might be said about the book's complex background. The author makes the reader work.)
Francis made his fortune by creating planets as an art form. If that isn't god-like enough for you, he's also an avatar of an alien deity, one of many in their pantheon. It's unclear if this is a manifestation of psychic power or a genuine case of possession. The mixing of religion and science in an ambiguous fashion is reminiscent of the Zelazny's previous novel Lord of Light.
Somebody sends Francis new photographs of friends, enemies, lovers, and a wife, all of whom have been dead for a very long time. He also gets a message from an ex-lover (still alive) stating that she is in serious trouble.
This sets him off on an odyssey to multiple planets, as he tracks down an unknown enemy. Along the way, he participates in the death ritual of his alien mentor. The climax takes place on the Isle of the Dead, a place he created on one of his planets as a deliberate imitation of Böcklin's painting.
The bare bones of the plot fail to convey the exotic mood of the book, or Zelazny's style. His writing is informal at times; in other places, he uses extremely long, flowing sentences you can get lost in.
As I've suggested, this novel requires careful reading. Stuff gets mentioned that you won't understand until later, so be patient. I found it intriguing throughout. If the ending seems a little rushed, that's a minor flaw.
About fifty years before the novel begins, aliens arrived on Earth with what seemed to be benevolent intent. Well, you know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts.
The Kaltichs brought longevity treatments and advanced medical techniques that could replace any damaged organ. The catch is that Earthlings have to pay a high price for these things.
There's also the problem of overpopulation. The Kaltichs promised to give humans the secret of instantaneous transportation to a large number of habitable planets. It's been half a century, and we're still waiting.
Because the longevity treatments have to be renewed every ten years, and the Kaltichs deny them to anybody they don't like, Earthlings are subservient to them. We have to call them sire, and punishment with a special whip that inflicts extreme pain follows any transgression.
Our protagonist, Martin Preston, is a secret agent for S.T.A.R., the Secret Terran Armed Resistance. (I guess we're still not over the spy craze, with its love of acronyms.) The agency asks him to imitate a Kaltich and infiltrate one of their centers, which are off limits to humans.
(I should mention here that the Kaltichs are physically identical to Earthlings. That seems unlikely, but it's a plot point and we get an explanation later.)
Because the previous fellow who tried this had his hands cut off and sent back to S.T.A.R., Martin understandably refuses. An incident occurs that changes his mind. With the help of a brilliant female surgeon (who, like most of the women in a James Bond adventure, is gorgeous and sexually available), he sets out on his dangerous mission.
What follows is imprisonment, torture, escape, killings, double crosses, and the discovery of the big secret of the Kaltichs, which you may anticipate. The book is similar to a Keith Laumer slam bang thriller, if a little more gruesome. Hardly profound, but it sure won't bore you.
Three stars.
There you have it, folks. Take ten and enjoy all the new novels coming out. We'll be back next month to help you figure out which ones to put at the top of the pile.
Happy New Year to everyone! 1969 is upon us and the first new episode of Star Trek for this year is come! “Whom Gods Destroy” is the episode of the new year and although it was a smaller story, it was well crafted and concise.
It started off with the Enterprise arriving at a poisonous planet named Elba 2: a planet for the criminally insane. Kirk and Spock beamed down with an unnamed medicine that cured all incurable mental illness. As the curable ones have all already been cured throughout the galaxy, the asylum only had about a dozen patients in it.
Upon arrival they meet Governor Donald Corey, a very jovial man, who informs them that the asylum recently welcomed its 15th patient, Garth of Izar, a former captain that Kirk revered.
On the way to visit Garth, Marta, a green skinned Orion woman, says that Corey is not who he says he is. Corey laughs it off and takes them to Garth's cell, only to find that Corey, the real Donald Corey, is in the cell.
"Also, I'm Batgirl—why won't anybody believe me?"
Garth had tricked them, changing from Corey into his true form before their eyes, and freeing the inmates in the surrounding cells, bringing them to his side. Kirk and Spock are trapped on the planet. As Spock is dragged away unconscious, Kirk is put into the cell with the real Corey.
Lord Garth, leader of the future masters of the universe, as he now demands to be called, transforms into Kirk as a part of his plan to take the Enterprise and pursue vengeance against his former crew that mutinied against him.
As Garth contacts the Enterprise in the guise of Kirk, he is foiled in his attempt to gain access to the ship by Commander Scott. “Queen to queen’s level 3”, says Scotty. It's a passcode that the real Kirk set up as an increased security measure. Garth blows a gasket after this occurrs.
Garth then decides that he should change tactics. He goes back to Kirk, bringing Spock back and inviting them for dinner.
All the free asylum inmates, now Garth’s crew and subjects, are present and entertaining each other. We are even treated to a dance by the lovely, jade-colored Marta.
"Dessert, Captain?"
At this point I considered this episode, written by Lee Erwin, to be fully set up.
What came next was an expertly written tale of misdirection and subterfuge, by all parties. Kirk as the hostage trying to use his intelligence and wits to find a way out. Scotty, as a commander seeking to find a way to rescue his captain without causing him harm. Garth, as a brilliant, but insane, changeling able to match wits and brawn with Kirk to achieve his aim of universal domination.
Several times throughout the episode I had my assumptions challenged and my expectations subverted.
Again, I give credit to Mr. Erwin for crafting a tale with fleshed-out characters and subtle nods to history. Garth, wearing his coat with this left arm in the sleeve and the other draped over his shoulder, hinted at him being a futuristic Napoleon Bonaparte. Marta was a complex character who was as insane as the other inmates, yet lived within some rational rules and boundaries, never lying to anyone about anything.
Kirk, and the rest of the crew made no mistakes in the episode that a less skilled writer might employ to increase tension.
In the end this small, self-contained story did many interesting things, but didn’t try to do too much. There were many paths that this story could have meandered down, but Mr. Erwin skillfully kept the main thing the main thing. A great start for 1969 Star Trek in my opinion.
Five stars
by Janice L. Newman
The Little Captain
I was very much impressed by “Lord Garth’s” performance. He took a role which would have been terribly easy to overplay and made it his own. Thanks to movies, TV, and comic books, we’re all familiar with the idea of the inmate of an asylum who ‘thinks he’s Napoleon’. Often such roles are treated as one-note portrayals: usually for laughs, occasionally to be creepy or frightening, sometimes to be pathetic. Brilliantly, Steve Ihnat manages to infuse his performance as Garth with all of these, smoothly transitioning from menacing and cruel, to throwing a tantrum like a small child, to being unintentionally funny even as one tries not to laugh.
One of the most interesting and subtle aspects was Garth’s furred, gold-lined coat. Throughout the episode, except when he is disguised as someone else, he is never seen without it. He’s constantly fidgeting with the coat, swinging it around him like a cloak (with one sleeve hanging ridiculously off the back), slinging it over one shoulder like a toga, or even cuddling it like a child with a security blanket. The coat becomes a physical representation of his delusion, and it’s not until the very end of the episode, when he’s beginning to respond to the treatment of his mental illness, that we see him without it at last.
"Don't tell me how to wear my clothes…"
There were many other things I liked in the episode, but the one that stayed with me, and which I suspect will stay with me for some time to come, was “Lord Garth”.
Five stars.
by Gideon Marcus
Birth of a Dream
As is tradition, before we tuned into Trek Friday night, we all gathered 'round the dinner table for a fanzine read. Trekzines are a land office business these days, and my mailbox sees a good half dozen amateur publications in it each month devoted just to Trek (not counting the half dozen or so others that cover science fiction in general). This time around, it was the near-pro quality Triskelion issue #2.
The first piece in the fan-mag is by none other than Hal Clement, the famed hard science fiction author and professor, writing about the Enterprise and its basis in real science. Abstruse stuff, but interesting. It just goes to show how engaging the universe of Star Trek is, above and beyond the weekly drama and our favorite characters.
In addition to being a fine piece of writing and a showcase for some quite good acting, "Whom Gods Destroy" was compelling for how much it told us about the setting of the show. For though the episode takes place in the claustrophobic confines of Stage 10 on the Paramount lot, redressed to look like the prison colony of Elba, the dialogue fills in details about the show that seem to address the very beginning of the entire Federation.
When Kirk was put on trial in the episode "Court Martial", we learned that he had an award for "the Axanar peace mission". No other details were given at the time. In "Whom Gods Destroy", it turns out Axanar was the site of a terrific battle, one in which Fleet Captain Garth's participation was essential to victory. Kirk recounts that he was a "newly fledged cadet" when he went on the subsequent peace mission (in a role that could not have been too momentous given his inexperience). If Kirk is 35, which makes sense since last year he was 34, then he was a cadet probably 17 years ago, when he was 18.
And just last episode (well, last rerun), Spock related he'd been serving in Star Fleet for 17 years.
Hmm.
Add to that the fact that the Axanar accords resulted in Kirk and Spock being "brothers", and the significance of the event becomes pretty clear.
Kirk, Spock, Garth, red boa-cloak, and piggy-face: brothers, thanks to Axanar
In the first half of the first season of Trek, there were no references to the Federation. The Enterprise was an "Earth ship" reporting to the "United Earth Space Probe Agency". Only gradually did the words "Star Fleet" and "Federation" get bandied around with frequency. That suggests that the United Federation of Planets is a fairly new nation.
I deduce that Axanar was some sort of titanic conflict between what would be the major races of the Federation: the humans, the Vulcans, the Andorians, the Tellarites, the Orionids, and all the rest. It might even have resulted in a defeat for the Vulcanians—the "conquering" to which McCoy refers in "Conscience of the King". But now, the UFP is like a United Nations with teeth, ensuring harmony among the myriad worlds that have banded together in the name of peace.
Garth, a soldier's soldier, and maddened by a grievous injury, could not stomach this clemency, so he tried to incite an insurrection on Antos IV. Happily, the Antosians were having none of it, lest the shaky foundations of the Federation be toppled even as they were laid.
After Axanar, Kirk became an explorer first, and a soldier second. Now that Garth is on the way to recovery, perhaps he can join Kirk on that noble expedition to the stars.
About face
by Lorelei Marcus
It is not often that our Captain Kirk submits readily to another person. He gives his respect to direct Starfleet superiors, but to an esteemed alien passenger or important civilian escort, he shows only the required amount of deference, and sometimes less. Even when he or his ship is threatened with mortal danger, he refuses to buckle to the whims of any supposedly all-powerful being, often to his own detriment.
Yet, in "Whom Gods Destroy", Kirk not only lacks hostility towards his captor, but in fact follows Garth's orders and tries to reach an understanding with him through exclusively nonviolent means. One could argue this was merely Kirk acting out of self-preservation, as Garth could have killed him with a phaser at any time. However, in a similar episode, "Plato's Stepchildren" Kirk relentlessly resisted the physical control of the Platonians, almost to his death. He is not one to give in easily, if at all.
Then why the change in temperament with Garth? I postulate two reasons. First, Garth is a former starship captain and Federation hero. Kirk grew up reading of his exploits and admires Garth as a man of greater rank and accomplishment. Even in his delusional state, Garth still invokes an awe that commands obedience, even from Kirk.
Second, Kirk understands that Garth is mentally ill and doesn't hold him accountable for his actions. When dealing with other enemies, Kirk is unyielding from his position of righteousness. Other foes act horrendously, with full intent and cognizance, justifying Kirk's equally stubborn resistance.
But Garth does not truly know what he's doing, at least not the Garth Kirk worships and admires, and he's better dealt with using a soft hand. Ironically, this ends up being the wrong choice. On multiple occasions, Kirk tries to reason with Garth and talk him down. However, his diplomacy never works—as it shouldn't, given Garth's insanity is incurable. If not for Spock's clever ruse and confidence with his phaser, they might never have escaped the prison.
Kirk gives diplomacy the old college try
Between the acting and the development of Federation history, "Whom Gods Destroy" makes for an excellent bottle-esque episode.
5 stars.
by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele
Second Verse, Same as the First
GARTH: You wrote that?
MARTA: Yesterday, as a matter of fact.
GARTH: It was written by an Earth man named Shakespeare a long time ago!
MARTA: Which does not alter the fact that I wrote it again yesterday! I think it's one of my best poems, don't you?
Kirk seems destined to watch his heroes fail. Professors and peers from the Academy, fellow officers, esteemed scientists. Time and time again, he expects better from his fellow humans, and is met instead by (mostly) men who think that the only issue with ultimate authority and unchecked ambition is the personal failings of previous tyrants.
“It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.” -Theodor Reik
Even with all the horrors he has encountered, perhaps even in spite of them, he is quick to declare a paradise, to look for the best in others. The rank of Starship Captain must demand a degree of ego, surely, to be capable of commanding over 400 persons, making life-or-death decisions, and being the first to approach previously unknown species and planets. Setting the stage for humanity and the Federation is a doozy of a first impression! A sense of confidence is a must, then.
We have seen Kirk mishandle situations, fall prey to his own weaknesses. But he also relies on Spock and McCoy to check him. Is it enough? After peers and mentors keep making the same mistakes with catastrophic repercussions… is it telling of the system, of the people, or both? Just what sort of curriculum does the Academy promote, that so many graduates have gone on to lose perspective, take over planets, view tyrants from history as inspiration, reconstruct fascist regimes? To repeat the mistakes and tragedy of history, thinking that this time they can do things right.
Starfleet: molding megalomaniacs for more than 20 years!
Consider Dr. Daystrom's desperate need to achieve again, at the cost of lives in war games with his M5. Or Lt. McGivers, so enamored with how men “used to be” that even as a historian who knew of Khan, she was easily swayed. Remember Dr. Adams who used a neural neutralizer to gain complete control of Tantalus, or Gary Mitchell declaring himself a god upon gaining psychic powers? And of course we can't forget John Gill, a historian and teacher so sure of his ability to do it the 'right way' that he recreated the Nazi regime. Kirk and his colleagues have stumbled to different degrees over the Great Man theory, the notion that history hinges on exceptional individuals.
More importantly, on dismissing those who aren't Great Men. Only the fact that his crew mutinied saved the planet of Antos 4 when Captain Garth was unable to handle the rejection. And yet, without his crew, he could do nothing. (Mutiny! As recently as in The Tholian Web, there is no recorded instance of such on a starship.) The story was written before, it will be written again. Abuse finds home in authority. Once one thinks of people as something less than human (or in Trek, alien), it is possible to justify any number of injustices.
Much of this episode was a re-wording of what has been said before, and usually said better. It wasn't terrible, but I'd like a key-change, at least.
3 stars
[Come join us tonight (January 10th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
China's got the Bomb, but have no fears—they can't wipe us out for at least five years…
So sang satirist Tom Lehrer in 1965 for the television show That Was the Week that Was. Well, here we are, about five years later, and the Chinese have graduated to the big time. 18 months ago, they tested their first H-Bomb, the big firecracker that involves nuclear fusion rather than fission, with a damage yield equal to more than 100 times that of the Hiroshima A-Bomb. A try at #2 last year was a dud, but one detonated less than a fortnight ago went off just fine, creating a 3 megaton blast.
Radio Peking announced the blast on December 29th, but the Atomic Energy Commission had detected the blast the day before. It was apparently timed in celebration of Mao Tse Tung's 75th birthday. (In China, if you go carrying pictures of the Chairman, you will make it with someone…)
The bright…uh…positive side to this is that China's missiles, if there be any, are probably mostly pointed at the Soviet Union. Apparently, the Russians have beefed up their border divisions, and inter-Communist relations are sub-frosty.
So perhaps we have another five years…
Bigger than a half-dozen magazines
On the homefront, the latest issue of Galaxy, the magazine with half again as much content as all the others, offers some boffo entertainment as well as a few duds.
by John Pederson Jr.
To Jorslem, by Robert Silverberg
The ever-productive Silverbob offers up what may (but may not) be the final installment in his vivid Nightwings series. I'm sure we'll see a fix-up soon, a la To Open the Sky. According to Bob, this is his modus operandi—sell novellas to Galaxy editor Pohl, and then corral them into a novel.
by Jack Gaughan
Following directly on the heels of the last story, the invaders have fully Vichy-ized the Earth. Tomis, formerly a star-surveying Watcher, and then an historian of the caste Rememberers, is now a Pilgrim. Accompanied by the haughty Olmayne, cast out of the Rememberers for her slaying of her husband to be with the (now dead) former prince of Roum, the two make their way toward the holy city of Jorslem. Tomis is burdened not only with Olmayne's company but also the knowledge that he has sold out humanity, giving the invaders records of the Terran subjugation of the aliens' ancestors—thus justifying the invasion.
The story is something of a travelogue, something of a search for redemption, and it's written absolutely beautifully. It's not New Wave, exactly, but it's qualitatively different from what filled Galaxy last decade (or, indeed, what continues to fill Analog). Maybe Silverberg is leading a one-man revolution.
"Jorslem" does not quite achieve five stars, however. The plot is thin, even as (and perhaps especially as) a climax to the series. The happy endings come too suddenly and a bit implausibly. Female characters exist to be lovers or harpies.
Nevertheless, the world is so beautifully rendered, and the prose so masterfully done, that you'll enjoy the journey regardless.
Four stars.
Now Hear the Word of the Lord, by Algis Budrys
An alien race has controlled the world since 1958, secretly and tirelessly infiltrating every level of our society. One lone voice, a representative of the World Language League, finds a member of this cabal and threatens to kill him in order to learn the true extent of the invasion. The truth is shocking enough to blow your circuits.
A humdrum plot, but excellent, sensual telling. Four stars.
Another aliens-among-us story. This time, the baddies are the Fnools, who perfectly ape members of a given profession—realtors, minor cabinet officials, what have you. Only one thing gives them away: they are all only two feet tall.
But what if there was an easily accessible way for them to grow to human height? All hope would be lost!
This is a silly story, and most of the goodwill it earns is thrown away by the rather tasteless ending.
Two stars.
Golden Quicksand, by J. R. Klugh
by Jack Gaughan
The ferret ship H.L.S. Solsmyga is running for its life from two Grakevi raiders at thousands of times the speed of light. Its crew are protected from the tremendous accelerations involved only by the use of liquid-filled, individual pods, linked by the computerized Shipmind. If only the Solsmyga could use its superior maneuverability to ditch its pursuers; but in fact, Commander Yuri Hammlin's mission is to lead the raiders into a trap.
The running battle is competently presented, with lush, pseudotechnical detail, and Gaughan peppers the story with pretty, albeit superfluous, pictures. Ultimately, though, it's just a combat story. There is an attempted stingy tail, but it's more of an appendix.
Three stars.
Our Binary Brothers, by James Blish
by Brock
A driven man achieves everlasting success on Earth, but that's not enough. Repelled by humanity's technological quagmire, he longs for a simpler, cleaner world. And he finds one orbiting a hitherto undiscovered dwarf star just a fifth of a lightyear away. There, he sets himself up as a God and slowly leads the unwashed masses there toward a better civilization.
But planets comprise multiple populations, and not all are as backward as the hill people first encountered by the Terran…
A well-written but one-note vignette. Three stars.
For Your Information: The Island of Brazil, by Willy Ley
This is a fascinating piece on a variety of Atlantic land masses that never were. It's a nice complement to his piece on Atlantis.
Five stars.
Kendy's World, by Hayden Howard
by Reese
Kennedy Olson was born to high hopes just before the National Emergency turned the United States into an increasingly autocratic police state. After the death of his hippie, goodnik father, the boy coasted through life on his athletic skills and his winning smile. Come his junior year in high school, "Kendy" had more than a dozen scholarship offers, but the most persuasive came from the small California campus of National University. Seemingly too good to be true, the old-fashioned college offered a well-rounded education, sports opportunities, and a chance to make a difference.
Except that NU is really a training ground for spies, and the big bad isn't the Soviets, but the unspeakable, top secret horror they found when they tried to land on Phobos…
From the author that brought us The Eskimo Invasion, this story appears to be the setup for another serialized novel. The writing is strictly amateur, and there's not much story here—just a series of unpleasant events. I am curious about the alien menace, though, if it ever be developed.
Two stars.
Finish with a bust
As promised, there's lots of good stuff, and a fair bit of mediocrity in this first Galaxy of 1969. Ending with the weakest tale probably makes sense, but it does leave a bitter taste in the mouth. Nevertheless, the issue finishes on the positive side of the three-star divide, and that's a good enough New Year baby for me!
How about two of them, with Dick Martin from Laugh-In…
On December 23rd, 1968, exactly eleven months after they were captured by North Korea, the crew of the USS Pueblo was finally released, and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. The USA would not be starting World War III over the incident, and our boys, though they’ve been starved and tortured, are coming home alive for Christmas.
It is thus appropriate that this week’s Star Trek episode revolved around choosing peace instead of war.
Bill Theiss, you've done it again!
In the episode opener, we learn that the Enterprise has been sent to support Petri, Ambassador of Troyius, in his mission to “train” the Dohlman of Elas to be a suitable wife for the Troyian leader. The Dohlman turns out to be a beautiful woman played by France Nuyen, made up to look like Cleopatra in a bathing suit. Her name is Elaan, and she is imperious and demanding, while Petri is servile but contemptuous. They are intractable in their dislike of each other. Kirk quickly becomes exasperated with both of them, telling Petri, “Stop trying to kill each other. Then worry about being friendly.”
"And maybe try wearing a bikini…"
In the meantime, the Enterprise is being followed by a “ghost” ship, which eventually materializes and proves to be a Klingon warship. This is a nice callback to Balance of Terror, where the Enterprise played the part of the “ghost ship”, and the recent Enterprise Incident, where we learned that the Klingons now have cloaking technology.
"Follow that starship!"
No sooner does the ship reveal itself than Kirk is called away from the bridge again. Elaan has stabbed Petri, who declares that he will have nothing more to do with her. He also explains to Nurse Chapel that the mysterious “allure” of Elasian women is merely biochemical: “A man whose flesh is once touched by the tears of a woman of Elas has his heart enslaved forever.”
Back in Elaan’s quarters, Kirk is fed up and declares that he will be Elaan’s new teacher. He tells her she is, “an uncivilized savage, a vicious child in a woman's body, an arrogant monster!”
"I said, 'Gimme five'—you've got to learn modern courtesy."
I must admit, my sympathies were thoroughly with Elaan. Despite her imperious attitude in the beginning, it becomes increasingly clear that she has no choice in the political marriage and no desire to be married. At one point she says, “I will not go to Troyius, I will not be mated to a Troyian, and I will not be humiliated, and I will not be given to a green pig as a bribe to stop a war!” And yet, the Enterprise continues on its way to Troyius, regardless of her behavior, her orders, or her protests. It seems she has no true power, but is merely a pawn to be traded, and probably one the Elasians don’t actually care much about.
In fact, I had to wonder if the Elasians didn’t want peace at all, but sent their “Dohlman” to be married as a sop to the Federation. That way they could say they’d tried, and if the Troyians couldn’t handle the Dohlman, well that just proved that peace wasn’t possible between them.
This also nicely sets up the question of why the Federation cares so much about stopping the war between these two planets, to the point of bringing diplomatic pressure and sending one of their best starships to ensure that the wedding and negotiations go well. Scotty blatantly asks the same question in the episode opener, leaving it to rest in the back of our minds as we watch.
The next day, Kryton, one of the Elasian guards, sneaks into Engineering and sabotages the Enterprise. Kirk forces his way into Elaan’s quarters and again begins trying to “teach” her, which mostly consists of wrestling with her and threatening to spank her. She starts to weep, and he wipes away her tears. The effect is immediate, with Kirk’s ire evaporating and transforming into passion.
Kryton is caught, and kills himself rather than allow himself to be subjected to a Vulcan mind meld. Kirk orders Scotty to figure out what Kryton did, then returns to Elaan’s quarters. Elaan tries to convince Kirk to work with the Klingons, but he tells her there are more important things than love: “Elaan, two planets, an entire star system's stability depends on it. We have a duty to forget what happened.”
At this point, those of us who have been watching Star Trek since the beginning already know what’s going to happen: Kirk will always choose the Enterprise over everything else. And indeed, when Spock and McCoy come to roust the captain out of Elaan’s quarters, all it takes for him to leave Elaan behind is to hear that the Klingon ship has changed course and is approaching at warp speed.
"Don't mind me. I always walk this stiffly when my friends are watching…"
Once Kirk gets to the bridge, we’re treated to one of the best combat sequences we’ve seen yet on Star Trek. Kryton’s sabotage, Kirk learns at the last possible moment, was rigging the matter-antimatter unit to blow if the ship went into warp. The Klingon ship therefore starts by trying to bait the Enterprise into going into warp, and that doesn’t work, just firing on them.
The captain sends Elaan to Sickbay because it’s the safest part of the ship. Petri speaks to her there, finally treating her with a modicum of graciousness and respect, and asks her to wear the necklace gifted her by the Troyians, “as a token of respect for the desperate wishes of your people and mine for peace”. She seems genuinely affected by the words and gesture, perhaps realizing that Kirk will truly never sacrifice duty for love.
"Please put these on. The Emperor paid retail."
Back on the bridge, the crew struggles to keep the Klingon ship’s hits to its best shield (Kirk doing a bit of back seat driving as he leans over Sulu and gives him his orders). An impulse-power driven ship is no match for warp, though, and all seems lost.
Elaan appears on the bridge, wearing the Troyian wedding dress and necklace. Spock immediately notes that there are strange readings coming from the necklace. It turns out that the stones, which Elaan says are “common”, are dilithium crystals! (No wonder the Federation and the Klingons are both so interested in this system!) She gives them to the Captain, who has Spock hurry them down to Engineering, where he and Scotty start installing them. Kirk does his best to stall, but the Klingons are unwilling to discuss terms (I imagine that after “The Enterprise Incident” and The Deadly Years, the Klingons have been instructed not to listen to anything the Federation says—or at least nothing that Kirk says.)
This fellow is no Michael Ansara. He's not even a William Campbell…
The crystals are ready in the nick of time. A photon torpedo at close range leaves the Klingon ship damaged and limping. The Enterprise leaves it behind to fulfill its original mission.
Pow! Right in the kisser.
Kirk says farewell to Elaan, who asks him not to forget her. He tells her he has no choice. Nor does she, she replies, only duty and responsibility. It’s clear that she’s come to accept her role, though whether it’s because she realized that her last desperate play to manipulate the captain failed or because her near-death experience made her decide that peace was more important than her personal feelings, we do not know. It is also worth noting that while she goes on to marry into a culture she despises and where she will likely be surrounded by people who hate, fear, and ridicule her (if Petri’s behavior is any indication), Kirk will simply continue doing what he loves. Her choice of “duty” over all else is thus, in my estimation, a far more difficult and admirable one.
"Oh, this knife? I was just going to pare my nails. Not kill the Emperor or anything like that, why do you ask?"
McCoy, unsurprisingly (given his track record) discovers an antidote to the Elasian tears. Spock tells him the captain has no need of it, as he’s already found his antidote: the Enterprise.
There were many things to love in this episode, and many things that frustrated me. The “Taming of the Shrew” sequences early on were grating, but the combat was excellent, and to the scriptwriter’s credit, the story did not end with Elaan being “tamed”. In the end, she makes a choice to accept her fate, but she does so with dignity.
The things I liked and didn’t like balanced out pretty well, leaving this a three star episode for me.
by Gideon Marcus
The Sum of its Parts
What I found so gratifying about "Elaan of Troyius" was its continuity with the Trek history we've encountered thus far. Once again, as in "Journey to Babel", the Enterprise is host to a diplomatic mission (though how the ship could house several dozen delegates to the Babel Conference, but Uhura had to give up her room for Elaan, is never explained). Once again, Kirk shows irritation at having to play nursemaid to a bunch of civilians. I would find his flip treatment of Elaan demeaning, but it's no worse than he displays to Commissioner Ferris or Commissioner Fox.
I particularly loved the galactopolitical situation depicted in the episode. Here we have a fairly new Federation system with two hostile planets, abundant with dilithium crystals, perched right at the edge of the Klingon Empire. What a fraught situation Kirk must navigate!
At first, it was difficult for me to glean the plot behind the plot, but by the end of the episode, the setup was pretty clear. The Federation, upon learning of the rich deposits on Elaas (and Troyius?) placed a clamp on all dispatches coming out of the system. Not good enough, though, as the Klingons clearly want the worlds badly, too. The Feds then explained to the two worlds in the system that they must work things out. Elaas grudgingly agrees—and then effects two simultaneous plans to queer the deal.
The first is Kryton's sabotage. By handing the Enterprise over to the Klingons, they get in their good graces (if, indeed, the Klingons have good graces). Obviously, the savage Klingons are a better fit for for the militaristic Elaasians anyway.
"Of course I want to be a Klingon—you think I want to keep wearing this outfit?"
The second is Elaan. She clearly doesn't want to be there. Indeed, she does everything she can to get out of it, despite orders from the Elaasian council. Elaan goes so far as to try to murder the Troyian ambassador and seduce the captain of the Enterprise. And yet, that scheme fails when Elaan takes a page from Kirk's book, and indeed the example of the whole crew, that duty and the preservation of life trumps all else. It's a quick, undershown change, but it's there, and I appreciated it.
The episode reminds me a bit of the parable of the peasant woman who shelters a starving prince. The royal promises to give a gold coin for every fat bubble in the soup she serves. Greedily, she dumps a huge pat of butter in the soup, which results in one big bubble rather than a myriad of little ones. Similarly, if the Elaasians had stuck to just one plan, they might have succeeded. Instead, they double hedged and lost all.
And was the Klingon commander operating with Imperial sanction? Or was he a rogue skipper with notions of glory? After all, taking on a starship seems pretty bold given the ever-watchful Organians.
It's not a perfect episode, but it's certainly an engaging one, and I always enjoy seeing Mrs. Robert Culp on the small screen. Plus, her appearance alongside Shatner is something of a reunion—they starred together in the Broadway version of The World of Suzie Wong. Plus, I dug both the Klingon ship (which we saw a bit of in "The Enterprise Incident" and "Day of the Dove") and the score for the episode.
Four stars.
Twixt Scylla and Charybdis
by Trini Stewart
The beginning of this week's episode did not seem promising to start, mostly because of the guest characters' first impressions on me. Petri the ambassador seemed childish and reckless in his peacemaking, and Elaan was almost comically uncooperative for royalty sent as a hospitable offering. Looking back, Elaan was possibly playing to her strengths to some end with her antagonistic reactions, and her development with Kirk ultimately became a gripping trial for our captain.
Kirk was the shining star of this episode, which is not something I feel about him often. He was impressively quick-witted against biochemical and psychological manipulation, which really sold his captain qualities for me more than his usual speeches or fights. The way Kirk kept his priorities in check while thinking on his feet reminded me of how Spock left me feeling in "The Tholian Web" when he held the ship together without Kirk. In the short time I have known Kirk, he has struck me as the type to always know what to say and fight when there is no other choice. Kirk managed to unravel the layers of the princess's antics even with serious disadvantages, revealing what his problem solving is like when he is out of sorts. Tension was well-built in this episode on several levels, and the challenges Kirk faced were arguably more dynamic and interesting than Spock's in "The Tholian Web".
"What's a case of tight trousers when the Enterprise is at stake?"
Kirk transitioned from acting as a respectful host to a firm authority with Elaan, and his initial responses to her rude behavior were tastefully poised. Once Elaan had seduced Kirk, he still managed to expertly dismantle the Elaisians’ schemes without falling for the Dohlman or her subordinates’ clever tricks. Shatner did a great job conveying how difficult it was for Kirk to maintain his composure, so it was riveting to see just how he would escape the Klingons, prepare the guileful Elaan for her marriage, and get the Enterprise back in ship shape under that level of duress. His allegiance to the Enterprise evidently sobered Kirk; his articulate maneuvering reflected his symbiotic relationship with the ship and her crew. In the end, even Elaan was humbled by our captain, finally submitting to the responsibilities her title bore. I was quite pleasantly surprised by Kirk this week, and the adversities threatening the crew were positively captivating. 4 stars!
Be Our Guest, Do As You Please
by Joe Reid
“Elaan of Troyius” was this week’s episode of Star Trek. “Taming of the Shrew” storyline aside, there is one thing that the writers of Star Trek keep doing to twist my britches, and this episode was another example of it. The Enterprise, powerful symbol of human achievement, has the laziest security imaginable. Episode after episode, people that wish to do harm to the ship and its crew need only to walk into what should be the most secure areas of a ship to do as they please practically unchallenged. Areas that on large ships, not all members of the crew are even allowed to enter. So, let’s delve into some of areas of a ship that guests should not enter.
Let’s begin with the command center of the ship. The bridge. The seat of command, where the captain steers the destiny of a ship to complete its missions. Obviously, a perfect place for a teenage princess to casually enter whenever she chooses. Elaan pierced the bridge and interrupted the ship’s captain, while he was in the middle of a combat situation. Good on the writers for making the captain, thanks to Spock’s urging, send her away from the bridge, only to have her show up on the bridge again after a change of clothes. For an area holding some of the most senior members of the crew, it seems unusual that it wasn’t better protected. Past episodes showcased singing children, enemy androids, and furry tribbles having free access to the brain trust of the Enterprise. I anticipate that 15% of Kirk’s problems could be solved by securing access to the bridge to “Bridge Crew Only”.
The next ludicrous pattern that we witnessed in this episode was the open and unguarded access that guests on the Enterprise had to Engineering, the area of the ship that provides all the power, without which the Enterprise couldn’t move, fight, or support human life. Why did Elaan’s former suitor have a free ticket to stroll into this most vital part of the ship and sabotage systems? Again, good on the writers for allowing him to be discovered, be it many minutes later, only to allow the discoverer to be summarily executed for his weak efforts to question someone he'd found messing with the thing that keeps the ship alive. If only this random trespass in Engineering were rare. Previous episodes sported children again, along with genetically advanced conquerors, self-aware talking space probes, and Klingons traipsing merrily into the bowels of Engineering.
Where before I said that 15% of Kirk’s problems could be solved by securing the Bridge, 99% of problems could go away if Engineering had a couple guards working shifts to protect the very heart of this starship.
If only Kevin Riley were on duty, none of this would have happened. So long as he's sober…
Historically there have been some areas of the ship that have been kept secure week after week. Areas that no one can casually walk into without permission (unless you are a floating cloud of space gas that is). Those would be crew quarters. Even in this week’s episode, crew quarters were better guarded, and their doors are better respected, than what should have been the most sensitive areas of the ship. Not even Spock and McCoy could casually walk into the room where the captain was passionately kissing Elaan.
Perhaps future episodes will take the security of the most critical parts of the ship more seriously. That, or have the crew consider moving the engines and bridge staff to crew quarters, where doors are respected.
For continuing to overlook this easily solvable problem, I offer only 2 stars for “Elaan of Troyius”. Ignoring the fact that the episode did display some interesting makeup and costumes, and featured a few well-acted scenes, the continued stupidity of the security of the ship is as untenable as its “secure” areas.
Two stars
[Come join us tomorrow night (January 3rd) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
First, there was the stirring flight of Apollo 8, a bit of unmitigated good that gave the holiday season additional poignancy. And then, just last week, the crew of the Pueblo were finally released. Vietnam peace talks appear to be stumbling forward.
On a more personal level, I got to prepare the Galactic Stars for the year, which involves reading all of the four and five star stories recommended by my colleagues. For one month, everything I read is terrific.
It is in this euphoric mode that I get ready for tonight's New Year's celebration…and present to you the last of this month's magazines, the January 1969 Analog.
A galaxy-spanning empire makes contact with Earth. Amazingly, the denizens of the sprawling star-society appear to be humans, though the ruling caste is distinctive due to selective breeding—onyx white, seven feet tall, and brilliant. Because of the clear relation between the species, the prevailing belief is that Earth is some kind of lost colony.
by Kelly Freas
James Keil, bullfighter extraordinaire, is adopted by the High-born for display at the Throne World. Keil is also a trojan horse, dispatched by the United Nations to gather information about the non-alien aliens.
The hidebound High-born possess tremendous powers, from teleportation to matter conversion, but they are also just as petty and Machiavelian as any Earthers. Keil's only ally is Ro, a (comparatively) dark-skinned High-born tasked with caring for the High-born queen's menagerie.
Dickson spins an interesting tale, detailing how the "Wolfling", Keil, walks the diplomatic tightrope, navigating a literal lion's den all through his FTL journey to the heart of the galaxy. Though the story featueres eugenics, it is clear that the tale is an indictment rather than an endorsement. Of course, the message might have been more strongly made were Keil's surname "Chang" or "Ojukwu".
Four stars so far.
The Hidden Ears, by Lawrence A. Perkins
by Leo Summers
A renegade UFO on the lam breaks through the cordon placed around Earth by the interstellar fuzz, taking refuge in the barn of a rural homestead. The cops scratch their carapaced heads for a while, until they figure out a way to locate the hidden fugitive. The genuinely amusing conclusion is the one bright spot in an otherwise frivolous story.
Two stars.
The Other Culture, by Ted Thomas
by Kelly Freas
If ever the word "pedestrian" described a story, it's now. Thomas strings the most colorless sentences together, most of which are superfluous, and none of which are more than adequate.
The plot? The Weather Council has to decide who will be prioritized for the increasingly demanded amount of world rainfall. Because, as we all know, that's the kind of minor issue that is solved at a single conference.
That would be silly enough, except for the bombshell dropped about a quarter-way into the story: continental drift is suddenly speeding up, and all land masses will reunite as Pangaea in half a century.
Turns out this (ludicrous) plan is the work of BROW, the Brotherhood of the World, a rival underground (no pun intended) society. But this potentially disastrous plan also, fortuitously, contains the solution to the water problem.
"Culture" is a talky, ridiculous story with no merits whatsoever. It makes no scientific sense—moving continents around like bumper cars will produce a million 1906 San Franciscos—and the prose is dull as dishwater, as are all of the "characters".
One star.
"On a Gold Vesta … ", by Robert S. Richardson
This is a pretty neat piece about how we measure the density, size, and albedo (reflectiveness) of the myriad minor planets in the solar system. All of these values are related, and without a firm grasp of at least one of them, it's virtually impossible to estimate the others. A little short, but valuable.
Four stars.
Classicism, by Murray Yaco
by Kelly Freas
It's been eight years since we last heard from Mr. Yaco, and quite frankly, he might as well have stayed in hiding. This is the "funny" tale of a young engineer from the last planet that believes in "classical economics". He is sent to the big universe to become a cog in the command economy—specifically, to manage planet-wide garbage operations. In his spare time, he works on perfecting a teleportation system, which he hopes to sell at great profit.
Too silly to be truly offensive; too lightweight to be worth your time. Two stars.
Krishna, by Guy McCord
by Kelly Freas
Last year, Mack Reynolds…er… "Guy McCord" wrote a tale about Caledonia, a strange planet that was an odd combination of Scots and American Indian societies. Krishna is a direct sequel, and a much better (though incomplete) story.
John of the Hawks is now a man, Raid Cacique for his clan, in fact, when Outworlders return. The villain of the last piece, Mr. Harmon, is now wearing the black cloak of an acolyte of Krisha. His ship, the Revelation, houses a bunch of missionaries who offer cures to all diseases if only they will partake of soma, a powerful hallucinogen. Those who ingest soma become peaceful, one with Krishna…but also sterile and apathetic. Obviously, such is anathema to the hardscrabble, lusty Caledonians.
"McCord" balances the clan politics with the Outplanet menace much better this time around, and John's endeavor to "steal" Alice Thompson for a bride is pretty gripping. I don't mind that this novella is obviously the first (second?) installment in a novel, and I look forward to the next one.
Four stars.
We rate it
The word for this month is "vicissitudes". On the face of it, none of the magazines did very well—Analog finished at 2.9 stars, well above Amazing (2.4 stars), but below New Worlds (3 stars), Galaxy (3.1 stars), IF (3.2 stars), and Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.3 stars).
Yet, every mag save Amazing had at least one four-star story in it. Several had more than one. If you took all the good stuff this month, you could fill two magazines with it and have some quite good reading ahead of you. Women contributed 12% of the new fiction published, which is on the high end.
So, a foreboding or auspicious sign for the New Year, depending on whether you fill your scotch half full or half empty with soda. Either way, here's looking forward to a lovely 1969 with you all. May your holiday season be bright!
At long last, it's holiday season again—and that means offering up our choices for the best science fiction of 1968.
These recommendations represent the culmination of a year's work: reading virtually every English-language (and some translated) work of science fiction and fantasy, regardless of where it's published; reviewing them; rating them; nominating them; and finally, assembling this article.
In many ways, 1968 has been a banner year, with plenty to enjoy from a variety of subgenres and moods. You could spend a good many weeks just enjoying the best of what this rather fraught year had to offer.
And after the last 363 days you've had to endure, haven't you earned a break?
Poetry is the most subjective of the literary arts, so we won't offer a "Best". Instead, here is a nice cross-section of pieces we found moving. And remember that a lot of the best stuff can be found in the fanzines, so don't restrict yourself to the pros!
If you're a fan (or not a fan) of J. G. Ballard, then you must read "Sublimation World". It's an in joke, but one whose time has come.
ㅤ Crazy Annaoj, by Fritz Leiber
A galaxy-spanning romance that you will fall in love with.
When you've got a three-way tie for a category, you know it's a good year. Even better when there are ten tales that get Honorable Mention, too. The subject matter is more serious, on the whole, than the vignettes, though the Niven, the Sheckley, and the deFord are not without their amusing qualities.
A good suite of stuff, although I think the novelette category is not as strong as it has been in previous years. Also, how much you like our picks is strongly dependent on how much you enjoy Delany, who has a distinct flavor (although "High Weir" is the least Delany-ish story I've read by him in a while.)
A "Wichita Lineman" of the future tries electrifying a gang of Canadian Luddite hippies. Culture clash ensures.
ㅤ A Tragedy of Errors, by Poul Anderson
On an imperial planet reverted to savagery, the crew of a crashed starship attempt to effect repairs.
The world of Tu is another world that has become an interstellar backwater, but it is slowly clawing its way back to industrialization—in no small part thanks to Fantastique, the magazine of "contrivance fiction". When an astronomer with a psionic cat is tapped to rescue the one complete set of the magazine from destruction, it turns out far more is at stake.
WAWWAR, a psychotherapy machine, heals the mind by providing hallucinatory trips. But in this tale, just who is being healed, and how is the human therapist, who controls WAWAR, involved?
I just discovered this terrific story in Niven's Neutron Star, a collection of Known Space stories. This one features Bey Schaeffer, a retired hyperspace pilot who gets entangled in a kidnapping plot. I'm not sure why it didn't get published in a magazine, but it's well worth your time.
–
In contrast to novelettes, the novella category is quite healthy, in part thanks to the rise of the paperback anthology. Lots of hard choices here, and some really excellent work across a range of genres. I'd say the novellas are the most universally SFnal of the pieces this year.
Ancient Mediterranean swashbuckler Alyx is now part of a far-future team of troubleshooting adventurers. Somehow, it works.
ㅤ Rite of Passage, by Alexei Panshin
Young Mia Havero, who lives on a galaxy-faring trade ship, finds herself on a hide-bound, hostile colony world. Can she survive her rite of passage—her trip to the planet?
Another great year for paperbacks. In addition to the usual suspects (Delany, Dick, Leiber, Brunner), it's neat to see some newer names hit the charts: Russ, LeGuin, Shaw, White. The field is only getting bigger and better!
It's nice to see Willy Ley's name ascendant again, and of course, Lexy Panshin earned his Best Fan Writer Hugo this year largely on the strength of his book on Heinlein (originally published serially in fanzines). If the appearance of a piece on Warhol surprises you, read it—after all, why shouldn't art be a cutting edge technology, too?
—— Best Magazine/Collection
——
The Farthest Reaches: 3.40 stars, 2 Star nominees (just one anthology)
Galaxy: 3.22 stars, 12 Star nominees (nine 1.5x size issues)
New Writings 11-13: 3.08 stars, 2 Star nominees, (three anthologies)
F&SF: 3.06 stars, 10 Star nominees (12 issues)
IF: 2.96 stars, 2 Star nominees (12 issues)
New Worlds: 2.90 stars, 5 Star nominees (seven issues)
Famous Science Fiction 2.889 stars, 0 Star nominees (four issues)
Analog: 2.75 stars, 3 Star nominees (12 issues)
Amazing: 2.60 stars, 1 Star nominee (six issues)
Orbit 3 and 4: 2.50 stars, 3 Star nominees, (two anthologies)
Fantastic: 2.44 stars, 1 Star nominee (six issues)
Worlds of Fantasy: 2.32 stars, 0 Star nominees (one issue)
Beyond Infinity: 1.46 stars, 0 Star nominees (one issue)
—
Tallying things this way, it looks like Galaxy remains the front-runner. It's certainly the magazine I look forward to the most. Fan favorite and subscription juggernaut Analog is near the bottom of the back, and the Orbits, while they provide some excellent stuff, fare even worse. A bit surprising.
—— Best Publisher
——
Ace: 3 Star nominees
Doubleday: 3 Star nominees
Lancer 1 Star nominees
Paperback Library 1 Star nominees
Parnassus Press 1 Star nominees
No surprises here. Ace puts out 24 books a year just in the Doubles format, not to mention all its single titles. Still, Doubleday brings the goods when it comes to "serious" SF.
With so much to choose from, the Hugos next year are going to be a mess. The Trek episodes, with the exception of "Tribbles", will be rerun this summer, and most of these movies are still in the cinema. In short, you still have time to appreciate these instant classics!
—— Best Comic Book
——
Deadman
The Trigan Empire
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD
Honorable Mention
The Incredible Hulk
The Silver Surfer
Valerian et Laureline
–
Deadman doesn't have a book of his own, but ever since his introduction last year, he has been a National (DC) fan favorite. Or, as fellow traveler Kris puts it:
Deadman is so great. It is like Arnold Drake went:
"So this comic is like The Fugitive…"
"Great"
"…except he's a trapeze artist…"
"Sure"
"…and dead…"
"Erm"
"…well a ghost who can possess people's bodies…"
"what?"
"….where the murderer is trying to get inducted into a Society of Assassins run by an ancient martial artist."
The winning entry speaks for itself. Trumpet has terrific production values with its pro-style offset printing, but only one issue came out this year. Riverside Quarterly continues to be scholarly and excellent. The new incarnation of Science Fiction Times is the best way to keep up to date on the goings on in the fan world.
—— Best Fan Writer
——
Ruth Berman (on the right)
There are lots of terrific fan writers out there maintaining a myriad of 'zines for our enjoyment. It's difficult to pick just one, so I'm just going to play favorites. I met Ruth this year. She is big in Star Trek fandom, editing the 'zine Inside Star Trek. She also covers conventions, is incredibly literate and sharp, conducting interviews of various luminaries in addition to her writing, and is an all around superfan. I would not be surprised if she has a big pro career ahead of her.
She was also a nominee for Best Fan Writer Hugo this year, so I'm not the only one who loves her!
Whew! That's some list. And no rest for the wicked—we're already reading 1969's offerings. But with entries like those above, there's plenty of wind in our sails. Sure, we run into shoals every so often (ahem Piers Anthony, John Norman, Lin Carter) but the great discoveries keep our momentum going.
So enjoy…and let us know which of these you particularly liked!
Few things excite the imagination more than adventures in space. In particular, we love to hear about doings in the cosmos that can't be done on Earth. And one of the main things we can't do on Earth is see the sky.
Oh sure, when you look out at the starry night, you think you're witnessing infinity. In fact, your eyes barely apprehend a tiny fraction of the electro-magnetic spectrum. We are blind to radio waves, to ultra violet, to X-rays, to infrared. Our sophisticated telescopes are similarly handicapped. Even the mighty 200 inch telescope on Mount Palomar can't see in most of light's wavelengths, for they are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere. In the X-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, and cosmic ray bands, the glass seeing-eye tubes are as sightless as we are.
Which is why the launch of the Orbiting Astronomy Observatory (OAO) on December 7, 1968, was such an exciting event. Dubbed "Stargazer", it is the very first space telescope.
Well, technically, it's the second. The first one went up on April 8, 1966, but its power supply short circuited shortly after launch, and it never returned any data. This is a shame, as there were some nifty experiments on board, including a gamma ray experiment similar to the one carried on Explorer 11, another gamma ray counter supplied by NASA's Goddard center, and a Lockheed-made X-ray counter. But, the main experiment, a set of seven telescopes designed to look in the ultraviolet spectrum, provided by the University of Wisconsin, was duplicated for OAO-2.
This telescope cluster will be used for long-term observation of individual stars, something that only recently became possible with the perfection of star tracking technology. In addition, the Smithsonian has provided an additional package of four telescopes for the investigation of large masses of stars, up to 700 per day, to get an overall UV map of the sky.
Think of how revolutionary it was when the first radio observatories began mapping the heavens. We learned about the existence of quasars and weird storms on Jupiter and also a lot more about the stars we had been observing visually for centuries. Stargazer is about to give us a whole new view of the universe.
That's exciting—truly science fiction made fact!
Jeepers Creepers
While we wait to see what excitement OAO 2 returns from the heavens, let's turn to the latest F&SF to see what terrestrial treasures await us this month.
We return to the world of "The Lady in the Tower", one of my favorite McCaffrey stories, for the lead story this issue.
Damia, the daughter of that first story's protagonist, is 20 and humanity's strongest telepath. As tempestuous as she is beautiful and brilliant, she has refused the attentions of men, holding out for something…better.
That's when she meets Sodan, an alien inexorably approaching the Terran sphere from far, intragalactic space. Thus ensues a completely mental courtship, and Damia becomes infatuated with the foreign entity. But Afra, an experienced mentalist, who has been secretly in love with Damia for ages, is suspicious. What if the being is simply manipulating Damia so that Earth's greatest defense will be neutralized?
The stage is set for a cosmic battle, and a realignment of Damia's priorities.
I really wanted to like this story. I was anticipating an "Is There in Truth no Beauty?" romance where two beings find love despite fundamental physical differences. Instead, the viewpoint shifts from Damia's to Afra's early on, and all we get is his certainty that Sodan is up to no good, which is vindicated. Then, after the battle, Damia realizes the worthy that's been under her nose this entire time and, of course, gives him her love.
Of late, there has been a shallowness to the emotion displayed in McCaffrey's writing that just puts me off. Also, a sort of petty volatility. All of her characters snipe at each other constantly. But the real nadir of the story comes at the end:
Shyly, her fingers plucking nervously at her blanket, Damia was unable to look away from an Afra who had altered disturbingly. Damia tried to contemplate the startling change. Unable to resort to a mental touch, she saw Afra for the first time with only physical sight. And he was suddenly a very different man. A man! That was it. He was so excessively masculine.
How could she have blundered around so, looking for a mind that was superior to hers, completely overlooking the fact that a woman's primary function in life begins with physical submission?
I feel like if Piers Anthony had written that, we'd have given him the Queen Bee. Two stars.
A Brook in Vermont, by L. Sprague de Camp
De Camp muses poetically on the Carboniferous, and what future beings, millions of years hence, will burn the coal being formed today.
I think the author missed a real opportunity to imply that we would be the anthracite mined in the far future, suggesting that we run the very real risk of leaving nothing to the ages but our combustibility.
Three stars as is.
by Gahan Wilson
Black Snowstorm, by D. F. Jones
This is nothing more, nothing less, than an extremely well-told story of a plague of locusts. There's no satire, no metaphor, no literary experiments. Both shoes drop simultaneously, though slowly, gradually, rivetingly.
Five stars.
Unidentified Fallen Object, by Sydney Van Scyoc
One day, a small UFO falls with the snow, and a precocious teen boy picks it up to examine. As he handles the small craft, flakes of it come off, perhaps sliding into his very pores. Soon, he begins to radiate a frightful miasma, inciting hatred in all approach him.
Including his teacher, who has also touched the fell ship…
"Object" is a chilling, effectively written little horror. It's not particularly to my taste, and it's a bit one-note, so it's just a three-star story for me. Others may find more to like (for those who enjoy a sense of dread).
How I Take Their Measure , by K. M. O'Donnell
In the future, everybody's on relief…or administering it. This is a little slice-of-life story about a sadistic relief worker, who gets off on the tenterhooks he hangs his relief applicants on. No Brock, George C. Scott's kindhearted social worker from East-Side, West-Side; this guy is a real bastard.
This is my favorite story about terminal unemployment that I've read since one in IF a decade ago (the one about the guy who gets a job tightening all the screws on the buildings in the cities—which have been systematically unscrewed by some other schnook the night before…).
Here's St. Nick like you've never seen him before. In the style of Ian Fleming's James Bond series (though not Edward S. Aaron's Sam Durrell, Harlan offers up Agent Kris Kringle, a hard-stomached, oversexed, lean killer whose red suit is filled with every lethal device known to Elfkind. His nemesis is S.P.I.D.E.R., an international organization devoted to evil. This time, their nefarious scheme involves mind control: they have brainwashed LBJ, HHH, Nixon, Daley, Reagan, and Wallace into doing the most horrid deeds, and only the jolly agent from the North Pole can defeat them.
Okay, it's a bunch of silly fluff, probably written between bonafide adventure yarns Ellison probably writes under another name like "Rod Richards" or "Length Peters". I did appreciate how every cruddy thing in the world is ultimately attributable to S.P.I.D.E.R.—humanity is basically good and cuddly. Only the nefarious "them" subvert our goodness.
I've often noted that comic books and spy novels offer an easy way out for readers. It's tough to deal with everyday problems, with economic malaise, with systemic issues that cause crime and misery. How much easier to topple the goon of the week to get our cathartic kicks. Ellison lets us know he understands the flavor of his own cheek with the subtlety within the broadness.
That said, it's a one-note joke, and once you've gotten the punchline, I don't think the story bears much rereading, especially since it is so very much of a very specific moment in our history (as Judith Merril notes in her book column, August 1968 already feels like an age ago).
Three stars.
The Dance of the Satellites, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor continues his examination (see last month's piece) of what the Galilean moons of Jupiter might look like from the innermost moon, Amalthea. This time, he focuses on eclipses, the appearance of the moons in Jupiter-shine, and more.
Interesting cosmic data, of use to writers and laymen alike. Four stars.
The Legend and the Chemistry, by Arthur Sellings
The 3607th (or was it 3608th) interstellar exploration mission from Earth seems like it will be yet another humdrum operation. In all the expeditions, though many aliens have been found (most humanoid), all have been planetbound, none of them having reached our space traveling level of technology.
This latest planet is no exception, its humaniform denizens possessing a primitive tribal culture. But they have no less pride than any other race. What happens when the very existence of far superior beings constitutes an unpardonable affront? And who is responsible for the catastrophe that ensues?
A decent, moralistic yarn from the late, great Arthur Sellers. This may well be his last work published (unless he has a posthumous career like Richard McKenna) as he died recently. While Legend is not the best thing he's ever written, it has its own kind of power.
Three stars.
Wild ride
There are a lot of vicissitudes in this first F&SF of the year. The strong points cancel the weak points, and the magazine ends in positive territory, but because the lack of consistency makes things a bit sloggish.
Well, that's why I do this, right? To be your guide to ensure you only get the highlights!
This week's episode, “The Empath”, gave Star Trek fans some wonderful interactions from our crew on a rescue mission, but also had them running on a vaguely-guided track throughout the episode.
At the start, the Enterprise is tasked with evacuating a research station before the star it was studying goes nova, but when Kirk, Spock and McCoy arrive at the station, there is no one left to rescue. An enormous solar flare threatens the Enterprise during the search, so the ship leaves to safety just before a record tape reveals where the former inhabitants went. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy watch as the station researchers suddenly disappear while a strange noise shrills on tape, and the three distressed crew members are almost immediately teleported away by the same noise.
Where Kirk was…a very effective effect!
They find themselves in a dark area with a mysteriously mute woman, whom they nickname Gem. While the crew attempts to ask Gem about how they got there, two large-headed figures, the Vians, bluntly introduce themselves and refuse to tell Kirk what is going on. The crew is easily overpowered, the Vians collect data from Gem, and they vanish with the crew’s weapons. A small cut on Kirk’s head is suddenly healed when he checks on Gem, and McCoy realizes that Gem communicates through her highly responsive nervous system; all of Kirk’s feelings and ailments can become hers from just a touch.
The healing power of interpretive dance
Spock then locates a sophisticated lab, where they discover the Vians preparing large perspex tubes for the crew members, and the missing inhabitants of the station dead in tubes of their own. The three officers learn that they are meant to be subjected to deadly tests for reasons unknown, and they flee with Gem through a cave mouth. The Vians trick the escapees with a mirage of a search party to test their wills, and capture Kirk once they observe the crew’s perseverance. Kirk sacrifices himself by insisting he be the one specimen the Vians want for their cruel torture, after which Gem reluctantly heals his potentially deadly wounds at McCoy’s behest.
Shatner is devastated that he's not in the spotlight…
While Spock works out how to attune the Vians’ instrument to allow their escape, the aliens come back to reveal that they plan to gravely injure either Spock or McCoy next, and that the trio must choose the victim when they return. This leads to one of the most endearing displays of the crew’s dynamic I have seen in the show: both officers insist they be the test subject without hesitation, and antics ensue. The two begin to argue that the other is more valuable to leave with the captain, but Kirk insists he will be the one to decide, only to be rendered unconscious by McCoy’s treatment. Spock then notes his approval of the treatment, as it relieved Kirk of a rough decision and put Spock in charge as second-in-command. McCoy punctuates that sentiment by ambush-sedating Spock, saving the critical Vulcan the only way he could. Gem sheds a single tear as McCoy is taken away, since she has now emotionally connected with both Kirk and Spock and feels the depth of their affinity for him.
A single tear—Gem's race has not had time to be acquainted with clichés
The two remaining officers eventually awaken and begin to configure the Vians’ device, acknowledging that the aliens likely wanted them to escape and leave McCoy behind. Instead, Spock transports Gem and them to the lab, where McCoy is found with multiple fatal injuries, and he tries to make light for everyone’s sake. The two realize their only hope for McCoy is for Gem to help him despite the risk, and the Vians restrict them in their force field to prevent their interference. The aliens begin to explain that they must see how Gem reacts on her own, because she is being judged of her worth on behalf of her whole species; Gem’s choice to save McCoy would determine whether the Vians use their limited resources to save Gem’s species. Spock and Kirk escape the force field, and Kirk indicates that the Vians do not know the value of the compassion they claim to idolize. The aliens, humbled all too quickly, mend McCoy and whisk Gem away with a short farewell. The episode ends with the crew appreciating Gem as an entity, and Spock delivering a fun riposte to Scotty in response to his joke at the Vulcan's expense.
"There. All better. No hard feelings?"
The episode did a great job at highlighting the main characters, but left the intentions of the new ones blurry in execution. It is unclear why the Vians specifically found compassion to be the only trait worth preserving, especially when they didn’t practice it. It is generally accepted that self sacrifice is the ultimate show of love, but the weight that carries as a theme is undermined by how dubious the whole experiment is.
The crew’s interactions give a good taste of what the impact should have been, but the incomplete understanding of the threat ultimately caused the intense stakes built up for the captives to fall flat. Moreover, the Vians were presented as an overwhelming force, yet they hardly understood why they were conducting experiments, to the extent that insults from Kirk immediately caused them to question their motives. Not to mention that they conveniently and inexplicably had the means to save one of the races in the solar system. The crew’s roles in this episode outshone the disappointing parts, so I still consider this a good episode as far as enjoyment goes.
3.5 stars.
Amateur work
by Gideon Marcus
Joyce Muskat's name is probably new to you. It wasn't to me—she's a N3FFer (member of the National Fantasy Fan Federation. Also, a few months ago, her name was mentioned in one of the Trekzines. I can't remember which one it was, but the author was pleased that her fan friend, Joyce Muskat, had sold a script to Trek on the slush pile. This was remarkable since Trek officially doesn't take unsolicited manuscripts. So, good for her. I love that Trek has opened the door to new talent, particularly women.
I'd really like to know if the inconsistencies in the episode were the result of a spotty understanding of the material or revisions after submission. I suspect the latter. No true fan (he said hopefully) would write the Federation as inhuman monsters who would let the sundry races of Minar die when the sun went nova. No sf aficionado would make the boner mistake of having a planet's atmosphere protect the surface from cosmic rays, but not the Enterprise's shields, not to mention having cosmic rays cause earthquakes.
It's never even made clear whether or not Gem (Jem?) comes from a race of empaths or if she was unique among them. The latter seems more likely; I find it hard to believe that a race of empaths could fail to feel compassion. I could see telepaths walling themselves off to avoid a confusion of the psyches ("where do I stop and you begin?") but given that Gem cannot verbally communicate at all, an empathic race would have to rely on its mental powers to relate. And as Heinlein pointed out, no beings have more compassion than those who "grok" each other.
There's much to like about the episode, from the performances of the leads to the creative use of set and costume (the Vians have excellent Outer Limits-style make-up, though it is strange seeing such in color). On the other hand, the unremitting score, the odd pacing (Shatner slo-mo-ing to the ground for about a minute springs to mind), the nonsensical motivations for the Vians' experiment, and frankly, the directorial decision to keep focusing on Gem's facial expressions, which made her look somewhat clownish, all drag the episode down to average territory.
If only Harlan Ellison had written this episode of Outer Limits…
Three stars.
Substitutionary Theology
by Joe Reid
“The Empath” is this week’s episode of Star Trek. In it the crew of the Enterprise explore another strange new world. Yet again they face forces that are overwhelming. Yet again they find a way to pull their fat out of the fire and yet again the writers of this show chose to lace in overt theology into their story. Not only were these salutes to God and the Bible poorly executed, they sought to teach biblical morals without delivering the substance of the message through the narrative of the story, but through imagery and exposition only. This practice proved to be utter folly.
In one of the opening scenes we witnessed a recording of two missing scientists going about their work when a quake happened. This prompted the scientist named Ozaba to quote the first part of Psalm 95, verse 4, “In his hand are the deep places of the earth;…” A verse that when looked at by itself means nothing, but surrounded by the other verses in Psalm 95 that speak of the grandeur and majesty of God. Ozaba quoting this added nothing to the scene nor did it make his sudden disappearance meaningful. It was as if the writers desired to open the episode with a random scripture and blindly opened a Bible and picked the first verse they saw.
At the very end of the episode this time Scotty delivered the references to scripture, without quoting it this time. It was Mathew 13:45-46, where Jesus speaks about the kingdom of heaven being like a pearl of great price—it being worth selling everything that one has in order to obtain it. Although closer related to the something in the story, (Gem) this scripture like the previous one was a bad fit for the message that the story was attempting to deliver: sacrificing oneself for the benefit of another.
Strange use of scripture aside, the troubling part for me was in the main story of the episode: the imagery of Kirk as he was tortured by the aliens. His hands were bound and his arms were stretched wide as if he were on a cross. A nearly impossible position to hold as his wrists were bound with two ropes. It was done intentionally so as to place Kirk in a crucified posture. Conversely when McCoy was bound in a similar way his hands were above him.
Shatner's double is dying for the episode's sins
The combination of the out of place scriptural references and imagery used for both Kirk and the girl (in particular, the Pietà at the end as she is draped in a Vian's arms) muddy the waters of what this episode is attempting to say. A much more effective method would be to keep the moral message and the story only based in the environment of an alien world and deliver the message without the forced and uninspired asides to scripture. I’m fine with teaching morality tales using other mediums. I’m not fine with the poor application of scripture. It has the potential to cause more harm than good if misused—as we’ve seen done throughout the centuries.
Lest I be misunderstood, it's not so much that I found the episode offensive; rather it was too shallow and ineffective to deliver its message faithfully and respectfully.
One star
Staging a Comeback
by Janice L. Newman
When movies and television became widespread, early directors and producers treated them much like stage plays. There’s a static quality to shows, noticeable all the way up through the fifties and early sixties.
Eventually creators began to innovate, finally realizing that they could do things that weren’t possible on a stage. We began to see more creativity in how things were filmed, and particularly in how things were staged. In Star Trek we’ve seen both styles. Some episodes have had more traditional, static staging with actors carefully lined up in staggered and visible rows, while other episodes have pushed the boundaries of what can be done with a camera (the moving shots from Nomad’s point-of-view in Changeling come to mind).
“The Empath” is an interesting hybrid. There are a few scenes on the surface of the planet, and a couple on the Enterprise, but most of it is shot in a dark, empty space with minimal props. This makes it feel like a stage play, but more like a modern production than a traditional play. Gem’s interpretive dance-style form of communication strengthens this impression as well. It’s interesting to see how we’ve come full circle, from techniques drawn from the stage, to more dynamic shots made possible by modern filmmaking techniques, and now returning to a stage play, this time deliberately, to get a particular tone and feeling.
There was much I liked in this episode: the interactions between Spock, McCoy, and Kirk were excellent, and I loved the idea of Gem’s special ability. Unfortunately, rest of the story made no sense, with important or dramatic information revealed late and then ignored in ways that were entirely uncharacteristic. I found myself wondering, as Gideon did, how many of the inconsistencies were due to the original script and how much to modifications made by others (certainly Roddenberry never hesitated to cut up or re-write a script, as Harlan Ellison will bitterly tell you). The bright spots and dark spots canceled each other out, leaving me with a somewhat disappointing three star episode and a lot of questions.
A Familiar Song
by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele
The Talosians are back! Oh wait, these are different beings with bulbous skulls, silver robes, illusory abilities, and a penchant for experimenting on humanoids. Supposedly the Vians have the power to save an entire planet (but only one!) from the imminent nova, and are deciding the fate of said planet by coercing an empath to absorb injuries to the point of death. Are there representatives from other planets being tested elsewhere? If Gem “fails" will the Vians save their own planet? Why does an entire world need to reach a certain standard of “compassion” to deserve being rescued from annihilation? Pay too much attention and you will start to wonder if the Vians are making it up as they go along. Note the dead scientists stored in macabre tube displays! Nothing says good intentions like having three more tubes ready and labeled for when the landing party eventually dies!
"The Red Cross is getting overambitious with their blood drives…"
The Talosians- sorry, the Vians pay strangely little attention to Gem, for all their claims. It's hard to tell if Gem was left on the sidelines more from being a woman, or from what translated in human terms as a disability. Captain Pike is one of the few men who have been equally dismissed by an episode at large, and it's very clear that his role in The Menagerie was impacted by his limited means of communication. Despite clearly being able to comprehend what was happening, his binary Yes/No indicator left him largely out of the conversation. Even when he did express an opinion, it wasn't always respected. Gem had a more interpretive means of communication, but she too was often overlooked. In a future with translators that can talk to glowing clouds, and in the company of Spock, a touch telepath who has expressed a growing willingness to meld with aliens he encounters, it's beyond me how the crew ever opts not to try to communicate.
Upon first finding Gem, Kirk wants to know what is wrong, why she won't speak. Most aliens they've met have compatible languages, after all. McCoy's analysis: “She appears to be perfectly healthy. As for the other, her lack of vocal cords could be physiologically normal for her species, whatever that is,” provides a good reminder about human norms and poses the question, is a being “mute” if their species doesn't speak to start with? If her entire civilization uses empathy to connect, then the landing party likely seems just as restricted to Gem as she does to them. Being an alien, she doesn't nod or shake her head, but she does press McCoy's tricorder into Kirk's hands when the question of where to go arises. Given the option of escape, she votes to rescue the doctor.
Katheryn Hays brought a lot to her role as Gem, when the episode remembered she was there at all. Her performance, the set, and some choice scenes between the landing party couldn't make up for the surrounding episode, though.
3 stars
[Come join us tonight (December 20th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it… Plus early coverage of the Apollo 8 launch!]
![[January 18, 1969] (February 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690118cover.jpg?resize=663%2C372)
![[January 16, 1969] Mixed messages (<i>Star Trek</i>: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690116title.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[January 14, 1969] Ten for the road (January Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690114covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[January 10, 1969] Mad for this show (<i>Star Trek</i>: "Whom Gods Destroy")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690110title.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[January 6, 1969] Booms and Busts (February 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690106cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[January 2, 1969] Blood, Sweat, and Tears (<i>Star Trek</i>: "Elaan of Troyius")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/690102title.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[December 31, 1968] Auld Lang Syne (January 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/681231cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[December 30, 1968] Beautiful Downtown Starbank (the 1968 Galactic Stars)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/681230stars.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[December 22, 1968] What wonders await? (January 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/681222cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[December 20, 1968] A failure to communicate (<i>Star Trek</i>: "The Empath")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/681220title.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
