by Gideon Marcus

Flying

By the time this makes press, we'll already (hopefully) be on the flight back to San Diego.  As with most publications, though we try to hit the press as fresh as possible, there is a delay between writing and printing.  This is exceptionally unavoidable this time 'round because…

…we're off to Woodstock!

Specifically, the Woodstock Art & Music Fair, an "Aquarian Exposition" in White Lake, New York.  There's an art show and a craft bazaar and hundreds of acres of sprawl, but the main draw is the music: 27 bands, from Jimi Hendrix to Janis Joplin to Glen Beck to Sweetwater to Ritchie Havens, playing in 12-hour swathes, 1pm to 1am, every day (except the first—then, it's 4pm to 4am, apparently).

Well, we couldn't miss a chance to see something like this, so we booked tickets to Idlewild…er… JFK, chartered a bus, and we're headed for Max Yasgur's farm.  This isn't our first rodeo, so we've taken a few precautions:

1) We left early to avoid the rush.  With more than 100,000 expected to show up for this thing, there's going to be traffic jams;

2) We bought supplies in case we can't get what we want to eat;

3) We brought our own toilets!  A handy trick we developed camping up in Sequoia country: take a bucket, fill it a quarter way with Kitty Litter, and stick a toilet seat on top.  It works as well for people as it does for cats, and you don't have to dig latrines!

So, we're hopeful to get good seats and enjoy, as much as anyone can, three days of fun in the open air.  We'll have a full report when we get back!

Dragging

by Chesley Bonestell

Sweet Helen, by Charles W. Runyon

On a distant world, rich with export goods, yet another trader succumbs before his tour is up.  Two deserted.  One went native.  One shot himself.  The company sends a professional troubleshooter to find out what happened.

Somehow, the natives are the culprit.  The amphibian humanoids run twenty males to the female, and the female is in charge.  The men all compete for the honor of breeding with her; the rest die.  The females are humanoid and lovely… for a while.  They swell into enormous toads when it is time to become gravid. 

The troubleshooter is unable to determine the exact problem, until too late.

Of course, none of this would be an issue if they had sent a woman trader (probably).  And apparently women traders do exist in Runyon's universe, though they are rare enough to not be sent except by deliberate assignment.

Also, none of this would be an issue if the aliens weren't so uniquely humanoid and compelling to humans—a cliché I find tiresome these days.  Really, this is just a "women are dangerous" story in SF trappings, something done much better, and more creepily, in Matheson's "Lover When You're Near Me" almost two decades ago.

Two stars.

Bonita Egg, by Julian F. Grow

A riproarer of an adventure involving a middle-aged doctor, a young, East-Coast-educated Apache woman, and a dark-skinned alien named Mwando.  The last wants to abduct the former pair, but he is continually thwarted by his would-be captives' pluck, as well as the woman's outlaw uncle and tribal chief father.  Not to mention a platoon of Union artillerymen led by the bullheaded Winfield Scott Dimwiddie.

It's all rather silly and a bit long-winded, but it's not unreadable.  A low three stars.

Muse, by Dean R. Koontz

Leonard is a famed musician, or rather, he is when he's got Icky the symbiont alien on his back.  But anti-slug/human prejudice runs strong on old Earth, and his father wants Leonard to lose the connection for his own good.  Tragedy ensues.

Koontz is a pretty good writer, generally, but this story smacks of being an early, hitherto unsold work.  It's less artfully written, with repetitive phrasing in places.  The story is threadbare—if it's a metaphor for drugs, it's clumsy; if not, it needs a lot more development to be effective.

Three stars.

by Gahan Wilson

The Patient, by Hoke Norris

This is the story of the first brain transplant, as told from the point of view of the doctors who performed it and the patient.  Much discussion of the ethics involved and the problems ensuing, particularly with regard to the families of the donor and donee.  The patient is unable to reconcile his past with his present and ultimately commits suicide.

Sorry to give things away, but this is really a tedious, stupid piece.  It is pedestrian and repetitive, a stark contrast to, say, Fiztpatrick and Richmond's Half a Loaf series, which covers the same ground.

Also, that the doctors performed their operation on a day's notice, and none of the legal or moral t's were crossed or i's dotted reminds me of how space travel used to be depicted: a guy would build a spaceship in his backyard and fly to the Moon.  You'd think a lot more infrastructure would be needed before such a thing could even be contemplated.

One star.

The Screwiest Job in the World, by Bill Pronzini

Phineas T. Fensterblau has an odd hobby: collecting unusual animals, particularly ones with the power of speech.  To this end, he has employed the resourceful Elroy, who travels the world, proving the veracity of the claims of those who would sell exotic beasts to the millionare eccentric.  In the course of his work, Elroy has uncovered ventriloquists, dwarfs in costumes, hidden transmitters, etc.  But when he is sent to the Alaskan wilderness on the trail of a talking Kodiak bear, Elroy finds something completely new.

This isn't a bad story, but since it is set up as a mystery, it would have been better if the reader had been filled in on the clues before their lumpy exposition near the end.  That could have raised the piece from three stars to higher.

The Man Who Massed the Earth, by Isaac Asimov

Dr. A continues his layman presentation of first semester physics, explaining what weight is and how Cavendish determined the gravitational constant "G".  It's actually pretty interesting, and there is an intuitive explanation as to why the weight of the Earth…is zero.

Four stars.

J-Line to Nowhere, by Zenna Henderson

In this non-The People story, Henderson tells the tale of a teen girl who gets an urge to see the world outside the crammed city-scraper she's lived her whole life in.  She succeeds, but can't figure out how to get back.

There's a lot of gushing thoughts, but not a lot of story to this one.  Three stars.

Finishing the trip

Well, that was dreary!  Remember the days when fiction took you to better places than reality?  Of course, I haven't gotten to Woodstock yet, so maybe it will be equally disappointing…but somehow I doubt it.

Stay tuned!

(and dig on what F&SF has got coming next month…I'm excited for the Niven, of course.)

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