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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[February 20, 1969] The Old Man and the She (Star Trek: "Requiem for Methuselah")

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by Joe Reid

This week’s episode of Star Trek will likely turn many members of the audience into devout Buddhists.  It’s an episode which stands as a reminder of the destructive nature of desire and why the devotees of the Buddha eschew that emotion.  “Requiem for Methuselah” showcased a level of desire that proved more contagious and damaging than any infectious fever.

title card over Enterprise in orbit over a red planet, a golden moon above the limb of the world

The show started with the Enterprise in orbit of Holberg 917-G, in the Omega system.  3 crew members had died and 23 were sick with Rigelian Fever.  Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beamed down the planet in search of ryetalyn, a mineral that could cure the ill.

As they were about to split up to locate the vital substance, a hovering robot reminiscent of Nomad, from “The Changeling”, showed up and fired on them.  It rendered their weapons useless and had them cornered until “Do not kill!” was shouted by a voice whose owner was out of view.

A spherical robot of gray steel floats menacingly in front of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, who have their phasers out
"You are the Kirk?  The Creator?"

A finely dressed older man with a Caesar haircut revealed himself, demanding that they leave the planet. Kirk and crew would not be deterred and threatened they would take the ryetalyn if they had to.  The man, named Flint, said that he could kill Kirk, implying that the crew and the starship were no threat to him.  McCoy pleaded with Flint, saying that Rigelian fever was on par with Bubonic plague.  This caused Flint to think back to the city of Constantinople and what the plague had done to the people there.  Flint relented and allowed the crew to stay, while his flying robot, M-4 (likely unrelated to M-5 from “The Ultimate Computer”), went off to gather ryetalyn.  Flint promised that M-4 could gather the materials faster than they could.  Being that those who were sick on the Enterprise had only four hours before the disease progressed, McCoy and the others agreed to allow it.

Image of Flint, an older man in a ceasar hair cut, a futuristic Shakespearian noble outfit, complete with tights, standing in a blue-walled room with a Renaissance painting on the wall
"What else can I get you?  A bag of reds?  Keys to my Mercedes?  An original copy of the U.S. Constitution?

Flint took the trio to his castle.  Inside Spock noticed a treasure trove of classic art.  Art from DaVinci.  Music from Brahms and other fineries.  Flint left them alone to enjoy some brandy, after telling them that he lived alone with only M-4 as company, while in another part of the castle, a lovely young woman watched Kirk and the others on a screen.

Rayna, sitting in a chair and wearing a polychrome, metallic gown, views a cream-colored flat screen
"I do so love that Johnny Carson!"

Flint entered the room and spoke to the young beauty, named Rayna.  She looked on the other men with desire and said she wanted to meet them, since she had never met other people besides Flint.

As M-4 returned with the ryetalyn, Spock continued to marvel at the priceless art pieces housed in the castle, but he also noted that they were created using modern materials and not ancient ones.  Flint then entered and sent M-4 away to prepare the ryetalyn, with the promise that it would be completed faster than it could be on the Enterprise.

As an apology for his initial rudeness, Flint introduced Kirk and the others to Rayna, her very presence being as a gift to the men in attendance.  At first sight, desire for the beautiful young woman flooded Kirk’s eyes.  Flint’s method of apology apparently landed well with Kirk in particular.

Image of Rayna and Kirk, leaning over a pool table with a cue ball and two red balls; Rayna is helping Kirk with his cue fingering
Rayna teaches Kirk how to hold his stick

The introduction of Rayna started the main arc of the episode in earnest.  Her beauty and intelligence seemed to have stirred something in Kirk rather quickly.  She in turn began to explore emotions that she had never felt before due to Kirk’s focus on her.

The desire between Kirk and Rayna was visible and out in the open, whereas Flint was a man filled with deep desires that he protected viciously.  The story also revealed him as a man of many secrets, holding so many of them that it was not until we finally learned the truth about him and also about Rayna, that the real danger of the episode took hold.

In the end, the painful desire and vast longing on display in this episode brought one character to complete ruin and threatened to destroy the rest in their wake. 

In conclusion, outside of the insane speed at which Kirk falls for Rayna, this episode had an interesting plot and premise.  The characters seemed compelling and the type of people that would be tempting to see on adventures of their own.  Suffice it to say, that Rayna and Flint didn’t feel disposable to me as other characters often do.  Also, the narrative twists and surprises near the end were not overly foreshadowed.  They took me by surprise and I appreciated that.  Now, if I can just find a Buddhist temple to ensure I remain free of what happened in this episode.

Four stars

What Could Have Been


by Janice L. Newman

“I’m tired of broken episodes,” my daughter said wearily after the credits had finished rolling. I couldn’t help but agree. For the past several weeks, we’ve had frustrating episode after frustrating episode, made all the more dissatisfying because in every case, we can see what could have been.

With shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the plots are generally silly enough not to be taken seriously. But we’ve seen just how good Star Trek can be, and it’s obvious that the script writers are trying. Sadly the most recent batch of episodes has been filled with poor characterization of our beloved crew, plots that made no sense, stories that tried to Say Something but stumbled over their words, and things that…well…just didn’t feel like Star Trek!

The most recent episode suffered from many of these ailments. For one, it had two conflicting plots: the epidemic on board the ship and the mystery of the old man and his ‘daughter’ on the planet. A competent version of the script would have played these two threads off of each other, keeping the viewers in suspense about whether the captain and his men would be able to bring back the cure in time. But since all three crewmembers treat the epidemic situation casually, it’s hard for the viewers to take it seriously or become invested in it. We never see anyone sick on the ship, so it’s up to Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley to give us a sense of urgency. Instead, Spock is intrigued by the mystery surrounding Flint and Kirk far too quickly becomes enamored with Rayna. Their constant distraction feels out of character and irresponsible to the point of dereliction of duty. Yet it could have been good with a few changes.

Then, too, the plot thread of Rayna’s humanity could have been great. Star Trek has played with the idea of androids or computers with emotions before, but mostly it's used the concept as a plot device where such feelings can be leveraged as tools to trick or confuse hostile mechanical beings. Rayna’s awakening to human emotions could have been poignant and meaningful. Instead it felt cheap and forced. I could even have accepted her becoming infatuated with Kirk since he was one of the first humans she’d ever met besides Flint. But Captain Kirk returning her feelings is patently ridiculous, particularly given the extremely short amount of time they knew each other, her utter lack of personality, and the fact that his entire crew were hours away from painful deaths. By making the story mainly about Kirk’s feelings instead of hers, the writer really missed the mark. Two of the major problems could have been easily fixed if Kirk was focused on helping his crew while Rayna actually expressed her growing feelings for him (or for another character—either Spock or McCoy would have been a more interesting choice).

Image of Flint leaning heavily against his chair, as if greatly moved and, perhaps, dismayed

Image of an image on the flat screen viewer of Kirk and Rayna kissing
Flint watches his home-made stag film; good thing his peep show has a good cinematographer!

The interplay between Spock and McCoy was good as always, partly because Kelley is such a pro in his delivery, while Nimoy’s ‘stoic face’ is excellent. But Spock’s choice at the end killed any good will the story had managed to scrape together. The idea that Kirk, no matter what he said in a moment of weakness, would willingly submit to having his memory erased is ludicrous. Even setting aside the events of Dagger of the Mind, where he had his memory toyed with, this is a starship captain we’re talking about. I cannot believe that he would truly want a memory, even a painful one, removed. And I likewise cannot believe that Spock would do such a thing without permission. It was an interesting idea, but once again the execution fell flat because it felt all wrong. If it had been a different crewmember, McCoy for example, and if he’d given his permission, it could have been an amazing moment. Instead, it was ugly and nauseating. Quite simply, it didn’t feel like Star Trek, or at least not the Star Trek I love: where women are treated with respect, Spock would never take advantage of his captain even in the name of ‘helping’ him, and Kirk actually cares about his crew.

Two stars, because inside the bad episode there was still a good episode trying to get out.

Just Another Pretty Face


by Lorelei Marcus

I found Louise Sorel's depiction of Rayna to be vaguely reminiscent of another blonde android I'd seen on TV a few years before: her stiff head tilts and unfocused gaze reminded me of Julie Newmar's Rhoda, the superhuman, do-it-all robot thrust into Bob Cumming's unwilling care on My Living Doll.

As Rhoda's guardian, Cummings had to ensure her artificial nature was kept secret, but this became increasingly difficult due to Rhoda's extraordinary abilities.  The show shouldn't have worked, but despite Cummings' off-putting performance and his character's incompetence, it hung together—thanks to Julie Newmar's incredible physical comedy and skill.  Be it the countless amusing ways Rhoda misinterpreted commands, or her incredibly mixed up piano performance, or the way she instantly slumped whenever anyone pressed the little "off button" on her back, Rhoda was a wonderfully funny character and (more importantly) individual, and she was the reason I tuned in every week to watch the show.

Image of Bob Cummings in a suit next to Julie Newmar in an evening gown; a title card says Also Starring Julie Newmar as The Doll

The same, sadly, cannot be said for Rayna.  While it's true that wacky humor wouldn't suit the character nor the tone of the episode, any form of charisma would have made Rayna better than the blank slate we got.  The only details we know about her are the number of degrees she has, and that she would have liked to have had a conversation with Spock—something she never actually gets to do.

Instead, she's whisked into a forced, 20-minute romance with Kirk, in which we continue to learn nothing about her personally.  Then she dies, unable to make a single choice for herself because of the clashing desires of other people.  Bleah.

For all that we've had too many Kirk love interests this season, I'm going to make the unpopular assertion that this one could have worked.  I think Rayna could have so bewitched Kirk that he would lose sight of the urgency of saving his ship and crew, but for that to work, she would have needed to make us fall in love with her, too.  Reduced to a pretty face, without initiative nor personality, I can't imagine she'd be able to seduce Ensign Chekov, much less Captain Kirk!  For the missed opportunity of an interesting character, and the loss of integrity of everyone else's character as a result, I give this episode 1.5 stars.

"Train up a child in the way that he should go" — King Solomon


by Erica Frank

I planned to write about Rayna – about the utter ridiculousness of "the equivalent of 17 university degrees in sciences and art" as judged by one man. About her claim that Flint is "the greatest, kindest, wisest man in the galaxy," based on her vast experience of… an hour spent in the company of three other men.

Those made more sense after she was revealed as an android, programmed rather than taught. Others have already mentioned how bland her robotic tabula rasa personality was, without managing to be quirky or entertaining.

I find myself more interested in Flint. The man who claims to be (presumably is, in the Star Trek universe) Methuselah, Solomon, Lazarus, Alexander the Great, Merlin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Brahms. An artist, inventor, and wizard: his ultimate creation is the woman he falls in love with.

Flint and Rayna view what looks to modern eyes like a flat-screen television
Did he invent the paper-thin large-screen television as well? Can I get one of those?

…Whom he promptly loses to a broken heart; he failed to teach her anything about how to make hard choices, how to find a solution when both options will hurt someone. …Just what did those 17 degrees cover? Any study of history should be packed with examples of art made in despair after facing choices with no good outcomes.

But why should she be facing a no-good-options choice? After six thousand years of human life, in an array of different cultures, can he not contemplate a relationship with more than two people? Solomon had 700 wives, but Flint today cannot handle the idea of a wife with two husbands?

Close-up of Flint with a pensive expression.
Flint despairs that Rayna might care for someone other than him.

Ah, but Rayna doesn't see him as a husband yet—no surprise, since he's been telling her he raised her from childhood, like a parent. If she was to be his mate, why didn't he teach her that: "Someday, when you are ready, we will be married—full partners who love each other." She would've been looking forward to some unknown change, some nebulous marker of full adulthood, to take her place by his side. (With or without Kirk as a harem-boy on the side.) Instead, he treated her like a daughter, like a student, not like someone intended to be his peer.

Setting aside all of that—and much more that I didn't mention—once he had perfected Rayna, why didn't he just make another one after Kirk left? Even if he's limited to a normal human lifespan now, there's time to try again.

Kirk leans over Rayna #16, who is deactivated on a bed, with red hair. Behind her, covered in blankets, are Raynas 14 and 15
The current Rayna is 17.  One more and she's legal!

Two stars. The idea of Methuselah changing identities and living throughout human history is fascinating, but it is bungled here.

Too Many Beaches to Walk On


by Gideon Marcus

One of our readers sends us letters after every episode.  He has developed a rating system not on quality, but on the number of times an element or device is used in an episode.  For instance, "Wig Trek" (if there are wigs in evidence), "Cave Trek" (if there is a subterranean setting), etc.

He recently introduced a new scale: "Love Trek".  More and more often, we see one member of the crew or another falling in love.  This theme has been used to good effect in shows like "This Side of Paradise" (Spock falls in love, or at least, is able to express his love), "The City on the Edge of Forever" (a better case of "Tahiti Syndrome" than "The Paradise Syndrome", honestly), and "Spectre of the Gun" (Chekov and the saloon girl, whose name I can't remember.) It is less tolerable in any case involving Scotty, as the engineer, when lovelorn, becomes a moron.  C'est l'amour, I guess.

It is least tolerable when it's Captain Kirk.  Oh sure, the Enterprise's skipper has developed a reputation for randiness over the course of the last three years, but usually, said reputation is actually undeserved.  For the most part, Kirk is the pursued rather than the pursuer, or he uses sex as a weapon, kissing antagonists until they submit.  First season Kirk was positively chaste, and he recognized that his supreme obligation was to the Enterprise.  Afflicted by the alcohol-like effects of the Psi 2000 disease in "The Naked Time", Kirk laments that he has no time, no capacity for love—"no beach to walk on."

It's something of a tragedy, but it's also a poignant and useful character trait.  The scene in "This Side of Paradise", when Kirk's fidelity to his ship shakes the influence of the Lotus-Eater spores of Omicron Ceti Three in "This Side of Paradise", is still perhaps my favorite of the series.  In "Elaan of Troyius", when Kirk is made a thrall of Elaan by her love-inducing tears, the audience knows he will break their influence once his ship is put in danger—and he does.

So howthehell does Kirk find the love of his life in less than five minutes of dancing with Rhoda Rayna the Robot?  Especially such a bland, nonentity of a not-woman?  (If she'd been played by Julie Newmar, there might have been some—not much, but some—justification.) Kirk's entire crew is dying.  He is dying.  His crew is his ship.  Yet he carouses, drinks brandy, banters about Brahms and Da Vinci with Spock, and generally acts as if he is on shore leave rather than less than four hours from the death of his first and greatest love.

In a sumptuous drawing room, Spock, McCoy, and Kirk hold glasses filled with amber Saurian brandy
These three really look like they're worried about the imminent death of the Enterprise crew…

The episode is not utterly horrible.  As Janice notes, there are some intriguing elements.  That it has some resemblance with Forbidden Planet doesn't do it any favors, but both share an ancestry that goes back to The Tempest, so I can forgive that.

But the utter savaging of Kirk's character, not to mention Spock's uncharacteristic blasé attitude, his sudden role as a love guru, and his casual use of the Vulcan Mind Touch (remember when using such was all but tabu?) makes me hate this episode in hindsight all the more.

1.5 stars.

[Come join us tomorrow (February 21st) 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…]





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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[November 8, 1968] A Diplomatic Tiger by the Tail ("Day of the Dove")

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by Amber Dubin

As a Captain, James T. Kirk has always been known more as a soldier than a diplomat. In the same way that Captain Kirk was forced to move past his initial, violent, problem-solving instincts in "Spectre of a Gun," here, yet another great and powerful alien species drops the crew of the Enterprise into direct contact with a combative, unreasonable opponent, making him take a "diplomatic tiger by the tail" that Captain Kirk must use every tool in his skill set to tame.

The setup is masterfully crafted from the very beginning by what appears to be a solitary alien made of pure energy that presents as a wheel of twinkling lights. Twinkling alien energy, who I will refer to from now on as TAE, is not invisible, but takes pains to silently hover just out of direct line of sight from every group of combatants it takes interest in. The Enterprise does not notice TAE on its first appearance when they beam down to an uninhabited planet, searching for what was supposed to be the ruins of a recently destroyed colony described in a distress signal. Chekov remarks, in confusion, that his readings indicate that there was no evidence of a colony nor an attack. Before the crew has time to process this information, Sulu chimes in over the communicator, warning him that a Klingon ship is approaching. Said ship immediately starts showing signs of distress, quickly becoming disabled by internal explosions to which the Enterprise made no contribution.

Commander Kang, the Klingon starship captain, makes no attempt to understand his situation; he beams down and decks Captain Kirk, yelling that since the federation has committed an act of war against the Klingons by killing 400 of his crew and disabling his ship, he is owed command of the Enterprise. TAE glows a menacing red color, apparently delighted with the increase in hostility. Thus the stage is set before the first credits roll of this episode.


The episode's opening salvo

Captain Kirk displays his newfound diplomatic skills, engaging in dialogue with someone whose assault just knocked him flat on his back. When Kang again demands that Kirk cede control of the Enterprise, our captain calmly replies, “go to the Devil.” Kang smoothly retorts “We have no Devil, Kirk, but we understand the habits of yours,“ whom he intends to emulate by torturing crewmen until Kirk hands over control of his ship.

Suddenly, a strange look comes over Chekov’s face and he jumps at the Klingon commander, practically volunteering to be first on the torture block, incoherently yelling about needing revenge for his brother, Pyotr, who had been killed on the colony they never found. In another clever manipulation, Captain Kirk gets Kang to agree to cease torturing Chekov by promising to beam the Klingons aboard the Enterprise, assuring him that there will be no tricks once they are on the ship. Of course, phrasing it like this left a loophole where he wouldn’t be lying if beaming the Klingons up was the trick—they are stuck in stasis until guards can round them up. Back on the Enterprise, Kirk quarantines the angry Klingon landing party with their distressed ship's remaining crewmen stranded.


A gaggle of steaming-mad Klingons

Before our heroes can figure out what’s going, the Enterprise crewmen start falling one by one under the same spell of violent madness that seized Chekov down on the colony site. Unlike with the Klingon crewmen, this wave of violence is very out of character for the Enterprise crew, and they turn on each other using racist, species-ist and otherwise highly offensive rhetoric against each other, the likes of which hasn’t been used on earth in centuries at this point. Chekov even goes on a slathering rampage where he outright defies Captain Kirk and goes to attack the Klingons to avenge his slain brother. This strangeness becomes particularly significant when Sulu declares that Chekov doesn’t even have a brother, as he's an only child.


Chekov disobeys a direct order.

Captain Kirk does the best job of fighting through the madness in order to refocus each crewman one by one towards finding out the root of the issue at hand. It is eventually surmised that TAE is on board, spurring the crewmen to fight and feeding off the negative emotions when its manipulations work and they get at each other’s throats. It is soon discovered that TAE is even more dangerous than originally feared, as it not only can influence the memories and emotions of its victims, but it also has the ability to warp reality itself, healing the scars of the wounded and turning nearly every object at everyone’s disposal into swords, deliberately making every weapon just inefficient enough to prolong conflict and minimize potential fatalities.


Bread and circuses, redux.

In typical Kirk fashion, the seriousness of TAE’s threat doesn’t fully hit him until a female is affected; Kang’s wife, his ship's Science Officer, gets separated from the rest of the group and is set-upon by a completely rabid Chekov. He rips her clothes, but thankfully is interrupted by Kirk and the bridge crew before he can go further. Kirk is justifiably horrified that TAE would be more than willing to push his crew towards that kind of violence. After incapacitating Chekov, Kirk entreats Kang’s wife to join him in uniting her husband and the rest of the Klingons against the real enemy; and it is with great difficulty that he does finally change Kang’s mind and get him to call the rest of the Klingons to a truce. In the end, it’s Kang’s words that finally eject TAE from the ship, as he taunts ”we need no urging to hate humans… only a fool fights in a burning house”


United in defiance.

While it is obvious to see that this episode is once again making a political commentary of our time, this one doesn't rub me the wrong way because the character foils have been fleshed out enough to be likable. Straw men have a tendency to be hollow and weak, but Kang and his wife Mara are anything but that. The Klingons may be violent and aggressive on their face, but they justify their actions with a strong moral backbone and end up proving themselves capable of being reasoned with. Michael Ansara's tremendous presence of voice and body does a phenomenal job of making Commander Kang a formidable yet worthy foe. No slouch herself, Mara shows that she is a leader in her own right, making Kirk work almost as hard to change her mind as her husband's, along the way making some very solid points about Klingon foreign policy. If anything, the Klingons are made to be anti-heroes rather than villains, and in constantly having to take their side against his own men, Kirk shows us the value of humanizing one's enemy, even when that enemy is not human at all.

5 stars.


by Janice L. Newman

When entertainment takes a stance on politics or morality, it’s often a recipe for a bad story. There are plenty of classic parables and fables, of course, but when popular television gets involved in such things sometimes the lesson feels shoehorned in or the plot feels warped around the ‘message’ the writer wanted to send. For example, The Omega Glory and A Private Little War were both attempts to make a point about current political situations, and both were subpar episodes.

“Day of the Dove”, on the other hand, does it right.

This is not a subtle story, yet it maintains a clever mystery plot and dramatic tension right up to the end. The denouement carries a powerful message that I found both shocking and welcome. Shocking, because I didn’t expect to see such blatant anti-war sentiments expressed on prime-time TV. [Janice doesn't watch the Smothers Bros. (ed)] Welcome, because I feel the same way.

There are plenty of intense moments throughout the episode, but the message can be summed up in a few lines of dialogue:

KIRK: All right. All right. In the heart. In the head. I won't stay dead. Next time I'll do the same to you. I'll kill you. And it goes on, the good old game of war, pawn against pawn! Stopping the bad guys. While somewhere, something sits back and laughs and starts it all over again.
MCCOY: Let's jump him.
SPOCK: Those who hate and fight must stop themselves, Doctor. Otherwise, it is not stopped.
MARA: Kang, I am your wife. I'm a Klingon. Would I lie for them? Listen to Kirk. He is telling the truth.
KIRK: Be a pawn, be a toy, be a good soldier that never questions orders.
(Kang looks at the weird light, then throws down his sword.)
KANG: Klingons kill for their own purposes.

(Transcript courtesey of chakoteya.)

There is so much conveyed within these few lines. In the context of the rest of the episode, they inspire all sorts of thoughts and questions:

“Question orders.” “Is it wrong to participate in unjust wars?” “Who is benefitting from our wars?” “Who stands to profit and has a vested interest in keeping a war going?” “Are the people with a vested interest also in authority? Do they have control over those in authority?” “Refuse to fight if a war is wrong.” “War may always be wrong.” “Total pacifism may be a possible path.” “If we do not stop hating and fighting, the hating and fighting will not stop.”

These are messages which, if spelled out clearly in almost any other kind of television show, would be unlikely to be allowed on the air. At a time when young men who choose to flee the country rather than accept being drafted are being convicted of treason, telling people to question orders and refuse to fight is risky. Yet the futuristic setting provided by science fiction makes it possible to convey these ideas without the hidebound network pulling the plug or insisting that it be changed. I’m just stunned that Gene Roddenberry let it through, especially after his reputed heavy influence on the script for A Private Little War. I’m not saying I want Star Trek to turn into a ‘message’ show, but I wouldn’t mind a few more episodes like this.

Five stars.

A Third Party


by Lorelei Marcus

As Janice put it, “Day of the Dove” is a ‘message episode’. It’s there to tell you something about life today under the guise of the possible future. Yet unlike my compatriots who saw a cautionary tale of ceaseless fighting in Vietnam and the larger Cold War behind it, I saw a different war entirely.

Star Trek has rarely shown racial tensions between humans and aliens of the Federation. When it is done, it’s for a very specific purpose, like Kirk aggravating Spock in This Side of Paradise. Even the Federation’s disdain for the Romulans and Klingons has less to do with xenophobia and more the fact that neither will agree to reasonable peace terms. Hence why the blatant hatred between not only human and Klingon, but also human and Vulcan, is so jarringly effective in this episode.

Star Trek is the ideal, bigotry-free future—Uhura and Sulu and even Chekov on the bridge are proof of that—but “Day of the Dove” is the closest it gets to reflecting the ugliness of racial tensions in our own world. Cloaked in the veneer of alien and human terms, I saw the hostility and lack of compromise inherent to the Democratic Convention this year, the hatred from man to man over superficial traits.


A scene from the Democratic convention—taken from the Nixon ad that aired during the episode.

Most of all, I saw small prejudices being stoked and inflamed by an outside force, turning anger boiling hot until it nearly exploded into bloody violence. I know that too well. Every step towards peace and equality we take gets slid back when another Wallace or Nixon comes along. Every injustice we commit against the Black man is another reason for him to take a rifle to the streets. Every school that fails to integrate is a generation of Whites who can’t see past the color of skin. And yet, that’s just how Wallace and his ilk want it. They benefit from it.


Wallace preaching hatred from the pulpit.

Perhaps that’s the scariest part: at least in the show, the alien seems to be fomenting hatred out of a need to feed, a necessity. Our politicians do it in the complete service of self-interest. And with the results of the election, tragically, we seem to be dancing right in the palms of their hands.

I often see shades of our world reflected in Star Trek, but never so viscerally. 4 stars.

Go to the Devil


by Joe Reid

“Day of the Dove” was this week’s episode of Star Trek.  On first reading that title it evoked religious themes in my mind.  I wondered if Star Trek was getting preachy again, the dove being the Christian representation of the Holy Spirit.  Like in “Bread and Circuses” where the crew was jubilant that the people of the planet worshiped the son of God.  When TV shows try to pass on spiritual virtues, they tend to do it in a ham-fisted way.  “Day of the Dove”, although not perfect, does a decent job passing on two themes that I learned in my own religious training.  One from the book of Ephesians, chapter 6, verse 12.  The other from First Peter, chapter 5, verse 8.  So permit me to put on my chaplain's robes as I explore the religious themes I saw in “Day of the Dove”.

Ephesians 6:12 says, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The crew of the Enterprise and that of the Klingon ship were made to think that they were enemies.  Expertly manipulated and set upon by another, with the intent to have them fight.  The real enemy was the outside force.  A powerful alien entity that understood the fears, thoughts, emotions, and technology of each side to create opportunities for conflict.  This scripture I quoted explains that no flesh and blood human is your enemy; we are all victims of outside forces that use us against one another.  As hard as it was for Kirk and Kang to see that they were being used, it is so much harder for all of us to see that we are literally killing ourselves when we raise arms to harm others.  All that does is satisfy the real enemy, that of our very souls.

The second verse that came to mind in this episode, 1 Peter 5:8 says, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour”.  At the start of the episode, Kirk told Kang to “Go to the devil!” when Kang slapped Kirk, accusing him of crimes, claiming the Enterprise.  As they left that planet, we saw that Kang didn’t have to go to the devil, because a space devil went back to the ship with them.  The alien, always near the action, remained just out of sight.  It stalked the crew, looking for minds to twist to meet its ends.  Kirk displayed powerful sobriety, breaking free from the influence of the alien.  Although he could not see the alien, he was able to know of its presence and resist its influence.  The message for us is that it takes sober vigilance to prevent wrong actions that may damage other’s lives.  It was awareness of the enemy that helped Kirk stay disaster; it may be awareness that people are not the enemy that may help us.


Kirk prepares to preach to the choir.

This episode read like a sermon.  One that encouraged brotherhood over bitterness.  Which brings us to the close of the episode and yet another verse that came to my mind watching it.  That was James 4:7. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” This was the method Kirk and Kang used to get rid of the unwanted alien influence.  They stopped giving it what it wanted, stopped seeing each other as the enemy and told their dancehall mirror ball devil to leave the ship.  With both Kirk and Kang saying GO to their devil.

In conclusion, “Day of the Dove” was well acted.  It had great costumes and good characterizations of all characters.  Sadly, the dialogue at one point was filled with exposition, explaining to the audience what the alien was even though no one explained it to them, which I never love.  It caused me to knock the score down a couple of points, but that is to be expected when TV shows—and reviewers—get preachy.

Three stars

Only in the movies


by Gideon Marcus

Despite being a show set in the far future of the 22nd Century, Star Trek has always employed themes from our current era.  This has never been truer than in episodes involving the Klingons, the chief adversary of the Federation for which Kirk's Enterprise is employed.

In Errand of Mercy, we saw Commander Kor and Captain Kirk stand shoulder to shoulder, united in their defiance of the superpowerful Organians, who had the temerity to deprive them of their "right" to fight.  The threat of the Organians to demolish both adversaries should they escalate their conflict to a general war, was very much a metaphor for the atomic bomb—specifically the newly minted concept of "Mutual Assured Destruction."

Thus, "The Trouble with Tribbles", "Friday's Child", and "A Private Little War"—the Klingons and Federation now fight proxy wars, engage in cloak and dagger exploits, and occasionally skirmish one-on-one.  That last title was very much a product of last year, when it looked like we might "win" in Vietnam.  Kirk asserted that the only way to prosecute the conflict on the planet of Neural was to arm the hill people so they remain at parity with the Klingon-aided townsfolks.

Contrast that to "Day of the Dove".  Kirk and the Klingon commander (beautifully portrayed by "Mr. Barbara Eden", Michael Ansara) once more stand back to back, but they are resisting the urge to fight.  It is a beautiful bit of synchronicity that LBJ the night before airdate announced a full bombing pause on Vietnam after three years of incessance.  I watched the episode with tears in my eyes: for once, the hope matched the reality.  Maybe we were going to stop the cycle of violence after all.


Would that it could always be this easy.

But Trek is science fiction, and we still live in the real world.  Dick Nixon won the election this week, South Vietnam has retracted its willingness to participate in the Paris peace talks, and the beat goes on.

This is the second episode in a row (the first being "Spectre of the Gun") that has featured a new Kirk, a diplomat first and a soldier second.  I like this new Kirk.  I worry that he will run afoul of his superiors, increasingly conflicted, as John Drake was when working for MI6, ultimately becoming The Prisoner.  But at least he's fighting for peace, a fight I can 100% get behind.

It's not a perfect episode, a little heavy-handed in parts, but boy did it resonate.

Four stars. 

[Come join us tonight (November 8th) 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…]




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[February 28, 1968] Zero for the Price of Two (Star Trek: "By Any Other Name")

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by Janice L. Newman

This week’s Star Trek episode starts in one genre and ends up in another, ultimately making a promise it just can't deliver on.

The story opens with the Enterprise responding to a distress signal and landing on an out-of-the-way planet. They encounter aliens that appear human, who immediately commandeer the ship. When the landing party attempts to resist, the aliens make a chilling example: they turn two members of the landing party (both garbed in red) into small, strangely-shaped objects, apparently by removing all the water from their bodies and leaving the concentrated essential salts and minerals. One of these objects is crushed before Captain Kirk’s eyes, while the other is restored to his normal human state.

I want to take a moment to note how compelling this part is. It could have been corny in a different kind of show. Yet it’s unexpectedly effective as Kirk crouches over the powdery remains of one of his crewmembers, shocked. There’s no gore or blood, yet it is genuinely horrific.

This promising beginning leads to a promising next act, where the aliens have successfully taken over the ship. Scotty and Spock work out a method to blow up the ship rather than let the aliens take it back to their home planet and start an intergalactic takeover. Kirk nixes the idea, apparently unable to bear the idea of destroying the Enterprise and everyone aboard. Instead of bluffing the aliens or coming up with some clever solution, Kirk flails helplessly, especially when the aliens proceed to turn the entire rest of his crew into salt sculptures. This is once again very creepy and effective, particularly when Kirk comes upon a hallway filled with the fragile objects. Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Spock, and Scotty are the only ones who remain un-salted.

Spock is, appropriately, the one who identifies the aliens’ weakness: they have taken the forms of humans and are now subject to human weaknesses, desires, and emotions. Together, the four hatch a plan to wrest back control of the ship from the aliens.

This is the point where the episode takes a hard left turn into comedy from horror. Of course I expected that the crew would ultimately win, but the tonal shift from creeping horror and despair to wacky high jinks is jarring. Not only that, but the crew’s plan doesn’t make much sense.

McCoy injects one of the aliens with something that will gradually fray his temper, making him angrier and angrier until he snaps. But why didn’t McCoy just use something to knock him out?


"Hey!  Did you put knock-out juice in there?"  "Rats!  Why didn't I think of that?"

Scotty introduces one of the aliens to alcohol, eventually drinking him under the table. These scenes are funny; James Doohan is a talented actor. But since Scotty collapses shortly after his drinking buddy does, ultimately he makes no difference to the plot. Also, why didn’t Scotty just put something in the alien’s drink to knock him out sooner?


"Shay… Did you put knock-out juice in the booze?"  "Ach!  Why didn't I think of that?"

Kirk calls ‘dibs’ on the female alien and repeats the technique he’s come to use on any woman who has captured him: he seduces her (see: “Catspaw”, “Gamesters of Triskelion”, etc). In a nice switch, at first she seems completely uninterested and cold. Disappointingly, this doesn’t last, with her soon falling into his arms again. By the way, Kirk was definitely close enough to have knocked her out with his standard chop to the neck (which he had already used this episode!)


"Say…your lips wouldn't be drugged would they?"  "Why didn't I think of…I mean…why, yes!"

Spock plays on the alien leader’s jealousy, making him angry enough to eventually attack Kirk with his bare hands. Spock has several opportunities to neck-pinch the leader, but does not.


"Say…my shoulder is tense.  Would you mind gripping it?"  "No thanks."

Captain Kirk then gives a monologue which almost makes up for everything in the episode I disliked up to this point. If the aliens are behaving like this after just a day of being human, he says, what will they be like after the 300 years it will take them to get back to their home planet? They won’t even be the same species anymore, they’ll basically be humans, and therefore invaders.


"Aren't you… glad.. you use Dial?  Don't you wish everyone did?"

Sadly, this cleverness is ruined by how easily the once-intractable aliens agree and give in and how quickly everything is wrapped up.

This almost feels like two halves of different episodes. Moreover, the solution is far too pat and comes too easily to have real emotional impact. I assume the scriptwriter wrote himself and the crew into a corner by making the aliens too powerful, then had to do something implausible to get himself out of it.

Three stars, mainly for Scotty and the salt effect.

A Convenient Escape


by Joe Reid

Do you remember that age-old riddle, “what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?” I promise to answer that at the end of this piece.  The question for this week’s Star Trek episode is, what happens when an undefeatable adversary meets an undefeated crew?  In “By Any Other Name”, our heroes were set upon by an enemy that had them outclassed and beaten in every conceivable way.  They faced technology that they could not understand or overcome and a foe that was unrelenting and capable.

When Rojan of Kelva made his appearance, with the female Kelinda at his side, he calmly got right to the point and made his demands clear.  Then he followed up by showing the potency of their power, making the crew impotent.  Impotence in that within a minute and a half he'd paralyzed the team on the planet, making it impossible for them to fight back.  Then he conquered the ship, taking over the critical functions before Kirk had a moment to understand how outmatched they were.  Before we knew it the crew of the Enterprise were slaves on their own ship, most of them converted to mineral polyhedrons. 

Facing a technologically superior baddie that forced them to play red-light green-light or turned them into bouillon cubes, there should have been no way the crew could have gotten out of this trap.  Yet before the end of the episode, the momentum completely shifted to benefit Kirk and company.

This shift happened when Rojan and his associates suddenly became grossly incompetent.  In a short amount of time the Kelvans went from calculating, strategic, and disciplined conquerors that were always in control to drunk, horny, jealous, and rebellious teenagers.  After failing to subvert the Kelvan technological advantage both on the planet and on the ship, Kirk’s strategy to win boiled down to getting the Kelvans to succumb to human faults.


Drea, the one remaining competent Andromedan

In the end this episode allowed the crew to escape their unbeatable dilemma too easily.  I think that more time was needed to unravel a foe of this caliber.  After being introduced to such a credible threat, allowing said threat to beat itself so quickly was a real lost opportunity.  Perhaps this provides us with that answer to that age-old riddle that I promised at the start.  The irresistible force and the immovable object must both yield in order to remain what they are upon meeting.  Answers to ancient puzzles aside, having this unbeatable threat beat itself in the final minutes of the show failed to deliver the payoff that I expected from Star Trek.  The Kelvans lost all credibility in the end and so did this episode.

2 stars

A Generation of Idiots


by Erica Frank

The Kelvans planned a 300-year journey to the Andromeda galaxy. That's a long time, so the trip was planned to involve multiple generations. The Kelvans were born among the stars, and their children would be born en route to another world.


This is a neat effect.

"Generation ships" have been addressed in science fiction before: Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, Brian Aldiss's Starship ("Non-Stop" in the UK), Judith Merril's "Wish Upon a Star" among them.

In both novels, the "crew" has long forgotten the purpose of their journey. In Merill's story, the arrangement of officers is very different from a standard exploratory mission: the rules have been adapted for multi-generation space travel. In all of them, the authors considered that the great-great-great grandchildren of those who set out will have different goals and priorities than the initial crew.

I do not believe that was considered in this episode.

Set aside that the Enterprise is not designed for this–it does not have food for hundreds of years; its equipment isn't designed to last that long. Pretend that whatever they do to improve the engines will remove the need for repairs or spare parts, and that Sulu's garden will provide enough food. Let's pretend the Enterprise and a small crew can make this trip safely.

The "small crew" is three men and two women. That's not a large breeding pool. But let's pretend that, since they made "perfect" human bodies, they have no troublesome recessive genes; there are no issues with inter-breeding. They designed these bodies with a generation ship in mind, after all.


Do they even know how human breeding works? They didn't know kissing. Are they planning to use the Enterprise's medical records to teach them childbirth, child-rearing, and so on?

They'll need about 4 to 5 new generations per century, depending on what ages they are when they start having children. If they wait until they are 30 or so, they'll have fewer generations–less distance from the original crew. But in that case, the fourth generation will barely remember the originals, and the fifth will not know them at all.

Are they going to have children in neat, exact generations, all births within a 5-10 year period followed by a long gap? How will they enforce that, eight generations down the line?

Nothing about their "generation ship" plan makes sense.

The episode had some good points: Scotty drinking Tomar under the table; Kirk and Spock subtly cooperating to push Rojan into a jealous rage. But the Kelvans' basic plan is so deeply flawed that I watched to see how, not whether, our heroes would foil it.

Two and a half stars. Everything was great… except the actual plot.

Seven Deadlies


by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Spock, and Scotty's plan to use the Andromodeans' newfound humanity against them takes rather a dim view of our (mostly) shared species. It seemed like they each picked a Catholic Deadly Sin to specialize in: the Andromodeans already had more pride than they knew what to do with, plus ample greed on tap; to that potent mix, Scotty served gluttony, McCoy provoked wrath, Spock worked with Captain Kirk on engendering envy, and Captain Kirk spiced things up with lust. The only missing sin by my count was sloth, though there is something kind of inherently parasitic, if not explicitly lazy, in their approach to finding themselves a ride home.


"Get off me!  You don't rank me and you don't have pointed ears, so just get off my neck!"

I wonder what a version of this story might have been if they had instead focused on virtues, on appealing to human curiosity, ingenuity, empathy, even entrepreneurialism, cleverness, or wisdom. Janice is right, the hard left turn to comedy stripped this episode of all of its potential insight into the human condition, taking us from the meaningful deeps and leaving us in frothy waters. But it is fun to imagine what other species-level traits visiting aliens might be saddled with: Our taste for adventure? Our tendency to anthropomorphize ships? Our habits of collecting pets? There are so many more things that make each and every one of us "human" than the sins the officers of the Enterprise honed in on.

Three stars.



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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[October 12, 1967] See you on the flip side (Star Trek: "Mirror, Mirror")

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by Joe Reid

A Shadowy Reflection

As this most intriguing and excellent season of Star Trek continues on we find ourselves delighted week after week with more thoughtful and fantastical stories.  This week takes the cake!  I have stated repeatedly that Star Trek is a mirror to society here on Earth, today in 1967.  This episode took that mirror and held it up to its own world and its characters.  Appropriately, the writers called it “Mirror, Mirror”.  Let’s take a gander at it and see what’s on the other side.

The episode opens on an alien world as a storm rages.  Captain Kirk is in discussion with the very human looking Halkan Council to allow the Federation to mine dilithium on their planet. Uhura, Dr. McCoy, and Scotty are with him as part of the landing party.  With negotiations stalled, as the Halkans don’t wish to see their dilithium used by those who may cause harm to even a single person, Kirk decides to return to the ship due to the coming ion storm.


"Do not try to adjust your communicator. We control the horizontal and the vertical." (Vic Perrin, head Halkan, is the narrator for The Outer Limits)

As the four of them are transported to the ship, something goes wrong and instead of appearing on the USS Enterprise they find themselves wearing different clothing as they appear on a different Enterprise.  They are immediately confronted with Spock sporting a goatee who then calls for the eradication of the Halkans for not giving their dilithium to the "Empire" and who is quick to painfully punish Transporter Chief Kyle for an issue with the transporters.


Performance reviews are brutal on this Enterprise

Kirk soon figures out that the four of them are in a parallel universe.  Finding themselves isolated among violent familiar looking strangers, the quartet seek to find a way to save the Halkans from destruction and get themselves back home.  As they attempt to masquerade as "themselves" on the brutal ISS Enterprise while trying to carry out their secret mission, Urura is forced to resist the advances of a savage and craven Sulu, while Kirk barely survives an assassination attempt by an ambitious and bloodthirsty Chekov.


"You die, Captain, and I get to sing Mickey's songs."

Soon thanks to the male voiced, magically capable ship's computer, Kirk and McCoy confirm how they ended up on the opposite side of this dark looking-glass and learn of a way to return to their universe.  As amazing as that was, we soon meet the other Captain Kirk's mistress and confidant, Marlena, waiting for him in his quarters, who shows our Kirk the powerful assassination weapon that he has at his disposal to wipe out all of his enemies.  Marlena threatened to use it on Spock after he made clear to Kirk that he was under orders to kill him if he failed to purge the Halkans for refusing to allow the Empire rights to the dilithium.


The new Admiral TV not only has the brightest color, but it eliminates unwanted personnel!

The action and excitement then gets fast and intense as our crew carry out their plan to get home.  Uhura gets into another struggle with the wicked Sulu and has to strike and almost shank him to save herself.  Goatee Spock realizes things aren't right and captures our righteous four crewmembers for answers.  This leads to another fight against the powerful Vulcan.  Just as they found a way around Spock, the devious Sulu returns to kill everyone and murder his way to command of the ship.  After an amazing save by Marlena using the weapon she told our Kirk about, she approaches the captain, explaining that she had learned everything about them and wanted to return to their world with them.

In the end it is the unerringly logical Spock of the violent universe helps our people return to their world as Kirk made a passionate, Nomad-level logical plea for him to rescue the people of this dark universe.


"And we have better donuts."

Our crew finally made it home and things were back to normal.  The final scene has all four members of the landing party stricken with surprise as they meet the normal universe’s version of Marlena for the first time.

The range that we saw in some of the actors was chameleon-like. In particular, Sulu was a completely different person with a different deck of facial expressions than we are used to.  Truly unlikeable. 


"Peel your apple?"

From concept to story to acting, this was the best night of television that I have seen in a dog’s age.

Five stars.

The Enemy Without


by Janice L. Newman

This week’s episode of Star Trek was about a good Kirk and an evil Kirk. Sound familiar? If you watched The Enemy Within, this episode might sound like it’s just the same idea revisited. Don’t be fooled! It’s not.

The premise of the episode, that there is a “parallel” universe similar to our own but where history took a different course, leading to a totalitarian empire instead of Starfleet and the federation of planets, is an intriguing one. The people in that universe are shaped by their environment: they are vicious, self-serving, traitorous, and sadistic. And yet, there are exceptions. Spock is still Spock, even when he is enforcing the empire’s orders. He describes McCoy as ‘soft’ and ‘sentimental’ (if McCoy is as dedicated to being a healer in this harsher world, it’s no wonder that Spock would think so).


A kinder McCoy?

The Enemy Within was a story of ‘man versus himself’, exploring what makes us human from the inside. Mirror, Mirror asks the opposite question: “How much does our environment make us who we are?” It’s an intriguing thought: who we might be if born under different circumstances. What kind of an environment creates a Hitler? Are we but one universe over from a world where someone – maybe you – pressed the button to start World War 3?

If there is anything this well-paced, well-acted episode lacked, it was screentime for the landing party’s counterparts. Unfortunately, the story simply couldn’t fit a focus on them in the hour-long runtime. I did appreciate that ‘our’ crew immediately realized that there was something wrong and locked up the alternates.

If you missed this week’s episode, I highly recommend catching the re-run next summer if you can. As much as I liked The Enemy Within, this episode is even better.

Five stars.

The middle road


by Lorelei Marcus

Star Trek gives us a future that is aspirational, and perhaps brighter than our own. The Starfleet Federation borders on utopian, with scarcity of resources becoming almost nonexistent, and the main military body existing solely for goodwill and scientific exploration. It is refreshing to see a future where people of all colors and sexes (and even nonhumans) can work and be treated equally, particularly on the decks of the Enterprise.

In today's episode, we were presented with an alternative universe completely opposite to the Star Trek we are used to. Rather than a utopia, the world order resembled a totalitarian dictatorship with security police and brutal forms of punishment. It was a shock, to say the least, to see all of our favorite characters in this new environment and how they and their hierarchies changed. The lack of women on the mirror ship particularly stood out to me, and those that were left were no longer equal with the men – forced to prostitute themselves to gain any power and security.


How to win friends and influence captains.

The parallel universe possibility intrigued me. Star Trek's main universe and this mirror universe are two ends of the spectrum. Could there be more parallel universes? And what would one that falls right in the middle of that spectrum look like? How closely would it represent our modern world? I can imagine a ship where there is still some distinction based on race and sex, if only systemically. The Enterprise would probably be sent on missions to settle the protests of disquieted colonies, or to do tactical phaser strikes on rogue planets that have sided with the Romulans. I see a universe with more poverty and more discontent with the Federation. Maybe Kirk would have an episode where he falls in love with a poor colonist girl, but she is an anti-Federationalist, and ultimately he must reject his personal life to reaffirm loyalty to his cause.

This thought experiment only makes me appreciate the world of Star Trek even more. Roddenberry really has done a spectacular job of building an independent universe that is not just a gussied up copy of our own. When I am watching, it is never hard to believe that what is on my television screen is truly the future. (Except for sometimes when they show Chekhov's hair).

The episode as a whole was fantastically done with an interesting premise and phenomenal acting.

Five stars.

"A Well Oiled Trap"


by Amber Dubin

Although this episode was most likely meant to repel the viewer with horror at the savagery exhibited by the mirror universe, the entire episode was so charged with the kind of raw, animalistic energy that it had the exact opposite effect on me.

From the very beginning of the episode, it becomes clear that the unrelenting barbarism of the mirror universe necessitates the exposure of the Starfleet's most exceptional qualities; both literally, with the flashy and extremely flattering improvements to the crewmen's uniforms, and figuratively, in the way all of them rise to the challenges they are faced with. This is displayed most dramatically by Uhura, who, bolstered by Kirk's faith in her, manages to overcome her initial fears and slips on the camouflage of a violent seductress as easily as putting on a second skin. Similarly, on the other ship, Spock's notorious intuition proves itself almost comically effective when he immediately recognizes the landing party as dangerous imposters and goes straight to work trying to get his real Captain back.


A most entertained Spock.

An even more intriguing theme in this episode is that as savage and chaotic as the behavior of the crew in this alternate universe is, their selfishness and barbarity only served to make them more human. Mirror Chekov and Sulu's actions are self-serving and violent, but their motivations are neither unreasonable nor excessively malicious in the context of their environment. If anything it could be argued that, stripped of the need to adhere to formalities, the way they behave is more honest and truer to their desires than their more 'civilized' counterparts. As our Spock says, the mirror crew were "In every way, splendid examples of homo sapiens. The very flower of humanity." This is shown best by the introduction of Marlena, a woman whose intelligence and impressive powers of intuition and seduction have allowed her to not only survive but to wind her way around the heart of a violent and psychopathic Captain Kirk. She even proves that she has not lost her moral center by saving Kirk's life even after he has revealed himself to be an imposter and wounded her ego by not succumbing to her wiles after she "oils [her] traps" for him. The alternate version of Spock shows this same level of integrity when he chooses to help the landing party return to their universe, despite the fact that this version of Kirk would logically be much easier to usurp and control than his stubborn, unreasonable, greedy and angry counterpart. The actions of these two mirror crewman suggest that this universe is not in fact evil, but may just be stripped bare of inhibitions that cause the crew we know to control or polish their true selves.

With the smooth delivery from its cast, brilliant script and mind-teasing metaphors, this episode acted upon me as a siren song that by the end had me echoing Marlena's plea to "take me with you."


Sexy Spock with a beard didn't hurt either…

This episode deserves all the stars in the universe, but since the rating system limits me to five, I give it all of them.

Women's Liberation


by Erica Frank

Uhura found herself in a universe where women’s uniforms are made with a fraction of the fabric used in men’s, where they have to endure sexual advances at work, where some women get ahead by sleeping with the boss, and nobody dares object.

So…. not too different from our world, hmm?

After the initial shock of realizing her officer's uniform was smaller than some swimsuits back home and that Sulu’s spark of interest in her own world (“I’ll save you, fair maiden!”) was an obsession here, Uhura quickly adjusted her expectations and behaviors.

She didn’t cringe from the lustful gazes that followed her everywhere. She didn’t frantically check her wardrobe, trying to find something, anything that covered more skin and was still considered a Starfleet Empire uniform. She didn't demand one of the other men escort her and protect her.

She got herself a knife.


Chief Security Officer Sulu discovers that some women prefer to manage their own security.

She knew exactly how to cope with a workplace where men are allowed to demand sexual favors… and where women are allowed to set whatever terms they’d like, as long as they back them up with force.

As much as Uhura wanted to go home — back to a world where women have status based on their skills in the workplace and not between the sheets, where promotions are assigned by talent and not assassination, where Starfleet operates on principles of compassion instead of conquest — she knew how to operate in this one.

Drawing that knife on Sulu must have been tremendously vindicating. She wasn’t just facing him, but every faculty advisor who ever stood too close, every regional manager who said “come back to my place and we'll talk about your promotion,” every police officer who did a pat-down that was more grope than inspection.

In that shining moment, Uhura acted for all of us, every woman who's been told, "Smile more; women should be pretty!" (Followed by, "What was I supposed to think? You were always smiling at me!") The mirror-universe is a dark, twisted version of our own… but that moment on the bridge explained why some women are proud and happy to belong to the Starfleet Empire.

A world where men openly harass women and require them to be sexy at all times is not unknown to us. A world where we can strike back…that’s new.

Five stars.

Speaking of Star Trek, it's on tomorrow!  And it seems to star Godzilla…

Here's the invitation! Come join us.

Also, copies of The Tricorder are still available — drop us a line for details!




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 14, 1967] The Beat Goes On (August 1967 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The August 1967 Amazing looks out on the world through one of Frank R. Paul’s later and less interesting works, trimmed of course from its original pulp size.  This one, titled A City on Uranus, is from the back cover of the April 1941 Amazing, as usual cropped to fit the lower half of this smaller magazine.  The issue’s overall contents and presentation are also as usual: one new story and a bunch of reprints, with Harry Harrison’s intelligent book reviews taking a few pages.


by Frank R. Paul

La de da de de.

The Man from Zodiac, by Jack Vance

Once more I say—at the risk of repeating myself repeating myself repeating myself—when a first-rate author shows up at the bottom of the market, there’s a reason for it.  The one non-reprinted piece of fiction here is Jack Vance’s “Great New Short Novel,” as the table of contents has it, The Man from Zodiac.  Zodiac Control, Inc., is a corporation that sells government services to colony planets across the galaxy, or galaxies (there is ambiguous reference to Andromeda), with competitors like Aetna, Fidelity, and Argus. 


by Gray Morrow

The eponymous Man is Milton Hack, a Zodiac employee (and also a minority shareholder, a fact which ultimately has little significance), who is charged by the main owners with getting and supervising a contract with the Phrones of Ethelrinda Cordas.  The Phrones are cartoon barbarians who have (or whose elite has) little interest in schools, sewer systems, and the other usual appurtenances of government; they wish only to obtain weapons with which to smite their neighbors and enemies, the equally cartoonish Sabo. 

Hack engages in a course of bamboozlement and chicanery and ends up representing both the Phrones and the Sabos with identical contracts, and persuading them to live in something resembling peace, outsmarting everyone in sight at every opportunity since they are all utterly stupid.  It’s frankly pretty crude, devoid of Vance’s usual sharp satirical wit; worse, it’s thoroughly boring, and gives the impression that the author is as bored as the reader.  Or maybe he is attempting to emulate the literary and commercial success of Christopher Anvil.  Two stars.

Martian and Troglodyte, by Neil R. Jones

The reprints are the usual mixed bag, slightly better mixed than in some issues.  The longest and oldest—a “Special—Short Novel” per the contents page—is Neil R. Jones’s Martian and Troglodyte, from the May 1933 Amazing.  Jones is best remembered for his protracted “Professor Jameson” series, about a scientist who is revived from his orbiting tomb and who goes chasing around the universe for a couple of dozen stories with the robot-bodied Zoromes.  In this one, Thrag, a cave guy who has been chased out of his tribe in a dispute over possession of the winsome Tua, is saved from becoming lunch for a cave bear by visiting Martians on a voyage of discovery.  (Jones’s Earth has many perils.  In addition to cave bears and saber-tooth tigers, tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls are still around.) Thrag learns not to be afraid of the Martians and they help him out in his quest to recover Tua from her brutal usurper by lending him lethal Martian technology.  Thrag’s and the Martians’ efforts to figure each other out are surprisingly well done. 


by Leo Morey

Overall, this is a pleasant antique, though Jones’s peculiar verbosity is sometimes a distraction.  (Any resemblance to the present commentator is entirely illusory.) A sample:

“In the depths of space between the earth and its contemporary planet, known to present day man as Mars, a small space ship sped at an inconceivable speed across the millions of miles of space towards the earth.  It was now very close, having been upon its journey through the stellar void for the period of time in which it had taken the great globe it was approaching to turn upon its axis forty times.  Forty times the topographical features of the planet earth had swung lazily before the eager eyes of the two space navigators within their interstellar craft as day by day, according to the rotation of the cosmic sphere, the planet grew larger in proportion as they drew near.”

Two stars; it probably would rate higher by the standards of its time.

Blabbermouth, by Theodore Sturgeon


by Malcolm Smith

Theodore Sturgeon’s Blabbermouth, from the February 1947 Amazing, is about a captivating woman who is telepathic and compulsively blurts out people’s secrets to those from whom they are being kept secret.  This brings ruin to her husband’s career as a prominent New York radio emcee, but by the end he figures out how to make lemonade (i.e., money) from this particular lemon.  The story is told in an affected semi-Damon Runyonesque style that bespeaks a writer trying to execute the cliches he thinks his market requires.  And maybe it did.  Or not.  This is only the second published story Sturgeon sold to an SF or fantasy editor other than John W. Campbell, and maybe he didn’t have much confidence about following his own bent anywhere else.  Two stars.

The Roller Coaster, by Alfred Bester


by Bernard Krigstein

There are two stories here from the magazine’s brief high-word-rate renascence of 1953-54.  Alfred Bester’s The Roller Coaster, from the May-June 1953 Amazing, is also told in an affected style, but it’s Bester’s own affectation, so it’s a lot more convincing than Sturgeon’s off-the-rack costume in Blabbermouth.  It starts with a slap to the reader’s face of Spillaneish violent sadism—quite appropriate in context, as it turns out—and continues without letup or wasted words to retell a familiar SF story.  It’s as if somebody said, “You read Vintage Season?  Here’s how it really goes.” Four nasty stars. 

One Way Street, by Jerome Bixby


by Augusto Marin

In the other renascence item, Jerome Bixby’s One Way Street (Amazing, December 1953-January 1954), the protagonist has a split-second blackout, drives off the road, and wakes up in a wrecked car and a slightly different world—phone numbers are different, his dog is different, there’s no Hamlet, Shelley, Keats, or atomic power, and Stalin’s alive.  His wife’s a little different too, but he likes the differences and is trying to make a life in this new world when he gets a chance to try to go home via an experimental procedure.  The surprise ending is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning, but overall the story is sharply and economically done.  Three stars, pushing four.

North God’s Temple, by Henry J. Kostkos


by Leo Morey

We dip back into the archaic with Henry J. Kostkos’s North God’s Temple (Amazing, August 1934), in which a Professor Challenger-type blowhard, Professor Norton of the Cosmopolitan Museum, receives a telepathic summons from the historians of the People of the Magnetic God, who live undersea near the North Pole.  So he fakes up a pretext for an expedition to seek out the magnetic pole.  Once there he is summoned alone and sucked underwater and then underground in a rowboat, and finds the Temple of the Magnetic God (it must be, since he’s pinned to the wall until he manages to work his steel revolver out of his pocket).  This Temple landed on Earth after the breakup of the former fifth planet that became the asteroids.  Then Norton gets sucked back underwater in a contretemps that apparently is intended to explain the migration of the magnetic poles.  Two stars for this tiresome period piece.

Vis Scientiae, by Miles J. Breuer, M.D.

But there’s still one more piece of archaic to eat: Vis Scientiae, a poem by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. (Amazing, May 1930), which seems to be a lament by the ancient gods that they’re no longer in charge of those pesky humans.  It must speak for itself:

“They have chained the livid lightning that goes hurtling down the sky,
Made it slave for them and pass them scatheless as it hurtles by;
They have trapped the furious tempest at whose breath the forest reels,
And the angrier it rages all the merrier turn their wheels; . . .”

Et cetera, though the meter varies.  The substance of Tennyson and the accidents of Robert W. Service?  The best to be said for it is that it could have been worse.  Two stars.

Summing Up

A couple of stories well worth reading, a couple more at least readable, and a couple of wastes of time.  La de da de da.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

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

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


by John Boston

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


by Frank R. Paul

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

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

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


by Gray Morrow

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

The Last Bounce, by William Tenn


by Henry Sharp

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

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

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


by Frank R. Paul

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

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

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

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

Whew!  Two overripe stars, barely.

Little Girl Lost, by Richard Matheson

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


by Ray Houlihan

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

Small Town, by Philip K. Dick


by Bernard Krigstein

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

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

Angels in the Jets, by Jerome Bixby


by Paul Lundy

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

Summing Up

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

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 12, 1967] All's Fair in Love and War (March 1967 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Peace on Earth? No. Peace Above Earth? Maybe.

With the conflict in Vietnam growing ever more bloody, and tensions building between the Soviet Union and China, it seems that war is here to stay on this sad little planet. Dare we look to the skies for a way to escape this endless chaos?

Although humanity is just starting to take its first baby steps into the cosmos, some folks are trying to make sure that it will be filled with plowshares instead of swords. Late last month, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed the so-called Outer Space Treaty.


President Lyndon Baines Johnson shakes hands with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin at the signing ceremony. Barely visible between them are British ambassador Sir Patrick Dean and American ambassador Arthur J. Goldberg. I think that's American Secretary of State Dean Rusk at the podium. Don't ask me who the other folks are.

The agreement is formally known as The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. That's quite a mouthful, but what does it mean?

In brief, it bans nuclear weapons in space; limits use of the Moon and other extraterrestrial bodies to peaceful purposes; and prevents any nation from claiming sovereignty over any region of space or any celestial body. Of course, only three countries have signed it so far, and any treaty is only a piece of paper, so we'll have to wait to see what really happens outside the atmosphere. Hope for the best.

Monkeying Around With My Heart

Let's turn our backs on war and look for romance. Love songs are always popular, and the current Number One hit in the USA is no exception. The upbeat number I'm a Believer by the Monkees has been at the top of the charts since early January, and shows no signs of fading away.


And all this time I thought they were just a fictional band created for a television situation comedy.

Tales of Mars and Venus

The latest issue of Fantastic is full of stories involving wars, both large and small, as well as amorous relationships between women and men. Sometimes both themes show up in the same yarn.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

This issue, unsurprisingly, features one new story and a bunch of reprints. The cover illustration is also from an old magazine.


The May 1939 issue of Fantastic Adventures, to be exact.

Happiness Squad, by Charles W. Runyon


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

A personal war meets love gone very bad in the opening of the only original story in the magazine. A man places a timebomb in his wife's flying car, so it will explode during her flight to visit her mother. After this stark beginning, we learn something about this future world, and the man's place in it.

In the tradition of Aldous Huxley's famous novel Brave New World, this is a society bent on eliminating unhappiness through the use of drugs. It has also nearly wiped out the ability of human beings to perform acts of violence on each other, in a way reminiscent of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange.

In addition to that, it also manipulates memories, in such a way that it can give people completely new identities. The uxoricidal protagonist accidentally discovers that he was once a brilliant plastic surgeon, who transformed an unattractive woman into a raving beauty. The woman, with the help of the man's rival, then altered his memory so that he imagines himself to be her loving husband.

Because of his programmed aversion to violence, the man sabotages all his attempts to kill the woman he blames for ruining his life. (Besides everything else, he also lost the woman he really loves, who had her memory altered in such a way that she now works in a brothel.) Unable to perform the murder himself, he hires one of the very few people who avoided the programming to do the dirty work. (This fellow was one of the rare folks born on Mars who survived a failed colony and escaped to Earth.)


The killer, the victim, and the man who hired him.

There's a twist ending that changes everything we thought we knew. Without giving too much away, I interpret the conclusion as implying yet another reversal, which the author leaves unwritten. I may be reading too much into this, but what remains unsaid is just as powerful as what is made explicit, I believe.

I have a hard time giving a fair rating to this very disturbing story. It's not exactly pleasant to read, but it held my attention from the beginning to the (incomplete?) end. It's nearly impossible to sympathize with any of the characters, even if they're not really responsible for the kind of people they've been manipulated into becoming. The subtle implications of the conclusion may just be in my imagination. In short, I think I like this story more than I should, if that makes any sense at all.

Four stars.

Shifting Seas, by Stanley G. Weinbaum

The April 1937 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this apocalyptic work from the pen of a pioneering author who died much too young.


Cover art by Leo Morey.

Gigantic volcanic explosions and earthquakes rip apart the isthmus of Central America, driving most of the land under the sea. Besides the immediate deaths of millions, this changes the flow of the Gulf Stream, so that much of Europe becomes much colder. The crisis alters political alliances. In particular, war between the United States and a desperate Europe, led by the sea power of the United Kingdom, seems imminent.


Illustration also by Leo Morey.

Besides war, we also have love. The protagonist is an American man engaged to a British woman. The impending conflict threatens to destroy their relationship, until the man comes up with a way to solve the problem without a clash of arms.

The premise is an interesting one, and I liked the way the author considered the political implications of a major change in world climate. The resolution may be a little too simple, and the narrative style a bit old-fashioned, but the story creates a decent sense of wonder.

Three stars.

Judson's Annihilator, by John Beynon

An author now better known as John Wyndham supplies this war story, which first appeared in a British publication under the title Beyond the Screen.


Cover art by Serge Drigin. This issue, number one of only three ever published, is dated 1938, without specifying the month.

It was quickly reprinted in the October 1939 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua.

In true Astounding/Analog style, a lone genius invents gizmos producing fields that make anything inside them disappear. When combined German and Italian forces send a huge number of planes to attack England, the devices cause the aircraft to vanish.


Illustration also by Robert Fuqua.

The inventor's sister falls into the field produced by one of the machines and disappears. The hero, in love with her, follows her into it. As the reader suspects by this point, the invention doesn't really destroy what passes through the field, but sends it somewhere else. The place turns out to be an England inhabited by a small number of people living in a primitive way. With the help of a local woman, the hero and his beloved escape from the clutches of the Germans who went through the field.

There's a nice little twist about where they've wound up that is mentioned in passing, but nothing much comes of it. The plot is pretty straightforward once the hero enters the field. I found the imaginary version of World War Two the most interesting part of the story. Other than that, it's a pretty typical science fiction adventure.

Three stars.

Battle in the Dawn, by Manly Wade Wellman

From the January 1939 issue of Amazing Stories comes this vision of the remote past.


Cover art by Robert Fuqua again.

Apparently, this is the first of a series of stories about a caveman named Hok. In this tale, his tribe is moving to better hunting grounds when they run into Neanderthals. Contrary to what modern anthropologists think, these are bestial creatures, who attack the group of Homo sapiens and even kill a baby and eat it. Obviously, a war between the two species begins.


Illustrations also by the ubiquitous Robert Fuqua.

After an initial triumph over the subhumans, Hok steals a woman from a rival tribe of Homo Sapiens, in order to make her his mate. She objects, going so far as to threaten to kill herself if he doesn't let her go. Eventually, the first kiss in history makes the woman fall in love with her captor, and the two tribes unite against the Neanderthals.


Not to mention other challenges.

With nearly three decades of hindsight, it's easy to dismiss this story as a very inaccurate portrait of prehistory. It might better be thought of as a sword-and-sorcery yarn, without swords and without sorcery. The Neanderthals are monsters, the hero is a brave warrior with a beautiful woman to win, and so forth. As such, it's a fair example of the form.

Three stars.

The Draw, by Jerome Bixby

The March 1954 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this tale of the Old West, where war often consisted of one man against another.


Cover art by Clarence Doore.

You may have already seen it in a paperback collection of the author's stories that came out a few years ago.


Cover art by Ralph Brillhart.

An onery teenager — we'd call him a juvenile delinquent these days — is an excellent marksman, but not good at all when it comes to pulling his pistol from his holster. This is the only factor that keeps him from becoming an infamous killer.


Illustrations by William Ashman.

Through sheer force of will, he develops the telekinetic ability to instantaneously transport his gun to his hand, making him the deadliest gunman around. After terrorizing the local townsfolk, he challenges the sheriff to a gunfight. As you'd expect, things don't go well for him.


A scene from Gunsmoke?

I don't have a lot to say about this story. The ending is somewhat anticlimactic, but there's nothing particularly wrong with it. The usual Western clichés are present, which may be inevitable.

Three stars.

Masters of Fantasy: A. Merritt Illustrated, by Anonymous

The magazine ends with a few drawings by Frank R. Paul that accompanied a reprint of Abraham Merritt's 1919 fantasy novel The Moon Pool, which was serialized in Amazing Stories in the May, June, and July 1927 issues.


I guess this is the Moon Pool.


All cover art by Frank R. Paul as well.


I didn't notice the frog people at first.


I'm guessing this is a scene from The Moon Pool.


Is she doing the Twist?


Caution! Mad Scientist at Work!

What can I say? Three stars.

Fighting for Something to Love

In this magazine full of love and war, the stories were fair. Not that great, not that bad. I predict that Runyon's new novelette is going to produce strong reactions, both positive and negative. The reprints are likely to be less controversial.

As for the choice between the two great themes I've noted, it seems like an easy one.


Somebody came up with this catchy slogan a couple of years ago, and now you can get it on a poster.

 



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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 8, 1966] Flesh and Blood (January 1967 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Burning Curiosity

It's probably just my morbid imagination, but it seems to me that the most intriguing, if horrifying, event in recent days was the demise of Doctor John Irving Bentley earlier this month. The elderly physician was reduced to a pile of ashes (except for part of one leg) in what some people are calling a case of spontaneous human combustion.


The scene of the fire. Notice the large hole in the floor caused by the flames. I have deliberately avoided sharing more gruesome photographs.

Church Music

After that piece of news, it's a relief to turn to a piece of light entertainment. The unique novelty song Winchester Cathedral by some British folks calling themselves the New Vaudeville Band, currently at the top of the American music charts, is a deliberately old-fashioned number. It sounds like something Rudy Vallee might have offered in the 1920's, complete with singing through a megaphone and a finishing chorus of oh-bo-de-o-do.


Rumor has it that the song was recorded by session musicians hired for the occasion, and that the band was hastily put together when it became a hit.

Well, that got me to thinking about all the folks buried in Winchester Cathedral. (There's that morbid imagination at work again.) The most familiar one — to me, at least — is the great author Jane Austen.


It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a dead woman in possession of a good reputation must be in want of a lengthy epitaph.

Gore on the Pages

Given my grim mood, it's appropriate that the
latest issue of Fantastic is full of violence, horror, and bizarre manipulations of the human body.


Cover art by Frank R. Paul, stolen from the back cover of the March 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.


The original, with brighter colors. The Reptile Men (no women?) are cute.

The Ultimate Gift, by Bryce Walton

We begin our journey into the macabre with the magazine's only original work.


Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Aliens arrive at the Moon. They seem ready to conquer the world, but are hesitant about humanity's ability to put up a fight. They allow envoys to pay a visit, but kill them for some unknown violation of protocol. The dying words (thoughts, really, but let's not get into that subplot) of the most recent victim lead to an unusual choice for the next diplomat.

The so-called Basket Man was born without arms or legs. After years of misery, he winds up as a sideshow freak, making use of advanced technology to move around and manipulate things. In his bitterness, he refuses to have artificial limbs attached to his torso. A representative from the United Nations, based on the hint noted in the paragraph above, convinces him to acquire robotic arms and legs, and to head to the Moon to meet the aliens.


The fact that they're reptilian, sort of like the creatures on the cover, is relevant.

A little knowledge of zoology may lead you to predict the reason for the aliens' violent reaction to their visitors. As you may have guessed from my description, this is a ghastly little story, with a particularly disquieting scene near the end. It has a certain raw power, I suppose. Given the infamous thalidomide tragedy of not so many years ago, the premise may strike many readers as being in poor taste.

Two stars.

The People of the Black Circle, By Robert E. Howard

Dominating the issue is a bloody sword-and-sorcery adventure, featuring a hero who seems to be making a comeback of sorts. This novella was originally serialized in three parts, in the September, October, and November 1934 issues of Weird Tales.


All cover art by Margaret Brundage.


Brundage often painted scantily clad young ladies for the magazine.


Two scantily clad young ladies.

Before I get into the story itself, let me talk about the revival of interest in Robert E. Howard and his most famous creation. The tales of Conan were left in the yellowing pages of old pulp magazines until specialty publisher Gnome Press starting collecting them in several volumes.


Cover art by David A. Kyle. The novella under discussion appears in this book, number two in the Gnome Press series, from 1952.

Earlier this year, the story appeared in a paperback collection. (It should be noted here that L. Sprague de Camp completed some of Howard's unfinished works about Conan.)


Cover art by Frank Frazetta.

The setting is an imaginary ancient past. There are clues that this takes place in a fantasy version of the Afghanistan/Pakistan/India region. (Some of the hints are a bit too obvious, such as a chain of mountains called the Himelians.) We begin with a king whose soul is about to be stolen by evil sorcerers. Rather than allow this to happen, he orders his sister to kill him.


Illustrations by Hugh Rankin.

This opening scene is just a hint of the carnage to follow. The plot is a complex one, with various factions scheming against each other, betrayals, allies becoming enemies, and foes forced to work together. Frankly, I had some trouble following it. In brief, the sister wants to force Conan, now the leader of a group of hill people, to wreak revenge on the sinister forces that attacked her brother. This involves several of his men who have been taken prisoner by another realm. (It's complicated.)

Instead, Conan kidnaps the sister, hoping to exchange her for the freedom of his men. This plan is ruined when a sorcerer, betraying the dark forces for whom he was working, works with the sister's disloyal servant on their own scheme to rule the land, which results in the death of Conan's men. (I said it was complicated.)


Conan, his captive, and a horse.

After a whole bunch of wild adventures, with plenty of killings, the pair wind up at the mountain where four powerful sorcerers dwell, along with their less powerful minions and one ultra-powerful sorcerer. By this time, the sister's hatred for Conan has turned to love, just in time for her to be kidnapped from her kidnapper, if you see what I mean.


One of the many torments to which the sister is subjected.

I hope this gives you some idea of the breakneck pace, non-stop action, and frequent plot twists in this story. I lost count of how many people are slaughtered by sword or magic. (At one point, Conan acquires a magic item that protects him from deadly sorcery. This seems awfully convenient.) There are even battle scenes, with hundreds or thousands of warriors massacring each other.

There's plenty of weird magic as well, which may be the most interesting part of the story. I was particularly impressed by the floating cloud on which the four sorcerers travel.

Howard had an undeniably important influence on sword-and-sorcery fiction, and his imitators continue the tradition. (Brak the Barbarian, created by John Jakes, comes to mind.) The raw intensity of Howard's style and the bloodthirstiness of his plots aren't for all tastes. Personally, I prefer the wit and elegance of Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Three stars.

The Young One, by Jerome Bixby

From the April 1954 issue of the magazine comes this supernatural yarn.


Cover art by Augusto Marin.

Jerome Bixby is probably best known to SF fans for his chilling tale It's a Good Life and the memorable episode of Twilight Zone adapted from it. He has also dabbled in screenwriting, coming up with the kind of B movies I enjoy, such as It! The Terror From Beyond Space.


Illustration by Sanford Kossin.

A young boy meets a fellow his own age, newly arrived in the United States from Hungary. He seems nice enough, but all animals hate him. What's even stranger is that his parents eat raw meat and have very sharp teeth. (You can already see where this is going, can't you?)

The immigrant boy says he absolutely has to be back home before seven at night. The American kid tricks him by taking him into a cave, then pretending to be lost, so the Hungarian lad can't return until after his strict curfew. You can probably guess what happens.

It's an decent story, if predictable. (The exact way the plot is resolved may be a little bit unexpected.) The description of the cavern is intriguing, if nothing else.

Three stars.

The Ambidexter, by David H. Keller, M.D.

This Kelleryarn comes from the April 1931 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Leo Morey

The world's two greatest surgeons, one American and one Chinese, have a meeting. The American has a brain tumor, so he wants the Chinese physician to remove part of his brain and replace it with part of a brain from another person. Can you guess that this is going to go very badly wrong?


Illustration by Leo Morey also.

This tale of Mad Science reminds me of old horror movies, the kind that show up on Shock Theater. In particular, the transplant theme brings to mind things like Mad Love, although that was about hands and not brains.

The partial brain transplant concept is unique, as far as I know, and Keller's background as a physician makes the crazy idea seem somewhat plausible. The character of the Chinese surgeon reeks of the old Yellow Peril stereotype, unfortunately. Replace him with, say, Boris Karloff and you might have the basis for a decent black-and-white chiller. I don't think the censor would care for the ghastly ending, however.

Two stars.

Mad House, by Richard Matheson

The January-February 1953 issue supplies this reprint.


Cover art by Robert Frankenberg.

Like Bixby, Matheson is associated with Twilight Zone and has written screenplays for feature films. His movies are too many to list, but a couple worth mentioning are the Jules Verne adaptation Master of the World and The Last Man on Earth. (Apparently Matheson wasn't happy with this version of his novel I am Legend, so he used the pseudonym Logan Swanson for his share of the screenwriting credit. I actually thought it was pretty good.)

As with Howard's novella, Matheson's story has already been reprinted in a couple of collections. The first one is named after his first published story, already considered a classic.


Cover art by Mel Hunter.

The second one is sort of a reduced version of the first one, omitting some stories.


Cover art by Charles Binger.

This psychological horror story features a frustrated writer who ekes out a living as a poorly paid instructor of literature. He's nearly always boiling over with anger about his inability to be published, lashing out at his students and just about everyone else. Fed up with his rage, his wife leaves him.


Illustrations by Bill Ashman.

He also fights a daily battle with inanimate objects around the house. They seem to be conspiring to harm him. An acquaintance — he can't be called a friend, given the fact that the main character is as nasty to him as he is to everybody else — suggests that the house is sort of absorbing his anger.


Chaos ensues.

Like other stories in this issue, it leads to a blood-soaked conclusion. It's also similar in that it's pretty predictable. The best part of it is the author's style, full of short, rage-filled sentences that really get you into the main character's head. That's not a very nice place to be, of course.

Three stars.

Worth All That Suffering?

The magazine ends with this appropriately macabre anecdote, which I offer without comment.


I don't believe it. Oh, wait a minute, that was a comment, wasn't it? Sorry about that.

Not a great issue, although a bare majority of the stories were at least worth reading. The Conan story is of historical importance, anyway. I suppose the magazine would be enjoyable enough if you happen to be in a situation where you need to be waiting around.


Cartoon by somebody called Salame, from the same issue as the Matheson story.

[Join us tonight for the next episode of Star Trek — airing at 8:30 PM Pacific and Eastern!]




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[June 12, 1965] The Number of the Bests

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by John Boston

The Collectors

SF anthologies are not neutral vessels.  They are shaped by editors with agendas.  Sometimes these are as simple as “what can I throw together to make some money,” but usually they advance the editor’s conception of what the field is, or should be. 

The first “best of the year” compilation in SF was the well-received The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, published by Frederick Fell in 1949 but containing stories from 1948.  The Bleiler-Dikty anthologies spawned a companion series, TheYear’s Best Science Fiction Novels (i.e., novellas), which ran from 1952 through 1954.  Bleiler left the project in 1955, to the detriment of its quality, and the series died with a final single volume from Advent, a small specialty publisher, in 1958.


by Frank McCarthy

There was abortive competition along the way.  Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books, a long-time anthologist, published Prize Science Fiction (McBride, 1953), containing 1952 stories supposedly comprising the winners and runners-up for that year’s Jules Verne Prize, an award and a book title that were not heard of again.  The next year August Derleth, another veteran anthologist, published Portals of Tomorrow (Rinehart, 1954), collecting stories from 1953 and pointedly subtitled The Best of Science Fiction and Other Fantasy.  The editor described it as “covering the entire genre of the fantastic: not only supernatural and science-fiction tales, but also every kind of whimsy and imaginative concept of life in the future or on other planets,” apparently distinguishing it from the Bleiler-Dikty series without mentioning it.  There was no second volume.

But Judith Merril achieved ignition, and kept it.  Her series of annual anthologies shows no signs of flagging after nine years.  The first, SF: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, appeared in 1956, with 1955 stories, from the SF specialty publisher Gnome Press, in an unusual publishing arrangement: a Dell paperback edition appeared in newsstands, drugstores, etc., more or less simultaneously with the publication of the Gnome hardcover, rather than after the usual year or so interval before paperback publication.  After four volumes, as Gnome tottered towards oblivion, Merril jumped to Simon and Schuster, which published the fifth through ninth books.  We await the tenth, slated for December.


by Ed Emshwiller

Merril’s angle from the first was good SF as good literature, accessible to the non-fanatical reader, with emphasis on character—not necessarily character-driven, but more concerned with the perspective and experience of recognizable human individuals than much SF.  Her taste in cherry-picking the SF magazines was near-impeccable.  She also looked beyond the SF magazines and the writers identified with them.

The latter practice has been both a strength and a weakness, bringing to the SF-reading public many worthy stories that they otherwise would never have heard of, but also including some items that seemed trivial or misplaced but came from a prestigious source or with a prestigious byline.  As a result, the Merril series has become woolier and more diffuse in focus over the years.  Her last volume included stories from Playboy (two), the Saturday Evening Post, the Saturday Review of Literature, the Peninsula Spectator, The Reporter, and the Atlantic Monthly, and such large literary bylines as Bernard Malamud and Andre Maurois, the latter with a novelette that may have been the best of 1930, when it was first published.  Oh, and three cartoons.  Of course it also included, as always, a large and solid selection of indisputable SF and fantasy, both from the genre magazines and from other sources.

Merril’s agenda is clear.  Let her tell you about it.  In her introduction to the last of the Gnome volumes, she wrote:

“The name of this book is SF.
“SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy).  Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy) is really an abbreviation too.  Here are some of the things it stands for. . . .
“S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity. . . .
“F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-will; Figuring, Fact-seeking, and Fancy-free.
“Mix well.  The result is SF, or Speculative Fun.”

English translation, if you need one: What she thinks the SF field is, or should be is . . . not really a field.  That is, not categorically distinguishable in any clear-cut way from the general body of literature, though having a somewhat different set of preoccupations than the typical contemporary novel or short story.

You can debate her argument, but I’m not inclined to.  I think if Merril did not exist it would be necessary to invent her, or someone similar, to help rescue the field (that word again!) from excessive insularity.  I am also glad to have her book to read each year, exasperating as some of its contents may be. 

Yin and Yang

But not everyone feels that way, and it is not surprising that there is once again some competition.  Donald Wollheim is back for a second try, with co-editor Terry Carr, a long-time SF fan and shorter-time author now working at Ace Books, with that publisher’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965, a chunky original paperback with a distinct “back to basics” air about it, though there’s no comment at all about Merril’s book and nothing that can be read as a disguised dig at it.

So what’s the more overt angle, besides “here are some stories we think are good”?  First, the title does not include “Fantasy,” a word which for Merril covers a multitude of exogamies.  And the “World’s Best” in the title is not ceremonial; the editors make much of having scoured the world, and not just the US, for stories.  The back cover says “Selected from the pages of every magazine regularly publishing science-fiction and fantasy stories in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the rest of the world. . . .” The yield: five non-US stories, of seventeen in the book.  Two of these are from the British New Worlds, which is not exactly news, but the others are from less familiar sources, though they are closer to the Anglo-American genre core than some of Merril’s catches.

First of these three is Vampires Ltd., by Josef Nesvadba, a Czech psychiatrist and well-known SF writer, the title story of his recent collection, about the current preoccupation with fast automobiles; the protagonist accidentally gets his hands on an especially fine one, and per the title, finds out that it doesn’t really run on gasoline.  We reach that denouement by way of a surreal and hectic series of events which makes little pretense to plausibility.  But that is beside the author’s point, which is satire.  It’s an interesting look at a different notion of storytelling than you will find in the US SF magazines.  The Weather in the Underground, by Colin Free, best known for his work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, from the Australian magazine Squire, is more consistent with US conventions.  It takes place in an underground habitat where part of humanity has fled for safety, leaving the rest to freeze in a new ice age.  This life is made tolerable by constantly renewed psychological conditioning, but our protagonist’s conditioning never quite took hold, so he’s miserable and maladjusted, leading to banishment and a sorry end.  It’s a strikingly vehement story, very tightly written and forceful, and one of the best in the book.

The third non-US/UK offering is What Happened to Sergeant Masuro?, by Harry Mulisch, from The Busy Bee Review: New Writing from the Netherlands.  Mulisch is apparently a notable Dutch literary figure, with eight books published.  Sergeant Masuro was a soldier in a Dutch patrol in Papua New Guinea; one of the other soldiers raped a native girl, or tried to; the headman was later seen skulking around; and Sergeant Masuro began to undergo a terrible transformation.  The story is the report to headquarters by the patrol’s superior officer, who recounts both the events and his own anguish at some length.  Amusingly, the plot—white men go into the jungle, transgress against the natives, and are cursed—is a long-familiar pulp plot of which dozens of examples could no doubt be exhumed from Weird Tales, Jungle Stories, and the like.  The literary gloss doesn’t add much to it.

Aside from these foreign trophies, the book is a stiff gust of de gustibus.  Of the five stories which one of us at Galactic Journey thought worthy of five stars (excluding several outright fantasies from Fantastic), none are included.  Nor are any included from our longer end-of-the-year Galactic Stars list.  Of the stories that are in the book, only two were awarded four stars, and one—Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow—fled the wrath of Gideon with only one star.

And much of what is here is remarkably pedestrian or worse.  The editors seem determined to reproduce the genre’s weaknesses as well as its strengths.  Starting the book is Tom Purdom’s Greenplace, which features such lively matters as a psychedelic drug and a man in a wheelchair being beaten by a mob, but is essentially an extremely contrived and implausible warning about a genuine problem: how democracy can survive, or not, as psychological manipulation becomes more sophisticated.  Next, and proceeding downhill, Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis’s Men of Good Will is an equally implausible, but more trivial, story built around a scientific gimmick that’s not even entirely original (remember Jerome Bixby’s The Holes Around Mars?). 

This is followed by Bill for Delivery, by that faithful purveyor of contrived yard goods Christopher Anvil, about the problems some salt-of-the-earth spacemen have carrying a cargo of unruly and dangerous birds from one star system to another.  At this point, a reader who bought the book thinking it was time to check out this “science fiction” stuff people are talking about would probably start to think “How can anybody possibly be interested in this?” and toss it or leave it on the bus.

There’s more of this ilk later on: C.C. MacApp’s weak and gimmicky For Every Action, and Robert Lory’s The Star Party, an annoyingly slick rendition of an original but silly idea.  And Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow answers the question that hardly anyone is asking: “What does a talented author do when he can’t think of anything of substance to write?”

But that’s the bad news.  The good news is a number of worthwhile stories.  Four Brands of Impossible by new writer Norman Kagan is at once an amusing picture of aspiring math and science brains in their element, and a chilling one of the uses to which their talents may be put, wrapped around an interesting mathematical idea.  William F. Temple’s A Niche in Time is a smart time travel story that goes off in an unexpected direction.  John Brunner’s The Last Lonely Man (one of the New Worlds items) develops a clever piece of psychological technology in the author’s earnest and methodical way.  Edward Jesby, another new writer, contributes the stylish and incisive Sea Wrack, which starts out as a tale of the idle and decadent rich in a far future where some humans have been modified to live undersea, and and turns into a story of class struggle, no less. 

Philip K. Dick’s Oh, To Be a Blobel! is a sort of slapstick black comedy updating Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  Thomas M. Disch’s Now Is Forever is a sharp if overlong piece of sociologizing about the effects of wide availability of matter duplicators, which kick the props from under everyone’s getting-and-spending way of life.  New writer Jack B. Lawson’s The Competitors is a breezy rearrangement of stock SF elements that reads to me like a facile parody of the genre, probably done with A.E. van Vogt in mind.

To my taste the most striking item here is Edward Mackin’s New Worlds story The Unremembered, a sort of religious fantasy framed in SF terms.  In the automated and urbanized future, lives have been extended for hundreds of years, but the show seems to be closing from sheer ennui: the birth rate is falling and the youth suicide rate is rising, and older people are queueing up at the euthanasia clinics.  Apparitions of people are appearing and disappearing seemingly randomly, because (it is hinted) the human span has become divorced from its natural length.  The elderly protagonist becomes one of the apparitions, and his consciousness takes a Stapledonian journey through the cosmos before arriving at the final revelation.  C.S. Lewis would appreciate this one if he were still around.  It is quite different from anything I’ve seen from Mackin before, or from anybody else for that matter.

But that’s the only really strikingly memorable story here; closest runners-up are the Colin Free and Edward Jesby stories, based mainly on their intensity in presenting relatively familiar sorts of material.  The writers who are pushing the SF envelope in notable ways are not here—no Lafferty, no Zelazny, no Ellison, no Cordwainer Smith.  And there is too much overt dross.

So, the bottom line: a pretty decent book with much solid material, but it mostly fails the “Surprise me!” test.  Maybe the next one will be more startling.  Meanwhile, Merril will be back to argue with in a few more months.

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 16, 1964] The Waiting Game (November 1964 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Patience is a Virtue

If you're like me, you look forward to the arrival of the latest issues of your favorite magazines at the local newsstand. You carefully calculate the exact day they'll show up and get there ahead of time, eager to meet the delivery person who loads all the publications off the truck. There they are, ready for the metal wires that hold them together in bundles to come off so they can go on display.

You may understand my consternation, then, when Worlds of Tomorrow failed to make an appearance on the scheduled date last month. Since it's a relatively new magazine, I figured that, like so many other science fiction publications, it was out of business.

Imagine my delight when I saw it again, thirty days later. Why the delay? Let me hand the microphone to editor Frederik Pohl, who can explain the situation better than I can, and who will also offer us a preview of the next issue.

Thanks for clearing that up, Fred. Now let me take a look at the contents of the current issue.

Better Late Than Never


Cover art by George Schelling

Killer!, by Robert Ray


Illustrations by Gray Morrow

Taking up one-third of the magazine is a novella by an author new to me. The gentleman with the gun, pictured above, is trained as an assassin by the taller man standing next to him, his half-brother. There is no love lost between the two. The intended target is the newly arisen dictator of a planet populated by very human aliens. (The only important difference between the two species is that the aliens are all short, light-skinned, and fair-haired. In this future, almost all human beings are tall, dark-haired, and have black or dark brown skin. Our antihero happens to be one of the rare persons who resemble the aliens.)

The agency for which the half-brothers work believes that the dictator poses a threat to Earth, even though his species does not yet have space travel. If that seems paranoid, well, so do nearly all the characters in this grim story.


The target.

The assassin's mission is to disguise himself as an alien and use a local weapon to kill the dictator, so Earth won't be blamed. What he doesn't know, but the reader does, is that the agency planted a hypnotic suggestion in his brain, so that he will kill himself immediately after the assassination.


Surfing down to the planet.

As soon as he arrives on the alien world, things go wrong. The dictator's forces are far more powerful and technologically advanced than the agency thought, thanks to the secret intervention of another species of alien. (They aren't quite so human, thank goodness, so we can keep track of who's doing what.)


The hero in typical form, about to knock out an innocent bystander.

What follows is an extended series of captures, escapes, chases, and violent battles. The protagonist, formerly ready to murder without qualms, slowly develops a conscience after he kills several aliens.


Take that, alien scum!

He eventually figures out that he's been set up as a sacrificial lamb, and tries to carry out his mission while staying alive. It all leads up to a very dark ending.

This is a fast-moving, action-packed spy adventure, with plenty of twists and turns in the plot. It's a quick read for its length, although some of the author's sentences are a little clumsy. The story's cynical view of espionage reminds me of last year's bestselling novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré, although I certainly wouldn't say it's as good. Worth reading, but not a classic by any means.

Three stars.

Natural History of the Kley, by Jerome Bixby

This mock article deals with microscopic intelligent beings who live on animal hairs. Humans only find out about them after they've been wiped out by a substance that kills all animal parasites on Earth. The mood changes from black comedy and satire to sheer silliness, as the author treats us to a series of groan-inducing puns. It's inoffensive, and not as bad as a Feghoot, but that's about the best I can say.

Two stars.

The Long Way, by A. Bertram Chandler and Susan Chandler


Illustration by Norman Nodel

A male space explorer and a female artist at a nudist colony, not quite romantically involved, meet a fellow who believes in dowsing. He's able to demonstrate the procedure successfully. (It seems that dowsing works better when you're naked.) Convinced that there's something to it, the spaceman does his own dowsing, in order to find a missing earring for the artist. Because the earring is shaped like a star, and the man is thinking about interstellar travel at the time, they wind up very far from home indeed. They are able to make their way back to Earth by doing some more dowsing, but things don't turn out the way they hope.

This collaboration between a well-known author and his more obscure wife isn't very convincing, as you can probably tell from the above synopsis. The theme of dowsing makes me wonder if it was intended for the pages of Analog. I think even John W. Campbell, Jr., would reject the premise as too unbelievable. The twist ending adds another layer of implausibility.

Two stars.

The Kicksters, by J. T. McIntosh


Illustrations by Gray Morrow

A group of thrill-seeking teenagers, the sons and daughters of the wealthy, play dangerous games of chicken to see who's the bravest. Their latest competition, as shown above, involves free-falling from a great height while wearing a jet pack. The trick is to turn on the jets at the last possible moment, in order to avoid being smashed into a pulp.

The boldest of the gang is a girl named Peach. Bored with risking her life in the usual ways, she decides on an even more hazardous prank. She and her boyfriend, who tries to convince her to drop the whole thing all the way through the story, travel to the Moon under false identities. She sneaks into the main jet of a spacecraft ready to return to Earth. The ship doesn't use the main jet until it's about to land, so she'll be able to survive inside a spacesuit. The joke is to force the ship to turn around and land on the Moon again. (It doesn't need to use the main jet in the lesser gravity of the satellite.)


Peach, approaching the ship unseen.

The captain of the spacecraft hates spoiled brats, particularly female ones. Since he doesn't have absolute proof that anyone is inside the main jet, even though Peach's boyfriend, as planned, lets everybody know, he refuses to delay his journey to Earth. The second-in-command, desperate to save the girl's life, comes up with various plans, but all of them prove to be impossible. It seems as if Peach is doomed.

The sense that the laws of physics are conspiring to kill the heroine reminds me of the famous story The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. The story creates genuine suspense as to whether the protagonist is going to live or die. I'll admit that the situation is a bit contrived, but I have to give the author credit for thinking up all possible objections to the premise, and answering them in a logical fashion. Peach, although definitely foolhardy and selfish, also manages to be appealing in some ways. The captain and the second-in-command also turn out to be more complex characters than they might seem at first.

Four stars.

The Carson Effect, by Richard Wilson


Illustration by Norman Nodel

At first, this story seems to be nothing but a series of unrelated vignettes. A newspaper reporter struggles over the writing of an article about something that hasn't happened yet. A man, desperate for money to pay for his wife's operation, makes a feeble attempt at robbing a bank, only to have the teller give him much more cash than he demands, without a word of argument. A woman nervously asks her employer for a small amount of money to make up for the taxi she had to take to perform an errand, and winds up getting hundreds of dollars and the rest of the day off. A six-year-old boy thinks he can buy an extremely expensive brooch for his mother from Tiffany's, and the clerk gladly sells it to him for one dollar. The President of the United States resigns his office, turning it over to the Vice President, who is obviously unfit for the job.

We return to the reporter and discover the reason for these strange events, which I won't reveal here. I also won't talk about the ironic ending, which changes everything that happened before. Suffice to say that the story looks at a very big event from several very small perspectives, and does so in an effective manner.

Four stars.

The Fruit of the Tree, by Lester del Rey

This issue's non-fiction article speculates about the possibility of altering the genetic characteristics of living organisms. By 1980, the author believes, we'll be able to produce fruits and vegetables that will stay edible, without refrigeration, for many years, and even have flavors previously unknown. We'll be able to get edible nuts, maple and/or latex sap, and lumber, better than any used today, from a single tree. New kinds of animals will appear, supplying carnivores with novel cuts of meat. (Vegetarians, like myself, will have plants that taste exactly like meat. I'm not sure I want that.) Scientists will create replacement organs, grown from scratch, for those suffering from disease.

The author lets his imagination run wild, coming up with a lot of ideas for science fiction stories, if nothing else. I doubt I'll see all these wonders a mere sixteen years from now, but I could be wrong. Even if it's hard to believe everything this essay says, it makes for interesting reading.

Three stars.

Somewhere in Space, by C. C. MacApp


Illustrations by John Giunta

Some time before this story begins, people found alien teleportation technology on Mars. Since then, it's been used routinely, with few problems. Up until now, that is. Without explanation, folks without close relatives or friends disappear into thin air after using the teleportation device. The protagonist is a technician who accepts the dangerous but extremely lucrative assignment of figuring out what's going on. Not only does he know as much about the technology as any human being can, he's another loner, expected to vanish when he goes inside the machine.

He winds up on an unknown planet, naked and without any of his equipment. There to meet him is a very human alien, a young woman whose only differences from a human female are the fact that she has no thumbs, and that her skin is an odd color. She's one of the slaves that another group of aliens kidnap from all over, including Earth. (Our hero is very lucky that the slavers aren't around to grab him. They happen to be at some kind of celebration, getting drunk.)

With the help of the woman, the protagonist gets away from the slave facility, facing the challenge of surviving on a strange, alien world. Things get really weird when he reaches a mountain, which is really an ancient, all-powerful being, able to take on any form it pleases.


The ball of light the mountain uses to communicate with the man.

After many adventures, and falling in love with the alien woman, the hero battles the slavers against seemingly impossible odds, using only simple weapons like rocks and wooden spears. Can he possibly defeat the Bad Guys, return to Earth, and win the Girl? Well, maybe with a little help from a deus ex machina, in the form of a god-like mountain-being.


Chaos at the slave camp.

You might be able to tell from my tone that I found it hard to take this wild adventure seriously, although it's certainly not intended as a comedy. The nonstop mishaps that the hero faces kept me reading, even if I didn't believe a second of it. The mountain, alien, god, or whatever you want to call it, is the most interesting character. Although it reminds me of the lead novella in some ways, it's got a much more optimistic mood.

Three stars.

Worth Waiting For?

So, did the delay in receiving this issue have any effect on my reaction to it? Did I have high expectations that it failed to meet? Or, did I assume that the extra month would sour me on the magazine, so that I wouldn't be able to fully enjoy it?

None of the above, really. This is a typical issue. A couple of decent, if not great, adventure yarns; a couple of good stories; a couple of poor stories; and a so-so article. Good enough for half a buck, I'd say.

I guess biding my time until it appeared paid off. It's better than, say, waiting around for somebody who never shows up.

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