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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 8, 1968] Probing the future (November 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Professional opinion

Fred Pohl opens up this month's issue of Galaxy with a summary of the letters he's received from readers on how they would, in 100 words or fewer, successfully resolve the war in Vietnam.  He has great faith in the power of harnessing a bunch of smart folks to spit out solutions to problems.  I honestly don't know how useful someone's cursory stab at peace in Southeast Asia can be, even if it's from the pen of a clearly clever person like Judith Merril or Larry Niven.

He did, however, talk about a different kind of brain-tapping, one that has me very excited.  There's something called Sigma, which is a scientific way of presenting scenarios to people and assessing their likelihood, feasability, and desirability.  A consensus can then be reached and a mass-mind prediction derived. 

And as it turns out, I recently was sent a copy of Probe a 14-volume compilation of technological predictions made by the folks at TRW's Space Technology Laboratories—the folks who gave us Pioneers 0, 1 and 2, Explorer 6, Atlas Able, Pioneer 5, the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory, and parts of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module.  I've only just started perusing it, but it makes for fascinating reading.  Of course, only time will tell if their predictions are accurate, or if they're even asking the right questions.

Of course, science fictioneers have been predicting the future in their own way for half a century.  And while the stories in this issue may not depict situations that ever come to pass, I have to say that are, at least, quite entertaining!


by Sol Dember, illustrating Building on the Line

Perris Way, by Robert Silverberg


by Jack Gaughan

I had not expected a continuation of the story, "Nightwing," but "Perris Way" is a direct sequel.  The tale picks up with our nameless Watcher, whose profession of scanning the skies for alien invasion, is no longer relevant as the invasion has come and succeeded, heading toward Perris (Paris) with his companion, the former Prince of Roum.  That latter, a member of the Dominator caste, was blinded during the invasion by the alien-in-disguise Gormon for forcing himself upon the Flier, Avluela, whom Gormon loved.  The two arrived at France's former capital to become members of the guild of Rememberers.

The erstwhile Watcher becomes an apprentice, and during his training discovers the true history of Earth and the hubristic crime that warranted the alien invasion.  His halcyon half-year with the Rememberers is abruptly terminated when the Prince shames the guild with a tactless act.  The Watcher, caught on the horns of a dilemma comprising the remedy to a Rememberer's anger versus (perhaps misplaced) loyalty to the Prince, comes up with a solution that ultimately pleases no one.  It also leaves room for a Part 3, which, if a novelization be forthcoming, is probably necessary to reach the appropriate length.

Silverbob's language is exquisite.  His poetic SFnal prose is probably even better than Zelazny's, and more approachable than Delany's.  His history of Earth is as fascinating as any that has been drawn.  On the other hand, he never treats his women well, and they are always sex objects, one way or another.  Contrast that with James Schmitz's Dr. Nile Etland, showcased just last month in Analog, lest someone want to lecture me on how "this is just the way things are."  Women do not exist just to be scenery, as much as those who hum "I'm a Girl Watcher" and hound the bosomy New Yorker Francine Gottfried on the way to work might like to think so.

It's still terrific stuff, but I can't give it more than four stars.

Keep Moving, by Miriam Allen deFord

Science fiction stories often play with the premise, "If this goes on…"  DeFord, one of the genre's most venerable authors, offers up a 22nd Century in which freeways pave virtually every square inch of the planet, and commuter culture has become the norm.  People don't even have homes anymore—they simply live in their cars, driving constantly to obtain food, entertainment, and presumably working while moving.

One man decides he's had enough and founds the "Live-In" movement, boldly staying put in one place over night.  This crazy idea wins the casual endorsement of dozens and the fervent support of one particular woman, a rather famous poet.  The ensuing partnership proves unstoppable.

Absolutely silly, but also quite charming.  Three stars.

Building on the Line, by Gordon R. Dickson


by Gray Morrow

Clancy and Plotchin are mismatched, feuding workers on the Line, a galaxy-spanning set of teleporter stations.  The two are building a set of Starlinks on the hostile world of XN-4010 when its incorporeal, gibbering race of "hobgoblins" unleashes a meteorite storm upon them.  Plotchin is incapacitated, maybe dead, but there is hope that an experimental cryogenic unit in the man's suit might be sustaining him.

Clancy decides that staying put and waiting for rescue is less desirable than making the 36-mile trek back to the main exploration ship.  And so, with Plotchin in his arms, he begins the brutal trek through the ice and near-vacuum of XN-4010, the hobgoblins nibbling at his psyche the entire way.  This bit is truly thrilling, reminiscent of the middle section of Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel when our heroes are making a similar journey across the frozen wastes of Pluto.

The denouement, however, is a rather windy extolling of the virtues of heroic men expanding the horizons of mankind.  It all felt a little hollow, especially as it is intimated that the hobgoblins may not be malicious but simply trying to defend their world from an onslaught of human tourists.  That, to me, was the more important point, and it was tossed aside.  Framed differently, Line's premise could have made an excellent novel, with themes similar to those explored brilliantly in Silverberg's The Man in the Maze.  Alas.

Still, it's beautifully written, and the first two thirds are a wild ride.

Four stars.

For Your Information: My Friend, the Nautilus, by Willy Ley

This is quite a neat piece, definitely a throwback to Willy's better days.  It's really the evolutionary history of mollusks, with an eventual focus on nautiloids and their relatives, the ammonites.  No, this is not a Pennsylvania religious sect but a prolific family of shelled mollusks that thrived during the Age of Dinosaurs.

Given that octopuses (Ley calls the plural 'octopi', tsk tsk) are shockingly intelligent, and ammonites were advanced nautiloids, I think stories about sapient Mesozoic shellfish would be fascinating.  Be sure to credit me with the idea if you use it.

Four stars.

The Market in Aliens, by K. M. O'Donnell

An unscrupulous fellow runs a brisk trade in sapient aliens.  He has occasional twinges of guilt, but he perseveres, nevertheless.

This is a dark, ugly story.  Looking back on it, I think I have to give it four stars.  It says a lot with a little.

Locust Years, by Douglas R. Mason


by Brock

In the not too far future, universities literally recreate the past, casting lines through time to reel in prehistorical happenings for student viewing.  But when a construction accident summons a wounded mastodon and opens up a time vortex, no one is safe—up to and including humans from other time frames!

This is an interesting story, if initially difficult to apprehend.  Probably the best thing the author has written to date.  Three stars.

The Tell-Tale Heart-Machine, by Brian W. Aldiss

This one's about bitter, middle-aged man, reeling from the recent loss of his wife and his ejection from the board of the company that made his fortune.  Said company has discovered the secret of synthetic life, starting with the recreation of dinosaurs, and with the aim of creating complete humans.  Ostensibly, the man hates his father-in-law, erstwhile partner in the endeavor, for his lack of morality, and for the coldness he has hitherto shown his family.  In fact, there is something deeper going on, and a rift that may not be mendable, even as the father-in-law attempts to attone.

I found myself moved by this one.  Definitely one of Aldiss' better efforts of late.

Four stars.

Eeeetz Ch, by H. H. Hollis


by Dan Adkins

I had gone into this one expecting from the title some sort of joke story.  It's not.

Dolphins are hot news this decade.  From Flipper to People of the Sea to World of Ptavvs, the idea of porpoises being partner sapients is catching on in a big way.  Hollis' story details the visit of the junior Senator from Hawaii, Ramon Coatl (presumably of Filipino ancestry), to a Caribbean research center.  There, the dolphin called Andy but really named Eeeetz Ch is being fitted with artificial hands and tested on advanced machinery.  But the tests go both ways—the two scientists working with him (a man and a woman, the woman being the senior engineer; Silverbob, take notes) are fitted with artificial gills that plug into a plate surgically embedded in their sternums.

There's doesn't exactly seem to be a plot to the whole thing, until it's done, and you understand the stakes of Coatl's visit.  Hollis says a lot about intelligence and handicaps, about technology and ethics, without spelling it out too heavy-handedly.  Most impressively, all of the characters are extremely well realized.  Andy the dolphin, in particular, is an alien.  A likeable, sympathetic one, but not human.

This is my favorite story of the issue.  It's both conventional and new, prosaic and profound.  It made me laugh a couple of times.  It kept me riveted.

Five stars.

Like, wow!

What a contrast, huh?  Last month, Galaxy finished at a dismal 2.4.  This month, we're at 3.9, probaby the best mag of the year.  It reminds me of the old Gold days of the early '50s.  Of course with a spread like that, it's hard to make any solid predictions, but at least there's always a chance every month that Galaxy will knock it out of the park like it did this month.

That's something to look forward to!

(oh, and dig the cool offer on the back of the mag—Trek is everywhere!)




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 6, 1968] Snail on the Slope? (November 1968 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Suspicions confirmed—this November Amazing names as Editor Barry N. Malzberg, who was listed last issue as Associate Editor.  Sol Cohen is now merely the Publisher.  Oddly, though, the editorial is by Harry Harrison, now listed as Associate Editor (though most likely gone).  Go figure, or just say it’s more Sol Cohen chaos.

Johnny Bruck is back as the cover artist; this one (from Perry Rhodan #109, published in 1963) looks even more cliched and perfunctory than his earlier covers, making me wonder if they are really getting worse, or if I am just getting more tired of them.


by Johnny Bruck

“New” is sprinkled across the cover wherever possible to distract from the fact that once again, reprints dominate.  Four new short stories take up 36 pages, just under 25% of the magazine. And the prize: “plus stories by: RAY BRADBURY (Winner of the Aviation Space Writers Association’s Top Award). . . .” Does Bradbury need that kind of boosting? 

One of the new stories, interestingly, is a collaboration between Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany.  When Delany appeared with a novel excerpt in the issue before last, his name was misspelled about half the time; this issue, it’s misspelled “Delaney” everywhere—on the cover, on the contents page (twice), on the first page of the story, in the book review column.  Well, small mercy, it’s spelled right in the blurb for the story. 

There are worse production botches, discussed when I get to them.

Harrison’s editorial, Science Fiction and the Establishment, is superficial and banal: the Establishment doesn’t like SF, it’s a problem all over, but it’s starting to get better, someday it will be gone.  The book review column continues interestingly but incestuously, with James Blish as William Atheling reviewing Larry Niven, and Samuel R. Delany reviewing Blish.  Leon E. Stover contributes another in his “Science of Man” series, discussed below.

Despite all the above kvetching about the magazine’s presentation, the good news is that the new short stories are as interesting a batch as we’ve seen in Amazing for a while, and the reprints are all readable or better, unlike many of their predecessors. 

Power of the Nail, by Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany

Ellison and Delany’s Power of the Nail reads like what Ellison was publishing in the SF magazines around 1957, polished up by a smoother writer.  Robert Zagaramendo and his wife Margret are Ecological Observers on the planet Saquetta, and boy howdy is Margret pissed: “You promised me better than this, somewhere.” Robert’s not too thrilled either, especially with Margret.  Bickering is constant.

Saquetta features the Saquettes, mole-like aliens who are not at all cute, but have the interesting trait of being reincarnated when they die naturally, which is most of the time.  But the vibrations of the “phase-antenna of the automatic ecology equipment” that the humans are burying in various locations draw the Saquettes away from their usual hideouts to places where they are vulnerable to attack by giant predatory birds, called molloks because that’s what the Saquettes scream when they’re being hunted.


by Dan Adkins

After further conflict with his wife, including a near-rape, Robert sets up “ecology equipment” near an especially large Saquette colony, complete with lurking molloks, and goes back later to find, as expected, hundreds of dead Saquettes.  He builds little round coffins for them and nails them together, then goes back and tells Margret that they’re going home—and shortly, suffers a terrible and fatal punishment that is not clearly explained, though one may surmise it is related to the operation of the "automatic ecology equipment."  (Compare David H. Keller's The Doorbell if you've ever read it.) In the moral universe of the story, it’s obviously because he decided to sacrifice hundreds of Saquettes in order to escape an emotionally intolerable situation.

It's a very vivid and readable story, which goes some way towards compensating for its ultimate obscurity.  Three stars.

The Monsters, by David R. Bunch

The formerly prolific David R. Bunch, who has not appeared in Amazing since Sol Cohen took over, is back with The Monsters.  It’s short as usual for Bunch, and on a familiar theme: the need to harden one’s small children against the brutalities of life by brutalizing them pre-emptively.  (See Bunch’s earlier story A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins, Fantastic June 1961, and thence to Judith Merril’s annual “year’s best” volume.) Here, the threat the children are to be prepared for is a bit trite, but the writing is brisk and economical.  Three stars.

Try Again, by Jack Wodhams

Jack Wodhams is new to me, though the Journeyer-in-Chief has not thought highly of his work in Analog.  His Try Again is surprisingly good.  Pyler, a psychiatrist, is having a session with the precocious five-year-old Tommy, who says he has lived before and remembers it.  But this isn’t quite the same life as before, since with adult memories he acts differently the second time around.  Tommy is much burdened by his knowledge of future events and the question whether he could do anything about them (it’s 1935, Mussolini has just invaded Ethiopia; and Tommy knows what comes later).  Shortly he is kidnapped to Germany.  An alternative history, even worse than the real one, is telegraphically unfolded.  Tommy, who has disappeared from the plot after his interrogation, reappears at the terrible end.  Four stars—maybe a bit crude, but powerful.


by Jeff Jones

The reading experience is undermined at the end by Amazing’s production values, or lack of them.  The story stops on page 29 in the midst of a sentence with no “continued on” notice, and the reader is left to rummage through the magazine to find the rest of the text on page 138.

This Grand Carcass, by R.A. Lafferty

R.A. Lafferty’s This Grand Carcass is, typically, told in high Tall Tale mode, and it is also clearly a moral tale, though the precise moral may be a bit obscure.  Mord comes to Juniper Tell offering to sell a device cheap that will allow Tell to “own the worlds.” So why is he selling it?  He’s dying. Tell bites and is the new owner of Gahn, for Generalized Agenda Harmonizer Nucleus, which soon enough is outdoing and dominating all the other “general purpose machines.” Shortly, it is a full partner with Tell (in Tell and Gahn—get it?). 

Before long, Tell, like Mord, is almost, er, gone, and Gahn (whose power inputs have been revealed as dummies) candidly admits: “I use you.  I use human fuel.  I establish symbiosis with you.  I suck you out.  I eat you up.” So Tell sells Gahn on to the next high-rolling sucker.  Moral, did I say?  Machines are the Devil?  Anything that makes humans’ work too easy is damnation?  Something along those lines, I’m sure.  This is not one of Lafferty’s best; it is simultaneously obvious and vague and less deliciously absurd than Lafferty at his best.  But it’s amusing enough, good for three stars.

The Dwarf, by Ray Bradbury

In Ray Bradbury’s The Dwarf (Fantastic, January/February 1954), Mr. Bigelow, a dwarf, visits the carnival daily, forks over his dime at the Mirror Maze, and heads straight for the mirror that makes him look large.  Aimee, a carnival worker, hangs out in the booth with ticket-seller Ralph when her business is slow.  She is sympathetic to Mr. Bigelow’s plight.  Ralph isn’t, and makes fun of him, and of her.  Aimee discovers that Mr. Bigelow makes a living writing detective stories, which reveal his inner torments.  Ralph plays a nasty trick on him, proving that Ralph is nasty, which we already knew.


by Sanford Kossln

Rather abruptly, end of story.  Or is it?  There’s no “Continued on . . .” at the end.  As with Try Again, I rummaged through the magazine, but found no loose piece of the story.  So I checked the original 1954 Fantastic . . . and there’s an entire page of text at the end that is omitted from this reprinted version.

No rating, since the full text doesn’t actually appear in the magazine.  It’s not one of Bradbury’s better stories to my taste, but it’s a whole lot better complete than truncated.  Sheesh.

The Traveling Crag, by Theodore Sturgeon

The Traveling Crag, from the July 1951 Fantastic Adventures, is a silly confection by Theodore Sturgeon—a non-trivial category of his ouevre.  On the other hand, silliness by Sturgeon is more palatable than that from less accomplished hands.

Cris is a literary agent with an assistant, Naome, who is obviously in love with him, though he is oblivious.  Cris has received a story, The Traveling Crag, from an unknown, Sig Weiss, which “grabs you by the throat, shakes your bones, puts a heartbeat into your lymph ducts and finally slams you down, gasping, weak, and oh so happy,” and incidentally makes a lot of money fast.  But Weiss sends no more stories.  Cris visits to find out why, and the local storekeeper warns him, “Meanest bastard ever lived,” a judgment Weiss lives up to in the flesh.


by Lawrence (L. Sterne Stevens)

When Weiss finally submits another story at Cris’s urging, it begins: “Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light-years from Sol.” This is the beginning of a notorious subscription ad that ran in Galaxy, headlined YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT IN GALAXY!, designed to distinguish Galaxy’s policy from that of lowbrow pulp magazines like . . . Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories.  So to perpetrate this in-joke, Sturgeon must have convinced not only Galaxy editor H.L. Gold, but also Fantastic Adventures editor Howard Browne, to allow it.

But I digress.  The point is that Weiss has turned in a bunch of crap, continuing his mean-bastard performance.  Meanwhile, Cris meets Miss Tillie Moroney, who is offering a reward for an “authentic case of devil into saint,” and eventually tells him a story—“a science fiction plot”—about a humanoid race that has developed the ultimate weapon, one of which has apparently been lost on Earth for thousands of years.  And she wants Cris to get Weiss to write another blockbuster story and then find out how and where he wrote it.

So Weiss produces another story that makes everyone cry, and Cris and Tillie head out to see him, but Naome the assistant contrives to get there first, and the ultimate weapon, a small object found after a rockslide, proves to have been the key to Weiss’s transformation, but it gets triggered, and one of Tillie’s blouse buttons emits communications from the humanoids, who explain to them all telepathically that the ultimate weapon was one that stops useless conflict, and now a reaction is propagating through the atmosphere to bring the weapon’s benefits to all the world (it’s science!), and by the way Naome has paired off with Weiss, and Nick with Tillie.  “Outside, it was a greener world, and all over it the birds sang.”

It's all just Too Much, but rendered so smoothly as to disarm even the house misanthrope’s ire.  Three stars for this feat of making fatuity charming.

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse

“Years, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leaving me unscathed, for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind.  Universe?  Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit.  Universe?  The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of whose who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak.  The word is a mockery.  Yet how glibly men utter it!  How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!”

Yes!  Rave on!  Here is a fine specimen of the peak of cosmos-spanning rhetoric occasionally reached by early (pre-Campbell) SF, and what follows lives up to it in naïve grandeur.  It is the first paragraph of He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse, a novella from the August 1936 Amazing.

The plot is essentially that of The Man from the Atom run backwards.  Atoms are solar systems and galaxies are molecules, and the Professor has devised a substance (called Shrinx!) that will reduce humans to subatomic dimensions so they can explore the sub-universes.  When his unnamed assistant is unenthusiastic about making this one-way trip, the Prof stabs hin with the needle.  As he shrinks, the Prof drops him onto a block of Rehyllium-X (sic!), where he descends into a microscopic scratch on its surface and is chased around by a germ, fearsomely portrayed by illustrator Morey.


by Leo Morey

Soon enough, our hero finds himself surrounded by luminous masses—nebulae!—and then, as he shrinks further, stars and planets.  He alights on one occupied by gaseous intelligences, shrinks further to a planet of cave-dwellers, and then (in a powerful passage) to a planet of machines gone out of control.  Their birdlike creators have fled to the world’s moon, as their mechanical heirs maniacally tear down the remains of their civilization and remake the world closer to their circuits’ desire. 

Our hero continues downward, or smallward, through universes he cannot bring himself to recount except in the most summary form (“Suns dying . . . planets cold and dark and airless . . . last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more years of sustenance . . . [etc.]”) But then . . . he is mysteriously attracted to a tiny, distant spark of yellow, which on approach proves to be circled by planets including a tiny blue one that twinkles invitingly, so he approaches, descends, and finds himself in . . . Cleveland!

Well, actually, he lands in Lake Erie, flooding much of Cleveland as well as nearby Toledo.  Upon attaining dry land, he is accosted by aircraft shooting at him, which he finds annoying.  He is bundled into a vehicle and taken to Cleveland, to a building where scientists assemble to interrogate him, but are unable to understand his thoughts, though he can read theirs.  He is not impressed by them, or humanity.  He escapes and flees into the countryside, where he is drawn to an isolated house occupied by a writer, of science fiction of course, who is sufficiently enlightened to be capable of receiving his thought, and to whom the shrinking man tells his tale before continuing his apparently endless and by now wearisome voyage.

In one sense this is an odd story for Amazing to reprint, since it appeared in the 1946 anthology Adventures and Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas—one of the oldest stories in the book, and the only one from Amazing.  That book is so well known that stories included in it are much more likely to be familiar to current Amazing readers than most of Sol Cohen’s other reprints.  I read that anthology when I was a kid and wondered what this old-fashioned story based on scientific nonsense was doing in the company of Heinlein, Asimov, et al.  But I’m younger than that now and can better appreciate its hokey majesty.  Four stars, allowing for its age.

Henry Hasse (b. 1913) began publishing SF in 1933; this is his third published story.  Aside from it, he is best known for collaborating with Ray Bradbury on a few minor early stories.  None of his other work, which has appeared sporadically over the decades, has garnered the recognition that this story has. 

One side note: This story presents a very early occurrence of what later was named Tuckerization, after its heavy use by Wilson Tucker: giving fictional characters the names of real members of the SF community.  The Cleveland writer to whom the shrinking man tells his story is named Stanton Cobb Lentz, obviously a reference to Stanton A. Coblentz, a prolific SF writer mainly of the late ‘20s and ‘30s, whose work is nowadays most charitably described as quaint. 

The Last Day, by Richard Matheson


by Robert Kay

In Richard Matheson’s The Last Day (Amazing, April/May 1953), the Sun is about to destroy Earth (it’s swollen and red and much too hot).  Protagonist wakes up after the last night, which he and friends have spent in drunken, lustful, and/or senselessly destructive pursuits.  He decides this approach to the end is unsatisfactory, and after wrestling with his conscience reluctantly heads to his parents’ house (shooting an attacker en route).  He has avoided this visit for years because of his mother’s excessive piety.  But on this final hot day, she’s cool, and they hang out waiting for the end.  The editor blurbs: “Waxing philosophical is like waxing a floor; it is powerful easy to fall on your face while trying it.” Matheson does not.  Four stars, mainly for keeping just on the right side of bathos as he renders the conventional sentiments.

Science of Man: War Is Peace, by Leon E. Stover

Leon E. Stover is back with another of his “Science of Man” articles, War Is Peace, written in his usual dogmatic style.  He takes on the likes of Konrad Lorenz (of On Aggression), arguing that aggression is not a mode of behavior that we must sublimate or otherwise redirect, but a goal-directed extension of human social organization.  He says: “The ethologists have nothing to offer that can improve on what Karl von Clauswitz said of war in the 19th century: that it is an extension of politics carried on by different means.” And he concludes: “There is no magic solution to be found in animal behavior studies, psychology, or biology.  Do not be misled.  The only solution is better politics.  But we have to know that to want it.” Well, maybe—he has no suggestions for how we get there in practice.  But Stover recounts much entertaining anthropological lore along the way.

Three stars.

Summing Up

Well, that wasn’t bad at all.  The new material is lively and interesting, and even the reprints are all readable or better, with nothing grossly stupid or incompetent.  Admittedly, that shouldn’t be the standard, but in Sol Cohen-world it does make a difference.  This issue is a magazine that one might actually purchase for enjoyment and not as a duty, a change not to be sneezed at.  Can it continue?

[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, Serial

[October 2, 1968] Future History Lessons (November 1968 IF)

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by David Levinson

Saving the past

Around the turn of the century, the British in Egypt set out to regulate the flooding of the Nile by building a dam at Aswan, near the First Cataract, a little under 150 miles north of what is today the border between Egypt and Sudan. They limited the height of the dam in order to prevent the submergence of the island of Philae and the many monuments there, but still raised the height twice by the mid-1930s. The reservoir nearly overflowed the top in 1946, and it became increasingly clear that the dam’s storage capabilities were insufficient for modern Egypt.

King Farouk favored the construction of dams in Sudan and Ethiopia, where cooler temperatures would mean less loss of water due to evaporation, but when he was overthrown, the new government under Nasser preferred a larger dam at Aswan under Egyptian control. One of the reasons for the nationalization of the Suez Canal was that shipping fees would pay for the new dam. The change in plans alarmed archaeologists, who pointed out that the entirety of the ancient province of Nubia would be flooded, inundating numerous ancient monuments and sites. In 1959, Egypt and Sudan appealed to UNESCO for help, and thus was born the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia.

The most impressive of the monuments to be rescued are the temples of Abu Simbel, built by Ramses II in the mid-13th century B.C. to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Kadesh. Best known is the Great Temple, dedicated to Amun, Ra-Horakty, Ptah and the deified Ramses himself. The entrance is flanked by four statues of the pharaoh, each over 65 feet tall. Nearby is a temple dedicated to Hathor and Ramses’ favorite wife Nefertari.

Ramses gets a face lift.

But how do you rescue something like that? A freestanding temple can be taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt elsewhere. This was done with the temple of Kalabsha, in work funded and supervised by West Germany. The Ramesseum was carved into sandstone cliffs. One suggestion was to build a clear freshwater dam around the temples and create underwater viewing chambers. Instead, an international team of archaeologists, engineers, and heavy construction experts have spent the last four years carefully carving the entire site into enormous blocks with an average weight of 20 tons and moving the whole thing to a new site some 650 feet back from the Nile and over 200 feet higher. The work is finished, and on September 22nd the reconstructed Ramesseum was opened to the public. Let’s hope that the many other rescue projects are just as successful.

Optimists and pessimists

This has been a rough year all around the world, and so it’s natural to turn to our entertainment to make us feel better. Unfortunately, the trend in science fiction seems to be toward unhappy endings, and this month’s IF seems to lean more to the pessimistic side. It also takes us to Ancient Egypt in the far future.

The Waw is bored. Art by Vaughn Bodé

The Computer Conspiracy (Part 1 of 2), by Mack Reynolds

Regular readers of the big American SF magazines will be familiar with Mack Reynolds’ People’s Capitalism, in which every citizen is granted Inalienable Basic shares that pay dividends that are enough to live off, while the more ambitious can earn Variable Basic shares and move up in the world. Meanwhile, the Universal Credit Card serves all economic and identification functions. All of that is made possible by a massive computerized data bank. What if a hostile power could tap into that data bank, or worse yet change or erase the data?

Action in the subway of abandoned Manhattan. Art by Gaughan

This first half of Reynolds’ new novel is delivered mostly in the form of lectures telling the protagonist things he already knows. Reynolds can usually make this sort of thing interesting, but normally he doesn’t rely on pages of dialogue for his exposition. Much of it seems to be based on Vance Packard’s The Naked Society from a few years ago, which he explicitly mentions. This is interspersed with a couple of action scenes, one of which is overly detailed to the point of being interesting only to practitioners of karate, and the other is largely taken from the recent Among the Bad Baboons. All in all, not Reynolds’ best work, but I don’t see how the second half can be anything but story, so the whole thing should be better.

A low three stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

This month, del Rey delves into the science of ecology, which studies the interrelationships of living things and their environment. It’s the sort of thing that will be crucial in establishing a colony on another planet, but it’s rarely dealt with in science fiction, except as an occasional aside. It’s also sadly neglected in the real world, though that’s beginning to change. There’s a lot here for SF writers to explore.

Four stars.

Creatures of Light, by Roger Zelazny

Sometime in the distant future, all of humanity lies between the poles of the House of Life, ruled over by Osiris, and the House of Death, ruled over by Anubis. Now, an old threat is returning from outside, and various factions must take steps to stop it.

Anubis and Osiris determine the fates of humanity. Art by P. Reiber

The obvious comparison here is to Zelazny’s Lord of Light, though the “gods” here make the spacemen pretending to be the Hindu gods look like apemen banging rocks together. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote in a letter to Science earlier this year, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It’s all very Zelazny in terms of style and construction. However, there’s no actual story here; it’s just the author introducing various characters and establishing the conflict.

It says on the cover that this is an excerpt from an upcoming novel. That’s enough to save its rating, but the Lord of Light excerpts that ran in F&SF were much more successful as stand-alone pieces. I’m probably interested in seeing the whole thing, but something with a bit more of a traditional structure (if possible) would have been better.

A tentative three stars.

Where the Time Went, by James H. Schmitz

Everyone is familiar with those times when you set out to get a lot done, and suddenly it’s the end of the day and you’ve accomplished next to nothing. That happens to writer George Belk every day until his agent puts him in touch with someone who can help.

I suspect Schmitz was inspired by a couple of days like those George describes. It’s a cute story, but it doesn’t play to any of the author’s strengths, especially his ability to create characters.

Three stars.

Now That Man Is Gone, by James Blish

The Waw has been nine years old for over 2,000 years. Humanity has been extinct for 1,994 years. The aliens who care for him call him the Waw, because he is the Next-to-Last, but there is no sign of the Ya. Until now.

Art uncredited

This is the most optimistic story in the issue, which seems odd coming from Blish, though it is tinged with melancholy as well. It’s also the inverse of a concept that forms the core of many Ray Bradbury stories. Nice enough, but nothing special.

Three stars.

Wizard Ship, by F. Haines Price

Primitive tribesman Hin bravely boards a ship of the gods which has descended from the sky. He soon figures out that the gods are mere mortals who plan to sell him into slavery. The three unscrupulous spacers aboard also don’t realize that primitive isn’t the same as stupid.

Price is this month’s new author, and it shows in his writing. The story is too long, and the darkly ironic ending isn’t worth the trip.

A low two stars.

Bookmobile, by Charles L. Harness

A report from an alien librarian describes how humanity lost the ability to read thanks to everything moving to audio.

What an incredibly stupid story; nothing about it makes any sense. It ignores the fate of the deaf when everything is spoken and nothing is written, which is odd considering a key point is that the librarian can’t hear. I’m also not sure how you look things up when it’s all audio. Harness is an attorney, you’d think he would find that important.

One star, because it makes me angry every time I think about it.

The Perfect Secretary, by Mike Kirsch

On the day Albert Willis opens his new business, a strange man offers him a free trial of an automatic secretary. It can write articles and letters, retrieve reference materials from a host of locations, and pretty much do his job for him. It’s rather more than he or its makers suspect.

Willis is presented with his new secretary. Art by Wallace Wood

An awful story about awful people being awful. And it comes with another dark ending. Kirsch seems to be another new author, though maybe he’s sold things in other genres. The writing is decent enough, but all the characters are horrible.

Two stars.

Summing up

That’s another month of IF in the bag. There sure are a lot of familiar authors here not putting their best foot forward. And Zelazny’s piece really deserves a grade of Incomplete. There’s not even enough there to tell us what the rest is going to be like. Add in all the attempts at being dark and gritty, and the whole thing’s rather unsatisfying. At least the serials are back.

Science fiction from A(simov) to Z(elazny). That Zelazny piece might be another part of the new novel.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[September 30, 1968] A spoonful of sugar… (October 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Sputnik all over again?

Last week, the Soviets produced their latest space spectacular, potentially leaving America in the dust again.  Zond 5, launched September 14, was sent around the moon, returning safely to Earth on the 22nd.

It's tempting to say, "What's the big deal," right?  We've sent probes to the moon, too, and the Russkies have orbited lunar satellites and soft-landed spacecraft.  What's special about Zond?  Well, it's suspected that "Zond", a monicker usually reserved for interplanetary spacecraft, is really a lunar-adapted Soyuz.  That means the Communists have completed a successful, robotic dry run for a human mission to the moon.  We haven't even launched our first manned Apollo yet!

So we're in something of a race.  Apollo 7 will go up in a couple of weeks, testing the spacecraft for an endurance run in Earth orbit.  Apollo 8 is due to be a circumlunar shot, to be launched near the end of the year.  That's the one to beat: if the Soviets make that journey before us, that'll be a feather in their cap.

That said, while our program was delayed 20 months due to the tragedy of Apollo 1 last year, the Soviet lunar program has undergone some setbacks, too.  Most notably, their Saturn equivalent appears to be having teething troubles.  While they might be able to send a Soyuz around the moon with their current rockets, landing cosmonauts will require a beefier launch system.  Our Saturn is already man-rated.

If I were a betting man, I'd give the odds of the Soviets beating us around the moon at around 50/50.  But as for landing on the moon, which is still planned for some time next year, I think we're still favored to win that one.

The medicine

This month's issue of Analog starts off extremely well.  Savor the taste of the opening piece, as it's what will sustain you through the rest…


by Kelly Freas

The Pirate, by Poul Anderson

Trevelyan is the agent of an arcane, galaxy-wide service.  Most of the such agents are employed for scouting, search and rescue, and mediation services.  This time, Trevelyan is on a mission of crime prevention.  His suspect: Murdoch Juan and his partner, Faustina.  Ostensibly, they aim to set up pre-made colonies on the marginal world of Good Luck, offering transport and homes to settlers at a bargain.  Trevelyan knows such endeavors are never profitable, and he suspects a shady angle.


by Kelly Freas

Such concerns are confirmed when he and his alien shipmate, Smokesmith, discover Murdoch's true target: a once-inhabited world, seared with abated radiation, abounding in empty cities ripe for occupation.  But is that what the dead race would have wanted?

Poul Anderson's writing ranges from turgid to sublime.  This piece is much closer to the latter end of the scale, and it benefits from lacking the author's typical linguistic tics.  In addition to being a good read and an excellent depiction of a true alien race, I appreciate the moral questions raised and the conservationist attitude expressed.  This would be good required reading for any apprentice building contractor or would-be Schliemann.

Five stars.

Mission of Ignorance, by Christopher Anvil


by Leo Summers

The galactic aliens have returned.  Last time, they brought three gifts to revolutionize our food production, our computers, and our birth control—and leave us completely at their mercy.  This time, Earth is being a bit more circumspect.  Rather than accepting the ambassadors with open arms, a buck 2nd Lieutenant is dispatched to treat with them—with absolutely no briefing at all, but with a set of instructions designed to terrify and befuddle the extraterrestrials.

I often joke that every Chris Anvil story begins with [Military rank] [Name] [present participle verb], and this is no exception.  I also, less jokingly, note that Chris Anvil's stories for Analog tend to be smug, stupid affairs.  Thus, I was surprised to find I didn't hate this piece.  It is somewhat smug, and the latter half is all explanation, but the premise is kind of interesting.

Right on the 2/3 border.  I'll be generous and say three stars.

Taking the Lid Off, by William T. Powers

The "lid" in this science article refers to Earth's atmosphere, which prevents us from seeing the universe in most of the interesting wavelengths like X-ray and infrared.  Powers, who wrote a terrific article on measuring charged particles last year, offers up a less impressive, but serviceable piece on lunar and orbital telescopes.  It's just a bit less coherent than his last article, and with fewer revelations, although I did appreciate his explanation of using gravity gradients to stabilize satellites.

Three stars.

The Steiger Effect, by Betsy Curtis


by Leo Summers

Human merchants arrive at a planet that views internal combustion as a kind of witchcraft.  Nevertheless, they buy our engines when they are demonstrated to work.  But the engines all mysteriously conk out when humans reach a certain distance away.  Turns out they—and all internal combustion engines, everywhere—run on psi energy, and always have. 'Humans secretly have psi powers and don't know it' certainly sounds like a plot tailor-made for Campbell, doesn't it?

Never mind that the premise makes no sense; the division of the (otherwise completely humanoid) alien society into "Men" (those who do with their minds) and "Boys" (those who do with their brawn) hews too close to a metaphor of antebellum days in the American South for comfort.

One star.

Underground, by Lawrence A. Perkins


by Kelly Freas

A senator is kidnapped by a Latin American insurgency that plans to harness earthquakes to topple their oppressive dictator [a plot reminiscent of the Doctor Who episode "Enemy of the World" -Ed].

This piece reads like one of those Ted Thomas mini science articles from F&SF turned into a story, except there's no real story—just a lot of show and tell.

Two stars.

The Tuvela (Part 2 of 2), by James H. Schmitz


by John Schoenherr

Last installment, we learned that the colony of Nandy-Cline was about to be invaded by the rapacious Parahuans.  The only thing holding them back was the concern that humanity was led by a shadow cabal of "Tuvela", a subrace of genetic supermen.  Now, the security of the world lies in the hands of the youthful Dr. Nile Etland, who must convince the Parahuan that she is one of the mythical Tuvela.  Luckily, she has a quartet of sapient otters as wingmen…

This is a frustrating novel.  The premise is excellent, and Schmitz is one of SF's few authors who lets women be heroes.  What keeps this book at the three-star level for me is the lack of characterization.  I have a vague idea of who Ticos Cay is, the two-hundred year old man who we meet as a prisoner of the Parahuan.  I even kind of know the various Parahuan.  But Etland is a cipher, utterly uninteresting as a person.  She goes through her James Bond maneuvers with competence and a few jitters, but with precious little demonstration of a soul.

My nephew enjoyed this serial a lot.  It is creative, and the biology of the world well realized.  If only I could say the same for Nile Etland.

Three stars.

Doing the math

Thus ends the month with Analog clocking in at 2.9, just under the 3-star line.  Ahead of it are The Farthest Reaches (3.4), Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.1) and IF (3.1).  The pack below it is far below—Galaxy (2.4), Worlds of Fantasy (2.3), and Fantastic (2).

The worthy stuff would fill two magazines, which would be an impressive amount if it hadn't taken seven publications to produce it.  Women penetrated the magazines pretty well this month, but their lack of pieces in Worlds of Fantasy and The Farthest Reaches brought the aggregate percentage down to 11%.

And so, with science fiction as with science fact, we find ourselves in a bit of a holding pattern, awaiting what's to come next month.  But whether it's the Soviets or the Americans, Campbell or Ferman, someone will entertain us.

And that's worth being ready for!

[Stop Press: Mark just got his reviews of this month's New Worlds to me.  It's too late to run an article, so we'll be doubling up next month.  For the sake of statistics, however, the magazine raises the amount of worthy material slightly, and it reduces feminine participation in SF magazine prose for October 1968 to 10%.  Stay tuned…]




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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 24, 1968] Reconstructing The Past (The Farthest Reaches & Worlds of Fantasy #1)

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by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall

Yesterday, in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, a huge celebration took place. International dignitaries attended, US Marines fired cannons, Local Choirs sang specially composed songs.

What was all this in aid of? The beginning of one of the strangest architectural projects of our time. The reconstruction of London Bridge.

An Abridged History

A painting of Old London Bridge, in the 18th Century. A stone bridge of many arches with georgian houses built on it as boatman sail underneath it.
Old London Bridge, in the 18th Century

Whilst there has been a bridge across the Thames for at least as long ago as The Romans, the longest lasting and one that has been immortalized in song is the medieval “Old London Bridge”, which was completed in 1205. As you are probably aware it was constantly beset with problems. After endless changes, removal of properties and attempts to shore it up, a committee in 1821 was formed to build the New London Bridge.

The ”New” London Bridge,early in the morning a granite bridge with arches, with a road, pedestrian walkways and a small number of cars
The ”New” London Bridge, at a less busy time

This new version was opened to the public in 1831 and has fared reasonably well for over a century. However, the increased volume of traffic has caused it to slowly sink. This was not as much of an issue in the era of the horse and cart, but with hundreds of tonnes of steel sitting on it every rush hour, and not prepared for the passage of millions of Londoners, a change had to be made.

New London Bridge with high volumes of traffic
Not made for this kind of weight

In order to recoup some of the costs for the destruction of the old bridge and construction of a new one, Ivan Luckin of the Common Council of the City of London, put it up for auction. After a promotional campaign, two dozen serious bids came in. In April, the winner was announced to be Robert P. McCullough of McCullough Motors, planning to rebuild it in Arizona.

“In The Modern House They Throw In A Few Antiques”

What does a motor company want with 100,000 tons of granite? To understand that you have to know a little more about where it is going.

Lake Havasu City as pictured from the air in the late 1950s
Not your typical holiday destination

In 1938, the Parker Dam was built on the Colorado River, providing water and power to Southern California. Behind it sits the reservoir of Lake Havasu. In 1942 the US government built an auxiliary airfield and support base there. What they were apparently unaware of was the land was not theirs to take but was actually owned by Victor and Corinne Spratt. After the war, the couple were able to get the land back and turn it into a holiday resort.

In 1958 McCullough enters our story. He was looking for a site to test onboard motors and convinced the Spratts to sell most of their land to him. He turned it from a resort into a city and set up a chainsaw factory there in 1964.

However, this is not exactly prime real estate. Lake Havasu City sits in the middle of the Mojave desert, around 40 miles from the Colorado River Reservation, a hundred miles from the Hoover Dam and almost equidistant between Las Vegas, Palm Springs and Phoenix. There is little else of interest, unless you like a lot of rocks. What could attract people? Maybe a piece of history…

Anglophilia

McCullough standing in front of the New London Bridge, arms spread wide
McCullough, now the proud owner of the world’s largest antique

Whilst this may be the strangest and, at over $2.4m, possibly the most expensive purchase of a piece of British design, it is not unique. The Queen Mary currently sits at Long Beach, California and the Church of St. Mary Aldermanbury was recently relocated to Missouri.

Will this grand venture pay off? It will take at least three years to complete the project, so we will see if in the mid-'70s people are coming from all over to see London Bridge, or if Lake Havasu City becomes another ghost town.

Ghosts of the Past

Talking of this kind of reconstruction project, this month, across two publications, I read 21 short stories, all of which are attempting to revive something of the past.

The Farthest Reaches
The Farthest Reaches hardback book cover
Joseph Elder is not a name I was familiar with before. He appears to be a fan of the old school, endorsing the “sense of wonder” over literary pretensions. As such he has asked his contributors to only include stories set in distant galaxies containing Clarke’s ideals of “wonder, beauty, romance, novelty”. Let’s see how they have done:

The Worm That Flies by Brian W. Aldiss
As these are sorted alphabetically, we of course start with Mr. Aldiss (at least until Alan Aardvark gets more prolific). And, just as obviously, it is one of the strangest in this volume.

Argustal crosses the world of Yzazys collecting stones to build his parapattener. When he is then able to communicate with Nothing, he hopes to answer the strange questions emerging about phantoms called “childs” and the dimension of time.

The ideas of this story are not particularly new and the mystery is reasonably obvious. However, what Aldiss manages to do well is create such a strange unnerving atmosphere, such that it carries the reader along and raises it up above standard fare of this type.

A low four stars

Kyrie by Poul Anderson
The spaceship Raven is sent to investigate a supernova, a crew consisting of fifty humans and one Auregian, a being of pure energy. This being, Lucifer, has its orders communicated telepathically by technician Eloise Waggoner.

I am not usually as much a fan of Anderson’s science fiction compared to his fantasy, but this one impressed me. It has an interesting mix of hard-science with psi-powers but a strong character focus. A compelling read.

Four Stars

Tomorrow Is a Million Years by J. G. Ballard
I am not quite sure why the cover claims these tales are never before published, as this one has been printed a number of times, including in New Worlds two years ago.

I don’t have much to add to Mark’s review, I will just say it is a strange, but wonderful piece.

Four Stars

Pond Water by John Brunner
Men attempt to create their ultimate defender, Alexander. The creation, indestructible and with all the knowledge of humanity, proceeds to invade and take control of more and more worlds. But what is Alexander to do when there are no more worlds to conquer?

This progresses well and Brunner shows us the scale of conquest vividly in such a short space. Unfortunately, the ending is so pat it wouldn’t even appear in the worst Twilight Zone episode.

Three Stars

The Dance of the Changer and the Three by Terry Carr
Forty-two men died on a mining expedition on the gas giant Loarra. According to a PR man who was there, the answer to what happened lies in an ancient myth of the native energy forms, The Dance of the Changer and the Three.

This is a very challenging story and you may need to read through a couple of times to fully understand it. However, it is definitely worth your patience. Carr really makes an effort to show the Loarra as truly alien, but not in an unknowably menacing way as Lovecraft does. Rather they have a completely different understanding of what life and reality is.

Five Stars

Crusade by Arthur C. Clarke
On an extra-galactic planet, a crystalline computerized creature sets out to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

What Clarke gives us here is a kind of fable about the dangers of biases and science for its own sake. A more cynical take than is usual for him; perhaps Kubrick's influence is rubbing off?

Four Stars

Ranging by John Jakes
Jakes’ tale is set centuries in the future, where generations range the universe, in order to map it and send back data. Whilst Delors wants to carefully explore as instructed, Jaim wishes to rebel and jump trillions of light years at a time.

This could have been an interesting take on exploration but it mostly descends into the two leads yelling at each other “you cannot understand because you’re just a man\girl”.

Two Stars

Mind Out of Time by Keith Laumer
Performing an experimental jump to Andromeda, the crew of the Extrasolar Exploratory Module find themselves at the end of space, where they start to experience reality outside of time.

I feel like Laumer was going for something analogous to the final section of 2001. However, he lacks the skill of Kubrick and Clarke, making what could be mysterious and profound merely serviceable.

A low Three Stars

The Inspector by James McKimmey
Steve Terry, hero of the planet of Tnp, went into orbit, walked out of his spaceship and suffocated. Forest and his team are sent to investigate why this happened, and why no one has attempted to retrieve the body.

This is the one story that does not conform to the brief—there is no particular reason this could not be set on Earth. In fact, there isn’t much need for it to be SFnal at all. With half a dozen small changes you could have it contemporaneously on a newly independent Caribbean Island.

Putting that aside, it is not a bad story, just rather pedestrian, where I had deduced the themes and mystery by the second page.

A low Three Stars

To the Dark Star by Robert Silverberg
Three scientists, a human man, a human woman altered to suit alien environments and a microcephalon, are sent to observe a star. One problem: they all hate each other.

Your feelings for this story will likely depend on how you feel about unpleasant protagonists. The narrator in this piece is incredibly so and the whole thing left me cold.

Two Stars

A Night in Elf Hill by Norman Spinrad
After 18 years of service, Spence is depressed that his travels in space will be over and he must choose a single planet to settle on. He writes to his psychologist brother Frank begging him to talk him out of going back to the mysterious city of The Race With No Name.

This is quite an impressive short story. Spinrad manages to seamlessly move from science fiction to fantasy to horror, creating a real emotional thrill. He also does it through a letter that has a unique tone of voice and gives a whole new sense to Spence’s descriptions.

It does sound like it might resemble what I have read of the Star Trek episode The Menagerie but I think Spinrad spins this yarn well enough that it doesn’t bother me.

Four Stars

Sulwen's Planet by Jack Vance
On Sulwen’s Planet, sit the wreckage of millennia old ships of two different species. Tall blue creatures, nicknamed The Wasps, and small white creatures, nicknamed the Sea Cows. A team of ambitious scientists departs from Earth, all determined to be the first to unravel these aliens' secrets.

Like Silverberg’s piece, this is also a tale of squabbling scientists, here primarily focused on the two linguists. Competent, enjoyable but forgettable.

Three Stars

Worlds of Fantasy #1

Worlds of Fantasy #1 Cover by Jack Gaughan depicting a human baby being bottle fed by a green amphibious creature
Cover and all illustrations by Jack Gaughan

After a 15-year hiatus Lester Del Rey returns to editing. He opens the magazine with a rambling editorial taking us from ancient firesides, through folktales, modern uptick in astrology, Tolkien, and theories of displacement, before concluding it doesn’t really matter as long as the stories are fun.

Well, are they? Let’s find out:

The Mirror of Wizardry by John Jakes
Brak the Barbarian shown on the floor after fighting the wizard
This marks the return of Brak the Barbarian, late of Cele Lalli’s Fantastic issues.

As Brak is fleeing from Lord Magnus he rescues a woman from rock demons. She reveals herself to be Nari, also fleeing but from Lord Garr of Gilgamarch and his wizard Valonicus, who can send forth shadow creatures after them with his magic mirror. Nari’s back is tattooed with a map to a treasure, one that could win or destroy a kingdom. Together the two attempt to flee across the Mountains of Smoke, but can they outrun such power?

This is a pretty standard story, full of the usual cliches of these kinds of tales. It probably would have managed a low three stars, except that it treats a rape victim very poorly. Brak does not seem to understand why a woman running scared would be wary of getting naked in front of a stranger who angrily badgers her for information about torture and sexual assault. And the ending is just disturbing in the wrong way.

A low two stars

Death is a Lonely Place by Bill Warren
Miklos Sokolos is a 68-year-old vampire who leaves his crypt in Parkline Cemetery to feed. But when he meets his latest potential victim, he is not sure if he can kill her.

I was originally surprised to see this here as it seemed like it would be more suited to Lowdnes’ Magazine of Horror, but, as it went on, I realized it was less a Lord Ruthven style tale, and more a meditation on how much of a curse the situation might be.

More thoughtful than expected.

Four Stars

As Is by Robert Silverberg
A turbaned man, descending on a rope from the sky with an oil can to aid another man standing by his car
Sam Norton is transferred from New York to Los Angeles, but his company will not pay moving costs. To save money he rents a U-Haul and buys an unusual secondhand car that was left for repairs a year ago but never returned to. Not long after Sam sets out, the prior owner returns and wants his vehicle back. How will he catch up with Sam before he reaches LA? By renting a flying horse, of course!

Eminently silly short.

Two stars for me, although car owners might give it three.

What the Vintners Buy by Mack Reynolds
Matt Williams is a hedonist who has tried everything twice but has grown bored. As such he approaches Old Nick to make a deal for the ultimate pleasure.

Yes, another “deal with the devil” story, a dull and talky example. I can’t help but wonder if this was a reject from The Devil His Due.

One Star

Conan and the Cenotaph by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp
Conan, arms up against a wall as he is attacked by a gelatinous creature
A young Conan “untampered by the dark deceits of the East” is working for the King of Turan, transporting back a treaty from the King of Kusan. Enroute their guide, Duke Feng, tells Conan of an ancient treasure hidden in a haunted valley and suggests together they can retrieve it.

This is another new tale of Conan from his biggest fans, however Carter and de Camp lack even a quarter of Howard’s skill. Over described, dull and the plot feels stretched even over these 10 pages. This would be bad enough but it, as you can probably tell from the quoted phrase above, invokes some horrible racism.

This can be seen most prominently in the villain of the piece. Duke Feng encapsulates every negative Asian stereotype, managing to somehow be both Fu Manchu and a sniveling traitorous coward. Whilst there are problems in Howard’s original work (the finer points of which my colleague Cora and I have expended much paper debating) this takes it many steps further.

One star

After Armageddon by Paris Flammonde
At the start of the “Final War”, Tom accidentally stumbles on the fountain of youth. Centuries later, after everyone else has died, Tom continues to wander the Earth.

This is another last man tale, the melancholic philosophical kind that used to fill the pages of New Worlds a few years back. This is not a great example and doesn’t add anything new to the already overused subgenre.

Two Stars

A Report on J. R. R. Tolkien by Lester Del Rey
The editor gives a look at the publishing history of The Lord of the Rings, the status of its planned sequels and the effect it is having on the industry.

Fine for what it is but, at only two pages, it does not delve into the why or give any information not already reported in multiple places.

Three Stars

The Man Who Liked by Robert Hoskins
A small man appears in the city dispensing joy to the residents. Who is he? And why is he being so generous?

A pleasant vignette, but one where you are continually waiting for the penny to drop. When it does, it is not where I would have predicted it going, but it works well.

Three Stars

Delenda Est by Robert E. Howard
The first printing of one of the many unpublished manuscripts that were left by the late author. This one is primarily a historical tale, set in the Vandal Kingdom of the Fifth Century. As King Genseric ponders his position, a mysterious stranger comes to convince him to sack Rome.

Howard clearly did his research and manages to explain the history of this much neglected period in an entertaining fashion. It also only contains a mild piece of speculative content (the rather obvious identity of the stranger), which is probably why it remained unsold.

Three Stars

However by Robert Lory
A large sea serpent peering over two men in a row boat
After having accidentally caused his boatman to be eaten, Hamper finds himself stuck in Grath. There, people are committed to only doing their profession, no matter how useless or obsolete it is. As such, getting across the water is to prove incredibly tricky.

Robert Lory has been writing for the main magazines for over 5 years, with some modern feeling pieces under his belt. This, however, feels like a reprint from the 19th century, one that might have been intended as a satire of mechanization but now reads as a tall tale.

Serviceable but silly and rambling.

Two Stars

A Delicate Balance

Artist's impression of What the New-New London Bridge may look like, a long steel structure only supported on either end
What the New-New London Bridge may look like

As can be seen, trying to do stories in an old style can be difficult work. Some, like Anderson and Warren, are able to use the ideas in a new way to make something profound. Others, such as de Camp and Carter, create an object of significantly less value. Whether constructing prose or pontoons it takes both skill and imagination few possess. However, those that do make the journey rewarding.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 20, 1968] It comes and goes (October 1968 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Out and in

Being something of a geography buff, one of my favorite games is to go to a thrift shop and inspect their globe collection.  I can generally tell what year a globe was manufactured from the configuration of countries.  And while we haven't had anything like the banner year of 1960, when more than a dozen African states sprang into existence, nevertheless, there are still enough changes every year to keep the game going.

For instance, this month, the Kingdom of Swaziland with its 400,000 denizens, achieved independence from the United Kingdom.  The second-smallest African country, is not entirely free, of couse.  It is completely surrounded by South Africa, with all transportation lines running through Pretoria.  The money is South African.  All telegraph lines go through South Africa.  As for their economy, it's mostly propped up by British hand-outs.

But they do have sovereignty, something South Africa tried to snatch from them time and again, but which was thwarted by the British.  Plus, the new country has vast mineral reserves of asbestos and iron, plus forests and fertile soil.  So King Sobhuza I just might make a go of things.

Going the other way, the people of West Irian (formerly Netherlands New Guinea) have has been annexed as Indonesia's 26th province.  Six years ago, the United Nations stepped in to stop a budding conflict between the Dutch and the Indonesians, who both laid claim to the region.  Now the 800,000 poverty-stricken inhabitants are officially under the auspices of General Suharto.  Sometime soon, they will be given the choice between independence and a union with their neighboring would-be superpower.  It is anyone's guess how free and honest the local elections can be under the Suharto dictatorship (i.e. don't expect a free West Papua any time soon…)


The Morning Star Flag—which you won't see flown until and unless the Irians get independence…

Good and bad

Speaking of mixed bags, this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction has much to recommend it, but then there's all the rest of the magazine.  See for yourself:


by Ronald Walotsky

The Meddler, by Larry Niven

Bruce Cheeseborough, Jr. is a private dick operating some time in the near future.  While in the course of waging a one man crusade against the new crime boss, Lester Dunhaven Sinclair, a certain meddler crosses his path.  Said meddler first appears as a nebbishy, softish man, but he quickly betrays himself as a protean blob, possessed of all manner of wondrous powers.  The "Martian" offers to help the detective, granting him invulnerability, the gift of flight, time dilation…but Cheeseborough finds the tilting of the scales unsporting.

Still, when the detective makes his final assault on Chez Sinc, it's going to take every resource he has, from human wit to alien marvel, to come out the other end alive…

The Meddler is a brilliant piece of genre hybridization, combining hard-boiled noir with cunning science fiction.  Every piece of the story's myriad puzzles is meticulously laid out, so that an astute reader can figure out the revelations just before they materialized.  Beyond that, the piece is funny as well as perfectly paced.

Five stars, and a nice broadening of the author's talents.

Time Was, by Phyllis Murphy

Picture a man so obsessed with saving time, that he applies the art of speed reading to life.  You know: skipping over most of it, trying to absorb only the salient points.  Except, how do you know which bits are the important ones?  And what if you lose the ability to focus on any given thing in the pursuit of apprehending everything?

This story reminded me of a friend who insisted a person must do several things at once to be truly efficient.  If she read the paper, she listened to the radio.  When we watched television together, she'd inevitably crochet.  Remarkably efficient…except half the time, she lost track of the show's plot and had to ask us what was going on.

Three stars.

The Wide World of Sports , by Harvey Jacobs

They say that football is a bloody sport, but it's nowhere near as bloody as whatever Jacobs is describing in this story, featuring machine guns, the slaughter of all audience members of a certain name, and general mayhem.

This story would be more effective if it made a lick of sense and/or had a plot.  Two stars.


by Gahan Wilson

Coffee Break, by D. F. Jones

There's a Laugh-In bit where the projected news break underneath the action runs, "The United Nations today voted unanimously on everything; UN police are still looking for who put grass in the vents."

This story covers the exact same ground, but it takes much longer to do it, and not in nearly as funny a manner.

Two stars.

Dance Music for a Gone Planet, by Sonya Dorman

Fiddling after Rome is burnt?  A tinge of hope for a post-apocalyptic ode?

I'm not sure—I found this one a bit too obtuse to understand.  Maybe I'm the obtuse one.

Two stars.

Possible, That's All!, by Arthur C. Clarke

The Other Good Doctor takes umbrage at Asimov's assertion that nothing can go faster than light.  He offers up some counterexamples, but they're honestly rather feeble, and the article is not particularly coherent.

Three stars.

Try a Dull Knife, by Harlan Ellison

Eddie Burma is an empath, life of the party, and he has so much to give.  Folks are drawn to his magnetic personality like moths to flame, but, unknowingly, each takes a little bit from Burma in each encounter.  This is the price of popularity: eventually, there can be nothing left of you, the you behind the glamor and charm, because no one wants you.  They just want what rubs off.

If you've heard this refrain before, it's because Ellison delivered a soliloquy on the subject in his last collection, From the Land of Fear.  Harlan is afeared that no one really loves him; they just love The Talent that resides within his physical husk.  Readers of that collection also have encountered Knife in its embryonic form, a snippet of it among the story fragments at the beginning of the book.

Anyway, I've said it before and I'll say it again: if your soul overlaps with Harlan's, then his writing resonates with you as The Truth.  If you are much unlike the man (as, for instance, I am), then you can admire the way he strings words together, but they don't move much.

Three stars for me.  Four stars, perhaps, for you.

Segregationist, by Isaac Asimov

Organ transplants are the topic du jour in both science and science fiction.  I find it particularly interesting that much is made of the muddled identity of a person when they incorporate the parts of other humans (viz. Van Scyoc's A Trip to Cleveland General in this month's Galaxy).  This time around, Asimov takes things a step further: are humans less human if they have metal hearts?  And are robots more human if they incorporate biological components?

I liked this story, one of the better pieces Dr. A has done since largely going on fiction hiatus after the launch of Sputnik.

Four stars.

The Ghost Patrol, by Ron Goulart

Speaking of crossed genres, Ghost Patrol is the latest in the Max Kearny series about an art director who solves occult crimes in his spare time.  These yarns range from hilariously clever to limp.

This one, about a free doctor beset both by celebrity ghosts and Bircher anti-freeloaders, belongs, sadly, in the latter category.

Two stars.

Little Found Satellite, by Isaac Asimov

This month's piece is worth it for the funny anecdote that forms its preface.  The rest is a pleasant, if not particularly deep, history of Saturn's telescopic observation.  The piece culminates in the discovery of Saturn's tenth moon, Janus, just outside the ring system.

Four stars.

The Fangs of the Trees, by Robert Silverberg

At a recent convention, my daughter led a panel entitled "Plants vs. People", in which the panelists and audience discussed green menaces of various kinds.  Triffids, killer ragweed, stuff like that.  I wish I'd had Fangs as an example, as it's a good one.

Zen Holbrook is runs a plantation on a world countless light years from Earth.  His trees produce a valuable, hallucinogenic-juiced fruit.  They're also quasi-sentient, something like ultra-advanced Venus Fly Traps.  Though he tries to keep his relationship with his trees strictly business, he can't help ascribing them personalities, giving them names, and treating them like pampered pets.

Which makes it all the more difficult when he gets news that all of the trees in Sector C have been afflicted with "rust", a disease that not only spells their impending death, but has the risk of spreading throughout the whole planet.  Holbrook must kill his friends lest an entire world's economy die.  Further complicating the matter is his 15-year old niece, Naomi, who would rather die than see the grove decimated.

It is implied, though never specifically stated, that there is no less destructive way to solve the problem: not only must the trees die, but so must an entire species of benign hopper-bear—a link in the infection cycle.  Lord knows what that will do the local ecosystem, but "the needs of the many…"

It's an interesting, thought-provoking piece, composed with Silverberg's usual excellence, though I'm not quite sure which side we're supposed to take, if any.  Like, do we all need to grow up and realize that ecological destruction is a valid and important necessity?  Or is Zen actually the villain?  I could have done without so much of the Uncle's attraction for his niece, too, even if it was supposed to say…something…about Zen's character.  I know that the word for people who ascribe the emotions of an author's creation to the author himself is "moron" (at least, per Larry Niven), but Silverbob sure includes a lot of just-pubescent minors in his stories…

Four stars.

Whaddaya make of that?

If you read judiciously, this month's mag is terrific, kind of like how, if you parse the news in just the right way, it's all positive developments.  Look deeper, and the seams show.  Still, whether the news or the magazine are half full or empty all depends on your temperament, I suppose.

I guess I'll leave with the wishy washy conclusion that's always true: things could be worse!




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[September 16, 1968] Siriusly? (October 1968 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Summertime, and the living ain't easy

Our longest, hottest summer began early with the shooting of Bobby Kennedy.  It heated up to the sound of Soviet bullets and tank treads in Czechoslovakia and reached a crescendo with the fiasco of a Democratic Convention in Chicago, shuddering in synchronicity with the quake in eastern Iran that killed 10,000.  Meanwhile, radioactive rain from the French H-bomb test soaks Japan, Pete Seeger's daughter, Mika, has been in a Mexico City jail for two months (for participating in anti-police protests), and the 82 crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo are still locked up in North Korea (for participating in unauthorized offshore fishing exercises).

But, hey, thanks to the war in Vietnam, unemployment is at its lowest rate since Korea.  And America has a new Queen, Miss Judith Ford, formerly Queen of Illinois.

Her "subjects" demonstrated a properly American sentiment toward the coronation.  Spurred by a collective called the New York Radical Women, several hundred protesters tossed "beauty" accoutrements into the "freedom trash can": bras, girdles, high-heeled shoes, fake eyelashes, etc.  So there was a bright spot, of sorts.

I wouldn't sent a knight out on a dog like this…

I apologize for coming off sour.  It's not just the season.  I've got a humdinger of a virus, and the latest issue of Galaxy is only making me feel worse.


by Douglas Chaffee

The Villains from Vega IV, by E. J. Gold and H. L. Gold


by Jack Gaughan

Fred Pohl, editor for Galaxy, likes to talk about how Gold, the founding editor for the magazine, was legendarily zealous with his red pen.  Not a single story made it through the slush pile (or any other) without looking like it had been through a Prussian duel.  Now, one could argue that there was merit to this approach: much of vintage Galaxy is superlative.

However, when Gold first submitted a story for an anthology Pohl was putting together, Fred could not help taking delight in a bit of revenge.  He contrived to mark everything, even innocuous conjunctions and prepositions.  When it was done, there was more red than black and white.  The dedication this must have taken!

Reportedly, Gold called Pohl up, and said something to the effect of, "Fred, you're the editor, and I'll defer to your judgment, of course, but…Jesus!"

In any event, it couldn't be this story to which Fred was referring since Villains was co-written by both Gold and his son, Eugene (but not, as I initially thought from the initials, his wife, Evelyn).  It's the silly story of Robert E. Li, President of Vega IV, who comes to Earth to find his young bride, who has run off to be in pictures.  Andytec, a diffident young android, is dispatched to accompany him as bodyguard and detective.

There are some interesting concepts, like the Vegan tradition of 36 year olds marrying 18 year olds, who themselves find new partners upon reaching 36.  At 54, one is then free to marry whomever one likes.  And there's the Bird of Perdition, a chimerical creature biologically rooted into the heads of former criminals (including, surprisingly, the Vegan President).  Semi-intelligent, they spout Poe-derivative prose when alarmed.

But all in all, the story is not funny enough, nor does it break enough ground (indeed, it feels vaguely like a washed out A Specter is Haunting Texas) to sustain its novelet length.  One good bit, however:

"Turn that bloody thing off!" he shouted at me.

"Off, sir?" I said vacantly.  "You can change channels and make it louder, but you can't turn it off.  With the 3V off, what would there be to do?  And it would be so lonely."

Two stars.

All the Myriad Ways, by Larry Niven


by Joe Wehrle, Jr.

Things look up a bit, as they always do, with Niven's latest.  An L.A. cop is trying to decode the recent rash of murders and suicides, all spontaneous, few logically motivated.  The timing suggests a connection with Crosstime, the company that just began producing vehicles that can transit parallel time tracks.  In addition to bringing back marvels from other histories—worlds where the Confederacy won the Civil War, or where the planet has been bombed into searing radioactivity—it has also discovered a philosophical crisis.  If everything that could ever be does exist somewhen, does anything you do really matter?

And would you kill/die to find out?

As usual, the value of the tale is in Niven's crisp telling.  I particularly liked the revelation that the world our detective inhabits is not our Earth.  There's not quite enough to the story to make it truly memorable.  It's more of an idea-piece (or, per the author, an anti-idea piece; he doesn't buy the idea of parallel universes, nor does he appreciate their implications.  This is the ad absurdum extension of the concept.)

Of course, I think there is a middle ground: probabilities do exist.  Just because there are two options doesn't mean their chance of occurring is 50/50.  Or as I tell folks, if I flip a coin, it's 50% likely it comes up heads or tails.  But it's 100% likely the coin falls down rather than up.

So while there may be an infinity of universes, it would seem they would all remain confined to the possible, and the preponderance tend toward the probable.  I could also see timelines sort of merging back together if they were close enough.

Anyway, a good story, and thought-provoking.  Four stars.

Thyre Planet, by Kris Neville


by Dan Adkins

One day, an alien race called the Thyres all, suddenly, disappeared.  They left behind an inhabitable world and a working, planetary teleportation booth grid.  Of course, humans jumped at the chance to settle the planet.

The hitch: each use of the booth has an infinitesimal but non-zero chance of killing the traveler.  Hundreds die each year.  A Terran scientist is dispatched to solve the problem.  Convinced it is tied to some abstruse physical law, he secures billions in funding to crash-start a Manhattan Project to rewrite cosmic law.  The endeavor takes on a life of its own, ultimately eclipsing the original problem.  Said problem remains unresolved until the end, and it turns out to be caused by something completely different.

I found this a deeply frustrating story.  Is it a satire of scientific institutions?  A cautionary tale advising us to look for simple explanations before complex ones?  A screed against hasty colonization?  it all muddles together without a satisfactory payoff.  Maybe I read it wrong.

Two stars.

Homespinner, by Jack Wodhams


by Joe Wehrle, Jr.

Boy, this was a hard one to rate.  It's about a fellow who lives in a future where houses can be done up in a day, rooms completely redecorated as quickly as one might, today, swap out a picture on the wall.  Said fellow is annoyed that his wife keeps changing his home on a weekly basis.  All he wants is some consistency in his life.  Indeed, you can't help wondering why the couple are together at all, so incompatible they seem.  The husband also seems awfully sexist, expecting his wife to stay at home and do virtually nothing but greet him cheerfully after work.

Of course, you'll figure out what's up with their relationship before it's revealed, and that bit is reasonably clever.  The problem is, the getting there is repetitive and unpleasant.  I get why, but I feel a more skilled author could have put it together better.

For some reason, however, I appreciate it enough to give it three stars.

Criminal in Utopia, by Mack Reynolds


by Brand

In yet another story exploring "People's Capitalism", the American welfare state of the 1980s, a citizen embarks on a crime spree to improve his lot.  After all, in a system where everyone is supposed to be equal, the only way to get ahead is to cheat.

The question is: in an economy where income is strictly tied to each person, and all transactions are electronicized and trackable, can a person get more than he deserves?

As usual for Reynolds, a mildly diverting story and some very interesting technologies.  Three stars.

For Your Information: The Orbit of Explorer-1, by Willy Ley

Despite the sexy subject matter (I dig space stuff), this piece on…well…the orbit of Explorer-1…is pretty dull stuff.  I think Ley's heart just isn't in these articles very often anymore.

Three stars.

I Bring You Hands, by Colin Kapp


by Virgil Finlay

A rather amoral fellow is a Hands merchant.  These are tape-programmable, robotic hands that can do a physical task an infinite number of times.  Perfect for replacing assembly line workers, tailors, cooks, you name it.  Along the way, the salesman has an affair with one of the workers whose job he causes to be roboticized.  The end is not a pleasant one for the Hands dealer.

I had a lot of hopes for this story.  I thought it was going to make some sort of statement about mechanization, the ensuing unemployment, and how society adapts to change.  Instead, it was all thrown away for a cheap, obvious, macabre finish.

Two stars.

A Visit to Cleveland General, by Sydney J. Van Scyoc


by Jack Gaughan

Two brothers were in an air-car accident.  Just one emerged.  So why does Albin have trouble distinguishing himself from the deceased Deon?  Why does he need to take a pill every morning "for memory"?  And what are those aerosols Miss Kling, the nurse at Cleveland General, keeps spraying to affect everyone's mood and recollection?  Particularly in surgery, where body parts are shuffled into various people, muddling the identifies of donor and recipient?

Visit is a decent enough piece, thematically and literally, though you'll guess what's going on very quickly.  Scientifically, it makes no lick of sense.

Three stars.

The Warbots, by Larry S. Todd


by Todd

You'd think I would be quite keen on a fictional history of legged assault vehicles.  This one, however, is both too goofy and far too long to scratch that itch.

Two stars.

Behind the Sandrat Hoax, by Christopher Anvil


by Safrani

My first thought upon reaching this final piece was, "Oh, great—a Chris Anvil epistolary story."

And that thought was justified.

It's about how a prospector on New Venus discovers that eating the raw stomach of a desert rat allows the consumer to digest water from grass, but the proud scientific community doesn't like the way the research is done and impedes progress.  All of the scientists are made of straw, you see.

I was surprised not to find this in Analog—I guess sometimes things are too lousy even for Campbell.  On the other hand, Campbell gets the credit for tainting Anvil so that he's now worthless wherever he publishes.

One star.

Dimmer than a thousand squibs

2.4 stars.  Not only is that dismal, but recall that an issue of Galaxy is half-again as long as a normal mag.

There's a reason I paused for breath halfway to tear through The Weathermonger (and that is a good read!) Anyway, all things pass, and summer's only got five days left to it.  Surely next season will see an improvement, yes?




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[September 14, 1968] Half a Loaf is Better Than None (October 1968 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

You don't have to be a sociologist to realize that the past few years have been one of cultural upheaval. The hippies, the struggle for civil rights, protests against the war in Vietnam; I could go on and on.

An example happened one week ago, when hundreds of women protested at the Miss America pageant. They asked to be treated as human beings, not as stereotyped images of artificial standards of beauty.


Members of the emerging Women's Liberation movement toss things like stiletto heels, makeup, and copies of Playboy magazine into a symbolic garbage can.

A recurring theme of these social changes is the desire for freedom. It can even be seen in popular culture. For nearly a month, for example, the number one song in the USA has been People Got to be Free by the Rascals.


They seem very serious about it.

This is a laudable goal, of course, and there's a long way to go before we can truly say that oppressed groups are liberated. An optimist might say we're halfway there.

Speaking of halfway . . .

Four of One, Half an Octad of the Other

I've been griping for quite a while about Fantastic filling its pages with reprints, along with one or two new stories per issue. Maybe somebody at the magazine heard me. Of the eight stories in the latest issue, only half are reprinted. That's progress!


Cover art by Frank R. Paul.

You can see the cover screaming New at you. Ironically, the cover art is old. It served as the back cover of the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories.


As you can see, they reversed it, covered up a pretty big part of it, and just generally made it look worse.

Did I say halfway? The four new stories take up somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the magazine. They're all clustered together at the front.

The Sound of Space, by Ross Rocklynne

A spaceman returns from a two-year voyage to Alpha Centauri. He shows up at Triton, a moon of Neptune, where his fiancée is waiting for him.


Illustration by Jeff Jones.

She's upset because he hasn't aged at all. (This is supposedly an effect of weightlessness, which seems unlikely to me.) She also doesn't like the fact that space travelers are notorious for being irreligious. She takes him to church, and tells him that she's going to marry the pastor unless he goes back to Earth and ages in its gravity. The spaceman comes up with a wild scheme to show the woman and the pastor what deep space is really like.

The premise of gravity being the cause of aging isn't exactly plausible, to say the least. The story is written in an odd style, with verbal quirks. The woman inserts a fair amount of French into her speech. People often talk in flowery language that doesn't sound like anything anybody would really say. Folks are often referred to as Sir So-and-So (such as Sir Preacher); the spaceman even calls mortality Sir Death.

Two stars.

The Dragons of Telsa, by Arthur Porges

As an example of the care with which the magazine is put together, the cover and the table of contents call this yarn The Dragons of Tesla (note the change in spelling.)

Anyway, this is the latest in a series of science lessons disguised as fiction featuring the clever Ensign De Ruyter. In this tale, he and his captain explore the planet Telsa (not Tesla). It's hot and has an atmosphere without oxygen. There are a huge number of dangerous reptilian predators around.

(Herds of hundreds and hundreds of predators? That seems unlikely, given the typical predator-to-prey ratio you'd expect.)

After wiping out a whole bunch of the beasts with their ray guns, the unlucky pair run out of the energy that powers their weapons. They go hide in a cave, which just happens to have exactly the stuff that De Ruyter needs to save the day.

As I may have suggested above, the plot depends on a pretty outrageous coincidence. (Gosh, the cave has a pool of liquid rubidium and an object that's shaped like a shallow bowl! Just what we need to play Mister Wizard!)

It's like minor league Hal Clement.

Two stars.

Oaten, by K. M. O'Donnell

It's not a big secret that K. M. O'Donnell is actually Barry Malzberg, the magazine's new assistant editor. He's had a few New Wave stories published here and there.

This epistolary tale relates the misadventures of a sort of social psychologist, for lack of a better term, among aliens. He goes through a ritual, not understanding what's going on, leading to a bizarre climax.

I've supplied a pretty bad synopsis, because it's not easy to figure out what's going on. The nature of the so-called Oaten, for example, is particularly puzzling. Then there's that ending . . .

I really don't know what to make of this thing.

Two stars.

Where Is Mrs. Malcolmn?, by Susan A. Lewin

The magazine proudly announces that this is a first publication. That's not always a good sign. In another example of careful editing, the table of contents spells the character's name Malcolm, which looks more normal to me. The text makes it clear that it's really the less likely Malcolmn.


Uncredited photograph, one of three accompanying the story that pretty much all show the same thing.

A woman recovering from a heart attack investigates what she thinks is a water tower that appears out of nowhere. If you've ever read any science fiction before, you'll know exactly what happens.

There's not really much to say about this extremely predictable first story. Was it written just to go with the photographs? Lots of room for improvement, I suppose.

One star.

So much for new stuff. On to the reprints.

Lords of the Underworld, by L. Taylor Hansen

The April 1941 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this yarn.


Cover art by J. Allen St. John.

Three guys are fooling around in the California desert, doing archeological stuff. One of them very casually mentions that he's built a time machine. The main character (the other two disappear from the story quickly) sends himself back thousands of years.


Illustration by St. John also.

This leads to a rip-roaring adventure, as the hero defeats an evil empire nearly by himself. There's a beautiful princess to help him, a sinister cultist to destroy, vampire bats, a saber-toothed tiger, and, yes, a dinosaur. Lots of stuff goes on.

It's all nonsense, of course. There are some nice descriptions, but the whole thing is pretty darn goofy. The open-ended conclusion suggests a sequel, but I don't think there was one.

Two stars.

Between Two Worlds, by Milton Lesser

The December 1955 issue of the magazine is the source of this fantasy story.


Cover art by Edward Valigursky.

A meek fellow has dreams about being Jason from mythology. Of course, he really is living as the legendary hero. He falls in love with the warrior maiden Atalanta, fights with Hercules, wins the golden fleece, and so forth. If you've seen the nifty movie Jason and the Argonauts, you know what to expect. There's a surprise ending that's not surprising.


Illustration by Louis Priscilla.

This piece comes from a brief, odd period in the history of Fantastic when it was dedicated to wish fulfillment stories. Or, as you can tell from the cover, male fantasies. It's not as openly voyeuristic as the other stories seem to be, judging by their descriptions, although Atalanta is stark naked at one point.

As a retelling of an old story, it's OK. Otherwise, there's not much to it.

Two stars.

Bandits of Time, by Ray Cummings

This wild and wooly adventure comes from the December 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Rod Ruth.

A mysterious fellow approaches a reporter and his blind girlfriend. He promises them a wonderful life if they'll meet him at a certain place in the middle of the night. He also says he'll restore the woman's sight.


Illustration by Ruth as well.

Understandably, the reporter is suspicious. He takes his girlfriend home and shows up at the designated place with a fellow newsman, hoping for a big story. Instead, he discovers that the woman has been kidnapped. She and the two reporters are sent two million years into the future.

The weird man who approached them has a mad scheme to set up his own private empire in a distant future when humanity has devolved to a primitive state. He takes along male criminals from all periods of history, as well as kidnapped women to mate with them.

Can the two heroes escape being executed by the insane dictator? Will the woman regain her sight? Will the seductive would-be empress prove to be an enemy or a friend?

Two time travel yarns from 1941, both of them full of nonstop action. This one isn't quite as wacky as the first one, although there's a revelation about the madman's identity that comes out of nowhere.

Two stars.

The Monument, by Henry Slesar

We finish up with a mood piece from the July 1956 issue of Amazing Stories.


Cover art by Ed Valigursky.

A small group of tourists are on a spaceship headed for the Moon. A couple of them complain a lot. The captain opens the observation window to show them something.


Illustration by William Llewellyn.

The plot is very simple. The story accomplishes what it sets out to do. Maybe that's enough.

Three stars.

Half Empty or Half Full?

Either I'm in a bad mood or this was a very weak issue. Maybe I should have given out some three star ratings to some of the stories, maybe not. My time might have been better spent making a sandwich.


A full loaf of diet bread counts as half a loaf of regular bread, doesn't it?




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[September 2, 1968] What might have been (October 1968 IF)

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by David Levinson

From spring straight into the fall

Back in April, I reported on the early days of the “Prague Spring,” First Secretary Alexander Dubček’s effort to reform Czechoslovakian communism and create “socialism with a human face.” Dubček managed to keep his plans afloat through the spring and much of the summer, but—as anyone who has been following the news is aware—the Soviet bear has flexed its claws and put an end to ideas of openness and freedom of speech. But not without creating a few cracks in the Warsaw Pact.


A Soviet armored vehicle comes to a fiery end.

The first sign of trouble came in June. Military maneuvers by Warsaw Pact forces took place in Czechoslovakia as scheduled, but Soviet troops were slow to leave the country after the conclusion. A number of communist leaders visited Prague over the course of a week in early August; some, like East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht and Hungary’s János Kádár, probably trying to bring Dubček to heel, while Yugoslavia’s Tito and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu were no doubt more encouraging. Ceaușescu certainly was, since he signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Czechoslovakia and has loudly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the last few days.

It’s not clear what straw broke the camel’s back, though the announcement that Czechoslovakia was considering loans from the World Bank might have accelerated things. In any case, at 11:00 PM on August 20th Warsaw Pact forces rolled across the border in numbers not seen in Europe since the end of World War II. Dubček and other reformist leaders were arrested, and the Soviets tried to install a puppet government, but the people of Czechoslovakia weren’t having it. On the 22nd, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia met hastily and elected a new central committee and presidium, which then unanimously re-elected Dubček as First Secretary.


Somewhat more peaceful resistance.

The invasion triggered protests around the world, even by some Communist parties in western and neutral countries. In Czechoslovakia, although the military was never ordered to oppose Warsaw Pact forces, the invaders have been met with protests and violence. Alas, it was not enough. The arrested leaders signed an agreement to roll back their reforms on the 26th, and after returning to Prague on the 27th, Dubček gave a tearful radio address, asking Czechoslovakians to end their resistance as well as for their forgiveness for his surrender. As I write, that is where things stand, and like Hungary a dozen years ago, Czechoslovakia has been brought back into the fold.

Lost in the fog

A couple of the protagonists in this month’s IF spend their stories wandering in a daze. Unfortunately, the far less successful of the tales takes up nearly a third of the magazine and feels like a lot more, overwhelming an otherwise decent issue.

Scientists on Mars make an unexpected find. Art by Chaffee

High Weir, by Samuel R. Delany

A group of scientists investigate an ancient Martian temple and discover that the jeweled eyes of the sculptures contain moving holographic images. Meanwhile one of their number, linguist Rimkin, suffers a severe mental breakdown.

Art by Gaughan

Normally, I’d complain about the idea of an ancient Martian temple, but Delany’s writing is just so gorgeous I don’t care. He also has the skill to keep the viewpoint entirely with a man slowly losing his mind, keep the story coherent and include a discussion of information storage that ties the whole thing together. Not his best work, but still excellent.

Four stars.

Report on Japanese Science Fiction, by Takumi Shibano

Top Japanese fan Takumi Shibano (for more on him see last month’s article by my colleague Alison Scott) tells us about the state of science fiction in Japan. The first half of the article offers a brief history of the genre in Japan, from the inter-war years to today; the second half is a run-down of the authors in the field today and the sort of things they write. The history is very good, while the second half is a bit dry. But maybe something in there will catch a publisher’s eye and prompt a translation or two.

A high three stars.

Deathchild, by Sterling Lanier

A baby named Joseph is the ultimate weapon; anyone who comes into unprotected contact with him dies horribly. Is he enough to keep a surging communist China from conquering all of Asia and bring them to the negotiation table?

Feeding time. Art by Virgil Finlay

After a slow start under John Campbell’s tutelage, Lanier seems to have come into his own as an author. There’s certainly some good writing here, however it’s too long. Worse, the concept behind Project Inside Straight is utterly absurd. The quality of the line-by-line writing is just enough to keep the story’s head above water.

Three propped-up stars.

Paddlewheel on the Styx, by Lohr Miller

From the title, I was expecting something in the mode of John Kendrick Bangs or Riverworld. Instead, we have the tale of an attempt to rescue a crashed spaceship on the shore of a river of molten metal on Mercury. It’s beautifully poetic, but it falters a bit right at the end. I will forgive the lapse, though, because this month’s new author is very new indeed: he won’t be 14 until sometime in November. This is very well done for someone so young, and I hope we see more from master Miller in the future.

A solid three stars.

The Proxy Intelligence, by A.E. van Vogt

Space vampires and some nonsense about intelligence. ‘Nuff said.

The head vampire meets the scientist and his beautiful daughter. Art by Gaughan

This unasked-for sequel to Asylum (Astounding, May 1942) is a confused mess. The protagonist wanders through the story in a daze due to his exposure a vastly superior intelligence, but unlike with Delany’s story the reader comes away knowing even less than the “hero.” In desperation, I tracked down the original story. While it did clarify who all the characters are, I can’t say it helped otherwise.

Barely two stars.

If… and When, by Lester del Rey

This month, del Rey looks at what is coming to be known as materials science, the study of improving the materials we use to make things and developing entirely new ones. He covers a wide variety of topics, such as building materials that can be eaten in a pinch, metals that dampen impacts, materials that can be induced to return to a given shape, and many more ideas. This was all inspired by The New Materials by David Fishlock, which he makes sound very interesting indeed. But then, this is a field I’ve long had something of an interest in.

Four stars for me, maybe slightly less if your interests are different.

Or Battle’s Sound, by Harry Harrison

Dom Priego is a university student doing a hitch in the military. His unit is tasked with boarding an enemy spaceship carrying a matter transmitter and keeping them from sending through a huge mass of men and equipment.

Dom fights his way through the enemy ship. Art by Adkins

On the surface, Harrison has given us an entertaining space opera, but underneath it is the philosophical question of why we fight. Overall, this is very well done, but I think it’s the wrong length. Either the combat scenes need to be tightened up, reducing the story by a couple of pages, or it needs to be a lot longer, so we can get to know Dom better, say some stuff from before he signed up and why he did so.

A high three stars.

Pupa Knows Best, by James Tiptree, Jr.

In this sequel to The Mother Ship, more aliens come to Earth. First some blue lizards who leave behind some mysterious missile-like objects, followed by the Siggies, who everybody likes. Earth people start picking up aspects of the alien culture, and then things start to go wrong.

Siggie religion features quaint rituals. Art by Brand

I liked this one a bit more than the first story. Maybe that’s because I have an easier time accepting the underlying premise. In any case, it’s a pithy tale dealing with both religion and the effects of colonization.

Three stars.

Summing up

This could have been a pretty good issue. All but one story are average to very good. Even the low score for “Deathchild” is mostly due to the highly unbelievable premise; up until that is revealed, it’s a good read. But then there’s van Vogt. A “complete novel condensation in a special section” it says on the cover. As I said, if it’s condensed, they took out too much. As for the special section, the magazine is the same length it always is; the story just squats right in the middle like some sort of unpleasant toad. Can we please go back to serials?

Three out of the four have potential, but I’d rather have the whole Zelazny.




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[August 31, 1968] The Sound and the Fury (September 1968 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

In the backround (and sometimes the foreground) of my reading of this month's issue of Analog was the Democratic National Convention held over four tumultuous days in the Windy City.  This was not four days of politicians patting themselves on the back, as we saw in Miami Beach for the GOP Convention—amid the citywide busdrivers and telephone workers strike, there was tumult, walk-outs, protests, and a general breakdown of the democratic process.


Il Duce, Mayor Daley, intent on turning his town into a police state in the pursuit of Law and Order: 12,000 cops plus a contingent of National Guard were on hand last weekend.

The writing was on the wall that first day when Julian Bond arrived with his alternate set of Georgia delegates, the group that broadly represented the demographic makeup of the Georgia Democratic Party.  First, they were not even allowed in; then they were grudglingly placed in the cheap seats of the balcony.  All while Daniel Inouye, Senator from Hawaii, gave a stirring, unprecedented keynote speech in which he decried the anarchy and violence occurring outside the convention halls, but nevertheless put on the assembly the responsibility of rectifying the racial injustice that led to such agitation.

Eventually, the delegates prepared to vote on the certification of the Georgia delegation that had been approved by the party—the less integrated one.  Actually, first they voted on if they were going to vote on it that evening.  It was during this battle that the Michigan delegation offered their seats to the alternate Georgia delegation, a move that enraged members of the "official" delegation.

With regard to who was going to get the Presidential nomination, by the end of the first night, it was clear McCarthy was a dead duck, and few were mentioning McGovern.  However, there was a rising "draft Kennedy" movement that peaked on Day 2 despite Ted repeatedly saying he wasn't interested.  More dramatically, Day 2 marked the day police evicted 1,000 protesters from nearby Lincoln Park, CBS correspondent Dan Rather got punched by plainclothes security for not wearing his credentials prominently, dozens of delegates, mostly Black, walked out, and Georgia Governor Lester Maddox took his ball and went home, saying he was going to stump for segregationalist independent candidate, George Wallace.


Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out…

And that night, I'm pretty sure they still hadn't certified the Georgia delegation.

On the third day, 10,000 protesters gathered at Grant Park, a terrific anti-War demonstration broke out on the floor of the convention, and the minority position tried in vain to make an end to bombing North Vietnam a part of the party plank.  By the time Humphrey was anointed the candidate (a foregone conclusion by that point), it was an anti-climax and anything but a triumphant coronation.  And what a change twenty years has wrought: the Southern delegations that walked out on the convention in '48 are now behind Humphrey, where the liberals who admired the fiery populist now reject the man they view as Johnson's stooge.

Discontent was rampant.  Delegates were frustrated that they were not listened to, that the motions they were voting on were not sufficiently explained, and that Mayor Daley was strong-arming them into voting the way he wanted them to.  Not to mention that there wasn't enough food to feed everyone in the convention's vicinity, and the hot dogs on site were terrible. Many said 1968 marked the death of the party convention, at least in its current incarnation.

But the political strife was as nothing compared to the rivers of blood that were shed as blue-helmeted cops clashed with protestors.  "The Whole World is Watching" and "Fuck LBJ" intertwined with shouts and screams, and all of it was televised in full color (but not live, as that was impossible due to the strikes and Daley's security efforts).

The only bright spot of that third evening was the nomination of D.C. and Black native son the Rev. Channing Phillips, the first American of African descent to be nominated by a major political party for President.

By the fourth day, I was exhausted, yet I tuned in anyway.  I'm glad I did.  That evening, the convention played a retrospective on RFK.  It was too hagiographic, and frankly, the wounds too fresh to bear close watching, at least for me.  But when it was over, something amazing happened.  Virtually the entire audience of delegates, excluding just the groups from Texas and Illinois, rose to its feet and began clapping.  Louder and louder, and then they started singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  Over and over, "Glory Glory Hallelujah, His truth is marching on."  Daley's henchmen tried to impose order.  They gaveled.  They called out the Sergeants-in-Arms.  Nothing deterred the delegates.  All of the anger, all the discontent, all of the frustrated might-have-beens boiled over in that moment into this display of singing, of shouting, of clapping.

It was only defused when a moment of silence was called for the memory of Dr. King, and then the convention could continue.  The business of the moment was the nomination of a Vice President.  That morning Humphrey had already tapped Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, and there was no serious opposition.

Yet, and in a truly touching moment, Julian Bond's name was advanced as a candidate (so, the first Black VP nominee of a major party in history), and he garnered 27 and a half votes before voluntarily withdrawing his name.  Humbly, self-effacingly, he noted that he was too young to accept.


Bond withdraws his name from consideration.

Muskey and Humphrey gave their acceptance speeches that night.  There was a lot on their shoulders—the need to deliver speeches that thread the needle, knitting the party back together, both addressing and condemning what had happened in Chicago.

That didn't happen.  What we got was a limp flatness of platitudes.  When I woke up, I learned that 20 delegates, supporters of McCarthy, had been beaten up in their hotel and arrested.  The charge pelting the cops with sardines.  McCarthy pointedly did not congratulate Humphrey that morning; the Vice President, now the newly christened candidate, had made no comment on the incident, tacitly endorsing it.

So that's that.  HHH is our bulwark against Nixon.  Muskie is his backstop.  Wallace just got a shot in the arm, and I can only think that's a blow against Democratic hopes.  Americans are disunited as we have not been for many decades.

It is hard to go on with my assigned task after all that, but the job remains, and I'm the one who has to do it.  The convention was four days of Hell.  Accordingly, the September 1968 issue of Analog was a slog, too, though of a different kind.


by John Schoenherr

The Tuvela (Part 1 of 2), by James H. Schmitz


by John Schoenherr

The ocean planet of Nandy-Cline is in the sights of the Parahuans, a rapacious race of aliens that was beaten back by the Federation seventy years ago, and wants another try at the apple.  They're being cautious.  The humans beat them once, which is almost heresy to the arrogant Parahuans.  To justify losing to the inferior homo sapiens, they decide there must be a secret cabal of superhumans that leads and coordinates our species.  They must know more in order to sway political power from those supporting the Voice of Caution to those in favor of the Voice of Action.

To that end, they have set up a submarine base on the planet and abducted the human, Ticos Cay.  Why?  Because he is nearly 200 years old and seems to have found the secret of immortality.  It is clear to the Parahuans that he must be in the employ of the "Tuvelas", our putative ubermenschen.  They torture him, at length, but he resists because the same disciplines that have extended his life also grant him the ability to blot out pain.  Nevertheless, he will succumb—unless he can get outside help.

Enter Nile Etland, a young biologist living on Nandy-Cline.  She and her two giant mutant otters, sapient and clever, are looking for Cay, who has disappeared from the floating island where he was doing research.  Cay's only hope is that the Parahuans will take Etland for a Tuvela and treat her with comparative kid gloves, testing her abilities, rather than killing her outright.

Etland, to her credit, is up to the challenge…

The premise for this one is excellent, and something I love about James H. Schmitz is his ability with (indeed preference for) featuring heroines over heroes.  That said, the writing in this piece is often plodding and explanatory, and I found my momentum frequently flagging.

So, three stars for this installment.  Now that all the pieces have been set up, perhaps the next half will be more exciting.

The Powers of Observation, by Harry Harrison


by Leo Summers

The Soviets have developed a new kind of super spy.  He looks just like a man, but for some reason weighs over 400 pounds.  If that leads you to guess that he's the Communist version of Hymie the robot from Get Smart, give yourself a cigar.

But the American agent tasked to pursue him through the back roads of Yugoslavia has a few gimmicks up his sleeve, too…

Well-written, but nothing spectactular.  Three stars.

Steamer Time?, by Wallace West

As America grapples with its oppressive smog situation, some are calling for a return to the good ol' days—the days of the Stanley Steamer.  I'm just a little too young to remember when steam cars battled internal combustion vehicles for supremacy, so I don't have the nostalgia for them that Wallace West infuses his piece with.  The arguments for steam are largely that it burns clean, with its only waste gas being carbon dioxide (of course, while not strictly a "pollutant", there are other problems with it; viz. our 1958 article on the potential for industry-caused global heating).  Steam engines were also more fuel-efficient, though I don't know if that's still the case.

The arguments against steam, to me, would be the long time to develop a head of steam.  In the old days, waiting for your boiler to heat up was acceptable since the alternative was cranking up your IC car, and risking breaking an arm when the crank snapped back.  With the invention of the electric starter, that became a non-issue.  Perhaps the steam folks have a plan, too.

Anyway, the piece is readable, if a bit gushing.  I'm sure the auto industry will never allow an IC competitor to emerge, although as we speak, two electric cars are racing across the nation, so who knows?

Three stars.

Hi Diddle Diddle, by Peter E. Abresch


by Leo Summers

A harried reserve USAF captain, assigned to the UFO division, gets tired of all the cranks and reporters and spins a yarn for them: the cigar-shaped "ships" are really space cows feeding on the gasses of our upper atmosphere.  His creation is recounted credulously, and hysteria sweeps the nation.  Eventually, even Soviet agents are involved.

But what if the captain actually guessed too close to the mark?

This is a tedious story, and it just goes on and on.  Analog rarely does humor well.

Two stars.

A Flash of Darkness, by Stanley Schmidt


by Leo Summers

Mars Rover (MR) Robot is having a bit of trouble on Mars.  The autonomous machine uses a holographic laser rather than a camera for navigation (apparently it's lighter; I don't buy it).  When night falls, the rover finds its vision fogged and then blinded by something beyond its ken.  It's up to the technicians back on Earth, and maybe a little intuition in MR Robot's mechanical brain, to solve the problem.

This could have been an interesting piece, but I felt the ending was a let-down.  You'll see why.

Two stars.

Parasike, by Michael Chandler


by Leo Summers

A fellow pretending to use numerology to make guaranteed stock picks turns out to be a quack of a different duck.  He is promptly recruited by America's super-secret psi corps.

A lot of talking, a lot of fatuous acceptance of psi as science—in short, the perfect Campbell story.

Two stars.

Counting off

August has been one of the roughest months of one of the roughest years in recent history.  Analog finished at 2.5, which is lousy, but not that far removed from the rest: Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.5), Amazing (2.6), If (2.9).  Only Galaxy finished above the three-star barrier (3.1)

You could take all the 4/5 star stuff, and you wouldn't even fill a single issue.  That's awful.  Women were down to their usual publication rate, producing 6.5% of all new fiction this month.

It's going to take bold new leadership to change that trend, just as it will take bold new leadership to fix the country.  That new leadership doesn't seem to be near in coming.  I just hope we can withstand another Long Hot Summer…




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