Tag Archives: Norman Spinrad

Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[October 26, 1967] Duet in G(ray) (Star Trek: "The Doomsday Machine")

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by Gideon Marcus

Remember, thou are but a mortal

For the past year and a half, we've thrilled to the sight of the Enterprise, a graceful vessel that calls to mind the spindly beauty of tall ships and the blunt power of a battleship.  We've seen her proudly sailing the ether, shaken about by time streams, canted oddly after an attack.

But until last week's episode, we never saw one of her class utterly wrecked.

In the opening scenes of "The Doomsday Machine", when the Enterprise comes across the wrecked Constellation, accompanied by a most effective dirge, it is a gut punch.  The misaligned warp pods.  The charred saucer.  It calls to mind visions of Pearl Harbor, of kamikaze-ravaged ships.  A starship is mortal, we realize.

So, too, is its captain.  The sight of Commodore Decker, mute with shock when Kirk first beams aboard the Constellation, is all too believable.  This is a man we can believe has been stunned out of his mind first by the wreck of his ship by an enormous, extragalactic planet-wrecker, and then by the destruction of his helpless crew by the same implacable menace.  That he alone should be the sole survivor of this disaster is all the more painful–to him, and to us.

If we sympathize with poor Decker, ably played by the ubiquitous character actor William Windom, we can feel little but revulsion for the planet killer, a cross between Saberhagen's berzerkers and Marvel's Galactus.  Plated with impenetrable armor and self-regenerating, the juggernaut has the power of Nomad, but with none of the human-induced fallibility.  It is simply a mindless killing machine.

In the battle that ensues, we root for the crippled Constellation, helmed by Captain Kirk and held together by Scotty, Washburn, and two unnamed crewmen.  We root for the Enterprise, crippled by the presence of a maniacally driven Matt Decker, who assumes command over vociferous and constant objections by Mr. Spock.  If the three-cornered fight is occasionally hindered by inconsistent special effects, it is immeasurably helped by fine acting and an incomparable, Emmy-deserving score.

The drama that takes place on the bridge of the Enterprise is no less compelling, drawing strongly from The Caine Mutiny, complete with Decker fondling tape cartridges like Queeg's ball-bearings.  And unlike in that tremendous book (and less successful movie), Spock has no stomach for mutiny. Deliverance of the Enterprise must wait until Kirk can reestablish command.

"The Doomsday Machine" sees the death of Commodore Decker and the near death of Captain Kirk, both vital to the destruction of the planet killer.  Decker's suicide run with a shuttlecraft establishes the enemy's weakness; Kirk's determination to ram the Constellation inside the machine proves the strongest weapon against it.  But it is really the loss of the Constellation, sacrificed to immolate the destroyer from inside, that impacts the most.  One of the Enterprise's 12 sisters is dead.  Its skipper and complement of 400 will have no thrilling adventures, no end-of-the-episode laugh line.  And if one starship can die, any of them can.

While credit must be given both to the regular cast and this episode’s guest star, and I have already praised the music, there are yet laurels to pass out.  Marc Daniels has consistently impressed with his tight and creative direction, especially in contrast to the competent but rather staid work of the fellow he seems to alternate episodes with, Joe Pevney.  Whomever edited this episode also did a terrific job, often cutting seamlessly between two dialogues to ratchet up the pace.  And, of course, writer Norm Spinrad is no stranger to good science fiction, having been writing it since 1962.  It is probably him we can thank for the "hardness" and plausibility of this episode.

There are a few quibbles, a few scientific gaffes, and my comrades may discuss them.  But for my money, this was perhaps science fiction's finest hour on television.

Five stars.

Call him Ishmael


by Amber Dubin

The tale this episode follows is a well-worn one in sea-faring lore, but I was nevertheless pleasantly surprised to see Star Trek take on the classic story of Moby Dick. Commodore Decker is cast as Ahab, a shipwreck of a captain on a wrecked ship maddened by the obsession with the entity that took everything from him. His illogical pursuit of his white whale is just as turbulent as the protagonist of the famous novel, but what sets this retelling apart from the rest is the gracefulness with which the crew of the Enterprise strike a delicate balance between adherence to duty and survival.

This is on full display in the way Spock does his best to ignore the commodore's obvious madness in order to follow the rules of his station. I found myself shouting, "just nerve pinch him!" as I was forced to watch Decker spit on every opportunity Spock offered him to choose a logical path. Kirk, on the other hand, ever the space cowboy, immediately undermines all the subtlety of the crew's struggles by exclaiming "blast the rules" and outright calling the commodore a ship-stealing tyrant. I found this to be a refreshing deviation to the plot, because Kirk was very much speaking my mind and I was grateful to see the crew rally behind him in exhausted, fearful relief.


A happier crew

While I wasn't thrilled about the spacial reasoning behind the climactic battles, it's incontestable that the score and cinematography in this episode were phenomenal. The last scene, when the transporter kept malfunctioning up until the last seconds before the explosion, had me literally biting my nails with suspense. Likewise, the pulsating droning of the music that started when the crew boarded the shipwrecked vessel left me authentically unsettled and made me wonder what horrors they would stumble upon. This thematic wariness provided the perfect backdrop to introduce the commodore, as he was essentially a discarded shell of himself, a dead man cursed to haunt the abandoned halls of his once mighty and powerful ship.

The place where this episode lost points for me was the forced simile Kirk kept pushing about the killer robot being a doomsday device like an H-bomb. It felt like a ham-fisted attempt to force relevance to our times, which I found unnecessary when a story of a powerful man driven mad by failure was timeless in itself. Moreover, stating that this robot must have been used as doomsday device is a view as limited as the potential usages the H-bomb, or the power behind it. True, the mahine has the destructive power of a powerful bomb but the robot could just as easily have been once used to convert inert material into energy to feed a planet, not destroy it. I'm most disappointed that there's a gaping hole in Kirk's logic over the origin of this device and Spock isn't even tempted to close it. Possibly Spock doesn't challenge his captain's theory because he has been burnt out from challenging illogical authority figures all day, but I have to stretch to make this explanation fit.

Four Stars

There but for the grace of God…


by Janice L. Newman

The Traveler nicely summed up how painful it was to see a sister-ship of the Enterprise fatally wounded. But what held my attention was Commander Decker’s plight and performance. Though some of my companions gently mocked his scenery-chewing tendencies, I found his first appearance and his explanation of what had happened to his ship to be compelling. This was a man at the end of his rope, who had endured the greatest loss any starship captain could imagine: the loss of his ship and crew.

If Captain Kirk should ever live through such a nightmare, I firmly believe he would behave in much the same way. Starfleet must choose captains who have a certain, shall we say, obsessive streak when it comes to their ships and crews. We’ve seen Kirk become aggressive and irrational when his ship is threatened. We’ve also seen him brought back from mind-altered states more than once when giving in would have meant the loss of his ship. For Kirk, the Enterprise and its complement mean everything to him. It’s all too easy to picture him in Decker’s place, a broken, desperate, suicidal, and vengeful man.


Would Kirk face the death of his own ship so calmly?

Four stars.

By the way, we're just burning to see what happens in the next episode of Star Trek, coming out tomorrow night!

Here's the invitation! Come join us.

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




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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 14, 1967] First batch (January Galactoscope)

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Big, But . . .


by John Boston

No matter if you don’t believe in Santa Claus. Judith Merril is back with another volume of her annual anthology, 11th Annual Edition the Year’s Best S-F (sic), from Delacorte Press just in time for the Christmas trade. If you missed the boat on Christmas, surely you can make it work for Valentine’s Day.


by Ziel

The overall package is familiar: 384 pages thick, a crowded contents page, a short introduction, but lots of running commentary between items, sometimes about the stories or authors and sometimes, it seems, about whatever crosses Merril’s mind as she assembles the book. There is the usual Summation at the end, but the extensive Honorable Mentions listing is gone, though she mentions some items that didn’t make the cut in the Summation and commentary.

The contents are eclectic as usual, but let Merril tell it: “The stories and poems and essays here have been selected from as wide a range as I could cover of books and periodicals published here and in England last year. About half the entries are from the genre magazines. The rest are from books and from such diverse sources as Mademoiselle and Escapade, The Colorado Quarterly and the Washington Post, Playboy and the Saturday Review (and Ambit and King in England).” “Of the year” in the title is notional at best. This volume includes a story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins, which dates from 1940, and an . . . item . . . by Alfred Jarry, who died in 1907.

The usual disclaimer is here, too. From the Introduction:

“This is not a collection of science-fiction stories.

“It does have some science fiction in it—I think. (It gets a little more difficult each year to decide which ones are really science fiction—and frankly I don’t much try any more.)”

Unfortunately this year’s book falls short of most of its predecessors to my taste. Unusually, some of the selections by the biggest-name authors are strikingly lackluster. Isaac Asimov’s Eyes Do More than See, from F&SF, is a short piece of annoying pseudo-profundity about the down side of becoming a disembodied energy being. Gordon R. Dickson’s Warrior (from Analog), part of his militaristic Dorsai series, gives us a protagonist who is such a comprehensive superman that his enemies are rendered helpless by his mere presence, and the story turns quickly into self-parody. J.G. Ballard is represented by one very fine story, The Drowned Giant, from Playboy, and another, The Volcano Dances, which reads like a parody of his recurrent theme of humans happily pursuing self-destructive obsessions: his protagonist takes up residence near a volcano that’s about to blow, refuses all entreaties to leave, and at the end is apparently heading towards it as the volcano’s rumbling becomes more ominous.

There is a decided swerve this year towards the British magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy, with four stories from each here. The best of this lot is David I. Masson’s Traveler’s Rest (New Worlds), which depicts a world where the passage of time varies with latitude, much faster at the North Pole where a furious high-tech war is ongoing, and more slowly towards the equator where people live more or less normal lives. In some of the others, it is quite unclear what is going on, and purposefully: two of them are (or seem to be) narrated by mental patients (David Rome’s There’s a Starman in Ward 7 and Peter Redgrove’s long poem The Case (both from New Worlds)). Josephine Saxton’s The Wall (Science Fantasy) is a strange, haunting, allegorical-seeming story of lovers who never meet except through a small hole in a wall dividing a world that seems like some sort of artificial construct that they don’t understand and is unexplained to the reader.

As always, Merril has harvested some stories from non-genre sources, most sublimely Jorge Luis Borges’s The Circular Ruins, from 1940. It’s a metaphysical fantasy about a man who travels in a canoe to a ruined temple to carry out a mission: “He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality.” This story, resonantly translated from the Spanish, is the find of the book. Also noteworth is Game, by Donald Barthelme, from the New Yorker, about two guys locked in an underground bunker charged with dispatching nuclear missiles as ordered. They have gone months without relief and are pretty much nuts; it is strongly hinted that the war has happened and they’re never getting relieved. Gerald Kersh’s Somewhere Not Far from Here, from Playboy, is about some ragged revolutionaries against an unidentified tyranny; its portrayal of men struggling in extremity in mud and blood, in a seemingly hopeless cause, may be hokey but it contrasts sharply and favorably with Dickson’s absurd power fantasy of an effortlessly irresistible conqueror, discussed above. But there are also a number of less meritorious, and sometimes outright distasteful items from the non-SF press, including a remarkably sexist story by Harvey Jacobs, The Girl Who Drew the Gods, from Mademoiselle, of all places.

Summing Up

There’s a lot in this big book that’s perfectly adequate, but not so much that made me seriously glad to have read it, and a fair amount that seems silly, trivial, or distasteful. The best of the lot to my taste are mostly mentioned above; others include Arthur C. Clarke’s Maelstrom II, R.A. Lafferty’s Slow Tuesday Night, Johnny Byrne’s Yesterday’s Gardens, and Walter F. Moudy’s The Survivor. The other two-thirds of the book’s contents are things I don’t imagine I will ever think of again.

Interestingly, Merril herself expresses dissatisfaction with the current state of American SF, which she attributes to the lack of a “combining force” or “focal center”: “We have the writers; we have the markets; we have the readers. But nothing is happening to bring them together.” She compares this situation unfavorably to that in the UK. I don’t find this explanation very convincing. I am convinced that Merril would have a better book if she included a few longer stories and accepted a shorter contents page, and dropped a few of the less substantial items from prestigious sources.

As the Los Angeles Dodgers might say—wait ‘til next year.


by Gideon Marcus

The Quy Effect, by Arthur Sellings

This latest book by short story veteran, Arthur Sellings, starts with a literal bang. A factory has blown up, and Adolphe Quy, an eccentric inventor is the culprit. Seems he was doing experiments with an organic room-temperature superconductor, which got overloaded. But in the process, something even bigger was discovered: practical antigravity.

With a setup like that, you'd think this short novel would be about the effect such an invention would have on humanity. Indeed, for the first forty pages or so, Sellings seems to be taking forever to start the plot. Then you realize you've been anticipating the wrong book. The Quy Effect is about the trials and tribulations of a discredited inventor doing his best to bring to light a technology only he believes in.

Which means, of course, that there were two ways the book could have gone that would have been deeply dissatisfying. One is the John Campbell route, in which it is made obvious that everyone but Quy (pronounced 'kwe') is a moron, and the whole book is a satire of our stupid society that quells the inspirations of unsung geniuses. The other is the British route, which would have Quy end up in an insane asylum, the work being sold as "darkly humourous."

Thankfully, despite Sellings actually being British, he avoids both of these potentialities. Instead, The Quy Effect is a quite interesting set of character studies, one that kept me glued to the pages. It really is not certain throughout the entire book whether or not Quy will succeed. Nor does it seem that the odds are artificially stacked against him. Quy, in many ways, made the bed he's stuck in. Now he has to find his way out.

And while science, for the most part, takes a backseat in this book, I did appreciate the bit where Quy dismisses rocket-powered spaceflight as an economic dead end:

Rockets have got as much future as the dirigible airship had. A certain beauty, a kind of glamour, but too damn dangerous and cumbersome and expensive. Riding space in a pint-sized canister on top of a thousand tons of high explosive—that's not the way. We've got all the energy we want, if we can only use it. We shouldn't have to rely, in this day and age, on crude chemical reaction. Subject a man to ruinous accelerations because we have to carry a giant-size gas tank a minimum distance. What we need is more like a nuclear-powered submarine. Point its noise in the air and float up.

Only time will tell if he is right, but I've made similar assertions since Sputnik. I'm delighted to see the latest results from Explorer satellites, to watch the Olympics live from Tokyo (at 3 A.M., Pacific), and I thrill at grainy videos of spacewalking astronauts. But for the kind of mass space exodus so much of our science fiction is based on, I suspect Sellings' mouthpiece is right—rockets won't do the trick.

Anyway, going by the Budrys yardstick of quality (if one enjoys reading the book, it's good), The Quy Effect is very good, once one accepts it for what it is.

And what it is garners a full four stars.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Entropy


by Victoria Silverwolf

Agent of Chaos, by Norman Spinrad

It wasn't very long ago that I reviewed this young author's first novel. It's obvious that he keeps banging away at the typewriter steadily, because here comes another one.


Anonymous cover art, and a misleading blurb. Ending the human race isn't the goal of anybody in the story. And I don't think that calling a novel agonizing is a way to help sales.

I don't know about you, but when I pick up a book I like to look at the stuff that surrounds the text first. Front and back cover, dedication, preface or introduction, afterword, whatever. Let's flip this paperback over and see if we can learn anything.


Is it really possible for a new book to be a classic?

This blurb isn't much more accurate. The Brotherhood of Assassins isn't the dictatorship; that's the Hegemony. Allow me to explain.

Several centuries in the future, long after the two sides of the Cold War got together to avoid total destruction, the combined government known as the Hegemony rules the solar system. The oligarchy in charge controls every detail in the lives of their subjects, known as Wards. Any violation of the rules is punishable by death. The sheep-like Wards mostly accept this, because the Hegemony offers them peace and prosperity.

The Democratic League is an underground organization, literally and metaphorically. It opposes the Hegemony, and is willing to use violence to overthrow it. The novel begins on Mars, where Boris Johnson, a member of the Democratic League, is part of an elaborate plot to assassinate one of the oligarchs. The motive is to convince the Wards that the Democratic League is a serious threat to the Hegemony.

The third player in this deadly game is the Brotherhood of Assassins. Despite the name, the first thing this bunch does is prevent the killing of the oligarch. Like other things they've done in the past, this action seems completely random. Both the Hegemony and the Democratic League think of the Brotherhood of Assassins as deranged fanatics, dedicated to the philosophical writings of the fictional author Gregor Markowitz. Quotations from this fellow's books, which have titles like The Theory of Social Entropy and Chaos and Culture, introduce each chapter in the novel.

The story jumps around the solar system, with plenty of plots and counterplots, ranging from political intrigue within the oligarchy to mass violence. At times, the book reads like a cross between Ian Fleming and Keith Laumer. But Spinrad is trying to say something more profound, I think.

The Hegemony represents any established Order. The Democratic League represents the opposition to that Order. Ironically, that very opposition becomes part of a new Order. The Brotherhood of Assassins represents Chaos, working against both of the other groups. (In another touch of irony, this often means working with one or the other. Such paradoxes, we're told, are part of Chaos.)

There's a major plot twist about halfway through the novel that I won't reveal here. Suffice to say that something found in a lot of science fiction stories changes the situation drastically, leading to a dramatic ending involving the Ultimate Chaotic Act.

The book certainly held my interest. I'm not sure what to think about all the discussion of Order and Chaos, but it was intriguing. At times the novel is melodramatic. Overly familiar science fiction elements appear frequently, from moving sidewalks to laser guns.

One peculiar thing is that there are no female characters in the book, not even a minor one playing the typical role of the Girl. The closest we get to acknowledging that two sexes exist is a line describing a crowd of Wards as placid, indifferent-looking men and women. The Wards are just cannon fodder, casually slaughtered by the three competing forces, so they remain pretty much faceless.

That reminds me of the fact that there are no Good Guys in this novel. All sides are willing to kill to achieve their goals, including wiping out innocent bystanders. The author's sympathies seem to be with the forces of Chaos, but they definitely have as much blood on their hands as the forces of Order. (Why else would they call themselves the Brotherhood of Assassins?)

Overall, a provocative but frustrating book.

Three stars.




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 22, 1966] Why Johnny Should Read (November 1966 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Tune out, turn off, drop in

Lately, the Journey's been fairly taken over by the boob tube.  These days, it seems all we do is cover Star Trek, Doctor Who, Raumpatrouille Orion, and like that.

Don't get me wrong — I like these shows, and our circulation numbers show you do too.  But let us not forget that science fiction began as a literary tradition, and those lovely monthly magazines crammed with speculative morsels are still with us.  Sometimes it's great to unplug from the clamor of the idiot box, curl up in a sunbeam, and read some great STF.

Thankfully, there's a lot of great stuff in the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction…

Under the cover


by Bert Tanner

The Manor of Roses, by Thomas Burnett Swann

This is one of the few times (the first?) that an American magazine has been graced with Mr. Swann's work.  Normally, he spins modern retellings of mythological tales for the British mags.  But oh are we glad to have him here!

The Manor of Roses, set in King John's England, is the story of two adoptive brothers.  John is of gentle Norman birth; his inseparable villein companion, Stephen, comes from the stock of Saxon nobles.  Together, they steal away from their homes hoping to join in a latter Crusade in the Holy Land.

In a crypt they find along the way, they discover what appears to be an angel.  The beautiful young thing lies in repose, clutching a cross, professing to have lost her memories.  Stephen names her Ruth and takes her for an omen of good fortune, beseeching her to join their party.

Their expedition soon runs afoul of a community of Mandrakes, the one fantastical element in this richly drawn historical portrait.  These humaniform beings look like people after hatching, but soon grow hairy and woody.  Hunted for their bodies, which are rumored to make powerful aphrodisiacs, they are understandably hostile to humans.  Nevertheless, they are Christian, after a fashion, and Ruth secures the freedom of their party by bartering her cross.

Whereupon we come to the Manor of Roses and encounter the true narrator of the story, as well as the truth about Ruth.  I shall say no more of the plot.

As for the story, it is a beautiful thing, both engaging and educating.  Swann has such a subtle flow to his writing.  Indeed, I struggle to explain why I "only" give this story four stars instead of five. 

You may well not restrain yourself as I have.  Either way, it's fine reading and bravo, Mr. Swann.


by Gahan Wilson

The Best Is Yet to Be, by Bryce Walton

Retirement homes are a growing phenomenon these days.  Who wouldn't like to live out their sunset years in coddled comfort?  But what if the gilded cage is too suffocating?  And what is the value of secure longevity if one can't be with one's lifelong love?

Walton (who has been writing since the mid-forties) offers up a resonantly emotional story of a man who must live on his own terms, even if it means discarding all of his safety nets.

The sting in the story's tale is neither positive nor negative.  I think it could have been more adroitly done so as to cast doubt on the reality of all that transpires in the piece.  But it also could have been more heavy-handed, destroying the raw joy of the escapee's journey.

So I call the story a memorable four stars, and (unlike with the Swann) fully cognizant of how it might have gotten to five.

Heir Apparent, by Ed M. Clinton, Jr.

Here's a strange throwback of a story.  Fellow on Alpha Centauri writes to his (presumed) fiancee, describing how a tremendous genetic discovery made by his father means that he can no longer see her again. 

For there are people on Alpha Centauri.  Well, mostly.  Homo similis centauri is essentially human but lacking the frontal lobe.  Said father archaeologist begins rather scandalous attempts at cross-breeding, ultimately producing a viable being.  Surprise, surprise (not really), that offspring is the narrator.

It all reads like the Lovecraft stories where the storyteller discovers that he is really a fish-man or something and goes insane.  Clinton doesn't have his protagonist go crazy, exactly, but the result is much the same.

I dunno.  It didn't do it for me.  Two stars.

Earth Tremor Detection, by Theodore L. Thomas

Thomas, in his "science" article, makes the rather broad leap from seismometers that can tell the signature of a Russkie H-bomb test to delicate acoustic sensors that can tell a person from one's distinctive walking pattern.

Seems like a stretch, Ted.  Two stars.

A Friend to Alexander, by James Thurber

The one reprint of the issue, this is my first encounter with the prolific Mr. Thurber.  A fellow has nightmares about watching Aaron Burr goad Alexander Hamilton into a duel, ultimately killing him.  Then, in sleep, the dreamer becomes Burr's target of harrying.

It's well told, but the ending offers no surprises.  Perhaps there were no surprises to be had in the forties?

Three stars.

Neutral Ground, by Norman Spinrad

Welcome back, Mr. Spinrad!  In this tale, astronauts range unknown worlds not with the help of rockets and space suits, but with drug-enhanced clairvoyance.  Neutral Ground details the encounters one particular psychonaut has with a dreadful alien presence that gets closer with every mission.  Our hero is torn between fear of the inchoate threat and the desire to learn what it is. 

I found this story particularly interesting as the plot is somewhat similar to one of mine called Clairvoyage (though, of course, there is no chance of cross-pollination).  I liked it, though I found the end perhaps a touch pat.

Still, a memorable four star story.

Old Man River, by Isaac Asimov

Dr. A is at it with his lists again, this time describing the longest rivers — and just what length means in a riparian context.  I usually find The Good Doctor's list articles to be his lesser ones, but this one made me rethink how I approach geography, one of my favorite subjects.

Four stars.

The Devil and Democracy, by Brian Cleeve

Last up, a novelette featuring Old Nick.  Seems the demons are on strike.  Shoulder to shoulder with the damned souls, they refuse to let any new entrees into the underworld until their demands are met.  Mephistopheles hatches a plan to bust the strike, but it'll take a Hell of a lot of cleverness to see it through.

I tend to like Satanic stories, but this one is not as clever as it thinks it is.  Weighing the piece's pros and cons against each other, they come out fairly balanced.  So, three stars.

Closing the Book

All in all, the November F&SF is a somewhat uneven, but ultimately rewarding experience.  Moreover, for just four bits (cheaper than most mags these days), I obtained several hours of speculative entertainment.  Compared to the flickering wares of the television, which even at their best are alloyed with vapid commercials, I think magazines still hold their own.

There's still plenty of new left in the old medium!


by Bert Tanner

[Speaking of new works in print, there is now a new installment in The Kitra Saga!  Sirena has been a smash hit, and I think you'll dig it, too.  Buy a copy…you'll be supporting me and getting a great read at the same time!]



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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 10, 1966] Bon appetit! (this month's Galactoscope)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

What's Space Opera, Doc?
with apologies to Chuck Jones

There are many different kinds of science fiction stories. Time travel, future societies, parallel worlds, and so on. When most people think of science fiction, however, they probably imagine tales set in outer space.

I recently came across three new works of SF that might be called space opera. Although all of them feature adventures set, at least partly, on planets orbiting distant stars, they are quite different from one another. For one thing, they vary in length. Let's take a look at them, from shortest to longest.

A Three-Course Literary Meal

First up is a light appetizer from a prolific British author who has already won quite a bit of praise from Galactic Journeyers. His creations are almost always competent, at least, and sometimes outstanding.

A Planet of Your Own, by John Brunner


Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

As you can tell, this is one part of an Ace Double. I almost said half of an Ace Double, but it takes up much less than fifty percent of the book. Well under one hundred pages in length, with plenty of white space between chapters, it's really a novella rather than the Complete Novel bragged about on the cover.

Our protagonist is a woman named Kynance Foy.

Wait a minute. That sounds familiar. Let me dig through some old magazines and figure this out.

I knew it! A Planet of Your Own was previously published in Worlds of If just a few months ago under the title The Long Way to Earth, and reviewed by my esteemed colleague David Levinson. I've taken a look at both versions. If there's any difference at all, it must be very minor.


Cover art by Hector Castellon. It's still not a complete short novel.

Anyway, Kynance is stuck on a planet with no money and few prospects for getting back to Earth. The company that supplies so-called pelts from another world offers her a job that sounds too good to be true. (The extremely expensive pelts are actually vegetable matter that changes color and produces pleasant aromas.)

All she has to do is stay alone on the pelt planet for a year, so the company can maintain its claim. In exchange, she'll get a fortune in cash and a free ride to Earth.

Of course, there's a catch. Nobody has ever been able to avoid violating the company's rules, so they get tossed out without payment, and are expected to die on the uninviting world of pelts. However, a few previous employees have managed to survive, barely managing to feed themselves on the plant life that covers the entire watery planet.

These poor guys make their way to the company's station, where Kynance violates her contract by waving at them. (The evil corporation has very strict rules.) Is she doomed to the same ghastly fate as the other ex-employees?

This is an enjoyable story, maybe not groundbreaking but certainly engaging. The heroine is appealing, and the way she uses her knowledge of the law is clever.

Four stars.

After our palate has been sharpened by this hors d'oeuvre, even if we've tasted it before, let's flip over the book and savor something a little bit more substantial. (Soup or salad?)

The Beasts of Kohl, by John Rackham


Another cover by Jack Gaughan.

Another British writer supplies the larger part of this Ace Double. John Rackham is the pen name of John T. Phillifent. He's mostly been published in British magazines, although he's also shared a couple of Ace Doubles prior to this one. The phrase First Book Publication makes me wonder if this novel appeared in some magazine somewhere, but I can find no evidence for that.

Our hero is a fellow called Rang. (I'll try to avoid You Rang? jokes.) We first meet him hunting a six-legged beast on an eternally stormy planet with three suns. Helping him are an enormous bird of prey and a gigantic canine. This unlikely trio are the title beasts.

Kohl is a huge, sea-dwelling, tentacled alien. He collects species from various planets, including Rang and his friends. Kohl comes to realize that Rang is more than just an animal, so he offers to send him back to Earth, from which he was taken when he was a small child. Rang is happy living with Kohl in an underwater shelter, but Kohl insists that he visit his home world first and then decide whether to stay there instead.

Accompanying Kohl, Rang, the bird, and the dog, is a woman called Rana. (First rule of science fiction nomenclature: Female names have to end with the letter a.) She's one of the beasts of another member of Kohl's species, and is a little wilder than Rang.

Once their spaceship lands in the ocean on Earth, Kohl casually mentions the fact that, due to time dilation at speeds near those of light, about one hundred thousand years have gone by since Rang and Rana were last on Earth. We find out that they're Cro-Magnons, and they're now in the modern world.

(There are a few hints that this is the future, but for the most part it might as well be 1966.)

The two fish-out-of-water and their giant pets get mixed up with a genius who earns large amounts of money for offering his opinions; his secretary, who carries a torch for him; a film maker working on a documentary about the genius; the greedy financial manager of the genius; and some other folks. This part of the novel offers a satiric look at today's society through the eyes of the visitors.

When the manager arranges to have the genius meet a couple of Soviet agents, the book turns into a spy thriller, with Rang in the role of a primitive James Bond. (Rana does her fair share of beating up the bad guys as well.) It all leads up to a car/helicopter/submarine chase, with some vital help from Kohl, who remains in the underwater spaceship.

It's not a bad yarn, if you're willing to put up with the changes in mood from drama to comedy to adventure. The romance between the genius and the secretary is a little corny, with each of them attracted to the other but not saying anything about it until the end. You might agree with Rang and Rana that modern people are badly mixed up in their minds about logic and emotion.

Three stars.

Grab your steak knife and get ready to dig into the main course.

The Solarians, by Norman Spinrad


Anonymous but rather accurate cover art.

Here's the first novel from a new author who has shown up in various magazines for a couple of years. It starts off in true space opera form, with a fleet of human spaceships engaging in battle with a relentless enemy intent on extermination. The humans are outnumbered by the ruthless Duglaari, so the commander of the fleet beats a hasty retreat, abandoning a human colony world to their foes.

The war has been going on for centuries, and the humans are slowly losing. Their only hope is the nearly legendary home world. The solar system has been cut off from the many other human planets for about three hundred years. The inhabitants of humanity's place of origin are supposed to show up and defeat the enemy with a secret weapon.

The commander of the defeated fleet happens to be reporting to his superior officer when these so-called Solarians arrive. Instead of a huge number of warships, only a small vessel appears. It carries three men and three women, which seems hardly enough to turn the tide of battle.

The six Solarians have various psychic powers, from telepathy to the ability to control another's body. This is obviously a great advantage, but it still seems impossible that they would be able to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat.

Their outrageous plan is to travel to the Duglaari home world, and offer terms of surrender. Through sheer force of personality, aided by demonstration of their powers, they manage to convince the officer in charge to send the commander with them as a supposed ambassador from the human worlds.

The commander is suspicious of their motives. He is also uncomfortable about their lifestyle. The half-dozen Solarians live in a group that isn't quite a family, but something like one. One of the women openly offers to have sex with him, although she's in love with one of the men, and the fellow she loves isn't jealous at all. The commander eventually learns to accept this new way of relating to other people during the long trip to the Duglaari planet.

That changes when he thinks the Solarians have double-crossed him, by offering the Duglaari the chance to destroy the rest of humanity if they'll leave the solar system alone. Although the Duglaari reject this offer, the commander imagines himself surrounded by traitors as their spaceship heads back to Earth. Of course, the reader is aware that the Solarians have something up their sleeve.

The combination of classic space opera with sociological science fiction, in the form of the Solarians' way of life, is intriguing. There's a climax that's spectacular in its scale, but you'll probably see it coming. The novel is quite talky, and all the human characters sound about the same. The aliens are interesting. Overall, it's a decent first novel, if not great.

Three stars.

What's For Dessert?

After that hefty triple offering, you're probably in the mood for something a little lighter to clear the palate, although still featuring heroic space adventures.


by Jason Sacks

Thief of Llarn, by Gardner F. Fox

Thief of Llarn is the third or fourth book written by Gardner Fox that I’ve written about for this fanzine, and a pattern has definitely emerged in terms of the man’s work. The fabulous Mr. Fox is just fine at delivering solid, exciting, comic-booky sci-fi filled with traditional action and adventure. Every novel of his that I’ve read is a delightful but shallow page turner, with plenty of swashbuckling Flash Gordon action but little character depth or new wave insights. He’s more like early Heinlein than later Heinlein, so to speak.

Which isn’t a bad thing, and Fox’s latest short novel, Thief of Llarn, fits comfortably in his oeuvre. It stars a larger-than-life lead character who seems like a DC superhero, say someone like Adam Strange. Thief of Llarn features breathtaking escapes and horrific villains and a never-ending journey across a planet and beautiful princesses, yeah yeah yeah I see your head nodding and yep we’ve all seen this sort of thing before but that derivativeness is sort of the point of the work.

Thief of Llarn sat comfortably in my local Woolworth’s next to novels by Rice Burroughs and (ugh) Lin Carter, with Tarzan and Conan and Thongor all pleasant peers to Fox’s protagonist Alan Morgan in their delivery of high adventure and traditional heroism. All swashes are buckled, all heroes are wise, all thieves are rogues, and all planets are explored. This novel gives 40¢ worth of thrills and earned the author a few hundred dollars in payment from publisher Ace Novels, and that’s a transaction which benefited everybody. It's a workmanlike novel, but that's kind of the point.

I enjoyed this book precisely as much as I wanted to. There are exciting time travel elements, thrilling escapes from dark castles, journeys across arctic wastelands, a brilliant guild of thieves and some astonishing cars gliding across the skies. We get strange variations on polar bears, a doddering Cthulhu type creature, a murder fortress and a Disney style castle. We have a hero who doesn’t introspect too much, some fighting companions of his who are of mixed genders, and even an ending that allows our hero to love two women without two-timing either of them. It’s 146 thoroughly solid pages that acts as a delivery mechanism for a story which will delight any fan of traditional planets and sorcery sci-fi.

If Llarn doesn’t have the literary merits of the works of Zelazny or Moorcock or even Leiber, that’s just fine, and those limits should be part of our expectations. Mr. Fox has a side job writing for the rather staid National Comics on series like Adam Strange, Justice League of America, The Spectre, The Atom and Tomahawk.  Alan Morgan could have come right out of any of those series. And on top of his comic book work, Fox also finds time to write four novels per year. Talk about a man chained to his typewriter! Gardner Fox is a working writer delivering excitement at 35¢ a pop – and I’m just fine with that.

3 stars

After Dinner Coffee

Wrapping things up, how about a nice warm cup of java to go with that dessert?


by Gideon Marcus

The Scheme of Things, by Lester Del Rey

Lester Del Rey has been one of the most prolific writers of science fiction over the last thirty years. He started in the pulps, and he's never really stopped (though he had a slow patch a few years ago).

His latest novel is with a quite new publisher: Belmont. They've been prolific since their establishment ~1960, though their line is confined mostly to anthologies and a small stable of authors. I think this is Del Rey's first book with them.

It opens with a bang. Mike Strong is an Assistant Professor of Logic at "Kane University" somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic. At the tail end of a typical class, he is suddenly visited by a vision, transported to another world entirely, though just for a moment.

So begins an increasingly disjointed existence. By turns, he finds himself in the bodies of countless alternate Mikes: the husband of an adulterous actress, fixer for the Mob, leader of a ragtag group of refugees following a nuclear war, and on and on. The only common element is Mike, and the fact that he always returns to "the real world". And to the waiting, patient ear of Paul Bender, a former soldier-of-fortune and fellow faculty member, who serves as Mike's anchor and sounding board.

Is Mike actually plane-trotting? Are his lives connected? And what awaits him if any of his alter egos die?

Scheme is the sort of book that, in the hands of someone less skilled, could have been potboiling mediocrity. Instead, Del Rey makes each of the realities, each Mike, independently interesting. The book almost feels like the other, yet-unwritten, half of The Man in the High Castle. Its threads weave together into an interesting discourse on the difference between consciousness and awareness. Plus, it's a riveting, quick read.

I don't know if it'll be a candidate for next year's Hugo, but it certainly is a feather in the growing Belmont cap.

Four stars.




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Magazine, Serial

[July 31, 1966] Dimmed lights (August 1966 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

Blackout

This morning, Janice noted sparks coming from the socket by her typewriter desk.  With great swiftness, she unplugged the lamp and radio.  There was a respite, but only briefly, and soon the wall was spurting flame again. 

I heard her calm bellow, "Gideon, hit the circuit breaker.  Now."  You never saw someone descend a flight of stairs so fast (at least in control of their feet).  She called an electrician – fortunately the phone company have a separate power supply – and we went out for breakfast until the fellow could arrive.

That afternoon, we got a stern lecture on overloading our poor house's circuits.  We thanked and paid the fellow and were back to work by 1 pm.

Whereupon the entire neighborhood's power went out.

And that, dear readers, is why this article was typed by the light of the window rather than artificial incandescence!

Flicker, flicker

It was fitting that we should be failed by the men and women of our investor-owned, business-managed electric light and power company just as I turned to write about this month's Analog.  It's not that the stories were horrible, but I've definitely seen better in these pages.


by John Schoenherr

Too Many Magicians (Part 1 of 4), by Randall Garrett

To date, the Lord d'Arcy stories, set in an alternate 1960s with Victorian technology but replete with magic, have all been novellas or shorter.  This latest piece is the first full length novel.

A naval courier has been killed, perhaps while bearing crucial intelligence.  The Anglo-French Empire's most renowned magical detective is contracted to get to the bottom of the case.  Meanwhile, Sean O'Lochlainn, d'Arcy's sorcerer assistant, is thrown in the Tower after witnessing a second death at a wizards' conference; this locked-room murder has a similar murder weapon to the first.

And so, the setup for a magical who/howdunnit.  As with the rest of the series, Garrett's tale compels (though none engage so thoroughly as the excellent first d'Arcy adventure.) If I have a complaint, it's that Garrett is starting to rely a bit too much on pastiche: d'Arcy gets more like Holmes with every installment.  Indeed, his cousin, the Marquis, is Mycroft in all but name.  I half-expect our hero will take up the violin and acquire a cocaine habit.

Four stars so far, but we'll see.

Spirits of '76, by Joe Poyer


by Leo Summers

A representative from the UN pays a visit to a lunar squatter, who has illegally laid claim to a piece of the Moon's surface and established a distillery.  After a great many homebrewed drinks, the agent decides that free enterprise and private ownership are actually just fine.

I suspect maintaining an independent habitation on our airless neighbor will be a lot harder than this story would have us believe.  Still, the libertarian spirit of the piece surely tickled Campbell's capitalist heart.

It'll go in one eye and out the other, but it's harmless, at least.  Three stars?

One MOL Step Forward , by Lyle R. Hamilton

Hamilton opens up this non-fiction article with a promise to explain how the X-20 "Dynasoar" spaceplane was killed by paperwork.  Instead, he offers up a meandering piece, told largely in contractor interviews and press releases, which culminates in a description of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory.  This budget space station, serviced by an Air Force Gemini, is the current DoD space project of size.

I suppose there's useful information in the piece, but not much point.  I've gotten much better insight from my subscription to Aviation Week and Space Technology.

Two stars.

Psychoceramic, by John W. Campbell, Jr.

The fearless editor follows Hamilton with a shorter piece on a ceramic that can apparently extract pure oxygen and produce power at the same time.  Typical Campbellian kookery, or is he onto something?  I guess only time will tell.

Two stars for the unnecessary smugness and having cried wolf too many times.

By the Book, by Frank Herbert


by Kelly Freas

An aged troubleshooter is summoned from retirement to fix a big beam.  It's some kind of launching laser that propels seed packets (vegetable and human) toward colony worlds.  Problem is, it keeps killing technicians trying to service it.

I had many problems with this story, the biggest of which was the devotion of so many words to setting up a technical problem whose resolution I had no interest in.  A real snoozefest of gizmo-speak.

One star.

Technicality, by Norman Spinrad

The MPs have arrived, fearsome conquering aliens whose greatest strength is their ability to vanquish whole armies without firing a shot.  But does their nonviolent rapaciousness hide an Achilles Heel?

While the gimmick falls a little flat, Spinrad tells this no-blood-or-guts tale with fine detail and not a little subtle satire.

Three stars.

Light of Other Days, by Bob Shaw


by Kelly Freas

A quarreling married couple touring the Scottish Highlands come across a purveyor of "slow glass."  This remarkable substance passes light so slowly that, after ten years of absorption, will replay the scene that played across it for the next decade.  Thus, a city dweller might install one of these wonder panes and enjoy ten years of a view of the rugged north of Scotland rather than local squalor.

The technical bits felt a little overdone, but Shaw tells the story with a light, domestic touch that reminds me of Cliff Simak.

Three stars, and eagerness to see him tackle a longer subject.

Something to Say, by John Berryman


by Leo Summers

Last up, the fellow who gave us the Walter Bupp psychic stories gives us, instead, one of his more nuts-and-bolts tales.  The Earth Federation (apparently an evolution of the UN) has reason to believe that Soviet-aligned agents have infiltrated a primitive world to poison the natives against the West.  Said planet has a breathable atmosphere some six times as dense as Earth's.  This affords a far more airborne ecology, and even the indigenes have Bronze Age flying machines.

A troubleshooter is dispatched to thwart the Soviet plot, but is overpowered by a Communist.  The two crash land and are taken prisoner.  The Sovworld agent seems to have the leg up, as she is fluent in the indigenous tongue, but our plucky hero has an ace up his sleeve: an encylopedic knowledge of gliders.

There is a good story lurking in here, with a great setting and a decent setup.  It is hampered by its truly insufferable and two-dimensional characters.  As well, Berryman seems to have forgotten much that he's learned about pacing.

An uneven three stars.

After the lights go out…

2.7 stars is not a great score, though it's actually the median for this year's crop of Analogs.  And also for the month.  Coming in below it are IF (2.6), Galaxy (2.5), Worlds of Tomorrow (2.2), and Amazing (1.9).  Note that three of those four are Fred Pohl's triplets.

Ahead of Analog are Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.1), New Worlds (3.2), and Impulse (3.4)

There was exactly one woman-penned new story this month, and four/five-star stories would have barely filled two slim magazines (and one of them is a reprint of Make Room, Make Room!).

Ah well.  At least there's only one more month of summer, after which, ironically, things should get brighter!

Have you gotten your copy of Rosel George Brown's new hit novel, Sibyl Sue Blue?  If not, get down to your local newsstand and pick it up!




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Magazine, Serial

[December 13, 1964] Save us from Yourselves (January 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

That Low

The uproar at the University of California at Berkeley continues, with student leader Mario Savio becoming instantly famous for his cri de couer: “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

Ever see that corny old silent movie Metropolis, with its oppressed workers desperately struggling against the gigantic levers of a future civilization’s industry?  Do you think Mr. Savio might have had those scenes in mind?  Is our culture now to be dominated by the imagery of old science fiction, recycled through late-night TV?  It can’t come soon enough for me.

The Issue at Hand


by Michael Arndt

Speaking of retrograde imagery, the January Amazing leads off with what seems a striking misjudgment.  Though it features the first installment of a serial by the up-and-coming Roger Zelazny, his longest work to date, the cover is a cartoony though well-executed depiction, by newcomer Michael Arndt, of an extraterrestrial boxer being knocked out of the ring, with a Damon Runyonesque audience looking on, clearly illustrating Blue Boy by the determinedly mediocre Jack Sharkey.  Zelazny’s story is relegated to smaller type above the magazine title, with his name hard to read against a bright background.  Amazing is clearly leading from the wrong side.  (Can’t anybody here play this game?)

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


by George Schelling

Promising as it seems, I will withhold reading and commenting on Zelazny’s serial He Who Shapes until the concluding installment is at hand, as is my practice.  A look at the first few pages indicates that the story involves psychiatric treatment by mental projection—not exactly a new idea (see Peter Phillips’s Dreams Are Sacred from 1948 and John Brunner’s more recent The Whole Man), but not overly familiar either.  Zelazny also seems to be making the most of his theatrical background in this one.  We will see the results next month.

Blue Boy, by Jack Sharkey

Blue Boy is even worse than I expected.  The protagonist, formerly involved in the boxing world, has been drafted, and is sent with a large crew on a mission to Pluto, where they encounter blue-skinned humanoids, whom they clap into the brig, and hastily head back towards Earth.  The Plutonians are quite muscular and have a knack for footwork, so our protagonist gets the idea of sneaking onto Earth with one and turning him into a boxer. 


by Michael Arndt

That’s about as far as I got (halfway) in this offensively stupid and also interminable screed (34 pages but seems like much more), which is written, and padded, in a stilted and circumlocutory style which seems pretty clearly intended as a pastiche of the above-mentioned Damon Runyon.  “Why?” one might cry, but the wind only whispers . . . “one cent a word.” One star.  No stars.  Heat death of the universe.  Cessation of all brain activity.  Bring back Robert F. Young!

A Child of Mind, by Norman Spinrad


by Virgil Finlay

We return at least to the semblance of sentience with Norman Spinrad’s A Child of Mind, a clever variation on a stock SF plot.  Three guys from Survey land on a planet which seems idyllic, but of course there’s something wrong; there always is.  This time, the majority of the females of the various local fauna have cell structures indicating they are really different organisms under the skin. 

Turns out they spring from “teleplasm,” an inchoate life form whose modus vivendi is, whenever a male of any species passes by, to discern and produce his ideal mate.  Why this all-female survival strategy?  As the hero, ecologist Kelton, Socratically explains to one of the other guys:

“Who pays for a wife’s meals?”

“Her husband, of—Oh my God!”

Er . . . that’s not always how it works.  If a lioness could speak, she would have a rather different account of things, as would many other females of other species.  But never mind, because, of course, very shortly, all three crew members have their own cocoon-grown dream girls: the thuggish one has an adoring slave, the mama’s boy has a sexy mama figure, and well-balanced Kelton has a merely supernaturally beautiful mate who understands his every desire.

This road leads nowhere, of course—to species extinction, since teleplasm doesn’t breed in the usual fashion, and not even to short-term satisfaction for Kelton, to whom

“. . . Woman had always been Mystery.

“And a creature of his own mind could hold no mystery for him, only the unsatisfying illusion of it.”

So Kelton does the only sensible thing, which you can probably guess.  While Kelton’s devotion to the autonomy of Woman may be creditable, there are hints of some pretty strange attitudes drifting through the story.  At one point, as Kelton is musing about how the teleplasm women are custom-made for their men, he thinks, “Swapping them would be like swapping toothbrushes.” Earlier, Spinrad quotes a “saying among Survey men: ‘Planets are like women.  It’s not the ugly ones that are dangerous.’”

Well, let’s reserve the psychoanalysis and give the author credit for a reasonably well-turned story—but meanwhile, Mr. Spinrad, you might think about putting some women on your space crews.  Three stars.

The Hard Way, by Robert Rohrer

Robert Rohrer’s growing competence suffers a setback in The Hard Way, a one-set psychodrama starring the sadistic Lieutenant Percy, who is delivering several prisoners from a penitentiary on Earth to one on Mercury.  Unfortunately they missed the turn towards Mercury and are heading towards the Sun, to die of heat on the way.  May as well have some fun with it! thinks the Lieutenant, and offers the prisoners a choice between slowly roasting to death and opening the airlock for a faster and cleaner exit.  Contrived, cliched, scenery-chewing.  Two stars, barely, and mainly to distinguish it from the abysmal Sharkey story.

The Handyman, by Leo P. Kelley


by George Schelling

Leo P. Kelley’s The Handyman is a pleasantly inconsequential dystopia about a small town where everything seems pretty nice except for the medical facility, the Hive, which spirits sick people away to its sterile and overlit premises and forbids any medical practice but its own.  Old Doc Larkin must ply his profession covertly, masquerading as a handyman and carrying his instruments concealed in a loaf of bread newly baked by his wife.  Three stars, also barely.

The Men in the Moon, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

The second of Robert Silverberg’s “Scientific Hoaxes” articles is The Men in the Moon, concerning the hoax perpetrated by journalist Richard Adams Locke, who published a series of articles in the New York Sun concerning the observations of profuse flora, fauna, and people on the Moon, supposedly made by famed astronomer William Herschel from his observatory at Cape Town, South Africa.  Herschel was indeed in Cape Town but of course made no such observations and didn’t know Locke was making these claims until years later.  Like its predecessor, it’s an interesting story capably told.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So: another dose of mediocrity from this historic magazine that hasn’t done much of anything for us lately, and owes us big time, at least those of us putting down good money for it each month.  Maybe the Zelazny serial will be its redemption.  Hope springs eternal, but it’s getting tired.

[Holiday season is upon us, and Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), on the other hand, contains some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age.  And it makes a great present! Think of it as a gift to friends…and the Journey!




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Book, Magazine

[November 29, 1964] All-star (December 1964 Analog)

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by Gideon Marcus

The Big Guns

Thanksgiving is over, and the holiday season will officially begin tonight with the lighting of the first of the Hannukah candles.  After that, it's just a short skip and a jump to that more widely celebrated holiday.

I am, of course, referring to the Winter Solstice.

It is an appropriate season, then, for science fiction's most-read magazine, Analog, to finish its year of publication with a bang.  Fantasy and Science Fiction is fond of issuing "All-Star" magazines, in which the majority of the authors are big names.  The December 1964 Analog isn't so dubbed, but nevertheless, it's chock full of heavy hitters.  Let's take a look!

Armed Assault


by Robert Swanson

Tempestuous Moon, by Joseph H. Jackson

It has been the subject of wives' tales and farmers' almanacs that the phases of the Moon have an effect on the weather.  In particular (they maintain), some points in the lunar cycle are likelier to be rainy than others.  And now Analog has got a breathless article confirming the folk wisdom.  Take that, doubting eggheads!

It's true that (editor) Campbell is notorious for printing the worst pseudoscience pieces, and Jackson's article is mostly blather.  However, if his data be accurate, they are compelling.  While the phases of the Moon should have no effect on the Earth, per se, they do correspond to geometries between the Sun and the Moon with respect to the Earth.  And both of those bodies do have a profound effect on our planet every day in the form of tides.  I can conceive that a strong tide, for instance when the Sun and Moon's forces combine to cause Spring Tides, might create lower atmospheric pressures, reducing the amount of moisture the air can hold, causing rains.  Neap Tides would have the opposite effect.

Or it could all be garbage.  Are there any pieces in reputable journals?

Plague on Kryder II, by Murray Leinster

Calhoun the interstellar Med Service man and his adorable pet/assisant, Murgatroyd, are back.  This time, they are investigating an impossible plague, one which seems to suppress the immune system rather than directly infecting the body.  Worse, this disease kills tormals, the monkey-like race that Murgatroyd belongs to.  Since this latter is an impossibility, tormals being immune to all diseases, Calhoun suspects foul play.


by Kelly Freas

I love the Med Service stories.  Sadly, they are suffering from the same malaise that has infected all of Leinster's writing to date.  It causes him to write only in short, declarative statements, often repeating himself for no reason.  Also, this tale's solution is given mostly in exposition, which kills the fun of the mystery.

Still, even substandard Calhoun and Murgatroyd is pretty fun, and the picture of the sick tormal is too cute for words.  Three stars.

Shortstack, by Leigh and Walt Richmond


by Kelly Freas

The latest vignette by the Richmonds is an odd one, more a dramatized advertisement for a unique power generator.  It uses the heat differential between the top and bottom of a plastic cylinder to drive an engine and also to distill water.

Harmless, kind of interesting.  Three stars.

Contrast, by Christopher Anvil


by Kelly Freas

A man trapped out in a wilderness that would give Deathworld a run for its money gets buzzed by an obnoxious tourist.  When said sightseer falls out, the hermit takes his skimmer and rides to safety.  The moral of the story: don't take what you have for granted, and a stint in the muck might do you good.

Enjoyable, despite the smugness of the ending.  Three stars.

Sweet Dreams, Sweet Princes (Part 3 of 3), by Mack Reynolds


by Robert Swanson

We return to the world of the early 21st Century, where society has stratified into stagnancy: in both East and West, the top 1% rule everything, the bottom 90% are jobless and tranquilized, and only the middle 9% have any real agency.  Last time, Estruscan professor and gladiator-extreme, Denny Land, had just won a tripartite contest over custody of a Belgian scientist who had invented anti-missile missiles, something with the potential to destabilize the world.

But when the Americans go to pick up the scientist, he has disappeared!  And rather than express disconcertment, Land's boss, Joe Mauser seems almost unsurprised…

Land goes back to his old school with a promotion and bump in caste, but he can't hide his frustration and disenchantment.  Reenter Bette Yarborough, who recruits Land into the Sons of Liberty to try to upend the whole rotten world order.  And then comes an even unlikelier ally in the cause — former foe and Sov-world agent, Yuri Malshev.  Together, can the three create a revolution?

And what if the revolution has already happened, and nobody knows?

This installment was the most engaging, well-paced and thoughtful, though there may have been one too many wheels within the wheels.  Perhaps a Part IV would not have been amiss.  I was grateful that Bette turned out not to just be a love interest (though more than one female in the universe would have been nice).  If anything, Denny and Yuri had more chemistry…

Anyway, four stars for this segment.  Call it three and a half for the novel as a whole.  I appreciate that Reynolds is willing to make "if this goes on" predictions.  I wonder how right he will prove to be…

Rescue Operation, by Harry Harrison


by Adolph Brotman

An alien astronaut crash lands on the shore of an Adriatic village.  Injured and barely conscious, he is taken to a local scientist for help.  But can an effective treatment be developed in time?

This simple story is given depth and emotion by the unusually talented Harrison, who will probably get my nomination for one of the year's best authors.  Four stars.

The Equalizer, by Norman Spinrad


by Adolph Brotman

In Israeli's Negev desert, a scientist wrestles with his conscience — and his superior — over the the new bomb he's invented.  On the one hand, it will give the little Jewish state inordinate power; on the other hand, power never remains exclusively owned for long. 

An interesting think piece whose title has a double meaning.  Three stars.

High Marks

Well, color me surprised!  Analog, normally a disappointing performer, scored a respectable 3.2 stars — second only this month to the superlative Galaxy (3.6).  Science Fantasy and Worlds of Tomorrow both scored an even 3 stars, largely thanks to better-than-average long pieces balancing out less impressive small ones.

And on the negative side of the ledger, we have a lackluster IF (2.8), a still-Davidson weighted Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.6), and Cele G. Lalli's mags did worst of all: Fantastic got just 2.3 stars, and Amazing broke the two barrier, scoring a jaw-dropping 1.9.  What happened?

Women published just 5 and a half of all the stories in magazines this month, all of them very short.  Betty Friedan would be rolling in her grave, and she's not even dead!

Ah well.  1965 approaches, a chance to wipe the slate and start anew.  But before then, you will want to see our Galactic Stars awards when they come out in a few short weeks!  Then you won't have to wade through the dross to get the gems — we'll have done the work for you.

Happy Holidays!

[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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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 15, 1964] Veteran's Triumph (December 1964 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Marching as to War

November 11 used to be the federally mandated holiday set aside for the honoring of World War I veterans.  After "The Great War" was eclipsed by later conflicts, the day's scope became more general, dedicated to veterans of all wars.  And so, parades like this one in Walla Walla, Washington, featuring soldiers from as far back as the Spanish American War, have become an annual tradition.

Of course, in Las Vegas, it was a day like any other.  Well, the show must go on…

It is no surprise that, given this particularly bloody century (which saw the American Civil War, two world wars, the Korean War, the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, etc. etc.) that war is a perennial theme in science fiction.  But where war was once portrayed in a patriotic light, or at least, merely as an exciting backdrop for adventure, we are now starting to see a decidedly cynical tinge to modern SF war stories. 

And there is no finer example of this trend than this month's superb issue of Galaxy.  Read on and find out why:

The Starsloggers, by Harry Harrison

The biggest military science fiction hits of the last five years run the gamut from novels like Heinlein's ultra-jingoistic Starship Troopers and Dickson's Hornblower-esque Dorsai! at one end, through the more nuanced "Joe Mauser" series by Reynolds and the latest Starwatchman, by Bova, to anti-war pieces like Dickson's Naked to the Stars.

But there has never been such a biting, such an accurate, and such an eminently readable satire of the veteran's experience as Harry Harrison's new novel, The Starsloggers.

Bill, a backwoods hick with dreams of becoming a Technical Fertilizer Operator, is shanghaied into This Man's Space Navy.  Thus ensues months of grueling, dehumanizing boot camp under the merciless lash of the fanged Drill Sergeant, Deathwish Drang.  But these torments are as nothing when the entire training division is drafted into an all-out war against the saurian "Chingers", whose greatest offense is that they exist. 

Bill is pressed into serving as a fusetender, sweating profusely while he watches for the big red band on the six-foot weapons fuse to turn black, and then replacing it with another monstrous device.  It's a position that normally takes the better part of a year to learn the intricacies of, but needs must, and somehow Bill and his brood learn the ropes in about fifteen minutes.

Along the way, Bill meets such notable characters as "Eager Beager", a perennially smiling chap who loves to shine everyone else's boots; Tembo, a proselytizing zealot who refuses offers to muster out; a nameless ship's chaplain who doubles as the laundry officer…and on and on.  All of them are ridiculous, yet strangely plausible.

Ultimately, Bill ends up in a Southeast Asia analog, fighting to preserve a 10-mile square postage stamp of land against a limitless enemy in the foggy jungle.  This is the kind of story where the protagonist is punished for bravery and rewarded for self-interest, and suffice it to say, by book's end, The Starsloggers earns the ironic subtitle: Bill, the Galactic Hero.

Satire is hard.  Comedic satire is harder.  It's easy for a story to devolve into silliness, and it's harder still to maintain the joke and readability throughout novel length.  Harrison manages to lambast every sacred cow in the military barn, all while making a story with just enough reality and interest to keep the pages turning.

The Starsloggers should be required reading for anyone who reads Starship Troopers, if anything to keep too many Eager Beagers from enlisting.  Five stars.

The Rules of the Road, by Norman Spinrad

In this, Norm Spinrad's second appearance outside of Analog, a death-defying mercenary is hired to explore an alien dome that has mysteriously appeared on Earth.  Nine men have gone in before; none came out.  Can the mercenary survive the strange geometries and lethal traps of the dome?  And what will he be when he comes out?

An interesting piece, though perhaps 20% too padded and without a great deal of consequence.  Three stars.

Ballad of the Interstellar Merchants, by Sheri S. Eberhart

The third poem from this author; a pleasant 24th Century space shanty.  I imagine someone will put music to it and we'll hear it at Westercon next year.  Three stars.

For Your Information: The Rarest Animals, by Willy Ley

The latest from Veelee, the good German, is a piece on endangered species thought to be extinct…but aren't!  It's quite good, except it just abruptly stops without any kind of conclusion.  I hope he didn't have a heart attack at the end!

Three stars.

The Monster and the Maiden Roger Zelazny

One of the genre's newer lights offers up this silly little piece, about virgin sacrifice and turnabout.  It's worth a chuckle.  Three stars.

A Man of the Renaissance, by Wyman Guin

Last time we saw Wyman Guin, he offered up a political piece set in a delightfully unique world.  With Renaissance, the author has outdone himself. 

The story is set on a water world, on whose oceans float islands of vegetation-lashed pumice.  Their dwellers are reduced to a resource poor and medieval existence.  But one latter-day Leonardo, Master of the Seven Arts, would risk love, limb, and life to effect a daring plan: to bind three small land masses together.  To accomplish this, he must overcome prejudice and adversity, and plain, hide-bound stubborness.

Renaissance starts a little choppily, confusing since the context only comes gradually, and I found the combat scenes a little inexpert.  But everything else, particularly the worldbuilding, is simply marvelous.  I tore through it in no time…and then found myself trying to figure out how to make a wargame out of the setting!

Four stars.

Let Me Call Her Sweetcore, by David R. Bunch

Bunch, of course, is best known for his tales of Moderan, where humanity has become increasingly roboticized.  Sweetcore seems to take place in an adjacent universe; it is a love story about an old man, his overly emotional robot, and the girl robot whom it falls in love with.

I both appreciated the story's juxtaposition of the maudlin machine and its emotionless master, while at the same time being annoyed with the stereotypical portrayal of love and marriage.

A low three stars.

To Avenge Man, by Lester del Rey

We end with another robot story, which is also a war story.  Sam, a sentient Mark I machine assigned to a small moonbase, is left behind when the scientific team is recalled to Earth.  Shortly thereafter, the planet flares into myriad pinpoints of brilliance before going dark.  Now Sam is truly alone.

The first half of the piece, where Sam becomes fully actualized after reading the base library, is quite compelling.  But the latter half, in which Sam looks for humanity's remains in vain, deduces that we were destroyed by Wellesian aliens, and leads a galactic crusade to punish them, is both redundant and revealed in the story's prologue.

Sadly, this reduces what could have been a four star story to readable three.

Yin's Yang

I lamented that this month's IF was decidedly subpar, and per Victoria Silverwolf, Worlds of Tomorrow wasn't much better.  But Galaxy, the old warhorse of Editor Fred Pohl's stable, remains a sterling example of how to do science fiction right.  Just the Harrison and the Guin would have made a full, 4.5 star issue of F&SF.  It's ones like these that have kept me a faithful subscriber for 14 years, and I don't see myself bugging out any time soon.

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Book, Magazine

[October 12, 1964] Slow Cruising (November 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

It’s a cliche that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  What can one say about those who don’t learn even from what they see around them?  At the University of California at Berkeley, a city within a city in which many thousands of people study, work, and in many cases live, the administration recently decided it will strictly enforce rules prohibiting political advocacy and speech, appearances by political candidates, and recruitment and fundraising by student organizations at a heavily-travelled area (an intersection of the city’s main street!) where such activities were routinely conducted.

Let’s pause for station identification.  This is 1964.  All over the United States, people are standing up for the rights and freedom of individuals, including political rights, most notably the right to vote.  Most of them are Negroes, but you’d think people in responsible positions would realize that a few white people (as apparently are most of Berkeley’s students) might get some funny ideas too—like the ideas of direct action and civil disobedience that they have been seeing on TV, and in some cases in person, for several years. 

You’d also think they would be aware that a significant number of their own students and some faculty members just got back from the Freedom Summer activities in the segregated South, where they lived daily with the risk of physical assault and even death, and are unlikely to be too fearful of university administrators.

So on October 1, the campus police arrested a guy named Jack Weinberg—one of those who went south this past summer—who was sitting at an information table for the Congress of Racial Equality and refused to show his identification.  A crowd formed around the police car, preventing it from moving, and the car became a speaker’s podium for a crowd said to have swelled to three thousand people.  This went on for 32 hours until the university agreed not to press charges against Weinberg, and also agreed to . . . what else? . . . form a committee!  This is to be a student/faculty/administration committee to discuss “all aspects of political behavior on campus and its control, and to make recommendations to the administration.”

What next? Nobody knows.  But one thing seems to be clear: increasingly, infringement on the rights that politically active Americans have come to expect to exercise will be challenged using the tools we all see on TV every week from the civil rights movement.  Authority is no longer its own justification, and those in positions of power, some of whom seem to look to Louis XVI as their role model, will need to change their approach to survive.  As that folksinger put it—I forget his name, the one with the frizzy hair and nasal voice—“you’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.”

The Issue at Hand


by Alex Schomburg

More prosaically—back to science fiction.  The November 1964 Amazing is distinguished by being the second consecutive issue with a cover depicting a guy in a flying chair, calling to mind the observation of the Hon. Jimmy Walker, erstwhile Mayor of New York City, before fleeing the country to avoid a corruption prosecution: “Never follow a banjo act with another banjo act.” Alex Schomburg’s rather static and solemn depiction of the device contrasts amusingly with Virgil Finlay’s interior illustration, which attempts to imbue the same gadget with all the energy and drama that the cover picture lacks.  Can we say Apollonian versus Dionysian?  I thought not.  Forget I mentioned it.

Rider in the Sky, by Raymond F. Jones


by Virgil Finlay

The story itself, Raymond F. Jones’s long novelet Rider in the Sky, is unfortunately pretty inane, a hardware opera that reads as if it had been dumbed down for prime-time TV.  In the near future, private enterprise is starting to get into the act in space, and Space Products, Inc., has developed the Moon Hopper, essentially a rocket-propelled chair in which a space-suited person can sit and fly over the lunar surface, untroubled by the quantities of fine dust covering it.  But how to market this device?

The Space Products boys (usage highly intentional) decide on a publicity stunt—they’ll get somebody to fly the Moon Hopper from Earth orbit to the moon.  Who?  They’ll ask for volunteers from within the company!  They get one—Sam Burnham, a company accountant and secret space buff, who knows he doesn’t have the right stuff but has indulged his fantasies to the point of installing a centrifuge and an imitation space capsule in his basement. 

Sam’s wife Edna, who spends her copious spare time supporting the cause of the orphans of Afghanistan, is appalled, and leverages her Afghan-symp connections to start a national movement to keep Sam Earthbound.  This, and Edna, are presented in a spirit of condescending sexual oppression of the sort one finds in, say, True: The Man’s Magazine.  I forget if the author refers to “the little woman,” and I’m not going back to look, but that’s the attitude.

After much machination, with the President getting into the act, Sam goes, and his trip takes an unexpected turn, plot mechanics unwind reasonably cleverly, and he and the story are brought to a soft landing.  But the treatment of women, and the smarmy faux-folksy style in which a lot of the story is told, make it difficult to appreciate the admittedly limited virtues of the story.  Two stars, barely.

Enigma From Tantalus (Part 2 of 2), by John Brunner


by Ed Emshwiller

John Brunner’s two-part serial Enigma from Tantalus concludes in this issue.  While it’s not the pretentious mess that his previous effort The Bridge to Azrael was, Brunner has not regained the form of (as I keep saying) his sequence of smart and well turned novellas in the UK magazines. 

Here, humans have discovered Tantalus, a planet inhabited by a singular intelligent life-form with separate units linked telepathically and capable of being molded into a variety of forms and functions.  The crisis that drives the plot is that the Tantalan is believed to have made a fake human (presumably disposing of the real one) and dispatched it on a spaceship to Earth; we can’t let it loose on our planet!  (There is an acknowledgement along the way that the Tantalan appears to be studying humanity just as humanity is studying it.)

So, there’s a bunch of people confined in a small space, and we must learn which is the alien!  This is not exactly an original plot, but Brunner plays it more in the style of a country-house mystery than that of its distinguished and horrific predecessor, Campbell’s Who Goes There?, spiced up by the fact that the passengers are as eccentric a bunch of freaks and neurotics as one could wish for.

Brunner manages the latter parts of the plot capably and trickily enough, but overall the story has two sore-thumb-level problems.  One is that by far the most interesting part is the discovery and opening of communication with the Tantalan, all of which happens off-stage—in fact, before the story opens—and we learn about it only in fragments.  In that sense the story is much too short. 

In another sense, it’s too long.  The other big problem is that here as in The Bridge to Azrael, Brunner wants to wrestle with Big Thinks, in this case chiefly that technological development and affluence have left the run of humanity with a sense of helplessness and lack of purpose.  But his attempts to integrate this notion into the story are perfunctory, or worse; for example, he invokes it to explain the manipulative and nymphomaniacal female journalist who is confined in the spaceship and chewing the furniture.  (This is a conspicuous sour note from a writer whose prior work is notable for strong and relatively cliche-free female characters.) So this exercise in speculative social psychology in the end contributes nothing to the story but verbiage.

Another problem, at least to my mind, is that when something comes up that the machines can’t handle in the ordinary course, Earth is essentially governed by a tiny elite called the “Powers of Earth” (a particularly arrogant and irascible specimen of which conducts the inquiry of the spaceship passengers).  These “Powers” apparently exercise unchecked authority based on their extraordinary powers of deducing correct conclusions from limited information. 

This seems to me a sort of magical thinking, no better than (not much different from, in fact) the recurring notion in another magazine that the future will be dominated by a psionic elite, and about as plausible and useful for thinking about the future as the depiction by Edmond Hamilton and others of galactic empires ruled by hereditary nobles with pompous titles.

One might ask if this criticism is too big a demand to make of popular fiction in newsstand magazines, but Brunner invites it by posing the questions himself.  I don’t want to be hard on the guy for essaying too much, but his ambition is outrunning the format he is writing in, and he will have to find better ways to integrate them, or move on to a different kind of writing.  Anyway, three stars for a nice but flawed try.

Your Name Shall Be … Darkness, by Norman Spinrad


by George Schelling

Norman Spinrad displays his own brand of ambition with Your Name Shall Be . . . Darkness, about an Army psychiatrist captured and subjected to sophisticated brainwashing in the Korean War. He is repatriated, seemingly intact, but . . . .  This is essentially The Manchurian Candidate as applied social psychology, and pretty clever, though done in an overly bombastic style for my taste.  Still, it’s effective: three stars verging on four.

The Seminarian, by Jack Sharkey


by Virgil Finlay

And, last of the fiction, Jack Sharkey . . . is Jack Sharkey, with The Seminarian, about a guy, the son of missionaries, reared on a South Sea island without significant technology who comes to the States to conduct his own missionary work.  It’s a tribute to Sharkey’s superficial skills that his facility distracts one from the story’s complete implausibility.  Two stars.  Sure you don’t want to go into advertising, Jack?

The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

There’s a new byline on this month’s non-fiction: Robert Silverberg (also now the regular book reviewer) contributes The Lying Stones of Dr. Beringer, apparently the first of a series—it’s labelled “Scientific Hoaxes #1.” It’s about a 16th-Century German scholar who was taken in by a large aggregation of fake fossils, an interesting story in itself (especially in the hands of Silverberg, a much more capable writer than the usual suspect Ben Bova) and one which contributed to a shift in understanding of what fossils actually are.  Three stars.

Summing Up

So, business as usual at Amazing: a couple of nice tries, one dreary failure, one lighter-than-air piece of trivia, plus a better article than usual.  Steady as she goes.

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Magazine

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

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Opening Ceremonies

Howdy, sports fans!

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


The first day, and already the scoreboard is broken

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

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

Batter Up!


cover by Gray Morrow

On Messenger Mountain, by Gordon R. Dickson

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

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


by Gray Morrow

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

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

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

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

Four stars.

The Twerlik, by Jack Sharkey

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

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

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

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

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

Four stars.

Short Course in Button Pushing, by Joseph Wesley

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

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

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

Three stars.

Stay Out of Our Time!, by Willard Marsh


by Nodel

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

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

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

Two stars.

Lucifer, by Roger Zelazny

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

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

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

Four stars.

The Great Doomed Ship, by J. T. McIntosh


by Gaughan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two stars.

The Realized Man, by Norman Spinrad

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

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

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

Three stars.

What the Dead Men Say, by Philip K. Dick


by Virgil Finlay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five stars.

The Box Score

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

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