Tag Archives: philip k. dick

Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 20, 1964] Apocalypses and other trivia (Galactoscope)

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[Don't miss your chance to get your copy of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), some of the best science fiction of the Silver Age.  If you like the Journey, you'll love this book (and you'll be helping us out, too!)]

[This month's Galactoscope features two global catastrophes, two collections, and four authors you've almost certainly heard of!]


by Jason Sacks

The Penultimate Truth, by Philip K. Dick

Like many fans, I first became really aware of Philip K. Dick after he won the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel for his remarkable The Man in the High Castle. That book dazzled in its chronicle of an alternate history in which the Nazis and Japanese won World War II (which opened up many areas of thought and conversation for me and my friends) as well as in its brilliant world-building and the fascinating, multifaceted characters at the heart of Dick's award-winner.

High Castle was also an amazingly tight novel, packing a dense plot into its mere 240 pages. As many of us Dick fans have learned, not all of his works are quite so tightly plotted. I adored his Martian Time-Slip and Dr. Bloodmoney from last year, but those books tended to both delight and annoy in their meandering, nearly stream-of-consciousness styles.

The newest Philip K. Dick novel, The Penultimate Truth (just out in paperback from Belmont) fills a bit of the gap between his ’62 masterpiece and the challenging ’63 books. This thoroughly delightful book wanders a bit but always held me in its comforting grasp.

The Penultimate Truth is shambolic and episodic, but that approach serves the work well. Its main characters are living shambolic lives, which Dick depicts as full of odd episodes which occasionally have great and beautiful moments of transcendence, even in the post-apocalyptic wasteland in which the book is set.

Note that this review will reveal elements of the book, comments that "spoil", if you will, so skip down to the next review if you love surprises in your fiction.

In the future world of this book, much of humanity lives in massive underground bunkers, nicknamed anthills, in which they build weapons and medical devices for the nuclear war they believe is ravaging the surface of the Earth. When Nick St. James, the president of one anthill, makes his way to the surface, St. James discovers his people have been lied to. The world on the surface has survived nuclear devastation and has emerged into a unique and odd civilization. Needless to say, the revelation of the relatively peaceful world surface changes nearly everything.

What makes this novel so special, though, is that those revelations don't change the way St. James views his world. He doesn’t become a noble crusader for truth or a vengeful destroyer of the new civilization. Instead our protagonist goes the opposite way of most heroic leads. Instead of rebelling, he goes out of his way to allow the world to stay in its current state. He will not let the truth of his world change life in the anthill. The penultimate truth of the story is the truth behind the nuclear war. But the ultimate truth is more powerful: it is the special bond society creates, the relationships created and enduring for decades, and the lies and half-truths that are necessary to perpetuate that society.

This description makes The Penultimate Truth sound heady and brainy, and it is filled with a intriguing level of intelligence and wisdom about human nature. But it is also has the several elements we have come to expect from Dick’s finest work.

First and foremost, this is an exciting story, with scenes of high adventure, escapes and shootouts which keep the reader turning the page. There are mysteries piled upon mysteries, characters who shift and change as the story proceeds only to have them revealed in ways for which the reader was foreshadowed but for which he likely could not have anticipated.

Secondly, this is a wise and fascinating study of human nature. The Penultimate Truth is about jealousy and lust for power balanced with trust and love for family and friends. It sets stability and chaos in opposite sides of the metaphorical coin in ways few other novels of any type have explored, and in doing so shows the power of novelistic science fiction in the hands of a master of the medium.

Thirdly, this book seems to explode with ideas, from the anthills (an idea Dick has explored in some of his short fiction such as “Second Variety”) to the vast demesnes in which the surface dwellers live, to the vast conspiracies used to keep ordinary people following their leaders. In fact, it is in that last set of ideas that Dick falls down a bit for me. I had trouble imagining a government systematically lying to its people in the way described here. In a world in which leaders are elected by the governed, there is no reason for leaders to lie to their people. [Oh, my sweet country mouse…(Ed.)]

And the last element I’ve come to love in Dick’s work comes from the very end of the book. In my mind there are two endings to this novel, and in fact I won’t reveal them here so you can experience them yourself. But I’m curious how many readers wish The Penultimate Truth had ended with the deeply ironic penultimate chapter as its conclusion as opposed to those who preferred the redemptive final chapter.

Throw in some gorgeously descriptive language and you have one of the finest science fiction novels of 1964. I hope Mr. Dick brings home another Hugo next year from London.

4.5 stars


by Gideon Marcus

Tongues of the Moon, by Philip J. Farmer

Three years ago, just before John Boston started reviewing Amazing for us, Philip Jose Farmer had a short story called Tongues of the Moon.  The tale began with a literal bang: the Axis of southern nations launched a preemptive strike on the Communist Northern Hemisphere (including a subjugated United States kept pacified with skull-mounted pain inducers!), and the entire world was destroyed.  At the same time, the "Axes" attacked their enemies throughout the solar system — from Mercury to the Mars, Copernicus to Callisto.  Our hero, a scientist named Broward, is caught in a crossfire at what was supposed to be a lunar peace conference.  Together with the monomaniacal American, Scone, he manages to escape the fight and deactivate the central pain induction center on the Moon.  Now free agents, Scone finds himself the leader of some of the very few human beings left alive.  Can he knit together a new human race from the four hundred survivors representing dozens of nations and ideologies?  Can a viable culture be created when men outnumber women 4:1?

These are all excellent questions, and I'm not surprised that Farmer decided to expand his novelette into a full novel.  Unfortunately, what could have been a fascinating sociological study is subverted in favor of a fairly pedestrian adventure story and a series of treasure hunts.

In the expanded portion of the book, Broward is dispatched to the ruined Earth to find a planet-destroying bomb.  The plan is to destroy the last significant Axis presence in the system, their colony on Mars, so that the Moon is safe.  But Broward recognizes paranoia when he sees it, and he is reluctant to carry out Scone's plan, which will cause yet more decimation of the human population.  He also, understandably so, has issues with Scone's plan to condemn the remaining women to forced multiple marriages.  And so begins a merry excursion — to the caves of Siberia, the undersea domes of the Mediterranean, the vastness of outerspace, the tunnels of Mars.  Tongues never stops to take a breath, and each sequence is more or less self-contained.  The most interesting bit involves the Siberian expedition, when Broward takes along as co-pilot the last Jew in the world (and probably the last person of Japanese extraction, too).  In this section are tantalizing hints of what the story might have been.  Alas, all development is tossed for more running and chasing.

It has been said of Farmer that he is "always almost good", which is not nearly as nice as "almost always good."  This latest book continues the trend.  Someday he'll make a masterpiece.  Until then, he's just a decent writer who can never quite deliver.

3.5 stars


by Rosemary Benton

Ace Double: "The Million Year Hunt" by Kenneth Bulmer and "Ships to the Stars" by Fritz Leiber

Ace Double novels are always a treat. Even though they are largely reprints of stories from the 1950s I always feel like I have rediscovered something special when I pick up one of these books at the bookstore. This month's release features titles by veteran authors Fritz Leiber and Kenneth Bulmer. Given the styles of each author I was intrigued to see how they would read back to back. Sadly to say, this was not one of the better lineups from Ace.

"The Million Year Hunt" by Kenneth Bulmer

Kenneth Bulmer's contribution to this month's Ace Double follows the adventures of a scrap yard worker turned savior of the human race. The story begins as we drop in on the aftermath of a prank pulled by protagonist Arthur Ross Carson, a mischievous young colonist on a back-water planet with few prospects. In short order he finds himself contending with the unjust killing of his fiancé Lucy, startling news of his parentage, and the piteous million-year mission of an alien conscious that enters his body. This is a lot to unwrap within less than 150 pages, and that's not even the full extent of the plot. Bulmer goes on to reveal a slew of converging political schemes to control the universe, including a program to selectively breed a successor to lead the intergalactic police force known as the Galactic Guard.

I felt like I was reading a much larger story that had been brutally and awkwardly chopped down to fit a page count limit. Up to the very last sentence the story is rife with major plot points that are not resolved, gawky transitions of emotion within the cast of characters, and plot twists that feel last minute and cheap. I can't overstate the issue that lies with the jerking sensation the reader gets as the story shifts from scene to scene. So awkward and halting was the pace that I just couldn't believe Bulmer was the one to give it a final proof read before sending it to publication. There was just no way a man as prolific as him could have been satisfied with this story, a public presentation by which he would be judged as a writer, going to press in the state it's in.

If "The Million Year Hunt" is indeed the butchered result of a much larger manuscript, then the most tragic victims of its murder were the emotional transitions of the characters and the quirky, adventurous and lighthearted atmosphere that was so desperately trying to take hold. The easy and funny dialogue between Arthur Ross Carson and the alien conscious that strapped itself to him nervous system is very entertaining to read. Their banter actually comprises some of the best scenes in this story. Instead of clunky exposition their conversations dynamically teased out information on their respective pasts, personalities, and surroundings.

If only Bulmer could have let the characters be themselves stumbling through space on adventures loosely tied to an end goal, specifically Carson's mission of revenge and his origin as the "savior" of the Galactic Guard, then this would have been a fantastic story. Unfortunately in its current state "The Million Year Hunt" is not a story that should have made it to print.

[Apparently, The Million Year Hunt is a fix-up of sorts, created from Scarlet Denial in Science Fiction Adventures No. 26, and Scarlet Dawn in Science Fiction Adventures No. 28. Both came out in 1962, published in the United Kingdom. The text is unchanged from the originals. (ed)]

"Ships to the Stars" by Fritz Leiber

On the other side of this Ace Double is a collection of six short stories by power house actor and novelist Fritz Leiber. In contrast to Bulmer's story, Leiber's "Dr. Kometevsky's Day", "The Big Trek", "The Enchanted Forest", "Deadly Moon", "The Snowbank Orbit", and "The Ship Sails at Midnight" are all well structured with tight plots and developed characters. Leiber's writing also demonstrates a more measured understanding of how to maintain the flow of a story. The tendency of his characters to repeatedly ponder the effects fear has on them makes them fragile, fallible, and very true to the duality of human nature. They want to know and see everything, but there are limits to what they can understand and what their eyes have access to. Leiber's inclusion of these relatable and basic human failings forms a tension in his stories that would be otherwise missing if he had held full faith in humanity's ability to rationalize everything with science.

The strongest short stories in this small selection were "The Big Trek" and "The Ship Sails at Midnight". In these two tales the reader can really see Leiber's deep connection with the gothic authors whom he draws inspiration from. In "The Big Trek" Leiber writes from the first-person perspective of a man joining a feverish march of bizarre beings from across the universe. The employment of fluctuating space and loose concepts of time's passage echoes William Hope Hodgson's "The House on the Borderland" (1908) and pretty much any piece by Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator's awe and trepidation touched with excitement are also very similar to Arthur Machen's inner voice within "The White People" (1904).

Like H. P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany, Leiber's strongest talent as a writer is keeping his characters grounded by the weighty truth that humans are far from the most powerful forces in the universe. All of Leiber's stories have humans sprinting to stay out of the way of some larger, stronger entity charging through with little interest in our species’ plight. "The Ship Sails at Midnight" best encapsulates this with its accompanying message that humans have such potential but are so readily self-sabotaging.

The joy of reading Fritz Leiber’s short stories greatly made up for my disappointment in Kenneth Bulmer’s novella. Fast paced, thoughtful and touching, they make this Ace Double a worthwhile purchase. I will absolutely be looking forward to reading more of his work in the future.

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




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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 8, 1964] It's War! (The October 1964 Galaxy and the 1964 Hugos)

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[We have exciting news!  Journey Press, the publishing company founded by the team behind Galactic Journey, has just launched its first book.  We know you will enjoy Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), a curated set of fourteen excellent stories introduced by the rising stars of 2019. 

If you enjoy Galactic Journey, you'll want to purchase a copy today — available physically and virtually!]


by Gideon Marcus

It's a War, Man

No matter which way you look these days, fighting has broken out somewhere.  Vietnam?  War.  The Congo?  War.  Yemen?  War.

Worldcon?  You'd better believe it's war.

Back in May, the committee putting on this year's event (in Oakland, called Pacificon II) decided that Walter Breen would not be allowed to attend.  For those of you living in a steel-plated bubble, Breen is a big-name fan in the SF and coin-collecting circles with a gift for inciting dislike in direct proportion to one's proximity.

Oh, and he's also a child molester.

Now there has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the draconian action taken by the Pacificon committee, likening the arbitrary action to McCarthy's witch trials of the last decade.  As a result, fandom has largely resolved itself into two camps, one defending the attempt to evict Breen from organized fandom, the other vilifying it.

I know we're a kooky bunch of misfits and our tent should be pretty inclusive, but ya gotta draw the line somewhere, don't you?  And what may have been fine for Alexander doesn't hold in the 20th Century.  I guess it's clear which side I fall on.

Well, despite the protests and the boycotts that tainted the Worldcon (which were part of what deterred me from attending this year), they still managed to honor what the fans felt was the best science fiction and fantasy of 1963.  Without further ado, here's how the Hugos went:

Best Novel

Here Gather the Stars, by Clifford Simak (63 votes)

Nominees

For the first time, the Journey had reviewed all of the choices for Best Novel before the nominating ballots had even been counted.  While we didn't pick the Simak for a Galactic Star last year, it's not a bad book, certainly better than the Heinlein and the Herbert, probably better than the Norton.  I suspect the reason the Vonnegut finished so low is that, as a mainstream book, fewer had read it.  Or perhaps just because it was so weird.

Short Fiction

The No Truce with Kings by Poul Anderson (93 votes)

Nominees

We got all of these this year, too.  The Anderson was our clear favorite, being the only one on the list to rate a Galactic Star.  The rest are in the order we had rated them.  Sadly, because this category encompasses so many stories, a great number got cheated out of recognition.  Perhaps they will divide the categories by length in the future.

Best Dramatic Presentation

None this year — insufficient votes cast for any one title to create a proper ballot.

I bet this will change next year what with so many SF shows coming out this Fall season (Rose Benton has got an article coming out in two days on this very subject!)

Best Professional Magazine

Analog ed. by John W. Campbell, Jr. (90 votes)

Nominees

It looks like people voted for the magazines in rough proportion to subscription rates, though F&SF did disproportionately well.  I am happy to say that this is the year we start covering Science-Fantasy…in its new incarnation under the editorship of Kyril Bonfiglioli.

Best Professional Artist

Ed Emshwiller (77 votes)

Nominees

Book covers are showing their influence on the voting — Krenkel and Frazetta don't do the SF mags. 

Best Fanzine

AMRA (72 votes)

Nominees

  • Yandro (51 votes)
  • Starspinkle (48 votes)
  • ERB-dom (45 votes)
  • No Vote (52 votes)
  • No Award (6 votes)

(isn't it interesting how close the ERB fanzine's tally is to Savage Pellucidar's…)

I was glad to see that Warhoon, which is full-throatedly in favor of Walter Breen, was not in the running.  Starspinkle, which makes no secret of its disdain for Breen, is the only one of these I read regularly.

Also, while Galactic Journey was not on the ballot again (for some reason), we did get a whopping 88 write-in votes.  So, unofficially, we are the best fanzine for 1964.  Go us!

Best Publisher

Ace Books (89 votes)

Nominees

  • Pyramid (79 votes)
  • Ballantine (45 votes)
  • Doubleday (35 votes)
  • No Vote (25 votes)
  • No Award (11 votes)

I should keep track of who is publishing what for next year.  The problem is, I usually read novels in serial format.

And that's it for my Hugos report.  It'll be interesting to see if fandom's scars heal at all by next year.

Veterans of Foreign Wars

Given the turmoil in the papers and in fandom, it's not surprising that war is a common theme in science fiction, too.  In fact, the October 1964 issue of Galaxy is bookended by novellas on the subject; together they take up more than half the book.  They also are the best parts.


by George Schelling

Soldier, Ask Not, by Gordon R. Dickson

Centuries from now, after humanity has scattered amongst a dozen or more stars, the species has splintered to specialize in particular traits.  The eggheads of Newton focus on scientific advance while the Cassidans make the building of starships their trade.  The mystical Exotics have devoted their lives to nonviolent pursuit of philosophy.  The Dorsai, of course, are renowned galaxy-wide for their military prowess.  And the hyper-religious "Friendlies" are committed to faith.

Our story's setting is the wartorn Exotic world of St. Marie, where Dorsai mercenaries have been employed to topple the Friendly mercenaries who had conquered the world years prior.  Newsman Tam Olyn has learned that the Friendlies' mission is a forlorn one, and he hopes to leverage that information to force the Christian zealots to do something desperate, illegal, to win the fight.  For Olyn has a grudge to settle with the Friendlies, having watched them slaughter without mercy an entire company of surrendered soldiers several years back.


by Gray Morrow

Set in the same universe as Dickson's prior Dorsai stories, Soldier is a more mature piece, asking a lot of hard questions.  Is Olyn's zeal any less than that of the Friendlies, any more laudable?  If Olyn's actions cause the destruction of an entire sub-branch of humanity, can the species' collective psyche withstand the loss of one of its vital components? 

Of course, the situation turns out to be far more complex than Olyn thought, with the Friendly commandant and the Dorsai commander proving to be independent variables beyond his control.  In the end, nothing goes as planned.

Soldier is not perfect.  It's overwritten in places, although since the tale is a first-person account written by a war correspondent, I wonder if this was intentional.  The omniscience of the Exotic, Padma, who has an understanding of events and factors that would make even Hari Seldon jealous, is a bit convenient as a storytelling device.  The idea that humanity has evolved in a few centuries, not just societally but mentally, such that vital components of our minds have been bred out of existence, is difficult to swallow.

But Dickson is a good writer, and I found myself turning the pages with avid interest. 

Four stars.

Martian Play Song, by John Burress

A variation of patty-cake that will make you chortle.  Three stars.

Be of Good Cheer, by Fritz Leiber

The first of two robot stories, this is a letter from Josh B. Smiley, Director-in-Chief of Level 77's Bureau of Public Morale to one Hermione Fennerghast of Santa Barbara.  It seems she just can't be happy living in a mechanically run world, where robots ignore the people, where people seem to be increasingly scarce, and where both the indoors and outdoors are being reduced to dull grayness.  Smiley does his best to reassure her that all is for the best, but the Director's verbal smile increasingly comes off as forced.

It's cute while it lasts, forgettable when it's over.  Three stars.

The Area of "Accessible Space">, by Willy Ley

Mr. Ley offers us a list of near-Earth celestial targets that could be reached in the near future by rockets and probes.  The author is quite optimistic about our prospect, in fact: "There can hardly be any doubt that a mission to a comet (unmanned) will be flown before a man lands on the moon."

Anyone want to lay odds?

Three stars.

How the Old World Died, by Harry Harrison

Robot story #2: computerized automata are programmed with one overriding desire — to reproduce.  Soon, they take over the entire world, having deconstructed our buildings and machines to make more of them.

The twist ending to the story is not only ridiculous, but it also is in direct contradiction to events described earlier.  Sure, perhaps the narrator (a crotchety grandpa who remembers the good old days) is not reliable.  But if that be true, then 90% of the story is invalid, and what was the point of reading it?

Two stars.

The 1980 President, by Miriam Allen deFord


by Hector Castellon

Have you noticed that every President of the United States elected in a year ending in zero ultimately dies in office?  Perhaps that's why, in 1980, the two big parties have nominated candidates they wouldn't mind losing (though they'd never admit it publicly).

A cute idea for a gag story, I guess.  Except, in this case, the parties have been maneuvered into their actions by alien agent, The Brown Man, and his goal is racial harmony and equality.

Yeah, I found the whole thing a bit too heavy-handed for my tastes, too.  I've liked deFord a lot, but her work lately has seemed kind of primitive, more at home in a less refined era of science fiction.

Three stars, barely.

The Tactful Saboteur, by Frank Herbert


by Jack Gaughan

From bad to worse.  This unreadable piece involves a government with a built in Department of Sabotage to ensure things don't run too smoothly.  I guess.  Maybe you'll get more out of it than I did.

One star.

What's the Name of That Town?, by R. A. Lafferty

A supercomputer is tasked with discovering an event not from the evidence for its existence, but from the conspicuous lack of evidence.  Lafferty's piece is an inverse of deFord's — a great idea rather wasted on a feeble laugh. 

Another barely three-star story.

Maxwell's Monkey, by Edgar Pangborn

What if the monkey on your back was a real monkey?  This monkey is a clunker.

Two stars.

Precious Artifact, by Philip K. Dick

Humanity emerges victorious from a war with the "proxmen", and Milt Biskle, a terraformer on Mars, is granted the right to return to Earth.  He does so only reluctantly, subconsciously dreading a trip to his overcrowded homeworld.

Once there, he is wracked with fears that the teeming masses of people, the burgeoning skylines are all imaginary.  Underneath, he is certain, lies nothing but ruins, smashed by the proxmen — who were actually triumphant and project this illusion to keep the few remaining humans sane.

But there is a level of truth even deeper…

A minor effort from a major author, Dick's latest warrants three stars.

The Children of Night, by Frederik Pohl


by Virgil Finlay

Lastly, Galaxy's editor picks up the pen to deliver a tale of marketing in the early 21st Century.  It's a topic near and dear to Pohl's heart, he having started out as a pretty successful copywriter, and it's no surprise that he often returns to this subject in his stories.

In this particular case, Pohl's protagonist is "Gunner", a fixer for the world's most reputable (and infamous) publicity firm.  They're the kind who'd even try to reform Hitler's image if the were enough Deutschmarks in the deal.  And in 2022, Moultrie & Bigelow's client is no less than the Arcturan insectoids who tried to wipe out humanity in a decade-long interstellar war.  I mean, how do you sell the public on a bunch of stinky bugs who killed indiscriminately and conducted experiments on children that would make Mengele blanch? (Who am I kidding — the bastard would take notes.)

Unlike many of the author's other marketing stories, this one is played straight; and while I don't know that I buy the ending, no one would argue that Fred Pohl can't write.

Four stars.

Picking up the Pieces

At times, the latest issue of Galaxy feels like a battlefield, with definite winners and losers.  In the end, though, this kind of war is a lot more palatable than the other ones going on in the world. 

At four bits, that's affordable and welcome R&R.

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




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Magazine

[June 20, 1964] How low can you go?  (July 1964 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

SFlying West

Once again, the Journey is brought to you from Japan!  Specifically, the nation's capital, Tokyo.  We've become old hands at making the trk across the Pacific, especially since Pan Am inaugurated direct 707 service from Los Angeles to Tokyo International.

This time, we stayed at a new hotel, in the shadow of the recently completed Tokyo Tower.  From the observatory deck of the hotel, the often elusive Mt. Fuji was clearly visible, thanks to a heavy rain that had occurred the night before.

Tokyo remains as it has been for the past 16 years (our first visit was in 1948!) Bustling, filled with energy and cigarette smoke.  There is a particular focus on renovation what with the Olympics coming to town soon.  Nevertheless, life otherwise goes on normally in the thoroughfares, wide and narrow.

TV cartoons have become a big deal here, with the recently debuted "Mighty Atom" inspiring tons of merchandise.

It's not all roses, though.  Up on the other side of the country, an earthquake struck off the coast of Niigata.  Then, a tidal wave swept in.  The property damage was immense and at least two dozen people have died.

More personally, though my tragedy hardly compares, this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction managed to limbo below the low bar recently set by Editor Avram Davidson (who fled Mexico and apparently now resides in my home state of California).

With a sigh, here we go again:

The Issue at Hand


by Ed Emshwiller

Cantata 140, by Philip K. Dick

It is said that too many cooks spoil a broth, and the SFnal corollary is that too many ideas spoil a plot.  Indeed, Dick's newest novella, the third in the "News Clown" series set late in the 21st Century, has so many handwaves that I could have used the magazine to fly to Japan.  The piece's 60 pages contain:

  • An overpopulated world with abortion but not Enovid (birth control medicine).
  • A satellite of prostitutes to relieve proceative tension.
  • A super cheap way to get to said satellite.
  • Precious few other satellites.
  • Teleportation.
  • Teleportation (accidental) to another world.
  • Suspended animation as the standard treatment for excess, unemplopyed population.
  • An American population that is more "Colored" than "Caucasian".
  • The Presidential campaign of the first "Colored" candidate (the "Event of 1993" caused the demographic shift such that Whites were outnumbered, yet it is not until 2080 that a Black candidate has a chance).
  • A two-bodied, one-headed mutant human crime lord.

For the most part, the plot follows Jim Briskin as he tries to become the first "colored" President of the United States.  Other things happen, including the "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" incident in which a balky teleporter somehow links Earth to a far-off, virgin planet.  It is very quickly taken as read that this is the solution to Earth's frozen overpopulation problem (creating the excuse for the rather esoertic title — it probably refers to Bach's "Sleepers wake!" composition).  I suppose if the story stuck to these two threads and developed them in a satisying manner, this could be a good read — especially since it's written by Dick, one of the genre's masters.  Instead, the piece is a jumbled mess, stuffed with clumsy jargon, and combining both implausible and contradictory elements with several overly conventional ones.

For example, race relations appear to be stuck in the 1960s even though the story takes place more than a century later.  The overpopulation angle makes no sense.  At first, I thought there might be moral objections to abortion and/or medical birth control, but given that state-assisted suicide is a sanctioned population stabilizer, I doubt it.  And how do the prostitutes not get pregnant?  And how do 5000 of them satisfy Earth's billions?

Inconsistencies aside, the narrative is neither interesting nor comprehensible.  If I can't have good SF, I'd at least like good satire.  If I can't have that, I'll settle for decent writing.

And if that's lacking, there's no rating I can give a story other than…

One star.

The Second Philadelphia Experiment, by Robert F. Young

From the lost pages of Ben Franklin's diary comes an account of the great scientist's further explorations into electricity.  It's a facile reproduction of Franklin's style but really just exists to set up a fairly flat joke.  I was feeling more charitable when I read it, but now I think it's fair to give it just two stars.

Balloon Astronomy, by Theodore L. Thomas

This month's nonfiction seed for science fiction articles suggests using balloon-mounted instruments to provide constant weather reports.  But don't they already do that?

Two stars.

The Scientist and the Monster, by Gahan Wilson

Wilson offers The Twilight Zone episode, "Eye of the Beholder" virtually unchanged except for a slightly improved moral message at the end.  Still just worth two stars.

A

The Happy Place, by Toni Heller Lamb

Ms. Lamb's first published story is a dark piece involving a young girl who finds the cemetery a more hospitable residence than any place of the living.  There is a nice final line, and the story is nice in a macabre sort of way, but otherwise it is unremarkable. 
Three stars.


by Ed Emshwiller

The End of the Wine, by C. S. Lewis

This poem, which follows a bedraggled Lemurian as he makes landfall in Stone Age Europe, is made all the more poignant by being the author's last creation (he died last year, same day as JFK).  Thus, the double whammy as we realize what we've lost as the man from Atlantis rues over same.

Four stars.

The Salvation of Faust, by Roger Zelazny

An interesting inversion of the Faustian Bargain, it entertains and then disappears.  Three stars.

All-Hallows, by Leah Bodine Drake

A tiny poem whose message is that nothing dies — it just becomes part of the world around you.

Three stars.

Nothing Counts, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor regales us with a nonfiction article on the evolution of Roman numerals and the utility of the zero.  It's well-written but there is very little useful information, and in particular, almost no history of the zero itself.

Three stars.

The Struldbrugg Reaction, by John Sutherland

New author Sutherland brings us a pointless Sherlock pastiche, the gimmick being that Holmes and Watson ("Bones" and "Dawson") are in their 90s and immortal (thanks to the Struldbrugg Reaction — see Gulliver's Travels to understand the reference). 

It's no Lord Darcy.  Two stars.

The Girl with the 100 Proof Eyes, by Ron Webb

Some schlubb decants a genie named Jeanie and coerces her to love him.  A delightful rape fantasy.  One star.

We Serve the Star of Freedom, by Jane Beauclerk

This final story, the first from Ms. Beauclerk, features a clever native of an alien world (inhabited by quite human extraterrestrials) who gets the best of traders from Earth.  It's a pleasant story, though more fable than SF.  Probably the best prose piece of the issue.  Three stars.

Summing Up

Good grief.  I do hope Avram Davidson's tenure at the helm of this once proud magazine will soon come to an end.  It's either that or my days of subscribing will.

Oh well.  At least I'm in Japan!

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[June 16, 1964] Strangers in Strange Lands (August 1964 Worlds of Tomorrow)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

We've probably all felt out of place from time to time, like the philosophical private eye Philip Marlowe quoted above. I'll bet that the Rolling Stones, a British musical group newly introduced on this side of the pond, felt that way when they made a very brief appearance on the American television variety show The Hollywood Palace this month. Their energetic version of the old Muddy Waters blues song I Just Want to Make Love to You lasted barely over one minute. The sarcastic remarks made about them by host Dean Martin took up at least as much time.


Here are the shaggy-haired troubadours at a happier moment, shortly after their arrival in the USA.

In Tears Amid the Alien Corn

Similarly, the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow is full of characters who aren't where they belong, along with a couple of authors who might feel more at home elsewhere.


by Gray Morrow

I trust that the shade of John Keats will forgive me for stealing a few words from his famous poem Ode to a Nightingale, because they movingly evoke the emotions of those far from where they feel at home. The stories we're about to discuss may not have many tears, but they've got plenty of aliens, as well as, unfortunately, quite a bit of corn.

Valentine's Planet, by Avram Davidson


by Gray Morrow

Better known, I believe, as the current editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a fact that does not endear him to all readers, Davidson may seem a bit out of place as the author of a long novella of adventure in deep space. Be that as it may, his story takes up half the issue, so it deserves a close look.

We start with mutiny aboard a starship. The rebels kill one of the officers in a particularly brutal way, sending the others, along with a few loyal crewmembers, off to parts unknown in a lifeboat. They wind up on an Earth-like planet, inhabited by very human aliens. (There's one small hint, late in the story, that the natives came from the same ancestors as Earthlings.) The big difference is that the men are very small, no bigger than young boys. The women are of normal size, so they serve as rulers and warriors. (There's a male King who is, in theory, the source of all power, but he's little more than a religious figurehead, living in isolation from the world of war and politics.)

The survivors of the mutiny get involved with local conflicts, while they try to find a source of fuel so they can make their way home in the lifeboat. Things get complicated when the insane mutineer in command of the starship lands on the planet, intending to plunder it. After a lot of hugger-mugger, and a dramatic final confrontation with the rebels, the Hero gets the Girl, achieves a position of power, and is well on his way to reshaping the local matriarchy into something more to his liking.

As you can tell, I was not entirely comfortable with the implication that replacing a woman-dominated society with a male-dominated one is a laudable goal. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt, and assume he was aiming at nothing more than escapist entertainment. On that level, it's a pretty typical example. The feeling of the story changes from space opera to science fantasy halfway through, and the transition is a little disorienting. Davidson avoids most of the literary quirks found in many of his works, although he indulges in a little wordplay now and then. (I lost count of how many times he told us that the armor of the Amazon warriors was black, scarlet, black and scarlet, scarlet and black, black on scarlet, scarlet on black, etc. He also gives names to a large number of the political factions on the planet, apparently just to amuse himself.)

Two stars.

What Weapons Tomorrow?, by Joseph Wesley

A nonfiction article, among a bunch of tales of wild imagination, may seem, as the old song goes, like a lonely little petunia in an onion patch. In any case, this is a rather dry piece, imagining what the tools of war might look like in 1980. The author describes satellites that could rain destruction from above, and energy beam weapons that could defend against them. He then explains why neither of these methods is practical. It's informative, if not exciting.

Two stars.

The Little Black Box, by Philip K. Dick


by George Schelling

This strange, complex story begins with a woman who is definitely not where she belongs. She's an expert on Zen Buddhism, sent to Cuba in an attempt to distract the Chinese Communists living there from their political philosophy. This quickly proves to be a deception, as she's really there so a telepath can read her mind and track down a religious leader. It seems that the woman's lover, a jazz harpist so popular that he has his own TV show, is a follower of the enigmatic mystic Wilbur Mercer.

Mercer is a mystery. He broadcasts an image of himself walking through a desert wasteland on television. His devotees use devices that allow them to experience his sensations, primarily his suffering as he approaches his death. Both sides of the Cold War consider him a danger. There is speculation that he may not even be human, but some sort of extraterrestrial. The United States government declares the empathy machines illegal, driving the Mercerites underground. The story ends in what seems to be a miraculous way.

Like most stories from this author, this peculiar tale contains a lot of a characters, themes, and subplots. Sometimes these work together as a whole, sometimes they don't. It certainly held my interest throughout, even if I didn't fully understand what Dick was driving at. Your enjoyment of it may depend on your willingness to accept that some things have no rational explanation.

Three stars.

We from Arcturus, by Christopher Anvil

Everything about this story makes it seem as if it fell out of the pages of Astounding/Analog and landed in a place where it doesn't belong. That's no big surprise, since Anvil has been a regular in Campbell's magazine for quite a while. You also won't be startled to learn that it's a comedy about hapless aliens who fail to invade Earth. The author can write that kind of thing in his sleep by now, so he pulls it off in an efficient manner.

A pair of shapeshifting scouts from another planet suffer various misadventures as they try to prepare the way for their leaders to conquer the world. Five such teams have already disappeared, so the new duo is cynical about the chance of success. (Like in many of these stories, even when it's human beings making the attempts, you have to wonder why they don't just give up.) One big problem is that the aliens get all their ideas about Earthlings from television. Eventually, they find out why the other scouts vanished, and the story ends with a mildly amusing punchline.

It's refreshing to have a comic science fiction story that doesn't degrade into crude slapstick, and Anvil has a light touch that can provide a few smiles. It's a pleasant enough thing to read, even if it will fade from your memory as soon as you finish it.

Three stars.

The Colony That Failed, by Jack Sharkey


by Jack Gaughan

Here we have not just one person in the wrong spot, but a whole community. Colonists disappear, one by one, from an agricultural settlement on a distant world. Norcriss, a fellow we've seen before in the so-called Contact series, arrives to take care of the problem. As in previous stories, he uses a device that allows him to enter the mind of other beings. One problem is that, in this case, he doesn't know what mind to enter. Adding a touch of what seems to be the supernatural is the fact that the coffin of a dead woman burst open, her body went missing, and other colonists heard her voice after she died.

The author provides a scientific solution to the mystery that is interesting, if not extremely plausible. The story accomplishes what it sets out to do, without anything notable about it. At least Sharkey wasn't trying to be funny.

Three stars.

Day of the Egg, by Allen Kim Lang


by Nodel

Talk about being in the wrong place! This story was supposed to be in the April issue, but because of some kind of goof it's only showing up now. I can't say that its disappearance was a bad thing.

This is a silly farce, set in a solar system where stereotyped British folks rule one planet, stereotyped Germans rule another, and bird people rule another. The protagonist, Admiral Sir Nigel Mountchessington-Jackson (are you laughing yet?), competes with his nemesis, Generalfeldmarschall Graf Gerhard von Eingeweide (still not laughing?), to sign a treaty with the birds. The egg containing the new monarch of the avian planet hatches, and the baby chick thinks the German is her mother. The Englishman comes up with a scheme to turn the tables on his opponent.

I found the whole thing much too ridiculous for my taste. The way in which the British guy wins the day was predictable, and the jokes fall flat. The author makes Anvil look like the master of sophisticated wit.

One star.

Not Fitting In

Reading this issue made me feel like I should have been somewhere else, doing something else. The stories range from poor to fair, with only Philip K. Dick rising above mediocrity. Even his unique story fails to be fully satisfying, and seems to have been shoved into a place where it doesn't quite belong.  As science fiction fans in the mundane world, I'm sure we can all identify with that situation. 


This newly published book provides a fit metaphor, but don't bother reading it. It's all about the pseudoscience of matching people to their proper careers through physiognomy.

Nevertheless, we're also a hardy breed, and we know that even when times are rough, something good is right around the corner.  Like this month's Fantastic…

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Magazine

[June 12, 1964] RISING THROUGH THE MURK (the July 1964 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Wishing Waiting Hoping

Can it be . . . drifting up through the murk, like a forgotten suitcase floating up from an old shipwreck . . . a worthwhile issue of Amazing?

You certainly can’t tell by the cover, which is one of the ugliest jobs ever perpetrated by the usually talented Ed Emshwiller—misconceived, crudely executed, and it doesn’t help that the reproduction is just a bit off register.


by Ed Emshwiller

Mindmate, by Daniel F. Galouye

This hideous piece illustrates Mindmate, an amusingly hokey long novelet by Daniel F. Galouye, an improvement over his last two pieces in Amazing if not up to the standard of his Hugo-nominated novel Dark Universe.  In the near future, the Foundation for Electronic Cortical Stimulation, a/k/a the Funhouse chain, is raking it in selling ersatz experience, but is being chivvied by the Hon. Ronald Winston, chairman of the House Investigative Subcommittee on Cultural Influences, who thinks the Funhouses are addictive and should be stopped. 


by Ed Emshwiller

So the Funhousers do the only sensible thing—they kidnap Winston and, before killing him corporeally, use their technology to install him as a secondary personality in the brain of protagonist Sharp, who has been surgically altered to be a dead ringer for Winston.  It’s Sharp’s job to subvert the Subcommittee’s investigation, though he’s actually thinking of playing a double game. 

Sharp’s access to Winston’s memories and habits permits him to impersonate Winston quite successfully, to the point where he sometimes wonders whether he or Winston is really in charge.  And that, along with his mixed motives, sets the theme for the story: he’s not the only one playing a double game, or the only one with a double personality and questions about who is dominant. The attendant rug-pulling is executed reasonably well, though the author cheats a little: which personality emerges as dominant seems determined by plot needs and not by any identifiable aspect of the invented technology.  And it’s all acted out in the slightly incongruous context of a gangland melodrama.  But it’s sufficiently well turned and entertaining to warrant some generosity.  Four stars.

Placement Test, by Keith Laumer


by Virgil Finlay

There are two other novelets.  Keith Laumer’s Placement Test is one of his aggressively dystopian pieces, similar in degree of oppression but much different in mood from The Walls in the March 1963 Amazing, and less effective.  In a hyper-stratified future society, protagonist Maldon, who has done everything by the book, is excluded from his chosen career path through no fault of his own, relegated to Placement Testing for a menial future, and, if he doesn’t like it, Adjustment (of his brain). 

Instead of accepting his fate, he rebels, and through a combination of chutzpah and chicanery manipulates the rigid and stupid system to get what he wants . . . only to be told (here’s a revelation as massive as the cliche involved) that it was all a set-up, his rebellion was the real placement test, and he’s going to be a Top Executive (sic).  The hackneyed gimmick is offset by Laumer’s usual propulsive execution, so three stars for competence.  But if this is Laumer’s placement test . . . he’s not quite as promising as we might have thought from The Walls, It Could Be Anything, and others. 

A Game of Unchance, by Philip K. Dick


by George Schelling

The third novelet is Philip K. Dick’s A Game of Unchance, set among colonists on a Mars every bit as unrealistic as Ray Bradbury’s, but much more depressing.  A spaceship lands at a settlement, promising a carnival: “FREAKS, MAGIC, TERRIFYING STUNTS, AND WOMEN!”—the last word painted largest of all.  But the colony has just been fleeced by another carnival ship!  This time, though, the colonists have a plan: their half-witted psi-talented Fred can go to the carnival and win the games with the most valuable prizes.

The prizes turn out to be dolls with intricate internal wiring (microrobs, they’re called), which attack and escape, and later prove bent on harm to the colonists, wiring up the local fauna and the livestock.  The UN says the colonists will have to evacuate while they flood the area with poisonous gas; then a higher-powered UN guy shows up and says that they will probably have to evacuate Mars entirely in the face of this extraterrestrial invasion, for that is what it is.  At story’s end, yet another carnival ship has shown up—this one with prizes consisting of little mechanical devices claimed to be “homeostatic traps” that will catch the little things the colonists can’t catch themselves—and at the end, they are falling for it. 

In outline, this sounds like a tight little piece of irony, but on the page it’s quite atmospheric.  Dick has become hands down SF’s master of dreariness.  (“The night smelled of spiders and dry weeds; he sensed the desolation of the landscape around him.”) But more than that, he is a master of a particular kind of horror, the horror of being trapped, not necessarily physically, but in events and situations that can only have a bad end and that his characters cannot turn away from.  The fact that some of the situations (like this one) make very little sense does not detract from their power; this is a sort of dream logic at work.  It doesn’t work for everybody, but for my taste, four stars.

The Mouths of All Men, by Ed M. Clinton, Jr.


by McLane

Ed M. Clinton is a very occasional SF writer, with eight stories scattered over the past decade, almost all in second-tier magazines.  In his short story The Mouths of All Men, Soviet and American astronauts are launched simultaneously, intending to meet in space and return together in a show of brotherhood, but while they’re en route someone triggers World War III, destroying humanity.  So they match velocities, dock, and immediately try to kill each other; then they calm down, show each other their pictures of their now incinerated families, inscribe a proclamation on their viewport, and purposefully botch re-entry so they’ll be killed on the way down.  This is more of a harangue than a story—not a badly done harangue, but the sentiments are quite familiar to SF readers, and starting to get that way for everyone else.  Two stars.

The Scarlet Throne, by Edward W. Ludwig


by Blair

The Scarlet Throne by Edward W. Ludwig, a little more prolific but about as obscure as Clinton, is another Message story, this one less well done than Clinton’s.  Esteban, the patriarch of a poor Mexican family who lives near a desert rocket launching facility in the US, is troubled by the fact that space is being conquered while his family and his neighbors still lack indoor plumbing, and decides to take his message to the launch site where the President will be in attendance.  He doesn’t get far.  The story ends with a crude but appropriate joke.  The worthiness of the message is overtaken by the story’s heavy-handedness and the rather patronizing portrayal of the Mexican family.  Two stars.

Operation Shirtsleeve, by Ben Bova

Ben Bova soldiers on with Operation Shirtsleeve, discussing how to transform Venus and Mars so we can walk around in our shirtsleeves on them—i.e., terraform them, though Bova avoids this term for some reason.  Instead, he uses “shirtsleeve” as a verb at least once.  I don’t think that usage will stick.  Anyway, the answers, respectively, are bombard Venus with algae and bombard Mars ith energy and hydrogen.  (I am simplifying a little bit.) It’s the usual fare of interesting information presented dully. 

Bova does venture outside his specialties with one observation: “While the moon has some political and perhaps even military advantages, Mars is too far away for any nation to attempt to reach single-handedly.  Manned expeditions to Mars will probably be international efforts supervised by the United Nations.” I wonder if he’s giving any odds.  Bova then concludes: “The real question is: Why bother?  That is a question that can only be answered by the men who actually land on Mars.” I would think that the people who will pony up the trillions of dollars or other currency needed to pay for this project, and their representatives, might have something to say about it too.  But the fact that Bova is even asking this question gets him a grudging three stars.

In Conclusion

So: nothing terrible, everything readable, and a couple of items distinctly above average.  Celebrate! . . . while you can. 

Next month . . . Robert F. Young.

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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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Book, Magazine

[January 22, 1964] The British Are Coming!  The Americans Are Here! (February 1964 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

Galactic Journeyers from the United Kingdom have often spoken about the strange phenomenon known as Beatlemania.  Not too long ago, CBS News offered a report on the craze.

This peculiar form of passionate devotion to four shaggy-haired musicians has made little impact here in the United States.  That may change soon.


released January 10


released January 20

With the nearly simultaneous release of Beatles albums by two rival record companies this month, Yanks have the opportunity to judge the British quartet for themselves.

For now, Americans seem to prefer ballads to upbeat rock 'n' roll.

Originally a hit for baritone Vaughn Monroe nearly twenty years ago, crooner Bobby Vinton reached the top of the charts for the third time with his sentimental remake.

Whether or not the USA welcomes the foursome from Britain remains to be seen.  It might be an omen that the latest issue of Fantastic features only American authors. 

Novelty Act, by Philip K. Dick

This prolific author specializes in quirky accounts of tomorrow's fads and follies.  His latest offering is no exception.

Most Americans live in gigantic communal apartment buildings.  The government still allows voting, but there's only one political party.  The President has no real power.  The most revered figure is the First Lady, who is still young and beautiful after a century.

(The description of the character, and the way in which the nation idolizes her, suggest that she is a parody of Jacqueline Kennedy.  The writer could not predict that the target of his gentle mocking would soon suffer a devastating tragedy.)

The protagonist dreams of winning the First Lady's favor by performing classical music with his brother on water jugs.  The brother works at a spaceship dealer, with the help of a robotic imitation of an extinct Martian creature.  The device, like the defunct Martians, can influence human minds.  Everything comes together when the brothers make their appearance before the First Lady, and discover her secret.

This is a mixture of comedy and serious political satire.  Imaginative details create a portrait of a neurotic future United States.  A hint at the end that the brothers may escape their subtle dystopia lighten the story's mood.  Although the plot is disjointed at times, it makes satisfying reading.

Four stars.

The Soft Woman, by Theodore L. Thomas

A man has a doll that looks like a naked woman with the head of a frog.  He meets a beautiful woman and brings her to his room.  A strange and frightening thing happens to him.

I can't say much more about this very brief story without giving away the ending.  It confused me.  I don't understand why the doll has a frog's head, or why it's named maMal [sic].  There seems no good reason for the man's unfortunate fate.  There's some beautiful writing, but what does it all mean?

Two stars.

The Orginorg Way, by Jack Sharkey

An unattractive fellow who grew up alone in a Brazilian jungle has a strange ability to crossbreed plants into organic versions of technological devices.  At first, he makes simple things like fishing rods.  Eventually he creates substitutes for telephones and lightbulbs.  He earns a vast fortune, enabling him to win the girl of his dreams.  Of course, there's an ironic ending.

The absurd misadventures of the protagonist provide mild amusement.  They way in which the plants imitate machines shows some imagination.  As a whole, however, the story is too silly.

Two stars.

The Lords of Quarmall (Part Two of Two), by Fritz Leiber and Harry Fischer

The conclusion of this short novel brings Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser together, along with the two rival brothers they serve, at the funeral pyre of the siblings' father.  The death of the ruler of the underground kingdom leads to open warfare between his heirs.  Sorcery and swordplay follow.

Disguise, deception, and skulking around keep the story moving at a rapid pace.  A major twist in the plot near the end is predictable.  Although there's plenty of colorful adventure, much of the hugger-mugger seems arbitrary.

Three stars.

They Never Come Back From Whoosh!, by David R. Bunch

In this surreal tale, people go inside a gigantic, soot-spewing building.  They do not return.  The narrator, like the others, feels a compulsion to enter the place, against his own will.  Within he meets one of the building's strange caretakers.

This is a bizarre allegory of life, death, nature, and technology.  The author's unique style is compelling, if not always lucid.

Three stars.

Return to Brobdingnag, by Adam Bradford, M.D.

A couple of months ago, the fictional Doctor Bradford journeyed to Lilliput, Jonathan Swift's land of tiny people.  Now he visits the realm of giants.  He finds out that they keep their population under control through death control instead of birth control.  Whenever a baby is born, an elderly person takes poison to ensure a quick and painless demise.  Their government is democratic, but the elite have more votes per person than the lower classes.  The author also describes the science-based sun worship of the inhabitants, as well as their unusual way of performing surgery.

As with the previous installment in this series, the story takes far too long to get the narrator to his destination.  The peculiar ways of the Brobdingnagians seem arbitrary, with no satiric point.

One star.

Death Before Dishonor, by Dobbin Thorpe

As we saw last month, Dobbin Thorpe is really Thomas M. Disch in disguise.  Like Thorpe's creation in the previous issue, this is a tale of horror.

A woman wakes up from an alcoholic blackout and finds a tattoo on her thigh.  She has no memory of how she got it.  It turns out she had a one-night affair with a tattoo artist while she was drunk.  The tattooist is a man of uncommon skill.  His creations have a life of their own.  The woman's romance with another man leads to terrifying consequences.

The story is gruesome, with a touch of very dark humor.  Some might see it as a cautionary tale about drunkenness and promiscuity.  I think the author just came up with a scary idea, and the plot grew out of it.  On that level, it works well enough.

Three stars.

Summing Up

With eight Americans offering seven works of imagination, there are certain to be some stories you like and some you don't.  I appreciate the wide range of fiction found here.  We have satire, pastiche, adventure, allegory, comedy, surrealism, and horror.  The only thing I'd like to stir into the mixture would be a few pieces from talented British writers.  A story by Aldiss, Ballard, or Clarke – to mention just the ABC's of the UK – would be refreshing.  Maybe the Beatles will add the same thing to American popular music.  At least it would mix things up a bit.

(Did you read about all the ways the Journey expanded last year?  Catch up and see what you missed!)




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Book, Magazine

[January 8, 1964] A Taste of Homely (February 1964 Galaxy)

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by Gideon Marcus

Lost that Zing

It's tough to get out of a rut.  After all, you went through all the trouble of digging the trench in the first place — why expend extra effort getting out of it?

But the fact is, the house that H.L. Gold built in 1950, the superlative Galaxy Science Fiction digest, has gotten pretty stale lately.  Sure, the authors are still household names, but the works aren't their best.  Maybe Editor Pohl, who succeeded Gold a couple of years ago, is starved for material given that he maintains an industry record of three simultanteous mags.  Or perhaps Galaxy just doesn't have the cachet (or the budget to pay authors) of F&SF or Fantastic.

Maybe it's just a slow patch.  Anyway, take a gander at the February 1964 Galaxy and see what I mean:

The Issue at Hand

Grandmother Earth, by J. T. McIntosh

It was just a couple of months ago, in Poul Anderson's Conversation in Arcady, that we last saw the a decadent, paradisical Earth visited by more vigorous colonists.  McIntosh's variation on the theme features a less happy homeworld, one on which humans have given up for lack of challenge, and the sum population of Earth is reduced to a few tens of thousands stretched along France's idyllic Mediterranean coast.  When the last efforts at changing the status quo from within founder, it us up to a pair of extraterrestrial Terrans to come up with a solution.


(I have to wonder if this picture is the main reason the story was accepted…

McIntosh is a pretty good writer, though his best days seem far behind him.  The pacing and execution are engaging even if the plot is hackneyed.  What really tips the balance from four to three stars is the utterly unnecessary exposition at the end.

Hence: Three stars.

A Bad Day for Vermin, by Keith Laumer

A wormlike alien lands in a small Arkansan town, but before it can open discussions with the citizens, a ramshackle exterminator shoots it dead.  A trial ensues to determine whether or not the extraterrestrial counts as a person such that the killer can be tried with murder.  Ultimately, the alien is classified as a person and the exterminator, excluded from the definition, is labeled vermin — and exterminated.

Summarized like that, it sounds like a pretty good story.  It's not.  Unpleasant and preposterous, Laumer must have dashed this one off for a quick buck.  Two stars (if that).

Shamar's War, by Kris Neville

When the completely humanoid inhabitants of a another planet refuse Earth's entreaties to formally ally, humanity sends a spy to foment rebellion and install a more friendly government.  The aliens are under a dictatorship, you see, and Earth deems them ripe for a bit of Democracy.  When efforts to install a formal voting system fail, the aliens come up with a more brute force option: selective boycotting of goods nonessential to life but essential to the economy.

It's hard to believe this piece was written by a veteran author, one who has produced several excellent stories over a career lasting more than a decade.  This piece is filled with short, unncompelling sentences; the characterization is nonexistent; and the exposition is endless.  The aliens aren't at all, and the solution to the story's puzzle is laughably simplistic.  I have to wonder if this wasn't an early piece of work that Neville had stuffed in a desk somewhere and which Pohl accepted out of desperation.

In any event, two stars.

The Early Days of the Metric System, by Willy Ley

Our favorite German rocket scientist had been going through a lackluster period, but this non-fiction article on the origin of standard weights and measures, though in some ways overlapping an old F&SF article by Dr. Asimov, is entertaining and informative.  This is the Willy that compelled me to start my subscription to Galaxy umpteen years ago.  5 stars.

Oh, to Be a Blobel!, by Philip K. Dick

Here's another human-sent-to-spy-on-aliens story, except this one takes place after the espionage.  It features a young man whose physical form was altered to match that of the invading amorphous Blobels.  Though promised to be reconditioned back to human physiognomy, the fellow finds himself reverting to Blobel form half the day, making his life thoroughly miserable.

Luckily for him, the other side had spies, too, and some of them are having similar readjustment trouble.  Our hero marries a young female Blobel spy, and all is well…for a while.  But feelings of inadequacy (she is smarter and more successful than he) and the hybrid nature of their children cause rifts.  Ultimately, the couple must choose between love and individual fortune.

This is a story that shouldn't work, ludicrous as it is in its premise.  But it's Dick, and it does. 

Four stars.

The Awakening, by Jack Sharkey

Imagine being one of hundreds preserved in suspended animation against a global catastrophe, only to wake up countless ages after the planned date.  Your machines are rusted, your elders rotted, and the world you knew has drastically changed.  How would you feel?  What would you do?

This story belongs in the "Color Me Surprised" department.  While the plot of the story is not particularly innovative, the execution is perfect — a sharp increase in quality from Jack Sharkey's usual output.

Four stars.

The Star King, by Jack Vance

In the last installment of The Star King, a fellow named Gersen was tracking down the "Demon Prince," Grendel, one of the Galaxy's most notorious crime bosses.  The trail had led Gersen to a university on the civilized world of Alphanor in search of the patron who had commissioned a survey of an Eden-like world far Beyond the edge of civilization.  For Gersen had every reason to believe that this patron was Grendel, especially after he killed his surveyor for refusing to reveal the location of the planet.

Part 2 opens Gersen facing several obstacles.  Foremost is that Grendel could be any of three professors at the school, all of whom profess ignorance of the murdered surveyor.  Then there are Grendel's three lieutenants, all of whom are deadly assassins who want Gersen out of the way.  Finally, there is the issue of Pallis Atwrode, an employee of the university who is the first to touch Gersen's heart after a life of nothing but revenge-seeking.

The conclusion to this novel ties all the threads together, throwing all of the characters onto one ship where Gersen can declaim the solution to the mystery, Poirot-style.

The Star King's problem isn't the plot, it's the execution.  After a rather gripping first half of the first half, the novel becomes a plodding bore, particularly with the unnecessary encyclopedic inserts every few pages.  Vance did such a good job of building a fresh new world in The Dragon Masters (also a Galaxy novel), but he rather flubs it here.  Moreover, Vance completely missed his opportunity to give us a real surprise ending, instead deciding on Grendel's identity almost at random, it seems.

Two stars, two and a half for the whole thing.

Summing Up

When I transfer the story data to punch card and run it through my Star-o-Vac, I get a roll of tape with the computation: 3 stars.  That doesn't sound so bad, right?  Thoroughly adequate compared to some of the other mags we've suffered through lately.  But it's the cavalcade of blandness that saps the will over time.  It's like a steady diet of matzah.  Sure, it gets you out of Egypt, but where's the milk and honey, man? 

Cordwainer Smith's in the next issue.  Maybe we'll make it to the Holy Land in March…

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December 9, 1963 Indifferent to it all (January 1964 IF)

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by Gideon Marcus

Picking up the pieces

It's been two weeks since President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and the country is slowly returning to normal (whatever normal is these days).  Jackie has taken the family out of the White House, President Johnson is advancing the first legislation of his social welfare plan, the "Great Society," and all around the nation, streets, parks, and buildings are being renamed in the slain President's honor.  In fact, Cape Canaveral, launching site for all crewed flights, is being christened "Cape Kennedy."

We're still trying to make sense of the events surrounding Kennedy's death.  Within an hour of the shooting, there were two divergent theories as to who shot the President.  CBS reported on the trail that led to Marine-turned-defector, Lee Harvey Oswald.  NBC, on the other hand, interviewed a woman who saw a shooter on a grassy knoll overlooking Dealey Plaza.  On December 5, the FBI determined that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, did the deed.  Of course, Jack Ruby ensured that Oswald would never speak in his own defense.  The seven member "Warren Commission," headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, has begun a more thorough investigation.  We may never know who shot Kennedy or why.

A eulogy for Kennedy

Yesterday, I appeared at a local venue to present a eulogy for Kennedy and enlighten the audience as to the youthful President's numerous accomplishments.  In the end, we all drank a toast to Jack.  We taped the performance so you can view it even if you couldn't make the event.

Meanwhile, the science fiction magazines continued as if nothing unusual had happened.  This makes sense given the vagaries of production schedules and the need to have work to press months in advance.  Still, it is an eerie feeling to have the world turned upside down and yet see no evidence of turmoil in one's reading material.

Maybe that's a good thing.  One can use stability in crazy times.

In any event, the January 1964 issue of IF, Worlds of Science Fiction was the first sf digest of the new year.  As usual, it contained a mixture of diverting and lousy stories.  Let's take a look:

The January 1964 IF

Three Worlds to Conquer (Part 1 of 2), by Poul Anderson

On the Jovian moon of Ganymede, American colonists warily greet the arrival of the U.S.S. Vega, a battleship out from Earth.  Thanks to a recent civil war in the USA, it is uncertain where the loyalties of the ship's crew lie.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of miles below, the inhabitants of Jupiter's surface are also preparing for a war of their own.  The common thread to the two stories is the neutrino beam link set up by the human protagonist who makes his home on Jupiter's biggest moon.

It's an interesting set up, but it utterly fails in its execution.  Poul Anderson is the patron saint of unreliability.  On the one hand, he produced some of last year's gratest works, including Let the Spacemen Beware and No Truce with Kings.  On the other, he produced drek like this piece.

Some examples: Anderson likes to wax poetic on technical details.  He spends a full two pages describing what could have been handled with this sentence: "I used a neutrino beam to contact the Jovians; nothing else could penetrate their giant planet's hellish radiation belts or the tens of thousands of thick atmosphere."

Two.  Pages.

Worse, while I applaud Anderson's attempt to depict a Jovian race, he fails in two directions.  Firstly, it's highly doubtful anything could live on the solid surface of Jupiter, if the planet even has one.  If there is a rocky core, its surface gravity must be around 7gs, and the air pressure would be more crushing than the bottom of the Earth's ocean.  Assuming life could stand those conditions, it would have to be something akin to the well-drawn creatures portrayed in Hal Clement's Close to Critical (in the May 1958 Analog).  Instead, Anderson gives us centaurs with quite human characterization and motivation.

The dialogue is stilted.  The writing is uninspired.  And there's enough padding to comfortably sleep on.

One star.  And, oh boy, a whole 'nother part to read in two months.

Mack, by R. J. Butler

Dolphin stories are big right now, from Clarke's People of the Sea to Flipper.  New author, R. J. Butler, gives us another one.  Something about the thwarting of an alien invasion of fish people.  Pleasant enough but it won't stay with you.  A very low three stars.

Personal Monuments, by Theodore Sturgeon

IF's non-fictionalist tells us about six science fiction authors he believes deserve more credit than they get.  He's probably right.  Three stars.

Science-Fantasy Crossword Puzzle, by Jack Sharkey

A welcome feature that is as long as it needs to be (two pages for the game and half a page for the answer).  Three stars.

The Competitors, by Jack B. Lawson

Here is the jewel of the piece.  Humans and androids have evolved in their own directions, each with a stellar sphere of influence.  When humanity comes across an alien race, whose close ties with their own robots make them more than a match for our species, a crotchety old man and a powerful (but subdued) android take on the enemy.

The interactions between human and humanoid robot are priceless and illuminating.  Neither can stand the other, but both see the value in their cooperation.  In the course of their quest, our human protagonist learns the pros and cons of too close integration of humanity and machinery.

Excellent stuff that packs a wallop: Four stars.

The Car Pool, by Frank Banta

Car Pool is a cute little joke in which a gaggle of human petty criminals turns a run-in with the Martian law into a profitable venture for all concerned.  Three stars.

Waterspider, by Philip K. Dick

There is a sub-genre of science fiction known as "fan fiction."  It is written by SF fans (of course) and involves said fans going on wild and fantastic adventures.  Laureled SF author, Philip K. Dick, offers up the fannest of fan fiction in which a pair of folks from the 21st Century employ a time machine to visit a gathering of "pre-cogs" in 1954 to get help with some thorny spaceflight issues.

The gathering is the 1954 World Science Fiction convention in San Francisco, and the pre-cog the Futurians seek is none other than Poul Anderson.  He is kidnapped back to the future, where he runs into mischief before making it back home (with the notes for a story, of course — probably this one).  Along the way, we get an alien's eye view of the various personages who attended SFCon, including A. E. Van Vogt ("so tall, so spiritual"), Ray Bradbury ("a round, pleasant face but his eyes were intense"), and Margaret St. Clair, whom the aliens anachronistically revere for The Scarlet Hexapod, which she hadn't written yet.

It's a bit of silly, self-indulgent fluff saved from banality by the talents of Mr. Dick; I don't know that it merits a quarter of IF's pages.  Three stars.

Summing up

So, yes, it certainly looks like IF will remain steady and true through any crisis.  This means some bad stories, occasional winners, and a lot of filling. 

Things could be worse.

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Magazine

[November 13, 1963] Good Cop (the December 1963 Amazing)

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by John Boston

Amazing is starting to resemble a good cop/bad cop routine, and this December 1963 issue is brought to us by the good cop. 

The cover story is To Plant a Seed, a longish novelet by Neal Barrett, Jr., in which this still fairly new writer earnestly wrestles with one of the more familiar plots in SF’s cupboard: Earthfolks go starfaring, encounter colorful primitive aliens, usually highly religious; observe them under a strict rule of noninterference; then the aliens start doing really strange stuff.  After the mystery is milked for a while, the revelation: typically, the aliens aren’t so primitive after all, or at least they are the remnants of something greater. 

Here the aliens are the barely humanoid Kahrii, who cultivate the Shari, plants which are the only other life form here on the extremely hot and otherwise barren Sahara III (and how likely is that ecology?).  The Shari provide their food, clothing, and everything else they have.  So why have they suddenly cut down their entire crop and begun using the pieces to build something in this desert that looks like a boat, which they could never have seen?  And should the human observers break the command against interfering to stop this racial suicide?  Barrett wrings a decent amount of suspense out of these questions; one knows generally what is going to happen, but why and how remain interesting enough. 

As for the human observers: these are Gito, the assigned observer (male of course), and Arilee, whose job title is Mistress, the latest of several in Gito’s career.  But she’s pretty smart for a Mistress—a Nine, in fact, on some completely unexplained social ranking scale—and Gito has allowed her to wander around the tunnels of the Kahrii and make her own observations.  Despite her formal designation as a male plaything, she is a significant actor in the story, and she ultimately saves Gito’s bacon.  And in fact that’s part of Barrett’s point, that she transcends the condescending role she occupies.  But it’s still frustrating and annoying to see a reasonably capable SF writer displaying more imagination in devising a completely alien society than in thinking about the likely future of his own.  Aside from that, this is a pretty solid performance on a well-established theme.  Three stars, towards the top of the range.

The other novelet is The Days of Perky Pat by Philip K. Dick, who has now had stories in three consecutive issues.  This one is far better than the others, which I described as resembling rambling stand-up routines.  Here he reverts to his long-standing preoccupation with life after catastrophe, in this case, as in many others, a nuclear war.  The characters, called “flukers” because it’s only by a fluke that they survived, live underground in the old fallout shelters, kept alive by the grace of the “careboys,” mollusk-like Martians who drop food and other goods to sustain the flukers’ lives. 

The adult humans are completely preoccupied with Perky Pat, a blonde plastic doll that comes with various accessories including boyfriend, which the flukers have supplemented with various improvised objects in their “layouts,” which seem to be sort of like a Monopoly board and sort of like a particularly elaborate model train setup.  On these layouts, they obsessively play a competitive game, running Perky Pat and her boyfriend through the routines of life before the war, while their kids run around unsupervised on the dust- and rock-covered surface chasing down mutant animals with knives.

Obviously the author has had an encounter with a Barbie doll complete with accessories, and didn’t much care for it.  This is as grotesque a black comedy as you’ll find, with plot developments reminiscent of Robert Sheckley, but not at all played for yocks.  Some years ago Anthony Boucher reviewed one of Dick’s books and used the phrase “the chilling symbolism of absolute nightmare.” Here it’s mixed with over-the-top satire and is still pretty chilling.  Four stars.

F.A. Javor’s Killjoy is a rather short story on another familiar theme: Earthfolk starfaring to find exotic alien fauna and hunt and kill it, with a twist that will probably be morally satisfying to many.  But the whole thing is hyper-contrived.  Two stars.

The oddest item in the issue is The God on the 36th Floor by Herbert D. Kastle, who has had a scattered handful of stories in the SF magazines (many more in other genres), but also edited the last two issues of Startling Stories, for what that may be worth.  His main credentials, though, are contemporary novels, mostly original paperbacks, with titles like One Thing On My Mind and Bachelor Summer.  So it’s not surprising that this story doesn’t read much like what you’d find in an SF magazine; it’s more like something adapted from a script for The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. 

Protagonist Der (a nickname) works in Public Relations in a big company, but he’s had some sort of breakdown and can’t actually function any more.  Through happenstance he’s managed to stay on, collecting his salary and pretending to do a nonexistent job.  But a new man, Tzadi, shows up and seems to know a lot about him, and everybody else too.

Further interaction with the mysterious Tzadi suggests that Der is at even more risk than he feared; and things keep moving until we are in the territory of such paranoia epics as Heinlein’s They and Dick’s Time Out of Joint.  So it’s another familiar idea, but nicely developed through dialogue and visualization, not to mention unobtrusively slick writing.  Three stars, again near the top of the range. 

The issue’s biggest surprise is H.B. Fyfe’s The Klygha, which features more spacefaring Earth explorers (I refuse to say Terrans like the author; nobody but SF writers will ever use that word), lobster-like inhabitants of the planet they are exploring, another spacefaring explorer from somewhere else entirely (the Klygha), a cat, lots of telepathy, and some hidden motives. 

I am not saying more because the author has juggled these absolutely stock elements from the back pages of the last decade’s SF magazines into an extremely clever construction, and much of the pleasure of it initially is just figuring out what’s going on, in a way a little reminiscent of Bester’s Fondly Fahrenheit. It’s not quite on that level, but it’s certainly a little tour de force, much better than the other Fyfe stories I’ve read, mostly in Astounding and Analog, which are clever enough but entirely too gimmicky and superficial.  Four stars.

Sam Moskowitz is back with another “SF Profile,” Fritz Leiber: Destiny x 3, one of his better efforts: he doesn’t say anything overtly wrong or ridiculous, there are no gross offenses against the English language that cannot be attributed to Amazing’s proofreading, and (unlike his usual practice) he gives as much attention to Leiber’s recent work as to that of the ‘30s and ‘40s.  Indeed he goes so far as to describe Leiber’s latest novel, called The Wanderer, which has not even been published yet.  The title refers to the fact that Leiber has had two significant hiatuses in SF writing and thus has started his career three times, and also to an early novella titled Destiny Times Three, which deserves neither its present obscurity nor Moskowitz’s over-praise.  While Moskowitz skips over some of Leiber’s more significant work, that probably has as much to do with space limitations as his preference.  Three stars.

And just to put a cap on it, I read The Spectroscope, the book review column by S.E. Cotts, who generally gets little respect . . . and it’s not bad!  These are fairly perceptive reviews despite Cotts’ slightly stuffy manner.  No stars, since we don’t ordinarily comment on these things at all, but another pleasant surprise.

So: this is certainly the best issue of Amazing this year; in fact, you have to go back to March and April 1962 to find anything comparable.  But the bad cop, as always, lurks outside the interrogation room, slapping his blackjack into his palm.  Next month, we are promised more Edgar Rice Burroughs.

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