It’s considered a truism in journalism that nothing happens in August, so the papers run filler stories about silly things to make up their page count. Sure, Hurricane Camille killed hundreds as it raged from Mississippi to Virginia, and China and the Soviet Union are on the brink of war, but that doesn’t sell papers. Madison Avenue also has a truism: sex sells. Now, the two have come together.
Newsday columnist Mike McGrady was disgusted by the schlocky, sex-obsessed books that regularly make the best-seller lists, so he recruited a bunch of fellow journalists (19 men and five women, by one count) to write a deliberately bad, oversexed book. The result is Naked Came the Stranger, in which the editors worked hard to remove any literary value from the tale of a New York woman’s sexual escapades.
When the book sold 20,000 copies, McGrady and his co-conspirators decided they’d better come clean. Nineteen of them appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, being introduced as Penelope Ashe (the book’s purported author) and walking out to the strains of A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody. As a result of their confession and discussion of their motives, the book has become even more popular. And as of last Sunday, it’s on the New York Times list of best-sellers. You have to laugh to keep from crying.
Penelope Ashe, in part, with the cover model superimposed.
This puts me in mind of a similar literary hoax with a more sfnal connection. Back in 1956, radio host Jean Shepherd was unhappy with the way best-seller lists were being compiled and urged his listeners to ask their local bookstores to order I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing. He offered some vague hints about the plot, and many listeners who were in on the joke created references to the book elsewhere. Demand was so high, publisher Ian Ballantine convinced Theodore Sturgeon to knock out a quick novel based on an outline from Shepherd. Betty Ballantine wrote the last chapter as Sturgeon lay in exhausted sleep on the Ballantines’ couch after trying to write the whole thing in one sitting. The cover by Frank Kelly Freas is full of visual jokes and puns. The book is rumored to have gone to number one, but it doesn’t seem to have been on any lists, probably out of pique on the part of the list makers.
The pub sign features a shepherd’s crook and a sturgeon. Art by Frank Kelly Freas
New and old
I think we’re starting to see some of the influence of new editor Ejler Jakobsson. Editor Emeritus Fred Pohl doesn’t seem have ever had anything nice to say about the New Wave, while there is at least one story in this month’s IF with a nod in that direction. There’s a new printer, with a crisper typeface (though it seems better suited to a news magazine than fiction). No one’s mixed up their e’s and o’s, but instead of lines being printed out of order, some lines are just missing. Hopefully, that will be corrected in future issues.
Supposedly for Seeds of Gonyl. If so, it’s from later in the novel. Art by Gaughan
Frank Herbert appears to have tried to write a Philip K. Dick story. There’s a computer that keeps changing the world in an attempt to carry out its function, an unhappy marriage, and an old man who gets a glimpse of why the world he lives in is the way it is.
Art uncredited, maybe by Gaughan
Unfortunately, none of it works. The lines of reality aren’t blurred; people know the computer is changing things, just not why. And the marriage isn’t as unrelievedly grim as in a Dick story (thank goodness). We’re left with none of the good things that either author brings, and the flaws of both.
Two stars.
By Right of Succession, by Barry Malzberg
A man named Carson shoots the occupant of a motorcade. As he leaves the building he fired from, he’s met by a policeman who escorts him to his next destination on a strict timetable. Eventually, all is explained. Sort of.
Is that Nixon? Art uncredited
Here’s our New Wave—or New Wave-ish—story. It’s fine for what it is, but I don’t quite see the connection between the events and the explanation.
Three stars.
None But I, by Piers Anthony
When last we saw him, interstellar dentist Dr. Dillingham had been accepted as an instructor at the galaxy’s top dental school. Now he’s off to cure the oral ills of a long-buried robot that has vowed to kill the person that frees it from 10,000 years of imprisonment.
Dr. Dillingham meets his patient. Art by Gaughan
Anthony is developing a reputation at the Journey, and not a good one. That’s largely down to the way he writes women. Fortunately, none of that is on display here, possibly because the only female character is a highly efficient secretary who looks like a giant spider. We’re left with an inoffensive and mildly entertaining story, whose only flaw is that it specifically makes note of the old tale it is clearly modeled on of a genie with a similar vow.
Three stars.
Survival, by Steven Guy Oliver
A day in the life of an old man living in the irradiated ruins of a city.
Ignore the blurb. These aren’t the last people on Earth. Art by Gaughan
This month’s new author offers us a grim tale of life after World War Three. It’s very well written, but also very depressing, what I believe kids these days call “a real downer.” I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more from Oliver. But did I mention that the story is grim?
Three grim stars.
Down on the Farm, by W. Macfarlane
Three agricultural salespeople were brought from Earth to a distant planet. Now their contract is up, and the local autocrat who hired them struggles to find a way to pay what they’re due. Unbeknownst to him, they have ulterior motives.
Erasmus Ballod is having a bad day. Art by Gaughan
A bit old-fashioned, but otherwise an enjoyable enough story. Ask me what it was about a month from now, and I won’t be able to tell you, but it didn’t waste my time. For some reason, Macfarlane’s name was left off the first page; fortunately he was credited in the table of contents.
Three stars.
The Story of Our Earth: 2. The First Traces of Life, by Will Ley
The second part of Willy Ley’s sadly incomplete final book looks at the latest theories as to how life began. He discusses the idea of the “primordial ooze” and how and why it has fallen out of favor. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of continental drift.
While still very good, this chapter didn’t engage me quite as much as the previous did. I can’t say if that’s down to my interest in the subject matter or the quality of Ley’s treatment of it.
Jeff Mallory wakes up to discover that three months are missing, the house shows little sign of cleaning and maintenance, and his wife and two younger children are frightened and worn down. Worst of all, no one remembers his oldest daughter, and her room doesn’t even exist. He soon learns that the town has been taken over by things that are barely human, which force everyone to work on a mysterious project.
Remembering that his daughter was planning to stay with a friend who lives well outside of town, Jeff makes his escape. At the friend’s house, he finds only the friend and several unpleasant occupiers, who tell him that the United States has fallen to Russian forces and that his town is a bombed-out, plague-ridden ruin.
He and Sally, his daughter’s friend, move on and are arrested by Russian military. But the Russians are working together with Americans led by a Colonel Strang, who tells him that the Russians were called in to fight the real occupiers, the Chinese. As the installment ends, Jeff finds himself drafted into Strang’s army. To be continued.
Tonight, the role of Colonel Strang will be played by Ronald Reagan. Art by Gaughan
So far, so Laumer. He may be influenced by some of his work on those books he wrote based on The Invaders, what with people not believing in the invading aliens. Honestly, the main thing that stands out to me in this part is the way young Sally abruptly and quickly throws herself at our hero. Jeff put up at least a token resistance so far, though there is a vague paragraph that suggests things could be otherwise. It plays uncomfortably.
Three stars so far, if you like this sort of Laumer story.
One-Girk-Two is undergoing a field test to see if he will be promoted to One-Girk-One. If he passes, he will become the thinking portion of a composite creature called a Unit.
Our hero. Art by Gaughan
This is probably the Chapdelaine story I’ve enjoyed the most. Unfortunately, like all of Chapdelaine’s work, it’s too long. On the other hand, it didn’t go where I thought it was going. Best of all, it has nothing to do with Spork.
Three stars.
Machines That Teach, by Frederik Pohl
Fred took a trip to Tennessee A. & I. In Nashville, where Perry Chapdelaine is a professor of mathematics and is running a lab researching computer aided instruction. There, through a computer in the lab, a computer at Stanford in California administered a test to measure competence in mathematics. Neat stuff, even if the headline is misleading. Maybe even more interesting is the simple fact that he was able to use a computer in Tennessee to interact with another computer a couple thousand miles away
Three stars.
Summing up
We’re starting to see some of the new editor’s influence, though things aren’t really that different. I’m wondering if Jakobsson is going to continue the IF first program, running a story from a new author every month. The issues he’s been in charge of have had such a story, but he hasn’t called attention to it the way Fred did.
The other thing that stands out to me is that the interior art is all uncredited. Where I’ve indicated it’s by Gaughan, it’s because his signature is visible either on the piece reproduced here or a different piece for the same story. I’m not too keen on all the art coming from just one artist (although if the alternative is “art” by Dan Adkins…). More importantly, they give out Hugos for art. If we don’t know who did it, how do we know who to nominate and vote for?
Tiptree is the only name that means anything to me. A bit of a coin flip as an author, but definitely improving with every story.
We've got a whopping ten titles for you to enjoy this month. Part of it is the increased pace of paperback production. Part is the increased number of Journey reviewers on staff! Enjoy:
From the author of Stand on Zanzibar, and also a lot of churned-out mediocrity, comes this mid-length novel. Can it reach the sublimity of last year's masterpiece, or is it a rent-payer? Let's see.
The band "Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" (great name, that) have a bit of a Be-in on a deserted beach south of London. Their frivolity is marred by the appearance of a flight-suited zombie, half his face eaten away.
Strange happenings compound: the lushy Mrs. Beedle, who lives in a wreck of a home by the beach, suddenly starts appearing in two places at once. Those who encounter her find themselves doused with some kind of acid. Meanwhile, Rory, a DJ on the pirate radio ship Jolly Roger, hauls up a fish on his line that transforms halfway into a squid before breaking free.
The local constabulary, as well as the scientific types in the vicinity, are increasingly alarmed and then mobilized, as the true nature of what they're dealing with is determined: an alien or mutated being with the power to digest and mimic anything it encounters.
In premise, it's thus somewhat akin to Don A. Stuart's (John W. Campbell Jr.) seminal "Who Goes There". In execution, it's not. The rather thin story is developed glacially, with lots of slice-of-life scenes that are not unpleasant to read, but don't add much. Indeed, one could argue that it is possible to unbalance things too far in the direction of "show, don't tell"—Double, Double is written almost like a screenplay, with endless little cliff-hangers, and always from the point of view of the various characters.
Beyond the writing, the premise is fundamentally flawed: digestion is never 100% efficient. Heck, I don't think it's 10% efficient. And this creature can not only digest but duplicate, down to memories? Color me unconvinced. Also, we are lucky that it chose to come to land as quickly as it did—if it had just stayed in the sea, all of the sea life in the world would have been these… things… in very short order.
All told, this is definitely a piece written for the cash grab, perhaps even a recycled, rejected script for the TV anthology Journey to the Unknown. It's not a bad piece of writing, but I'll be donating it to my local book shop when I'm done.
Three stars.
by Brian Collins
For my first book reviews as part of the Journey, I got some SF and fantasy in equal measure. Neither are really worth it, but here we can see the difference between a deeply flawed novel and one that is virtually impossible to salvage.
I know it’s only been a few months since Piers Anthony hit us with his second novel, Sos the Rope, but he has already given us another with Omnivore. That’s three novels in two years! For all his faults, you can’t say he’s lazy. It’s quite possible that in thirty years there will be more Piers Anthony novels than there are stars in the sky.
Omnivore is a planetary adventure, not dissimilar from what Hal Clement or Poul Anderson would write, but with some of those “lovable” Anthony quirks. Here’s the gist: A superhuman agent named Subble is sent to investigate three explorers who have returned to Earth from the “dangerous but promising” planet Nacre, each with his/her trauma and secrets as to what happened. Why did eighteen people die while exploring Nacre prior to these three, and what did they bring back with them? There’s Veg, who as his nickname suggests is a vegetarian; Aquilon, an emotionally fraught woman who now has a case of shell shock; and Cal, gifted with a brilliant intellect but cursed with a frail body. Veg and Cal love Aquilon and Aquilon loves both men. Romantic tension ensues. Anthony pulled a similar love triangle in Sos the Rope, but for what it's worth this one is not quite as painful.
Nacre itself is the star of the show, and it would not surprise me if Anthony were to return to this setting in the future. It’s a fungus-rich planet in which the land is covered in an unfathomable amount of “dust”—spores from airborne fungi. There’s so much airborne fungi, in fact, that the sun has been more or less blocked out, and the animal life has adapted not only to low-light conditions but to move about with only one (big) eye and one limb. Clement would have surely treated this material with more scientific enthusiasm, but Clement sadly is no longer producing his best work and this novel is a serviceable substitute for the not-too-discerning.
Omnivore is Anthony’s best novel to date; unfortunately it’s still not good. There are two crippling problems here. The first is that Anthony simply cannot help himself when it comes to writing women unsympathetically, and the first section of the novel (there are four, each focusing on a different character) is the worst. Veg, while heroic, is unfortunately a woman-hater. I don’t necessarily have an issue with characters having unsavory flaws, but the problem is that this dim view of women bleeds into the rest of the novel to some degree. It should come as no surprise that Aquilon, the sole female character, is also the only one driven purely by emotions as opposed to intellect. Subble himself may as well be a robot, but Anthony writes him as a human so that he can a) take drugs, and b) seduce Aquilon.
The second is that it’s clear that this novel is About Things, but I can’t figure out what those Things could be. There is obvious symbolism at work. The trio of explorers play off of elements (herbivore/carnivore/omnivore, brains/brawn/beauty, and so on), but I’m not sure what statement is being made here. This is especially glaring in a year where we got many SF novels that are About Things; indeed 1968 might’ve been the year of SF novels that try to say Something Very Important. Omnivore might’ve been fine in the hands of a Clement or Anderson, but rather than be true to itself (an Analog-style adventure yarn), it has delusions of importance. It doesn’t help that Anthony gives us a puzzle narrative, but then takes seemingly forever to tell us what the puzzle actually is. The solution, thus, is unsatisfying.
At the rate he’s progressing, Anthony may be able to pen a decent novel in another few years. Two out of five stars, maybe three if it had caught me in a very forgiving mood.
Swordmen of Vistar, by Charles Nuetzel
Cover by Albert Nuetzell
Now we have the latest in what's proving to be an avalanche of heroic fantasy releases, and this one is simply painful to read. We know something is amiss just from looking at the title; to my recollection Nuetzel never used "swordman" or "swordmen" in the novel itself, which leads me to wonder what he could've been thinking. The writing between the covers is no less clumsy.
Thoris is a galley slave, in an ancient world not far off from the mythical Greece of Perseus and Pegasus, when he and the princess Illa find themselves possibly the only survivors of a shipwreck. Thoris falls in love with Illa before the two have even had a full conversation together. They first arrive at an island of cannibals before escaping, only to fall into the clutches of the tyrannical Lord Waja and his sword(s)men of Vistar. Also imprisoned is the wizard Xalla, who is father to a woman named Opil whom Thoris had saved earlier. With no other options, Thoris makes a deal with Xalla to vanquish Waja and then free the wizard—on the ultimate condition that Thoris also take Opil as his bride.
The back cover compares Thoris to Conan the Cimmerian and John Carter of Mars, and indeed Swordmen of Vistar is supposed to be a rip-roaring adventure with a damsel in distress, a morally ambiguous wizard, and a giant snake. One problem: the prose is some of the most ungainly I've ever laid eyes on. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were not tender in their use of the English language, but they had a real knack for plotting which Nuetzel lacks. This is a 220-page novel and surprisingly little happens in it. I hope you still like love triangles, because this novel also has one. Lord Waja and his top henchmen are defeated by the end of the eleventh chapter, but we still have two more to go with Opil as the final obstacle. We need to pad out this already-short book, obviously.
With how much I've been reading about love triangles, I think God may be telling me to try acquiring a second girlfriend. If I were Thoris I would be stuck with a tough choice. Do I pick the tough-minded woman who clearly appreciates my swordsmanship, or the haughty princess who's been degrading me for much of the novel? Sure, the former threatens to kill me if I refuse her, but nobody's perfect.
By the way, Nuetzel may be excusing the awkward prose by stating in the preface that the Thoris narrative is a translation of an ancient manuscript that some academic had written up and given to him. Unfortunately academics, by and large, are terrible writers with no ear for English, and this shows in the "translation." It doesn't help that yes, this is derivative of the John Carter novels, along with a few other things; and while Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are often About Something, Nuetzel doesn't really have anything to say. If you've read hackwork in this genre then the good news is that you've already read Swordmen of Vistar, and so can save yourself the trouble of buying a copy.
Basically worthless, although the illustrations (courtesy of Albert Nuetzell) are at least decent. One out of five stars.
Bill Jarrett is a galactic adventurer, a man who spans the stars to find excitement, glory and money. He’s a flirt and a fighter and the kind of guy who can work himself out of situations. But when Jarrett gets abducted, has a mind-controlling creature strapped to his head, and is sent to overthrow a man who he’s told is a dictator, Jarrett finds himself in a situation he might not be able to win.
Well, yeah, of course, Jarrett does end up winning in the situation he finds himself in, with the help of his friends and a few mechanical contrivances. Because of course he does. As a galactic adventurer, that’s what you might expect from him.
The Star Venturers is an entertaining Ace novel, a quickie star-spanner with a handful of ideas which might stick to your brain. Author Kenneth Bulmer occasionally throws in a small element of satire or self-awareness which enlivens the plot; there’s a bit of a feeling of the author kind of winking at us as he tells this story. But there’s not nearly enough of that stuff to make this book stand out.
Bulmer does play a bit with an interesting concept, the sort of self-learning machine, a kind of artificially intelligent creature called a frug (which Jarrett nicknames Ferdie the Frug) which is placed on a person’s forehead like a headband and which compels the person to follow orders lest they feel horrific agony.
Mr. Bulmer with his wife Pamela
Bulmer takes pains to imply that the device is both mechanical and semi-sentient, a kind of uncaring vicious machine which Jarrett sometimes reasons with and almost treats like a pet – if the pet was a giant tumor which could only cause pain, that is. This idea of artificial intelligence dates back at least to the first robot stories, but the author gives the idea a fresh coat of paint here, and that concept is a real highlight for me.
Other than that, this is a pretty basic space fantasy Ace novel, which is entertaining for its two hour reading time but which will have you quickly flipping over to read the novel by Dean Koontz on the other side. At least it’s not About Things or Very Important. Instead The Star Venturers is just forgettable.
On the other hand, the flip side of this Ace Double is pretty memorable. Dean R. Koontz, an author new to me, has delivered a fascinating satire of a world which is easy to imagine and just as easy to dread.
In the near future, post apocalyptic America, television rules our world. All the people in America live for a special show which all can experience viscerally. That TV show, called The Show, has seven hundred million subscribers. Those subscribers watch a continuing story, kind of a soap opera, about the characters on the screen. But they don't just watch the characters, they also feel the same emotions as the characters. They feel empathy and pain for the characters. In a real way the characters and viewers are bonded.
Because the actors are so well known, so much a part of their audience's lives, even the act of replacing an actor can be tremendously fraught with stress and worry. The act of leaving The Show can be freeing but also terrifying. And when lead actor Mike Jorgova leaves The Show, it makes his life much more complicated. He becomes untethered, is trained to become part of a revolution, and discovers the deeper frightening truths behind a world he scarcely understood.
Young author Dean Koontz delivers a clever and exciting story which shows tremendous potential. He does an excellent job of creating his world in relatively few words, delivering character in just a few broad strokes and creating memorable villains and settings. The end action set-piece, for instance, is built with real suspense and ends with a thrilling struggle which is filled with energy.
Dean Koontz
Along with that aspect, young Mr. Koontz delivers two more elements which separate this book from many of its peers.
First, he paints a fascinating future which seems like a smart extension of McLuhan's concept that "the medium is the message." Koontz creates a TV show which feels like reality, in which the characters live in some semblance of real life while engaging in exaggerated, bizarre actions. That's a concept which feels all the more possible these days, with controversies about the Smothers Brothers and Vietnam dominating headlines about television in 1969.
Koontz also delivers a series of philosophical asides which discuss human evolution from village to society and the ways mass media both shrinks the world and expands our horizons. Nowadays we know everything about people who live across the world but nothing about the people who live next door to us, and that gap only promises to get wider. As our social networks grow, the strengths of our connections only shrink.
This is heady stuff for an Ace Double – and I've only touched on a few of the many ideas shared almost to overflowing here. In fact, the book is chockablock full of ideas but the ambition is a bit high for their achievement. Like many a new author, Koontz has many, many ideas he wants to explore but there are a few too many on display. Nevertheless, despite its thematic density, The Fall of the Dream Machine reads like a rocketship, hurtling ahead until it lands gracefully, sharing a thrilling journey for the readers.
Keep your eye on Mr. Koontz. I predict great things from him.
Poetry has always had a strange place in science fiction. Long before appearing in Hugo Gernsbeck’s magazines, poets have been attempting to explore fantastic themes. However, in spite of their regular presence in almost every SFF periodical, and many fanzines, they rarely seemed to be talked about, nor are they represented in either the Nebulas or the Hugos (although we here give out Galactic Stars to them).
Enter John Fairfax and Panther publishing, who have put together this anthology of responses to the space age. The selection inside is varied. Some are original and some are reprints. Some are SFnal, some are fantastical, others closer to reality. And, as the editor puts it:
Some poets are optimistic about the space odyssey, others view it with cynicism…and other poets do not care if man steps into space or the nearest bar so long as human relations begin with fornication and end with death.
As this book contains almost 50 separate pieces, I cannot hope to cover them all here; rather I want to give an overview and highlight some of the best.
Possibly due to my natural cynicism, Leslie Norris’ poems were among my favorites. He is willing to engage deeply with the future, but believes the same problems we have down here will continue there. For example, in Space Miner we hear of the fate of those travelling to distant worlds for such a job:
He had worked deep seams where encrusted ore,
Too hard for his diamond drill, had ripped
Strips from his flesh. Dust from a thousand metals
Stilted his lungs and softened the strength of his
Muscles. He had worked the treasuries of many
Near stars, but now he stood on the moving
pavement reserved for cripples who had served well.
Just a small part of one of his moving poems that raise interesting questions about where we are headed.
Closely related is John Moat’s Overture I. His works concentrate less on the science fiction but still wonder if we are heading in the right direction:
That twelve years’ Jane pacing outside the bar,
Offering anything for her weekly share
Of tea; those rats now grown immune to death –
I ask you, in whose name and by what power
Have you set out to colonize the stars?
This is only an extract and continues in that fashion. It ponders if what we are bringing to other planets is something they would care for.
Not all are so negative. Some, instead, write about the wonder and artistic possibilities of space travel. Robert Conquest (who SF fans may know from his anthologies or short fiction in Analog) produces a Stapledon-esque epic among the stars in Far Out:
While each colour and flow
Psychedelicists know
As Ion effects
Quotidian sights
Of those counterflared nights.
Yet Conquest still asks within, what is the value of these views to the artist? A complex piece for sure.
There are probably only two other names you have a reasonable chance of recognizing inside: D. M. Thomas and Peter Redgrove, both for their occasional appearances in the British Mags. As you might expect these are among the most explicitly science fictional. For example, in Limbo Thomas gives us a kind of verse version of The Cold Equations, whilst Redgrove’s pieces are trains of thoughts of two common character types of SFF.
However, it should not be thought others have written repetitively on the theme. These poems include such diverse topics as the difficulties of copulation in space, how to serve tea on a space liner, the first computer to be made an Anglican bishop, and explorers getting absorbed into a gestalt entity.
The biggest disappointment for me are the poems from the editor. It is to be expected Fairfax would have a number of pieces inside but, unfortunately, they are among the most pedestrian. For example, his Space Walk:
Around, around in freefall thought
The clinging cosmo-astronaut,
Awkward and expensive star
Dogpaddles from his spinning car.
The poem has nothing inherently wrong with it, but it does not feel insightful, nor does it do anything experimental. It more feels like what would win a middle-school poetry competition on the Space Race. Probably deserving of a low three stars but little more.
I feel, at least in passing, I need to point out we have the recurring problem of the British scene. In spite of the number of poems contained within, none of the poets appears to be woman. There are no shortage of women poets, either in the mainstream or within the fanzines, so I find it hard to believe there were no good pieces available. Hopefully, this can be remedied in a future volume. The Second Frontier, perhaps?
Either way, this is still a fabulous collection. Of course, it will not be for everyone. Poetry is probably the most subjective form of literature, and not everyone likes to sit down to read more than forty poems in a row. However, the selection here is a cut above what we tend to see from our regular science fiction writers (looking at you, de Camp and Carter) and I hope it helps raise the form to higher standards and recognition.
Four Stars for the whole anthology with a liberal sprinkling of fives for the poems I have called out.
Four new novels suggest the seasons, at least for those of us living in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Let's start with the traditional beginning of the year, as opposed to our modern January.
Cover art by Margery Gill, who also supplies several interior illustrations.
The first thing you see when you open the book is musical notation. The melody is said to be a very old French tune, and it plays a major part in the plot.
Those of you who can read music may be able to whistle along with the boy.
Christina, known as Kirsty, is a schoolgirl whose mother died a while ago. Her father remarried, this time to a much younger woman. Like many stepchildren, Kirsty resents her.
An opportunity to escape the awkward situation for a while comes when Kirsty gets a job picking fruit in Norfolk. She moves away from her home in Suffolk and lives with a kindly elderly couple.
Strange things start to happen when she hears music coming from an empty room next to her attic bedroom. She meets a local boy who experienced amnesia and sleepwalking when he stayed in the house. More alarmingly, he almost drowned when he walked toward the sea in a trance.
In addition to this mystery, which involves the supernatural, there are multiple subplots. Kirsty has to learn to get along with her young stepmother. A schoolfriend has no father, an alcoholic mother, smokes, admits to having tried marijuana, and is later arrested for shoplifting. One of her two young brothers suffers an accident.
Despite all this going on, and a dramatic climax, the novel is rather leisurely. The author captures the voice of her young narrator convincingly, and never writes down to her readers. There's a love story involved, and the book might be thought of as a Gothic Romance for teenage girls. In addition to this target audience, adults and even boys are likely to get some pleasure from it.
Two young men are hiking when they get lost in a storm. They wind up in a tiny village with only a handful of people living there. It seems that a dam under construction is going to flood the place, so most folks have moved out.
They spend the night in the home of an elderly couple whose son was killed in World War Two. (That may not seem relevant, but it plays a part in the plot.) The other inhabitants of the doomed village are an ex-military man, his adult son and daughter, a somewhat shady fellow, and the former showgirl who lives with him.
Things get weird when this quiet English village develops a tropical climate overnight. Bizarre plants, some like hot air balloons and some like birds, show up. The surrounding countryside changes into a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. What the heck happened?
We soon find out that people from a time thousands of years from now use time travel to transport folks hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Why? Because the future people face an all-encompassing disaster, and want to start human life all over again in the extreme far future.
(They only select folks in the past who were going to be wiped out of history anyway. The village was just about to be buried under a huge landslide, leaving no evidence behind.)
The rest of the book shows our reluctant time travelers exploring, figuring out a way to survive, and fighting among themselves. The two young women pair up with a couple of the men, but not in the way you might expect.
Near the end, the plot turns into a murder mystery, which seems a little odd. The conclusion is something of a deus ex machina. Otherwise, it's an OK read. The characters are interesting.
Fall is a time of nostalgia and anticipation. We gaze at the past, and ponder the future. Our next book features a lead character who has a lot to look back on, and plenty to concern him coming up.
The book takes its title from a famous painting by 19th century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.
The artist created several versions of the work. This is one of them.
Francis Sandow, our narrator, started off as a man of our own time. (There are hints that he fought in Vietnam, or at least somewhere in Southeast Asia.) He went on to travel on starships in a state of suspended animation, so he is still alive many centuries from now. In fact, he's one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy.
(Some of this is deduction on my part. The narrator only offers bits and pieces of his life throughout the text. The same might be said about the book's complex background. The author makes the reader work.)
Francis made his fortune by creating planets as an art form. If that isn't god-like enough for you, he's also an avatar of an alien deity, one of many in their pantheon. It's unclear if this is a manifestation of psychic power or a genuine case of possession. The mixing of religion and science in an ambiguous fashion is reminiscent of the Zelazny's previous novel Lord of Light.
Somebody sends Francis new photographs of friends, enemies, lovers, and a wife, all of whom have been dead for a very long time. He also gets a message from an ex-lover (still alive) stating that she is in serious trouble.
This sets him off on an odyssey to multiple planets, as he tracks down an unknown enemy. Along the way, he participates in the death ritual of his alien mentor. The climax takes place on the Isle of the Dead, a place he created on one of his planets as a deliberate imitation of Böcklin's painting.
The bare bones of the plot fail to convey the exotic mood of the book, or Zelazny's style. His writing is informal at times; in other places, he uses extremely long, flowing sentences you can get lost in.
As I've suggested, this novel requires careful reading. Stuff gets mentioned that you won't understand until later, so be patient. I found it intriguing throughout. If the ending seems a little rushed, that's a minor flaw.
About fifty years before the novel begins, aliens arrived on Earth with what seemed to be benevolent intent. Well, you know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts.
The Kaltichs brought longevity treatments and advanced medical techniques that could replace any damaged organ. The catch is that Earthlings have to pay a high price for these things.
There's also the problem of overpopulation. The Kaltichs promised to give humans the secret of instantaneous transportation to a large number of habitable planets. It's been half a century, and we're still waiting.
Because the longevity treatments have to be renewed every ten years, and the Kaltichs deny them to anybody they don't like, Earthlings are subservient to them. We have to call them sire, and punishment with a special whip that inflicts extreme pain follows any transgression.
Our protagonist, Martin Preston, is a secret agent for S.T.A.R., the Secret Terran Armed Resistance. (I guess we're still not over the spy craze, with its love of acronyms.) The agency asks him to imitate a Kaltich and infiltrate one of their centers, which are off limits to humans.
(I should mention here that the Kaltichs are physically identical to Earthlings. That seems unlikely, but it's a plot point and we get an explanation later.)
Because the previous fellow who tried this had his hands cut off and sent back to S.T.A.R., Martin understandably refuses. An incident occurs that changes his mind. With the help of a brilliant female surgeon (who, like most of the women in a James Bond adventure, is gorgeous and sexually available), he sets out on his dangerous mission.
What follows is imprisonment, torture, escape, killings, double crosses, and the discovery of the big secret of the Kaltichs, which you may anticipate. The book is similar to a Keith Laumer slam bang thriller, if a little more gruesome. Hardly profound, but it sure won't bore you.
Three stars.
There you have it, folks. Take ten and enjoy all the new novels coming out. We'll be back next month to help you figure out which ones to put at the top of the pile.
I trust that singer Martin Gaye will forgive me for stealing the title of his current smash hit, which has been at the top of the American pop music charts since last month, and shows no signs of disappearing soon. (Gladys Knight and the Pips had a big hit with it not much more than a year ago, too.)
He's what's happening.
The reason for my musical theft is that certain information about the authors of the stories in the latest issue of Fantastic reached me through informal channels.
Open your ears, for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks?
— Henry IV, Part 2
I'll explain when the time comes. Meanwhile, let's take a look at a very mixed bag indeed.
Wow! A new piece of art on the cover. The grapevine tells me editor Barry N. Malzberg is shaking things up at Fantastic.
The editorial by Robert Silverberg, the magazine's new associate editor (so long, former-editor-turned-associate-editor Harry Harrison), makes the case that there's plenty of room in the world of imaginative fiction for both Old Wave and New Wave. Hear, hear.
This issue, which contains ten new stories as well as four reprints, should prove an excellent test case for his thesis. We've got old-fashioned yarns as well as experimental works.
First of all is a new tale from an author who bridges the gap between the opposing Waves. (Don't try to tell me his 1950 story Coming Attraction isn't a Dangerous Vision!)
Near the end of his life, Edgar Allan Poe encounters a mysterious, beautiful woman with whom he becomes obsessed. Their conversation suggests that Poe has a premonition of the coming American Civil War. The conclusion hints at the woman's true identity.
As you'd expect, this is elegantly written. Leiber obviously knows and loves the works of fellow fantasist Poe. The story is full of references to Poe's tales and poems. (Some might say too many.) The denouement is nicely subtle.
It's not a major piece (calling it Fritz Leiber's Greatest Short Story in the table of contents is hardly accurate) but well worth reading. High three stars or low four stars? I'm prejudiced in favor of both Poe and Leiber, so let's go on the high end.
Four stars.
Any Heads at Home?, by David R. Bunch
Hollywood used to call actor/director Erich von Stroheim The Man You Love To Hate, because of his many villainous screen roles. The controversial works of David R. Bunch, back when the magazine was edited by Cele Goldsmith (later Cele Lalli), made him The Writer You Love To Hate in the eyes of many conservative readers. He's back in form here.
The insane narrator (shades of Poe!) relates how he took the head of his dead, filthy rich boss out of his grave so he could kick it around. A visit from the police isn't the only thing he should worry about.
The bare bones (pun intended) of the plot make it sound like an ordinary horror story. What makes it unusual is the author's unique style. His familiar quirks are here. Certain words are printed in ALL CAPITALS, often with EXCLAMATION POINTS! Bunch uses hyphens to create new words like leather-cloppy and stone-feather. The whole thing seems to be written in a frenzy.
Whether you like this stuff or not is a matter of taste. I think it's fairly effective.
After that bit of New Wave, we go back to the Old. This story from one of the greats comes from the December 1950 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by James B. Settles.
A newspaper man finds out his alarm clock and watch are both an hour fast. Just an odd coincidence? Maybe, but then there's the guy who calls the newspaper to report a sewing machine moving down the street by itself. Not to mention the rat-like machines hiding in the newspaper office, and the fact that the protagonist's typewriter prints out messages to him.
Illustration by Leo Summers.
The grapevine tells me this story has already been reprinted quite a few times, under the less melodramatic title Skirmish. The premise may remind you of the Twilight Zone episode A Thing About Machines. It's not bad, but it stops right at a dramatic moment, leaving things unresolved.
Three stars.
Back we go to new stuff; no less than half a dozen brief yarns before it's reprint time again. (Note that these six stories lack any illustrations. Maybe most of the art budget was blown on the cover.)
All in the Game, by Edward Y. Breese
An unscrupulous fellow finds himself in an extremely luxurious afterlife. His every desire is satisfied. There's a twist.
Sound familiar? Then you've seen another episode of Twilight Zone, namely A Nice Place to Visit. At least Simak has the excuse that he came first!
Two stars.
The Castle on the Crag, by P. G. Wyal
The previous story was new, but very traditionally narrated. This one is not. It starts like a satiric fairy tale (we're told that a princess is a White Liberal, and thus values poverty above all else) but then it jumps forward multiple centuries at a time, in several brief sections of text. A tree grows out of the dead body of the princess, an abbey is built on the ruins of her castle, etc. It builds up to a modern horror.
The point seems to be that nothing is permanent. This is a strange, dark story with a couple of remarks about religion that may raise some eyebrows. Not exactly pleasant reading, but interesting.
Three stars.
The Major Incitement to Riot, by K. M. O'Donnell
The grapevine tells me K. M. O'Donnell is actually editor Barry N. Malzberg. This surreal yarn consists of multiple conflicting versions of what caused violence to break out during the display of the gigantic death mask of a deceased official.
Weird stuff. Don't ask me what it means. The image of the huge mask is haunting, if nothing else.
Two stars.
The Life of the Stripe, by Piers Anthony
The army is running out of the stripes they use to designate rank. A sergeant is busted down to buck private so his can be reused. After his death, everybody who wears the stripe comes to a bad end. Is there a way to end the curse?
Not much to this beyond the premise. As military satire, it's not exactly Catch-22.
Two stars.
Slice of Universe, by James R. Sallis
As far as I can tell, this story involves a couple of aliens who speak in a complicated, song-like manner because they have multiple tongues. Their starship is operated, in some manner or other, by self-pitying, homesick birds. They explore the universe to its very end.
That's a very poor synopsis, because this piece is more of a dream-like prose poem than anything else. As such, I found it intriguing, if a little confusing. The aliens are really alien, that's for sure.
Three stars.
Reason for Honor, by Robert Hoskins
After World War Three, a couple of soldiers are the only ones left out of their unit. They see enemy troops approach. The encounter leads to an ironic conclusion.
Pretty grim stuff. Effective enough for what it is.
Three stars.
The Closed Door, by Kendall Foster Crossen
Back to reprints. This one comes from the August/September issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Gaylord Walker.
The grapevine tells me that the author's first name, despite the way it is spelled in the original magazine and in this reprint, is actually supposed to be Kendell. Gotta watch those vowels.
Illustrations uncredited.
Anyway, what we have here is a futuristic locked room mystery. The detective even mentions Gideon Fell, a fictional solver of such mysteries created by author John Dickson Carr.
Whodunit?
A humanoid alien is murdered in his hotel room, despite the fact that the door can only be locked or unlocked by his hand. Does a torn piece of paper bearing the letters COO hold the key to the crime?
Boy, this is a lousy story. It fails as science fiction and as a mystery. The solution depends on things the reader can't possibly know. Give me Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw any day in the week.
One star.
The Origin of Species, by Jody Scott Wood
We interrupt our reprints for a couple of new pieces. (Again, no illustrations.)
Less than a page long, this one takes the form of a tirade by a tree-dwelling ape against those radicals who are walking on the ground and doing other outrageous stuff.
A satire about the previous generation (Old Wave?) complaining about those darn kids nowadays (New Wave?), I suppose. Whatever.
Two stars.
Grounds for Divorce, by Robert S. Phillips
A man goes to a lawyer asking to divorce his wife. It seems the fellow isn't satisfied with his sex life, compared to the images he sees of the old days.
You'll probably see the twist coming a mile away. A mildly Dangerous Vision.
Two stars.
This Planet for Sale, by Ralph Sholto
The pages of the July 1952 issue of Fantastic Adventures supply this space opera.
Cover art by Walter Popp.
A couple of guys are in their spaceship, smuggling valuable cargo. Meanwhile, a father and daughter are in another spaceship. The two vessels run into an invisible planet that made its way into the solar system.
Illustration by Ernie Barth.
The daughter (in true science fiction fashion, this young adult woman is always called a girl) gets captured by the bad guy. The smuggler-turned-hero rescues her.
It all has something to do with the bad guy's plan to wipe out the indigenous population of the invisible planet and transport it somewhere else, in order to sell it to aliens. The bad guy also wants to do the same thing to Earth.
Pretty bad stuff. Nonsensical science, thud-and-blunder action. The nature of the smuggled cargo (kept concealed from the reader) solves everybody's problems (expect the bad guy, of course.)
One star.
The Day After Eternity, by Lawrence Chandler.
Another action/adventure yarn, this time from the February 1955 issue of the magazine.
Cover art by Henry Sharp.
The grapevine tells me that Lawrence Chandler was a house name (pseudonym shared by more than one writer.) Might be Howard Browne, might be Henry Slesar, might be somebody else. The grapevine doesn't know everything.
Illustration by Paul Lundy.
Another wandering planet comes into the solar system. This one seems to be stealing Earth's water. (Forget that. It has nothing to do with the plot.) Our manly hero and his manly buddies, plus a whole bunch of cannon fodder from other planets, set out to defeat the thing.
A telepathic psychiatrist comes along, because she's figured out that the planet is actually stealing minds. The cover illustration, for which the story was probably written, depicts a scene in which one of the buddies, who loves old cars, gets tricked by an illusion and blown up.
(At this point, I was reminded of Ray Bradbury's 1948 story Mars is Heaven!, which is much better.)
Everybody gets killed except the hero and the (ahem) girl. They bicker at first, but of course they wind up in love.
Two rotten old stories in a row. This one adds insult to injury by emphasizing the fact that the psychiatrist is old-fashioned because she doesn't expose her breasts.
One star.
Sour Grapes
There were some real stinkers in this issue, particularly the reprints from lesser known writers. Not all the new stuff was worthy either.
The grapevine tells me that Malzberg isn't happy with the magazine's reprint policy. Did he deliberately choose losers to make his point? The rumor mill also suggests that he won't be around long.
There were some decent stories here — it's hard to throw fourteen darts and not hit the target sometimes — but you might want to spend some time watching an old movie on TV instead.
There's an interesting piece by Ted White in May's Science Fiction Review. He talks about how the magazines are on a slow, inexorable decline due to a number of factors. The biggest is that SF mags used to be just one subgenre of the myriad pulps, all of which had their lurid covers prominently displayed at every corner newsstand. Sure, the SF pulps weren't exactly of a piece with their mystery, Western, and thriller brethren, but Joe Palooka didn't care, grabbing the most attractive issues. So, SF thrived, making a profit even if it sold just 25% of a print run.
Note Astounding (now Analog) in the upper left and Amazing in the upper right
Then the pulps died in the 50s, partly due to changing tastes, mostly due to the collapse of American News Company, the main distributor for monthly mags (and comics). The remaining SF mags were consigned to lesser shelves, all by themselves. The average schmo got his entertainment from TV.
The profit mark has now risen to 50%–in other words, at least half of the issues printed must sell for the run to break even. This makes it very risky for the mags to try to expand their market by printing more issues. If they, say, print 50K and sell 35K, well and good. But if they then print 200K and sell 96K…they've lost money on the run.
Add to that even SF people are losing interest in mags, lured by paperbacks and the new paperback anthologies, and dismayed (as I have been) by the declining quality of stories over the last ten years. The only thing that keeps us subscribing is inertia and brand loyalty. That'll wear off unless the magazines manage to turn the ship.
The magazines have been around for almost half a century. Assuming they are around in the 21st Century, and if this trend continues, they will service an increasingly small fraction of the SF-interested community. They will be like the horseshoe crab: living fossils, unchanged for 300 million years, clinging to life in a wildly different environment.
But that's all speculation. For now, enough good stuff still comes out in the mags to keep me buying. Though the high variability of the latest issue of F&SF may cause me to revisit that policy…
Over Hill and Dale
by Chesley Bonestell—this is the same nebula featured repeatedly in the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor"
Ogre!, by Ed Jesby
It's been four years since Ed Jesby offered up his first tale, Sea Wrack, which was so-so. His sophomore tale, Ogre!, is an improvement.
Knut the Ogre takes a nap sometime in the Middle Ages. When he awakes, covered in loam and with mushrooms growing in his ears, he finds he has slept clear through to the 20th Century. There (then), the seven-foot beast befriends a timid bookie on the run from the Mob. You see, Ogres are actually misunderstood creatures, quite nice and mild despite the calumny heaped upon them by humans.
Together, Knut and the bookie (and the bookie's seamstress pal) hatch a scheme to get the bookie off the hook and out of the business. And of course, it involves horses:
To Harry the plan seemed to be basically sound: after all the way to make money was on the races; there was no better way. You took bets or you made them, all other ways of earning a living were mysterious, square, or the result of inheritance.
It's really a charming tale, and it put me in a charitable mood for the rest of the issue. More fool me…
Four stars.
Butterfly Was 15, by Gilbert Thomas
A scurrilous German scientist has learned how to manipulate others with the judicious use of electrodes and remote transmitters. He meets his match when he locks horns with a traditional psychologist with methods of his own.
This is supposed to be a funny piece. I found its themes of mind control and Ephebophilia to be thoroughly repellent.
Once again, we turn to our friend, Brian, who will likely never volunteer for anything ever again…
by Brian Collins
We now find ourselves in the final installment of the latest F&SF serial, but unfortunately it’s so long as to encompass nearly half the novel. We run into trouble before we’ve even jumped into the story proper, as the recap section commits the grievous sin of telling us about things that we have not been able to read for ourselves. At the end of the previous installment you may recall that Sos and Sol are about to fight in the battle circle to see who takes custody of Sola and Soli, Sol’s wife and adopted daughter respectively. Apparently, between installments, Sos lost the fight, and is now journeying up “the mountain” to commit ritual suicide.
I do not understand how this happened. It could be that Anthony had turned in an early draft of the novel and had intended to write the fight scene between Sos and Sol, but all the same, this is such a glaring oversight as to show incompetence. I was confused at first because I thought I had somehow missed the ending of the previous installment, but no, I had not missed anything; it’s just that the fight and its immediate aftermath were kept “offscreen.”
Now up to date, we find Sos who, naturally, does not die on his way up this freezing mountain, but falls unconscious and is rescued by a small society of people who are somewhere between the crazies (the civilized people) and the nomads who roam the wasteland. We come across the second major female character of the novel (foreboding music plays), who, as you would expect, goes unnamed at first. She’s a short athletic girl whom Anthony repeatedly calls childlike and “Elfen,” but also attractive, which makes me wonder if Anthony might be appealing to a certain subspecies of male reader here. The girl steals Sos’s bracelet and makes him work for it, all but forcing him into taking her as his wife. As if the institution of marriage were not already filled with holes, the system presented in this novel may be fit for ants, spiders, and other small invertebrates, but not actual humans.
Since this is at least theoretically the last stretch of the narrative, in which we find our hero at his lowest point before he rises from the darkness, I need not go into great detail as to what happens next—except for one thing: Sosa (for that is her name now) reveals that she’s been desperate to find a husband, having gone through several men already, because she feels great angst at not being able to produce a child. Infertility is often sad news, to be sure, but in a world where contraception is presumably hard to acquire, I can’t imagine this strikes Sos’s ears as too sad; after all, he’s still committed to Sola in his heart.
Piers Anthony seems to understand women about as much as I understand the inner workings of a submarine.
Having given up his rope in his fight with Sol (another major detail we are not told about until after the fact), Sos has not only regained his confidence but taken up fists as his new weapon. I don't recall if we get his new full name (as men in the novel’s world have a monosyllable followed by their weapon of choice), but Sos the Fist sounds…….
Anyway, there is an inevitable rematch, and this time Sos is victorious. The ending here implies that there may be a sequel in the works, but I’m not waiting to see what Anthony does next. 1 out of 5 stars for this installment, and barely 2 out of 5 stars for the novel.
Someone in the zines was complaining that magazines never run worthy poetry anymore, that back in the golden days of the 50s, most of the pieces were memorable.
Keeping up the trend, De Camp offers up a snatch of doggerel comparing the titanic beasts of yore with the primate beasts of now. Pretty pat stuff.
It is amazing the lengths to which people will go to maintain a sinecure. Harry Van Deventer is the richest man in the world, senile and filled with infantile rage and a teen's hormones. His hangers-on can only manage him by keeping his surroundings perfectly controlled—a willing nurse here, an emergency surgery to fix a day's incaution there. But even a 24/7 watch can slip up…
It's hard to imagine a man both so utterly terrible and yet so rich and powerful that so many would endure so much to keep him alive. But I suppose venality trumps all.
Three stars.
The Evaporation of Jugby, by Stephen Barr
Wadsworth Jugby is a big zero, a department store Vice President-without-portfolio, mediocre in every way. He finally gets the opportunity to live life from a different perspective when his friend, Dan Byron, invents a psyche-swapping machine. Intoxicated by his exchange, he eagerly agrees to expand the scope of the experiment, round-robining with six other folks. The end is…well, given away by the title.
Fluff, with one funny line:
"Jugby could suggest a puzzled frown without lowering his eyebrows-some monkeys can do this."
Two stars.
The Dying Lizards, by Isaac Asimov
Last month, the Good Doctor had a terrific article on the dinosaurs. This month, unfortunately, he indulges in speculation, which never works out well.
The topic this time 'round is the sudden death of the dinosaurs. He advances various climatic and medical hypotheses, discarding each one in turn. He poopoos the idea of mammals being "superior" as we existed alongside dinosaurs for most, if not all, of their tenure on Earth. Asimov leaves off with the suggestion that an external event caused it, specifically a nearby supernova that spiked radiation-induced mutations.
Again, I have trouble seeing how the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and icthyosaurs and pleisiosaurs could all have destructive mutations but not the birds and mammals. I think Ike's cute idea that dinosaurs evolved intelligence and killed themselves with powerful weapons, which would have occurred in the blink of an paleontological eye and thus escape excavation, is more plausible.
Three stars.
A Scare in Time, by David R. Bunch
The demarkations of time, the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and centuries, have met in their onion dome. Tired of being measured and metered by humanity, they plot their ultimate revenge…only to have it foiled by human ingenuity.
A cute modern fairy tale. Three stars.
The Moving Finger Types, by Henry Slesar
Twilight Zone department: Legget couldn't figure out what was wrong with his life. It was like his every move was laid down in a script, and he'd lost the page. Little did he know, that's exactly what had happened.
A fun bit on predestination told in Slesar's competent screenwriter fashon.
Four stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Mixed feelings
You can see my problem. If you read from either end of this issue, you've got a good 30 pages of material (and you can count Merril's book column, too, though I rarely agree with her assessments, and her tastes are drifting far afield of SF these days). But if you read through the middle, that's a lot of one-star territory to slog through. A lot.
Is half a loaf better than none? More importantly, is it worth fifty cents a month?
I mentioned a few months back that Tony Boucher, one of the original editors for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had passed away. Because of the vagaries of publication, it took this long for F&SF to solicit eulogies for Tony and get them in print. But a finer tribute, I can't imagine.
Some of SF's greatest luminaries pay their respects: Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Randall Garrett, Philip K. Dick, Avram Davidson…but what impressed me even more was how many prominent women authors appear, too–Judith Merril, Mildred Clingerman, Margaret St. Clair, Miriam Allen DeFord. It is fitting that so many of the fond rememberers are women; F&SF, particularly in the Boucher years, was by far the biggest SF publisher of woman-penned SFF.
Those were great days, the Boucher reign, when virtually every issue was a winner (sort of like the Gold days at Galaxy). And half the stories we picked for our anthology of SF by women from 1953-57, some of the very best science fiction of the time, came from the pages of F&SF.
It is a shame that the appearance of these names from yesteryear evoke a pang of loss perhaps greater than the passing of Mr. Boucher. Except for a few notable rallies, F&SF has been on a slow, inexorable downward trend since 1959, it's last superlative year. This issue is no exception. While it is not crammed with wholly unworthy material, nor is it anywhere near the standards it used to maintain.
Let me show you…
by Gahan Wilson
The House that Tony Built
The Devil and Jake O'Hara, by Brian Cleeve
I was less than enthusiastic about Brian's last story about Old Nick, in which Satan is cast out of hell along with a lowly sidekick when the souls of Hell unionize and go on strike. This one is a step downward.
All Lucifer needs to break the strike is one measly member of the damned who will cross the picket lines and turn the power back on in the underworld. He sets his eyes on an Irish lush who sells his soul for a bottle of quality whiskey. His daughter adds a few amendments to the deal, but it doesn't really matter. Ultimately, the sot goes to Hell, though the result is not what the Prince of Darkness wants.
There's just too much affected dialect, meandering, and oh-so-cleverisms. What could be a workable premise is, instead, tedious. And this is from someone who likes Deal-with-the-Devil stories.
Two stars.
Sos the Rope (Part 2 of 3), by Piers Anthony
[As with last time, Brian has graciously offered to stand in so I don't have to suffer through Anthony's latest "masterpiece"…]
by Brian Collins
To show once again that democracy is a flawed system, Piers Anthony is now a Hugo nominee! I can scarcely fathom some people’s enthusiasm for his debut novel Chthon getting nominated for Best Novel. His second novel, Sos the Rope, may redeem itself by the final installment, but the chances of it recovering are not high. There is one positive that can be said of this middle installment immediately: it’s short.
Not much happens here, and at only about 25 pages there isn’t much opportunity for Anthony to bless us with his worst habits, all involving women. To recap, it’s America a good century after a nuclear catastrophe, and two rogues, Sos and Sol, agree to a one-year partnership while the latter builds a tribe, one combatant at a time. The two are good friends and respect each other as warriors, but Sos is weaponless while Sol is unable to beget children of his own. Their friendship is complicated when Sol’s wife in name only, Sola, takes a strong liking to Sos and the two eventually have sex behind Sol’s back, leaving Sola pregnant with Sos’s child. This is unfortunate for everyone, including the reader. But by now the one-year contract has run out and Sos and Sol agree to part ways, with Sos returning to a crazy-run hospital where he grew up and where he learned to read.
Another positive thing I can say is that since Sola is virtually absent in this installment, and since Sol only appears at the beginning and end, we’re taken away from the plot to be given more of an explanation as to the workings of this post-apocalyptic world. It’s during his time away from Sol’s tribe that Sos finally decides to take on another weapon—this one the long heavy rope of the title. It’s about halfway through the novel that we finally get the weapon that would become part of the hero’s name. I still cannot properly describe how much I object to the naming system Anthony concocted here. It only gets more aggravating when Sos eventually returns to the tribe and finds that Sol now has a daughter named—wait for it—Soli. Sos and Sola still want each other but the latter refuses to give up Sol’s name and Sol himself refuses to give up his adoptive daughter. A fight in the battle circle, possibly to the death, ensues!
Anthony still cannot write compelling action scenes, and he still cannot write women above the level of depicting them as instigators of doom. A recurring implication here is that Sos and Sol would turn out fine, at worst going down different paths amicably, if not for Sola’s meddling. At the same time I was not offended so much this time.
If I turn my head on its side I might be able to stretch this installment to 3 stars, because it is a relatively painless experience and even mildly enjoyable in a few places, but that implies a tepid recommendation and I can’t lie to readers like that. Strong 2 out of 5 stars.
by Gideon Marcus
The Twelfth Bed, by Dean R. Koontz
by Gahan Wilson
This one takes place in a futuristic rest home, where the aged are confined in their last years under the beneficent but iron care of robot wards. One day, a young accountant is checked into the home by mistake. Try as he might, he can't get out…until he brews a revolt.
Koontz is a writer with a lot of promise, and he did manage a 4-star tale last month, but most of his stories have some kind of issue. For this one, it's that the setup is a bit too contrived to really engage sympathy. Maybe it's supposed to be satire, but again, it plays things to straight if that's the case. Moreover, I read a similar (and better) story in Fantastic three years ago (Terminal, by Ron Goulart).
Anyway, three stars, and keep trying Dean!
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Samuel R. Delany and Ed Emshwiller
Two of my more favorite people provide reviews of Kubrick/Clarke's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. They are interesting perspectives, one from a vivid fictioneer, and one from a gifted illustrator and artist.
Chip (Delany) actually favored the original three-hour version that was cut within a week of its premiere, asserting that the irony of the HAL segment is sharper, and the disorientation of the weightlessness scenes settle in more viscerally. I don't know if that kind of glacial pacing would have been an improvement, but on the other hand, the only time I felt even slightly restless when I watched the film was during the transit scene near the end, so maybe I missed out.
Emsh praises the effects and spends most of his time discussing them rather than the story, which he seems to find serviceable, if not stellar.
It's a better pair of reviews than, say, Robert Bloch's blistering affair (in which Bob calls the monolith a "cylinder" for some reason–sadly, I can't remember where I saw it. A fanzine, I think.)
This piece is book-ended by the protestations of a producer of a television program, disclaiming all responsibility for what ensued on his show, Investigations. It seems he hired a has-been actor to re-enact the recent assassination of a public figure (presumably, echoing the murder of JFK). The actor went meshuginnah and actually assured that he actually got killed in a sort of expiation of public sins. We know this from the interminable, raving diary the actor left behind explaining his motivations.
I really don't know what to make of this story. While I'm not the biggest fan of J.G. Ballard, I found his utlization of the Kennedy assassination (and other cultural touchstones) to be more effective. Certainly more readable, despite the outré nature of his composition. O'Donnell just seems like he's trying too hard.
It is the last night of a short-lived affair, for the male half is leaving. And not just away from his lover, but from Earth. You see, he is an alien, sort of, a member of an extraterrestrial race of humans, and Earth is doomed to soon be consumed in a natural nova. He was sent to our world to gather our finest art treasures, these to form a legacy of our lost race.
The tale is reasonably well executed, but its effectiveness is reduced both by the mawkishness of the scenario and that of its participants (the woman is hysterical, the man poor at communicating), as well as the fact that, again, this feels like a story I've read before, one that was done better. I just can't remember which one it was…
Maybe Taylor, who is a novice, will realize his potential with a more original story next time out. For now, three stars.
The Terrible Lizards, by Isaac Asimov
I was just thinking that I wanted a nice survey on what we know about dinosaurs in 1968, and the good Doctor has presented one. As a bonus, he tell us some horrible things about Sir Richard Owens, a preeminent dino-hunter in the last century.
I enjoyed learning the greek roots of the various dinosaur names as well as the relationship between dinosaurs, mammals, birds, crocodiles, and turtles.
Lanier is another newcomer, but this is his second story, and he seems to have found his footing very quickly. This is the tale of a British Brigadier, the sort with decades of experiences and a knack for storytelling. Apparently, Lanier has a whole treasure chest of stories that the Brigadier will tell, which we'll get to see as F&SF publishes them.
This particular piece involves the time the Brigadier went Caribbean island-hopping in a small boat with his friend, Joe, and two local seamen, Maxton and Oswald. They learn of Soldier Key, a little spit of land inhabited by the queerest of ex-Britishers, dedicated to an unholy church and with an unhealthy adoration for giant hermit crabs.
The plot is Lovecraftian, but without the undercurrent of racism (indeed, the story is quite anti-racist). I found it engaging, thrilling, and also satisfying. Not just horror for horror's sake, but threaded with light–the light provided by decent human beings remaining human in the face of inhumanity.
Four stars.
Urban blight
Well, that wasn't all bad, thankfully. Still, 2.4 is a pretty dismal aggregate. Compare that to the 3.3 average for 1959. Also, for all the female participation in the eulogizing, there are no fiction stories from women this issue. In fact, there have been only six stories by women this entire year.
We could stand to go back to the '50s in more ways than one…
One of the German Empire’s colonies before the First World War was German South West Africa, nestled between what are today South Africa, Angola, and Botswana. After the war, South Africa was granted a mandate over the colony by the League of Nations, similar to Britain’s control over Palestine or France’s over Lebanon and Syria. The League was dissolved in 1946 and replaced by the United Nations. In general, mandates were intended to be replaced by United Nations Trusteeship, and the General Assembly recommended that South West Africa be one of those, however South Africa refused. In 1949, South Africa declared that it was no longer subject to U.N. oversight where South West Africa was concerned, as they began to extend their apartheid system into the former colony. The following year, the International Court ruled that the U.N. should exercise supervision in the administration of the territory in place of the League, but South Africa rejected the Court’s opinion and has refused any involvement by the U.N.
A political cartoon from after the First World War.
Independence movements have swept through Africa over the last decade, and as I noted in January of last year, South West Africa is not immune. The predominant organization is the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), and they have been lobbying the U.N. for several years. In 1966, the General Assembly terminated the mandate, giving the U.N. direct supervision of the territory. Last year, they established the United Nations Council for South West Africa to administer the territory until independence. South Africa remains recalcitrant. And so, on June 12th, the Assembly approved Resolution 2372, which, in accordance with the wishes of the people as represented by SWAPO, changed the name to Namibia. Well, that, some finger-wagging at South Africa and the nations supporting the illegal occupation of Namibia, and a request that the Security Council do something to get South Africa out. Don’t hold your breath.
Sam Nujoma (r.), President of SWAPO, shakes hands with Mostafa Rateb Abdel-Wahab, President of the Council for Namibia
Noir, nonsense, and the blatantly obvious
The stories in this month’s IF range from the patently obvious to those that leave the reader wondering why the author bothered. There are a couple of mildly entertaining stops along the way, and the high point may surprise you (even if it is more molehill than mountain).
Supposedly for Rogue Star, which doesn’t have a starship crash. Or this many characters. Art by Chaffee
Whaddya Read?, by H.L. Gold
The founding editor of both IF and Galaxy offers a defense of modern science fiction. Maybe the new stuff isn’t as different as most people seem to think. It’s just better written.
Three stars.
Getting Through University, by Piers Anthony
A few stories ago, dentist Dr. Dillingham was kidnapped by aliens and has since bumbled around the galaxy, from one emergency patient to the next. Now, he’s been given the opportunity to attend dental school and gain proper accreditation. All he needs to do is pass the entrance exam.
The doctor deals with a difficult case instead of prepping for his exam. Art by Vaughn Bodé
Surprisingly, given the previous stories and the author’s general output, I rather liked this one. A lot of what happens is ridiculously obvious, but it doesn’t lead to quite where you might suspect. This is almost the quality that Cele Lalli used to get out of Anthony. Maybe there’s hope for him after all.
A somewhat above average three stars.
If… and When, by Lester del Rey
This month, del Rey looks at Project Orion, the idea of using nuclear bombs to propel a starship. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, but he’s not shy about discussing some of the problems connected with a successful launch of the project (including the hundred billion dollar price tag). This is a clear-headed look at an interesting idea full of possibilities for science fiction authors.
Three stars.
In Another Land, by Mary Urhausen
Seeking to escape a regimented society and a failed love affair, the narrator attempts suicide only to find himself in a utopia. That utopia feels like the sort often imagined 50 or 60 years ago, but this month’s first time author does what she can with it. The shift from first person perspective to third person is slightly jarring, but gives the story what little bite it has. New author Urhausen shows definite skill. Here’s hoping she can hone it into something a little meatier.
Commodore John Grimes just wants to go home, but the strangeness at the Rim of the galaxy keeps throwing adventures in his way. This time, it’s a habitable planet with no sun, where everything is out of a bad fairy tale, and everyone speaks in rhymed couplets.
It comes as no surprise that Dan Adkins can’t draw a fire-breathing dragon. Art by Adkins
I generally enjoy the Grimes stories, but this is just silly – and that in a series that has had intelligent rats and an appearance by the Olympian gods. Of course, Chandler knows it’s silly and does get some humor out of the Commodore’s grumpiness about the situation. (He really should have ended a sentence with the word “orange,” though. Let’s see them rhyme that.) Overall, a disappointment; the more so because Chandler teased us with a story from the very beginning of Grimes’s career, but has since stuck with the older man near the end of his service. Let’s see some more of the younger man, whether wet behind the ears or just coming into his prime.
A low three stars.
Merlin Planet, by E.G. Von Wald
Sticking with fantasy pretending it’s science fiction, we have the story of the new man on a Terran trading team on a world where the locals can do magic (thanks to some psychic handwaving; what hath Campbell wrought?). Fortunately, the wizards can be stopped for a time by doing complicated math in your head. Unfortunately, instead of the requested mathematician, headquarters has sent a business law expert.
That’s not how you use a magic staff. Art by Wehrle
If you can get past the magic, the story isn’t terrible. However, it is twice as long as it needs to be. I saw the solution as soon as the new guy revealed he couldn’t do high order math. The rest was just an interminable wait until he figured it out. Right on the line between two and three stars, but the length drags it down for me.
Zelazny takes us into the mind of a man who either betrayed Earth to alien invaders or carried out a clever stratagem to defeat them. The problem is that he never engages with his theme. The ambiguity of the ending could be read a couple of ways. Pretty, but shallow.
A low three stars.
What the Old Aliens Left, by D.M. Melton
Here’s our first tale with strong noir elements: an honest cop, a corrupt system, a dangerous dame. The lure of great wealth? The technology left behind by a dead alien civilization.
Most of the action takes place in a bar, too. Art by Brand
Melton continues to improve. He’s never going to get to the point where I’m excited to see his name on the cover, but at least it’s a sign of a probably-entertaining read. He might be getting a handle on writing women, but he’s working from a strong template here, one that’s not necessarily great, but at least gives them their own motives. On the whole, the story probably could have been tightened up here and there. Less going back and forth from the bar, for instance. Still an entertaining read.
Three stars.
West Is West, by Larry Tritten
The inhabitants of the planet West wallow in the cliches of old-school westerns and have names like Randolph Scott Cartwheel, even if many of them are duck-billed saurians. Sheriff Matt Cooper has to bring in Cartwheel for the unprovoked killing of another saurian. Then things go a bit noir, with a femme fatale and the Maltese Longhorn Steer.
A shootout is about the only thing missing from this story. Art by Wehrle
Tritten appears to be another newcomer, though he’s not acknowledged as an IF First. The parody here is laid on with a dumptruck and feels dated. The cliches are familiar, but the western genre has largely moved on from them. There’s no room for Clint Eastwood’s man with no name (though Rowdy Yates would likely feel at home). Ron Goulart could have pulled this off.
A low three stars.
Rogue Star (Part 3 of 3), by Fredrik Pohl and Jack Williamson
This thing doesn’t deserve a recap. I’ll merely note that the climax features actual stars battling each other. The flaws are many, but I’ll limit myself to just two. For starters, “protagonist” Andy Quam should have just stayed home. Everything would have turned out exactly the same, and he wouldn’t have had to deal with all the stress. There are also a number of unresolved subplots, most notably the strange behavior of Earth’s sun. We’re told why it’s happening, but nothing is done about it.
Two stars for this installment and barely two stars for the novel as a whole.
Edmond Hamilton just smashed planets together. What a piker. Art by Gaughan
Summing up
If you told me that, in an issue with stories by the likes of Roger Zelazny and Jack Williamson, the one I would like best was by Piers Anthony, I’d have laughed at you. Look, it’s not a great story; it’s just the one that annoyed me the least. Maybe the summer heat is making me cranky.
It's been so very long since I could offer a travelogue from my favorite of countries, Japan. But now, after four years (and a stop at the Fotomat to develop pictures), I finally have a dual treat for you–vacation slides and a review of the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction!
But instead of dumping either of them on you all at once, how about we take a simultaneous trip, both to the Orient and to vistas even further off?
by Jack Gaughan
For this article, I have the invaluable assistance of Mr. Brian Collins, a fellow 'zine editor with a penchant for pain. To wit, after reading this month's issue, he offered to take a stab at the lead story. As I have no qualms with anyone stabbing Piers Anthony, here goes…
Sos the Rope (Part 1 of 3), by Piers Anthony
by Brian Collins
Piers Anthony has appeared here and there over the past few years without making much of a fuss, with his first SF novel, Chthon, being decidedly uncontroversial among the Journey people (read: everyone I know hates it). That was last year, and now we already have the beginning of his second SF novel, Sos the Rope, which Ed Ferman introduces as a “successful” contest novel “of superior quality.” I don’t wish to call Ferman a liar, but I shiver to think of what the standard must be for contest-winning SF novels for this to be deemed a success.
The premise is simple—too simple. It’s been a century since a nuclear holocaust apparently sent mankind back to its early hunter-gatherer ways, with “society” being reduced to mostly roaming tribes with little hotspots of civilization maintained by “the crazies,” people who somehow retain the ways from before the holocaust. We start with a duel between two warriors, both named Sol, who fight in a circle to see who gets to keep both the name and the right to use all the standard weapons of combat. The loser is thus named Sos, and he becomes not only weaponless but Sol’s (the winner’s) servant; but it’s not all bad, for Sol is not some wandering rogue but a man with a vision, as he wants to build an empire from scratch. A nameless woman who witnesses the duel joins the two and, in a rather haphazard ceremony, becomes Sol’s wife and takes the name of Sola, as is the custom. Apparently people here can change names the way one changes pairs of shoes.
Thus the story starts as something of a road trip narrative that at first sounds like it may be adventure fantasy a la Conan, but is actually science fiction—although Anthony puts in the minimum effort to justify the setting. We also have a lust triangle (I wouldn’t say love, for any reasonable person can’t suppose that Sos and Sola are in love) as Sos and Sola are clearly attracted to each other, but Sola wants Sol’s title while Sol has no affection for Sola. We find out at one point that indeed Sol can’t satisfy his wife as he’s all but said to be a eunuch. “Sol would never be a father. No wonder he sought success in his own lifetime. There would be no sons to follow him.” This does not stop Sos and Sola from eventually doing the dirty deed and the latter getting very pregnant. I continue to suffer.
My experience with Anthony up to this point was basically nil (though, of course, my friends at the Journey tell me stories), but I can already sense a profound distrust of women running through his writing. The way marriage works in the novel’s world is that women literally do not have names and presumably no property rights unless hitched to a man, whereupon they take their husband’s name with just a letter added to it. There is no signed contract, and marriage can be made and ended upon the exchanging of a bracelet. This notion of wife-as-property went out with the Dark Ages, but Anthony has revived it so as to a) generate conflict, and b) give us an excuse to view female characters through the lens of someone who might as well be picking out clothes in a store. There is much ogling at Sola’s physique, including a couple situations where she shamelessly tries to seduce Sos.
The battle circle scenes are not even strikingly written. By the time we get to the climax, where Sol, in recruiting men for his empire, is about to take on a massive brute named Bog (all the men seem to have monosyllables for names), I struggled not to put down my issue and do something better with my life. However, because I feel Anthony can do (and maybe has done) worse, I’m inclined to give this installment a generous 2 out of 5 stars.
by Gideon Marcus
The above was actually written before we went to Japan. On the 10th, we took off from Los Angeles, the Boeing 707 we flew in now a nostalgic experience rather than a new one (we're so spoiled!) Because of our speed, we were in daylight the entire time, and yet, when we landed at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, it was already the next day thanks to the international date line.
Just in time for me to read this story about a completely different kind of trip…
The Psychedelic Children, by Dean R. Koontz
The effects of LSD are still relatively unexplored. Some believe that the psychedelic effects of a "trip" suggest the unlocking of psionic potential. And what if that psionic potential was inheritable…
It is the near future, and Laurie, Frank's wife, is having an episode. Her psi powers come in waves; when they peak, they must be channeled outward in a fiery blaze lest they destroy her. So Frank drives her out to the countryside (furtively, for the psi-capable children of Acid-droppers are all sought by the authorities) so Lauren can vent her energies.
The next day, a patrolman and his robot assistant show up at their door…
Koontz paints a vivid world in a few deft strokes, creating a memorable story with a nice ending. Koontz is still a bit new, and it shows in some awkward turns of phrase and a less than expertly rendered final act. Nevertheless, it's a good story, both SFnal and fantastic.
Four stars.
We spent our first week in Tokyo, down by the harbor in the Hamamatsuchou area. Tokyo is different from other metropolises–from the air, it's an endless cityscape, and on the ground, it seethes with activity. Commuters rush by in endless streams, on foot and by train. It should be oppressive, but the fundamental politeness and regimentation of Japanese society, at least in the urban areas, somehow makes it all bearable. It's much different from, say, the noisy stink of New York City or the sprawling gray of Los Angeles.
Speaking of regimentation and programming…
Key Item, by Isaac Asimov
I was prepared not to like the Asimov story as his best fiction-writing days seem long behind him, and they now tend to be gimmick-ended vignettes. But this one, in which a scientist figures out why a sentient MULTIVAC computer has stopped answering requests, was pretty gratifying–and most surprising.
Four stars.
Tokyo also distinguishes itself from other cities in its random beauty. Personal space is at a premium, and so Japanese people decorate everything with thought and an aesthetic eye. Even storefronts and random streetscapes become scenic.
Ultimate Defense, by Larry Brody
If the last story dealt with a mechanical brain, Ultimate Defense features a bionic wonder, a genetically engineered super human. Jarvis Raal is under suspicion of murder, and it is up to a harried public defender to get him off. How he does so involves an interesting twist on the subject of race.
I love the way Brody hints at an integrated future (a necessary underpinning of the story), and the story's conclusion is a lovely jab at centuries of bigotry. My only complaint is stylistic: Brody ends every other paragraph with a punchy, one-line, standalone. It lacks effectiveness in the repetition.
Four stars.
After five lonely nights in Tokyo (all of our friends in the capital had moved away or drifted out of sight since our last visit), we made our way on the Shinkansen for the first time in four years. It's still as thrilling an experience as ever, zooming past the countryside as fast as a Cessna can fly. Our destination was Nagoya, a rather ugly, industrial city in the country's center. After Tokyo, it looked curiously American with its Western-style grid of streets designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was the least we could do after flattening the city during World War 2.
However, the urban sprawl of Nagoya was in some ways lovelier than Tokyo for the people who live in it. The Chubu/Osaka region is home to the greatest concentration of friends in Japan, both foreign and indigenous. After meeting up with Jen and Dan, two professors who work at Nagoya University (Dan is half-Japanese, Jen is full Minnesotan), we got a call from Nanami, whom you may remember from our previous Japan-based articles and her appearance on The Journey Show.
Well, not only had she recently gotten married, but her husband and she had formed a jazz duet. They invited us out to a coffee shop to watch them perform, and they were just terrif.
The ability to go all over Japan at great speed, manifesting almost at will, calls to mind the next story…
Remote Projection, by Guillaume Apollinaire
This ancient, translated piece starts off as one kind of thing and ends up very much another. A messiah, calling himself Aldavid has appeared simultaneously throughout the globe. Though he simply prays and gives sermons, his effect is electric. Jews start emigrating en masse to Palestine, Jewish bankers are incarcerated so that they cannot empty their coffers in the support of Zionist goals, and gentiles grudgingly concede that they might have backed the wrong horse 2000 years before.
So it's a religious fantasy, right? Then why does the messiah look suspiciously like a no-good-nik con artist, murderer, and crackpot inventor that our narrator character recalls from earlier life? The end of the tale is all science fiction (well, scientific romance; we didn't have "scientifiction" yet), and pretty prescient.
Three stars; four if the old style tickles your fancy.
It is said that being invited into the home of a Japanese family is quite the honor for a Westerner. Well, we were more than honored when Nanami and her husband, Tomoki, insisted we join them for a home-cooked meal of okonomiyaki at their lovely little house. Afterwards, we had an impromptu jam session. I sang Kyu Sakamoto's Ue wo muiteru arukou, which you know States-side as Sukiyaki (Nanami had ended their jazz concert with the song, too.) It was an absolutely sublime experience.
John Sladek offers up this pastiche of a certain New Wave pioneer (the story is ostensibly by a J. G. B??????) If you've read any Ballard, and especially if you've read a lot of Ballard, you will see that Sladek skewers him with absolutely convincing parody. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of mockery. Yet he also manages to tell his own tale and put his own spin on things. Brilliant stuff. I read it aloud to Janice immediately upon finishing it, and it was difficult to avoid breaking up.
Five stars.
Nanami's pad wasn't the only place we ate well. One morning in Nagoya, I found a little restaurant serving soba. And not just soba, but cold soba. And not just cold soba, but cold soba with fried onion on top. WITH a side of curry rice. I can tell you, I didn't eat lunch that day!
That was food for my stomach. Now, how about some food for the mind?
Little Lost Satellite, by Isaac Asimov
Dr. A's first fictional story was Marooned off Vesta, so it is appropriate that he finally do an article about the titular asteroid. He doesn't have too much to say because there isn't much to be learned from a point of light–the best we can resolve the tiny object with terrestrial telescopes. He does make some rather half-baked theories as to the origin of Vesta and other asteroids, suggesting they might be former moons of the big planets, their rotation rates indicative relics of the worlds they once orbited.
Mostly, we're left with questions. Three stars.
Beyond Words, by Hayden Howard
Last up, we have the fellow whose Esk tales in Galaxy started promisingly, meandered terribly, and ended…decently. The fellow can write, sometimes. And indeed, he does a decent job with this story, about a fellow who went into the desert to revert to language-less savagery.
But when you can't speak anymore, how can you defend yourself against a murder charge?
Three stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Heading for home
And so, 12 pleasant vacation days and 130 pages of F&SF go by. Aside from the disappointing beginning, which I thankfully didn't have to read, the magazine definitely compelled me to return to F&SF next month. Just as we fully intend to return to the lovely land of Japan next year, this time.
Out in the vastness of space, a constellation of man-made moons keeps watch on the Earth below. Unlike their brethren, the military sentinels that look out for rocket plumes and atomic blasts, these benign probes monitor the planet's weather with a vantage and a vigilance that would make a 19th Century meteorologist green with envy.
In addition to the wealth of daily data we get from TIROS, ESSA, and Nimbus, the West is now getting aid from an unlikely, but no less welcome, source: behind the Iron Curtain.
Two years ago, the Soviets rebuffed the idea of exchanging weather satellite imagery. "No need," was what they said; "no sats," was probably the real story. For in August of 1966, all of a sudden, the USSR activated the "Cold Line" link between Moscow and Washington for the exchange of meteorological data. This action coincided with the recent launch of Cosmos 122, revealed to be a weather satellite.
This constituted a late start in the weather race–after all, TIROS had been broadcasting since 1960. Nevertheless, better late than never. Unfortunately, the Soviets first sent only basic weather charts with limited cloud analysis. Not much good without the raw picture data. When we finally got the pictures, starting September 11, 1966, the quality was lousy–the communications link is just too long and lossy. Our ESSA photos probably didn't look any better to them.
By March 1967, however, the lines had been improved, and Kosmos 122 was returning photos with excellent clarity.
We also got infrared data. The resolution was much worse, but the Soviets maintained they did first discover a pair of typhoons bearing down on Japan.
Since then, the USSR has orbited at least two more weather satellites, Kosmos 144 and Kosmos 184, both returning the same useful data, often from different orbital perspectives than we can easily reach. For instance, the Soviet pictures offer particularly good views of the poles and northern Eurasia.
It's a little thing, perhaps, this trading of weather data between the superpowers. But anything that promotes peaceful exchange and keeps the connections between East and West ready and friendly is something to appreciate. Sometimes the Space Race is more of a torch relay!
Raining all the time
by Kelly Freas
In sharp contrast, Analog remains an island unto itself, and like all inbred families, often produces challenged offspring. Such is the case with the March 1968 issue, which ranges from middlin' to awful.
The Alien Rulers, by Piers Anthony
by Kelly Freas
We start with the awful.
Fifteen years ago, the blue-skinned Kaozo engaged our space fleet, destroyed it utterly, and became the benevolent masters of Earth. They created a working socialist society, implementing tremendous public works projects, and humanity proved remarkably complacent under their rule. Nevertheless, a revolution of sorts has been hatched, and Richard Henrys is tasked with the stickiest assignment–assassinate the Kazo leader, Bitool.
Henrys is quickly captured, but instead of facing execution, Bitool offers him a deal: protect Seren, the first female Kazo on Earth, during the next three days of the revolution, and he can go free.
Sounds like a decent setup. It's actually a terrible story. For one thing, the author of Chthon has all of his off-putting tics on display. Seren is a straw woman, whose vocabulary is largely limited to "Yes, Richard," and "No, Richard." The social attitudes of this far future world seem rooted in the Victorian times, with passages like this:
"You'll pose as my wife. Hang on to my arm and–"
"Pose?" she inquired. "I do not comprehend this, Richard."
Damn the forthright Kazo manner! He had five minutes to explain human ethics, or lack of them, to a person who had been born to another manner. Pretense was not a concept in the alien repertoire, it seemed.
He chose another approach. "For the time being, you are my wife, then. Call it a marriage of convenience." She began to speak, but he cut her off. "My companion, my female. On Earth we pair off two by two. This means you must defer to my wishes, expressed and implied, and avoid bringing shame upon me. Only in this manner are you permitted to accompany me in public places. Is this clear?"
And this one:
"I promised to explain why this subterfuge was necessary. I didn't mean to place you in a compromising situation, but–"
"Compromising, Richard?"
"Ordinarily a man and a woman do not share a room unless they are married."
And then, there's the scene where the feminine disguise Richard puts together for Seren falls apart because her body lacks mammalian contours. Why doesn't he then dress her in male clothes? And when her stockings start to fall off her legs, I couldn't help wondering how they'd somehow uninvented Panty Hose in the 21st Century.
But then, I'm not sure if Piers Anthony has actually ever talked to a woman, much less seen her in her underthings.
On top of that, the final revelation that the Earth fleet was never destroyed, but instead went on to conquer Kazo, and the two planets have swapped overlords (both governments populated only by the very best technocrats) is so ridiculous as to beggar belief. That Henrys is invited to become one of the ruling class largely for his novel ideas on how to cut a cake fairly, well, takes the cake.
Members of an interstellar agency learn that the best way to increase the technological sophistication of a primitive race is not to give them expertise, but allow them to steal it. The two-page point is hammered in using fourteen pages of digs at women, higher education, and educated women.
One star.
The Inevitable Weapon, by Poul Anderson
by Harry Bennett
A scientist discovers teleportation. Useless for interstellar travel, at least for a while, it's great for beaming in concentrated starlight–as a weapon at first, but potentially, to provide energy.
This would be a decent, one-page Theodore L. Thomas piece in F&SF. Instead, it's fourteen pages of bog-standard detective/secret agent thriller.
Jim Tiptee's freshman story is an Anvilesque tale of breakneck pace and nonstop patter. T. Benedict of the Xeno-Cultural Gestalt Clearance (XCGC) has got a tough job: making sure the trade goods of the galaxy not only take into account the taboos or allergies of alien customers, but also the transhipment longshorebeings.
Tedium sets in by page two, which, coincidentally, is how many stars I rate it.
A lot and very little happen in this installment of Jason dinAlt's latest adventure. Last time on Deathworld III, Jason offered up his fellow Pyrrans as mercenaries to wipe out the horse barbarians on the planet Felicity. It's fair play, after all, since these barbarians (absolutely not the Mongols, because they have red hair!) slaughtered the last attempt at a mining camp on their frozen plateau.
So, Jason accompanies "Temuchin", the warlord, on an expedition down a cliffside to the technologically advanced civilization on the plains below. There, they steal some gunpowder, kill a lot of innocent people, and come back–in time to link up with the rest of the Pyrrans for a raid on the Weasel clan. More slaughter ensues.
Jason feels kind of bad about his part in the killing, but it's all a part of a master plan to someday, eventually, pacify the warriors with by opening up a trade route with the south (as opposed to setting up off-world trade, since the barbarians hate off-worlders). So whaddaya gonna do?
Well, personally? Pick a different career path. Even if the nomads are the biggest savages since the Whimsies, Growleywogs, and Phantasms, what right do the Pyrrans have to kill…anyone?
Setting aside the moral concerns, Harrison is still an effective writer. I wasn't bored, just a bit disgusted.
A shabby little private school for problem children is suddenly the subject of a set of accreditation inspectors. There's nothing wrong with the kids or the staff–the problem is that the snoops might discover it's really a training ground for junior ESPers! Luckily, the tykes are on the side of management, and the inspectors are snowed.
I went back and forth on whether this very Analogian tale deserved two or three stars. On the one hand, I'm getting a little tired of psi stories (the headmaster in the story even says there's no such thing as something for nothing–and that's what psi is), and I resented the smug digs at public school.
But what swayed me toward the positive end of the ledger (aside from the unique and lovely art) was the bit at the end whereby it's suggested that the reason for the school, and the reason psi is so unreliable, is because, like music or language, it's something that needs to be practiced from an early age. It's a new angle, and pretty neat.
So, three stars.
Can't go on…
Wow. 2.1 stars is bottom-of-Amazing territory, and it easily makes this month's Analog the worst magazine of the month. Compare it to Fantastic (2.2), IF (3), New Worlds (3.3), and the excellent Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.6), and the contrast is even stronger.
Because of the paucity of magazines, you could fit all the really good stuff into, say, one issue of Galaxy. On the other hand, women wrote 12% of new fiction this month, which is decent for the times (not to mention the episodes of Star Trek D. C. Fontana has been penning).
It's 1968, an election year. Maybe this is the year Campbell hands the reins over to someone else. It certainly couldn't hurt the tarnished old mag.
And then, maybe the sun will come out again!
Speaking of election news, there's plenty of it and more on today's KGJ Weekly report. You give us four minutes, and we'll give you the world:
The latest issue of Yandro has got a nice piece from Ted White reviewing the latest (and best?) tome on science fiction by Alexei Panshin. The best part of White's article is his gentle but lengthy disagreement over the status of magazines versus paperbacks. Both White and Panshin agree that the paperback novel format is The Next Big Thing (indeed, it's already here), but they disagreed on their role and prospects.
Panshin sees the science fiction digests as a continuation of the pulps, with all the negative connotations attached thereto. He thinks they will eventually die. White strongly disagrees. Firstly, he notes that pulp does not equal bad–many extremely talented authors got their start cranking out a half million words for the old mags. Indeed, White says magazines are now populated by a stable of established writers who have perfected their trade while the paperbacks, since they are a buyer's market, will publish anything. Essentially, the books have taken the role the magazines had in the glut days of the early '50s.
White goes on to say that paperbacks are great, but 1) mags are the main outlet for short stories, and some authors are just better at the short form, and 2) editors keep mags going for the love of it. This means they are likely to survive longer than purely economic considerations would suggest.
It's a good piece. I'd give it a read.
The issue at hand
Speaking of which, should you give the strikingly covered latest issue of Analog a read? Well, if you're one of the 30,000 subscribers who gets it delivered, sure go ahead. If you're eyeing it at a newsstand, you'll want to read further…
by John Schoenherr
Dragonrider (Part 1 of 2), by Anne McCaffrey
In Weyr Search, the first installment of this serial-in-all-but-name, we were introduced to planet Pern. It is a fraught former Earth colony, severed from its homeworld for thousands of years and ravaged periodically by rhizomic attacks from a nearby world. The only defense against the "threads" are fire breathing dragons ridden by telepathically connected humans.
The problem is it's been four centuries since the last attack and the "weyrs" of dragronriders have been allowed to go fallow. Only Benden Weyr is left, and it is woefully undermanned and underdragoned.
This latest installment in the saga of Pern opens up sometime after the last. Lessa, heir to the Hold of Ruatha and now Weyrlady by virtue of her communion with the dragon queen Ramoth, has shacked up with the F'lar, head of the dragonriders. Not because the two like each other, but because that's the law: Weyrladies and Weyrleaders must get hitched.
The thread has begun to fall, and the dragons are sorely taxed to meet the challenge, teleporting in and out of the frigid between to intercept the alien spores.
(Note: What do you call it when a dragon relieves itself between? An ICBM!)
Despite the perseverence of F'lar's crew, the thread has the upper hand–until Lessa accidentally discovers that dragons not only can teleport and telepath, but they can also time travel, too! (telechron?) As one might expect, this changes the whole equation…but maybe not for the better.
by John Schoenherr
I dunno. I was expecting a rousing Battle of Britain story, with never so much being owed by so many to so few. The thread would start gradually, the brave fighters would fight to their limits, and through ingenuity and tenacity, eventually win. The story would get extra points for being by and from the viewpoint of woman, a rare thing in science fiction, particularly in the mag that Campbell built.
Instead, the story is badly paced, lurching from scene to scene. There is no build-up to the thread strike, no mounting of tension; it is just suddenly upon them. McCaffrey throws psionic conceits against the wall to see which ones stick (Lessa not only discovers time travel, but she is the only one who can communicate with all of the dragons–unlike the other riders, who can only communicate with their bonded dragon).
Beyond that, the two main characters are thoroughly unlikeable, by turns yelling and sardonically sniping at each other. An element of violence suffuses their interactions, with F'lar and Lessa's couplings being referred to as not less than rape. It all feels very Marion Zimmer Bradley. I've said before that Lessa feels like a wish-fulfillment character for the author. This hypothesis is only becoming more concerning.
What's frustrating is I feel there could be an interesting story here in the hands of someone else. Jack Vance has already written a thematically similar tale with his The Dragon Masters. It's clear that Campbell wants Pern to be the next Dune, complete with striking Schoenherr covers. Thus far, I'd say McCaffrey isn't up to the task.
I was originally going to give the installment a bare three stars, but I think I've talked myself out of it.
Two stars.
The Destiny of Milton Gomrath, by Alexei Panshin
In this short short, an orphaned garbage collector spends his life convinced that his existence of drudgery is a mistake, and that someone, somehow, will rectify the mistake some day.
Turns out he's right, but that may not be a good thing.
This could be the start of a mildly entertaining Laumer novel. Instead, it ends right after the first punchline.
Blink and you'll miss it: three stars.
Whosawhatsa?, by Jack Wodhams
by Kelly Freas
Picture a world where a sex change is as complete and easy as an appendectomy…and reversible, to boot! Now picture the most complicated legal case possible involving a married couple seeking a divorce, both parties of which have swapped genders. And there are children involved, multiple paramours, probate issues, and a Strong Public Interest.
On the one hand, this story is a drag. The attempts to make it "funny", mostly consisting of endless scenes in which the judge assigned the case contemplates suicide rather than attempt presiding, are a flop. Also, one gets the feeling that if women's lib had advanced in the story as much as medical science, most of the legal issues and many of the social ones would be irrelevant. Particularly if 1) we could extend the legal rights currently afforded women in the federal government to all women, and 2) we could approach homosexuality with a less than medieval attitude.
That said…
There is very interesting exploration of what it means to change genders and the motivations that underly the desire to make such a transition. While the situation is made as ludicrous as possible, the subjects, for the most part, are taken seriously. I actually found the piece remarkably progressive, especially for Analog. Certainly, I've never read anything like it before.
Three stars.
Beak by Beak, by Piers Anthony
by Kelly Freas
An alien spacecraft orbits the Earth, neither communicating nor responding to communications. Meanwhile, a red parrakeet arrives at the home of a bird-keeper and joins his avian pet family for a time.
This is a pleasant pastoral piece that tries a little too hard to get its message across. Still, I'll read something like this a thousand times before I'll read Chthon again.
Three stars.
Venus and Mercury—Locked Planets? by R. S. Richardson
Dr. Richardson writes so-so science fiction, but I generally quite like his science fact articles. This one talks about the newly discovered rotation rates of Venus and Mercury, as well as what they might mean in relation to the history of the solar system.
On the one hand, I learned a bit, and that's significant given that I know a lot of astronomy. On the other, I felt the pictures were worth a thousand words, and I found myself skimming a lot of the text. In other words, maybe 20 pages wasn't necessary to make the point (God help us–next month's science article will be 10,000 words!).
Still, four stars.
A Question of Attitude, by Christopher Anvil
by Kelly Freas
A recruit for the interstellar patrol finds himself in an increasingly difficult series of imaginary tests, ones that stick him in mortal peril in a simulated alien planet environment. He seems to fail each one, ending up "dead", yet the Lt. Colonel in charge of training seems to think he has promise.
Normally, Anvil and Campbell are a toxic combination. This time around, the story is kind of interesting. I also rather enjoyed the nihilistic suggestion that the recruit's success is measured in the degree of his failure, and also that passing the tests only means his life is about to get worse. It fits with the whole zeitgeist of our current engagement in Vietnam. Even if Joseph Heller did it better.
Three stars.
Psi Assassin, by Mack Reynolds
by Kelly Freas
Lastly, yet another of Reynolds' tales of Section G, the interstellar agency whose job is to make sure no human planet ends up too backwards, lest the race become prey to an ominous but yet unmet alien menace. This time, a psionic assassin is sent to kill the head of a Latin dictatorship. The problem: agent Ronny Bronston has already dispatched said leader and taken his identity!
We have all the hallmarks of a Reynolds Section G story: endless historical lectures (that never seem to have any object lessons beyond the mid-20th Century), flippant personalities that leach the story of any gravitas, the lone female agent (Reynolds never lets us forget her sex), and a happy ending.
Reynolds has done decent work with this series, but less often than not.
Two stars.
Doing the math
So who's right? Alex or Ted? Based on this month, I'd give the nod to Ted. While Analog was on the mediocre side, managing just 2.8 stars, other magazines fared much better. Both Galaxy and New Worlds scored 3.2 stars. Fantasy and Science Fiction was also pretty good (3.1). If was a bit tired, but par for the course (2.8), and while Amazing's 2.7 score puts it at the bottom of the pack, it actually is on an upward trend.
You could fill two magazines with all the superior stuff that came out this month, which is a good crop. Sadly, McCaffrey wrote the only woman-penned piece, and it wasn't very good (though it was better than Poul Anderson's novella in Galaxy).
I give magazines at least a few more years…
But that's not all we have for today. All the way from Australia comes this exciting stop press in the world of space news!:
by Kaye Dee
“Australia Joins the Space Club!”
Although Australia has supported American and British/European space efforts over the past decade, just yesterday, on 29 November we finally gained our own membership of the Space Club by placing our first satellite, WRESAT-1, into orbit. I’ve written articles previously about the first satellites of France and Italy, so it gives me great pride to report on Australia’s own satellite launch.
WRESAT-1 under construction in at the WRE
WRESAT-1 (WRE Satellite) has been a joint project of the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE) and the University of Adelaide, with significant support from the United States. In 1966, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) offered Australia a spare Redstone rocket from the ARPA-led Project Sparta programme at Woomera as a satellite launcher. Sparta has been the final phase of a US/UK/Australian re-entry physics research programme commenced in 1960, investigating radar-echo phenomena created by re-entering missile warheads. The Sparta team even offered to prepare and fire the Redstone for the WRE.
“A Rush Job!”
The scientists and engineers involved in the Australian upper atmosphere research programme took advantage of the proposal to move their instruments from sounding rockets to satellite. However, the Sparta launch offer placed the satellite project on a very tight schedule, as the spacecraft would have to be ready for launch by the end of 1967, when the Sparta project would be complete and the Americans returning home. So, in just 11 months Australia’s, WRESAT has been designed, constructed, tested and was finally launched on 29 November. Its development has been an example of local “make-do” ingenuity, as much of the testing equipment needed was not available in the country.
Australia’s first satellite has been designated WRESAT-1 because my WRE colleagues hope that it will have many successors. Australia doesn’t yet have a space agency like NASA, but the WRE is putting a proposal to the Australian Government for a national space programme, and we hope that it will be funded, with the WRE formally designated as the Australian national space agency.
Diagram showing the internal layout of WRESAT’s systems and scientific instruments
Given the short development period, WRESAT’s scientific payload consists of instruments similar to those already flown in the Australian sounding rocket programme conducted in conjunction with the University of Adelaide Physics Department. The university team has developed a suite of instruments to study solar and ultra-violet radiation, atmospheric ozone and molecular oxygen density, as well as measuring the temperature of the solar atmosphere.
“Going Up From Down Under”
After an aborted launch attempt on the 28th, the Redstone lifted-off flawlessly on the 29th to place WRESAT into a polar orbit, where it is being tracked, and its telemetry signals recorded, by NASA’s Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Network – a service also generously provided free to Australia.
WRESAT soars on its way to orbit from Launch Area 8 at Woomera
Because of its short development time, a solar array could not be designed for WRESAT, and the satellite is only battery-powered. This means it will have a very short operational lifespan, but we expect it to gather a large amount of data on the upper atmosphere that will provide a check on the data already gathered by sounding rockets.
Let’s hope that WRESAT-1 marks the start of Australia’s true Space Age, and that this country will soon “shine as brightly as the Southern Cross”, as President Johnson has put it in his congratulatory telegram on our first national launch!
You probably know that, while much of the world drives on the right-hand side of the road with steering wheels on the left side of the vehicle, Great Britain and most of her former colonies do things the other way around, steering wheel on the right and driving on the left. A few other countries follow the British example, such as Japan, Indonesia, and Thailand. Up until a month ago, Sweden was among them.
A switch has been considered for a while and, although Swedes voted overwhelmingly against the change in 1955, it has now gone through. All of Sweden’s neighbors drive on the right, with something like 5 million vehicles crossing the borders with Norway and Finland (not to mention Danish and German tourists arriving with their cars by ferry). On top of that, roughly 90 percent of the cars in Sweden have their steering wheel on the left, which means that Swedish automakers have been building their cars that way for a long time.
The logo for the traffic changeover.
After four years of preparation and education, H-day (Dagen H for Högertrafik, which means right-hand traffic) came in the wee hours of Sunday, September 3rd. Road signs had to be moved or remade, new lines had to be painted on the roads, intersections had to be reshaped. Just as much effort went into educating the public. The logo was plastered on everything from milk cartons to underwear. There was even a catchy tune written for the event, “Håll dig till höger, Svensson” (Keep to the Right, Svensson). Everything seems to have gone off without a hitch, and traffic accidents have been down, probably because everyone is being extra careful. Iceland is planning on following suit next year.
This photo was staged several months ago as part of the education campaign. The real thing was much less chaotic.
The time war against the deadly berserkers on the planet Sirgol comes to a head. The enemy will try to stop Vincent Vincento (a Galileo analogue) from recanting his belief in heliocentrism, thus preventing him from writing an important scientific treatise. Feeling guilt over sending his rival to his death, Derron Odegard volunteers to go back and try to stop the berserkers. If he succeeds, Time Ops will be able to locate their staging area and lock them out of the time stream. But what happens when a berserker meets the equivalent of St. Francis of Assisi?
Can a Foucault pendulum keep Vencento from recanting?. Art by Gaughan
This is a direct sequel to Stone Man and The Winged Helmet and wraps the story up nicely. That said, I’ve never been completely satisfied with the time war stories. Saberhagen continues to show some range, though, and I will always be glad to see his name on the cover.
Three stars.
Mail Drop, by C. C. MacApp
Klonit-41-Z-Bih is the director of the mail center on Galkbar. Things are stressful enough, but when the first manned mission to Mars stumbles into a long-forgotten mail transporter, war may break out between the Selidae and Medanjians over the Live Unclaimed Mail – a war that will claim the mail center as its first victim.
Klonit does his best to soothe the rival claimants. Art by Vaughn Bodé
I’ve noted before that MacApp tends to be unsuccessful when he tries to be funny. Here, he’s going more for general humor than a real knee-slapper and gets closer to the mark. Like a lot of what he’s put out lately, it’s reasonably entertaining, but forgettable.
The Sleipnir under Captain Grettir is scheduled to test the first faster-than-light drive. Before starting the test, the crew pick up the sole survivor of a wrecked ship. Unfortunately, she is distraught and becomes convinced the captain is her husband. Upset by his rejection of her, she commandeers the drive and sends the ship to speeds much faster than planned before stripping naked and walking out the airlock. Meanwhile, the ship and the body have burst out of the universe to find it is just an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus. Then things get weird.
The Sleipnir in orbit around the body of Mrs. Wellington. Art by Morrow
If the timing didn’t make it nearly impossible, I’d say Farmer wrote this as a parody or pastiche of Poul Anderson’s To Outlive Eternity, what with the Nordic names of the ship and captain. Farmer’s been on a losing streak lately; even his latest Riverworld story was a little off. This story does nothing to end that streak.
A high two stars.
Thus Spake Marco Polo, by James Stevens
The MARK-40 PLO Command Computer, which oversees America’s nuclear armaments, has gained sentience, dubbed itself Marco Polo, and linked up with the Russian IVAN-812 Command Computer. It also lisps. Now General Emerito Sandez has 24 hours to defeat the computer in a war game, or humanity will be wiped out.
This month’s new author is a 22-year-old graduate student in drama at the University of Illinois, originally from Puerto Rico. (I hope Fred keeps doing these mini-biographies for new authors; they’re handy.) Giving the computer a childish lisp may not be the most successful way of showing that its sentience is brand-new, but it’s not too distracting. On the other hand, it’s unusual to have a Latin protagonist, particularly one so high-ranking, and I approve. Overall, this is a fine debut, and I look forward to more from Mr. Stevens.
A solid three stars.
Dreamhouse, by Gary Wright
The planet of New Kansas is very, very flat. It also has no violent crime. However, it’s not without its sins, like the Dreamhouse, which offers patrons the chance to experience almost anything as though it were real. Maybe there’s a connection.
Adam’s dreams keep going disastrously wrong. Art by Wood
Gary Wright has turned out some sound, middle-of-the-road stories, frequently about sports. Alas, this is none of those things. The writing is fine, but the protagonist (such as he is) is unpleasant, and much of the story hinges on him being unable or unwilling to communicate his problems. The conclusion also doesn’t hold up if you give it even a passing thought. Wright is capable of much better than this.
Barely three stars.
In the Jaws of Danger, by Piers Anthony
Dr. Dillingham is a dentist who has been kidnapped by aliens, because he did such a good job fixing one of their dental problems. Now he’s been loaned out to deal with a cavity in an alien the size of a whale.
Dr. Dillingham asks his new patient to say “Aaah.” Art by Vaughn Bodé
Piers Anthony is a Cele Lalli discovery, and she seems to be the only editor to get the best out of him. Under other editors, he’s produced some mediocre stories (alone and in collaboration) and an execrable novel. This humorous piece is… fine, I guess (cue Señor Wences again). It also feels like there might be a story before this one that has gone missing somewhere.
Three stars.
Ocean on Top (Part 2 of 3), by Hal Clement
In Part 1, an unnamed investigator for the Power Board, which rations energy for the whole world, is looking into the disappearance of three other investigators over the last year. On the ocean floor, he discovers a vast area being illuminated in a criminal waste of energy. Eventually he is captured and taken into an underwater base. Still underwater, his captors removed their helmets.
After a while, he is visited by Bert Wehlstrahl, the first investigator to go missing. Communicating by writing, Bert explains that the 15,000 people down here aren’t stealing power, and that he has joined them. He has no news about Joey Elfven, the second investigator, but they do have Marie Wladetzky, who refuses to believe anything Bert says.
Our protagonist agrees to undergo the process to allow him to live in the underwater base, secretly planning to find out as much as he can before returning to surface. The people down there want him to go back with a message to the Power Board, but he wants as much information as possible. He meets with Marie and explains his plan and then takes a tour of the facility. Following a visit to the power plant, Bert claims that he is also not planning to stay and that the Power Board knows, or at least knew, about this base. He then takes the protagonist to see the supposedly missing Joey. To be concluded.
One of the locals shows the protagonist where to get lunch. Art by Castellon
Clement just keeps piling mystery upon mystery, without offering us any real answers. Most importantly, he hasn’t explained how these people breathe; the protagonist thinks they get their oxygen from special food. After remembering reading about some experiments done after the First World War with oxygenated saline to help soldiers whose lungs were devastated by gas and a trip to the library where I learned about some very recent breakthroughs, I think I know how the breathing works, at least.
The tour of the base is the most Clement-esque part of this installment, but the rest still has a darker, more “grown-up” feel than is usual for his work. If I have a real quibble, it’s that the dialogue is too involved and flowing for being done in writing on a letter-sized board.
Three stars for now.
Summing up
Last month at Worldcon, IF was awarded Best Professional Magazine for the second year in a row. In his con report, the Traveler suggested that voters were rewarding the magazine for its standouts. It’s true that the magazine has been lackluster of late, but the award was for last year, a year dominated by the serialization of Best Novel winner The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And while the magazine was only in the middle of the pack in last year’s Galactic Stars, it did tie for second in most Stars nominees, as well as running the Best Novel and Best Short Fiction Hugo winners. Up through the June issue of this year, every issue has had at least one truly outstanding story, and of course, there was the wonderful Hugo winners issue
Speaking of the Hugo winners issue, will Fred try to put out another one next year? I’m not hopeful. There were four potential authors last year, thanks to the tie for Best Novel and the one-time Best Series award. For next year, there are only three, even with the addition of another category in short fiction, and Heinlein hasn’t written a short story in almost a decade. Although, Best Fan Writer (and occasional Journey contributer) Alexei Panshin does have some professional sales… No, I’m not getting my hopes up.
Okay, new Leiber is promising, and James White is usually pretty good.
![[September 4, 1969] <i>Plus ça change</i> (October 1969 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/IF-1969-10-Cover.jpg?resize=487%2C372)
Penelope Ashe, in part, with the cover model superimposed.
Supposedly for Seeds of Gonyl. If so, it’s from later in the novel. Art by Gaughan
Art uncredited, maybe by Gaughan
Is that Nixon? Art uncredited
Dr. Dillingham meets his patient. Art by Gaughan
Ignore the blurb. These aren’t the last people on Earth. Art by Gaughan
Erasmus Ballod is having a bad day. Art by Gaughan
Tonight, the role of Colonel Strang will be played by Ronald Reagan. Art by Gaughan
Our hero. Art by Gaughan
Tiptree is the only name that means anything to me. A bit of a coin flip as an author, but definitely improving with every story.
![[January 14, 1969] Ten for the road (January Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690114covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[January 8, 1969] Young Punks and Old Fogies (February 1969 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690108cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[August 20, 1968] A tale of two issues (September 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/680820cover.jpg?resize=659%2C372)
![[July 22, 1968] Shades and Shadows (August 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/680722cover.jpg?resize=664%2C372)
![[July 2, 1968] What’s the Point? (August 1968 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/IF-1968-08-Cover.jpg?resize=505%2C372)
A political cartoon from after the First World War.
Sam Nujoma (r.), President of SWAPO, shakes hands with Mostafa Rateb Abdel-Wahab, President of the Council for Namibia
Supposedly for Rogue Star, which doesn’t have a starship crash. Or this many characters. Art by Chaffee
The doctor deals with a difficult case instead of prepping for his exam. Art by Vaughn Bodé
It comes as no surprise that Dan Adkins can’t draw a fire-breathing dragon. Art by Adkins
That’s not how you use a magic staff. Art by Wehrle
Most of the action takes place in a bar, too. Art by Brand
A shootout is about the only thing missing from this story. Art by Wehrle
Edmond Hamilton just smashed planets together. What a piker. Art by Gaughan
That’s a promising lineup.![[June 26, 1968] To far off lands (July 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/680620cover.jpg?resize=451%2C372)
![[February 26, 1968] Stormy Weather (March 1968 <i>Analog</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/680226cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[November 30, 1967] One door closes… (December 1967 <i>Analog</i> and Australia joins the Space Race!)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/671130cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[October 2, 1967] Switching Sides (November 1967 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/IF-1967-11-Cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
The logo for the traffic changeover.
This photo was staged several months ago as part of the education campaign. The real thing was much less chaotic.
A newcomer gets the cover. Does he deserve it? Art by Vaughn Bodé
Can a Foucault pendulum keep Vencento from recanting?. Art by Gaughan
Klonit does his best to soothe the rival claimants. Art by Vaughn Bodé
The Sleipnir in orbit around the body of Mrs. Wellington. Art by Morrow
Adam’s dreams keep going disastrously wrong. Art by Wood
Dr. Dillingham asks his new patient to say “Aaah.” Art by Vaughn Bodé
One of the locals shows the protagonist where to get lunch. Art by Castellon
Okay, new Leiber is promising, and James White is usually pretty good.