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Magazine, Serial

[January 22, 1965] With Apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein (February 1965 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf


The guy on the right doesn't seem too happy about all this.

The long-anticipated movie version of the smash hit stage musical The Sound of Music had sneak previews in Minneapolis and Tulsa this month, and is scheduled to show up in theaters across the nation in March. This sugary-sweet confection, very loosely based on the true story of the Trapp Family Singers, isn't really my cup of tea, but I thought I would pay tribute to the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II by stealing the titles of some of the ditties that appear in it.

Caution: May cause diabetes.

Climb Ev'ry Mountain

Just a couple of days ago, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as President of the United States for his first full term.


Chief Justice Earl Warren administers the oath of office.

The inaugural address was a short one. In the space of twenty minutes or so, he raised the issues of poverty, health care, literacy, and much more. A phrase about American lives lost in countries we barely know is surely a reference to the conflict in Vietnam. He even threw in a nod to the space program, mentioning the rocket that is heading toward Mars.

Those are a lot of steep, difficult mountains to conquer for any politician, so let's wish the President well.

Do Re Mi

I've complained before about some of the syrupy ballads that reach the top, so I was pleased to see two tunes more to my liking jump to Number One this month. Both are courtesy of the UK, so pip pip and cheerio to our friends across the pond!

Earlier this month, the Beatles made a big comeback on the American charts with their upbeat rock 'n' roll number I Feel Fine.


The big advantage of buying a record instead of going to a Beatles concert is that you can actually hear the song instead of screaming.

Even as I type this, the news reaches me that British songbird Petula Clark is now Number One in the USA, belting out a nifty tribute to the pleasures of big city living called Downtown.


Baby, it's her, as far as music fans go.

My Favorite Things

Like the rest of you, I'm a big fan of science fiction and fantasy stories, at least when they're done reasonably well. Let's take a look at the latest issue of Fantastic and hope for the best.


Cover art by Heidi Coquette.

A Fortnight of Miracles, by Randall Garrett

A magician, who is also handy with a quarterstaff, travels around with his familiar, a goblin. (In this world, that means an earth elemental.) They run into — literally! — a most unusual knight. Although he can talk and fight and do all kinds of knightly things, he's just an empty suit of armor. After a brief period of misunderstanding, the sorcerer and the goblin agree to help him find the wizard who put a curse on him.

Fortunately, all users of magic have to travel to a convention once per century or lose their powers, and it's going on right now. The knight also has to triumph at a jousting tournament, which is hard to do when you're just a suit of armor that doesn't weigh very much. Add in a lovesick wood nymph, the King of Faerie, and some Bad Guys, and you got a lighthearted fantasy adventure. It provides some amusement, although it's hardly profound.

Three stars.

Passage to Dilfar, by Roger Zelazny

If you studied Homer in school, you're familiar with the term in medias res. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, this brief tale begins in the middle of things.

Our hero, Dilvish the Damned, is riding his talking metal horse, for which he sold part of his soul, from the site of a lost battle, in order to carry the news to a city threatened by the advancing enemy. Along the way lots of foes try to stop him, but he escapes them all. A final encounter with a a knight wearing invulnerable armor tests the skills of Dilvish and his steed.

This lightning-paced tale is very well written, but it reads like a few pages torn out of a much longer story. I hope the author eventually tells us more about the Damned fellow.

Three stars.

The Repairmen of Cyclops (Part Two of Two), by John Brunner


Illustration by George Schelling.

As you may recall from the previous installment, the Corps Galactica finds evidence that the ruling class of the planet Cyclops is somehow restoring body parts for those lost by the wealthy; a thing which should be beyond their level of medical technology. As strongly hinted at last time, that's because they're buying them from some sinister folks who exploit the population of a planet unknown to the Corps.

The Bad Guys convince their victims that they're suffering from a terminal illness, take them away, and pay their families, pretending to be a sort of hospice. Of course, they really murder them in cold blood, and sell them to the physician on Cyclops who takes care of the elite.

In the concluding half of this short novel, the Corps figures out what's going on and tries to stop it. Complicating matters is the fact that the woman who is the de facto ruler of Cyclops orders the Corps to abandon their base on the planet, even though this will cause great economic hardship for her world. She has her own motive, which involves the physician and one of the innocent inhabitants of the secret planet. It all leads up to a daring raid on the evil doctor's lair by the heroine, a highly skilled and experienced agent of the Corps.

That makes the plot sound melodramatic, and, indeed, the climax resembles something from a James Bond novel. However, the characters are believable, the background is complex, and the combination of violent action and political intrigue always held my interest.

Four stars.

Winterness, by Ron Goulart


Also by George Schelling. I like the white-on-black effect.

Set in the early part of the Twentieth Century, this tongue-in-cheek yarn involves a spiritualist and a married couple, both of whom are novelists. The woman believes in the medium's powers, the man does not. At a seance for a newspaper editor and his mistress, the skeptic falls into danger, and dark secrets are revealed.

I've made the story sound a lot more serious than it is. Although the plot isn't a funny one, the characters, the dialogue, and the narrative style are all good for some laughs. I particularly liked a bit of satire on the writing game of years gone by, with the woman producing sentimental novels with titles like Venetia; or Led Where Love Compels and the man turning out muckraking works like Soil and Steam.

Three stars.

The Vamp, by Thomas M. Disch

The narrator is an old-time movie actor, going back to the silent days, who is now the host of a TV kiddie show. He sees his ex-wife on the street, acting like a flirtatious 1920's flapper to the men who pass by, who don't seem interested. That's not a big surprise, since she's more than sixty years old, with hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, dead white skin, ruby lips, sharp teeth . . .

OK, you know where this is going, from the title if nothing else. The narrator never figures it out, so he invites her home for a very rare — in fact, bloody — steak. That leads to the story's joke ending.

The whole thing is just a trifle, but I liked it well enough. Maybe that's because the idea of turning a silent-screen star into a you-know-what tickled me. Or maybe because the story reminded me of the great old movie Sunset Boulevard. (I can definitely see a similarity between the Vamp and Norma Desmond.)

Three stars.

So Long, Farewell

Before I say goodbye, let me sum up my thoughts on this issue. Overall, it was pretty decent. No bad stories, although many of them were definitely minor works. That's a lot better than a magazine full of lousy fiction, so I won't complain when I read something good.

[If you have a membership to this year's Worldcon (in New Zealand) or did last year (Dublin), we would very much appreciate your nomination for Best Fanzine! We work for egoboo…]




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Magazine, Serial

[January 18, 1965] Doors also open (February 1965 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

Eulogy for One

I opened this month's Fantasy & Science Fiction to the sad news that author Richard McKenna had passed away.  He was quite an excellent author, one who (like me) started writing fiction late in life.  That he was only to devote eight years to a career he'd hoped to last for sixty is a tragedy for all concerned.  Here's his obituary in full.

It is perhaps the fittest balm that the February 1965 issue of F&SF is the first really good one in a long time.  New editor Joe Ferman may have finally exhausted the dreck his predecessor, Avram Davidson, had assembled.  Aside from the improvement in quality and the inclusion of an honest-to-goodness science fiction story, I note there is only one piece in what I'd call the "joke" category, and there are four entries by women.  F&SF has traditionally published the most women per capita, but under Davidson's reign, that distinction had been surrendered.

So let's welcome back this return to form (long may it last).  Come take look:

The Issue at Hand


by Jack Gaughan

Marque and Reprisal, by Poul Anderson

Perhaps a hundred years from now, Earth's World Federation, beginning to settle the stars, runs into the humanoid Aleriona in the disputed Phoenix sector.  A misunderstanding ensues, and after Alerion ships slaughter the human population of New Europe with nuclear missiles, they occupy the planet.

Accidents happen.  Surely the decimation of half a million people is not worth risking interstellar war over, especially on the eve of establishing formal trade relations between Earth and Alerion.  Except, as we learn early on, most of those 500,000 colonists aren't dead.  They are holed up in New Europe's mountains, hoping for a rescue effort that the Federation is unwilling to mount.  Thus, the information is suppressed, its purveyors ostracized.

This all sits poorly with Gunnar Heim, a former space cruiser captain.  If not the Federation as a whole, surely at least one nation will stand up for New Europe.  And indeed, France would do so — if it had its own navy, which it does not in this future enlightened time.

But the Federation was never a signatory to the 1856 Declaration of Paris, which outlawed Letters of Marque…

This story takes a little while to get going, and it has a little bit too much of the protagonist talking to himself, which is one of Poul Anderson's idiosyncrasies.  It also lacks a single woman character.  On the other hand, it has many things going for it.  It is a space story, something the magazine has been sorely lacking for a long time.  It is an interesting story (ditto).  And it derails itself halfway through with a completely unexpected plot twist; I always appreciate it when an author can pull this off.

I'm giving it four stars even though it ends on a cliffhanger.  If there isn't a sequel, I'll eat my hat.

The Sin of Edna Schuster, by Willard Marsh

Mrs. Schuster engages in a tryst with a passionate, mysterious man named Raoul, an expatriate from some Latin country.  It becomes quite clear at the end that he is not quite of this world.

I am going to refrain from rating this one.  It's quite well written, but I fail to recognize the fable/myth it references at the end, so I cannot tell how effective it is at what it's trying to do.

Please enlighten me?

Mrs. Pribley's Underdog, by Sue Sanford

Aging widow Pribley discovers and becomes quite fond of an alien she finds on her lawn, one best described as a looking like an organic vacuum cleaner.  But if this is the extraterrestrial her scientist brother has been in mental communication with, why is it that it is suddenly incapable of anything more than the most rudimentary thoughts?

It's cute, the "joke" story I mentioned.  Three stars.

Time and the Sphinx, by Leah Bodine Drake

Here's a lovely piece about Time as personified aspect, and the Egyptian goddess-in-stone he comes to loathe.  Can he defeat her with his withering powers?  And will he be pleased with the outcome?

Four stars.

Harmony in Heaven, by Isaac Asimov

In which the Good Doctor discovers Kepler's Third Law and proceeds to draw up a number of tables.  It's exciting as it sounds (although, to be fair, Dr. A. is never bad).

Three stars.

The Switch, by Calvin Demmon

The Professor has been dead for a century, but his soul lives on in a box as gray as he was when he passed.  Every few months, he is switched on by some 21st Century student who wants first-hand knowledge of life in the 20th. 

Is this immortality?  Or a kind of hell?  Either way, I found it poignant.  Four stars.

Look Up, by Karen Anderson

The subject of this poem is the Tomorrowland that is space.  The quality is not up to Karen's usual snuff.  Two stars.

The Absolutely Perfect Murder, by Miriam Allen deFord

How best to eliminate a pesky spouse?  Kill their father before the spouse can be born, of course!  But, as is always the case with stories, there's an unforeseen wrinkle.

Nothing new with this piece, but neither is there anything offensive.  A low three stars.

The Placebo Effect, by Theodore L. Thomas

Our science springboardist suggests that the Placebo Effect, which is real, could be developed into a perfect cure, if only we could find the perfect placebo for every malady.

You'll quickly spot the logical fallacy, but as satire, it's kind of fun.

Three stars.

The Deadeye Dick Syndrome, by Robert M. Green, Jr.

Against the admonitions of a crackpot occultist, Tom Fish heads out to the desert.  And in the pre-dawn dark, he comes face to face with the "vast black thing, poised like a crow over the moon."  Suffused with a thrilling energy, he returns to his town only to find he is now utterly despised by all — liked Deadeye Dick from H.M.S. Pinafore.  Only the fruitcake can save Fish from an imminent lynching.

It starts excitingly, ends confusingly, and there is entirely too much quoting and name-dropping of Charles Fort and Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, but I hesitate to give it lower than three stars just because I am largely ignorant of the work of those three men.

Dialogue in a Twenty-First Century Dining Room, by Robert F. Young

Last up is a short piece in script form detailing how a scrupulously average couple in a deliberately average society manage to beat the wondrous Bartlett's quoting rowk bird into insipid inanity.

Good for what it is.  Three stars.

Celebration for All

And so, we say good-bye to a bright star, but we see the rosy-fingered dawn of a reborn F&SF.  Sadness and hope in equal measures.  Things could be worse.  I'll drink to both.


by "Moonman82"

[If you have a membership to this year's Worldcon (in New Zealand) or did last year (Dublin), we would very much appreciate your nomination for Best Fanzine! We work for egoboo…]




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[January 12, 1965] Last Minute Reprieve (the February 1965 Amazing)

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by John Boston

The Issue at Hand


Paula McLane

Well, what have we here?  A pretty decent issue of Amazing, not a common occasion at all, with some good and/or interesting material, one disappointing item by a big-name author, but no offenses against reason and decency!  Let us count our blessings, and proceed directly to their dissection.

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


George Schelling

Roger Zelazny’s two-part serial He Who Shapes concludes in this issue, and is the most pleasant surprise here: a capable writer taking on a substantial task and working hard to do a good job of it.  It features a psychiatrist specializing in neuroparticipation therapy: he projects hyper-realistic dreams into his patients’ minds and then stars in them, directing the action to the therapeutic end of his choice.  This is Render, the Shaper—a hokey note, but not misplaced, given the oratorical level of the whole. 

Neuroparticipation is a powerful tool, but sometimes double-edged: the therapist can lose control of the action and wind up in the patient’s movie, not his own.  Render is someone whose roots in his own reality are a little tenuous, by at least unconscious design: after the death of his wife, he maintains a determinedly superficial relationship with his mistress (sic) Jill, and a parental relationship with his son that is ostentatiously concerned (e.g., he changes the son’s school repeatedly) but seems emotionally arms-length.

So when another psychiatrist, brilliant, female, blind since birth, and of course also beautiful, asks Render to instruct her via neuroparticipation in visual imagery so she too can become a neuroparticipation therapist, the sophisticated reader can only think “Uh-oh.” I won’t go further; this is one that deserves to be read.  Not that it’s perfect by any means; unlike almost everything else in sight, it seems too short, and the end in particular seems rushed and underdeveloped.  But it’s a welcome sign both for the magazine and for the author, who seems to have moved from the “promising” column to the “delivering” one.  A strong four stars.

Far Reach to Cygnus, by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber’s Far Reach to Cygnus, a sequel of sorts to The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet from Fantastic of a few years ago, is labelled a short story but at 23 pages is as long as many novelets in this magazine.  It’s a rambling, low-intensity sort of thing, agreeable enough while reading, but it compares badly to Leiber’s tighter and sharper pieces like Mariana (Fantastic, 1960), A Deskful of Girls (F&SF, 1958), or for that matter the short novel The Big Time (Galaxy, 1958). 

Here’s another psychological theme, of sorts.  To open, our first-person narrator is racing eagerly to Dr. Dragonet’s redoubt in the Santa Monica Mountains, lured by Dragonet’s promise of “a drug that is to mescalin and LSD as they are to weak coffee.” Upon arrival there is some byplay involving the police, a beautiful young woman, and a possibly illusory black leopard.

Our hero then enters a sort of seance featuring another beautiful young woman, recumbent in a long white dress, and already drugged, describing a scene on an extraterrestrial planet featuring blue grass and inhabited by elvish blue people who ride unicorns.  Also present are a Professor, a Father, a Sister, “a handsome crophaired sun-tanned suavely muscled” young Hollywood man in all-white garb, who is “the newest and most successful Brando-surrogate and homegrown Mastroianni” of the media, and of course Dr. Dragonet.

The drug, or “psionic elixir,” is brought in by a third beautiful young woman (now we have a brunette, a blonde, and a redhead, all of them Dr. Dragonet’s nieces, if I am keeping score correctly).  But first, several pages of debate about the mind-body problem!  Finally, sixteen pages in, the characters start to take the drug, one by one, leading into several pages of drug effects, not badly done—the drug, as advertised, is psionic, so each character is seeing through the eyes of all of them.

And of course the drug effects become very palpable and menacing (mind-manifesting rather concretely, one might say) and are banished, and the Brando-surrogate, who it turned out was pretty dangerous, is psychically neutralized, and the white-garbed sort-of-medium recites some appalling developments on the blue planet (invaders with flamethrowers), and the police show up again briefly and comically, and much is made throughout about how fetching the young women are and how aroused and frustrated the narrator is (cheesecake without pictures, one might say). 

But all of these (slowly) moving parts don’t really add up to much (the police and blue planet subplots in particular go nowhere), and certainly don’t disguise the fact that the story is no more than a facile pot-boiler with some trendy furnishings.  Two stars.

The Answerer, by Bill Casey

New writer Bill Casey contributes The Answerer, the sort of story that might have appeared in Unknown in the early ‘40s—a fantastic premise developed like SF—except that editor Campbell wouldn’t have dared publish it.  Suddenly, prayers are being answered.  Everybody’s prayers.  So what happens?  As one of the characters puts it: “There can be nothing more dangerous than a personal god who actively interferes in the lives of men.” Hint: what if a lot of mental patients started praying?  It’s not the vignette one might expect to see on this theme, but an actual story, with a suitably sardonic ending.  Four stars.

Reunion, by David R. Bunch

David R. Bunch, who mostly hangs out in Fantastic these days, has his first appearance here in almost two years.  His short story Reunion is more lucid and less precious than his usual.  The language is also more straightforward though the preoccupation remains the same: the lives of humans whose bodies have been largely replaced with machinery (“new-metal” held together with “flesh-strips”; I think “cyborg” is becoming the fashionable term).  The unnamed protagonist is visited in his Stronghold by his twin brother, who “went with the big Paper Shield” (i.e., became a minister) rather than the metal one.  Protagonist is much troubled about their relationship and the prospect of meeting again, and considers shooting him, but in the end puts on the dog for him, mechanically speaking.  A moment of epiphany follows, but once the brother leaves—back to business as usual, war with the neighbors.  Three stars.

The Gobbitch Men, by Alfred Grossman


George Schelling

There’s a different flavor of the surreal in The Gobbitch Men by Alfred Grossman, who we are assured is “a novelist of some repute” responsible for Acrobat Admits and Many Slippery Errors, which I haven’t read, but which I gather could be described as black humor with anarchist tendencies.  So what’s he doing in Amazing?  I think writers use the term “salvage market.”

Grossman’s protagonist Irving is an ineffectual, incipiently alcoholic graduate student of the future, working on his thesis on the unbearably tedious, advisor-dictated subject of popular music of the late twentieth century, when he is delivered by mistake some spools titled Population and Catastrophe and the like.  He asks questions, learns how things really are in his world, is warned that he should keep on the straight and narrow or else, but the or else is imminent anyway.  Oh, the title?  The gobbitch men make a big racket with the cans, but that’s to cover their more sinister covert errand, which has suddenly become highly relevant to Irving.

This one is an interesting try, a heavy-handed dystopian satire in the mode of early Galaxy, cartoony and overdone, but still quite well written, as befits “a novelist of some repute.” Three stars, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Mr. Grossman slumming here again.

S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple, by Sam Moskowitz

Sam Moskowitz soldiers on with the SF Profile series, this time with a less familar and more interesting subject than usual: S. Fowler Wright: SF’s Devil’s Disciple.  Wright is a particularly good subject for Moskowitz, who prefers writing about work of the ‘30s and ‘40s, since almost all of Wright’s SF work was published then or even earlier.  The best-known of his novels include The Amphibians (1924), The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928), Deluge (1928), Dawn (1929), The World Below (1929), Dream, or The Simian Maid (1931), The Adventure of Wyndham Smith (1938), and Spiders’ War (1954).

Titles to conjure with!  But not much else, since as far as I can tell, Wright’s SF is entirely out of print, at least in the US—suffering the fate of his ideas.  Wright, who is still around, 91 next month, is distinguished by his opposition to scientific progress generally and birth control in particular (no hypocrite he—he has ten children), and much of his work is dedicated to extolling the virtues of noble savagery.  Moskowitz’s denunciation of these views helps make this article rather livelier than many of its predecessors, and the unfamiliarity of his work lends it considerable interest.  Four stars.

Summing Up

So—not a bad issue of Amazing, something one doesn’t see more than once or twice a year.  There’s even a sort of unifying theme, psychology, if you count the ostentatiously neurotic protagonist of The Gobbitch Men.  Can Amazing do it again?  Maybe even make it a trend?  The public breathlessly awaits.

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




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Magazine, Serial

[December 31, 1964] Lost in the Desert (January 1965 Analog)

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[Today is your last chance to get your Worldcon membership! Register here to be able to vote for the Hugos.]


by Gideon Marcus

Wandering

Setting: The Sinai, after the Exodus

Aaron: Hey, Moses! We've been walking a long time!

Moses: Nu?

Aaron: Haven't we seen that rock before? Are you sure you know the way to the Holy Land?

Moses: Who's the Moses here? I know the way to go. The Sinai is only 150 miles across. It'll only take us…

Narrator: FORTY YEARS!

I cite this absolutely accurate historical vignette for two reasons. One, my daughter has decided to give the Torah a deep dive and analysis over Winter (I believe the gentiles call it "Christmas") Break. The other is, well, the next installment of Frank Herbert's Dune World saga has been staring me in the face for weeks, ever since I bought the January 1965 issue of Analog. I found I really didn't want to read more of it, having found the first installment dreary, though who am I to argue with all the Hugo voters?

And yet, as the days rolled on, I came up with every excuse not to read the magazine. I cleaned the house, stem to stern. I lost myself in this year's Galactic Stars article. I did some deep research on 1964's space probes.

But the bleak desert sands of Arrakis were unavoidable. So this week, I plunged headfirst into Campbell's slick, hoping to make the trek to the end in fewer than two score years. Or at least before 1965. Join me; let's see if we can make it.

The Issue at Hand


by John Schoenherr

It's Done with Mirrors, by Ben Bova and William F. Dawson

Our first step into the desert is deceptively mild. Amazing's science guy and his friend offer up the suggestion that the universe really isn't so big — all the billions of galaxies we see are really the light from a few thousand going round and round a small universe.

It doesn't sound very plausible to me, but I enjoyed the cosmological review, and the picture included was drafted by my nephew's astronomy professor at UCLA!

Three stars.

The Prophet of Dune (Part 1 of 5), by Frank Herbert

And now we sink waist deep.

The Prophet of Dune is not just the sequel to Dune World; it picks up right at the cliffhanger where the other left off. Unlike most serials, but similar to how it was done with Cordwainer Smith's The Boy Who Bought Old Earth, the story begins without explanation. You simply have to have Dune World fresh in your mind.

Otherwise, you won't know why Paul Atreides and his mother, Lady Jessica, are refugees from Baron Harkonen in the deserts of Arrakis. You won't know who the Padisha Emperor is or why his Sardaukar elite forces are dressed in Harkonen House garb. You won't know who Duke Leto Atreides was, or why he's dead; who Yueh was and why he defected from House Atreides to the Harkonens; the significance of Hawat the mentat…or even what a mentat is. The significance of the melange spice, which is the desert planet's sole export.

I'm not sure why (editor) Campbell didn't include a summary at the beginning, but unless you've read Dune World, you will be lost.

If you have, you'll be bored.


by John Schoenherr

I won't go into great detail since this serial will cover a ridiculous five installments before it is done, but suffice it to say that includes all the features I came to dread in the first serial. That is to say:

  • Characters declaiming in exposition.
  • Endless fawning over wunderkind Paul Atreides, who has the gravitas of his father, the ability to see all futures, and no weaknesses (or character) that I can discern.
  • Every other line is an internal thought monologue, usually unnecessary, flitting from viewpoint to viewpoint according to author Herbert's fancy.
  • Lots of sand.

Dune presents an interesting, well-developed world populated by uninteresting plots and skeletal characters. And it looks like I'm suck in its deserts for at least another half year.

Two stars.

A Nice Day for Screaming, by James H. Schmitz


by Kelly Freas

A momentary respite as we trudge out of sand and onto more solid ground…

Schmitz shows us the maiden voyage of a new space vessel, jumping not into overspace but to the quantum beyond — Space Three! But upon its arrival, a terrifying entity appears and invades the ship, wreaking havoc with its systems.

The nature of the encounter is not what it seems. I like a story that turns a horror cliche on its head.

Three stars.

A Matter of Timing, by Hank Dempsey


by Robert Swanson

A tingling in our mind distract us, and suddenly we are again ankle deep in the dunes.

Until I read the byline (I've never heard of Dempsey), I thought A Matter of Timing was an inferior entry in Walter Bupp's psi series, in which a secret organization keeps a cadre of esper talents on hand to deal with weird events. While Dempsey's introduces a lot of potentially interesting characters (all apparently quacks; the organization that handles them is the Committee for Welfare, Administration, and Consumer Control — CWACC), the story doesn't do anything with them.

Droll setup and no resolution. Two stars.

Final Report, by Richard Grey Sipes

From out of nowhere, there is a blast of hot wind, and we are inundated with a spray of stinging sand and…paper?

Told in military report style, complete with typewriter font and army-esque jargon, Final Report pretends to be the results of the test of a psionic radio system. In the end, despite the set's fantastic capabilities, it is rejected as a prank, especially as it's too cheap to even be government pork.

Heavy handed, highly Campbellian, and utterly pointless. One star.

The New Boccaccio, by Christopher Anvil

As we reel from the last blow, the clackety clack of machinery assails our ears, but at least we're walking on stable rocks again.

In The New Boccaccio, Anvil covers the same ground as Harry Harrison did a couple of months ago in Portrait of the Artist — an automatic creator is brought into a publishing house to replace a human artist.

The prior story was serious and involved a comic maker. Anvil's is comedically satirical and involves a device that writes literate smut. It's a bit smarter, I think, but not worth more than the three stars I gave the other story.

Finnegan's Knack, by John T. Phillifent


by Kelly Freas

Look! Off in the distance…is that a line of trees? Or is it just a mirage? Our pace quickens, but our boots keep sinking in the shifting sands.

John Phillifent's Finnegan's Knack involves the arrival of an alien ambassador. His race is so far in advance of ours that there's nothing we can do to impress him. A demoralized Colonel joins his rather lackadaisical Major friend on a fishing expedition to relate his woes. Along with them is a certain Private Finnegan with a knack for accomplishing the darndest things (landing fish with a boat hook; making a hover car pop a wheelie; make a call to a private number). Maybe he can impress the aliens with his illogical prowess?

Maybe. Certainly nothing in the story made any particular impression on me, and as with so many of the other stories in the issue, the lack of a solid ending killed whatever competent writing came before.

Two stars. Oasis lost.

Does not Compute


"Rhoda" the robot…signed by Julie Newmar, herself!

How can it be that the one-proud magazine that Campbell built can pour forth little but a torrent of desert dust? All told, the magazine earns an dismally low 2.1 stars, This is significantly below the 2.5 star mags (Amazing) and (Fantasy and Science Fiction) and far below IF (2.9), Fantastic (3.3), and New Worlds (3.5).

Maybe SF is suffering in general, if this month's distribution is any indication. Certainly, it was a sad month for female representation (2 stories out of 37). On the other hand, it's not all bad news: you could fill three magazines with the superior stuff this month.

Every desert has an end, even if it's just the desert of the sea. Perhaps, if we keep trekking, we'll find out way back to verdant lands.

You know — after four more months of this fershlugginer Dune installment…

Happy New Year anyway! Thank you for following the Journey!




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Magazine, Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial, TV

[December 29, 1964] Be Ye All of Good Cheer… New Worlds, January 1965

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by Mark Yon

Scenes from England

Hello again!

I hope Christmas for you was a good one. Christmas was good to me in that I received a copy of Charles L. Harness’s The Paradox Men. So far I’m really enjoying it as an over the top Space Opera. Why has it taken so long to be published here in Britain, though?

More good cheer: this month’s New Worlds editorial begins with a loud “Hurrah!”, announcing that both New Worlds and Science Fantasy are to return to monthly publication in 1965.

This is wonderful news for both New Worlds and Science Fantasy. Clearly the increased readership has paid dividends on both counts. Let’s hope this continues. More on this particular issue later.

News-wise, politics has been on its Christmas break. So not a lot to particularly report there.

The contest for the Number 1 single slot is always competitive, but Brits have a particular obsession for the Christmas Number 1 single. This year that enviable position was held by (unsurprisingly) The Beatles with another catchy tune – I Feel Fine.

Music-wise, most of the year’s reviews seem to have focused on the global domination of our Fab Four as they travel the world, permanently surrounded by screaming teenagers. Not only having the British Christmas single, they will also be pleased to know that their single Can’t Buy Me Love, is the single to have spent longest as Number 1 for a majestic 3 weeks, back in March and April. More seriously, it really has been their year and I can see 1965 carrying on in much the same way.

At the cinema I am pleased to write that I enjoyed our Christmas movie,  Father Goose, starring Cary Grant. A rather comedic role with a feel-good family tone. It’s not Cary's best, but it was pleasant enough. And in the middle of Winter, pleasantly tropical.

But be warned – My Fair Lady is due at the end of January. I know that you’ve had to endure this film already in the US – all 170 minutes of it – and the reviews have been quite good, but I still haven’t managed to come up with an excuse of sufficient importance to avoid it. Can I claim that I’m much too busy reporting to you to go? I doubt it, sadly. I may have to bow to the inevitable.

On a more positive note, on the television I am enjoying the latest Doctor Who, which seems to be regaining its confidence after a couple of so-so episodes, and hopefully that upswing should continue in 1965. Jessica’s already mentioned this, but the latest Dalek episodes are in my opinion the most enjoyable series yet.

The Issue At Hand

cover by Robert J. Tilley

This month’s cover shows that, as hinted at last issue, circles are ‘in’.

Personally, I still yearn for art with some detail, but am resigned to the current vogue, whilst at least appreciating that, despite being crude and simple, it’s still not as bad as Carnell’s last issues.

The Editorial, as shown earlier, is pleasingly upbeat. It is akin to a state of the nation address, showing us where we are in the current state of things artistic and literary. There’s mention of a new critical magazine edited by Messrs Aldiss and Harrison, which sounds intriguing.

To the stories themselves.

The Power of Y (part 1), by Arthur Sellings

The triumphant tone hangs over to this first part of a serial by Arthur Sellings, who is highlighted in the Editorial for producing “stories of a consistently high standard since he began writing.” To me this does sound a little like faint praise, though I must admit that the serial is one of the most enjoyable I’ve read for a while. Max Afford is an art dealer in a world where Transdimensional Multiplying, or Plying, allows an object such as a painting or a car to be borrowed from multiple universes. You want the original Mona Lisa? You can borrow it and have it in your home, for a price.  There are limits, however. It is a very expensive process and an object can only be plied to a maximum of twenty copies. Plying living objects, such as a beloved pet, is seen as impossible.

This is an intriguing concept, but one that becomes more complicated when Max suddenly finds that he can tell the difference between plied objects and the original simply by touching them.  The story then ends on a cliff-hanger involving the President of the Federated States of Europe.

It’s all written in a deceptively chatty style that Heinlein is so good at, a combination of charming bonhomie and sly digs at both the establishment and the world of art – although Sellings is clearly an author the editor Mike Moorcock prefers. Nevertheless, it read well and was entertaining, and most of all I’m intrigued to see where this one goes. The most negative thing I could find about it was the awfully childish art throughout the prose! A great start. 4 out of 5.


Childish art? I rest my case, m'lud. But perhaps it's intentional irony in a story about art…

The Sailor in the Western Stars , by Bob Parkinson

A debut author. You can tell from the artwork at the beginning that this is a story retold as if it were ancient myth, a folk-tale rather like a science-fictional Arabian Nights. I liked the romantic tone of this, that the main character is some sort of wandering pirate-trader destined to sail across space. It’s similar to Bertram Chandler’s Rim stories or even Poul Anderson’s David Falkayn /Star Trader stories, but deliberately more lyrical and enigmatic. Behind the poetic sheen there’s not a lot going on, admittedly, but I remembered it more than many stories. File under “Interesting”. It’s nicely done, but fairly inconsequential. 4 out of 5.

Tunnel of Love, by Joseph Green

And here’s the return of Moorcock’s friend, Joseph Green, after Single Combat in the July-August 1964 issue. The title suggests a cheap fairground ride, but it is actually an ethnologic study with a creepy twist. Two young graduates, realising a way to make money, attempt to make a movie on Procyon Nine, a planet known for its beautiful people but whose strict moral code is that visitors do not seduce them. The twist is that the would-be suitors of the girls have, as a rite of passage, to crawl through an interdimensional portal that connects Procyon Nine to the nuptial bed! This is not quite as outré as it sounds and there’s a big old twist at the end. I found it better than I thought it was going to be, an adventure story that also made me think of it as a raunchier take on Chad Oliver’s themes. 3 out of 5.

There’s A Starman in Ward 7, by David Rome

And now something a bit darker. Very pleased to see the return of this writer, last seen in the August 1963 of New Worlds. As far as the New Wave type stories go, this is actually one I liked.

It is the story of a psychotic murderer who is locked up in an insane asylum and who claims to have been in a ward with a new inmate – a Starman from Alpha Centauri. It’s written in a deliberately disjointed and irrational manner and is filled with those stylistic typing patterns and fragmented streams of consciousness that you may remember in Alfred Bester’s work. It is something that the New Wavers should love – and for a change, I also liked. Unlike most stories that try this technique I found that David’s story doesn’t lose its purpose or its narrative thread along the way.  4 out of 5.

Election Campaign, by Thom Keyes

Oh-oh. Here’s the return of Thom Keyes, whose last story, Period of Gestation, was in the September – October 1964 issue of Science Fantasy.  I really didn’t like it. But actually, Election Campaign is a more straightforward tale than I thought it was going to be. General Aldheyer is sent on a mission to secure the votes for the General Dynamics Party of an obscure and out of the way colony. Unfortunately, the brain-in-a-box space pilot malfunctions on the way and the only solution is to create a replacement pilot. Consequently, Aldheyer’s brain is transplanted into the ship.  There’s a lengthy description of the surgical process and the story ends with the spaceship’s arrival on the planet to begin its electoral campaign.

After our recent change of government, this story is perhaps surprisingly topical. Some politicians will do almost anything for power! I must admit that this was more enjoyable than Keyes’ last story, but the purpose of it seems a little pointless, other than to make the reader question what makes a machine human and vice versa. Anne McCaffrey’s done all this before, of course.  3 out of 5.

Space Drive, by Gordon Walters

We then get a lengthy chunk of the magazine concerned with reviews and non-fiction. Gordon Walters is a writer new to me, although you may know him better as George Locke.  This is an article that discusses the different means of travelling around science-fictional space that have been used by authors in the past. It’s a nice discussion that sums up concepts from a range of books and authors.

Books: Fancy and Imagination, by Michael Moorcock, James Colvin and Langdon Jones

As expected from previous comments there’s reviews of Charles L. Harness’s The Paradox Men and Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard. Michael Moorcock likes both.

The bulk of the reviews from Colvin (aka Moorcock, of course!) and Langdon Jones pick up a rag-bag of books. Honorary mentions go to Andre Norton’s Judgement on Janus, which is OK, James Blish’s A Life for the Stars, which is ‘better’ and Alan E. Nourse’s Scavengers in Space (good for children.) On the other hand, Poul Anderson’s Time and Stars and Damon Knight’s Beyond the Barrier both get a mauling. The second New Writings in SF anthology is ‘disappointing’, which probably means that I will like it.  The Best from F & SF is above average yet summarised as overpraised, but A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with stories from the magazine originally published between 1949-59, is 'excellent'.

There’s also the usual endorsement of J G Ballard, this time for the US publication of The Burning World, and praise for Anthony Burgess’s 'powerful and horrifying' A Clockwork Orange, which is one of the most unusual books I’ve recently come across.

Langdon Jones then positively reviews Arthur Sellings’ The Uncensored Man and C. M. Kornbluth’s The Syndic.

The Letters pages show that I Remember, Anita, published in the September-October 1964 issue, seems to have generated some controversy. There’s also a letter complaining about the return of illustrations, which shows that people are never satisfied.

Summing up

It may be the season, but I’m pleased to say that this issue of New Worlds was one I enjoyed more than I didn’t. I enjoyed the range of stories, but most of all I liked the actual stories, which were not anything particularly radical yet made me feel like it was worthwhile paying my money to read them. Last month I said that I was enjoying Science Fantasy more. If this is New Worlds’s response, then the differences between the two magazines might not be as much as I had thought. Science Fantasy may have a fight on its hands for my attention!

And with this in mind, next month I should have two magazines to review – New Worlds and Science Fantasy! It’ll be interesting to see which one turns up first.

All the very best to you and yours for 1965.

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

mall>

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Book, Magazine, Serial

[December 23, 1964] Odds and Ends (January 1965 Fantastic)

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by Victoria Silverwolf

A Hodgepodge of Happenings

It's the season for clearing out all that stuff you've got piling up in the closet, ready to greet the new year with a fresh start. With that in mind, and given the fact that no one news item dominated the headlines this month, allow me to throw out a few observations about what's been going on lately.

Italy joined the Space Age this month, with the launching of that nation's first satellite, as recently discussed in great detail by our own Kaye Dee.  Named the San Marco, the spacecraft rode on top of an American Scout rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Although this is primarily just a test flight, the satellite does carry a couple of instruments designed to study the ionosphere.


The San Marco is the striped, spherical object, shown here being loaded into the Scout rocket. It seems fitting that an object intended to soar into the heavens is named after a saint.

After months of surprisingly passionate debate over its design, a new flag will now symbolize the nation of Canada. Some English-speaking Canadians wanted to retain the Union Jack found in the old, unofficial flag, while many French-speaking Canadians objected. The current flag looks like a good compromise.


The old design, known as the Red Ensign. Besides everything else, it just looks messy.


The new design, which seems much more aesthetically pleasing to me.

The late Ian Fleming's master spy continues to draw moviegoers to the box office like flies to honey, as his latest cinematic adventure arrived in the USA this month.


I think that woman in the middle has been sunbathing too long.

A Miscellany of Music

Unlike some months earlier this year, December offered no overwhelmingly popular song at the top of the American charts. There were no less than four hits that reached Number One this month, and maybe we'll even hear from a fifth contender before 1965 arrives.

Spilling over from late November was Leader of the Pack by the girl group the Shangri-Las. I can't decide if this tragic tale of a romance ended by a fatal motorcycle accident is an example of a Teenage Death Song, or a tongue-in-cheek spoof of that macabre little genre.


These smiling ladies aren't saying one way or the other.

It would be hard to find a starker contrast with that bit of feminine adolescent angst than Lorne Greene's rendition of the cowboy saga Ringo. Obviously, the record is cashing in on the popularity of his hit television series Bonanza. Greene doesn't really sing so much as narrate this tale of the final confrontation between an outlaw and a lawman.


I wonder how many young people think this song is about the drummer for the Beatles.

It wasn't much later that Greene was outgunned by crooner Bobby Vinton, returning to the top of the charts with the tearjerking ballad Mr. Lonely.


The singer kindly provides the address of his official fan club right on the record sleeve.

Not to be outdone, the Supremes gave us their third smash Motown hit with the catchy little number Come See About Me.


And they're classy dressers, too.

A Smorgasbord of Stories

In a similarly generous fashion, the latest issue of Fantastic supplies a wide variety of short stories, as well as the first half of a novel.


Cover art by Emsh

The Girl in the Gem, by John Jakes


Interior illustrations also by Emsh

Here's another swashbuckling adventure of the mighty barbarian Brak, whom we've met many times before.

In unheroic fashion, our protagonist is passed out drunk in a seaside inn. A bunch of dwarfs rush in, armed with knives, but deliberately avoid hurting him. It's all part of a plot to frame him for robbery. You see, an earthquake tumbled the old palace into the ocean. Another one raised it up again. Meanwhile, the local king is dying. His daughter blackmails Brak with the threat of death for thievery if he doesn't undertake the dangerous task of rescuing her sister, who was imprisoned in a gigantic jewel, from the recently revealed palace. Of course, this means he has to defeat a hideous creature.


The mandatory monster

The author writes vividly and definitely keeps the action moving. This is the shortest tale of Brak yet, and it's got plenty of plot for its length. The characters are standard for the sword-and-sorcery genre, and a few incidents seem arbitrary. (Why are the royal servants who invade the inn all dwarfs?) Despite a lack of originality in some aspects, it's worth reading.

Three stars.

Journal of a Leisured Man, by Bryce Walton


Illustration by George Schelling

In a technologically advanced future, an accountant loses his job to a computer. Like many other people, he is forced to remain unemployed for the rest of his life. To add to his troubles, his faithless wife leaves him for another man.

The company that formerly employed the fellow makes automatons, in the form of animals, children, and adults. We witness some gruesome ways customers use these simulacra. In what seems to be at first an act of kindness, an employee of the company offers the man a synthetic duplicate of his wife, to do with as he pleases. You may predict the twist ending.

Although there are few surprises, the story has a certain grim power. It's not always pleasant to read, but is likely to remain in the memory.

Three stars.

On the River, by Robert F. Young

A man finds himself on a raft, floating down a river by day, staying at deserted inns on shore by night. He meets a woman in the same situation, and romance blooms. It soon becomes obvious that both of them attempted suicide, and that the river leads to death.

(The idea of an afterlife on a world dominated by a river also appears in the most recent issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. Given the delays in the publishing industry between writing a story and seeing it in print, this must be nothing more than a coincidence.)

I'm a sucker for this author's bittersweet love stories, so I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The conclusion may be obvious, but any other ending would have been inappropriate for a writer who wears his heart on his sleeve.

Four stars.

The Repairmen of Cyclops (Part One of Two), by John Brunner


Illustrations by George Schelling

A little research reveals that this novel is set in the same universe as two previous works, each published as one-half of an Ace Double. The series as a whole deals with what are known as Zarathustra Refugee Planets. Many centuries ago, the star which the colony planet Zarathustra orbited went nova. The inhabitants, fleeing the disaster, wound up populating a large number of planets. The Galactic Corps watches over these worlds, making sure that outsiders don't interfere with their development, while refraining from becoming overly involved themselves.


Cover art by Emsh


Also by Emsh

In the style of Philip K. Dick, the author uses many different viewpoint characters, so it takes a while before the main thrust of the plot becomes clear. The story mostly takes place on Cyclops, a relatively poor planet, although there is a wealthy upper class. An agent of the Galactic Corps, who was, I believe, the protagonist of Secret Agent of Terra, reviewed by our own Rosemary Benton some time ago, arrives after twenty years of service. Her reward for two decades of unpleasant, thankless work is considerable. She will have her youth restored, and her life extended for two centuries.

The extremely advanced medical technology of the Galactic Corps is one reason why the ruler of the planet resents them. (Although the government of Cyclops is, in theory, representative, she wields the real power.) There is also the fact that many natives of Cyclops were killed by the inhabitants of another world when they tried to make slaves of them. (I think these events also appeared in Secret Agent of Terra. Castaways' World does not seem to be as closely related to this new novel.)

The ruler's lover is an ex-spaceman who lost a leg in an accident. Although it was replaced, he is no longer allowed to serve on spaceships. While hunting the gigantic shark-like creatures who live in the oceans of Cyclops, he loses the same leg. After a brief stay in the local Galactic Corps hospital, he is whisked back to the care of his lover and her doctor. This creates a mystery for the Galactic Corps; how was the man's leg replaced, given the limited medical technology of Cyclops, and how do they expect to do it again? The author soon reveals the answer in scenes that take place on another world, where a sinister conspiracy takes advantage of unsuspecting victims.

Although a bit melodramatic in parts, this is an intriguing novel, full of richly defined characters, many of whom I have not even mentioned.


I haven't talked about these people.


I also haven't brought up these folks.

The author balances scenes of violent action with necessary exposition. It's interesting to note that the characters who are, I assume, the main protagonist and the primary antagonist are both powerful women. The complex background is fully developed, without becoming overwhelming.

Four stars.

Make Mine Trees, by David R. Bunch

The magazine's most controversial writer returns with another dark and strange story. This one is more comprehensible than most, and the title definitely helps you understand what's going on. The narrator, who is clearly as mad as a hatter, used some kind of formula to change his wife and her lover into trees. Now his young son is undergoing the same transformation. Typical for the author, the plot is much less important than the eerie mood and the eccentric style.

Three stars.

Multiple Choice, by John Douglas

A trio of young men, who have undergone a series of tests to become part of the elite, wait in a room for their final examination. They hear gunshots and screams from outside. Each one has a different theory about what's happening. Is it a hoax, designed to test their nerves? Are those who fail the last exam shot to death? Is it even possible that everyone is killed? The story's ending is inconclusive, which may be the point. Many readers will find the lack of a full resolution frustrating.

Two stars.

Something For Everyone?

Although the overall mood of the issue is on the dark side, there are all kinds of imaginative fiction to be found between its covers. From a heroic fantasy set in a distant past that never existed, to an adventure in deep space in the far future, and from a romantic parable of love and death, to a cynical portrait of tomorrow's dystopian society, there is enough variety to please just about every reader of speculative literature. You won't enjoy every story, but I don't think you'll dislike all of them. (If you do, turn to Robert Silverberg's book review column for more recommendations.)


He mostly reviews anthologies and collections in this particular column, so you've got lots to choose from.

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Magazine, Serial

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

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by John Boston

That Low

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

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

The Issue at Hand


by Michael Arndt

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

He Who Shapes, by Roger Zelazny


by George Schelling

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

Blue Boy, by Jack Sharkey

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


by Michael Arndt

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

A Child of Mind, by Norman Spinrad


by Virgil Finlay

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

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

“Who pays for a wife’s meals?”

“Her husband, of—Oh my God!”

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

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

“. . . Woman had always been Mystery.

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

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

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

The Hard Way, by Robert Rohrer

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

The Handyman, by Leo P. Kelley


by George Schelling

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

The Men in the Moon, by Robert Silverberg


by Virgil Finlay

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

Summing Up

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

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




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Book, Magazine, Science / Space Race, Serial

[December 5, 1964] Steady as she goes (January 1965 IF)

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by Gideon Marcus

A tale of two missions

Mariner 4, launched November 28, 1964, is on its way to Mars.  Shortly after launch, the smart folks at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (some of whom I met last weekend!) determined that Mariner was going to miss its destination by some 200,000 kilometers.  So they calculated the nudge it would take to deflect the ship toward a closer rendezvous with the Red Planet.  This morning, the little spacecraft was ordered to fire its onboard engines for a 20 second burn, and it now looks like Mariner will come within just 10,000 kilometers of its target!

On the other side of the world, the Soviets have informed the world that their Zond 2 probe, launched two days after Mariner 4, needs no course correction.  On the other hand, on Dec. 2, it was reported that the probe is only generating half the power it's supposed to.

Similarly, in the science fiction magazine world, no fewer than three magazines got new editors this year (Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, and New Worlds), and two of them have the same editor with a different name (Amazing's and Fantastic's Cele Goldsmith is now Cele Lalli).

But in Fred Pohl's trinary system of Galaxy, Worlds of Tomorrow, and IF, not only is leadership unchanged, but so is content.  Nowhere is that clearer than in the January 1965 issue of IF, which like its predecessors, is an uneven mix of old and new authors, old and new ideas, and generally inferior but not unpleasant work. 

In other words, on course, but running on half-steam.

The Issue at Hand


by Gray Morrow

In many ways, this is not the issue Pohl wanted on the news stands.  The cover doesn't illustrate any of the contents of the issue; it's supposed to go with Jack Vance's novel, The Killing Machine.  But since that story ended up in book print before it could be serialized, it was pulled from appearing in the magazine.  Instead, we got the sequel to Fred Pohl's and Jack Williamson's The Reefs of Space, which had the virtue of being an IF-exclusive series and co-written by the editor. 

It's a good thing Pohl had it in his back pocket!

Starchild (Part 1 of 3), by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson


by Gray Morrow

Hundreds of years from now, the solar system is ruled by the Plan of Man, a computer-led collective in which everyone's lives are ordered, and dissent is rewarded with a quick trip to the body banks for organ harvesting.  But out in the stellar outskirts, in the frigid birthplace of comets, the steady creation of matter in the universe provides rich feeding grounds for the fusorians.  These cosmic plankton eaters in turn create vast reefs in space, homes to the seal-like spacelings and their predators, the dragonesque pyropods.  These reefs have also become shelters for Terran dissidents yearning to be free.  The Reefs of Space told the tale of their first human visitors.

Starchild is the story of Machine Major Boysie Gann, a spy sent to Polaris station to suss out traitors to the Plan.  He ends up kidnapped to the Reefs and then made a messenger to the Planner, the human liaison with the Planning Machine.  Mysteriously teleported back to Earth, Boysie bears with him The Writ of Liberation: if the Plan of Man does not end its attempts to subjugate the free people of the Reefs, the "Starchild" will blacken the Sun…

I was a bit chary of this serial at the beginning.  Williamson is a pulp writer from the way-back, and it shows.  Pohl can be brilliant, but Reefs was more pedestrian (except for the gripping middle section).  But Starchild kept me going the whole way, sort of a Cordwainer Smith "Instrumentality" story, though with less poetry.

Four stars so far.

Answering Service, by Alma Hill

A Boston fan and writer, Hill is new to my ken but has apparently been published since 1950. Service shows us a world where the SPCA has won, cats and other "aggressive" animals are tolerated only in zoos, and mice are overrunning the world without check.  One man is determined to reverse this situation.

Utterly forgettable.  Two stars.

The Recon Man, by Wilson Tucker


by Nodel

A young man wakes up from an amnesiac coma with a push to his back out the door of a house.  Onto a Heinlein moving road he goes, along with dozens of other male commuters to some mysterious labor destination.  A spitfire, himself, the other drones are so many zombies.  Only the pink jumpsuited women have any personality; they seem to run the show.

The man is harnessed to a machine, tasked with creating bacon by conceptualizing it so it can materialize in front of him.  He soon gets bored with this role and makes neckties and carpentry tools instead.  This shuts down the assembly line early, and one of the female supervisors takes him home to see what's wrong with him. 

Slowly, memories of a fatal car crash, centuries before in 1960, coalesce in the man's mind.  How did he get to this strange world?  For what purpose?  And how long does he have to live?

Recon Man is a neat little mystery with a truckload of dark implications.  I liked it a lot.  Four stars.

Vanishing Point, by Jonathan Brand


by Gray Morrow

This is the second outing by Brand, his first being a disappointment.  He fares better with this one, a space story within a bedtime story (the framing is cute but not particularly necessary) about Earth travelers on the first emissary mission to an alien race.

The place chosen for first contact is a sort of mock-Earth made by the aliens, a beautiful park of a world stocked with all sorts of game.  It even has a centenarian, human caretaker.  But neither the park, nor the old man, are what they seem.

Not bad.  Three stars.

The Heat Racers, by L. D. Ogle

Then we come to our traditional IF "first", the piece by a heretofore unpublished author (or at least an unpublished pseudonym).  This one is a vignette about a race of anti-grav sailboats.  I think.  The motive force and levitative technologies are never really explained.

Another trivial piece.  Two stars.

Retief, God-Speaker, by Keith Laumer


by Jack Gaughan

And last up, we have yet another installment in the increasingly tiresome saga of Retief, the diplomatic superspy of the future.  This one involves a race of money-grubbing, seven-foot, theocratic slobs, and the diminutive, subterranean aliens they mean to wipe out like vermin.  Can Retief establish formal relations with the former while saving the latter?

By the end of the novelette, you probably won't care.  This is easily the goofiest and most heavy-handed entry in the series.  I think it's time for Laumer to cut his losses.

Two stars.

Summing Up

All told, this month's issue is more "half a loaf" than "curate's egg".  The parts I liked were lots of fun, and as for the dreary bits, at least they made for quick reading.  I've said before that Pohl doesn't really have enough good material for three mags, but he could have a dynamite pair.

On the other hand, IF is a place to stick new authors and off-beat stories.  I just wish they were more consistently successes!

Maybe 1965 will be the year IF gets a mid-course correction…

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




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A Free Gift! (The Pirates of Ersatz; 3-12-1959)

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And now, my gentle readers, a free gift.

As you know, I am well-acquainted with Mr. Murray Leinster, science fiction writer extraordinaire.  His newest novel, The Pirates of Ersatz has just finished its serial run in this month's Astounding, and the nice fellow has given me permission to distribute it freely amongst my readers.

That's right.  This book is yours entirely free of charge!

Now, the question is, should you read it?

I suppose that depends.  As I said a couple of months ago, it's set in the same universe as the Med Series, but with a completely different protagonist. 

In brief, young Bron Hoddan is an engineer from a family of pirates.  Where Hoddan's from, it's almost respectable, even.  But Hoddan wants to make his mark in the clean world and so heads to squeaky-clean Walden… where he runs afoul of the law for trying to improve on paradise with an upgraded power generator. 

Fleeing for his life to the crude medieval planet Darth, he then runs afoul of the local aristocracy for… well.. just about everything.  Yet, so resourceful is Hoddan that he manages not only to survive but to thrive, getting the best of the petty nobles and winning the admiration of the plucky heroine, Lady Fani.

That's only the first half.  How Hoddan turns a ragtag fleet of colony ships into a phoney piracy concern and manages to steal from the rich and somehow make everyone richer, is rollicking adventure.

Now, I don't think this is the best Leinster I've ever read.  He likes to write short sentences.  His sentences have few words.  They can be repetitive.  He abuses this trait a little overmuch to my liking.  The story is also a bit disjointed (dare I say "episodic"?), particularly in the Darth section. 

That said, there is also much to like.  I happen to really like the decentralized Med Series universe with its range of interesting, unique planets.  The story also makes it quite clear that a strong heroine is far more compelling than a trophy, and it is always clear who is in the driver's seat in the Fani/Hoddan courtship.

Most interestingly, in the course of his travels, Hoddan invents an independent landing device small enough for installation on starships.  This is huge as, until this book, ships could only land on planets that had erected mammoth landing grids that projected magnetic tractor beams to guide vessels to the ground.  I wonder if we'll see the fall-out of this invention in later stories.

So try it.  The price is right, and it will definitely get you from point A to Z with a smile on your face.  3.5 stars out of 5.

See you on the 14th!

(Confused?  Click here for an explanation as to what's really going on)


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