Having a teacher first as a mother, and now one for a wife, I think of the year as mirroring the school terms, with the new year beginning in September. But, looking at the newspapers, it doesn’t appear the world has changed much in the last twelve months.
On the home front, the troubles in Northern Ireland keep getting worse, with the presence of British troops now seeming to be resented by both sides. Meanwhile, The Conservative party base is pushing the party to take a harder anti-immigration line, and union chiefs clash with the Wilson government.
British Troops in Ulster, caught in the middle of escalating violence.
Peace talks over Vietnam are once again being held in Paris and apparently going nowhere, there are continued conflicts in the middle East and the Junta in Greece seems as unstable as ever. A harsh crackdown has just finished in Czechoslovakia and the Soviets are still making threatening noises at the rest of Eastern Europe.
Scenes from the streets of Prague, one year on from the Soviet Invasion.
But, whilst the depressing politics of our time continues, so does the regularity of publishing. As such another anthology arrived in the post for me to review.
We open with another tale from the ever-reliable Mrs. Damon Knight. Here Janet Matthews returns to her hometown of Somerset after working in medicine in New York, where she wishes to look after her disabled father. At the same time, a Dr. Staunton is in town to study dreams. Annoyed by his pomposity Janet decides to join in with the project.
This is beautifully described, albeit with some unusual turns of phrase, but it goes on far too long for my tastes, only really becoming more SFnal towards the end. There are also a lot of interesting concepts, but I am not convinced they are explored well enough here to justify their inclusion.
Three Stars
The Roads, the Roads, the Beautiful Road by Avram Davidson
Highway Chief Craig Burns loves his vast new road constructions and does not accept any argument to the contrary. However, one day he misses his turn-off and finds himself in a labyrinth of tunnels and cloverleaf interchanges.
This is the kind of joke story Davidson used to regularly publish when editing F&SF, a feature I have not missed. Add on to this my general dislike of vehicular tales and I was not well disposed to this at all.
Hector, A Jewish father is estranged from his daughter, Lorinda, because of her marrying a form of Martian plant-life named Mor. Months later, the parents receive a letter from her, saying she is pregnant and asking them to come visit her on Mars.
I believe this is the first story from a well-known fan (and wife of Terry Carr) and it marks a strong start. It follows the familiar routes you have likely seen on television programmes but they are not as common in the SF realm. In addition, this is told using a great tone of voice that makes it feel believable.
King Argaven XVII of Karhide is having a recurring visions of executing a crowd of protesters. This madness is attempted to be treated by physician Hoge, but what could be the real cause?
I was originally unsure if this planet is indeed meant to be Gethen from The Left Hand of Darkness, as it is only referred to as “Winter” and the gender changes in the book are not referenced here. However, its connections to the Ekumen seem to confirm that it does indeed take place on the same world.
I found this a confusing read. I started again four times and afterwards I was constantly jumping back and forth to try to get to grips with what was happening. It does not have the usual easy style of Le Guin, instead told through a series of “pictures”. Honestly, I am scratching my head over what to make of it.
Three Stars, I guess?
The Time Machine by Langdon Jones
Jones seems to be emerging as one of the great polymaths of English SF. He has been involved in editing New Worlds for a number of years now, writes prose and poetry, has produced photographic cover art, is helping the Peake estate put together new editions of the Gormenghast trilogy and has an original anthology coming out in a couple of months. Amazingly he still had time to sell this tale to Orbit.
In an unnamed prisoner’s cell sits a photo of Caroline Howard. We hear the story of his past relationship with her and the construction of a time machine to see her again.
This tale is told in a passive distanced voice with the connection of the four different situations not immediately obvious. As such, I imagine it will be alienating to some, but I found it quite beautiful and cleverly constructed.
The titular Time Machine is not a HG Wells type of mechanical construct but a strange device containing a Dali painting and creating a “concrete déjà vu”. This may actually mean that it does not really “work” as such but these are merely the memories and delusions of the prisoner. I believe the ambiguity is intentional on the part of the author and makes the tale all the stronger.
Some may find the conclusion and meaning of the tale a bit mawkish, but I liked it a lot.
John Miller goes to analyst Robert Rousse to resolve an obsession he has had for the last 25 years, to reach the mythical Northern Shore. In order to cure this desire, they sail there in dreams.
Whilst I am a fan of what Mr. Jones does, the same cannot be said of Mr. Lafferty. As such this may work better for other people, but I found it all a little silly.
Two Stars
Paul's Treehouse by Gene Wolfe
Sheila and Morris’ son has been in a treehouse since Thursday and is refusing to come down. As they work with their neighbour to try to get him out, disorder is spreading throughout the town.
This is probably the Gene Wolfe story that has impressed me most so far. Not that it is brilliant, but it is well told and has a solid theme. Hopefully the start of an upswing in his writing.
A high three stars
The Price by C. Davis Belcher
The millionaire John Phillpott Tanker is in a traffic accident that caves in his skull. Whilst his body is still alive, he is braindead. After several tests the doctors conclude he is medically dead and use his organs to save a number of people. Whilst this is controversial, journalist Sturbridge writes a number of articles to win the public around. However, in a surprising turn of events, the recipients of the organ donations sue the Tanker’s estate claiming they are still the living John Phillpott Tanker.
These organ transplant stories are becoming a subgenre in their own right, and, unfortunately, this is among the poorer examples. Lem told a better version of this story in three pages last month than Belcher told in 27.
A low two stars
The Rose Bowl-Pluto Hypothesis by Philip Latham
At a track-meet at the Rose Bowl, three athletes all ran 100 yards in less than 9 seconds. If this wasn’t surprising enough, a whole set of other new running records were set that afternoon. What could be happening?
This spends a lot of time doing pseudo-scientific explanations for something incredibly silly. I was annoyed at having read it.
One star
Winston by Kit Reed
The Wazikis buy the four-year-old child of geniuses as a status symbol. Whilst he has an IQ of 160 they soon grow frustrated he is not yet able to win crossword competitions or answer any trivia question they pose.
This story irritated me for a number of reasons. First off, there is more than a whiff of eugenics about the concept here, with the child of a college professor being inherently smarter than this family with a name we seem to be encouraged to read as Eastern European or North African. At the very least, the way the Wazikis are portrayed feels classist.
Secondly, the fact that smart people are selling children to less intelligent people seems to imply that earning potential and IQ are inversely related. But the Wazikis see Winston as an investment, so are they just meant to be stupid and bad with money?
And then the story is just unpleasant with the amount of child abuse taking place in it. Maybe I am overly sensitive, as I am from the gentler school of parenting, but I found it to be gratuitous instead of aiding the storytelling.
One Star
The History Makers by James Sallis
John writes to his brother Jim about his arrival on Ephemera, a planet where the inhabitants live on a separate time-plane to humanity.
Sallis gives us another epistolary tale which, as usual, is written in a literary style and full of artistic allusions (including, strangely, the second mention of the same Dali painting in this anthology. I blame Ballard). I am not sure this has the same depth as his other works but it is still a wonderfully atmospheric read.
The US military has a problem. Their war against a guerrilla insurgency in Asia is not going well and they want to use tactical nuclear weapons to sort it out. However, the public are squeamish about this sort of thing. The solution? Using a violence obsessed rock group The Four Horseman, to spread their message.
A biting critique of both the American military-industrial complex and the hippy groups selling out. Incredibly timely, clever and disturbing.
A high four stars, bordering on five. (I recently discussed this with some friends over at Young People Read SF if you want to see more of our thoughts.)
The Cycle Continues
Some of the same artists, still in UK charts a year on
And so we complete another Orbit anthology, with it feeling pretty similar to the last one.
The main difference is that there is more New Wave influence creeping in (having stories by two of the editors of New Worlds will do that) but many prior authors reappear, doing similar things. Some of it brilliant, some mediocre, the rest best forgotten.
Will either Orbit or our politics break out of this cycle by autumn 1970? Only time will tell.
It's a highly superior clutch of books this month around—plus a double review of the new Vonnegut…
by Victoria Silverwolf
Sophomore Efforts
By coincidence, the last two books I read were both the second novels to be published by their authors. Otherwise, they are as different as they could be.
Coleman's first book was something called Seeker From the Stars. I haven't read it, so I can't comment. In fact, I was completely unfamiliar with this author, so I asked my contacts in fandom and the publishing industry about him. I turned up a couple of interesting facts.
Firstly, he's one of the few Black science fiction writers. (The most notable is, of course, the great Samuel R. Delany.) That's a good thing for the field. The more variety of writers, the better the fiction.
Secondly, he's currently in jail for burglary. It seems that he's taken up writing while incarcerated. That seems like a decent path to rehabilitation, so let's wish him good luck while paying his debt to society.
But is the book any good? Let's find out.
At some time in the future, humanity has reached the far reaches of the solar system. However, a conglomeration of business interests known as the Five Companies has put a stop to further development of space science, unless they control it. They're so powerful that they have their own secret police. Not even the World Government or the Space Patrol can keep them from crippling research.
Our protagonist is Catherine Rogers. She is part of a private space research group that dares to defy the Five Companies. Trouble starts when a scientist shows up at their headquarters, shot by the secret police. Just before dying, he gives Catherine and her colleagues a book and a key to a hidden cache of highly advanced technology brought from another world.
We quickly find out that two aliens in the form of glowing spheres are on Earth. One of them is insanely evil. He kidnapped the other, who is essentially the queen bee of her species. He intends to mate with her against her will, forcing her to produce one hundred million offspring (!) who will be raised to be as wicked as himself.
He wants to feed off the life force of human beings, and teach his children to do the same, wiping out humanity. Complicating matters is the fact that the evil alien shares his mind with one of the leaders of the secret police, who wants to get his hands on the advanced technology.
This all happens very early in the book, and we've got a long way to go. Suffice to say that Catherine and her friends work with the good alien, who has enormous psychic powers, to defeat the bad one.
The author's writing style isn't very sophisticated, sad to say, nor is the plot. Much of the time I imagined this story as a comic book. On the good side, the pace keeps getting faster and faster. By the end, it makes Keith Laumer look like Henry James.
I also appreciate the fact that the heroes are of mixed races, and a large number of them are women. All in all, however, I have to confess that this is a disappointing work.
Randall's first novel was called Hedgerow. I haven't read that one either, but apparently it's a Gothic Romance without supernatural elements.
Unlike Coleman, I'm familiar with this author. She had two excellent stories published in Fantastic a few years ago.
Will she be as adept at a longer length? Let's take a look.
An automobile accident claims the lives of the parents of two sisters. Elizabeth (twenty-four years old) escapes without a scratch, but Gabrielle (nineteen) is severely injured. The two young women move into a house owned by the great-aunt of a doctor who cared for Gabrielle during her long and painful recovery.
The house is located on an island off the coast of New England, the perfect setting for a Gothic Romance. Elizabeth and the doctor fall in love, giving us the other mandatory element for this genre.
The first half of the book is narrated by Gabrielle. On the very first page she feels the presence of Alarice, a woman who lived in the house long ago. (She's the dead sister of the great-aunt. Throughout the book, there's a strong parallel between the two pairs of sisters, including a love triangle.)
It's obvious from the start that Gabrielle is mentally and emotionally unstable, after her traumatic experience, so it's not always clear what's real and what's not. The second half of the book is narrated by Elizabeth, who gives us a very different perspective on events, including the tragic accident.
I haven't mentioned a third narrator, who shows up only a few pages from the end, adding a genuinely chilling touch.
This is a beautifully written book, with great psychological insight into its characters. Besides gorgeous language that makes me want to read it out loud, it has a plot as intricately woven as a spider web. We witness the same things happen from different viewpoints, completely changing what we thought we knew.
Five stars.
by Brian Collins
This month's Ace Double is a very good one for both Fritz Leiber fans and readers in general. The quality packed into this Double is unsurprising, though, since it is all reprints. There's the short collection Night Monsters, which contains four stories that all run in the horror vein. Three of these stories were previously printed in Fantastic, and so Victoria covered them some years ago. The other half is The Green Millennium, one of Leiber's more overlooked novels, first published in 1953 and not having seen print in the U.S. in about fifteen years.
The longest story here is also the best, at least in terms of the sheer beauty of Leiber's prose. It's Southern California in the early '60s, and the narrator is recounting the strange ramblings of a friend of his who would disappear under mysterious circumstances. Said friend believes that not only is oil a corrupting force, but that oil might somehow be alive. The supernatural is never seen but is strongly alluded to, in passages so evocative, so oppressive, that they compare with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The plot itself is rather structureless, but this doesn't matter because Leiber is so good at chronicling modern horrors such as industry and the urban landscape. I lived in California (in Pasadena) for a short time, and I'll be sure never to return.
Another contender for best in the collection is a more personal, more melancholy story. A middle-aged man, a chess-player, astronomer, and divorcee who reads somewhat like a stand-in for Leiber, sees a silhouetted figure behind him in the doubled mirrors he sees going up and down the stairs every night. Without giving away the ending, the apparition may be the ghost of a theatre actress he had met by chance who had committed suicide not long after their encounter. The man, in an attack of conscience, is confronted with a memory he had suppressed, of a person he had deeply wronged, though he didn't know it at the time. It's a ghost story, a striking portrait of guilt, and in a strange way, a love story.
As an unintended companion to the previous story, this one is interesting. It also features a ghostly woman who has been wronged, albeit the crime committed upon her is much worse. We're led to believe at first that this woman is simply a temptress, but while she may creep up on the unsuspecting male lead, she is not a totally malicious specter. "I'm Looking for 'Jeff'" is about a decade older than the other stories, and it certainly shows a restraint (given the horrific crime at the center) that Leiber would probably not show if he had written it today. My one real problem is the ending, which is an expositional monologue from a third party that explains the twist, rather than Leiber showing us what happened.
The last and shortest is also the most lighthearted; it's what you might call a horror-comedy. An actress is quite literally fading (her body is becoming more transparent) as her popularity is on the decline, so she resorts to a very old family ritual that might make her famous again—at a price. The satire is cute, although I think Leiber tackled something similar but better and more seriously in "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes." I'm also not sure about those rhyming couplets. It's fine, but ultimately minor.
Phil Gish is aimless and unemployed, but his life quickly gets turned upside down when he meets a green cat he takes an immediate liking to. He calls the cat Lucky, and like Lovecraft, who liked taking care of strays, he thinks of the animal as his own—only for Lucky to run off. Man gets cat, man loses cat, man goes looking for cat. This is the skeleton on which the book's plot is built, but it balloons into something much weirder and more convoluted.
The future America of The Green Millennium is dystopic, but not in ways we now take as obvious. Robots have become normalized, taking away much of human labor, and the people themselves are largely hedonists desperate for stimulation—not even for pleasure itself but more to fight off boredom. Despite being first published in 1953, it reads like something written in the past few years—in the wake of the New Wave and even something like Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Certainly it could not have been serialized in the magazines of the time, what with the explicit references to sex and drug use.
The plot, at its core, is simple, but Leiber introduces a colorful array of characters, all of whom want Lucky as much as Phil does. These characters include, but are not limited to, a husband-wife wrestling duo, an analyst who sounds like he himself could use an analyst, a woman with prosthetic legs that hide what seem to be hooves for feet, a pack of corporate higher-ups who may as well be mobsters, actual mobsters, and a few others I have not mentioned. The green cat might be an alien, or a mutant, or a weapon devised by the Soviets, I won't say which.
I might sound inebriated as I'm trying to explain all this, but let me assure you that I haven't smoked or ingested marijuana in five months!
Leiber is a mixed bag when it comes to comedy: he can be pretty funny, but he can also write The Wanderer. The Green Millennium is a madcap SF comedy that was written at a time (the early '50s) when Leiber could seemingly do no wrong, and it demonstrates his keen understanding of things that haunt the modern American. Most importantly, it's just a lot of fun.
On a routine flight from Stockholm to London, sixteen travellers (eight women and eight men) with no connection to each other, find themselves whisked to another world. Their new environs are suggestive of nothing so much as a zoo habitat designed to be reminiscent of home. To wit: a strip of highway flanked by a supermarket and a hotel, complete with electricity and running water. Two automobiles sans engines. A few workshops. A nightly replenished supply of booze, groceries, and tools.
Russell Graheme, M.P., quickly takes charge of the unwilling emigrants, organizing exploration parties. Soon, contact is made with a medievalist enclave, a Stone Age encampment…and what appear to be flocks of fairies.
What is this world? Who brought them there? And to what end? Those are the key riddles answered in this terrific little new book.
It's sort of a cross between Cooper's book Transit (in which five humans are transported to an extraterrestrial island) and Philip José Farmer's "Riverworld" series (in which everyone who ever lived is transported, along with his/her culture, to the banks of an extraterrestrial world-river) with a touch of the whimsy of L. Sprague de Camp (viz. The Incomplete Enchanter). It reads extremely quickly, and what with the short chapters and quick running time, you'll be done with the novel (novella?) before you know it.
What really engaged me, beyond the tight writing and fine characterization, was the central message of hope throughout the book. In "Riverworld", the various cultures who find themselves alongside each other in the hereafter almost immediately form belligerent statelets; war is the constant in Farmer's series. But in Seahorse, it's all about making peaceful contact, working together, having a productive goal. There's no Lord of the Flies to this story (though it is not unmitigatedly happy, either). Cooper clearly has a positive view of humanity, or at least wants to inspire us toward his idealistic vision. Count me in.
Five stars.
Contrast this upbeat book with the other one I read recently…
By page 100, Gideon determined that Slaughterhouse Five is not a book one enjoys, but rather experiences.
Two thirds of the way through the book, Gideon realized he'd been hoodwinked. Slaughterhouse Five is not science fiction at all, but rather the author's attempt to convey his experiences as a POW in Nazi Germany during the War, culminating in his presence at the firebombing of Dresden (now sited in East Germany). The SFnal wrapping, in which Billy Pilgrim is abducted by 4D aliens who unstick him in time and incarcerate him in an extraterrestrial zoo, seems there mostly to get eyes on the book. Or maybe to maintain a certain detachment from the material by changing the genre from "memoir."
For the same reason Billy Pilgrim, the eternal schlemiel, gets to be the closest thing the book has to a hero rather than the author, himself. The only way Vonnegut could work through his battle fatigue and War-derived ennui was to make the protagonist as hopeless and hapless as possible, to reflect the flannel-wrapped blinders through which the author now sees the world. To Vonnegut, Earth is a pathetic stage on which man inflicts indignity on himself and then on others. Then they die. So it goes.
On or about page 81, Gideon got a little tired of the fairy-tale language Vonnegut employs. It worked in Harrison Bergeron, but it's a bit of a one-trick pony.
Somewhere along the line, Gideon figured that the inclusion of the starlet, Miss Montana (who exists to provide someone besides the enormous Mrs. Pilgrim for Billy to stick his hefty wang into) was so that, in addition to appealing to SF fans, the book would appeal to horny SF fans. And horny readers in general. And because S.E.X. s.e.l.l.s.
Kilgore Trout, if he existed, would probably be reprinted these days in Amazing.
About a third of the way in, Gideon determined that he would write the review of Slaughterhouse Five in the style of Slaughterhouse Five.
Whatever the book is not, it is, at the very least, a memorable account of the author's feelings toward and memories of those dark last months of the war. It is a poignant counterpoint to all the jingoistic WW2 films that have come out this decade, and perhaps a more suitable epitaph for the millions who died in that conflict. So it goes.
Four stars.
by Cora Buhlert
War is hell: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Last month, thousands of people gathered in Dresden to remember the victims of the Allied bombings in the night from February 13 to 14, 1945, the night from Shrove Tuesday to Ash Wednesday and never was a day more aptly named. These memorial gatherings happen every year and while the number of East German officials and politicians attending and the degree of belligerence in their speeches waxes and wanes with the greater political situation (East German officials like using the Dresden bombings for propaganda purposes as an example of the infamy of the West), one thing that remains constant is the number of Dresdeners who come to remember the dead and the nigh total destruction of their city.
The burnt out ruin of the Church of Our Lady in Dresden, once a jewel of Baroque architecture.The Semper opera house in Dresden after the bombings. The exterior is still standing, but the once gorgeous interior is burned completely out.
I have never seen Dresden before 1945, though my grandmother who grew up in the area told me it was a beautiful city and how much she missed attending performances at the striking Semper opera house, which was largely destroyed by the bombings and is in the process of being rebuilt (The proposed completion date is 1985). However, I have visited the modern Dresden with its constant construction activity and incongruous mix of burned out ruins, historical buildings in various stages of reconstruction and newly constructed modernist office and apartment blocks and could keenly feel what was lost.
Views of the modern rebuilt Dresden in postcard form
I also know survivors of the Dresden bombings such as my university classmate Norbert who witnessed Dresden burning as teenager evacuated to the countryside and who – much like Kurt Vonnegut – was forced to help with the clean-up work and body recovery and wrote a harrowing account of his experiences for the university literary magazine.
Of course, Dresden was not the only German city bombed. Every bigger German city has its own Dresden, that night when entire neighbourhoods were wiped out and thousands of people, the vast majority of them civilians, were killed. For my hometown of Bremen, the night was the night of August 18, 1944, when Allied bombers destroyed the Walle neighbourhood next to Bremen harbour (while miraculously missing most of the harbour itself, similar to how the bombing of Dresden miraculously missed the industrial plants on the outskirts of the city). My grandfather, a retired sea captain, lived in the Walle neighbourhood. He was one of the lucky ones and survived, though his home in a housing estate for retired seafarers was destroyed. I remember sifting through the still smoking rubble of Grandpa's little house with my Mom the next day, looking for anything that might have survived the bombs and the firestorm and finding only two bronze buddha statues that Grandpa had brought back from Thailand. These two buddhas now stand guard in my living room, the war damage still visible. Meanwhile, the street where Grandpa once lived no longer exists on modern city maps at all.
An aerial view of Dresden's old slaughterhouse, where Kurt Vonnegut was imprisoned and survived the bombing of the city.
This is the perspective from which I read Kurt Vonnegut's latest novel Slaughterhouse Five, which uses science fiction as a vehicle for Vonnegut to describe his experiences as a prisoner of war who survived the bombing of Dresden and – like my classmate Norbert – never forgot what he saw that night and in the days that followed.
The result, much like the contemporary Dresden with the burned out ruin of the Church of Our Lady overlooking a parking lot and a hyper-modern restaurant and entertainment complex sitting directly opposite the newly restored Baroque Zwinger palace, is jarring and incongruous. Vonnegut's protagonist is Billy Pilgrim, an American everyman whose suburban postwar life is disrupted when he is abducted by aliens and becomes unstuck in time, forced to revisit the bombing of Dresden over and over and over again.
No, this photo of the burnt out ruin of the Church of Our Lady in winter was not taken in 1945, but in 1960. It still looks the same today.A banner advertises an exhibtion of contemporary Soviet art, while the ruins of Baroque Dresden loom in the background.The ultra-modern restaurant complex Am Zwinger, the largest in all of East Germany, opened only last year – directly opposite the newly restored Baroque Zwinger palace.Aerial view of the ultra-modern restaurant complex Am Zwinger, which includes a self-service restaurant, the Radeberger beer cellar and the Café Espresso, pictured here. Just don't expect the coffee on offer to actually taste like espresso.Tourists lounge in the terrace café of the restaurant complex Am Zwinger, overlooking the recently rebuilt Baroque Zwinger palace.
Slaughterhouse Five is not so much a novel, it is a metaphor for the trauma of war, a trauma that still hasn't subsided even twenty-four years later but that keep rearing its ugly head again and again. Many veterans report having flashbacks to particularly traumatic experiences during the war – any war. But while those flashbacks are purely psychological, poor Billy Pilgrim physically travels back in time to the worst night of his life over and over again.
Barely a blip on the radar
The bombings of World War II loom large in the collective memory of people in Germany and the rest of Europe, yet they are comparatively rarely addressed in contemporary German literature. Der Untergang (The End: Hamburg) by Hans Erich Nossack from 1948, Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Love and a Time to Die) by Erich Maria Remarque (who was not even in Germany, but sitting high and dry in Switzerland during WWII) from 1954 and Vergeltung (Retaliation) by Gert Ledig from 1956 are some of the very few examples. It's not as if World War II plays no role in German literature at all, because we have dozens of war novels. However, these are all tales about the experiences of soldiers on the frontline, not about the civilians getting bombed to smithereens back home. Most likely, this is because war novels focus on the experiences of men (and note that both Slaughterhouse Five and Remarque's A Time to Love and a Time to Die focus on soldiers experiencing bombings and air raids) and the experiences of men are deemed important. Meanwhile, the people who suffered and died during the bombing nights of World War II were mainly women, children, old people, sick people, prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers and their experiences are not deemed nearly as relevant.
Considering how utterly destructive the bombing of Dresden was, it's notable that it is barely a blip on the radar of German literature in both East and West. Erich Kästner's memoir Als ich ein kleiner Junge war (When I was a little boy) touches on the bombing of Dresden, where Kästner grew up, though the book is not about the bombing itself, which Kästner did not experience first-hand, because he was living in Berlin at the time. And for the twentieth anniversary of the Dresden bombings, Ulrike Meinhof, one of the brightest lights of West German journalism, penned a scathing article for the leftwing magazine Konkret, condemning Winston Churchill and Royal Air Force commander Arthur Harris for ordering the attack on Dresden under false pretences. "Was Winston Churchill a war criminal?" the cover of the respective issue of Konkret asked, while quite a lot of readers wondered why this was even a question.
So should Slaughterhouse Five, a work by an American author, albeit one who witnessed the bombing of Dresden first-hand, become the definitive account of the destruction of Dresden and of the bombing nights of World War II in general? I hope not, because I want to read more accounts by German civilians about the bombings of World War II. Nonetheless, I'm glad that Slaughterhouse Five exists, as an account about the horrors of war by one who has seen them. I'm also glad that this novel was published in the US, because too many Americans still consider the bombings of cities and civilians during World War II justified. Maybe Slaughterhouse Five will make some of them reconsider, especially since – as I said above – it wasn't just Dresden that was destroyed by bombing. It was also Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Rotterdam, Coventry, Guernica, Hamburg and right now, it's Hanoi. And the next generation's Billy Pilgrim is currently locked up in a bamboo cage in the Vietnamese jungle somewhere, watching the flames over Hanoi turn the sky blood red.
Not a pleasant book at all, but an important one. Four and a half stars.
And now for something much more pleasant. For after a difficult book like Slaughterhouse Five, you need a palate cleanser. Luckily, I found the perfect palate cleanser in The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs, a young American writer currently living in Britain. The Face in the Frost is thirty-year-old Bellairs' third book and his first foray in the fantasy genre.
John Bellairs
The novel starts off with a prologue that informs us that this is a book about wizards – just in case readers of Bellairs' previous two books, collections of Catholic humour pieces, are confused – and then introduces us to the setting, two adjacent kingdoms known only as the North and the South Kingdom. Such prologues can be dry and boring, but Bellairs' whimsical humour, which is on display throughout the book, makes them fun to read.
Once the introductions are out of the way, we meet our protagonist, the wizard Prospero ("not the one you're probably thinking of", Bellairs helpfully informs us) or rather his home, "a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples", which Prospero shares with a sarcastic talking mirror which can offer glimpses of faraway times and places, though mostly, it's just annoying and also has a terrible singing voice.
Prospero's house, as illustrated by Marilyn Fitschen
This first chapter very much sets the tone for the entire novel, humorous and whimsical – with moments of dread occasionally creeping in. For Prospero has been plagued by bad dreams of late, he has the feeling that a malicious presence is watching him and finds himself menaced by a fluttering cloak, while getting a mug of ale from his own cellar. To top off Prospero's very bad day, he finds himself attacked by a monstrous moth that "smells like a basement full of dusty newspapers".
Luckily, Prospero's friend and fellow wizard Roger Bacon – and note that this time around, Bellairs does not inform us, that this is not the one we're thinking of, so this likely is the famed medieval scholar and creator of a talking brazen head – chooses just this evening to drop by for a visit, after having been kicked out of England, when a spell went awry and instead of constructing a wall of brass around the island in order to keep out Viking raiders, Bacon instead raised a wall of glass with predictable results.
As the two old friends discuss the day's events, it quickly becomes clear that something or rather someone is after Prospero and all that this is linked to a mysterious book that Bacon tried to locate on Prospero's behalf. However, it's late at night, so the two wizards go to bed, only to awaken in the morning to find the house surrounded by sinister grey-cloaked figures, sent by a rival wizard. There's no way out – except via an underground river that the two wizards navigate aboard a model ship, after shrinking themselves down to toy size.
A Magical Mystery Tour
What follows is a marvellous, magical quest, as Prospero and Bacon attempt to figure out just who is after Prospero and once they do, how to stop that villainous sorcerer from casting a spell that will plunge the whole world into everlasting winter. On the way, the two wizards encounter such fascinating locations as the village of Five Dials, which turns out to be an illusion, a magical Potemkin village of hollow houses inhabited by hollow people. They also escape all sorts of horrors their opponent sends against them such as a magical puddle that will capture a person's reflection, should they happen to look into it, and of course the titular face that appears in a frost-encrusted window to mock and menace Prospero.
Fantasy is experiencing something of a boom right now, triggered by the paperback release of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lancer's reprints of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian. But while Conan has inspired a veritable legion of other fantastic swordsmen and barbarian warriors from Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné to Lin Carter's Thongor, Lord of the Rings has inspired very few imitators. Until now.
This does not mean that The Face in the Frost is a carbon copy of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Quite the contrary, it's very much its own story, even though the Tolkien inspiration is clear and was acknowledged by Bellairs. Furthermore, Bellairs' light and frothy tone makes The Face in the Frost a very different, if no less magical experience than Professor Tolkien's magnum opus.
The Face in the Frost is a delightful book, skilfully mixing humour and whimsy with horror and dread, and the illustrations by Marilyn Fitschen help bring the wonderful world of Prospero and Roger Bacon to life. The ending certainly leaves room for a sequel and I hope that we will get to read it sooner rather than later. At any rate, I can't wait to see what John Bellairs writes next.
A wondrous confection of whimsy, horror and pure joy. Five stars.
by Robin Rose Graves
Society Without Gender…
Another year, another Le Guin. For those tuning in for the first time, my introduction to Le Guin began two years ago, with her novel City of Illusions, which left me disappointed. Last year, I read A Wizard of Earthsea, where finally I saw Le Guin’s potential realized. When I saw she has another book coming out this year, I was interested, but reined in my expectations when I realized The Left Hand of Darkness would take place in the same universe as City of Illusions.
This is book four of the Hainish Cycle, but fortunately, you do not need to read these books in order to understand the story. In fact, I found little connection between this book and the previous one.
Genly Ai is an envoy sent to the snowy planet of Winter to convince the people to join the Ekumen (a sort of alliance between planets). Winter, or Gethen in their native language, is not as technologically advanced as the rest of the universe. They have yet to build airplanes, let alone a vehicle capable of space travel. Following an outsider’s perspective allows readers to learn about a new culture alongside the narrative main character.
As per my experience with her previous works, Le Guin excels at creating compelling and unique settings. Smaller, intermediate chapters offer folkloric stories from the planet of Winter to further enhance the reader’s understanding of Gethenian culture.
All the characters are human, though the Gethenians differ in one key way. They are completely androgynous except for once a month when they enter their reproductive cycle (known as “kemmer”) where they then shift into either male or female (as in they can either impregnate or become pregnant.) Which role a Gethenian will take on during kemmer is not predetermined and can change between cycles.
This confuses and occasionally disgusts Genly Ai, who regards all characters with he and him pronouns, perhaps because he is male and unable to empathize with or respect anyone who isn’t.
Without gender, Le Guin posits that there is no sexuality, no rape, no war. People who get pregnant are not treated as lesser. Children are raised by everyone, not just the person who gave birth to them. Jobs account for kemmer, giving time off for those experiencing their cycle, and special buildings are set aside for reproduction.
Contrasted with the world we live in today, this book subtly calls out the sexism of our own society, while also exemplifying how we may improve. I was pleasantly surprised by the feminist slant of this book.
Five stars.
Reflections in a Mirage, by Leonard Daventry
By Jason Sacks
Leonard Daventry is a British science fiction author whose work tends to follow standard pathways – until it doesn’t. As my fellow Galactic companion Gideon Marcus wrote about one of Mr. Daventry’s previous novels, Daventry likes to explore ideas of free love and complex relationships, using familiar set-ups with slightly surprising resolutions.
His latest book, Reflections in a Mirage, is an excellent demonstration of how Mr. Daventry takes on those challenges while delivering his own unique view of the world. Unfortunately, this novel is perhaps overly ambitious for its length. Mirage consequently falls short of the author’s clear goals.
We return to the lead character Daventry established back in 1965 in A Man of Double Deed: Claus Coman is a telepath, a so-called “keyman” who can create connections to minds of both humans and non-humans. Coman is enlisted to join a motley band of outcasts and criminals who journey to one of the many worlds which humanity has discovered among the vast stars: a forbidding but intriguing planet called Sacron. Coman at least has the comfort of traveling with longtime companion Jonl, a woman with whom he’s had a complex relationship.
But just as many British exiles to Australia rebelled against their crew, the group of 50 outcasts rebel against the crew of their space cruiser. A violent, vicious battle kills most of the men who can fly the cruiser, and terrible damage is visited upon the ship. They only have one choice: to land on the planet which is ironically called Paradise 1. Paradise 1 seems to be a desert world, nearly bereft of any life whatsoever, but there are hints the planet may be more complex than it initially seems.
In fact, we get an intriguing revelation towards the end of the book (with a few concepts which will be well understood by Star Trek fans), but I found myself hungering for more context of the deeper story. At a mere 191 paperback pages, I was constantly under the impression that Daventry had to cut out important elements to the story; its brevity leaves the conclusion feeling a bit unsatisfying.
Reflections in a Mirage is at its best when it explores the human relationships it depicts. Coman’s relationship with Jonl is at the center of the story and provides a happy connection where so many of the other connections are tenuous. Daventry spends some time showing Jonl’s relationship with other women on the colony ship – the men and women are partitioned away from each other – and alludes to furtive, loving relationships among the women. There are similar hints about some of the men's connections to each other, and a strong implication that this society accepts a full gamut of sexuality, from polygamy to homosexuality and even to asexuality.
All of that is very interesting, and places this novel firmly in a “new wave” mindset, but there’s just not enough of it to satisfy. Ultimately, Reflections in a Mirage has the potential to be great, but I felt Daventry needed at least 100 more pages to fully illuminate his story.
You’ll probably be more satisfied reading some of the other works in this column. (I do recommend the LeGuin and Vonnegut books.)
A school for young wizards: What could possibly go wrong!
I wanted to like last year's City of Illusions, but the book fell flat. However, I saw the potential in Ursula K. Le Guin as a writer. Her ideas in the book were good, it was the execution that was lacking, so with her latest book out, A Wizard of Earthsea,I figured I’d give her another try.
Ged is an ambitious young wizard with a hunger for knowledge and power. The book follows his journey from childhood into adulthood, first starting when he attends a school for wizards. There he learns the basics of magic, makes friends and a rival. He also unleashes a dark being that wants him dead, but thanks to magic protection around the school, he is safe for the time being.
It isn’t until Ged graduates and becomes a practicing wizard for various villages that he really learns the hard lessons of magic. Now outside the protection of school, he is pursued by the dark being, eventually forced to turn and fight it, putting his skills to the ultimate test.
Fantasy as a genre doesn’t excite me as an adult, as it is often too whimsical and too escapist, too detached from our own world. A Wizard of Earthsea managed a careful balance, with an attention to the laws of magic and how it is able to be used. Wizards can only use so much magic at a time, and overexerting oneself or attempting a spell higher than one’s skill has physical consequences, causing wounds to appear on the body. Throughout the book, we see Ged test these limits, only to end up in lengthy recovery each time. Eventually, he does go too far and ends up permanently scarring himself.
I liked the concept of true names: learning the true name of a creature, plant, object or place is the key to all spells in this world. Even people have true names that they keep secret, instead using an alias in day to day life. While Ged is the main character’s true name, and the narrative refers to him as such, in dialogue he is called “Sparrowhawk” by other characters. I loved the intimate moments of friendship when true names were exchanged, showing a great amount of trust between characters.
Ged makes a compelling main character, with his distinctive flaw being his own hubris. Time and again, he tries magic that is way above his level only to be hurt. He attempts to raise the dead, despite knowing that it can’t be done, and suffers the consequences. It's because of his hubris that a dark creature is brought into the world who specifically hunts him, creating the main conflict of the book. But we’re shown that he has other values. He isn’t greedy. When he fights the dragon, his only motivation is duty to the town he serves. When the dragon offers him some of his treasure as a reward, he declines. Most of the time when Ged overexerts his magic, it isn’t in pursuit of fame. Ged truly wants to help people, even when it’s past his capabilities.
You know it's a good book when there's a map
With this book, I finally saw what I knew Le Guin was capable of as a writer. She's always created compelling unique worlds readers want to immerse themselves in, but now her writing can back up her ideas. Maybe because this is her first foray into juvenile fiction or perhaps she is simply growing as a writer.
I look forward to what she writes next.
Four stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
Tomorrow and Yesterday
The latest Ace Double (H-95, two quarters and a dime at your local drug store paperback rack) contains one novel looking forward in time, and one collection glancing backwards at the author's recent career.
We begin with a brilliant mathematician from California sneaking around through a remote area of Wisconsin, ready to kill a man. We cut away from this scene to find a government agent from Washington, D.C., in Los Angeles, preparing to assassinate the richest man in the world.
Why all this homicidal intent?
Flashbacks tell us what's going on. John Androki is a fellow who shows up out of nowhere. He convinces a rich guy that he can predict exactly how stocks will move up or down in the future. The millionaire sets him up with some cash in exchange for the information. Androki goes on to not only be the wealthiest person on Earth (yep, he's the intended target of the government assassin) but to wield immense political power all over the world.
Our protagonist is Bertram Kane, a brilliant mathematician (yep, he's the guy stalking a man in Wisconsin) who is working on a theory of multiple dimensions. He's a widower who's having an on-again off-again affair with Anita Weber, an art professor. His buddy is Gordon Maxon, a professor of psychology.
Maxon is convinced that Androki can perceive the future (hence the novel's title.) He calls him a downthrough, a word that's new to me. Kane isn't convinced, but when Weber dumps him for the incredibly rich and powerful Androki, he becomes suspicious.
Things get scarier when other mathematicians working on multiple dimensions are murdered. Coincidence, or is Androki arranging for their deaths? And is Kane next on the list?
You may figure out the main plot gimmick, which explains why Kane is out to kill a completely innocent man. (The government assassin's motive is less mysterious. Androki is changing America's relations with other nations in ways the United States government doesn't like.)
Basically a suspense novel with a science fiction gimmick, the plot creates a fair amount of tension, although parts of it are talky. There are quite a few murders along the way, and a pretty grim ending.
Three stars.
So Bright the Vision, by Clifford Simak
Cover art by Gray Morrow.
Four stories, dating from 1956 to 1960, by a noted author appear in this volume.
First printed in the June 1960 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, this lighthearted yarn starts with a huge agate appearing in a guy's yard, along with the tiny critters mentioned in the title. Chaos ensues.
The Noble Editor gave it a lukewarm review when it first appeared, and that's fair. It's a pleasant enough bit of gentle comedy, but hardly profound.
The April 1958 issue of Infinity Science Fiction is the source of this oddly titled (and odd) story.
An elderly fellow collects stamps from alien worlds, piling them up in his rat's nest of a home. Some of the stamps are actually made up of living microorganisms. When mixed with broth made by an overly friendly neighbor, they jump into action and start organizing the guy's messy collection.
There's a strong resemblance to the previous story, which also had tiny creatures helping folks at first, but going a little too far. This one is a lot stranger than the other one, and a little more complex. (I haven't mentioned the role played by stuff that the old man receives from an alien pen pal, or what the weird title means.) Interesting for its eccentricity, if nothing else.
The August 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe supplies the story that gives the collection its title.
At a future time when Earth is in contact with several alien worlds, the only thing of value humans can supply is fiction. Other beings don't make up things that aren't true, and they're fascinated by the concept.
The fiction is created via programmed machines, with a little human input. Writing by hand (or pencil, pen, or typewriter) is considered old-fashioned, and even vulgar.
The plot follows the misadventures of a so-called writer who has fallen on hard times. His machine is on its last legs, and he can't afford a new one. A fellow writer's secret leads to a sudden decision.
Much of the story consists of discussions of the importance of fiction. The automated fiction machines seem intended as a dark satire of uninspired hackwork. It's clearly a heartfelt work, and the author manages to convey his passion.
This yarn comes from the pages of the September 1956 issue of Science Fiction Stories.
A newspaper reporter investigates some odd events. There's the sudden, seemingly merciful death of someone suffering from a terminal illness. A scientist's papers are rearranged, giving him the clue he needs to complete his work. The reporter suggests, in a joking article, that these and other happenings might be the work of brownies. He's not too far off the mark.
Once again we have small beings helping humans. This time their efforts are entirely benign, unlike the golden bugs (who ignored people completely, and only worked for their own goals) and the microorganisms from the alien stamp (who went a little too far in their effort to organize things.) This is a sweet, simple little story, benefiting from the author's own experience as a newspaperman.
Three stars.
The title story is definitely the highlight of the collection. As a whole, that bumps the book up to three and one-half stars.
There's no question that Star Trek is a bona fide phenomenon. Now in its third season (and so far, quite a good season it is), it is a universe that has launched several dozen fan clubs, most with their own 'zines, many with Trek-fiction included. Professional tie-in merchandise is booming, too, from the AMT model kits of the ships in the show, to Stephen Whitfield's indispensable The Making of Star Trek, to Gold Key's dispensable comic book.
The latest release is the very first (that I'm aware of) professional original Trek story, Mission to Horatius by none other than SF veteran Mack Reynolds. That a familiar name should be tapped to write Trek tales is not a surprise. Episodes of the show have been written by SFnal talents Norman Spinrad, Ted Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Jerome Bixby; and James Blish has written two collections of episode novelizations (well, noveletizations).
So how does Reynolds' effort rate? First, let's look at the story:
The Enterprise has been out on patrol so long that ship's stores are low and the crew is beginning to suffer from "cafard". This malady is a kind of isolation sickness that can lead to mass insanity. Before the ship can return to starbase, however, it receives a distress call from the Horatius system just beyond the Federation.
There are three Class M planets in the system, all inhabited by pioneers who don't want to be Federated. They are the primitive society of Neolithia, which operates in bands and clans; the theological autocracy of Mythria, controlled by a happy drug called "Anodyne" (a la "Return of the Archons"); and the Prussian military state of Bavarya. This world is the most dangerous, as they have designs on conquering the Federation, and they are building an army of clones ("Dopplegangers") toward that end.
Uncertain as to from which planet the distress signal originated, Kirk leads a landing party composed of his senior officers to each planet in turn. Meanwhile, the strings on Uhura's guitar break one by one, and Sulu's pet rat gets loose. Cafard causes 40 crew members to be put in stasis. It's not a happy trip. But in the end, it's a successful one when Kirk finds the that Anna, the daughter of "Nummer Ein" on Bavarya, summoned the Enterprise to thwart her father's nefarious scheme,
Well. There's quite a lot wrong with this book. Reynolds makes serving on the Enterprise feel like the worst duty in the galaxy. Maybe this is realistic, but from what we've seen, the crew isn't this unhappy. As for "cafard", if our nuclear submarine crews don't suffer from such issues, I can't imagine a crack Starfleet crew would.
Reynolds' characterizations are only cursorily accurate. Indeed, Mission feels more like a lesser story in his Analog-published United Planets series of stories, featuring a decentralized set of worlds with every kind of government imaginable. There's an undertone of smugness as Kirk destroys one society after another—first by beaming down an anodyne-antidote into the Mythran water supply (if Scotty can manufacture ten pounds of the stuff in ten minutes, why can't he synthesize new strings for Uhura?), and then by destroying all five million dopplegangers on Bavarya…who may well have been sentient beings.
And finally, McCoy staves off cafard by making the crew believe that Sulu's rat has Bubonic Plague, and that it must be killed to save the ship. The rat does not have a happy ending.
Most eyeroll inducing passage: "Anna, womanlike, had been inspecting Janice Rand's neat uniform. Now she responded to the bows of the men from the Enterprise. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties, blond, and, save for a slight plumpness, attractive."
(emphasis added)
Even accepting that the target audience is on the younger side (given that the publisher is Whitman), this does not really excuse all the problems with Mission to Horatius. Moreover, the stirring introduction seems to have been written for an entirely different story!
There are pictures by Sparky Moore. They are adequate, but the characters don't look too much like our heroes.
Two stars.
by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall
In the run up to Christmas, I received a special treat through my letterbox: a second Orbit anthology for 1968. Will it do better than #3?
Orbit 4
Cover by Paul Lehr
Windsong by Kate Wilhelm
Starting with the series’ most regular contributor, Wilhelm’s story concerns Dan Thornton, an overworked executive. He is trying to solve the problem of an armored computer that should be able to act as a policeman. However, it cannot cope with the stress of unexpected situations. To get solutions he has been working with the psychologist Dr. Feldman to see if his dreams yield any ideas but, instead, he keeps dreaming about Paula. She was a free-spirited “windsong” from his teenage years, a person who could instantly analyse patterns to understand the world in ways others could not.
I have been noticing a pattern emerging with Wilhelm’s writing. She wants to experiment with form and content but rarely manages to deliver a strong balance between the two. In this case it is the style that works well, using the dream sessions in a way that would please the New Wave, but the actual plot leaves something to be desired, not really travelling anywhere fast and engaging in some obvious cliches.
Evens out at Three Stars
Probable Cause by Charles L. Harness
Harness recently returned from his parental leave and is back to writing, getting an even warmer reception this time around. Using his legal background, he brings us the discussion of a supreme court case, one where the constitutionality of a conviction depends on an interesting question. If a search warrant is granted based on a psychic reading, does this violate the fourth and\or fifth amendments?
Whilst some of the arguments here do not make much sense to me, I am neither a lawyer nor an American. As such, I am happy to bow to Harness’ knowledge of constitutional jurisprudence. What I question is the length of it all. At over 60 pages, this is the second longest story to yet grace the pages of Orbit. But it is just some justices sitting in a room discussing a piece of legal theory. This might be worth a vignette, but I needed more to justify a novella.
Two Stars
Shattered Like a Glass Goblin by Harlan Ellison
Rudy has finally gotten out of the army on medical, only to find his fiancée Kris in a marijuana-drenched squat in downtown LA. Is he just not “with it” anymore? Or is something more sinister going on?
If this was from an older writer, I would assume it was a crass attempt to be relevant. With Ellison I am willing to assume he is in earnest in writing a hippy horror story. It is not entirely clear if what we see really happened or if it just a massive drug trip, but that actually makes it work better for me.
Four Stars
This Corruptible by Jacob Transue
This is an author of which no information is given, nor one I've heard of before. Is it perhaps a pseudonym?
Thirty-five years ago, scientists Paul and Andrew departed on bad terms. Whilst the former went into seclusion, the latter became vastly wealthy. Andrew now seeks out Paul after learning of his new discovery, the ability to renew a person’s life.
This reads like a middling story from 15 years ago. Whilst some horrifying imagery raises it up, it is pulled back down by lechery.
Two Stars
Animalby Carol Emshwiller
A strange animal is kept in the city by its keepers. What could it be?
This is a stylistic piece that will depend on your tolerance for this kind of prose:
It was said, on the second day, that he did not look too unhappy. A keeper of particular sensitivity brought him both a grilled cheese sandwich and a hamburger so it might be seen what his preferences were, but still he ate nothing.
This reader was unhappy, feeling nothing.
One Star
One at a Time by R. A. Lafferty
In Barnaby’s Barn, McSkee tells tall tales. But what if they are true?
I feel about Lafferty’s writing the way Superman does about Kryptonite. As such, I struggle with him at the best of times. This one I found it impossible to read. I don’t like bar-room frames or tall tales, I was confused by the style and was generally perplexed throughout.
A subjective One Star
Passengers by Robert Silverberg
In an interesting take on the Puppet Masters concept, Earth has encountered strange creatures called passengers. They can “ride” anyone, at any time, with no way to detect or stop them. Once a Passenger leaves a person, the memory goes. Our narrator wakes up to find he slept with a woman whilst he was ridden. However, upon exercising in Central Park he believes he has found her, even though she doesn’t remember him.
Anyone who has read Silverberg of late knows of his strange recurring writings about young women, so I will not belabour the point here. Your rating will probably result from how you balance the concept against this tendency. I come down in the middle.
Three Stars
Grimm's Story by Vernor Vinge
The planet Tu is a world that contains almost no metals. Whilst some technologies, such as pharmaceuticals, hydrofoils and optics, have been able to develop, others, such as heavier than air flight, have not.
It is on this world that Astronomy student Svir Hedrigs is approached by Tatja Grimm, the science editor of Fantasie magazine. She has a dangerous mission for Hedrigs, to stop the destruction of the last complete collection of Fantasie.
In less skilled hands this could easily have been contrived and fannish. Instead, Vinge spins a fascinating intricate plot and fully imagined world, touching on a number of interesting themes with complicated characters. It stumbles a little at the very end, stopping it from gaining a full five stars, but still very good.
A high four stars
A Few Last Words by James Sallis
Hoover is beset by bad dreams. He decides to head to Doug’s coffee shop where we learn from them why the cities are now so empty.
Well written and atmospheric, appealing to this sufferer of parasomnia.
Four Stars
Continuing a steady Orbit
Once again, Orbit contains some of the best and worst of SF for me. This issue more than most, though, is going to be a subjective one. So much is based on style that it cannot help but appeal to personal taste. I know others have considered Animal among the best and Grimm’s Story among the weakest. Whatever your tastes, I think there will be something in here for you to chew on.
This completely passed me by on first release but an ad for it from the Science Fiction Book Club in last month’s New Worlds was enough to convince me to get it. But was it worth me trialing a membership from them?
The so-called “end of the universe” is an area where physical laws as we know them break down. Sometimes this abstract nothingness recedes, sometimes it expands and swallows galaxies, leaving impossible creations in its wake. The Warden Corps have been set up at its current edge to monitor and explore the strange phenomena.
Among those who come to the current planetoid of the Warden Corps is Helena Kraag. Whilst the daughter of one of the richest men in the galaxy, she has become withdrawn from people since the loss of her mother. At first, she attempts to look straight into the nothingness and loses her sense of identity. In spite of this she still travels with the rest of the crew into this impossibility.
Unfortunately, their Heisenberg shields fail as they enter. As you can probably guess, things start to get strange.
Now, you might expect this to just then be a kind of surreal trip, a la Alice in Wonderland or Phantom Tollbooth. However, what Joseph produces is a kind of fractured character exploration. As we move through these different bizarre situations we learn more about each of the members of the crew and gain understanding of what motivates them.
There are so many delicious details. Initially this looks like it is going to be some kind of 19th Century comedy of manners, but we soon learn this has been carefully set up. Rather it is a kind of conditioning, one to allow the fliers to maintain a solid form of identity. Even when it feels like I am reading the lyrics to I Am The Walrus, there is clear intent and structure behind it.
Joseph is also a master of language and you feel yourself getting knowledge and beauty within the surreality. For example:
Everything and nothing had both happened and not happened; time was as broad as it was long; space was neither here nor there; the loop of eternity threaded itself through the eye of zero.
This kind of sentence could have been gibberish. But the way he phrases it and following the scenarios we have gone through, I absolutely understand what he is getting at.
I could go through all the characters and scenarios to explore the meaning behind it, but I think it is better to take the journey yourself. As Helena says, it is “like falling through the hole in the zero.” It may not be something that is at once fathomable but it is a new experience worth having.
Although primarily known as a poet, he clearly understands science fiction well and has an affinity for it (see, for example, the poem "Mars Ascending"). Here is hoping for more such forays.
Moondust by Thomas Burnett Swann takes place in and around the ancient city of Jericho. Swann’s Jericho is a poverty-ridden city ruled by the Egyptians, its denizens apprehensive about the steady approach of the Wanderers, a flood of former slaves absconding from Egypt.
Bard ekes out a meager existence in this city with his mother and beautiful younger brother Ram. Ram is stolen one night and replaced by an unbecoming changeling. Bard accepts the fat, ugly Rahab and comes to think of her as a sister until years later when an elusive, feline creature known as a fennec arrives. Rahab then magically transforms into a beautiful woman with wings and disappears one night.
Determined to rescue Rahab, Bard enlists the aid of his friend, Zeb. Together they track Rahab down to the underground city, Honey Heart, where the fennecs rule as gods and Rahab’s kind, the People of the Sea along with beautiful human males–including the long lost Ram– are docile slaves to the fennecs. Bard and Zub must now find a way to wrest Rahab from the insidious control of the fennecs and make it out of Honey Heart alive.
Moondust is a highly imaginative and reasonably interesting story but I did not—could not bring myself to enjoy it. At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered me about this novel. Then it finally occurred to me. This book has no soul, no humanity. Moondust feels like a book written from the clinical lens of a white Westerner who thinks he’s better than the people he’s writing about.
Apparently, people living in poverty must always be dirty and have very little regard for personal hygiene. If humans own slaves, those slaves must be black. What else could they possibly be? Beautiful women are nothing but whores. Fat people are ugly, and the Israelites had very big, very ugly feet.
I believe these small details were meant to add color to the story’s world, but obviously originate from a place of thinly veiled disdain.
The main character, Bard, is not one with whom I could sympathize. His little brother is stolen—kidnapped in the dead of night. Even though Bard bemoans the loss, not once does it occur to the self-absorbed nincompoop to go looking for his five-year-old sibling. Instead, he magnanimously accepts the supposedly fat, ugly changeling named Rahab left in his brother’s place as a sister and simply carries on with his life as if that makes any sense.
Years later, when Rahab literally sheds her “ugly” skin and becomes a beautiful creature of a woman, she then becomes a harlot. What else could she possibly become?
When Rahab disappears, summoned back to the underground city of Honey Heart by the fennec, Chackal, Bard immediately enlists the aid of his friend, Zeb and races off in search of his beloved sister. This raises the question of why he was so desperate to save the sibling unrelated by blood–who left voluntarily–but had possessed no inclination to go off in search of his biological brother, Ram.
Once Bard and Zeb descend into Honey Heart, the story loses all coherence for me. The contrived mish-mash of magic, ancient Eastern culture, and biblical myth falls short of a finely woven tale. Moondust merely rankled.
If I’ve learned anything from Swann it’s that you can learn the history and possess infinite academic knowledge of a culture but your words aren’t going to touch anyone if you can’t actually feel the soul—the humanity of the people.
Three Stars
by Jason Sacks
One Before Bedtime by Richard Linkroum
What an odd novel. One Before Bedtime is part mad scientist novel, part social satire, part speculative fiction, and part self-centered character rationalization.
I'm not sure this is a good book, per se, but is certainly odd.
See, in a way, this book is all about the social satire. It's about Jeff Baxter, a kid just home from Vietnam, where he's seen some stuff, man, and who has gone back to work at his a pharmacy in his small midwestern town. Jeff just has one minor problem: his skin is in rough shape and he needs for it to clear up so his girlfriend can be happy. Thankfully (perhaps), the pharmacist turns out to be a tinkerer. Cortland Pedigrew has his own set of chemicals and other tools in the basement of the pharmacy. Pedigrew invents a pill which can clear Jeff's skin.
There's just one problem. The pill somehow turns Jeff's skin from White to Black.
And there the troubles begin.
Because Jeff's girlfriend, Peggy, is a bit of a militant and freedom fighter. She walks around everywhere barefoot and speaks at rallies for Black rights and sings folk songs and reminds one of someone like Joan Baez in her steadfast commitment to the hottest social issues of the day. (She probably wouldn't have cared about Jeff's skin, either, but the poor guy was too self-deluded to notice.)
As the story goes on, Jeff, Peggy and several other characters find themselves mixed up in campus protests, urban riots, and unreasonable hatred. Along the way they're forced to see their own prejudices – often reflexive and instinctive – and, well, pretty much stay the same people they were before the events in this book start.
On top of all the oddball problems I've just described, this 168-page quickie is written from different perspectives. We get no fewer than four different approaches to this character's story, each exceeding the previous one in its banality and strange affect. I kept wondering, over and over, how dumb these characters are, how stuck in their idiotic ways they are so they can't actually see the world differently than they did before their loved one was turned black?
Of course, that's also all part of author Linkroum's goal here, I'm sure. It's clear from his approach that he's interested in exploring the idea that racism is arbitrary and simple-minded, that mere skin color is not a diffentiator of the worth of a person, and that our present great national troubles are as absurd as his chracters all act here.
If only Mr. Linkroum had been more satirical, more biting in his humor. Instead the plot of One Before Bedtime all feels a bit undercooked, a bit bland and a bit too on-the-nose for it to really work for me.
I tried looking up Richard Linkroum in my collection of science fiction mags and found no other examples of his work. This is despite the fact that the book was published in hardcover by J.P. Lippincott, a reputable publisher. Finally I was tipped that there's a TV producer who goes by Dick Linkroum who might be our author here. That makes sense because One Before Bedtime reads like a bad episode of the old Twilight Zone: a bit undercooked and way too preachy.
Philip K. Dick has a new novel out. And guess what, it’s very strange. Are you shocked?
The Ganymede Takeover, by Philip K. Dick & Ray Nelson
The space slugs have taken over the Earth.
Those slugs come from the distant planet Ganymede. Earth is their first invasion target ever. But they have ambitions. The Ganymedeans have managed to conquer and occupy our planet. However, the slugs are failing at their third objective: to absorb the people of Earth as their servants.
Resistance is strong in at least one area of the planet: the Bale of Tennessee. There, he will have to fight the Neegs, who are led by a violent revolutionary named Percy X. The dreaded assignment of conquering that area goes to Mekkis, an insecure slug whose fortune bodes poorly.
Mekkis and his fellow conquerors have one great weapon at hand they can use to defeat the humans. A human, the neurotic Dr. Baldani, condemned as quisling, has developed a reality distortion bomb, which can destroy all of humanity. But will he allow that weapon to be used?
The Ganymede Invasion, a rare collaboration between Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, is dense as hell and weird as hell. Dick and Nelson make a pretty good team. Nelson smooths out Dick while Dick makes Nelson weird. Their San Francisco writers’ workshop friends must love the stories the pair creates
The esteemed Mr. Nelson
Truth be told, I missed Dick’s wild randomness at times; I was genuinely shocked that nearly all the elements introduced in the first chapter resolve by the end! Meanwhile, Nelson pushed Dick to go even further with his usual psychedelia, with references to supermarket carts with submachine guns and to vorpal meat cleavers, among many other stunning images. It’s the Summer of Love and this book came from the San Francisco area, so how can you ask for anything timelier?
The Black Panthers at the California state capitol, earlier this year
Percy X is the most intriguing character in the novel. Percy can be seen as an analog to Malcolm X, which would make the Neegs the equivalent of the Black Panther Party. Or he can be seen as a reflection of Perseus, the Greek legend who slayed monsters and came to found the republic of Mycenae. Either interpretation would fit this story. Percy is a crusader, a fighter against the literal monsters of the Ganymedeans and is a true hero. Heck, the name Ganymede implies a reference to Medea.
Philip K. Dick, Nancy Dick, and Robert Silverberg conversing in lobby, Baycon
I haven’t discussed the sentient hotel rooms or talking, neurotic taxi cabs or even a key Quisling type character in the book. There’s just too much to cover in a review like this and I want you to be surprised by what you read.
The Ganymede Invasion isn’t great Dick, but it is hugely entertaining. And like nearly every novel by PKD, Ganymede is a short quick read. I recommend this oddball collaboration.
The third collection of Ellison stories contains the now-typical set of introductions which folks often like as much as the stories they precede. It's a thin volume, with just seven pieces, and it suffers for being less tonally nuanced than the prior two collections. The subject is pain, Harlan's personal pain, and while I'm sure the tales were cathartic to write for him, by the end, they all start to sound like Harlan kvetching to us over a Shirley Temple at around 3am.
Not that they're bad–Harlan is a gifted author–but they are somewhat one-note and unsubtle. To wit:
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The last five humans are trapped in the bowels of the sapient computer who hates and torments them. This is the unexpurgated version of the story that appeared in IF a few months prior, with less veiled references to homosexuality and genitalia.
It's a raw, powerful piece. Four stars.
Big Sam was My Friend: An interstellar carnival makes a stop on a planet with a tradition of human sacrifice. Big Sam, the circus strong man, can't let them go through with it…with disastrous results. Interesting more for the detail than the events.
Three stars.
Eyes of Dust: On a world devoted to and obsessed with personal beauty, can deformity be tolerated? Be careful – perfection may need imperfection to exist!
Another passionate story, but somehow forgettable. Three stars.
World of the Myth: Three astronauts are stranded on a planet: a cruel but charismatic man, the woman who loves him, and the nice fellow who loves the woman. They meet a race of telepathic ants, conversation with whom reveals the true nature of the parties communicating. Can the astronauts stand that knowledge?
It's a neat setup, but a rather prosaic story. Three stars.
Lonelyache: A widower is tormented by dreams in which he is hounded by assassins, forced to dispatch them in the most brutal of fashions. Gradually, the man becomes aware that there is an inchoate…something…sharing his apartment, feeding on his unhappiness. Can he escape its thrall before it's too late?
The story with the most Harlan-esque voice. Three stars.
Delusion for a Dragon Slayer: To all respects, Warren Glazer Griffin was the milquetoastiest of milquetoasts. But when he died in a freak accident, he was allowed to live an afterlife fantasy in which he indulged all of his suppressed depravities. The result isn't pretty.
Three stars.
Pretty Maggie Moneyes: Inspired by a true encounter (and with the best introduction of the collection), this is the tale of the woman who sold her soul for comfort, lost it permanently to a slot machine, and resorted to desperate measures to get free.
An amnesiac narrator on a planet of liars. Le Guin takes us far into Earth’s future where humanity has regressed under the domination of a group of aliens called the Shing.
Our main character is Falk, who looks almost human except for his slitted yellow eyes. He wakes up in the forest with no memory of where he came from and mentally reduced back to the mind of a baby. Falk is taken in by a family and rehabilitated, all the while learning their culture, which fears the Shing who now control Earth and hinder civilization from developing to be any larger than scattered small groups of people across the planet. The Shing are most notable for being liars, something Falk is warned about throughout the book. However, in order to reclaim the answers that were stolen from him, Falk must leave the family and seek out the Shing.
The book drags during the first 80 pages as Falk travels alone through nature. This part serves well to relay the isolation of his journey and to show the effect the Shing’s presence has on Earth’s development. However, overall nothing of great significance happens in this part of the book.
Once Falk gets captured by a hostile group of humans, he meets a slave woman named Strella with whom he plots his escape in exchange for her guiding him to the Shing. Here the book becomes interesting, particularly when something Strella says suggests that the reason Falk has been stripped of his memory might be because that is how the Shing punish criminals. It made me wonder if Falk is really the good guy after all.
However, it isn’t until Falk reaches the City of Illusion that the story reaches its full potential and lives up to its name, as deceptions are uncovered and more information is revealed to Falk, who doesn't know what is true and what is false – including everything he has experienced up until this point. He’s unable to trust the Shing and unsure if they have ulterior motives. I had a lot of fun reading these chapters. Something would be revealed only to be quickly disproved and it made for an exciting read where I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next because I barely knew what the truth was – much like the hero.
The end chapters redeem the slow beginning. For a small world, Le Guin well establishes Earth as something distant and foreign to a modern reader. The plot exercises the brain and leaves the reader in suspense. However, this book is far longer than it needed to be. For 160 pages long, the first 80 pages are particularly empty and I think Le Guin could have achieved the same story by cutting out half the words.
I enjoyed this book, but it failed to impress. 3 stars.
The Strength to Dream
by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall
The Young Philosopher himself
There have been many surprising entries into SF writing, but perhaps none more so than Colin Wilson taking on H. P. Lovecraft.
Best known as a philosopher, Colin Wilson received great acclaim for his first book The Outsider and continues to be successful in this arena, including last year’s Introduction to The New Existentialism.
He has also attempted to express some of his ideas in popular crime fiction, such as Ritual in the Dark and The Glass Cage.
Neither of these avenues lead directly to science fiction, let alone Lovecraft. So how did it happen?
Apparently, Wilson is a fan of the concepts of Lovecraft and had written an essay saying so but expressing distaste for his actual prose. August Derleth saw this and wrote to Wilson suggesting he write his own book on these themes.
The result is The Mind Parasites, what could be described as Post-Lovecraftian. An optimistic existentialist new-wave cosmic horror, which is likely to either impress or appall the reader!
The story starts in 1997, with Dr. Austin learning of the suicide of his friend and colleague Dr. Weissman. The news unsettles him, but the world suicide rate has been increasing over the decades and is in fact a major concern of many people. Delving into his papers, Austin discovers Weissman had been experimenting with ways of expanding his consciousness but became fearful of an evil presence.
At the same time Dr. Austin is working on a dig in Turkey. They discover a remarkable Proto-Hattian settlement where the inhabitants worship “Aboth the Unclean” and have massive blocks of stone which should have been impossible to move in 10000 BC. The site becomes a sensation when an elderly August Derleth notes how much this mirrors the stories of writer H. P. Lovecraft.
These two facts come together to form a startling discovery: for centuries mankind has had its progress impeded by a force that feeds on our despair. The Mind Parasites!
Whilst the concepts and themes are definitely of the cosmic horror seen in 30s Weird Tales, it is also most clearly something different.
Firstly, its writing is more academic than purple prose. This story is said to be compiled from a variety of papers in the early 21st century, explaining the unusual world events in the early 1990s. The fact that it is being told from the future provides an explanation for the style and shows the author giving real consideration to the context.
Secondly, in keeping with Wilson’s “New Existentialist” ideals, the characters are not simply the victims of ideas too big to grasp. Instead this is an ode to the limitless potential of the human mind. Rather than nihilistic, the ending is optimistic and the revelation about the true nature of the titular creatures was a fascinating surprise to me.
Thirdly, and what is likely to repel some readers, is that large passages are devoted to discussion of various theories of the mind and man’s place in the universe. These sections read more like Huxley’s Heaven and Hell than an Ashton Smith fantasy. That is not to say there is not plenty of action, with scenes involving wars, ESP and space flight. But your tolerance for exploration of Wilson’s pet theories is likely to dictate your enjoyment.
Grading this on a standard scale is tough as it is so strange and experimental. So I am giving it a – very subjective – five stars!
And because we have so many books to review, we'll be having another Galactoscope in just two days! Stay tuned…
SF books are like buses, you wait forever for one you want to pick up, then many come along at once. From the weird spy drama of Kingsley Amis’ Anti-Death League, to Andre Norton’s space fantasy The Moon of Three Rings. From Brian W. Aldiss’ collection The Saliva Tree & Other Growths, to expansions from Disch and Zelazny. However, our esteemed editor steered me towards Farmer’s new novel, and I am very glad he did.
Down the Path
I am starting to see through lines in the current crop of great SF writers. J. G. Ballard has been doing his cut-up explorations of Inner Space. Harry Harrison is involved in grim satires of conservative issues. Rosel George Brown has begun writing novels that put her own unique stamp on space adventures. Whilst Roger Zelazny is applying a literary and philosophical twist to the standard scenarios of science fiction and fantasy.
However, Philip Jose Farmer is harder to pin down. What connects the fabulous tales of Riverworld, the sword & wonder novels of Robert Wolff, and the religious exploration of Night of Light? Perhaps his latest novel,The Gate of Time, holds the key?
Through the Doorway
One thing that needs to be noted before I start. This cover bears no relation to the book itself, as best as I can tell (except the existence on men and women in the story). Possibly it was originally intended for another novel and reused?
Whatever the case may be, here is the actual plot of Farmer’s work: Lt. Roger Two Hawks is a half-Iroquoian pilot in WW2. He is going on a bombing raid on the oil fields in Ploetsi when his bomber and a German fighter crash land on a strange Earth. In this one there is another war going on between the Prussian-esque Perkunisha and the Anglo-Nordic Blodland, the latter in alliance with Eastern Europe states whose people seem to be Amerinds. Both sides are aware of these strange visitors and want the technology of their planes to tip the tide in the war.
(As an aside, Two Hawks names this world "Earth 2", which is how I will refer to it going forward. As he makes mention of comic books in the text, I am assuming this a reference to the Earth 2 seen in National Comics' Flash and Justice League of America.)
Earth 2 is built on an interesting premise: what if America had remained largely underwater? A lesser writer would probably do something like all of Europe submerged into a conflict of the totalitarian states of England and France, with the brave American outlander teaching the people the true value of democracy and leading them in a revolution, where he becomes the first president of the United States of Europe.
But not Farmer; he thinks things through in much greater detail. He considers how language and culture would change, the Amerind states that would exist in Europe and Asia, the weather patterns from the differing position of the Gulf Stream and much more. As Farmer posits what is missing from the Earth 2 without the Americas, he shows how pivotal the American continent has been to world history in a vast number of ways. In doing so he creates one of his most fleshed out worlds.
Two Hawks avoids being the kind of cliché you might find in, for example, a Mack Reynolds story. He says he is as much a part of mainstream White American culture as he is Iroquoian. And he regularly rejects people’s assumptions of him, such as believing he grew up on a reservation. His knowledge is of mechanics, history and science, not the kind of spiritual and earthy traditional you usually see depicted in Amerind characters.
Whilst, by necessity, large parts of the plot are told through long conversations about the nature of Earth 2 and how it compares to Earth 1 (Two Hawks’ Earth), I never found myself being bogged down. This is a pacey thriller where I was constantly engaged and wanting to know what happened next.
This does lead to my most major issue with the text: the simplicity of plot at times. Once you get past the differences in the world, it is largely a pulpy World War Two adventure. We have Germans (by geography if not ethnicity) who are committing genocidal acts against Eastern European populations and the British fighting them. Two Hawks allies with the British stand ins, not out of some moral sense (he says he doesn’t really think there is that much difference between nations in this world) but instead because he just doesn’t like Germans. At the same time the imported German pilot, Raske, is an opportunistic villain not given any more depth than being a tricky antagonist for Two Hawks.
Farmer would also have us believe history aligns on other Earths. If things are so different, why was there also a First World War where the Perkunishans were defeated? Why does Blodland have Dravidian (Indian) bases? Why are languages so similar between the Earths? The reason just seems to be, “because”.
I don’t want to be overly harsh. There is still a lot to like. I want to also note the framing device, which is used to pull off a final twist to great effect. The only other time I can think of a similar device being used is in Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet.
All of this adds up to another fantastic entry in Farmer’s bibliography.
On the Other Side of the Wall
But, to return to my original question: what is it that holds together the disparate threads of Farmers fiction? I think it is the worlds themselves. Earth 2 in The Gate of Time is just as well conceived and memorable as Riverworld or Okeanas.
As such I hope we get more tales in this setting. Whether that be Two Hawks visiting more timelines, or just more of the history of Earth 2.
Imagine a world that has been colonized – but the colonizers have lived on that world so long that their descendents have nearly forgotten their original roots.
And imagine those colonizers have the ability to communicate with each other using a kind of telepathy that always keeps them in contact with each other.
And imagine a world with a sixty-year rotation around its sun, a rotation so slow that seasons take years in our time. In fact, it's a rotation so slow that grown adults have no idea what winter will be like and have never seen snow.
And imagine on that world, there are groups who are at war with each other for the limited resources on that planet. And that the colonizers are caught in the middle of that war.
And finally, imagine an independent local woman and a passionate colonist meet, become fascinated with each other, get married impulsively, and become embroiled in a war.
Sounds like the recipe for a 400-page book, right?
And yet Ursula K. LeGuin creates a whole. compelling, intriguing world in a mere 125 pages in Planet of Exile.
Earlier this year I enthused over LeGuin's debut novel Rocannon's World, praising the author for her strengths in building a complex fictional environment and for bridging the gap between fantasy and science fiction. Planet of Exile builds on those strengths, taking readers to a world that seems vivid on the page, with complex interrelationships, intriguing characters and a background which seems to go back hundreds of years.
LeGuin smartly starts the book by anchoring readers in the experiences of the independent woman, Rolery, who is wandering through a forest at the "last moonphase of autumn" (as LeGuin states it) and is startled by a barefoot runner dashing through the woods towards her native town of Tovar. But Rolery goes the opposite direction, towards the village of the "farborn"; forbidden, mysterious, a place she could scarcely imagine but which holds great fascination for her. In that farborn village, she meets a farborn man named Jacob Agat whose life changes her and changes the city of Tovar.
Planet of Exile is an odd book in part because this relationship feels so insubstantial and unreal. This mismatched couple don't fall in love as much as they fall into admiration, or caring, or simply desperately feel the need for deep companionship. Lesser writers might have created a simple Romeo and Juliet type relationship between Rolery and Agat. But LeGuin's ambitions seem well beyond the obvious cliché and instead she explores more complex ideas like assimilation, battles for resources, and the complex struggles to thrive in an alien environment.
If LeGuin merely touches upon those ideas rather than dwells on them, well, blame that on the page length and consider this young author may merely need to grow into fully exploring these concepts.
Ms. LeGuin
About half this book is taken up with the battles between the barbaric nomads, the Gaal, and the people of Tevara. The battles are often seen as slivers, in fragments, through the eyes of the different characters of this book rather than in omniscient form. As such, the events feel extraordinarily vivid. I was deeply struck by a scene of the invading Gaal force and their supporters so large they filled one large valley from end to end, with more of them coming. And a rooftop battle reflected a wonderful combination of Errol Flynn style derring-do and alien landscapes.
All of this thoughtful inventiveness makes for a tremendously entertaining and tremendously dense read, accentuated by LeGuin's empathetic and often poetic writing which has a fantastic knack for bringing alien situations to life. There's a kind of ecstatic forward-hurtling beauty in a paragraph like this one that had me entranced:
She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of thier great difference: as if it were the difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining together, freed them.
Ultimately, Planet of Exile is a novel of aspirations not quite met. War is fought and attacks repelled at great cost. Relationships start but never reach an emotionally satisfying happy ending. Many complex questions are raised but never quite answered. And the character of Rolery is intriguing in her independence and agency, in her impulsive decisions and her steadfast curiousity, but she never becomes the three-dimensional character LeGuin obviously saw in her mind.
I concluded my review of Ms. LeGuin's earlier novel with a wish to read more novels that would realize the promise of this exciting new author. I am left now in a similar position, albeit perhaps closer to that realization.
3.5 stars
[Note: the flip side of this Double, Mankind Under the Leash, is an expansion of the 1965 story White Fang Goes Dingo (Ed.)]
One of my favorite sci-fi publishers these days is Ace Books. We've talked about their double novels a lot on the Journey, so I'm sure you're well aware of them, but I'd like to take a moment to consider just how delightful their line has been over the last decade-plus.
For the last 15 years or so, Ace's flip books, or tête-bêches if you want to get all French about them, have presented a wide spectrum of science fiction from some of the grand masters. Asimov, Brackett, deCamp and Dick have all been published under the Ace banner along with more modern writers like John Brunner, Kenneth Bulmer and Damon Knight. And while some of these little novels haven't been great – Agent of the Unknown, to choose one at random, has a fun cover but an uninspiring story – others are thoroughly delightful.
And best of all, all these little novels are all short! Most are 120 pages or less: a quick couple hours' read while on the bus or after school.
Whether delivered as an opportunity to repackage Ziff-Davis novels, or a chance for a young writer to experiment with his or her craft, or a chance for an older writer to burn off an unpublished tale, the reader gets real value from his or her 35¢ (in the '50s) or 50¢ today. And whether the reader discovers a nice treasure or total drek, the low price point and quick-read style of the books seldom leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
The biggest thrill for me with these Ace novels is to get to see a growing science fiction talent spread his or her wings a bit and deliver a terrific first novel. Rocannon's World is exactly that kind of thrill. Written by up-and-coming author Ursula K. LeGuin, this expansion of an earlier Amazing Stories tale shows a passion for alien cultures that demonstrates a unique and intriguing viewpoint.
Rocannon's World is a kind of sci-fi/fantasy hybrid. Our protagonist is Gaverel Rocannon, an ethnologist on a mission to explore the biology of the planet Fomalhaut II. Though Fomalhaut II is nominally under an exploration embargo by the League of All Worlds, the League's enemy establishes a base on Formalhut to battle them.
If you're thinking this sounds like the launch of one of those novels all about the lone hero fighting and defeating a staunch enemy, you're both right and wrong. Eventually Rocannon is able to win, but he only does so after a long and arduous — and exciting — journey, and only after causing himself great trauma and pain.
Formalhut is an intriguing planet, and LeGuin gives this planet an clever sort of fantasy feel. Rocannon and his native companions fly on "windsteeds," giant flying cat creatures, he encountrers dwarflike Gdemiar, rodent like Kiemhir, elven Fiia, even nightmarish creatures just called Winged Ones. It all feels like a bit of lesser Tolkien, and that gives this brief book a lot of its charm.
The author Ms. LeGuin
But charming as this book is, LeGuin wrote something more interesting and complex than a simple story about a battle on another planet. Rocannon goes through an archetypical journey to his heroism. He starts a bit feckless but soon learns the importance of his journey. After enlisting the help of newfound friends, Rocannon gains confidence and trust. His moment of transformation happens when he goes into a mountainside cave. While in the cave, he encounters "the Old One", a strange entity who grants Rocannon "mindspeech", or telepathy, in exchange for giving himself to the planet.
That mindspeech is a blessing and curse, granting Rocannon the ability to win his war but also granting him the chance to psychically feel the pain of all the beings he has killed.
All of this is heady stuff that expands on the considerable promise Ms. LeGuin has shown in her short stories. Though the novel has some flaws, most of them are tied to its abbreviated length. There's a feeling throughout of playing with key ideas and concepts, a kind of authorial exploration of her own mind. I hope we get to return to this world, but even more I hope the author has more good novels in her.
Rocannon's World 3.5 stars
[Note: This novel appears to be a sequel of sorts to Dowry of the Angyar, reviewed in these pages two years ago (ed.)]
I was surprised and happy to discover I liked the flip side of this double novel nearly as much. I've never been a big fan of Avram Davidson's stories in the mags, finding them a bit wordy and dull. Somehow, though, this novel clicked in for me much more than his short stories usually do, and I found myself intrigued and captived by a lot of The Kar-Chee Reign.
Kar-Chee takes place in a far-future Earth. Hollowed out by over-mining and ecological collapse, Earth has been abandoned and forgotten by her children who have long since settled on distant planets. Only a small number of humans remain on the planet, eking out a small subsistence lifestyle. Those humans, though, are imperiled by an insectlike alien race called the Kar-Chee, out to strip Earth of its few remaining minerals, for reasons completely unknown to humans.
As with the LeGuin novel, you can probably guess how Mr. Davidson's story will play out: a group of humans rally their forces, gather up their courage, build smart weapons and begin to beat back the invaders and reclaim Earth's birthright.
The author Mr. Davidson
Like Rocannon, the pleasure in Kar-Chee lies in its journey, not in its destination. Davidson delivers large amounts of expository text in this book, giving readers the background of Earth's downfall in a lyrical style that feels as evocative as stories told around a campfire. Those sections of this novel have a suprising power and I found myself missing the expository elements when the book settled back into its action-packed elements. I wonder if Mr. Davidson has any interest in writing a future history chronicle, because I would love to read something like that.
The Kar-Chee Reign: 3 stars
The April '66 Ace Double turned out to be… well, aces, or at least a Jack and a Queen. Who knows what the next publication will bring? I'll be haunting the paperback rack at my local Woolworth's till the next book arrives.
Big surprise: Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, the three civil rights workers who disappeared in June in Mississippi after being pulled over for speeding in Neshoba County and then released, have been found dead, buried under an earthen dam, two of them shot in the heart, the third shot multiple times and mutilated. The sheriff of Neshoba County had said, “They're just hiding and trying to cause a lot of bad publicity for this part of the state.” During the six weeks that law enforcement was failing to find their bodies, they did find the bodies of eight other Negroes, five of them yet unidentified—business as usual, apparently, in that part of the country.
The Issue at Hand
by Robert Adragna
The September Amazing has a different look from the usual hard-edged Popular Mechanics-ish style of Emsh and especially of Alex Schomburg. Robert Adragna’s cover features surreal-looking buildings and machinery against a bright yellow background (land and sky), a little reminiscent of the familiar style of Richard Powers, but probably closer to that of the UK artist Brian Lewis, who brought the mildly non-literal look in bright colors (as opposed to Powers’s often more morose palette) to New Worlds and Science Fantasy for several years.
The contents? Within normal limits. Business as usual here, too, though less grisly.
The Kingdoms of the Stars, by Edmond Hamilton
The issue leads off with The Kingdoms of the Stars, by Edmond Hamilton, a sequel to his novel The Star Kings, which originated in Amazing in 1947, and is to the subgenre of space opera what the International Prototype of the Kilogram is to the realm of weights and measures. In The Star Kings, regular guy John Gordon of Earth finds his mind swapped with that of Zarth Arn, a prince of the far-future Mid-Galactic Empire, and ends up having to lead the Empire’s space fleets against the forces of the League of Dark Worlds (successfully of course, despite a rather thin resume for the job). He also hits it off with Princess Lianna of the Fomalhaut Kingdom before he is returned to his own Twentieth Century body and surroundings.
The new story opens in a psychiatrist’s office, with John Gordon much perturbed by his memories of chasing around the galaxy and wooing a star-princess. He wants to find out if he is delusional. This may be a case of Art imitating Life, or at least imitating somebody else’s account of Life with the serial numbers filed off. Hamilton surely knows of (and I think is sardonically guying) The Fifty-Minute Hour (1955), a volume of six case histories by the psychiatrist Dr. Robert Lindner, one of which, The Jet-Propelled Couch, involves a similar story of a patient with detailed memories or fantasies of living in a spacefaring far future, which he ultimately abandoned and admitted were delusions.
But shrink notwithstanding, Gordon is brought back into the future, corporeally this time, by the benevolent machinations of Zarth An. Princess Lianna is anxiously awaiting him, but this time he’s in his own body and not Zarth An’s, and she’s going to have to get used to it. Meanwhile, they trundle off to the Fomalhaut Kingdom to attend to the affairs the Princess has been neglecting. En route, to avoid ambush, they head for the primitive planet Marral, ostensibly to confer with the Princess’s cousin Narath Teyn (who is in fact one of the schemers against her). Various intrigues and diversions occur there, followed by a narrow escape that sets the scene for the next in what obviously will be a series.
One can’t quarrel with the execution. Hamilton lays it on thick in the accustomed manner:
“Across the broad loom and splendor of the galaxy, the nations of the Star-Kings were marked in many-colored fire, crimson and gold and emerald green, blue and violet and diamond-white . . . the kingdoms of Lyra, Cygnus, Cassiopeia, Polaris, and the capital of the great Mid-Galactic Empire of Canopus. The Hercules Cluster blazed with its Baronies of swarming suns. To the south, as the cruiser beat westward toward Fomalhaut, the Orion Nebula sprawled its coiling radiance across the firmament. Far northward lay the black blot of the Cloud, where drowned Thallarna lay now in peace.”
Oh, and don’t forget the “vast wilderness of the Marches of Outer Space” (in space, can anyone hear you march?), presided over by the Counts of the Marches, who are allied to the Empire. And so on. Along the way there is plenty more colorful decoration, not least the telepathic struggle between a sinister gray-cowled alien and the deeply loyal Korkhann, Fomalhaut’s Minister of Non-Human Affairs, five feet tall and resplendent in gray feathers. At the end, Gordon concludes that this world beats hell out of the “sordid dream” of Twentieth Century life to which the psychiatrist wanted to confine him. Fiddle-de-dee, Dr. Lindner!
But—kings? It’s ultimately pretty depressing to be told that after two hundred thousand years, humanity hasn’t come up with something better than monarchy and all its cheesy pageantry. Bah! What this galaxy needs is a few good tumbrils and guillotines.
Three stars—a compromise between capable execution and shameless cliche.
There’s no monarchy in the issue’s other novelet, James H. Schmitz’s Clean Slate, but exactly what there is remains murky. It’s fifteen years since the Takeover, when several “men of action” . . . well, took over, though there’s no more explanation than that. There seem to be elections, or at least the risk of them, and public opinion has to be attended to if not necessarily followed.
The viewpoint character is George Hair, a Takeover functionary in charge of the Department of Education, and nominally supervisor of ACCED—a post-Takeover research program designed to develop “accelerated education” to produce enough adequately trained people to keep this complex modern civilization humming. Problem is the high-pressure regime of experimental ACCED, very successful in the short run, causes severe psychological problems as the kids get a little older. It seems having a personality gets in the way of this educational force-feeding for the greater good.
So they go to younger kids—less personality to get in the way–and when that doesn’t work, they get some newborns, who should have even less. Still doesn’t work. So they apply techniques of SELAM—selective amnesia—to get some of people’s inconvenient memories out of the way.
Maybe you’ve noticed that this is completely crazy. It gets more so: hey, why not just get rid of all the memories, to create the clean slate of the title? The guy running the ACCED program is the first subject of this total memory elimination, which, followed by intensive ACCED, will make him a superman!
But there’s a snag. A big one, with huge implications for the program, and the government, and the story ends on the brink of a denouement that is hair-raising, not to mention Hair-razing.
The story is a meandering mix of scenes with actual dialogue and action and long stretches of Hair’s ruminations and recollections about the history of ACCED and the politics of the post-Takeover government and his place in it. Like many of Schmitz’s stories, it really shouldn’t work at all, and does so only because he is such a smooth writer one is lulled into keeping on reading. That smoothness also distracts one from the fact that what he is writing about—the subjection of children first to an educational program that destroys them psychologically, and then to the eradication of part or all of their memories—is utterly monstrous, worthy of the Nazis’ Dr. Mengele (also something not unknown in Schmitz). Three stars and a shudder. This one is hard to put out of one’s mind.
Fomalhaut rears its head again in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dowry of Angyar, which takes place on a human-and-other-sentients-inhabited planet in that system, one with enough contact with humans to be taxed for wars by them, but not much more. Semley, a princess of the Angyar, covets an elaborately jeweled necklace which has somehow vanished from her family’s treasury, goes on a quest for it among the planet’s other sentient species, and gets badly burned by her greed and by not understanding enough about what is going on. It’s very well written and visualized, as always with Le Guin, but its ostentatiously folk-taley and homiletic quality is a bit tedious to my taste, and it’s too long by about half—an off day for a class act. Nonetheless, three stars for capable writing.
The Sheeted Dead, by Robert Rohrer
by Virgil Finlay
Robert Rohrer is back with The Sheeted Dead, blurbed as “A tale of horror . . . a story not for weaklings,” illustrated by Virgil Finlay in a style reminiscent of the old horror comics that were driven out of existence by public outcry and congressional hearings. The story is written in the same spirit. In the future, humans have fought wars all over space, and as a result, “great clouds of radioactive dust blew through the galaxy.” To avoid extinction, Earth has Withdrawn—that is, surrounded itself with some sort of electronic barrier so no radiation can get in, meanwhile leaving its armies stranded around the galaxy to die.
A mutated virus brings the local deceased and decayed veterans to life, or at least to animation, in their mausoleums on Earth, and they set off for the illuminated cities searching for revenge for their abandoned comrades, and for the field generator, so they can turn it off, allowing them to see the Sun again, and also killing off everyone left alive. William Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” We’re waiting. Meanwhile, this is at least (over)written with a modicum of skill and conviction. Two stars and a suppressed groan.
The Alien Worlds, by Ben Bova
Ben Bova’s The Alien Worlds continues his series on how humans could live on the planets of the Solar System, this time focusing on Mercury, Jupiter and the planets further out, and the planetoid belt (as he calls it, ignoring the more common usage “asteroid belt”). The material is mostly familiar and rendered a bit dully, as is frequent with Bova. Two stars.
Summing Up
Overall, not bad; most of the issue’s contents are at least perfectly readable, reaching the median through different combinations of fault and virtue. As always, one would prefer something a little bit above the ordinary; as all too frequently, one does not get it. In print and elsewhere.
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So, we have a new civil rights law, one which should transform life in the segregated South—not to mention the less overtly segregated North—if implemented. Note the last phrase. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, three civil rights workers involved in voter registration efforts have been missing for three weeks, after being pulled over for speeding by a local sheriff, then released. Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner: remember those names. I wonder if we will hear them again.
The Issue at Hand
This August Amazing features on its cover Robert F. Young’s The HoneyEarthers, on its face a depressing prospect. After his tiresome rehashes of Bible stories and fairy tales, is Young now sending Ralph Kramden into space? Fortunately, no. This time, Young has actually tried to write a story. It’s pretty terrible, but still, the effort is there. Attention must be paid to this man . . . briefly.
by Richard McKenna
The HoneyEarthers, by Robert F. Young
Young essays a rather complicated plot, and if you have any interest in reading the story, you might want to do so now. Okay, back? It begins with an unnamed kid working as an ice miner in Saturn’s rings, and he gets into fatal-looking trouble. Next, there’s an older man, Aaron, escorting a younger woman on the HoneyEarth Express to the Moon—his son’s wife Fleurette. His son Ronny (Aaron Jr.) has left her and is fleeing prosecution for tax evasion. The father is in love with his son’s wife, but this trip is to be entirely chaste, even though the voyage is typically for honeymooners, some of whose amatory antics on the flight are mentioned with disapproval.
On the Moon, Aaron discloses that Ronny was the doomed ice miner, whom Aaron rescued in the nick of time and then adopted. But Ronny experienced space fright and developed space fugue and can’t remember anything before the rescue. And there’s more! In the interim, Aaron went to the stars, spent a number of years on two different planets, and made a bunch of money. Now, he says, Ronny (having fled to space) is about to have a second space fright episode, which will bring back his memory of the years he lost to amnesia from the first episode, while cancelling out his memory of the intervening years, including Aaron and Fleurette.
by George Schelling
By this point it seems clear that Aaron and Ronny, decades apart in age, are the same person. But . . . where’s the necessary time travel? As mentioned, Aaron traveled to two extrasolar planets, then came back to Mars, and headed for Saturn to rescue Ronny. Now I know what you’re thinking—this guy has confused time dilation from faster-than-light interstellar travel with time travel!
But no. Young has instead relied on that time-honored technique of the field: just making stuff up. In this case, it’s called “circumventing the space-time equalization schedule,” a phrase that is not explained but which the author apparently thinks means he can bend time to his will and the needs of the plot. And after Aaron’s long anguished confession of all this history to Fleurette, it looks like he’s going to get his just reward.
All this takes place in the overarching context of Young’s familiar overbearing sentimentality about beautiful young women, which reaches a crescendo, fever pitch, or something like that. To wit:
“A girl stepped into the room.
“She had dark-brown hair. She was tall and slender. She had gray eyes and a round full face. The girlish dress she was wearing began below her shoulders, and the firelight had
already fallen in love with her smooth clear skin. Meadow flowers grew around her, and her mouth had the redness of the wild raspberries that grew in the fields of his youth. Spring resided in the dew-brightness of her eyes; her cheeks held the hue of frost-kissed leaves. Spring, summer, fall and finally winter in the snow-whiteness of her hands. . . .
“She came like a summer wind across the room and kissed him, and he knew the fields once again: the fields and the woods and the warm summer sun, and the red and succulent berries that had stained his lips and filled his mouth with sweetness.”
I believe the critics’ technical term for this is “icky.” There’s plenty of it. There are also other comment-worthy items, such as the notion of space fright, which causes amnesia, but a second episode of space fright will bring back the errant memories, a height of contrivance equal to the “space-time equalization schedule.” But enough. One star, with a ribbon for the labor this confection obviously required.
Selection, by Ursula K. Le Guin
by George Schelling
This jokey short story is in some ways the antithesis of The HoneyEarthers (by being jokey, for starters). On a colony planet, marriages are arranged by computer, and there’s no appeal. The protagonist, Miss Ekstrom-Ngungu, intensely dislikes her designated husband, Mr. Chang-Oliver, but in the absence of other options, they go through with it, and the bottom line seems to be that people get over things fairly easily in the face of a little danger and the need to get on with life. The selection process is presided over by a Mr. Gosseyn-Ho; appropriating the name of the protagonist of van Vogt’s The World of Null-A seems to be a dig at the long history of pseudo-rationality in SF. The story is a lightweight satire but is less cartoony than most of its type, with more density of detail than usual about the colony planet and the work of the colonists. Le Guin is a very solid writer even in her more relaxed moments. Three stars.
Valedictory, by Phyllis Gotlieb
by George Schelling
Phyllis Gotlieb, author of the rather overblown but underperforming serial Sunburst, is back with a miniature, Valedictory, in which a woman in training to be a time-traveling researcher thinks she needs to go back and comfort her younger self. Like Le Guin’s (and unlike Young’s!), this is a story about getting over things, rendered with nice economy. Three stars.
Furnace of the Blue Flame, by Robert Rohrer
by Robert Adragna
The precocious Robert Rohrer (b. 1946), who I would guess has just graduated from high school, contributes Furnace of the Blue Flame, but might as well not have bothered. It’s a capably written but terminally cliched post-apocalyptic story—you know, the kind that refers to “the still-scorched fields south of Nuyuk . . . the rocky wastes surrounding Bigchi . . . the plains of baked clay north of Lanna,” and so forth. Morg, a lone wanderer and apostle of knowledge, disposes of a local petty tyrant who keeps his people in ignorance. Morg uses the surviving nuclear reactor of the title to beat the bad guys. Two stars.
Zelerinda, by Gordon Walters
by George Schelling
The last item of fiction is Zelerinda, a long and turgid novelet by Gordon Walters, said to be a pseudonym of George W. Locke, who has published a few scattered stories under the two names. Zelerinda is a planet that is missing half the elements in the periodic table and has a temperature of 600 degrees F., so life on it is impossible—or so one would think. There’s been a series of nuclear explosions, which aren’t exactly natural, are they? So two guys are sent to investigate, one of whom possesses a poorly defined psi talent called delvining, or possessing a delvin, which he thinks he has to hide, though that idea is quickly forgotten. It’s quite badly written and about three times too long, though the ultimate revelation is at least mildly clever. Two stars.
Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman, by Sam Moskowitz
Sam Moskowitz’s SF Profile is Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman, which immediately raises two questions: who cares, and why bother? Meaning no disrespect to that shallow debasement of the conceptual armory of science fiction—er, let me try that again. While Superman in all his incarnations is no doubt of interest to students of popular culture, broadly speaking, one would think that Moskowitz would find higher priorities in this series on prominent SF writers. That said, it’s a perfectly adequate summary of a low-profile brief career in SF leading to a more substantial one in comics. Most interestingly, during World War II, the government found it necessary to suppress two Superman strips concerning atomic energy. Two stars.
Summing Up
So Amazing continues to idle, with the occasional loud backfire from the likes of Robert F. Young, and intervals of smooth humming from, this time, the very competent Ursula K. Le Guin and the getting-the-hang Phyllis Gotlieb. Next month, Edmond Hamilton and James H. Schmitz are promised. Expect no sudden shifting of gears.
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Judging by the unstoppable juggernaut known as the Beatles, it would seem that not much has changed in the last month or so. Following the massive success of I Want to Hold Your Hand, which remained Number One in the USA for all of February and half of March, the four Liverpudlians had another smash hit. Perhaps best known for its frequent use of the phrase Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, the upbeat rock ditty She Loves You is currently the most popular song on this side of the Atlantic.
Will they beat Elvis?
Of course, new things continue to happen. The Ford Motor Company just produced a snazzy sports car called the Mustang.
It even matches that lady's outfit.
Voters in New Hampshire overwhelmingly approved the first legal state lottery in the nation since 1895. Governor John W. King bought the first ticket.
He'll look even happier if he wins.
The Issue at Hand
Similarly, the latest issue of Fantastic offers a touch of the new, along with a lot of things that will seem familiar.
by Frank Bruno
Centipedes of Space, by Daniel F. Galouye
Here's a story filled with the traditional elements of space opera. The main character is an Admiral in command of a fleet of two thousand starships. (Writers always seem to assume that military space vessels will resemble Navy ships. I suppose it’s the romance of the high seas.) An enemy armada threatens a group of inhabited worlds. To reach the area in time to stop the attack, he must guide his flotilla through a dangerous region of space. Few ships have survived such a journey.
Bizarre creatures, from giant worms to dinosaurs, attack the warships. Even stranger things happen, such as a naked woman suddenly appearing on the Admiral's flagship. The phenomena can't be explained as hallucinations, because ships are destroyed and men die. (There are no women in this future Space Navy.) Will anyone survive to stop the invasion?
Despite some originality, decent writing, and good characterization, this is a typical space adventure. There's an explanation for the weird happenings, but it's not particularly convincing or interesting.
(Based on what little I know about the legends of Camelot, I presume the author is using a pseudonym. Further evidence for this is the fact that the narrator of this tale of eldritch horror is named Grail.)
In 1920, a British researcher arrives in New England to investigate an Indian burial ground. He meets the owner of a lumber mill. The fellow wants to look at the area also, as a possible source of wood. Complicating matters is a strange blue light seen by his workers. If that isn't spooky enough, the bodies of drowned animals keep showing up in the local river. It won't surprise you to find out that this involves the grave of an Indian sorcerer.
There aren't many surprises in this imitation of Lovecraft. Nitpickers will notice that the phrase comic book appears, although those didn't exist in 1920.
Two stars.
A Ritual for Souls, by Albert Teichner
We get a break from old-fashioned storytelling with this offbeat yarn. Very peculiar aliens arrive on a depopulated Earth. They take on human form in order to study the extinct species, which they think of as soulless. They decide to imitate human behavior as well. This turns out to be a bad idea.
I'm not sure what the author is trying to say in this dark satire of humanity's foibles. It seems to be, at least partly, an attack on the philosophy of behaviorism. At least it's different.
Back to the familiar, with a tale of wizards and dragons. The only magician on a small island is a middle-aged man, short and fat, without much skill. A seafarer arrives, who also happens to be an enchanter. It seems that a wizard made off with a dragon's treasure some time ago. The new arrival thinks the local magician has it. He's in for a surprise.
Deftly written, this light fantasy is reasonably entertaining, but the twist ending is predictable. Particularly notable is the author's creation of an interesting fantasy world consisting only of islands. Perhaps she'll make further use of it in the future.
Three stars.
The Devil Came to Our Valley, by Fulton T. Grant
This month's Fantasy Classic comes from the March 1937 issue of Bluebook. I hesitate to call it a Classic, and it definitely isn't Fantasy. The introduction by Sam Moskowitz tries to convince me that it's part of the Lost Race subgenre, but I don't buy it. The isolated group of people in the story are very real. Known as the Jackson Whites, they inhabit a mountainous area of New Jersey. Their ancestry isn't clear, although the author presumes they're a mixture of Indian, African, and European. Whatever the truth may be, there is nothing supernatural about these folks, in reality or in fiction.
An orphaned girl is not one of the Jackson Whites, but is raised among them. She falls in love with a young man of the people. The community thinks of them as married, without the need for ceremony. A wealthy man shows up in a nearby town. The woman is drawn to the luxuries he can provide. This leads to murder, a dramatic courtroom trial, and a self-sacrificing gesture by the woman.
This tragic tale walks a thin line between genuine emotion and melodrama, often falling on the wrong side. There's plenty of local color, although I can't vouch for how accurate it is. Some of the narration is beautifully written, some of it is overwritten. The author appears to feel great sympathy for the Jackson Whites, but also portrays them as ignorant and lawless. Although not speculative fiction in any sense of the word, the background is exotic enough to appeal to readers of such.
Three stars.
Summing Up
Without any outstanding stories, this is a disappointing issue. Neither the traditional tales nor the one unusual piece offer much excitement, although some are enjoyable enough. I guess it goes to show that, however much we might hunger for something new, change isn't always an improvement.
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Ring Out the Old
Is it 1964 yet?
The caption says Happy New Year, Kids!
These happy young cosmonauts seem to think so. That's a Vostok rocket they're carrying. You remember Vostok, don't you? The Soviet space program that sent the first man and the first woman into orbit? No wonder they look so happy.
Here in the good old USA we do things a little differently.
It's not even Christmas yet, but this guy is ready.
No matter how you celebrate the holiday season, this is the time to remember the old and look forward to the new. For Americans, of course, the most important change was the loss of a martyred President and the inauguration of a new one. We are not likely to forget 1963 for a very long time.
Norman Rockwell pays tribute to the late JFK.
When it comes to space travel, yesteryear's new ideas turn old very quickly. The X-20 program was cancelled this month, after seven years of development. There goes $660,000,000 down the drain. Looks like the proposed Dyna-Soar reusable spacecraft is now as dead as a dinosaur.
Now that's what I call a real spaceship!
The old British Empire continues to evolve into new, independent nations. As of December 12, Zanzibar and Kenya are the newest members of the United Nations.
In the world of popular music, a new artist paid tribute to a man who lived more than seven hundred years ago. Belgian singer-songwriter Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers, better known in the United States as the Singing Nun, holds the top position on the American music charts with her original composition Dominique.
Deckers is a member of the Missionary Dominican Sisters of Our Lady of Fichermont, where she took the name Sister Luc-Gabrielle. In her native land she is called Sœur Sourire (Sister Smile.) The song pays tribute to Saint Dominic (1170-1221), for whom the order is named. You don't have to be Catholic, or understand French, to appreciate the Singing Nun's pleasant voice, or the cheerful melody of her song.
The second foreign language song to reach Number One in the USA this year. At least the Americans didn't give it a silly name, the way they changed Kyu Sakamoto's lovely tune Ue o Muite Arukō into Sukiyaki.
Ring In the New
Fittingly, the latest issue of Fantastic (and the first dated in the coming year) features the first half of a new novel, but one that was born twenty-five years ago.
You may not know the name Harry Fischer. A new writer, perhaps? Well, not exactly. In fact, Fischer created the famous characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in a letter to his friend Leiber nearly three decades ago. Since then, of course, the great fantasist has made the pair of adventurers his own. In 1937, Fischer wrote about ten thousand words of a novel. Leiber completed it, and it appears here for the first time.
Quarmall is a strange kingdom. Its ruler lives in a keep above ground, but the rest of his realm lies deep down below. He has two adult sons. One reigns over the upper half of this underground land, the other the lower half. The brothers are bitter rivals, each trying to destroy the other through treachery and magic. They also plot against their father. He, in turn, hopes to eliminate his sons and leave his kingdom to the unborn child of a concubine.
Unknown to each other, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are each hired as a swordsman by one of the brothers. When the king's archmage announces the death of his master, the conflict between the siblings explodes into open warfare.
As you would expect from Leiber, this tale of derring-do is full of vivid, exotic details. The plot moves slowly, with much of the story taken up with the bored frustration of the two heroes. Fafhrd's rescue of a lovely young slave doomed to be tortured provides some excitement. No doubt the second half will provide plenty of sorcery and swordplay. It's not a bad yarn, but hardly up to Leiber's usual standard.
Three stars.
Minnesota Gothic, by Dobbin Thorpe
Another new author? Hardly. Thomas M. Disch, who appears later in the magazine, hides behind this peculiar pseudonym. The story is about a little girl named Gretel, but don't expect an old-fashioned fairy tale. The time is now. Gretel's mother leaves her in the care of a very old woman and her strange, bedridden brother. Black magic is involved, but not the way you might expect. This is a well-written, chilling little story. I wouldn't advise reading it on a dark and stormy night.
With four or five stories to her credit, LeGuin is still a relatively new voice in fantasy fiction, but her skill makes her seem like an old pro. Her latest tale of enchantment begins with a wizard trapped in a prison made of darkness. An evil sorcerer robbed him of his magic staff and locked him away. Although the loss of his staff greatly diminishes his power, he still possesses the ability to transform himself. He attempts to escape in many ways, only to be recaptured and made even weaker. In order to defeat his enemy, he must pay the ultimate price.
The author creates a dark fantasy of great imagination and vividness. The reader is sure to empathize with the despair and heroism of the protagonist.
Four stars.
Last Order, by Gordon Walters
Like LeGuin, Walters is a writer with few published works. Sadly, he doesn't share her talent. The story begins on an asteroid. An undescribed being tries to protect its master from an attack by police robots. When the master dies, it seeks revenge on all those who resemble the robots. The scene shifts to Earth. A detective with a fear of space travel receives an invitation to investigate the asteroid with his old partner, who left for space long ago. It turns out that the vengeful being kills anyone who arrives on the asteroid. After a dangerous encounter with the being, the truth comes out.
The characters frequently speculate about the possibility of a disembodied alien lifeform joining with spacemen in symbiosis. This turns out to be a complete red herring. The reader quickly learns that the spacesuits of the future are intimately connected to the bodies of their wearers, so the climax of the story is no surprise. There's much too little plot for a novelette.
Two stars.
A Thesis On Social Forms and Social Controls in the U. S. A.,by Thomas M. Disch
The secret identity of Dobbin Thorpe emerges from disguise with this fictional essay. It describes a nightmarish world of the future. In the Twenty-First Century, China and the Soviet Union destroy each other in an atomic war. Africa collapses into a state of permanent crisis. Europe is under the control of the Vatican. (Most Protestants move to the United States, which now includes Canada.) Only Australia emerges unchanged.
Disch begins with the famous dictums of George Orwell. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. Freedom is Slavery. To these, he adds two more. Life is Death. Love is Hate. One by one, he describes how these principles apply to American society. All adult males serve one year out of every five as a brutalized slave. The other four years they indulge in unrestrained orgies of pleasure. Women must care for the children they bear from multiple mates, or else serve as laborers or prostitutes.
The author paints a terrifying portrait of a culture that deliberately chooses to be schizophrenic. The essay's cold logic convinces the reader that such an insane world might truly exist. The stories by Thorpe and Disch could not be more different, except for the fact that they both induce a strong sense of foreboding.
Four stars.
Summing Up, and a Bonus Review
The new year begins with a very pessimistic issue of the magazine. From the sadistic Lords of Quarmall, to the insane world of the future, hardly a hint of hope appears in its pages. Even the book review by S. E. Cotts deals with a novel haunted by doom. I have read The Sundial by Shirley Jackson, discussed in the column. It's a very strange book. A group of eccentric people waits for the end of the world inside a weird house. Like everything I have read by Jackson, it is unique. I recommend it for reading by the fireplace on a dark night, waiting for the old year to fade away.
![[September 8, 1969] Another Orbit around the sun (<i>Orbit 5</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/O5-3.png?resize=312%2C372)
![[March 14, 1969 ] (March 1969 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690314covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[July 16, 1967] The Weird and the Surprising (July 1967 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/670716covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[October 14, 1966] Alien Worlds in Precise Detail (Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/661014cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[April 18, 1966] Rocannon and the Kar-Chee](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/660418books.jpg?resize=512%2C372)
![[August 13, 1964] Plus ça change (September 1964 <i>Amazing</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/amz0964cover-2.png?resize=649%2C372)
![[July 14, 1964] TO THE MOON, ALICE (the August 1964 <i>Amazing</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/640714cover.jpg?resize=659%2C372)
![[March 23, 1964] What's New? Not Much (April 1964 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/640323cover.jpg?resize=496%2C372)
![[December 23, 1963] Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New (January 1964 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/631223cover.jpg?resize=487%2C372)
