You don't have to be a sociologist to realize that the past few years have been one of cultural upheaval. The hippies, the struggle for civil rights, protests against the war in Vietnam; I could go on and on.
An example happened one week ago, when hundreds of women protested at the Miss America pageant. They asked to be treated as human beings, not as stereotyped images of artificial standards of beauty.
Members of the emerging Women's Liberation movement toss things like stiletto heels, makeup, and copies of Playboy magazine into a symbolic garbage can.
A recurring theme of these social changes is the desire for freedom. It can even be seen in popular culture. For nearly a month, for example, the number one song in the USA has been People Got to be Free by the Rascals.
They seem very serious about it.
This is a laudable goal, of course, and there's a long way to go before we can truly say that oppressed groups are liberated. An optimist might say we're halfway there.
Speaking of halfway . . .
Four of One, Half an Octad of the Other
I've been griping for quite a while about Fantastic filling its pages with reprints, along with one or two new stories per issue. Maybe somebody at the magazine heard me. Of the eight stories in the latest issue, only half are reprinted. That's progress!
Cover art by Frank R. Paul.
You can see the cover screaming New at you. Ironically, the cover art is old. It served as the back cover of the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories.
As you can see, they reversed it, covered up a pretty big part of it, and just generally made it look worse.
Did I say halfway? The four new stories take up somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the magazine. They're all clustered together at the front.
The Sound of Space, by Ross Rocklynne
A spaceman returns from a two-year voyage to Alpha Centauri. He shows up at Triton, a moon of Neptune, where his fiancée is waiting for him.
Illustration by Jeff Jones.
She's upset because he hasn't aged at all. (This is supposedly an effect of weightlessness, which seems unlikely to me.) She also doesn't like the fact that space travelers are notorious for being irreligious. She takes him to church, and tells him that she's going to marry the pastor unless he goes back to Earth and ages in its gravity. The spaceman comes up with a wild scheme to show the woman and the pastor what deep space is really like.
The premise of gravity being the cause of aging isn't exactly plausible, to say the least. The story is written in an odd style, with verbal quirks. The woman inserts a fair amount of French into her speech. People often talk in flowery language that doesn't sound like anything anybody would really say. Folks are often referred to as Sir So-and-So (such as Sir Preacher); the spaceman even calls mortality Sir Death.
As an example of the care with which the magazine is put together, the cover and the table of contents call this yarn The Dragons of Tesla (note the change in spelling.)
Anyway, this is the latest in a series of science lessons disguised as fiction featuring the clever Ensign De Ruyter. In this tale, he and his captain explore the planet Telsa (not Tesla). It's hot and has an atmosphere without oxygen. There are a huge number of dangerous reptilian predators around.
(Herds of hundreds and hundreds of predators? That seems unlikely, given the typical predator-to-prey ratio you'd expect.)
After wiping out a whole bunch of the beasts with their ray guns, the unlucky pair run out of the energy that powers their weapons. They go hide in a cave, which just happens to have exactly the stuff that De Ruyter needs to save the day.
As I may have suggested above, the plot depends on a pretty outrageous coincidence. (Gosh, the cave has a pool of liquid rubidium and an object that's shaped like a shallow bowl! Just what we need to play Mister Wizard!)
It's not a big secret that K. M. O'Donnell is actually Barry Malzberg, the magazine's new assistant editor. He's had a few New Wave stories published here and there.
This epistolary tale relates the misadventures of a sort of social psychologist, for lack of a better term, among aliens. He goes through a ritual, not understanding what's going on, leading to a bizarre climax.
I've supplied a pretty bad synopsis, because it's not easy to figure out what's going on. The nature of the so-called Oaten, for example, is particularly puzzling. Then there's that ending . . .
I really don't know what to make of this thing.
Two stars.
Where Is Mrs. Malcolmn?, by Susan A. Lewin
The magazine proudly announces that this is a first publication. That's not always a good sign. In another example of careful editing, the table of contents spells the character's name Malcolm, which looks more normal to me. The text makes it clear that it's really the less likely Malcolmn.
Uncredited photograph, one of three accompanying the story that pretty much all show the same thing.
A woman recovering from a heart attack investigates what she thinks is a water tower that appears out of nowhere. If you've ever read any science fiction before, you'll know exactly what happens.
There's not really much to say about this extremely predictable first story. Was it written just to go with the photographs? Lots of room for improvement, I suppose.
One star.
So much for new stuff. On to the reprints.
Lords of the Underworld, by L. Taylor Hansen
The April 1941 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this yarn.
Cover art by J. Allen St. John.
Three guys are fooling around in the California desert, doing archeological stuff. One of them very casually mentions that he's built a time machine. The main character (the other two disappear from the story quickly) sends himself back thousands of years.
Illustration by St. John also.
This leads to a rip-roaring adventure, as the hero defeats an evil empire nearly by himself. There's a beautiful princess to help him, a sinister cultist to destroy, vampire bats, a saber-toothed tiger, and, yes, a dinosaur. Lots of stuff goes on.
It's all nonsense, of course. There are some nice descriptions, but the whole thing is pretty darn goofy. The open-ended conclusion suggests a sequel, but I don't think there was one.
Two stars.
Between Two Worlds, by Milton Lesser
The December 1955 issue of the magazine is the source of this fantasy story.
Cover art by Edward Valigursky.
A meek fellow has dreams about being Jason from mythology. Of course, he really is living as the legendary hero. He falls in love with the warrior maiden Atalanta, fights with Hercules, wins the golden fleece, and so forth. If you've seen the nifty movie Jason and the Argonauts, you know what to expect. There's a surprise ending that's not surprising.
Illustration by Louis Priscilla.
This piece comes from a brief, odd period in the history of Fantastic when it was dedicated to wish fulfillment stories. Or, as you can tell from the cover, male fantasies. It's not as openly voyeuristic as the other stories seem to be, judging by their descriptions, although Atalanta is stark naked at one point.
As a retelling of an old story, it's OK. Otherwise, there's not much to it.
Two stars.
Bandits of Time, by Ray Cummings
This wild and wooly adventure comes from the December 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Rod Ruth.
A mysterious fellow approaches a reporter and his blind girlfriend. He promises them a wonderful life if they'll meet him at a certain place in the middle of the night. He also says he'll restore the woman's sight.
Illustration by Ruth as well.
Understandably, the reporter is suspicious. He takes his girlfriend home and shows up at the designated place with a fellow newsman, hoping for a big story. Instead, he discovers that the woman has been kidnapped. She and the two reporters are sent two million years into the future.
The weird man who approached them has a mad scheme to set up his own private empire in a distant future when humanity has devolved to a primitive state. He takes along male criminals from all periods of history, as well as kidnapped women to mate with them.
Can the two heroes escape being executed by the insane dictator? Will the woman regain her sight? Will the seductive would-be empress prove to be an enemy or a friend?
Two time travel yarns from 1941, both of them full of nonstop action. This one isn't quite as wacky as the first one, although there's a revelation about the madman's identity that comes out of nowhere.
Two stars.
The Monument, by Henry Slesar
We finish up with a mood piece from the July 1956 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Ed Valigursky.
A small group of tourists are on a spaceship headed for the Moon. A couple of them complain a lot. The captain opens the observation window to show them something.
Illustration by William Llewellyn.
The plot is very simple. The story accomplishes what it sets out to do. Maybe that's enough.
Three stars.
Half Empty or Half Full?
Either I'm in a bad mood or this was a very weak issue. Maybe I should have given out some three star ratings to some of the stories, maybe not. My time might have been better spent making a sandwich.
A full loaf of diet bread counts as half a loaf of regular bread, doesn't it?
Not all movies show up in theaters. Movies made for television began a few years ago, at least here in the USA, with a thriller called See How They Run. There have been quite a few since then.
A similar phenomenon is the fact that theatrical movies are frequently altered for television. Of course, films are often cut for broadcast, either to reduce the running time or to remove material deemed inappropriate for the tender sensibilities of American viewers.
But did you know that new footage is sometimes added to movies before they show up on TV? That's because they're too short to fill up the time slot allotted to them.
An example is Roger Corman's cheap little monster movie The Wasp Woman. In theaters, it ran just over an hour. On television, new scenes increased the length by about ten minutes.
Wasting time in front of the TV screen recently, I came across such an elongated theatrical film, as well as one made for television only. Let's take a look at both.
This thing began life in 1963 under the a much less laughable title.
Anybody who went to see this movie pushed the panic button.
The Madmen of Mandoras (somehow they lost the word The on the poster) was a low budget flick that lasted about an hour (although it probably seemed a lot longer than that if you were stuck watching it.)
Dramatic lettering, dramatic clouds.
New stuff was added to the beginning of the film to make it long enough to show up on TV. Unlike The Wasp Woman, they gave it a new title.
Apparently, the American television audience needs everything spelled out for them.
That gives away the movie's only plot twist, but at least it's truth in advertising.
Let's get the new stuff out of the way. We begin with a scientist carrying some important papers out of a lab.
Secure scientific facility or local high school?
The guy is almost immediately killed when his car blows up.
Exploding car number one.
The fellow was carrying the formula for an antidote to a deadly gas. Somebody doesn't want that information to get out.
Big news!
This event draws the attention of some kind of intelligence agency. The boss (who turns out to be working with the bad guys, although that doesn't really have much to do with the plot) assigns a couple of operatives to investigate the incident.
Secret agents or college students?
The man's long hair and mustache and the woman's short skirt provide evidence that we're not in 1963. Don't get too attached to these characters, because pretty soon the woman is shot dead and the man is killed another way.
Exploding car number two.
At this point, we go back to the original movie. After demonstrating the deadly power of the gas by showing a film of an elephant lying down, the scientist who knows the antidote for the stuff and his young beatnik daughter are kidnapped.
It's quite obviously just taking a nap.
Our nominal hero is the husband of the scientist's older daughter. Some guy reveals enough information to the married couple to send them off to the fictional Latin American nation of Mandoras (you know, the place where they have madmen) before getting shot dead. The protagonists deal with the problem of his corpse by stuffing it in a phone booth.
"When in Mandoras, stay at the luxurious Mandoras Hotel."
Another guy shows up and provides exposition. It seems that a team of Nazi doctors worked to preserve the Führer for future use at the end of the war. (In other words, They Saved Hitler's Brain.)
"We must save Charlie Chaplin's life!"
The two lovebirds act like ordinary tourists despite this remarkable bit of information. They happen to run across the younger daughter in a local nightclub. The kidnappers gave her some money and told her to have a good time, as long as she didn't contact anybody at home. She seems perfectly fine with this arrangement, despite the fact that her father is still in the hands of the bad guys.
Little sister doing the Twist, proof that we're in 1963.
Since we're in a nightclub, we have to kill time with a dance act. After all, we have a whole hour of movie to fill.
A little something for the leg men in the audience.
Somehow or other our heroes wind up in the secret headquarters of the Madmen of Mandoras. Dad is being tortured with bright lights and loud noises in an attempt to get him to reveal the secret of the antidote. Like a lot of other things in the film, this doesn't make much sense, since the bad guys just want to stop the antidote from being used.
"Let me out of this movie! I can't stand it any more!"
Then we get our big shock scene, which might have been surprising if the title didn't give it away.
As an example of the film's close attention to detail, note that the swastika is backwards.
Director Larry Buchanan made some very cheap films during the past few years. Starting last year, he's been responsible for extremely low budget color remakes — uncredited, of course — of old black-and-white science fiction and horror films. These are intended to be sold directly to television. Zontar, the Thing From Venus, for example, is obviously based on Roger Corman's 1956 flick It Conquered the World.
His latest effort in this vein is, in my opinion, very loosely inspired by the beach moviePajama Party (which doesn't actually take place on the beach, but you know what I mean.)
Don't believe me? I don't blame you, but I'll provide some evidence in a bit. Let's get started.
Even the titles are cheap.
We start with a few scenes of women suddenly disappearing, whether they're playing tennis, at a restaurant, or taking a shower. Don't pay any attention to this, as it never comes up again.
The plot really starts at a government facility.
Does NASA really need a lot of decoding?
They get a message from outer space that says — you guessed it — Mars Need Women. Thanks for reminding me what movie I'm watching!
A Martian appears from nowhere, without even the shimmering effect seen on Star Trek. His name is Dop, and he's played by Tommy Kirk, star of some Disney movies. He also played a Martian named Go Go in — a-ha! — Pajama Party. Coincidence? I think not.
"Make fun of my name and I'll disintegrate you."
Dop explains that some kind of problem with the Martian Y chromosome has resulted in men outnumbering women by one hundred to one. (That's a lot worse than Five to Twelve.)
The Martians would like to have five Earth women volunteer to journey to the red planet to solve the problem. (I'm not a geneticist or a mathematician, but that seems like an awfully small number to repopulate a whole planet.)
No dice, so we get some scenes of military types communicating on the radio.
This speaker gets so much screen time it's practically a guest star.
There's also a bunch of stock footage of planes flying around.
"I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth . . ."
This accomplishes nothing. The Martians decide to land on Earth and grab five women themselves. (Like I said, forget about their ability to just make women vanish.)
The Martian spaceship, not to be confused with the Enterprise.
Five Martians hide out in an abandoned ice factory and make plans.
"We will conquer these puny Earthlings with the advanced technology of flashlights and headphones."
First they have to disguise themselves as Earthlings. This requires some criminal activity. A gas station supplies cash and a map of the city. (I would have thought the Martians would be advanced enough to find their way around, but I guess not.)
"I sure hope this place has a men's room."
Next is borrowing a car. So much for using their power of teleportation for getting from point A to point B.
"Oh, cool, it's got AM/FM radio."
Then they need some clothes. This leads to a scene in which they reveal that Martians gave up wearing ties fifty years ago.
"Would this be too dressy for a kidnapping?"
Dop and one of his buddies spot an announcement for a lecture by a brilliant scientist. We're told that her book Space Genetics won a Pulitzer Prize.
A lecture on sex in space? Must be a science fiction convention.
Doctor Marjorie Bolen is played by Yvonne Craig, best known for playing Batgirl on the popular Batman TV show. So the audience can tell she's a genius, she sometimes wears spectacles.
"Why Doctor Bolen, you're beautiful without your glasses!"
Pretty soon Dop and Bolen (sounds like a law firm) are on a date at a local planetarium. Guess what's on display.
Irony!
Meanwhile, the other Martians stalk their intended targets. The first is an exotic dancer.
A guy far away from home? Of course he goes to a strip club!
Next is an airline stewardess.
"Coffee, tea, or me?" (Yeah, I stole that from the title of a recent book. Sue me.)
Third is a homecoming queen.
"Two, Four, Six, Eight, Who Will We Repopulate?"
Last is a painter. That doesn't quite fit with the other three, who are typical male fantasies of desirable women, but I guess they needed some variety.
"I call this one Portrait of the Artist as an Impending Victim of Abduction."
Naturally, the disappearances are big news.
"Oh, look what's showing on TV tonight."
The authorities seem powerless to stop them.
"Martians, Shmartians, let's see what Little Orphan Annie is up to."
Suffice to say that romance blooms between Dop and Bolen, even though we're told Martians gave up love long before they gave up ties. The kidnapped women are rescued and the Martians go home, apparently to face the extinction of their species.
"Let's see, Mrs. Marjorie Dop. Nah, it would never work."
A very silly film indeed.
One star.
Surely there's something better on television than these two losers.
The Cassiopeia Affair by Chloe Zerwick & Harrison Brown
In Redo Valley, Virginia, a radiotelescope complex in the late 20th century hunts for extra-terrestrial intelligence. One night Max Gaby detects a signal coming from Cassiopeia 3579. Inside there is a two-dimensional picture being sent out via binary.
Can you solve the binary-code puzzle?
This provides proof of an alien intelligence.
At the same time, conflict is brewing between Russia and China, one that could plunge the world into nuclear war. Is this evidence of intelligent life among the stars the greatest hope we have for peace?
Yes, this is yetanotherstory of RadioAstronomy. These are now becoming as regular in science fiction as space adventures and superhuman mutants, but this stands out as a wonderful example. I believe this is the first fiction from the pair, with Zerwick being primarily a visual artist and Brown being a scientist. Together they have created something masterful.
Although much of the novel is taken up by discussions of scientific theories or information on how to programme radio telescopes, it is raised up by excellent writing and a real understanding of character. Whilst Judith Merrill criticised it for being dull, I never found it so. It was a book I was dying to pick up whenever I got the opportunity. It is a testament to the authors that it never felt dry.
Regarding the characters, it is a huge cast, but one where they all feel considered and with depth, not merely props for discussion. These include Max Gaby as the wide-eyed believer, Barney Davidson the grouchy cynic, Rudolph Calder the Machiavellian hawk and Adam Lurie the disillusioned drunk who is secretly sleeping with Gaby’s wife.
Throughout there are little moments that make it feel real, such as Gaby calling Adam up at 4 am about a possible sighting and Adam grumpily insisting on having his shower and coffee first, or when someone tries to bribe Davidson and he threatens to kill him.
The characters are not perfect either, we regularly change perspective and sometimes see that they are downright unpleasant. But it is made clear we are not meant to sympathise with everyone’s point of view, rather to gain an insight into their motivations.
It also tries to consider the politics of the situation carefully. It demonstrates how different factions will react and what they will want to do with this information. A particularly interesting, if depressing, touch is that the hawks on both sides of the Iron Curtain distrust Gaby as he is a refugee from Hungary in 1956. This element gives it both a sense of excitement and verisimilitude that is often missing from these heavier works.
These kinds of harder science fiction stories are not usually the ones that appeal to me. However, I was enthralled. It may be even more enjoyed by fans of Clarke and Niven and I would not be surprised to see it on the Hugo ballot next year.
This is the third in a series of novels dealing with alternate universes. The first was Worlds of the Imperium. The Noble Editor gave it a moderately positive review.
Both books featured a fellow named Brion Bayard, a man from our own universe who went on to be an agent for the Imperium, a British/German empire that dominates another version of Earth.
Bayard plays a small but important role in this new novel, but the main character is a man named Johnny Curlon. He's also the narrator. Let's say hello to him.
Johnny is a big, strong guy who lives in Florida and runs a fishing boat. The story starts off with some tough hoods trying to intimidate him, but he deals with them easily. At this point, I thought I was reading one of John D. MacDonald's Florida-based suspense novels, particularly those featuring Travis McGee, a big, strong guy who owns a houseboat.
(If you haven't read them, give 'em a try. They're really good.)
Anyway, we find out this is a science fiction novel when Johnny gets rescued from his floundering boat, which the bad guys have sabotaged, by our old pal Brion. He carries Johnny around in a vehicle that can not only travel between universes, but is able to pass through solid matter and become invisible. Mighty handy little gizmo.
Naturally, Johnny is confused by all this. It seems that he's the key to preventing lots of universes from being wiped out by something called the Blight (capital letter and all.) There are antagonists eager to use Johnny for their own purposes.
At this point, Johnny's knife, which is actually part of an ancient sword handed down to him by his ancestors, gets reunited with another part of the ancient weapon. That's our first hint that this SF novel is going to seem a lot like a fantasy adventure.
Johnny winds up working with a fellow who is very obviously the main bad guy. (Obvious to the reader, anyway, although it's quite a while until Johnny catches on.) They travel to a universe whose only human inhabitant is a stunningly beautiful woman, straight out of a sword-and-sorcery story. She even has a pet griffin, and there's a giant around.
(This middle section of the book reminds me of Robert A. Heinlein's novel Glory Road. That was science fiction disguised as fantasy. This one is fantasy disguised as science fiction, to some degree.)
After leaving that magical place with another piece of the sword, the villain takes Johnny to the universe he wants to rule. It's a place where Richard Lionheart didn't die in battle, but lived to be a weak ruler. He wound up surrendering his kingdom to the French, so France is still in control of England, which is called New Normandy.
(Brion already told Johnny that he was the last descendent of the Plantagenets, so it all ties together, sort of.)
The bad guy's plan would come at the cost of destroying a bunch of universes. (You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, I guess.) Can our hero set things right? (Go ahead, take a guess.)
In typical Laumer fashion, this is an action-packed yarn that moves at a dizzying pace. It's not as tightly plotted as some, and I'd say it's the weakest book in the Imperium series. The middle section — you know, all that fantasy stuff — seems to come from another novel entirely. There's a lot of pseudoscientific blather trying to explain what's going on, and none of it makes any sense.
Nine years ago John Breton nearly lost his wife. Now, a decade later, he and Kate are drifting apart, their knives out at every opportunity, their marriage a fast cooling ember. John has thrown himself bodily into his geological consulting business, and his wife has picked a hobby John has no interest in, befriending Miriam Palfrey, an automatic writer. At a typical crashingly dull dinner party with the Palfreys, characterized by endless sniping, John decides only profound drunkenness will get him through the night.
Whereupon he receives a call:
"You've been living with my wife for almost exactly nine years–and I'm coming to take her back."
Because nine years ago, Kate had died. Two years into their marriage, a stupid fight had compelled Kate's husband to stay home, while she trooped through the night, headed for a party she would never attend, intercepted by a brutal rapist and killer.
John, calling himself Jack at the time, was devastated, wracked with guilt. More than this: he began to be unhinged from time, taking trips weekly to the scene of the crime. Jack resolved to stop Kate's murder, even if it meant rending the very fabric of space and causality.
Two timelines were created: Timeline A, in which Jack led a lonely, monomaniacal life, and Timeline B, in which a sleek and unappreciative John enjoyed his misbegotten wife, the fruits of the labor of his alter ego.
Thus, Jack hatched a plan–move sideways to Timeline B…and fill John's shoes, whether he liked it or not.
But the law of conservation of energy is a hard fact, in the multiverse as well as the universe. Jack Breton's actions threaten not only the rocky relationship of Kate and John, but also the whole of humanity.
According to the book's blurb, this is Shaw's third book, but the first to achieve wide distribution. I don't know what his first book was, but I read his second, Night Walk last year. Between that and his short stories, it was clear Shaw was a gifted author just waiting to grow out of his adolescence.
With The Two-Timers, he has done so.
I picked the book up just before bed and had to force myself to put it down. Eight hours later, it was in my hands again, and it did not leave until I'd finished the story come lunchtime (it was a welcome companion as I waited in the courthouse for a jury duty that never materialized).
The characters are vividly, deeply realized, all of them evolving throughout the story. We initially hate John and sympathize with Jack, but neither of the Bretons is wholly irredeemanble, nor sympathetic. And Kate is no prize to be won; she is an independent entity with her own virtues, failings, and feelings. Shaw reminds me a bit of Larry Niven, drawing people with quick, deft strokes. But Shaw has a sensitive style, working more with emotions than hard science. It's the people that matter in this piece; the SFnal content is exciting, necessary, but secondary.
The pacing in the book is exquisite, from the painful depiction of a marriage gone sour at the beginning, to the arrival of Jack, through the resolution of the resulting triangle. The interspersed scenes of the slow collapse of the physical universe around them are deftly handled, as is the closing in of Lieutenant Blaize Convery, the detective who knows Breton saved his wife nine years ago; he just can't figure out how.
As Lorelei (who picked up the book on my recommendation and tore through it in short order) notes, aside from the poetic writing, the real triumph of the book is that you get so many viewpoint characters, and so many changing perspectives on these characters, and none of it is confusing. It's just masterfully done.
It's a hard book to read in parts. The emotions here are fraught ones, and there are some rather unpleasant (though never gratuitous) scenes. Nevertheless, these are emotions that must be explored, and thankfully, the mystery and the brilliant writing carry you past them, as well as the satisfying resolution of the threesome's story. My only quibble is that the end doesn't quite work, logistically, though it makes sense thematically. And as Lorelei notes, it's a touch rushed.
Nevertheless, The Two-Timers is a terrific work, definitely a strong contender for my Hugo ballot next year.
We Americans love a good revolution story. After all, our nation was founded by a rebellion, and the appeal of an underdog throwing off an oppressor has been popular since David threw a rock at Goliath.
C.C. MacApp takes a stab at the theme with his latest book, Omha Abides, a tale of the 35th Century. 1500 years before, the Gaddyl had conquered the Earth. The amphibian aliens did not succeed without a fight, but their advanced technology, particularly their craft-shielding Distorters, proved decisive. Human civilization was shattered, the population reduced to a bare fraction, many of them condemned to slavery. Meanwhile, the Gaddyl build their own fiefdoms amidst the ruins of the human cities and built an interstellar teleport transit hub in Arizona.
Now Earth is a hunting preserve, humanity largely quiescent. The North American continent is home to just 25 million people…and half a million overlord Gaddyl. The humans who are not slaves roam in bands or live in primitive statelets. They have no hope of taking back the planet, until a series of events precipitously brings success in their reach.
Our hero is Murno, a freed man who lives with his family in Fief Bay, once known as San Francisco. A new, cruel lord has ascended to the fief throne, and he has decided that no longer shall free humans be off limits to hunting parties.
At the same time, Murno is contacted by the underground. He is entrusted with three items, two of them Gaddyl, and one of ancient human make, which he is tasked to take east, beyond the Sierras, beyond the mysterious Grove, even past the mighty Rockies, to where the mythical deity named "Omha" waits.
If you had a subscription to the recently defunct magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow, you may have read about half of this book. Victoria Silverwolf reviewed Under the Gaddyl Tree, which comprises about the first third of the book, and Trees Like Torches, which contains bits from the middle. Victoria gave both stories three stars and felt they were competent, but nothing special.
Often, the expansion of stories into a novel results in something less than the sum of its parts. The opposite occurs in this case. Now, instead of just being isolated, mildly interesting adventure stories, now Murno's encounters with Gaddyl, blue mutant humans, a giant grove of telepathic trees, and so on, gird a compelling plot. Humanity shouldn't have a chance against the Gaddyl. But neither should an electron, per classical physics, be able to jump energy levels. But thanks to quantum physics and the Uncertainty Principle, given a short enough period of time, an electron can possess abnormal amounts of energy.
Similarly, a confluence of circumstances makes for a successful rebellion opportunity. Because humanity had been waiting for its chance. The telepathic Blues had spies in pivotal places. There was an underground poised for action. There really is an Omha (and you can guess what its nature is early on, which will also clue you in on how to pronounce the word).
Add the trigger of the Gaddyl getting a bit too complacent and a bit too cruel, as well as the theft of some vital technologies, and a human victory becomes plausible.
The pacing of the book is a little off. Much of the human victory isn't even detailed until the last 25 pages of the book (though it turns out that's not really too short a span; MacApp pulls it off). Also, much reference is made to Murno baffling his alien pursuers with "trail puzzles", a phrase with which I'm not familiar, and whose meaning I still don't apprehend. Occasionally, the story does lapse into conventional adventure fare–more like a tale of the American West than the American future.
But, it's a book with real cinematic quality to it; the scenes in California were particularly resonant for me, a Golden State native. The Gaddyl are portrayed perhaps a touch too human, but I appreciated the range of types, from scoundrel to honorable enemy. And as an American, I suppose I've got as much a soft spot for overthrowing tyranny as anyone.
Four stars.
by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele
Last year's pairing of E.C Tubb and Juanita Coulson's has gotten an encore. In fact, both novels are sequels. My esteemed colleague and editor had favorable reviews of both, so I was excited to read them:
Earl Dumarest, the itinerant interstellar provocateur and do-gooder from The Winds of Gath returns in Derai, hunting news of Earth. On his way he takes a job escorting the Lady Derai of the House of Caldor back to her family on the planet Hive. He soon determines that Derai is a telepath. Her father sent her to the college of Cyclans to treat the constant fear and nightmares brought on by hearing the minds of those around her. Derai ran away from the college, where Cybers (once-humans with emotion and sensation excised who now can connect to a collective mind) wanted to use her genetics, turning her into a mindless vessel to bear telepathic children. Her home planet has its own risks – her uncle wants to take over the House, planning to assassinate her father and half-brother, and marry Derai to her cousin to gain legitimacy.
Dumarest keeps much of his thoughts to himself, both from the other characters and the reader, but cannot keep his developing feelings for Derai from her telepathic ability. He carries himself as a man who has seen too much. He inspires loyalty, and in those he has helped that is understandable, but it also comes from some who have only just met him. One man he meets through a mutual friend takes the chance of being burned to death to get a blade to Dumarest in a deadly maze arena.
Dumarest almost seems to resist the plot, needing to be pushed into each new quest. At times, his struggle as a character made him feel like a disparate individual, one side grim and withdrawn, another altruistic at great cost to himself; it's as if author Tubbs had two distinct directions for the novel in mind, and was unable to find the balance between them. Dumarest's staid demeanor only allows him to rebuff so much, and he is, if reluctantly, still prompted to aid disenfranchised travelers, save a gambler from himself, and compete in a tournament to prolong the head of Caldor House's life. Each time he intends to leave the House to its own devices, his feelings for Derai bring him back.
Tubb has a lurid, graphic style of description. It's equally evocative of beauty and violence. In a particularly unsettling set of scenes, Dumarest barely escapes being eaten alive like his companions by bird-sized bees. For how memorable the depictions of the insects were, I anticipated them playing a larger role in the overall story. The scenes stuck with me for several days due to the excessively grisly details.
Something else that ate at my brain: thanks to medical advancements and travel stasis Dumarest and Derai are chronologically far older than they seem, but Derai was described as childlike far too often for my liking. Tubb could have left it at one use of "nubile".
Geoff is a member of the Federation, the galactic government introduced in Coulson's Crisis on Cheiron. He embarks on what could be a suicide mission to the protectorate of Deliayan, Pa-Lüna. Both humans and Deliyans have been exploiting the people of Pa-Lüna, tricking them into indentured servitude. When a man is murdered right in front of him over a stone, Geoff investigates, finding the stone in question has strange, enchanting properties. He and Tahn, a Pa-Lünan, set out for the protectorate, and they meet Nedra, priestess of a mysterious goddess.
From the outset, he is on a clock: a past planetary mission left his team dead, and him with the lingering impacts from a past poisoning that flares, causing him pain and debilitating him with growing frequency. The nature of his sense of duty and outlook, framed by his limited lifespan, is compelling.
Geoff is a skeptic, both of motive and means. He views the people of Pa-Lüna with a mix of respect and condescension, but Geoff witnesses the tangible effects of the stones of song. They induce a euphoria and they, or their "goddess", can heal the sick and injured and strengthen her followers over time. Does the Goddess bestow gifts freely or are her worshipers trading one form of servitude for another, framed in a softer light? Are the powers of the Stones and the goddess's telepathic messages divine or an advanced, but still mortal mechanism?
I appreciated the exploration of what is becoming a new trend in sci-fi–rejecting overt military intrusions and favoring a system that furthers a newly-contacted culture's sovereignty. It's not a bad direction to go, though authors vary in degrees of patronizing the native people of these worlds, from treating them roughly as equals to regarding them as "primitive" beings who need protecting. And it does say something that it takes someone from outside the system to truly put things in motion, no matter how long change has been brewing. Having the fight be against not just an alien threat but also a human, institutional threat asks if human expansion is truly helping, needs tempering, or if it is causing more harm in the end.
All in all, a solid book. Had I not recently read several other books with a similar premise I would have liked it even more. However, I can't fault Coulson for the trends of this year. She created a rich tapestry and I would be happy to explore her worlds and characters in future stories.
Richard Brautigan is one I have heard praise heaped on over Trout Fishing in America but the title put me off (my father talks enough about it!) When I heard he had a more fantastical novel coming out this year I made sure to get a copy.
I am not sure what I was expecting but this book is weird!
It is set in a world that appears to have emerged after some kind of great disaster destroyed the prior civilisation. The people live around iDEATH where the main material for production is “watermelon sugar”. As well as apparently being very versatile in and of itself, the day of the week the watermelons are planted on dictates the type that grow and the different properties they will have.
People used to be hunted and eaten by “Tigers” (it is unclear if these are felines raised up to consciousness or humans that have descended to cannibalism) a fact people of iDEATH seemed to have accepted as a natural part of life. However, these have all been hunted now and what remains are statues to the fallen.
In addition, the narrator lacks a regular name and instead:
Just call me whatever is in your mind. If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago, somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer, that is my name. Perhaps it was raining very hard, that is my name. Or somebody wanted you to do something, you did it and they told you what you did is wrong, sorry for the mistake, and you had to do something else, that is my name.
Thankfully this fellow (who I will call Idle Thought) is the only one without a regular name.
Idle Thought is writing the first book in 35 years (the one we are reading) which starts off just recording little notes about his life or small events, similar to The Pillow Book by Sei Shônagon. This is disrupted by InBOIL who declares that he knows the truth of iDEATH and departs to live in the forgotten works, the large remnants of the past world.
Margaret begins to go to the forgotten works to forage for her collection and talks with InBOIL about his finds. A few weeks later, InBOIL and his gang return to show everyone the true meaning of iDEATH.
What does this all add up to? Honestly I am unsure. This is no “polytropic paramyth”, it has all the features of a regular short novel and Brautigan has a great narrative voice. You do not doubt that a land could exist where people have discovered how to spin fruit sugar of watermelons into a wide range of products.
The question is how literally are we meant to take the text? Is this meant to be a far future story where the new technology is beyond our understanding? A far-fetched satire of our current society? A fable about the nature of power and belief? Or something else? Are we even meant to consider Idle Thought a reliable narrator?
I don’t have any answers and can’t help but feel nonplussed by the ending. As a case of literary experimentation, it works better than many authors that attempt similar things (just check out some issues of New Worlds) but I am not sure about how to grade it as SF.
However, it is an experience I would recommend others try for themselves; I will give it four stars.
When Women Rule
by Victoria Silverwolf
Apologies to science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz for stealing the title of his essay, which appeared in the August issue of If last year.
No doubt Mister Moskowitz will add the novel I'm about to review to his list of future worlds dominated by females. Is it a worthy example? Let's find out.
We jump right into things with our protagonist, a fellow named Dion Quern, sneaking into a luxury apartment with burglary in mind. The place happens to be occupied by a female peace officer named Juno Locke aiming a laser pistol at him.
Futuristic crime novel? Well, not really.
After this opening scene, the author goes into full expository mode. It seems that birth control pills not only freed women from unwanted pregnancy, but it made them bigger, stronger, and smarter. (There's an implication here that, until this happened, they weren't as smart as men. I'll ignore that for now.)
Besides that, it also resulted in fewer boys being born and more girls being born. Now, in the late twenty-first century, men are outnumbered by women (you guessed it) five to twelve.
About three-quarters of women are powerful figures known as Doms. The rest, who have remained feminine (sic) are pretty much just baby machines, impregnated multiple times by artificial insemination. The Doms hire them to bear their adopted children.
Men who are fortunate to be partnered with Doms are known as Squires. Those who aren't are called Sports.
Dion is a Sport, making a living through petty crime and writing poetry on the side. He hates this woman-ruled world; however, as we'll see, he's a very mixed-up and contradictory character.
We last left him facing a cop with a pistol. Does she send him to jail? (Actually, a sort of mind-erasing facility.) Nope. She invites him to share a meal and then to bed.
There's an odd kind of love/hate relationship between these two throughout the book. Dion willingly becomes Juno's Squire. Sometimes they're passionate about each other, sometimes they're ready to kill each other.
Dion gets involved, more or less against his will (as I said, he's a very ambiguous character), in a plot to assassinate Queen Victoria II, as a symbolic act by rebellious men. Let's just say that it all leads up to a bittersweet ending for what has been, up to that point, a satiric novel.
The author's style is quirky. Everybody speaks in a weirdly affected way, full of puns and literary allusions. (The sole exception is one of the women who serve as baby machines, who plays an important part in the last part of the book.)
The big question, of course, is how sexist is it? Quite a bit, I'd say. There's a fair amount of complaining about the fact that this future world has lost its spirit of daring and adventure. (Of course, it has also eliminated war and poverty.) The baby machine is a nearly mindless character, interested only in love, sex, and reproduction, and the author seems to approve of her.
On the other hand, Dion is pretty much a jerk, even if we're supposed to sympathize with him at the end. Maybe the author is more of a misanthrope than a misogynist.
Not a great book. Two stars. Go see a movie instead.
I wasn't sure what to expect from this one. Well, that's not quite true. I had expected a silly story, maybe with lots of lurid bits. Instead I got…
Trapped in a pit, menaced by a tiger, cosmonaut Tanya Ouspanaya is nude and defenseless. She knows not why she is there–only that she has somehow returned from the moon, where she had been for days if not weeks. When escape seems impossible, and on the verge of losing all hope, a strange man speaking bad Russian arrives to rescue her.
Meet Sam Durrell, a CIA Agent on Tanya's trail. The story then rewinds to Durrell's assignment on the case, to his arrival in the allied (but dangerously independent) country of Iran, to his entanglement not only in international affairs, but a budding revolution. Tanya is the teaser, but the mysterious revolutionary General Har-Buri, with fingers of corruption in every government pie, is the key to the tale. And, of course, the evil Madame Hung and her comrade, the Chinese spy mastermind, Ta-Po, figure prominently, along with comrades of Durrell, both Western and Persian. It's all very complex, but ultimately quite manageable, and the solution to the mystery of Tanya's sudden appearance back on Earth less SFnal, and more cutting-edge plausible.
What I didn't realize, going into this book is that the Assignment books constitute a series, of which this one is number twenty six! Sam Durrell is a recurring hero, refreshingly not cut from the James Bond mold. He is intelligent, compassionate, resourceful. And Aarons is an equal opportunity author–if Tanya's introduction sounds like a bit of cheesecake, you'll be comforted to know that Durrell gets his naked time in the pit, too. In fact, Tanya is a strong character, never the prize, the damsel, nor the love interest. All of the characters are strong, actually, and vividly portrayed. But the real stand-out is the terrain of Iran, with which Aarons must have some conversance (or at least a long National Geographic subscription). The land of the Shahs is as real as any landscape in Dune.
It's a potboiler, but it's a good one, one I couldn't put it down. I may have to find more in the series…
Back in the 1950s, Robert Sheckley blazed a trail with the funniest, by turns dark and hopeful, short science fiction stories one could find. His main pad was Galaxy, but he made his mark elsewhere, too. Then came the 1960s, and Bob turned his energies to novel-length works. I'm sure it was lucrative–The 10th Victim got turned into a movie–but I wasn't really impressed by any of them.
Until now.
I brought Dimension of Miracles with me on the flight to Japan, and I had devoured the whole thing before we were far past Hawaii. Only the fact that I couldn't pound the keys on my typewriter without waking up the first class cabin kept me from dashing off a review right then and there.
Here's how it goes: Tom Carmody is a bland man, blandly handsome, blandly successful, blandly urbane. His bland life is made infinitely more colorful when an alien visitor appears in his home, announcing that he has won the Intergalactic Sweepstakes. What could Carmody do but accept the invitation to go to Galactic Central to collect his winnings? The Prize, it turns out, is a sentient box, purpose unknown. It soon turns out that Carmody was picked by accident, and the real winner is determined to secure the Prize for himself. The smiling faces of the clerks and awarders of Central are quickly shown to hide uncaring souls. Carmody is on his own against his rival. Worse than that, even should he withstand the challenge, Carmody has no idea how to get home, and no one is willing to help him.
Ultimately, going back to Earth requires not just knowing where it is, but also when it is (relativity is complicated), and also for Carmody to pick the right Earth, as there are an infinite number. Each succeeding section of the book details his misadventures as he tries to find his way home. Along the way, he treats with an omnipotent but marooned God, a family of intelligent dinosaurs, and a predator tailor-made just for Carmody who trails him across the galaxy and the eons.
It's all very farcical and stream-of-conscious-y, generally the sort of stuff I don't dig. This time around, however, Sheckley deploys his mastery of the short form to make every vignette absolutely delicious, while serving the greater whole along the way. Indeed, two bits of the story were released as short stories in and of themselves, virtually unchanged: Budget Planet, which was pleasant-enough in isolation, but better here, and ditto for Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay.
All along the way are some fascinating philosophical discussions, delivered better than Heinlein ever could. If there's any fault with the story, it's that things wrap up just a bit too quickly. Nevertheless, it's a great yarn, a story that will likely inspire other future tales of galactic hitchhikers. I imagine they won't be as well rendered as this one, however…
As my friend John Boston chronicled last week, the prolific science fiction fan and analyst Alexei Panshin is an expert in the fiction of Robert Heinlein. John does an excellent job in his article of analyzing the complex relationship between Heinlein and Panshin, and he does a great job of digging into the approach Panshin takes to his analysis. If you haven't read John's piece, I recommend you give it a read.
Alexei Panshin's new novel, Rite of Passage, often reads as if Panshin tuned elements of Heinlein's juvenile fiction to reflect Panshin's view of the world, thereby taking the energy and thoughtfulness of Heinlein and giving it a specifically Panshinian spin .
Heinlein is, of course, known for featuring teen and preteen protagonists in his juvenile space adventures. Panshin follows that element closely, but with an essential twist. Nearly all Heinlein's protagonists are boys. The main character of Rite of Passage is a pubescent girl named Mia Havero, who lives aboard a space ship which is composed of descendents of survivors of Earth's destruction. See, at the time we humans discovered we were going to destroy our world, a generational starship was launched. Mia is part of an undefined generation who only know of Earth from legends shared on the ship.
Over the years the ship has been used to colonize far-flung colonial worlds, with an uneasy and sometimes contentious trade policy existing between the colonies and the spaceship. This contentiousness is exacerbated by the fact that every ship-bound kid is expected to perform a rite of passage around their fourteenth birthday, taking a forced month-long trip to a colony world in order to experience life away from the ship and formally grow into adulthood.
When Mia and some friends are transported to a world that's both highly conservative and highly resentful of the ship, they end up experiencing an adventure that's more than a simple rite. Instead the young adults face real life and death situations. And those life and death situations help trigger the brilliantly nihilistic climax of the book, an epiphany of deep emotional angst which I predict will cause fans to debate this book quite a bit in fanzines this year.
A photo of Mr. Panshin from last September at Nycon.
As I've suggested, Mia Havero is a wonderfully perceptive lead character. Her energy and spirit are as strong as the greatest Heinlein heroes, but what really makes Mia stand out are her intelligence and insights. Panshin cannily has Mia be a student of philosophy, and that philosophic approach informs her actions. Her thoughts on stoicism, for instance, are charming, and, well, here are a few other thoughts which you might enjoy…
I can think of nothing sadder than to know that you might be more than you are, but be unwilling to make the effort.
or
If I had the opportunity, I would make the proposal that no man should be killed except by somebody who knows him well enough for the act to have impact. No death should be like nose blowing. Death is important enough that it should affect the person who causes it.
or
Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with.
I emerged from this book deeply impressed by the way Panshin brings his main character and her friends to life. Mia Havero and her friends are unique people, full of dreams, ambitions and intelligent thoughts. They have complicated relationships with each other, with their parents and with their larger society. The characters fairly pop off the page and I know a few girls who remind me of Mia.
Mia is similar to Heinlein's heroes, but only somewhat similar. For instance, she's a highly competent hero who must go on a quest and who is alienated from planet-siders. Readers frequently see those elements in Heinlein's juveniles. But they don't often see characters who have sex, as Mia does. They don't often see the level of empathy Mia shows herself, her friends and the planet-siders. And perhaps most importantly, characters like Mia are seldom on the outside of their societies in Heinlein's fiction.
In fact, I was also deeply impressed by how well Panshin builds both the shipboard society and the planetside society. Both are complex and intriguing, quite well sketched out for the terse length of this novel. The sclerotic approach to governing the ship, for instance, feels a bit like the sclerotic authorities in many of Heinlein's novels, while the backwards approach of the colonists feels like something out of Pennsylvania Dutch country crossed with fascist war-mongering.
Mr. Panshin accepting his 1967 Hugo Award.
Mr. Panshin has shown that his analysis of Robert Heinlein isn't the only insightful writing he can do. This book is a definite candidate for Galactic Star for the year, and I won't be surprised if Mr. Panshin wins back-to-back Hugo Awards in '67 and '68.
It's been more than a quarter of a century since the Communist Party of the United States ran candidates for President and Vice-President. That was back in 1940, when Earl Browder and James W. Ford were nominated.
They didn't win.
This month, the Party chose Charlene Mitchell and Mike Zagarell for the honor.
Zagarell is technically too young to serve as Vice-President, but I don't think he'll have to face that problem.
Overdue Notice
One month isn't anywhere near as long as twenty-eight years, but the failure of a July issue of Fantastic to hit the shelves of drugstores and newsstands (in June, of course, given the proclivities of the publishing industry) may have caused as much anxiety among readers of imaginative fiction as the lack of a Commie candidate caused in Red voters.
Not to worry. My esteemed colleague John Boston has explained the situation in typically erudite fashion in his latest review of Amazing. I'll wait here while you go take a look.
Ready? Good. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's take a look at the August, not July, issue of Fantastic to see if our patience has been rewarded.
Cover art by Johnny Bruck.
Our first hint that the delay hasn't changed things very much, if at all, is the fact that the cover is once again a reprint from an issue of the popular German space opera serial Perry Rhodan.
We begin in promising fashion with our old pals Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, in another witty and imaginative adventure from the living master of sword-and-sorcery.
Illustration by Jeff Jones.
The two lovable rogues have gotten their hands on some incredibly valuable magic jewels. Each one of them tries to cash in on the stolen goods, making use of different fences.
The Mouser goes to a blind fellow, who has a nubile female assistant. Fafhrd seeks out a woman of mature years, who insists on an intimate encounter before the deal is completed. Suffice to say that things don't work out as they expect.
As you'd expect, this is a beautifully written and highly enjoyable tale. It's a bit lighter in tone that some other stories in the series; an anecdote rather than an epic, perhaps.
As a bonus, the likable character Alyx, created by Joanna Russ, makes a guest appearance. Obviously Leiber approves of the way Russ is influenced by his work, and he has acknowledged this in a gracious manner.
A new writer makes his third appearance in print with this science fiction story. Narrated by a spaceman to an unknown listener over drinks, it tells how an inexperienced crew member got in trouble. It seems he clumsily injured an alien. Put on trial, he is found guilty and punished in a way the aliens can't convey to the humans. He seems perfectly fine, until strange things start happening.
What the aliens did to the fellow is the whole point of the narrative. It's pretty much a puzzle story. For that kind of thing, it's reasonably interesting. It could have appeared in Analog, except for the fact that the aliens aren't shown to be inferior to humans. It's not bad, but not outstanding in any way.
My advice to Mister Tiptree is to keep writing; the man shows promise.
Three stars.
Horror Out of Carthage, by Edmond Hamilton
Here come the reprints. This old-fashioned yarn comes from the September 1939 issue of Fantastic Adventures.
Cover art by Harold W. McCauley.
Our cast of characters includes the manly hero, an older archeologist, and the latter's beautiful daughter. They're on a dig to locate the Temple of Moloch at the site of Carthage.
Illustrations by Jay Jackson.
Right away we're told that the daughter feels as if someone is trying to force her out of her body. It's no surprise, then, when the mind of a woman of the ancient vanished city takes possession of her physical form. Pretty soon our hero's mind goes far back in time to inhabit the body of a Carthaginian man.
The big problem is that Carthage is about to be wiped off the map by invading Romans. (The two folks from the doomed city came forward in time to escape that fate.) Can the hero find a way to save his beloved from being sacrificed to Moloch, and return to his own time with her? Come on, you know the answer to that already.
War, with elephants.
This is a typical old-time pulp adventure story, with characters who are walking archetypes. It's got some vivid scenes, so it's not boring. Carthage is constantly described as a wicked, barbaric place. That sounds more like Roman propaganda than accurate ancient history, but I'm no expert.
The July 1948 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this unusual work.
Cover art by Arnold Kohn.
A mysterious entity sends a musical note from an ethereal realm to the material world. In mundane reality, a man strikes up a conversation with an airline stewardess. They are obviously attracted to each other, but eventually go their separate ways.
Illustration by William A. Gray.
This is a very strange story, and I have described it badly. The author creates a highly detailed mythological background, much of it difficult to comprehend. I'm not really sure what he's getting at. Did the musical note cause the pair to fall in love?
I found this peculiar tale rather haunting, if confusing. It's definitely not the same old thing, anyway.
Three stars.
When Better Budgies Are Built, by Bryce Walton
The November 1952 issue of Fantastic Adventures is the source of this futuristic farce.
Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.
The narrator is a vacuum cleaner salesman. He gets pulled into the future by a guy using a forbidden time machine. It seems that two rival merchandisers, the only ones left in this new version of the USA, are about to start selling gizmos that will supply everything that anyone could want, for a price. The problem is that one of the corporations has an army of robots who are able to sell anything to anybody.
Illustration by William Slade.
What makes this even more alarming is the fact that the head of the company is a would-be dictator planning to use the robots to sell people on the idea that he should be their leader. In exchange for a piece of future technology that will make him rich when he goes back to his own time, the narrator figures out a way to defeat the irresistible robot salesman.
Pretty silly stuff, really. The plot depends on the robots being absolutely perfect at selling merchandise and ideas, without any clue as to how they do this. We don't get to find out what the narrator earns for his service, either.
The ending makes use of a stereotype about women that is more goofy than offensive.
This two-fisted, he-man yarn comes from the October 1948 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by James B. Settles.
A Cro-Magnon runs away from his tribe after a fight with the bullying leader. He witnesses a sphere arrive and discharge two men and a woman. After saving the trio from a wolf, he jumps into the vessel to escape a sabretooth tiger. The four go off to another planet.
Illustration by J. Allen St. John.
The folks on this world are under attack by green monsters. The Cro-Magnon defeats the creatures easily, while the effete males around him cower in fear. Naturally, the woman is instantly attracted to his manliness.
The author is obviously trying to promote the idea that men should be fearless warriors. The Cro-Magnon's contempt for the decadent males surrounding him is evident, and the author appears to share it.
Even if I ignore all that, as an adventure story it failed to hold my interest. There are parts of it where there seems to be something missing; one scene jumps to another without any kind of transition.
Here's a tale of paranoia from the March 1955 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by Ed Valigursky.
A guy gets fed up with everything being fake. He goes on and on about this, until his exasperated wife calls in a buddy to talk some sense into him.
Illustration by Virgil Finlay.
The two fellows argue about stuff being phony for a while. The guy reveals what he thinks is behind all these ersatz things. There's a twist ending you'll see coming a mile away.
Definitely a one idea story. It's like one of Philip K. Dick's what-is-reality tales, with all the subtlety and complexity surgically removed. Or maybe it's more like a clumsy version of Robert A. Heinlein's famous solipsistic nightmare They.
This screwball comedy comes from the September 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures.
Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.
A nutty scientist uses a gizmo to remove an actor's head, as far as anybody can tell. Apparently he can still talk and breathe and such. He tells the actor to get a job without his handsome face within a month, or stay that way forever.
Illustration by Robert Gibson Jones also.
The actor's head is stored, in some way or other, like a photographic negative. Only pure alcohol can make it go back to normal. Let's just say that beer and a cat are involved in the ridiculous climax.
This thing is even more of a lunatic romp than I have indicated. The nutty scientist does all kinds of impossible things, from teleportation to literally flying.
Of possible interest to fans of pure wackiness.
Two stars.
The Wrong People, by Ralph Robin.
Yet another comedy, from the November/December 1953 issue of the magazine.
Cover art by Vernon Kramer.
A married couple who pretty much dislike everything, including each other, inadvertently conjure up a being from somewhere else in space and time. The creature is friendly enough, it seems, even if it scares the daylights out of the humans at first.
Illustration by Ed Emshwiller.
After they calm down, they think it's some kind of genie or something, ready to offer them whatever they want. This misunderstanding doesn't end well, leading to a shockingly gruesome conclusion.
There seems to be a touch of satire here, although you have to dig deep to find it. The sudden change in mood at the end really threw me for a loop.
Two stars.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Princess of Mars, by Charles R. Tanner
The author retells the story of ERB's famous novel in the form of a humorous poem.
Illustration by Jim.
I found it too sophomoric for my taste in literary spoofing. I may be prejudiced, as I am not a fan of Burroughs.
One star.
Worth Waiting For?
This issue started off well, but quickly sank into mediocrity and lousiness. Amazing and Fantastic seem to have reached the bottom of the barrel when it comes to reprints. Too much thud-and-blunder adventure, too much stupid comedy. It's enough to make you sick.
Cartoon by Frosty, from the same issue as Ralph Robin's story.
It's fitting that this article should appear on the Fourth of July, when we here in the USA celebrate the American Revolution, because I'm going to take a look at a film dealing with another kind of rebellion.
Thank You, AIP
Speaking of American, the American International Pictures company (how's that for a segue?) is responsible for releasing many of the low-budget, teen-oriented films that I rush out to see at my local drive-in. Whether they be Roger Corman's loose adaptations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, silly beach movies, or motorcycle melodramas, good old AIP provides the kind of lowbrow entertainment I crave.
Naturally, my attention was riveted by a poster for a coming attraction that appeared on the wall of the theater's snack bar.
Suggested for mature audiences, and thus sure to draw in the young folks.
The title suggests another biker flick, but the poster (and the trailer) indicate something unusual. Intrigued, I decided to do a little research.
The teeny-tiny line on the poster stating written by Robert Thom (that's how they treat writers in Hollywood) led me to an issue of Esquire from about a year and a half ago.
Scantily clad young lady on the cover? Must be a science fiction magazine.
The movie is based on Thom's own short story The Day It All Happened, Baby, which appeared in the December 1966 issue.
Does this literary background lead to something more sophisticated than, say, AIP's classic Beach Blanket Bingo? Let's find out.
Meet Max Frost
Right away, we get our antihero's background, from before his birth to adolescence. The first thing we hear is his mother-to-be saying that she doesn't want a baby. Little Max Flatow is born anyway. We hear his mother shouting at him for fooling around with a little girl. We see the furniture in his house covered with plastic.
Teenage Max rebels by destroying the furniture and blowing up the family car with homemade dynamite. After this dramatic scene, we find out the name of the movie we've been watching.
Oh, it's not Gone With the Wind.
A few years later, twenty-four-year old Max has changed his name to Max Frost. He's a rock star now, and a multimillionaire surrounded by a retinue of young folks. The film implies that his popularity makes the Beatles look like small potatoes.
Christopher Jones as Max Frost, doing the thing that makes him an object of devotion to everyone under 30.
Max's mother happens to see her estranged son on TV and recognizes him at once. Instead of resenting her rebellious child, she's proud to be the parent of a smashing success.
Shelley Winters as the mother, entranced by her son's performance.
By the way, the other members of the band are an interesting bunch. One guy is a super-genius who takes care of Max's financial situation. Another has a hook for a hand. A third happens to be a gay man, and the film avoids stereotyping him.
There's also this fellow, an anthropologist called Stanley X. He's played by a young actor named Richard Pryor. I understand he does stand-up comedy as well. You may have seen him on an episode of The Wild, Wild West.
A liberal Democratic politician is running for Senator. His major issue is lowering the voting age to eighteen. Max agrees to appear at one of his rallies.
Hal Holbrook as the candidate. He won the Tony Award a couple of years ago for Best Actor in a Play, based on his performance in the one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, and got the Emmy last year for repeating the role on TV.
Max surprises him by singing the groovy song Fourteen or Fight. Eighteen just ain't good enough!
(Like all the songs in this film, it's pretty darn catchy. Most of them relate directly to the plot, too.)
The candidate convinces Max to compromise by changing the bellicose Fourteen or Fight to Fifteen and Ready (which loses the alliteration, unfortunately.)
Front cover news!
Max also agrees to tell his millions of fans to avoid violence at the gigantic rallies held for the candidate. (Cue stock footage of real demonstrations full of young people.) Well, you know what the road to Hell is paved with.
A police officer fires his weapon during a riot.
Twelve people die in the ensuing violence. This leads to the best song in the movie, a hauntingly prophetic number called The Shape of Things to Come (with a nod to the novel of the same name by H. G. Wells.)
The cover of the first edition. Who knew Max Frost read classic science fiction?
After the tragedy, the candidate is elected by a landslide, and states rush to lower the voting age.
As luck (and the script) would have it, an elderly congressman dies of cancer. Max's girlfriend just happens to reside in the deceased representative's district, and is barely old enough to run for office. With the help of Max's overwhelming power over the newly enfranchised teens, she wins the vacant seat.
Diane Varsi as ex-child actress, nude model, and perpetually stoned member of Congress Sally LeRoy. She was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in 1957's Peyton Place.
Meanwhile, Max's mother transforms herself to resemble one of her son's followers.
Shelley Winters, hippie chick.
If you think this has been an improbable series of events, wait until you see what happens next.
In their continuing effort to put political power in the hands of the young, Max and his minions dose the members of Congress with LSD. In the chaos that follows, the age requirement for being President is lowered far enough to allow the unstoppable Max to run for the highest office in the nation.
Not a surprise, if you saw the poster.
Ironically enough, Max runs as a Republican. The Grand Old Party knows that young people are in control now, and they want a winner.
To nobody's surprise, Max wins every state except Hawaii. Note the image of Eisenhower behind him.
In one of her many chameleon-like transformations, Max's mother turns into the perfect President's mother.
Winters chews the scenery, in appropriate fashion, throughout most of the film. In this scene, however, she is wonderfully elegant and refined. It's really a fine performance.
The Senator who got elected with Max's help — remember him? — realizes that the rock star is mad with power, and is well on his way to becoming a dictator. He takes desperate measures.
A failed assassination attempt. Given recent events, this is a particularly disturbing scene.
It's at this point that the film really bares its teeth. Max declares that all Americans must retire at the age of thirty. When they reach thirty-five, they are forced to relocate into concentration camps, where they are kept docile with LSD.
Welcome to Paradise.
And for those reluctant to go? Max has stormtroopers ready to deal with that.
Note the peace sign instead of a swastika.
Guess who winds up in the camp with other older folks?
No one is safe.
The movie ends with a final scene that implies things will only get worse.
The end?
This is a biting satire, worthy of Sheckley at his most cynical. At first, the viewer is tempted to sympathize with Max's acts of rebellion against a smothering mother and a society that sends young men to war but doesn't let them vote. After all, he becomes rich and famous; isn't that the American dream? Once he becomes President, however, he reveals himself to be a monster. It's the old, old story. Power corrupts. The final scene provides a chilling bit of dark irony.
And hey, the music is far out. Dig it, baby, before you get too old.
My fellow Galactic Journeyers have reviewed a couple of Janifer's books (Slave Planet and The Wonder War) and found them lacking. Let's see if this one is any better.
The time is the second half of the 21st century. There are references to a devastating plague that happened a long time ago, travel to the planets in the solar system, and the replacement of all nations and governments with a single, worldwide authority.
Never mind all that, because these science fiction themes have nothing at all to do with the story. The novel could easily be set in the very near future, because there is only one important speculative element.
Technology allows people to enter the minds of others. This is used to treat mental illness when all other methods fail.
(The premise is somewhat similar to that of John Brunner's novel The Whole Man. In that book, however, the technique was used by a natural telepath, and did not require machines.)
Two nurses and two physicians enter the mind of a man in a catatonic state. In his imaginary universe, he is God. He has created angels and light, but nothing else. The medical professionals arrive in the form of angels as well.
Their motive is to convince the patient, through argument with the other angels, not to create anything else. Why? Because they believe a fully realized world would prevent him from ever escaping his solipsistic existence.
The process has its dangers for those who use it. We're told it can even be fatal, although there is no real evidence for this. One of the characters will suffer the consequences.
This synopsis is a lot more linear than the plot. The author frequently shifts point of view among the characters. (I haven't even mentioned the patient's mother and girlfriend, who also have important parts to play.)
The book reminds me, in some ways, of D. G. Compton's novel Synthajoy. Both works are introspective and deal with devices that allow one to share another's experiences. Both have depth of characterization, but Janifer's isn't quite as profound as Compton's.
A Piece of Martin Cann also lacks vividness. The scenes of debate among the angels are difficult to picture. Overall, the book fails to provide much emotional involvement.
I admire the author's ambition, even if I question his execution. This is definitely not an ordinary escapist adventure story. It has a touch of New Wave to it. (Although Janifer is American, the novel seems very British to me.) I might describe it as an interesting failure.
Apart from a few minor tweaks, the original novella makes up the first third of the book, renamed Priests for their Learning. In order to avoid repetition, feel free to reread the original synopsis.
The second part Soldiers for their Valor follows the now exiled Eric as he heads into Monster territory, here he meets others, people from further back in the burrows. They do not have experience in fighting monsters as the front burrow people do but have more complex organization and are willing to experiment with alien science in order to try to gain an advantage over the monsters (a subject verboten among the men of the front burrows). However, they end up captured and brought to an experimental laboratory of the monsters. Eric manages to survive being vivisected but is put into the cage of a strange woman.
The third part, Counselors for their Wisdom, finishes the narrative. The woman is named Rachel and she is from the far back burrows where they have retained much more knowledge from man’s time before the arrival of the monsters. After spending much time learning such varied subjects as the nature of the current Earth (the burrow is merely one of many in this particular monster’s house), astronomy and metaphysics. After they fall in love they escape and devise a plan to solve humanity's problems.
After the strong start in the first part, I found it less interesting as it went along. Firstly, moving the majority of action from burrows to the cages in the lab removes a lot of the atmosphere that made the prior segments so effective. In addition, the unveiling of the world moves away from exploration to explanation. For example, rather than encountering the “Wild Men”, who primarily live outside the monsters houses in the open, we are merely told by Rachel that Eric resembles one. This approach leans things away from excitement and more towards tedium.
Secondly, Tenn makes a lot of the points in a clumsy manner. One example is having Eric regard Rachel like a piece of cattle, assessing her viability for mating and thereby showing his lack of understanding of love. Having multi-paragraph descriptions of his thoughts on her naked body feel less poignant and more voyeuristic. Another would be where “little brown men” are put into the cage with men from the burrows we know and they end up fighting over customs.
And then for all of that, it doesn’t end up feeling very profound or unique. I think I can understand the points Tenn is making but it doesn’t feel that different from Micromegas, Giant Killer, Gulliver’s Travels, The Twilight Zone: The Invaders, or a hundred other tales of perspective and size based conflict. On top of that, the ending just felt perfunctory to me and a little silly.
That is not to say there are not good pieces to it. I agree with the initial review that the first section is very strong, Tenn has a great turn of phrase and at points there is a real sense of adventure to it. But it doesn’t really add up to much.
I would give the whole thing three stars, but not anything more.
by Blue Cathey-Thiele
The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets, by Lloyd Biggle
Based on Still, Small Voice, a short story Biggle published in Analog, 1961. The initial work was met with optimism, but left our reviewer disappointed. Let's see how the novel fares.
"Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny."
This is the Interplanetary Relations Bureau's code, and a bold statement to make. IPR, tasked with guiding planets to qualify for membership in the Federation of Independent Worlds, has been working for over 400 years to unseat a monarchy in Kurr. Forzon, a member of the Cultural Survey, is called to the planet and met with no orders and no democracy – surely there has been a mistake. Something suspicious is happening in the IPR headquarters. He is taught the wrong language, dressed as an enemy, and sent into an ambush. What saves him then will save him later: beauty. The people of Kurr surround themselves with art and even the most mundane items receive decoration.
Kurr has bread and, crucially, circuses. The system is flawed, but the "ugliness" is mainly unseen. The official punishment for any offense (real or imagined) is amputation of the left forearm, the victims sent to "One-hand Villages". Out of sight is out of mind with so much beauty to observe instead. Beauty and morality are often equated, and the book falls into sexism. Artisans pass their craft from father to son in a caste system, and while women play a rounded harp, that is the only note of their artistic endeavors. IPR had attempted to foment dissatisfaction among the women of Kurr, but was met by indifference and a denial that they lacked equal treatment. (I would have liked a better explanation for this, or any explanation at all.) Later, Forzon marries an IPR agent whose most noted trait is a memorable nose.
IPR must work within the existing culture, motivating the people to take action as democracy needs to occur without apparent outside influence. The "Rule of One" allows an exception. A single technological advancement may be introduced… but no one has done it before. It sounds simple. Flintlocks, for example! But those require metalworking, trigger mechanisms, gunpowder. Technologies build on what came before, and progress may look different depending on need. This brings up questions about whether civilizations are actually "more" or "less" advanced… or just different.
Forzon has a trumpet made and given to a newly handicapped harpist, who rejoices in the ability to create music again. Not limited by caste, the One-Hand Villages take up the instrument. Kurr is enchanted, having only known string instruments. The king is as well… until he realizes that the players are one-handed and he bans them as the sight weighs on his conscience. Denied beauty, the people rise up.
Did the rebellion depend on this king having a conscience? Did Forzon play things close to his chest or did he make it up as he went? It's left muddy. Even the IPR agents, despite living so long in Kurr were confused by the cause of the rebellion- which I found hard to believe. The concepts behind the book held up better than the execution. The short story only received 2 stars, so this is still an improvement.
Once, unicorns filled the forests. They frolicked and played and rested their heads in giggling virgins' laps, indifferent to the passage of time. Then one day they all disappeared, and only one remained. "I am the last," she said. "I must find what happened to the others."
She traveled far and long in a new world that could only see her as a white mare. She found companionship in a uselessly powerful magician and a harlot with a soft heart, who followed her on her travels. And at the end of their journey they came to face a wicked king and his brutal, frightful weapon, the Red Bull. A tale of tragedy and hope, the Unicorn reunites with her kind, but can never dream to be one with them ever again.
I can't help but feel that something is missing.
That was my first thought after finishing The Last Unicorn. I was ready to cast it aside as just another well-written fantasy novel, nothing more, but then friends and family, one after another, came to tell me how wonderful the book was. How fantastic. How excellent. I felt the mystification and perhaps jealousy that Schmendrick felt when he could not touch the Unicorn, but Molly could. Why couldn't I see how wonderful the book was? What was I missing?
I can agree that Peter S. Beagle's writing has a magical quality. The way that his words twist and conceal, describe and suggest, it caters to the human imagination – creating the sense of mystery that fairytales were born from in the first place. His characters, too, run counter to expectation and yet fall into their roles beautifully. Perhaps that is the difference for me. No matter how much Beagle allows his words and characters to push at their boundaries, they are still just words and characters to me. This book is just a story, and painfully, so are the unicorns within it. I think this is the difference between me and others. Others can believe in the magic, even if only for a little while. I simply cannot.
That said, I found the unicorns fascinatingly science-fictional, and thinking about them in an SFnal way made me appreciate the book more.
What are the unicorns? They never die from old age, but they can be killed. They see through disguises and can heal with the touch of their horn. Most importantly, though, they exist outside of time. Here is the passage that struck me most of this fact:
"Often then, between the rush of one breath and the reach of another, it came to her that Schmendrick and Molly were long dead, and King Haggard as well, and the Red Bull met and mastered – so long ago that the grandchildren of the stars that had seen it all happen were withering now, turning to coal – that she was still the only unicorn left in the world" (92).
What is unique about this paragraph is the way the Unicorn foresees the long distant future as if she were already existing there, but lacking the foresight of how her journey will truly end. It viscerally describes her experiencing her inevitable immortality, and yet she has this vision only midway through her journey, long before that time will come. Her human companions live and breathe beside her and yet also, paradoxically, are long dead ancestors in her mind. In a way, she is a fourth dimensional being, capable of seeing the present and elements of the future at the same time.
The Unicorn's ageless immortality and her ability to preserve her home forest in a perpetual spring also support the idea that unicorns are creatures with some dominion over time. The unicorns exist outside of time, adding somewhat to their wonder, and they have the ability to extend some of their immortality to the world and creatures around which they dwell. Perhaps their ability to heal is also a kind of time travel, in which they revert the afflicted body or mind to a time when it was healthy.
As inter-dimensional beings, it would also follow that unicorns would be able to tell false truth. When trapped in Mommy Fortuna's midnight carnival, the Unicorn is not deceived by the overlays the witch puts on her poor display animals. She sees in multiple dimensions their true forms and their disguises, and it is only the soaking of time that make it more difficult for the Unicorn to tell the difference
I think this leads to one of the key themes of the novel: that time affects all things and over time we as living (and eventually dying) creatures affect our world back. The mortals (such as King Haggard) bend the world around them until the earth itself is transformed and bearing their legacy. Meanwhile, the unicorns cannot change, and thus their surroundings do not change either. Their forests remain green and un-hunted, but also never grow beyond their boundaries. The Red Bull, too, is an immortal constant, but it is constrained to always require a master, never ruling its own domain or leaving a visible impact.
So it is only the humans and other mortal creatures that, while constrained by time, also reside within it. They can saturate time with meaning, and that meaning can then permeate the ground, seeping into the three lower dimensions. The unicorns exist statically, outside of time, barred from ever feeling its touch or touching it. They get eternal beauty and life, but they do not love. I do not know which existence is superior, but at least looking at it through this SF lens, I feel that I understand the unicorns and their book a little better. The unicorns are the opposite of the human experience, and by extension I think that makes us aware of what the human experience is. Schmendrick and Molly and even King Haggard are all foils to the unicorn to exaggerate how alien she is. This then reflects back how human her companions are, and how human we the readers are. The last unicorn is a fairytale, but it contains truths so vivid and tied to reality, it seems to exist outside of itself. Therein lies the true magic. Through only the power of words, Beagle creates life.
I wasn't even a fan of Kennedy, not really. Until last week, I'd regarded him somewhat with disdain. After all, he'd stayed out of the presidential fray until Senator Gene McCarthy had cleared the way, jumping in as if to steal his lunch. He had none of the urbane wittiness of his late brother, looking rather like a bad caricature of Jack Kennedy.
But as I followed the race, I came to develop respect for the man. The newspapers did not cover his speeches in depth, for RFK's speeches were about policy, and policy is boring. I like, policy, however. I like a candidate who lays out his priorities. I like a candidate who appeals to the most downtrodden of Americans, who risks being branded a rabble-rouser or "dangerous" in his efforts to bridge the race gap.
And he clearly was resonating, from his surprise victory in Indiana, to his follow-on win in Nebraska, to his narrow loss to McCarthy in comfortable, suburban, white Oregon.
Bobby came to San Diego last week. I think McCarthy was here, too. Kennedy talked of uniting their efforts against Humphrey to take the country in a new direction. McCarthy responded, per my local newspaper, that he prefered to go it alone and see what happens.
Well, McCarthy's gotten his wish, though he can't be happy with how it happened.
I did not vote for Kennedy in last week's primary, but I would have cheerfully voted for him had he survived to win at the convention. I did not dwell overmuch about Kennedy before last week. Now, I cannot think of the man without blinking away tears.
He did not deserve to die. This is the fifth time in six years that an assassin's bullet had cut down a hero in his prime (JFK, X, Evers, King, and now RFK) At this point, I'm not sure how much more we can take. As President Johnson tearfully said in a nationwide address last week:
"Let us, for God's sake…put an end to violence and to the preaching of violence."
by Victoria Silverwolf
It has happened again.
Robert Francis Kennedy, Senator from the state of New York and Presidential candidate, was pronounced dead early on the morning of June 6, a day after being shot multiple times after speaking to supporters in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.
The candidate addressing supporters not long before the murder.
Political assassinations are supposed to be something Americans read about in history books. Lincoln, Garfield, Mckinley. Those of us who were around three decades ago may recall the murders of Mayor Anton J. Cermak of Chicago and Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana. Old news, or so it seemed just a few years ago.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy: November 22, 1963.
Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz): February 21, 1965.
Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.: April 4, 1968
Only two months after the latest of these atrocities, we once again have to ask ourselves why such horrors plague us so frequently.
I should feel sorrow. I should feel rage. No doubt I will experience these emotions very soon. Today, I am numb.
Perhaps it is best if I end with words spoken by Kennedy himself, on the day Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered.
Senator Kennedy announces the death of Doctor King to a crowd in Indianapolis, Indiana. Some claim the wise and gentle words of this impromptu speech kept the city from exploding into violence.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
by Victoria Lucas
The Real World Invades the Land of Make Believe
In case you haven't been watching children's TV lately, Daniel Striped Tiger is Fred Rogers' sock-puppet alter ego that he voices for his Misterogers' Neighborhood PBS program and public appearances. Daniel is mostly seen in the show's make-believe section that Rogers carefully distinguishes from the "real" parts of his "neighborhood" to help children understand the difference. But sometimes the real world enters the inner world of Lady Aberlin (Betty Aberlin) and King Friday XIII (another puppet), as it did earlier this year when an anti-war protest happened in this part of the show (as reported by me in this piece).
Lady Aberlin Comforts Daniel
A nose rub helps
After Daniel gets another worry off his chest about whether all the air could go out of someone, making them cease to exist, he gets to the real concern bothering him. He asks his friend Lady Aberlin what "assassination" means. "Have you heard that word a lot today?" asks Lady Aberlin. The answer, as you can imagine, is "yes." His friend defines the term in words a child could understand, and soon attempts to move on and talk about a picnic two other denizens of the make-believe world are about to have. But Daniel is too sad to go to the picnic–very uncharacteristic of this childish, sensitive, and highly social character.
Rogers Will Speak Frankly Tonight
In another uncharacteristic move, NET has announced a half-hour prime-time special this evening for Rogers to speak–not, as he usually does, to children, but to adults, and specifically to parents, about caring for their children during this trying time. Although I don't have children (yet), I want to learn how to be sensitive to the needs of our friends' little ones.
Fred Rogers
And I don't know about you, but I'm going to try to find a neighbor with a TV who wants to watch tonight, since Mel and I still don't have one of our own. I can hardly think of anything more soothing than the voice of Mr. Rogers, speaking slowly and deliberately, attempting to comfort and inform. In the meantime I will be thinking about Bobby Kennedy and how excited I was looking forward to voting for him.
Bobby Testifying
Rest In Peace, Mr. Kennedy. I think history will treat you kindly.
I recently dived deep down into the abyss of Z-grade filmmaking with a pair of inept science fiction films. Grab your flashlight and come spelunking with me into the bottomless cavern of movie malfeasance.
This subterranean smorgasbord of silliness begins with stock footage of the casinos in Las Vegas. Two cops drive by and get a call to investigate a listening disturbance [sic]. That's a situation I don't recall ever appearing on Dragnet.
"Be sure not to help this guy, everybody! Just stand around and stare at him!"
In what is very clearly a set, and not Las Vegas, we see a fellow with his ear to the ground. He's raving about something that sounds like ants underground. Understandably, the cops drag him away as a kook, and he winds up in a mental hospital.
(By the way, the sanitarium has slot machines, for use by compulsive gamblers. At this point, I had to wonder if the film was a deliberate spoof. Unfortunately, I don't think so.)
Then they tell you what movie you're watching, in case you wandered into the theater by accident.
Our hero is a naval officer, recently assigned to lab duty on land after an experimental underwater habitat was destroyed in an earthquake. (Hint: It wasn't a natural disaster.) The sister of the listening guy happens to be his assistant. She tells him that her brother keeps asking to talk to him.
Peter Arne, as Arnold Kramer, in bathrobe, and Kerwin Mathews, as Commander Jonathan Shaw, in uniform. "Before I listen to your crazy story, allow me to remind you that I was the star of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which was a much better film."
It turns out that the guy isn't a paranoid nut, but a seismologist who has figured out that (wait for it) a Chinese general and his minions have dug their way under the Pacific Ocean and most of the way across the United States. The plan is to fill the tunnels with atomic bombs and, I don't know, rule the world, I guess. (We find out he's planted similar bombs under Peking, so he's working on his own, like any proper megalomaniac.)
A minion inside a Chinese digging machine. "Peek-a-boo!"
After a few skirmishes underground (excuse me, I mean a battle beneath the Earth), the good guys figure out that the general's supplies are coming from some place in the middle of the Pacific. They use their own digging machine to raid the place.
Carefully labeled, in case some swabby thinks it's a tank or something.
Along for the fun is our Good Girl, a Hawaiian geologist. She doesn't do much, really, except look pretty and fall into the arms of our hero.
"Gee, Miss Yung, you're beautiful without your glasses!" The character has a Chinese last name, but is played by Viviane Ventura, a British/Colombian actress. A small hint of casting problems to come.
The raid is a fiasco, with a bunch of Marines getting killed. Our hero gets captured by the bad guys.
Martin Benson as General Chan Lu. "Before I explain my sinister plan, in the proper manner of any James Bond villain, allow me to remind you that I had a small role in Goldfinger, which was a much better film."
At this point, our movie's Bad Girl enters. She hypnotizes our hero, using what is very obviously one of those little battery-operated handheld fans you use to cool yourself off on a hot day. She recites this bit of doggerel over and over, in order to wash the hero's brain thoroughly.
Red is green
Green is red
The East is sunrise
The West is dead
I don't think Robert Frost has any competition to worry about.
"I will control your mind through the power of a refreshing breeze!"
I should note that this character (Dr. Arnn) is played by Paula Li Shiu, a Chinese actress. All the other Chinese characters (except a few minor nonspeaking roles) are played by Occidentals. This kind of casting is embarrassing, but if Christopher Lee can play Fu Manchu, I guess anything goes.
The general in the tube gizmo he uses to descend to the underground tunnels. "The next wise guy who says 'Beam me up, Scotty' is going to get it!"
The bad guy has all kinds of supposedly Chinese stuff decorating his underground headquarters, just in case you forget what nationality he's supposed to be. He also has a pet hawk, just to show you how evil he is.
"The next wise guy who says 'This movie is for the birds' is going to get it!"
Will the good guys win? Oh, come on, you know the answer to that already.
Nothing like an atomic bomb for a happy ending.
Quality of film: Two stars.
Level of derisive amusement: Four stars.
All the Way Down to the Bottom
What happened to the word "The" and the hyphen between "Astro" and "Zombies"?
This cheapskate epic begins with a woman driving down the road. Get used to this kind of thing, because we'll have plenty of scenes that go on and on where people do ordinary things. Eventually, she winds up in her garage, where she's killed by a guy in a skull mask.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is an astro-zombie.
We then get our opening titles, oddly filmed over scenes of toy robots.
Nothing says quality like dime store special effects.
Cut to some science types and some government types talking in an office. Long and confusing story short, it seems there was a project to transmit thoughts from folks on Earth to brains in artificial bodies in spacecraft.
Government guy, played by Wendell Corey, looks concerned. He had a similar role in Agent For H.A.R.M.
It seems that one of the scientists working on the project got kicked out, and is now on his own. He's played by John Carradine, of course.
"You want me to play another Mad Scientist? How much does it pay?"
Naturally, Carradine has a hunchback for an assistant. Believe it or not, his name is Franchot.
"My parents could have named me 'Fritz' or 'Ygor,' but no . . ."
Franchot grabs a dead guy out of a car wreck and drags him back to the lab. If I've managed to follow the plot correctly, he wants to put a brain into his body and create another astro-zombie. Apparently, the previous one had a murder's brain and went on a killing rampage.
There's also a woman in a bikini strapped down on a table in the lab. She has nothing to do with the plot.
Meanwhile, foreign spies are after Carradine's secret. A lot of the running time is spent with the good guy spies and the bad guy spies fighting each other. The leader of the bad guys is played by the amazing Tura Satana, so memorable in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Tura and one of her minions.
I have to say something about Tura's appearance here. She wears tons of makeup, including gigantic false eyelashes. Her fingernails look like daggers. There's a special credit for her costume designer, who really did an interesting job.
Tura in pink. Is she auditioning for Star Trek?
No opportunity is lost to put her remarkable body on display.
A little something for the leg men in the audience.
Anyway, let me get back to the plot. We've got a couple of heroes, of a sort, as well as a heroine/potential victim.
Here they are, in a time-killing scene at a nightclub in which they watch a topless dancer covered in body paint. Is it really cricket for a guy to take a woman out to see a stripper?
They come up with a plan to have the heroine act as bait for the astro-zombie who's slaughtering women left and right.
"Uh, guys? I don't think that's such a good idea. And which one of you is supposed to be my boyfriend, anyway?"
Stuff happens. The funniest scene is when the astro-zombie runs out of energy, and has to hold a flashlight to his head in order to charge his photoelectric cells.
"Thanks, Eveready!"
Boy, this is a dreary little movie. Only the presence of Tura Satana makes it watchable.
One more cheesecake shot for the road.
Quality of film: One star.
Level of derisive amusement: Five stars.
I was greatly impressed by Robert Silverberg's recent novel Thorns. It seemed to mark a new direction for a prolific author of competent, if undistinguished, science fiction. Will his new book reach the same level of quality? Let's find out.
Christmas Day, 1998. A naked man appears out of nowhere, floating down from the sky. This fellow calls himself Vornan-19, and he claims to come from the year 2999.
With the year 2000 approaching, members of a worldwide apocalyptic cult fill the streets with wild orgies of sex and destruction. As you'd expect, the arrival of Vornan-19 changes things. Is he a fraud? A sign of the impending end of the world? Or proof that Earth will survive for many years to come?
Let's slow down a bit, in the same way the novel does at this point, and introduce some important characters.
The narrator is Leo, a physicist. He's working on time reversal. So far, all he's been able to do is transform a particle into an antiparticle, sending it backwards in time, but also causing it to be instantly destroyed. He's convinced that honest-to-gosh time travel is impossible, and therefore he thinks Vornan-19 is a phony.
Jack is a brilliant graduate student. He's been working on the theory of obtaining all energy from an atom (without the pesky side effect of a nuclear explosion), but he's not interested in any practical applications. For unclear reasons, he drops out and goes to live with his stunningly beautiful wife Shirley in a remote part of the Arizona desert.
The United States government sends Leo and a few other scientists to act as tour guides for Vornan-19, of a sort. They really want these geniuses to figure out if he's truly from the future. (Even if he isn't, he could be useful in convincing the cultists that the world isn't going to end in the year 2000.)
What follows is an episodic account of Vornan-19's encounters with people of the twentieth century. He causes chaos at a billionaire's party, in a mansion that keeps changing shape. He seduces men and women. Vornan-19 remains a mystery, revealing very little about himself or the world one thousand years from now. He becomes an object of religious devotion, leading to the book's dramatic but enigmatic conclusion.
After the intensity of Thorns, this is a surprisingly leisurely book. (I believe it is also the author's longest novel, at about two hundred and fifty pages.) We spend a lot of time with Leo, Jack, and Shirley before the narrator goes off with Vornan-19.
There's also quite a bit of sex. Jack and Shirley are nudists, and pretty soon Leo joins in. The group of scientists following Vornan-19 around includes both women and men, and we get to learn who's sleeping with whom, and who wants to sleep with whom, and who isn't sleeping with whom. Leo spends time with two prostitutes, one supplied by a grateful U.S. government, the other working at a legal, automated brothel.
(I've heard that Silverberg writes a lot of so-called adult novels under various pseudonyms, so maybe he's gotten into the habit of including this sort of thing.)
There's even a sex scene that serves as the book's climax. (Sorry, I couldn't resist the obvious pun.) We also find out why Jack ended his research, and what that has to do with Vornan-19.
This is an elegantly written novel that held my attention throughout. As I've indicated, it's hardly a thriller; the reader needs to be patient to fully appreciate it. There's a touch of satire and some interesting speculation about the technology of the near future.
I sometimes like to read books by authors I know nothing about, in the hope of getting a nice surprise. Well, this one certainly is not nice!
What is there to like about this?
The plot? No, dull plodding sub-Reynolds spy nonsense.
The characters? Paper-thin, laden with racist stereotypes.
The style? Long run-on sentences and expository dialogue which are about as exciting as drying paint.
Feel free to miss out on such writing as:
"Are you talking about the Alphans or spacemen in general?"
"Spacemen in general." The Doctor lifted his eyes. "I'll have to admit, I often think the Alphans are more complicated than others."
"In what way?" asked York.
"They're rather inscrutable," Bendbow explained. "As a psychomedician, I realize they don't wear their emotions or thoughts as transparently as most of us. But that's a racial characteristic."
Don’t buy it. Don’t read it. Don’t even acknowledge it. See it coming down the street, run the other way.
Save yourself!
Indeed, so bad, so offensive is this book, with enough off-handed bigotry to make even John Campbell blush to publish it, that with the blessing of the Journey staff, we've inaugurated a brand new award for badness. If the Queen Bee is bestowed for conspicuous sexism (thank goodness we have a word for the phenomenon now!) then there is only one name for the "honor" The Programmed Man deserves:
Is it an anatomical textbook? No, it's the debut novel of John Sladek.
Scientists want to create a self-replicating machine. Why? To get a government funded grant of course.
Quickly this invention gets out of hand, with robots consuming large quantities of metal and electricity, multiplying and converting other machines into robots, displacing humans from their homes, and even killing them.
The story follows a large cast of characters, ranging from scientists to soldiers, love interests, foreign spies, reporters, et cetera. At times, it’s difficult to follow, particularly in one fast paced section of the book where nearly every paragraph hops to another character’s perspective. With a number of names to follow, characters are best distinguished by their quirks, and while sometimes they feel more like caricatures than characters, it makes for a funny read.
The tone of this book reminds me of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Speaking of the latter, I can’t help but think this is a also response to the creation of the atomic bomb. The plot revolves around the negligent nature of scientific discovery without consideration of the consequences. Much like the atomic bomb, the reproductive system might solve a more immediate problem, but the lasting effects continue to hurt civilians who had nothing to do with the creation or any say in whether something like that should exist.
Possibly this is a response to Karel Capek’s play "R.U.R." a work that is referenced in the story. To spoil a forty year old play, the fatal flaw in the robot’s revolution is their dependency on humans to make more robots. I can see this being the inspiration for Sladek’s main conflict.
Author John Sladek
Though an American writer, Mr. Sladek is currently publishing overseas, and were it not for the hilarious title, my sister probably would not have bought this book as joke on her latest trip abroad. Hopefully it will come to the states soon.
I enjoyed reading this and it earned quite a few laughs from me. While lighter on the science side, The Reproductive System clearly comes from a love of science fiction, referencing many works that came before it. The ending is perhaps appropriately happy, though a bit too convenient for my taste, but I think that was intentional on Sladek’s part, ending on one last humorous critique of the genre.
Are you a Mack Reynolds fan? Then you'll like this book because it is the essence of Mack Reynolds from top to bottom, incorporating all of his strengths and few of his weaknesses.
In brief: The time is the late 20th Century. The setting is the United American States. If you've read Reynolds' Joe Mauser stories, then you know this future Earth is both a utopia and a dead end. The Cold War still simmers, but the People's Capitalism of the UAS and the Communism of the SovWorld are now two sides of the same coin: automation has put most people out of work, and wealth is concentrated with the elite while everyone else is stuck in fairly rigid castes, most living on the dole and watching telly while tranked up on free drugs. Common Europe and the few neutral countries aren't much better off.
Mick Grant and Anna Enesco are scholarship students, awarded their grant from the Joshua Porsenna endowment for a very specific reason–both seem to have the talent of precognition. The plot thickens when the mysterious and (in most places) illegal Monad Foundation also offers both of them exorbitant grants. All the Monads want is for the two to study socio-economic texts, from Anarchism to Zapata, Communism to Technocracy. Throw in the involvement of both military and government intelligence, and you've got the makings for quite an exciting time! But Reynolds manages to throw in yet another twist before finishing this slim novel, revealing the identity of the mysterious Porsenna.
The pacing for this book is excellent. Not a single chapter concluded that didn't tempt me to move on to the next. The setting is fascinating and also disturbingly plausible, and the motivation of the Monadians makes a depressing amount of sense. Of course, this being Reynolds, the book is peppered with historical essays with subjects like the anarchist Bakunin and the Greek colony of Cumae. Somehow, Reynolds makes it work. Maybe it's because the subject material was germane or simply well-presented, but it never turned me off.
The only real disappointment I had was the Anna Enesco's evolution into a caricature. She is at first played for frigid but independent. Over time, she falls for Mick, but there's never really a pay-off scene that sells the attraction. It's just accepted as having happened. By the end, her dialogue is stilted in the extreme.
I think dialogue has always been Reynolds' weak point. The man has traveled the world and has a broad knowledge of things. He knows how to plot, how to pace, how to build a world, but his characters are simply pieces in that world (though Mick isn't badly drawn, if a bit dense).
Unfortunately, this book came out November of last year; I only got to it now. As a result, though I'm giving it four stars, it's too late to make last year's Galactic Stars. Still, I recommend it.
Captain Randall and his crew have been preserved inside their submarine for over a thousand years. When an alien species refuses all compromise and sets out to destroy human life to make space for their own ever-growing population, these men are revived. They find humanity has genetically suppressed aggression and can't fight back, even in self defense against the Nerne.
Randall is physically outmatched, but future technology defends against future threats, and using old tricks and weapons they are able to sneak attacks under the radar. He is assigned eager robots who join his crew. After one of his men accidentally discovers how to unlock aggression – in one of my least favorite segments, when he hits a woman who insults him after they have sex, after which they… fall in love immediately and decide to get married – Randall recruits more humans. An unanticipated ally comes in the Revain, who have been fending off the Nerne for centuries. These alien allies bring their advanced tech, ships, and pills that work just as well to unlock aggression.
In the end, what ends the war isn't overwhelming force or superior firepower – it's social disruption. Using the computing of the robots, and the methods of the past, they undermine the highest ranking Nerne and cause the population to question the waves of existing lives sacrificed for potential future life.
The Nerne aren't alone in upheaval. Humans have also had a shift. With aggression, passion was also suppressed. Visible violence was removed, but other insidious forms remained – the crew had been used as a sort of nearly-alive wax museum for years before revival as a grim reminder, the government overruled the people's say, sent political opponents to become aggressive "deviants", and tasked robots – who were capable of feeling – with fighting and "dying" for them. Randall is disgusted by modern humanity's hands-off approach that still puts others in the line of fire and at the callous disregard of life by the Nerne. He doesn't delight in war, but recognizes when violence is called for to stop more death.
High makes clever use of the change in times and thinking. They didn't swoop in and do more damage, they were simply unexpected. How did they make humans violent again? Punching them in the face! It sounds absurd, and it is! But in a society without aggression, no one would be able to take that first swing.
While the whole book is set in a theater of war it explores what it means to be peaceable and how that can, and can't be achieved. It also makes a compelling case for contraceptives, and against eugenics.
Anthropol member Vernay is sent on an undercover assignment to a planet that his organization recently made and lost contact with when their scout team was killed. He is conditioned to fit in with the people, once from Earth, who live on Ujvila. It's a society strictly ordered by sex and rank, with men as subservient. He joins up with resistance fighters, helping facilitate change through the planet's own people and systems. Vernay must work around the Galactic Military (Gal-Mil) who have the same end goal but use force. He is captured and tortured, then meets the political and spiritual leader, the Kalauz. She confirms the existence of an alien presence that Anthropol had previously thought only metaphorical. These small aliens operated replicated human-forms but are no longer a threat as planetary defense scans for them.
Lori, the Captain of the Gal-Mil presence, is captured and sent to a "joy-labor camp" where prisoners rarely live past two years. Vernay volunteers himself to the camp to break her out or die trying. They escape with rebel help.
Vernay puts together odd hints he has noticed through his time on the planet, and brings it to a head when he calls to see Rosid, a resistance leader. Many of the rebels are, in fact, Ngign aliens posing as Ujvilans. Trisk, an Ujvilan rebel and cousin to the Kalauz, is horrified to discover that her people's minds were destroyed to create duplicates for the aliens. Vernay finds the one weak spot on the constructed body, the Ngignians dying in moments without a means to filter the atmosphere. They reach the Kalauz, but she too has been replaced. Trisk destroys her body, and takes over as Kalauz, starting social reform.
The epilogue calls Vernay and Lori back to the planet, as Trisk had spent four years improving the world, only to regress it to the original state, spurring new revolutionaries.
Anthropol went from a political revolution plot to an alien takeover in the last moments of the book. Although clues lead up to it, the plot turned so many times in the final chapters that it seemed there was another book's worth of material that hadn't been fully incorporated. Since so much time was spent exploring alternative methods, having the ultimate defeat come by physically attacking and killing the aliens instead of using Anthropol tactics was a let down. Also, Trimble recreated a female/male style system among the women, with feminine, "pretty" women as leaders, and masculine women given the roles usually assigned to men. As a commentary on the treatment of the sexes, it fell short.
![[September 14, 1968] Half a Loaf is Better Than None (October 1968 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/coverREDUCED.jpg?resize=427%2C295)
</small![[August 30, 1968] TV or Not TV, That is The Question (<i>They Saved Hitler's Brain</i> and <i>Mars Needs Women</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Untitled-2.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
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![[July 14, 1968] Long Time No See (August 1968 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/COVER-2.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[July 4, 1968] Youth Is Wasted On The Young (<i>Wild In The Streets</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/TITLE.png?resize=672%2C372)
![[June 14, 1968] Men, Women, and Monsters (June 1968 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/680614covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[June 8, 1968] Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/gettyimages-107635904.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[May 24, 1968] How Low Can You Go? (<i>Battle Beneath the Earth</i> and <i>The Astro-Zombies</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Untitled-2-1.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
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