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.
I've previously confessed my inexplicable enjoyment of beach movies. A similar vice to which I am addicted is my passion for films about motorcycle gangs.
This particular kind of cheap drive-in feature has exploded ever since the success of The Wild Angels last year.
There are already a bunch of these movies out there, all featuring guys on big bikes riding around, drinking beer, making out with chicks, getting into fights, and generally raising Cain.
But what if they weren't guys?
Three films I saw recently raised my hopes that I'd see the distaff side of things for a change. Not all of them met my expectations. Let's take a look.
The Hellcats
The poster for this low budget cycle flick certainly emphasizes the women in the cast. The trailer does the same thing, putting the names of five of the female characters right up there on the screen for all to see. But is that really what we get?
The movie starts with the funeral of one of the gang. The plot is both simple and difficult to follow, but let me do my best to explain it.
The dead member of the Hellcats was working with the cops. It seems that the cyclists are helping some gangsters push drugs, and he was informing on the crooks. The gangsters killed him, I guess. This isn't the most coherent movie in the world.
Anyway, they also kill one of the cops. The dead man's brother and girlfriend are our protagonists. They manage to join the Hellcats. Eventually, after a lot of random stuff happens, the Hellcats blame the gangsters for the death of one of their members and a big fight breaks out.
So where are all the tough biker chicks we're expecting? Well, they're around, but they don't do very much. Even the one-eyed blonde shown on the poster is a minor character. (You can see what she really looks like in the scene shown above. Not as scary as the poster.)
Not a good movie. Read a book instead.
Maybe not this one.
Quality of film: Two stars.
Bad Girl content: One star.
The Mini-Skirt Mob
The trailer for this somewhat more professionally made film makes it clear who the villainess is, and even features a knockdown, drag-out fight between the Bad Girl and the Good Girl. More false promises?
During the opening credits, I thought I had walked into the wrong theater and was watching a Western. Horses in a motorcycle movie? Well, it turns out the hero is a champion rodeo rider, although that has nothing to do with the story.
The cowboy has just married our Good Girl, played by Sherry Jackson. Hey, she was on Star Trek!
This makes our Bad Girl, played by Diane McBain, very mad. It seems she had a relationship with the cowboy some time ago, and doesn't want to let him go. Together with a few male sidekicks, she and the other members of a female gang called the Mini-Skirts give the newlyweds a hard time.
(Truth in advertising. The gang members really do wear miniskirts, as impractical as that may be on motorcycles. I'd hardly call them a mob, however, as there are only four of them. One of them, the leader's little sister, turns out to be not so bad after all.)
It all leads up to an out-and-out war, with rifles and Molotov cocktails as the weapons. People get killed. There's one death scene that's pretty darn gruesome.
The movie manages to create some suspense, and there are a lot of visually impressive scenes of the desert, courtesy of the state of Arizona.
Quality of film: Three stars.
Bad Girl content: Three stars.
She-Devils on Wheels
The trailer for this Florida-filmed epic reveals two things. It's got a bunch of Bad Girls, and it's really, really cheap.
The opening credits feature a painting of a screaming woman on a cycle. I hope you like it, because it shows up a lot. Between scenes, the same thing appears, spinning around like a record.
The Man-Eaters motorcycle club (their symbol is more cute than scary) have races to determine who has first pick from a bunch of men who are, apparently, just waiting around to be chosen as intimate companions for the night. When one member chooses the same guy too often, the others accuse her of being in love, which is against the rules. She has to drag the fellow behind her bike, leaving him a bloody mess, to prove her loyalty to the gang.
(There's a lot of fake blood in this thing. Director Herschell Gordon Lewis also gave the world extremely gory films such as Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!,Color Me Blood Red, and A Taste of Blood.)
The two most interesting Man-Eaters are Queenie, the leader, and Whitey. The latter is — how should I put it? — zaftig? Rubenesque? Anyway, she's not your typical Hollywood starlet trying to look tough.
There's also Honeypot, a new member. She gets the plot going.
After the Man-Eaters have a fight with a male gang, defeating the boys easily, the guys get their revenge by kidnapping Honeypot and returning her a bloody mess. (Do you sense a pattern here?) The Man-Eaters set a trap for the leader of the men, leading to our big shock scene (which you may have spotted in the trailer.)
Make no mistake. This is a terrible movie. The acting is atrocious. (I understand that women who could ride motorcycles were hired, rather than women who could act.) But it delivers the goods. These are very Bad Girls indeed.
Quality of film: One star.
Bad Girl content: Five stars.
Overall, not very good movies. Sometimes you just have to go back to the classics.
People who don’t like trippy, confusing endings for their movies are in for a bad time of it these days. The ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey at least makes more sense than the ending of The Prisoner (the filming of which series overlapped with 2001 at Borehamwood Studios, meaning Alexis Kanner had to share his dressing room with a leopard). The question is, does this make it a better piece of SF visual art?
No, I don't know either.
The plot of the movie is fairly thin. Millions of years ago, we see human evolution directed by a strange black monolith, in a premise strikingly similar to that of the recently-released Quatermass and the Pit. We then jump to the near future of 2001, where a similar monolith is discovered on the moon and another near Jupiter. A space mission is dispatched to check the latter out, but things go wrong in a memorable subplot when the sentient ship's computer, HAL 9000, goes mad and kills the astronauts before sole survivor Dave Bowman finally shuts it down. The psychedelic denouement contains the distinct implication that the next stage of human evolution has now been directed by the monoliths, and Bowman has become the first of the new species of elevated humans.
The monolith near Jupiter, about to mess with your head.
Interspersed with the plot is a lot of depiction of the future thirty-three years from now, with its space stations, ships and moonbases. Despite some very impressive and well-thought-through effects, with actors seeming to stand upside down or move at right angles to each other in zero-G environments, the overall impression was depressingly banal and rather like one of the corporate-sponsored imagined futures in Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland attraction. We may be able to travel to the moon, but we still have Hilton hotels and Pan-Am spacecraft. The characters are also banal, in the case of Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood almost to the point of seeming robotic: HAL is much more of a character than either of the two astronaut dolls.
Captain Scarlet is much more animated than these two.
As an anthropologist, what interested me most was the film’s questions about violence and human nature. The message seemed to be that humans are inherently violent, however evolved we are: the first thing the ape-men at the start of the movie do once they discover tool use is to kill a tapir and then make war on a rival tribe. Bowman’s last significant act as a human is to kill a sentient machine, and we have no idea what the evolved Bowman will do as he approaches the Earth. While the current scientific consensus on the inherent violence of humans is more nuanced (I note that the film also espouses the now-outdated theory about the first tools being discarded bones, suggesting that Arthur C. Clarke isn’t as up on his anthropology as he is on his astrophysics), it perhaps works well as a cautionary note about our current political situation and the possibility that we might wipe ourselves out through nuclear warfare.
Raymond Dart came up with this theory in 1924, we're over it, Arthur.
2001 is a beautiful and lyrical movie which raises some interesting questions about the nature of humanity, but which also bogs itself down in the dull minutiae of an imagined life in the future. Three out of five stars.
Love At First Sight
by Victoria Silverwolf
Unlike Tony Bennett, I left my heart in Los Angeles.
I happened to be in that city during the initial run of Stanley Kubrick's new science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. I understand that the director has cut the film slightly, to tighten the pace a bit and to add a few titles to the various sequences. (The Dawn of Man at the beginning, for example.) What I saw was the original version, and it knocked me out.
Instead of just gushing about the movie, let me introduce you to the little demon sitting on my left shoulder, who will do its best to convince me I'm wrong.
Giving the Devil Its Due
ZZZZZZZ. Oh, excuse me. I fell asleep trying to watch this thing. It's got the frenzied pace of a glacier in winter and all the excitement of a snail race.
Cute. Real cute. Some people are going to consider it boring, I'm sure, compared to an action-packed film like Planet of the Apes. But that's a matter of apples and oranges. I found every second of this leisurely movie absolutely enthralling.
No accounting for taste. What about the actors? What a bunch of bland nobodies! They could be replaced with wet pieces of cardboard and you wouldn't know the difference.
First of all, let me deny the premise of your objection in at least two cases. During the Dawn of Man sequence, a fellow by the name of Daniel Richter does an extraordinary job of playing the prehistoric hominoid who discovers how to use tools. (Of course, this character isn't named in the movie itself, but I believe the script by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke calls him Moonwatcher. We'll know for sure when the novel comes out.)
Not even the demon can deny that the makeup and costuming for this sequence is fantastic, better than in Planet of the Apes.
Then there's my favorite character, HAL 9000. Canadian stage actor Douglas Rain's voice is used to magnificent effect. It's exactly how I expect a sentient computer to talk.
Like everything else in the film, the design of HAL's eye is superb.
OK, I'll grant you those two. And I'll even throw in the costumes, sets, and props that appear in this turkey. But what about the actors who aren't hiding in a monkey suit or behind a glowing red circle? They're as dull as ditchwater.
Unlike Kubrick's black comedy masterpiece Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, this film doesn't have any big name stars in the cast. I think that's deliberate. Nobody is larger-than-life; they all seem like very ordinary people involved in something extraordinary.
Let's take a look at the three main human characters.
William Sylvester as Doctor Heywood R. Floyd.
William Sylvester was born in the USA but has lived and acted in the UK since the late 1940's. He's done a lot of British low budget films. I know him best for his lead roles in the horror films Devil Doll and Devils of Darkness.
Ha! And that gives him the experience to star in a multimillion dollar blockbuster? You've been watching too much Shock Theater, lady.
I can't deny that, but let me continue. Consider the two astronauts aboard Discovery in the depths of the solar system.
From left to right, Gary Lockwood as Doctor Frank Poole and Keir Dullea as Doctor Dave Bowman.
Gary Lockwood has done a lot of TV, and had the lead role in the fantasy film The Magic Sword. Keir Dullea has been in a few movies, and is probably best known for playing one of the two title characters in David and Lisa.
Let me guess; he didn't play Lisa. Anyway, you've just offered up two more minor league players. You're making my point for me. Where are the famous actors who would dominate the screen?
That's the problem. They would dominate the screen, and this is a movie best appreciated for its images and its ideas. You want to escape into its world, and think I am looking at the future and not There's Charlton Heston.
Point taken. So what about that goofy ending? What's that supposed to be, a San Francisco hippie psychedelic light show? Groovy, baby, pass the LSD!
I won't deny that the final sequence of the movie is ambiguous and mystifying. It's also a dazzling display of innovative film technique. In addition to what you call a light show, there's the eerie scene of Bowman in what looks like a luxurious hotel room.
A stranger in a very strange land.
What does it all mean? Don't ask me. Maybe the upcoming novel will make things clearer. But I adore this movie, and I expect to watch it dozens of times in the future, assuming it keeps coming back to second-run theaters. Maybe even if it ever shows up on TV, although it should really be experienced on a very big screen.
And the music! Goodness, what a stroke of genius to make use of existing classical and modern art music instead of a typical movie soundtrack. The Blue Danube scene alone is worth the price of admission. And the recurring presence of Also Sprach Zarathustra! Magnificent!
Five stars, and I wish I had more to give.
***sigh*** No use arguing with a woman in love.
You Damn Beautiful Apes!
by Jason Sacks
Man, who'd a thunk it? Just a couple weeks removed from seeing Planet of the Apes, there's another science fiction movie in the theatres which involves apes.
You might have heard of it, because this new film has the portentous title 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I loved Planet of the Apes. Just two weeks ago in the pages of this very magazine, I praised the film's restrained story, its tremendous special effects, its lovely cinematography and its spectacular use of music. Heck, I thought POTA was perhaps the finest science fiction movie in years. It's a thrilling, delightful sci fi masterpiece.
But 2001, man, wow, it's transcendent.
2001 is immaculate and powerful, smart and elliptical, with the greatest special effects I have ever seen in a motion picture. It tells a heady, fascinating story so vast it transcends mere humanity and expands into the metaphysical.
Many have criticized this film for being slow – heck, look at the devil on Victoria's shoulder to see just one example of that. But the slowness is obviously intentional. Director Stanley Kubrick clearly wants the viewer to see this film as stately and calm, playing astonishing space scenes juxtaposed with gorgeous classical music.
It's a work of genius to juxtapose Strauss's "The Blue Danube" with the image of a spinning space station. This juxtaposition and its stately pace allows the viewer to make connections, to see how a journey down a river in the 1860s will be as ordinary and beautiful as a journey into space in the year 2001. In the same way, using "Also Sprach Zarathustra" invites the viewer to imagine transcendence and evolution in an ecstatic way, bringing both a connection to the past and to the future in a way that perfectly suits Kubrick's themes.
Kubrick makes efforts to tether the viewer to his film with scenes like this.
What makes it even more thrilling is when he cuts that tether and demands the audience make connections ourselves.
What is the strange monolith that appears at different times of human evolution, and how does it propel us forward? Is the monolith a literal gift from alien beings (who might as well be gods – or God) or a symbol of mankind's evolution?
Why does the HAL-9000 computer, perhaps mankind's greatest achievement and an electronic being that achieves sentience, go crazy and destroy people?
What is the meaning of the trippy journey the astronaut takes towards the end of the film, and what is the meaning of the very strange place he finds himself? Why does he age? What is this place?
And what is that strange space baby we see at the end?
What do we make of any of this?
Kubrick asks the viewer to make up our own minds, to build our own interpretations of those scenes. 2001 feels overwhelming, in part, because it is participatory. This film demands we become involved with it as a means of determining some kind of truth and meaning out of it. Take this film in, interpret it, and determine your own truth. Like in life, there are no clear answers when considering the biggest questions.
Mr. Kubrick on the set with his actors.
Kubrick's previous film was Dr. Strangelove, a deeply cynical and polemical film (which is also hysterically funny) in which the director tells viewers what to feel. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the opposite. It's optimistic and ambiguous and highly serious. Strangelove was black and white and 2001 is glorious, rich color.
Stanley Kubrick is American's greatest living filmmaker. 2001: A Space Odyssey proves that fact.
Kubrick's film is an absolute masterpiece. Sorry, Fiona. The angel on Victoria's shoulder is right.
I recently read two new science fiction novels by British authors that are otherwise as different as they can be. One takes place in the very near future. The other is set centuries from now. One never leaves England. The other ventures into interstellar space. One uses an experimental narrative style. The other is told in a traditional manner. One is New Wave, the other Old Wave. Let's take a look at both.
Before the story starts, unmanned probes discovered a habitable planet orbiting Sigma Draconis. A team of four explorers went to check it out. Everything seemed hunky-dory, so three big starships carried a bunch of colonists there. They named the planet Asgard.
One ship was to be used for raw materials. Another was to be kept intact, in case the colonists needed to get out quick. The third was supposed to carry our hero, one of the original four explorers, back to Earth.
Disaster struck when an error in navigation caused one of the ships to crash into Asgard's moon. Our protagonist, a born wanderer, is stuck on Asgard, a reluctant colonist who doesn't fit in with the others. While off on his own, he is stung by a local critter and spends several days hallucinating.
Meanwhile, a microorganism native to the planet gets into the bodies of the colonists, leading to vitamin C deficiency and thus scurvy. For various reasons, the only permanent solution to this medical problem is for folks to start eating local foodstuffs, not yet known to be completely safe. Half a dozen colonists are selected at random to test native foods.
When our hero returns, he finds the six people locked up, apparently insane and guilty of sabotaging the colony. The other colonists are in a very bad state, barely able to take care of their basic needs and unwilling to make even very simple repairs. Can one man whip them into shape, solve the vitamin C problem, figure out what happened to the six insane folks, and save the colony?
I should mention that the hero's hallucinations, as well as those of the six colonists who eat local foods, take the form of folklore from their individual cultures. A Greek woman, for example, imagines scenes from Greek mythology. A detailed description of these hallucinations is probably the most interesting and original part of the book.
The explanation for what's going on didn't fully convince me; it got a bit mystical for my taste. What is otherwise a problem-solving SF story that wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Analog flirts with things like racial memory. I'll give the author credit for having major characters of both sexes and multiple ethnicities.
It's nearly impossible to provide you with a simple synopsis of this novel, because it's narrated in a nonlinear fashion. In addition to that, the narrator may be insane, spends most of the day in a sedated condition, and is subjected to a form of therapy/punishment that definitely messes up her mind.
The narrator is the wife of a obsessive scientist, now dead. With the help of a brilliant electronics engineer (later the wife's lover, and also dead), he came up with a way to record the sensations experienced by one person and to allow another to share them. Originally used as therapy, it becomes a form of entertainment as well.
We slowly learn that the narrator has been convicted of a crime, and that she is subjected to mental recordings designed to make her contrite. With multiple flashbacks, some going all the way to the narrator's childhood, we see how the device was invented, how it was used, and how it was corrupted. We also receive varying accounts of how the two men died.
Alternating with these memories, which may be distorted, the narrator also relates events happening to her in the present. Her relationship with the Nurse and the Doctor is a complex one, with hidden motives everywhere.
This is a difficult book. Besides jumping back and forth in time, often from one sentence to the next, the text frequently breaks off in the middle of a line. Events are not only narrated out of order, but also retold in a completely different way. It's impossible to discover the real truth.
Despite the effort required on the part of the reader, and the inherent ambiguity of the work, this is a fine novel. The author happens to be male, but he writes from the point of view of a woman in a completely convincing manner. If you're looking for light entertainment, seek elsewhere. If you want to discover that science fiction can be serious literature, you're in the right place.
H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds casts a long shadow over the science fictional world. Whether fans see it as using invasion literature as a satire on imperialism or just an atmospheric horror tale, know it from films, radio or magazines, it is one of the core works of SF.
But what if Wells’ Martians came not to exterminate but enslave?
Whilst not officially a sequel to War of the Worlds, it is hard not to read it as anything else. In this version, the Tripods came and conquered more than a century ago. After millions were killed in the war what remains of humanity lives in a feudal society under their tripod overlords. Once people reach the age of 13, a metal “cap” is put into their head which ensures their compliance with the alien commands.
Will Parker, from a Southern English village, meets a vagrant who tells him of the location of free humans. Together with his cousin Henry they journey to The White Mountains, to both learn more of The Tripods, and to fight against them.
At their heart these are juvenile adventure stories, a cross between Ian Serallier’s Silver Sword and Andre Norton’s SF tales. However, juvenile should not be taken to mean shallow or hollow. These are dark tales of children trying to survive in an oppressive society.
The highlight for me is the second book, where we get to see life in a Tripod city and Will is treated as a pet by one of the aliens. It is insightful, vivid and very disturbing.
These do have one flaw and that is found in the final book. Christopher wants to tie up the trilogy in these short books and the ending feels incredibly abrupt and light, given what we see in the others. However, there is still much to enjoy here and worth checking out.
I actually feel the limitations of having to write for a younger audience benefit Christopher. He is forced to remove his tendency for gratuitous shock scenes for the sake of it, nor did I notice any of his usual prejudices against the Celtic nations of the British Isles. If he sticks within this field, I will willingly pick up more of his books.
Pity About Earth introduces us to Shale, a callous, ambitious, often downright cruel man. He and Phrix, his alien assistant, work for the god-like Publisher, in advertising. His ship is automated, as is the rest of the universe. A mistress of his plots with a competitor, and Shale is forced to escape into a labyrinth. There he encounters cages inhabited by humans who have been conditioned to prove concepts in torturous and deadly ways. Shale feels no sympathy, up until a human-ape hybrid named Marylin catches his attention. He is strangely compelled by her. She helps him to escape the maze, and later, the planet.
Despite being a Groil, Phrix has been promoted to Shale's old position. In one of many instances where Marylin tries to redirect Shale from violence, she protects Phrix by setting Shale to go to Asgard, fabled home of the Publisher.
Upon reaching Asgard, they find the long dead remains of the Publisher. In his place is Limsola, a woman who has been gaining the secrets of Asgard executives just before their deaths. Shale is distracted by her allure, breaking Marylin's heart as he was the first being to show her a shred of care. Limsola encourages Marylin to Publish, to change the rules. Marylin confers with Phrix about how change could happen, and she takes up post as the new Publisher. On his homeworld, Phrix follows her lead, and together they begin to breathe life back into a world that had become frozen.
The world of the Publisher is automated to the point of inaction. Life is casually thrown aside even while there are means to prevent suffering. Advertising is a key function yet items only exist to *be* advertised. Phrix tasks himself with upending an entire universe. It is not a matter of ethics to him, only what is and what could be. Marylin has only abstract knowledge, no personal experiences, and yet she has more compassion and care than any other character.
Shale is hardly unique in his views, unwilling or unable to look beyond himself and care for others prior to meeting Marylin, and even after he begins to have some sense of shared "humanity" it is brief and confuses him. There is a special horror in his blasé approach to the labyrinth of experiments, food made of humans, and sexual violence. He doles out death and the dead are simply out of luck. He is a deeply unlikable protagonist; Marylin and Phrix provide far more engaging points of view.
I can't say I enjoyed it, but it left me with thoughts to chew on.
Captain Roadstrum plays the part of Odysseus in a loose adaptation of The Odyssey. Along with Captain Pucket, he and the crew of hornet-men visit planets that serve as analogs to the islands on the way home from Troy. Roadstrum is not some wise general, he survives via luck, sheer force of will, and the rare moment of inspiration. Margaret the houri and Deep John the "original hobo", myths in their own right, join the crew.
Roadstrum finds Valhalla, where his crew feast and fight and die, all to rise up ready to fight again the next morning. Upon leaving, the crew have their tongues cut out and grow themselves replacement organs- Roadstrum opts for a forked tongue, which grants him clever speech. They speed through twenty years while being sucked into a black hole, escaping via a recently installed button that reverses time.
Helios' cows are replaced by an asteroid belt orbiting a sun, though that doesn't stop the crew from capturing and *eating* one of these asteroids like a prize calf.
Roadstrum takes over for Atlas, not carrying the physical weight of the world but perceiving existence in its entirety, as anything he drops his attention from ceases to exist.
The crew complains about the size and quality of the hell planet they've been sentenced to for their crime against Aeaea, a version of the witch Circe, before breaking out.
Roadstrum is in no great hurry to get home, and we don't even get the name of his wife or son (Penny and Tele-Max) until the last 15 pages.
There is a degree of self-awareness to both the story and Roadstrum himself, moments when he recognizes that he is acting out a story that has happened before, or even actions he seems to remember. He makes a determined break from repeating actions at the close of the book, choosing not to settle peacefully with his wife and son as the former version of Odysseus did, but to fly off toward more adventure.
Although Space Chantey, like Pity, has characters eating other people, casual killing, and brutality, it's in the format of a tall-tale and with barely half the gritty detail as the first book of this Ace Double. Even the characters who are dying often take it as a bit of a joke. Indeed, this book reads more as a folk story with space-travel trappings than science fiction. Characters die and return with little or no explanation, survive impossibilities and contradict themselves and the narration. It is larger than life and at times quite silly. It also has plenty of dubious poetry in the form of verse interludes.
This would have been better suited as a series of stories around a campfire than a sci-fi novel.
If you've been following Dave Van Arnam's First Draft 'zine, you're probably rooting for this fan-turned-filthy-pro. I didn't get a chance to read his Star Gladiator, and this newest book is co-written. Still, Ted White's name is magic to me, and who could resist this lurid cover. Therefore, it was with no hesitation that I plunked down my four bits plus a dime to read Sideslip!
I was even more excited to see that the book starred Ronnie Archer, outsized private eye, who starred in the excellent short story, Wednesday, Noon. Turns out he's a false cognate, however. Per a letter Ted sent me:
Same name, different characters. Ron Archer was my penname as a cartoonist in the early '50s, and got applied to subsequent characters, usually private detectives. Ron was the protagonist in my never-written mystery novel, "The Stainless Steal."
Ah well. The rest of the book was similarly a disappointment. In brief, Ron Archer finds himself zapped into an alternate New York in a set-up quite close to that of White's Jewels of Elsewhen. But in this New York, alien invaders conquered the Earth in 1938, turning our world into a colonial source for raw materials. The "Angels", who look like tall, luminous humans, are protected by force fields and human collaborators known as Yellow-Jackets. This does not keep resistance groups from forming, which in the Untied States are represented by The Technocrats (led by Hugo Gernsback and employing Albert Einstein–these are the folks who warped Archer to this alternate world), the Communists, and the Nazis (led by none other than Hitler, himself).
The first half of the novel details Archer getting captured by and escaping from each of the various groups, ultimately ending up in the hands of the Angels. Well, one particular Angel. The one female Angel, who of course immediately falls in love with Archer. At this point, the story practically grinds to a halt as Archer is taken off-world to meet the Angels and argue for Earth's sovereignty. There are lots of pop-eyed descriptions of advanced technologies that feel better suited to SF from the 20s or 30s. Archer and Sharna, his Angel lover, have a fraught relationship written with the subtlety and skill of a teenager writing his first fanfiction. The end is a brief, action-filled segment. In between, there's a lot more sex and nudity than I've seen in an American SF novel. I found it a bit embarrassing.
In short, we have the bones of a Ted White novel, but none of the feel. Missing is the deft, sensual touch that White lends his pieces, as well as any semblance of good pacing. This actually makes perfect sense–in another letter, White explained that the story was largely executed by Van Arnam:
This was a book which started in a writer's group. I wrote an opening hook and passed it out to the others. Dave Van Arnam picked up on it and suggested we collaborate on a book. Which we did. I was not happy with Dave's writing early on, and heavily rewrote his first drafts, but as I fed these back to him he picked up on what was needed, and the last quarter of the book is mostly his. Pyramid liked the book well enough to ask us to write their Lost in Space book…
The real problem with the book, beyond the technical issues, is that Archer doesn't do anything. At every turn, he's simply along for the ride, noting his surroundings, occasionally running. Archer, himself, notes as much at the end of the book. I suppose that speaks to some authorial awareness, though it doesn't fix the problem.
Still, the book is readable, in a hackish sort of way, and the concepts are fine, if as hamfisted as the cover. Based on quality, I should give this thing two stars, but I did make it through Sideslip!, and I wanted to know what happened, so I'll give it three.
I need not remind you of the recent shocking murder of a genuinely great man who dedicated his life to nonviolence. Nor is it necessary to mention the wholesale slaughter of soldiers and civilians in Southeast Asia, which shows no signs of abating.
As if the heavens wish to mourn for the horrors humanity unleashes upon itself, there will be a total eclipse of the Moon tonight, visible from almost all parts of the Western Hemisphere.
An visual depiction of the phenomenon.
It is tragically appropriate that light reflected from Earth makes the eclipsed Moon appear reddish; an event known as a Blood Moon.
Even in the frivolous world of popular music, we are reminded of tragedy. At the top of the American music charts is the melancholy ballad (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay by the late Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash last December. It holds the unhappy distinction of being the first posthumous single to reach Number One.
Recorded just three days before Redding's death.
Better to Light One Candle Than to Curse the Darkness
It is tempting to sink into silence and depression. Instead, let us take what comfort we can from small pleasures. One such anodyne, at least for me, is reading science fiction and fantasy. Let's take a look at the latest issue of Fantastic and see if we can draw any solace from it.
Cover art by Johnny Bruck.
As has happened a few times before, the image on the cover comes from an issue of the popular German magazine Perry Rhodan.
That seems to mean The Little Men from Siga, presumably a fictional planet.
In this trivial bagatelle an Admiral (clearly supposed to be Christopher Columbus) has a scheme to sail west from Europe to the Indies without bumping into the new continent in the way. He uses gunpowder to send his ship into the air.
Can you guess this won't work out the way he thinks?
This is a weak joke, hardly the outstanding new story promised on the cover. At least it's short and inoffensive.
Two stars.
The Little Creeps, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The December 1951 issue of Amazing Stories is the source of this tale of the Cold War turned Hot.
Cover art by Robert Gibson Jones.
We start off with an odd scene in which a huge number of tiny glowing things invade the Tokyo home of an American General at night. Only light drives them away. They manage to talk to the officer by invading his phonograph and manipulating the needle. These are, of course, the Little Creeps.
Illustration by Leo Summers.
China and the USA are in a shooting war. The Soviet Union is supposedly neutral, but gives aid to its Red ally. The Little Creeps tell the General not to do three things.
1. Don't fire a Japanese servant.
2. Don't listen to a visiting General from the front lines.
3. Don't bomb Chinese installations along a river that serves as the border with the USSR.
You can probably predict that the General doesn't listen to the annoying Little Creeps, and things go from bad to worse.
This is a strange story, with a strong antiwar message mixed up with bizarre science fiction content. The latter never really made sense to me.
The visiting General is a loathsome character indeed. Not only does he love war, he also endlessly harasses a WAC Sergeant. I understand that he's the story's villain, but he really gives me the creeps (if you'll excuse the expression.)
Very mixed feelings about this one. The author has his heart in the right place, and the escalating tension of the situation creates a great deal of suspense, but the Little Creeps are kind of goofy.
Three Stars.
Dr. Immortelle, by Kathleen Ludwick
From the Fall 1930 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly we have the only story, as far as I can tell, this author ever published. I managed to take a look at a copy of the yellowing pages of the old magazine, and the table of contents lists her name as Luckwick. The introduction to the story refers to her as Miss Ludwick. I don't know which one is correct.
Cover art by Leo Morey.
Anyway, this is a horror story about a Mad Scientist who discovered a way to extend his life way back in the 18th century. (Did the title give you a clue?)
Illustration also by Morey.
He and his mulatto slave have kept themselves alive and young by transfusing the blood of children into their bodies. Even more improbable, and embarrassing for the modern reader, the transfusion of blood from white children has made the mulatto completely Caucasian!
Sometimes the children don't survive the sinister procedure. Justice finally catches up with the evil scientist and his servant (who developed a conscience about what they were doing over the decades) in the form of the grown sister of a little boy who died because of the transfusion.
It's easy to tell this yarn is nearly four decades old. Besides the stuff about the mulatto turning white, there's a lot of flowery language. The author uses a narrative technique I've seen in other antique works. We start with a narrator, who then quotes at length from another narrator. (In this case, the dying servant.)
Thirty-odd years ago, this could have been very loosely adapted into a cheap Boris Karloff movie, of the kind I eagerly seek out on Shock Theater. In print form, the years have not been kind to it. Whatever became of Miss Ludwick/Luckwick, she does not appear to have been a major loss to the literary world.
Two stars.
Spawn of Darkness, by Craig Browning
Never heard of Craig Browning? That's because he's really Rog Phillips, who gave us this story in the May 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures.
Cover art by H. L. Blumenfeld.
Guess what? Gregg Conrad, whose name appears on the cover, is also Rog Phillips! The guy gets around!
Illustration by Edmond Swiatek.
In a future war, two death rays meet, causing an entity to appear out of nowhere. It takes the form imagined by a soldier; namely, a genie.
Forget the futuristic stuff. From this point on, we've just got a story about a guy and his genie. He might as well have found it in an old bottle in the desert.
Anyway, he wishes his way home. Things seem fine, but then the military sends his mother a telegram, stating that her son is missing in action and presumed dead. I guess the mother is pretty superstitious, because a self-proclaimed psychic convinces her the young man is a ghost. Complications ensue when the guy rather foolishly uses the genie to perform practical jokes that seem like the work of a poltergeist.
I don't know what to make of this thing. As I've indicated, the science fiction content is pointless. I guess the author is making fun of parapsychologists and such, but nothing particularly funny happens.
Let's recap. Chandler's series character John Grimes, a female ethologist, and a bunch of other folks have arrived on a planet without women, as far as the bulk of the population knows. The elite Doctors actually have a secret cache of women hidden away.
Our protagonist is a military police officer native to the planet. He becomes a secret agent for the head of Intelligence, assigned to keep an eye on the new arrivals while also investigating the Doctors.
In this installment, the officer finds himself strangely attracted to the ethologist, although he thinks of her as an alien. On a tour of the planet, they come across the place where girl babies (considered to be deformed) are left to be eaten by predators. Of course, the ethologist rescues the sole surviving infant.
Meanwhile, another woman from Grimes' spaceship is raped (blessedly, this is obliquely described) by a gang of locals. The implication is that men who have no idea that women exist, and who imagine the strange visitors to be bizarre creatures of another species, are irresistibly drawn to them.
Eventually, there's a huge mob of men trying to get at the women hidden by the Doctors. After the battle, Grimes offers a long speech explaining how the planet developed its unique society.
As you can see, this half of the novel is a lot darker in mood and a lot more violent than the first half. After plenty of action, Grimes' expository speech slows things down quite a bit. Overall, I didn't mind reading it once, though this segment is somewhat distasteful.
Three stars.
Something for the Woman, by Ivar Jorgensen
As you may know, Ivar Jorgensen is a name used by a whole bunch of different writers in various science fiction and fantasy books and magazines. In this case, my research tells me it's really Randall Garrett hiding behind the name, in the March/April 1953 issue of Fantastic.
Cover art by Richard Powers.
A family (Mom, Dad, and two little kids) go through the process of selling everything they own except the clothes on their backs and a few other small items. They're going on a long, long journey.
Illustration by Ed Emshwiller, often known as Emsh.
The story mostly deals with the woman's fear of leaving home for the unknown. A small gesture from her husband makes the impending voyage less terrifying.
I think I like this story more than it deserves. Yes, it supports the stereotype that women are timid creatures. (There's reference to a few rare women who are as eager for adventure as men.) But it's sensitively written, and it was a welcome novelty to read something that was unashamedly sentimental.
Four stars.
Brave Nude World, by Forrest J. Ackerman
A hint in the introduction to this reprinted article led me to track down the publication where it originally appeared. I hope you appreciate the effort and embarrassment it took to secure a copy of an old nudist magazine. Namely, the August 1961 issue of American Sunbather.
I have cut off the lower half of the cover, which features the young lady with the big smile completely unclad, in order to spare the delicate sensitivities of any Journeyers who might be offended.
Big Name Fan Ackerman chatters away about his experience of nudism, while also mentioning a few science fiction stories that deal with the topic. Notably, the original magazine featured drawings by another well-known fan, Betty JoAnne Trimble, universally known as Bjo.
Ackerman claims this is the title of a story by Spencer Strong (Ackerman himself), but I can find no reference to it. Maybe it appeared in a fanzine.
On the other hand, this is a famous story by Robert A. Heinlein. (Galaxy, March 1952.)
This tale appeared in the December 1956 issue of the girlie magazine Caper, attributed to Spencer Strong (Ackerman again) and Morgan Ives (Marion Zimmer Bradley.)
The author indulges his love of puns throughout. There's not really any point to this look at nudism in science fiction. It's kind of like Sam Moskowitz without the scholarship. Too bad Fantastic didn't reprint Bjo's cute cartoons, so I had to dig them out for you.
Two stars.
A Portfolio: H. G. Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes, by Anonymous
The magazine fills up a few pages with illustrations from the Winter 1928 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly, which reprinted the famous novel in full.
Cover art by Frank R. Paul.
The drawings were themselves reprinted from the 1899 hardcover edition.
Cover art by . . . indulge me a while as I explain how I solved a mystery.
The introduction in Fantastic says the artist's identity was lost.
In fact, it says that even Amazing Stories Quarterly didn't know the artist's name.
I'm not sure I believe that. Maybe the magazine just didn't bother to give credit where credit was due.
Fantastic just attributes them to an English artist.
In fact, my research revealed that the artist was actually French, a fellow named Henri Lanos who often illustrated scientific romances.
Nice drawings, and the enigma of the artist's identity piqued my curiosity.
Three stars.
Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber
The master of sword and sorcery reviews books of that kind (Conan and King Kull) by Robert E. Howard, with much additional material by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp. Leiber doesn't talk much about the two modern authors, and generally praises Howard while pointing out his poorest stories and offering an example of his worst prose.
No rating.
Light at the End of the Tunnel?
This issue offers only mild diversion from the terrors of the real world. Most of the stories were poor to mediocre, with only Jorgensen/Garrett rising a bit above that level. Maybe that's enough for now.
Student protests have been erupting all over Europe and even the otherwise nigh impenetrable iron curtain cannot stop them.
Protesting students run from the police in Warsaw, Poland.
The latest country to be rocked by student protests is Poland. The protests were triggered when a production of the play Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) by Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's most celebrated poet, was pulled from the Warsaw National Theatre because of alleged anti-Soviet tendencies. In response, students protested against the cancellation of the play and censorship in general. More than thirty students were arrested during the initial protests in Warsaw and two of them were expelled from the University of Warsaw. The fact that both expelled students happened to be Jewish suggests that Anti-Semitism, which has been rearing its ugly head in Poland again in recent years under the guise of Anti-Zionism, may have played a role.
The Polish students, however, were not willing to give up and announced another protest for March 8. The authorities responded with violence and pre-emptively arrested several student leaders. Nonetheless, the protests spread to other Polish cities.
Buddha is a Spaceman: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
Roger Zelazny, of Polish origin himself, is one of the most exciting young authors in our genre and has already won two Nebulas and one Hugo Award, which is remarkable, considering he has only been writing professionally for not quite six years.
My own response to Zelazny's works has been mixed. I enjoyed some of them very much (the Dilvish the Damned stories from Fantastic or last year's novella "Damnation Alley" from Galaxy) and could not connect to others at all (the highly lauded "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"). So I opened Zelazny's latest novel Lord of Light with trepidation, for what would I find within, the Zelazny who wrote the Dilvish the Damned stories or the one who wrote "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"?
The answer is "a little bit of both" and "neither". Lord of Light is not so much a novel, but a series of interconnected stories, two of which, "Dawn" and "Death and the Executioner", appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction last year. To make things even more disjointed, the stories are not arranged in chronological order either.
The novel starts with the resurrection of Mahasamatman, Sam to his friends, who may or may not be a god. Sam is not happy about his resurrection, because he was pulled back into bodily existence from a blissful, Nirvana-like bodyless existence that was supposed to be a punishment, the only way of executing one who is functionally immortal. We gradually learn what brought Sam to this place, namely his rebellion against the gods of his world who keep the population downtrodden and oppressed .
Initially, Lord of Light appears to be a fantasy novel, but we eventually realise that the novel is set on a distant planet in the far future and that the gods and demigods we meet are the crew of the Earth spaceship Star of India, which landed here eons ago, while the demons are the original inhabitants of the planet. The human crew mutated themselves to better survive and reincarnate themselves in new bodies via mind transfer to become immortal. They rule over their descendants with an iron hand as self-styled gods. Sam, however, will have none of this and launches a rebellion.
Fantasy and science fiction have been drawing from European religion, mythology and history for decades. In Lord of Light, however, Zelazny draws on Hindu and Buddhist religion and mythology. The spaceship crew turned gods are based on Hindu deities, while Sam is based on Siddhartha Gautama a.k.a. Buddha.
Indian culture is popular right now and Indian influences can be seen in fashion, interior design, music (the Beatles have just embarked on a meditation sojourn in India) as well as in the yoga studios springing up in the big cities. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before Indian influences would appear in science fiction. Especially since it would be silly to assume that only white Christian westerners get to travel to the stars. There is a Christian character in Lord of Light, by the way; the ship's former chaplain Renfrew embarks on a crusade against the self-styled Hindu gods and their worshippers.
The Beatles arrived in India for a meditation retreat last month.
It is a refreshing change to read a science fiction novel where eastern rather than western culture and religion dominate the far future. Nonetheless, something about Lord of Light bothered me. As a child, I spent time in South East Asia, mainly in Singapore, but also in Bangkok, because my Dad was stationed there as an agent for the Norddeutscher Lloyd and DDG Hansa shipping companies. And while I cannot claim to know a lot about Hinduism and Buddhism (though two war-battered Buddha statues guard my home), I know enough to realise that Zelazny gets a lot of things wrong.
Singapore as it looked when I lived there: The General Post Office a.k.a. the Fullerton Building, which was brand-new at the time. I understand Singapore has been modernising rapidly since gaining independence.The C.K. Tang Ltd. department store in Singapore, where my mother and I enjoyed shopping back in the day.
Of course, Zelazny isn't the only person to rather liberally adapt mythology into fiction. For example, The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson, Marvel's The Mighty Thor comics or The Ring of the Nibelungs by Richard Wagner are all liberal adaptions of Norse mythology and yet I am not bothered by them. However, hardly anybody worships the Norse or the Greek gods anymore, whereas Hinduism and Buddhism are living religions with some 255 and 150 million worshipers respectively. And borrowing from a living religion as someone who is not an adherent feels disrespectful in a way that turning Norse gods into superheroes does not.
I for one would love to see more science fiction and fantasy that draws on non-western culture and mythology. However, I would prefer to read works written by authors who actually come from the culture in question rather than by a Polish-Irish Catholic from Ohio. India is a country of 533 million people. Surely, some of them write science fiction and I hope to eventually see their take on Indian mythology and history rather than Zelazny's.
Interesting and well written but disjointed and somewhat disrespectful to half a billion Hindus and Buddhists.
I don't just read science fiction and fantasy, but am also fond of mysteries and thrillers. This is how I came across John Lange, who burst onto the scene two years ago with the heist novel Odds On and followed up with the spy thriller Scratch One last year. Both novels are notable for their tight writing and clever plots, as well as their evocative – and as far as I can tell accurate – description of locations deemed exotic by the average American reader. There even is the occasional science fiction element, e.g. the heist in Odds On is planned using a computer program.
Lange's latest novel Easy Go contains all the elements that made his previous works so enjoyable. This time, Lange takes us to Egypt, where an American archaeologist named Harold Barnaby has made an exciting discovery, a seemingly innocuous papyrus which contains an coded message revealing the location of a heretofore undiscovered royal tomb. This discovery could gain Barnaby academic accolades – or a whole lot of money. Barnaby chooses the latter and decides to rob the tomb. However, the timid academic needs help and finds it in Richard Pierce, a journalist and old war buddy of Barnaby's who has the connections and the plan to pull off the heist of the century.
These days, Cairo is a bustling modern city, which does not remotely look like the set of a Hollywood sword and sandal epic, contrary to popular belief.
The novel follows the usual beats of a heist story. A team of specialists is assembled and a carefully plotted plan is executed, while fate keeps throwing wrenches at our protagonists, especially since the Egyptian authorities turn out to be not nearly as stupid as Pierce and Barnaby assumed. We have seen this sort of story before in movies like Ocean's Eleven, Topkapi or the TV-show Mission Impossible and yet Lange brings a unique flair to the well-worn plot via his knowledge of Egyptology and his vivid descriptions of bustling modern day Egypt (which contrary to popular belief does not look like the set of a Hollywood sword and sandal epic). The building of the Aswan Dam and the moving of the Temple of Abu Simbel play a notable role.
The marvelous of moving the Abu Simbel temple to save it from sinking into the rising waters of the Aswan Dam.
But who is John Lange? Rumour has it that he is a medical student at Harvard who is writing under a pseudonym in order to finance his tuition. Rumour also has it that Lange is working on a bona fide science fiction novel about a deadly plague from outer space, which is expected to come out next year. I can't wait.
An fun caper thriller which will make you want to book a trip to Egypt.
Four and a half stars
by Victoria Silverwolf
Tuning Up the Orchestra
I recently read a quartet of new works of speculative fiction. They range from so-called Hard SF, dealing with science and technology, to New Wave experimentation. Like the movements of a symphony, they offer varying contents, moods, and tempos. Let's grab copies of the program notes and find some good seats before the music begins.
First Movement: Andante
Anonymous cover art.
Out of the Sun, by Ben Bova
An American fighter plane traveling at three times the speed of sound over the Arctic Ocean suddenly breaks apart. The same thing happens to two other aircraft of the same kind. The military calls in the fellow who designed the special metal alloy from which the planes were constructed. He has to figure out what's wrong before more lives are lost.
This is a very short book with plenty of white space. I suspect it was intended for younger readers. (Unlike most so-called juveniles, however, all the characters are adults.) There are some violent deaths, but never described in any detail. The closest thing to sex in its pages is the hero taking a woman out to dinner.
This problem-solving story wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Analog. (Fortunately, it lacks John W. Campbell's quirky obsessions.) It moves at a moderate pace, but is never very exciting. You might be able to predict the main plot gimmick before it's revealed, if you've been keeping up with recent developments in technology.
The writing is very plain and simple. You could easily finish the book in an hour. A longer version, with more fully developed characters, would be welcome.
Two stars.
Second Movement: Adagio
Cover art by Robert Korn.
The God Machine, by Martin Caidin
This one starts with a bang. The narrator, having survived multiple attempts on his life, allows a woman with whom he's been having an affair to enter his room. She immediately offers her body to him, thrusting herself at him wantonly. Instead of reacting the way you'd expect, he knocks her unconscious with the butt of his pistol.
No juvenile novel here!
A long flashback tells us how he got into this situation. The narrator is a mathematical genius. The government contacts him while he's in high school, offering to pay for the best possible college education. In return, they want him to work on a hush-hush project.
It seems that millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been spent constructing a facility deep inside a mountain in Colorado. In terms of secrecy and security, it's the equivalent of the Manhattan Project. The goal? To build a super-powerful computer, one that can come up with its own ideas of how best to prevent a nuclear war.
The computer can also directly communicate with human beings through the use of alpha waves in their brains. Add in the fact that, along with the rest of its vast knowledge, it understands a lot about hypnosis, and you can see where this is going.
When the machine decides that the narrator has to be eliminated, things seem hopeless. He can't trust anybody. The computer itself is protected by lasers, electricity, and radiation. It's got its own secure atomic power generators, so you can't just turn it off. What's a fellow to do?
Other than the opening and closing scenes, most of the book moves at a leisurely pace. In sharp contrast to Bova's slim volume, this tome is well over three hundred pages. It could benefit from some judicious editing; I learned more than I really needed to know about the narrator's life before he becomes the computer's target.
As soon as you take a look at the table of contents for the author's first novel, you know you're in for something different.
Not only are the chapter titles weird, they form a poem. There are lots of other little bits of verse throughout the book as well. Usually, these are poems that the six children (or seven, if you count Bad John) use to work magic, particularly to kill people.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, and I'm confusing you. Let me start over.
Some time ago, two married couples came to Earth from another planet. They're doomed to succumb to Earth sickness. They had a total of six children (or seven, if you count Bad John) among them. Because these offspring were born on Earth, they won't get the sickness.
What's this Bad John nonsense? I hear you cry.
Well, he died at birth, but he's still around. Only certain Earth folks, such as an American Indian and a drunken Frenchman, can perceive him. He's insubstantial and can pass through walls and such, but the other children are emphatic that he is not a ghost.
I have no idea why he's called Bad John. Another of the kids is just named John.
This gives you a tiny hint of how eccentric this book is. I would be hard pressed to provide a coherent plot summary. It has something to do with the children plotting to kill everybody on the planet. Meanwhile, one of the adults is blamed for a murder he didn't commit.
The narrative style is that of a tall tale or a shaggy dog story. The mood might be described as serious whimsy. There's a lot of violence — the basic plot, if there is one, involves an ax murder — but only the Earth people seem to care very much about it. It's not exactly a black comedy, but it treats death in an offhand fashion.
Although they're from another planet, the characters are more supernatural than alien. (They're called the Puka, and the allusion to the Pooka from Celtic myth seems intentional.)
It may be labeled as science fiction, but this is a fantasy novel, and a very strange one at that. How much you get out of it will depend on whether or not you're willing to let the author take you on a dizzying journey with no particular destination in kind.
As editor of a remarkably transformed version of the venerable science fiction magazine New Worlds, the author proves himself to be the guiding light of the British New Wave. This book shows he can write the stuff, too.
It first appeared as threeseparatestories in New Worlds. I'm not sure how much has been added to it, if anything, or how substantially it's been revised, if at all. It's more coherent as a whole rather than in bits and pieces, but it's still somewhat episodic.
Jerry Cornelius is a rock star, a brilliant scientist/philosopher, and as quick with a gun as James Bond. He's also a snappy dresser. We'll get a lot of detailed descriptions of his mod outfits throughout the book.
Jerry gets involved with some folks who want to get their hands on microfilm kept secure in the fortress home of his late father. Complicating matters is the presence inside the house of Jerry's sinister brother Frank and his beloved sister Catherine.
(The relationship between Jerry and Catherine may remind you of a certain controversial story that recently appeared in a groundbreaking anthology.)
Things get pretty wild at this point, from a bloody assault on the fortress to a secret underground base built by the Nazis to the novel's truly apocalyptic climax.
I should mention another character who plays a vital part in the story. Miss Brunner (no first name ever given) is an enigma. At first, she seems to be nothing more than one of the conspirators who work with Jerry. She soon turns out to be a most peculiar sort of person indeed.
I'd say Miss Brunner is actually the heart of the novel, more so than Jerry himself. She's always several steps ahead of everyone else, and has an agenda of her own that doesn't become clear until the end of the book.
The author's style is usually surprisingly traditional, no matter how bizarre the plot. The mood combines frenzy with the feeling that things are falling apart all over, and that maybe this is a good thing. At times, I felt that Moorcock was amusing himself at the expense of the reader. It's worth a look, but you may wonder what it's all supposed to mean.
Rod Dorashi is a vagabond, a member of the wretched working class of Metropolis, staying out of trouble so as not to be squashed by the draconian dictator Korm. Yet he risks all to take in an old man, hit by a car, in his last hours of life. The dying man presses a packet of seeds upon Rod, promising that they are the secret to eternal life.
Enter Bey Ormand, a slick powerful man who is the founder and ruler of Trysis–a paradisical resort and the sole purveyor of the distilled essence of the forever seeds. For a lordly sum, they turn back the clock for their customers by five years. Seemingly without motive, Ormand picks up Rod and adds him to his select coterie of multi-centenarians. The troupe then acts as little dictators, forcing all invitees, whether petty princes of a Balkanized America, or faded stars and starlets, to grovel at their feet.
Despite an instinct for rebellion, Dorashi never quite revolts. Instead, he sticks with the sadistic Ormand and his band for centuries. When they leave (almost without notice), the wrap-up is many pages of explanation: turns out Ormand et. al. were not very old humans but actually very old aliens, and the goal of the project was to siphon off the wealth of the Earth–something they've done time and again.
The whole thing reads like a long, unpleasant cocktail party, and the framing of the ending is not at all condemnatory. It merely is.
I applaud new author Wobig for their first publication, but I found The Youth Monopoly a difficult, and ultimately unrewarding, read.
On the dead planet of Pavanne, light years from Earth, reside 'The Pictures'. This tremendous tapestry, carved from native rock by unknown aliens countless eons ago, are the most beautiful sight in the galaxy. And, of course, capitalism being what it is, the Harkrider corporation has secured the license to the their viewing. Now, Pavanne is a pleasure planet that specializes in relieving every wealthy guest of their money, pouring it into the coffers of the half-robotic, entirely wizened Jason Harkrider.
Enter Max Farway, one of humanity's leading artists. Driven by the need to prove himself, exacerbated by the twisted, diminutive and sterile body he was born with, Farway resolves to tackle the hardest subject of art: The Pictures themselves. And so, he travels to Pavanne with his beautiful, recently widowed step-mother, and his much put-upon agent, in time for the conjunction of the alien planet and the brighter of its two suns–when the artifact achieves its highest, and most ineffable level of beauty. But once he steps foot on Pavanne, Farway finds himself in a power struggle with the planet's venal warlord, with Harkrider's assistant, Rudolph Heininger, a wild card in the conflict. At the heart of it all are the unknown predictions of the murdered mathematician Damon Wisehart, whose calculations suggest something terrible is soon to occur involving Pavanne and its extraterrestrial art.
For a good portion of the reading, I admired author Wright's juxtaposition of the petty and irritable Farway, along with the thoroughly disgusting Wisehart (and his twisted twin daughters), with the unearthly beauty of The Pictures. As Farway slowly grows up under the ministrations of his gentle step-mother, I looked forward to a piece that was largely philosophical, eschewing the fetters of the typical Ace Double. This is largely discarded at the end, as things wrap up suddenly and with much action, but without much heart.
Perhaps a more satisfying book remains to be published by a different press. As is, I give it three stars.
Need more science fiction? The next episode of Star Trek is on TONIGHT! You won't want to miss it:
![[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)
![[May 18, 1968] Four Out of Six Ain't Bad (May 1968 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/680518books.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
![[May 14, 1968] Bad Girls On Bikes (<i>The Hellcats</i>, <i>The Mini-Skirt Mob</i>, and <i>She-Devils On Wheels</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Untitled-2.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
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![[April 12, 1968] Darkness (May 1968 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/SMALLCOVER.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
This tale appeared in the December 1956 issue of the girlie magazine Caper, attributed to Spencer Strong (Ackerman again) and Morgan Ives (Marion Zimmer Bradley.)
![[March 16, 1968] In Distant Lands (March Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/680316covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372)
