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[April 2, 1970] Being Human (May-June 1970 IF)

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A white man with short gray hair poses in front of a wooden wall. He is wearing a gray blazer, yellow shirt, and black necktie, and is smiling toward the left of the viewer.
by David Levinson

Counting coups

March saw not one, but two attempts to overthrow the established government in smaller countries. One failed, but the other looks like it may have succeeded.

A color geographic and political map of the Mediterranean basin, showing the island of Cyprus in the middle of the image.
Cyprus is the island south of Turkey, west of Syria, north of Egypt

Cyprus is a troubled nation. The populace is divided between those of Greek and Turkish decent, and the long-running hostility between Greece and Turkey spilled over to Cyprus. When the island sought independence from the United Kingdom, Greek Cypriots hoped for eventual union with Greece, which was not acceptable to Turkish Cypriots. The British were able to block annexation (or enosis, as it is called in Cyprus) as a condition for independence, but relationships within the island are so rocky that UN peacekeepers had to be brought in to keep the two populations from each other’s throats.

A major figure in the independence movement was Orthodox Archbishop Makarios III, who has led the country ever since. Before independence, he was a strong supporter of enosis, but was persuaded to accept that it would have to be put off as a hoped for future event. Makarios isn’t terribly popular with western leaders; he’s been a major voice in the Non-aligned Movement. Some in Washington have taken to calling him “the Castro of the Mediterranean.” In the last few years, he’s made himself unpopular at home as well. He’s taken away guarantees of Turkish representation in government and has also moved away from the idea of enosis. His justification is the Greek military coup of 1967, stating that joining Cyprus to Greece under a dictatorship would be a disservice to all Cypriots.

A white man with short gray hair poses in front of a wooden wall. He is wearing a gray blazer, yellow shirt, and black necktie, and is smiling toward the left of the viewer.Archbishop Makarios III visiting the Greek royal family in exile in Rome earlier this year.

On March 8th, somebody tried to kill Makarios. His helicopter was brought down by withering, high-powered fire. Makarios was uninjured, but the pilot was severely wounded. Fortunately, nobody else was on board. At least 11 people have been arrested, all of Greek heritage and strong supporters of enosis. Given the military nature of the weapons used, some are also accusing the Greek Junta of involvement.

Meanwhile in south-east Asia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk is out as the leader of Cambodia. Like Makarios, he hasn’t been popular in the west, due to his cozy relations with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. He’s also allowed Cambodian ports to be used for bringing in supplies for the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong, while also ignoring the use of Cambodian territory as part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

A color geographic and political map of the southeast Asian peninsula, with Cambodia in the center of the image.

Sihanouk was out of the country when anti-North Vietnamese riots erupted both in the east of the country and in Phnom Penh. Things quickly got out of hand, with the North Vietnamese embassy being sacked. By the 12th, the government canceled trade agreements with North Vietnam, closed the port of Sihanoukville to them, and issued an ultimatum that all North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces were to leave the country within 72 hours. When the demand wasn’t met, 30,000 protesters rallied outside the National Assembly against the Vietnamese.

On the 18th, The Assembly met and voted unanimously (except for one member who walked out in protest) to depose Sihanouk as the head of state. Prime Minister Lon Nol has assumed the head-of-state powers on an emergency basis. On the 23rd, Sihanouk, speaking by radio from Peking, called for an uprising against Lon Nol, and large demonstrations followed. A few days later, two National Assembly deputies were killed by the protesters. The demonstrations were then put down with extreme violence.

Two black and white photos.  On the left, Prince Sihanouk stands outside in front of several other men.  He has black hair and a concerned expression.  He is wearing a suit and tie and an overcoat, and is gesticulating with one hand while looking to the right of the photographer.  On the right, a head shot of Prime Minister Lon Nol.  He has gray hair and is wearing a black suit and tie.  He looks directly at the camera with a neutral expression.l: Prince Sihanouk in Paris shortly before his ouster. R: Prime Minister Lon Nol.

Where this will lead is anybody’s guess. The new government (it should be noted that the removal of Sihanouk appears to have been completely legal) has clearly abandoned the policy of neutrality and threatened North Vietnam with military action. Hanoi isn’t going to take that lying down; if the war spreads to Cambodia, will the Nixon administration expand American involvement? Add in Sihanouk urging resistance to Lon Nol and the deep reverence for the royal family held by many Cambodians, and it all looks like a recipe for chaos.

What is man

Some of the stories in this month’s IF deal directly or tangentially with what it is that makes humans human. The front cover also raises a question that we don’t have an answer to. We’ll get to that at the end; let’s look at the issue first.

The cover of the May-June 1970 edition of Worlds of If science fiction magazine. The magazine name and edition date are written in yellow across the top of the cover, except the word IF which appears in large white letters over a red rectangle.  Below this is a color painting of a white man's head staring directly out at the viewer. At the top of his head there are black lava-rock-like shapes that appear to be exploding out from his forehead.  The head appears to be emerging from a red and yellow pool of lava which is surrounded by dark swirls around the edge of the pool. At the bottom of the cover titles are listed: Novelette The Piecemakers, by Kieth Laumer; The Reality Trip by Robert Silverberg; Zon by Avram Davidson; Troubleshooter by Michael G. Coney. To the right the tagline of the magazine reads: If, the magazine of alternatives.Suggested by Troubleshooter. Art by Gaughan

The Reality Trip, by Robert Silverberg

What appears to be David Knecht is actually a small, crab-like alien inside a humanoid robot. He has spent 11 long years on Earth, studying it, possibly as reconnaissance for an invasion. Things start to go wrong when a young woman living in his residential hotel falls in love with him.

A black and white drawing of a crab like alien in a small white oval enclosure.  It is using its many legs to push levers and press buttons while looking at clocklike displays on the sides of the oval. Outside the oval what appear to be nerves and cells, drawn as lines and polygons and dots, drawn in white on a black background, flow outward from the levers and buttons.The real David Knecht. Art uncredited, but probably Gaughan

There’s the basis here for a really good story about alienation, isolation, and communication; Silverberg might even be the right person to write it. Unfortunately, he missed the mark. Not by much, but there’s a lack of emotion to the first person narrative, even when emotion is being expressed. There’s also the all too common Silverberg issue of highly sexualized descriptions of the female character. It’s especially off-putting and unnecessary coming from such a non-human character.

Three stars.

Troubleshooter, by Michael G. Coney

DeGrazza is a troubleshooter for Galactic Computers, sent out by the company whenever a client is having problems that no one else can solve. Following a disastrous mission which has left him shell-shocked, he’s called back from leave early to find out why spaceships in the Altairid system keep disappearing. Plagued by nightmares, if he can’t pull himself together he may soon be the victim of the next disappearance.

A black and white pen and ink drawing of a man staring directly at the viewer.  The background is shaded in cross hatches.  As in the cover image above, black lava rock like shapes appear to be exploding out of his forehead.Art uncredited, but since it’s nearly identical to the cover it must be by Gaughan

Combat fatigue, shell-shock, whatever they’re calling it these days for the boys coming back from Vietnam, science fiction has far too rarely dealt with that sort of trauma. When it has, it’s always the result of combat; this story takes the unusual step of pointing out that it’s not only war that can cause it. Coney isn’t quite up to his theme—downplaying DeGrazza’s mental state, for example—but he made a good effort.

A high three stars.

The Piecemakers, by Keith Laumer

Two-fisted interstellar diplomat Retief is back. He and his frequent boss Magnan have been sent alone to mediate a war between the Groaci and the Slox, neither of which has asked for or wants Terran meddling. The usual nonsense ensues.

A black and white drawing of a man and an alien having a conversation.  On the left, the man is in a tailcoat, dress pants, and knee high spats and is sitting on one of a series of mushroom-like growths, gesturing with one hand.  He is facing toward the alien, which resembles a huge bell-like flower rooted into the right side of the image, but with eyestalks and a tongue-like extrusion coming out of the inside of the flower bell.  Other, smaller bells appear to be growing from the side of the stalk.  The man's head is close enough to the bell to almost be inside it but not quite.As usual, Retief makes friends with the locals. Art probably by Gaughan

It’s been about a year since the last Retief story, and broad spacing between them helps. But it’s still the same old pattern. If you’re familiar with Retief, you know what you’re getting and if you’ll like it. If you aren’t, this isn’t the best place to start, but it’s not the worst either.

Three stars.

Human Element, by Larry Eisenberg

A wealthy young woman visits a gambling mecca and requests an android assistant. The good part is that Eisenberg isn’t trying to be funny; unfortunately, he doesn’t really develop his theme. He’s not helped by the fact that Robert Silverberg’s The Tower of Glass currently running in Galaxy is covering the same ground. It’s all right, but maybe I’m better disposed towards it for not being an Emmett Duckworth story.

Three stars.

The Nightblooming Saurian, by James Tiptree, Jr.

Tiptree’s latest is a trifle, really just a set-up for some not very funny scatological humor. It concerns a group of time traveling scientists studying pre-humans in Olduvai Gorge. They’re worried about budget cuts, but a non-scientific member of the team has promised a member of the budget committee a dinosaur hunt to get him to look favorably on the project. The problem, of course, is that Dr. Leakey’s proto-humans came tens of millions of years after the dinosaurs went extinct.

Barely three stars.

Reading Room, by Lester del Rey

A black and white image of an architectural drawing of a rectangular room, with an inward-opening door symbolized in the upper left corner.  In the center of the rectangle the title, Reading Room, written in a swooping serifed font. Below the title, the author's name, Lester Del Ray, is written in smaller block capitals.

This month, del Rey looks at three books he considers experimental in some way. The first is The Eleventh Galaxy Reader, where the experiment is that the stories were chosen by the readers. In 1968, Galaxy polled subscribers to determine the best stories of the year, with large cash prizes for the best. More clearly experimental is John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. Unlike most reviewers, del Rey is neither hot nor cold (our own Jason Sacks gave it five stars); he enjoyed much of it, but feels that Brunner let form distract him from story. Finally, there’s Lord Tyger by Philip José Farmer, about an attempt to produce a real-life Tarzan. Lester isn’t too keen on the result, but he likes the honest look at the underlying ideas of Burroughs’ creation.

The Misspelled Magician (Part 1 of 2), by David Gerrold and Larry Niven

Two familiar names have teamed up to bring us a story about magic and science. Larry Niven should need no introduction for regular readers of science fiction over the last five years, while David Gerrold scripted a couple of Star Trek episodes and looks to be making the jump to print.

A human scientist has landed on an alien world and runs afoul of local customs, all told from the viewpoint of the locals. They see “Purple” (as they come to call him from what his translation device says his name is) as just another wizard, one who is trespassing on the turf of their own without making the proper overtures. This installment ends with local wizard Shoogar performing a mighty curse on Purple’s “nest,” leaving it in the river.

A black and white drawing of an alien landscape. In the foreground, a stampede of alien animals is running toward the left of the image.  A black bubble floats up from the animals, in which is written The Misspelled Magician, by David Gerrold and Larry Niven.  In the background a humanoid figure appears in silhouette between two clumps of trees.  It is raising one arm as if to shake its fist.The mud creatures rise to attack. Art by Gaughan

So far, so good. It’s a well-told examination of Arthur C. Clarke’s assertion that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. When Purple tries to explain that he uses science, not magic, his translator uses the same word for both terms.

But there’s a problem, a big one: the authors are trying to be funny. This mostly comes out in the names of the various local gods. For example, there’s Rotn’bair, the god of sheep, whose symbol is the horned box; his great enemy is Nils’n, the god of mud creatures, whose symbol is a diagonal line with an empty circle on either side (i.e. %). There’s a lot of this; the narrator’s two sons, who make bicycles, are named Wilville and Orbur. It really distracts from an otherwise good story.

Three stars for now, maybe less if you have a low tolerance for the humor.

Zon, by Avram Davidson

A man called Rooster crosses a wasteland, possibly many generations after WWIII, in search of a wife. His search takes him to a stronghold of Zons (clearly shortened from Amazons) just as their Mother King lies dying.

A black and white pen-and-ink drawing of an outside post-apocalyptic scene, with tattered tents and exposed building girders.  In the foreground a man stands facing away from the viewer.  His left hand is upraised in a wave and his right is pulling what looks like a leash that extends out of the image without showing what's on the other end.  In the background, groups of people appear to be fighting and arguing.  Some appear to be women and others are of indeterminate sex.Rooster arrives at the Zon burrough (that’s not a misspelling). Art by Gaughan

Apart from the last couple Orbits, it’s been a while since we’ve heard from Avram Davidson. This has that Davidson feel to it, but somewhat darker in tone than is usual for him. I don’t think I can say how well he handled certain aspects of a society completely without men, but it seems better than most would have done. And despite the darkness, it ends hopefully and beautifully.

A high three stars

Summing up

Another straight C issue. I keep hoping for something better, but I’m grateful we aren’t getting anything worse. I wonder, though, if there are clouds on the horizon. This is the second straight issue without an “IF first” new author and the fifth without an editorial. Look again at the cover; it’s dated May-June. Is this a one time thing, or is IF going bimonthly? What does that portend? Some word from the editor about what’s going on would be greatly appreciated.

Black and white text from the back of the magazine reads: Subscribe now to the new If, the magazine of alternatives. I’m not sure I’d subscribe without some explanation of what’s going on.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[March 31, 1970] Seed stock (April 1970 Analog)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

It's the end of the month, and that means the latest Analog is on tap.  This one starts and even mids with the usual drudgery… but the latter third breeds a little hope.

April 1970 cover of 'analog SCIENCE FICTION SCIENCE FACT' featuring a blue man in a large visor helmet with a single eye decal pointing over the shoulder of a hooded wizard writing in a notebook, wearing a large medallion. The caption reads HERE, THERE BE WITCHES EVERETT B> COLE
by Kelly Freas

Here, There Be Witches, by Everett B. Cole

Frequently, some author will tailor a story to Analog editor John Campbell's particular idiosyncracies hoping to get some of that sweet, sweet four-cents-a-word payout.  In this case, Everett Cole has aimed at this kooky premise: the reason why humans didn't develop psionic powers (more than we have) is that true adepts were burned as witches.

And so, in this lead novella, we have a planet of exact humanoids going through their equivalent of the 17th Century.  The nobles are finding witches right and left because bumping off the psychics (who, naturally, are doing a bit better than the average population) is a lucrative business.  It's up to Hal Carlsen, agent of a galactic "Philosophical Corps", to alter the course of the planet's history.

Black and white image of aclose up man in a goggle-like mask and helmet with antennae. His hands are raised and clasped and smoke raises from one of his fingers on the righthand page the sillouette of a vulture sits in front of the moon in front of a body of water. The caption reads HHERE, THERE BE WITCHES
by Kelly Freas

Obviously, Cole succeeded at his mission—securing a check for several hundred dollars.  He does not accomplish much else, though.  The tale is by-the-numbers, and the premise is dumb on multiple levels.  Plus, I really didn't need several pages luridly describing the tortures that the accused had to endure.

Two stars.

Quiet Village, by David McDaniel

Black and white image of a man perched on one knee with a futuristic looking blaster in his hand. He carries a bow on his back. The caption reads QUIET VILLAGE Force- like any other tool- is itself neither Good nor Evil. The purpose- not the thing- determines value! DAVID MCDANIEL Illustrated by Vincent diFate
by Vincent DiFate

Three hundred years after The Plague eliminates most of the human population, pockets of America are slowly clawing their way back to civilization.  Their progress is hindered by rats—bandits clad in bullet-proof "street suits" and wielding blasters.  When a San Gabriel Valley community is threatened by a pack of rats, a contingent of Scouts is hired to flush them out.

Boy Scouts, that is.

This intriguing set-up quickly devolves into a competently told but otherwise uninteresting combat tale.  I suppose the "moral" is that, in times of trouble, a unified, God fearing organization like the Scouts will keep America going, like the Catholic church in the Dark Ages.  Or something.

A low three stars.

A Case of Overprotection, by Hazel Moseley

Ms. Moseley offers up a history of the Food and Drug Administration, notes its virtues, and decries its recent cautious slowness.  I appreciated the data, but I disagree with the sentiment.

Three stars.

Black and white caroon drawing of two surgeons in front of a large body on a table, organs clearly visible. Caption reads: DEPARTMENT OF DIVERSE DATA GASTRO- INTESTINUS DIAPANUS or GLASS GUT E.T. from Polaris IV, quite friendly as long as you keep him well fed. A favorite object of research among E.T. biologists, since no X ray is required to study his metabolism.
by David Pattee

The Siren Stars (Part 2 of 3), by Nancy and Richard Carrigan

Black and white image of scantily clad male and female figures crawling among the weeds in front of a wooden house. A man in dark clothing and a large brimmed hat holding a large rifle stands in front of the structure. In the foreground is an overturned wooden boat. The caption reads THE SIREN STARS
by Kelly Freas

Here we are again with the bland adventures of bland adventurer John Leigh.  This time around, after the failure of John's attempt to infiltrate his own base (as practice for a mission to investigate a Soviet facility which has received signals from an alien race), he meets up with Elizabeth Ashley.

She is a woman.

Oh!  You want to know more about her?  Well, in many ways, she is like every woman in the world: appreciates expensive clothes, startles easily, and has preternatural intuition.  In other ways, she's most unlike women.  For instance, she is very smart—despite being a very beautiful woman.

You think I'm being overly snide?  Read this installment, if you can.  Virtually every description and depiction of Dr. Ashley either emphasizes her femininity (explicitly) or contrasts this or that character trait with stereotypical femininity.  It's ridiculous.

Anyway, Ashley is an astronomer who came up with the hypothesis that maybe the ultimate evolution of intelligence is the creation of sapient machines.  And maybe said machines would conquer the universe by sending signals to other smart species that promise great technological increases.  And maybe those technologies are actually a Trojan horse, and if they are built, the hapless dupes will realize too late that they've actually created alien robots, who will take over.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Well, Ashley obviously struck a nerve with that one—foreign mooks first try to kill her, then succeed in abducting her.  Because nothing hides a cunning plan like offing the one person who has made casual surmises (without evidence, mind you) of the truth behind it.

The Carrigans also offer up some local color, showing off the places they have obviously seen personally.  There are some truly insipid love scenes, including a very brief peek inside Ashley's thoughts, just so the reader knows she is genuinely attracted to John and isn't just some kind of enemy agent.  We also get some Fleming-lite action sequences.

Things end with John now tasked to go to the USSR not to see which way their radio dish is pointed (it's a moot point—the Americans have also gotten the Lorelei signal; one astronomer has gone insane) but to destroy any technology derived from it.  Also, to extract a (presumably beautiful, and definitely female) defector.

Well, at least the Carrigans acknowledged (tardily) that satellite photography was an easier way to see which way the Russkie dish was pointed…

Two stars.

Come You Nigh: Kay Shuns, by Lawrence A. Perkins

Black and white image of a man clad in white looking angrily at a sheet of paper in front of a desk of machinery.
by Craig Robertson

A two-man fighter craft of the Tellurian International Space Force is disabled by a Zhobehr magnetic beam and left adrift in the solar system.  This turns out to be a blessing in disguise as the crippled craft winds up near the enemy aliens' secret local base.  But how to broadcast their findings to Earth without 1) giving away their position, and 2) letting the aliens know they've been found out?

The clue is in the title.  It's a cute story that, thankfully, goes no longer than it needs to.

Three stars.

The Life Preservers, by Hank Dempsey

Black and white image of a futuristic two-turret tank with a castle drawn in the background.
by Vincent DiFate

Here we've got another story about mechanical teleportation by "Hank Dempsey" (Harry Harrison in disguise).  This time, it's set much further in the future.  Teleporters have been situated on planets throughout the galaxy for so long that they've had time to be abandoned for centuries. 

Preservers is the story of Emergency Plague Control, a corps of doctors whose job is to ensure the health of humanity.  Alien planets have not spawned harmful diseases—the ecosystems aren't similar enough.  But isolated groups of humans evolve new spins on old epidemics, and its up to the EPC to keep them in check.

And so, a team is dispatched to a primitive world, regressed for a thousand years, to do a check-up.  Unwittingly, they bring death with them…

It's a pretty good tale, more nuanced than I had expected, and told in Harrison's taut style.  Not brilliant, but worthy.

Three stars.

Seed Stock, by Frank Herbert

Dark image of a hand reaching to sow seeds on the surface of an obfuscated planet. A ship or satelite glows in the foreground. The caption reads 'seed stock'.
by Vincent DiFate

A few months ago, I attempted a book by Rex Gordon called The Yellow Fraction.  The premise was that a colony world had divided into two factions: the Greens advocated terraforming the world to be a paradise for humans; the Blues said the settlers should adapt to the planet.  (There was also a minority group that said the planet was no good, and they should just up and leave—the yellows.)

Frank Herbert's newest story presents the Green vs. Blue debate in a much terser, much more compelling fashion.  It is told from the point of view of Kroudor, a laborer with an instinctive knack for the rhythms of their new world.  While the highfalutin scientists struggle in vain to make their imported crops and livestock survive in increasingly difficult conditions, Kroudor and his wife, the technician Honida, find and cultivate local resources.

The result presages survival for the colony… if not quite that which had been envisioned when the group left Earth several years prior.

This is probably the best thing I've read by Herbert.  I imagine he sold it to Campbell because it has a bit of the anti-egghead bias the editor enjoys so much, but it is a story that would have fit in any other mag.

Four stars.

The Reference Library, by P. Schuyler Miller

Schuy sings the praises, this month, of Poul Anderson's future history as told in the tapestry of his dozens of published tales.  The occasion is the novel releases of Satan's World and The Rebel Worlds, both of which Miller liked, but we were less impressed with.  He likes the new collection Beyond the Beyond, too, whose contents include many stories we've covered on the Journey.

There's a neat bit about how SF veteran Alan E. Nourse is chartering a flight to Heidelberg's Worldcon this August—might be worth it for you folks who want to hop the Pond to West Germany.

Of Eight Fantasms and Magics, a Jack Vance collection of works that fit in the gap between SF and Fantasy, Schuy says, "If you don't like this kind of thing, stay away from it.  If you do, sample Vance: he is a master of the genre."

He also enjoys the 18th volume of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: "It's the best F&SF anthology in a long time."  This tallies with our assessment—that magazine finished at the top of the heap last year when we awarded the Galactic Stars

Finally, he lauds the A. Bertam Chandler collection, Catch the Star Winds, and contemplates making an encyclopedia for all of the Galactic Rim stories (whose main protagonist is Commodore John Grimes).

Signs of sprouting?

A dark haired woman is shown operating a large boxy computer, an IBM 2265 terminal.
a woman working at an IBM 2265 terminal

All told, this month's issue scores just 2.8 stars.  The concluding pages were such a comparatively pleasant experience that I'm left with a bit of optimism.  Sure, there's a Campbellian smugness that suffuses all that gets submitted; yet, the best authors seem to overcome that particular editorial tic.  Of course, this also suggests that Analog would get even better with a different man at the tiller.  That doesn't seem to be forthcoming any time soon…

As for the other sources of short fiction this month, we had a bumper crop.  From best to worst, there was:

Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.8), Fantastic (3.1), Galaxy (2.9), IF (2.8), Nova 1 (2.7), New Worlds (2.5), Orbit 6 (2.4), and Vision of Tomorrow (2.2)…and Andre Norton's collection of old and new stories: High Sorcery.

Individually, no outlet was outstanding (except for F&SF), but there was enough 4 and 5 star work to fill three full digests.  Also, women contributed 12% of the new fiction, which is on the higher side (again, thanks to Norton).

I suppose if you cast lots of seed, you're bound to get sprouts.  It just takes a lot of stock for this strategy to work.  And a lot of subscription fare!

Thank goodness books bought by the Journey are tax deductible.

Aren't they?

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Science / Space Race

[March 30, 1970] The Age of Explorer — the end of the Space Race

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

In February 1958, just months before Galactic Journey took to press, Vice President Nixon visited Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  He went personally congratulate the team that had built America's first artificial satellite, Explorer 1.

Vice President Richard Nixon holds a model of the cone-shaped top of the Explorer satellite with Dr. Lee DuBridge, left, president of Cal Tech, and Dr. William H. Pickering, right, director of the Cal Tech Jet Propulsion lab
Vice President Richard Nixon and a model of the Explorer satellite with Dr. Lee DuBridge, left, president of Cal Tech, and Dr. William H. Pickering, right, director of the Cal Tech Jet Propulsion lab, during a news conference in Pasadena, Calif., Feb. 17, 1958.

Now it is 1970.  President Nixon is presiding over a severe curtailing of our space program.  Next month, Apollo 13 will head to the Moon, marking the end of the first stage of lunar reconnaissance.  The original plan was for ten increasingly ambitious lunar landings, paving the way for long term exploration and exploitation.  But it's looking now like Apollo 11 was more of a conclusion than a beginning.  The Saturn V assembly line is shut down, Congress and the President are against any ambitious space endeavors, and even the three phases of Apollo flights are being cut down to two.

That said, our space endeavors are not entirely ended.  In addition to at least five more Apollo flights (the fates of Apollos 18 and 19 are in the balance; Apollo 20 has been canceled definitively), NASA plans to launch a space station into orbit built out of a dry Saturn upper stage.  The first 28-day mission will take place in 1972.  Three astronauts will conduct the first long-term experiments in space.  Two more missions of 56-day duration will follow.

A black and white ilustration of a space station in orbit, with Earth visible in the background.

But then "Skylab" will go into hibernation.  There won't be any more American spacecraft to visit or service the home in space—at least not until 1977.  That's the earliest that the proposed "space shuttle", all that's left of NASA Administrator Tom Paine's grandiose proposal for space development, which had included a trip to Mars on nuclear engines and several large space stations, can be brought online.

It is appropriate that it looks like tomorrow will be the day Explorer 1's orbit finally decays and sends the little satellite plunging into fiery reentry.  In its 13-year lifetime, it completed more than 58 thousand revolutions of the Earth, traveling 1.66 billion miles.  Explorer discovered the Van Allen Belts, fields of radioactive solar particles trapped in the Earth's magnetic field.  Its launch, on January 31, 1958, marked the true beginning of the Space Race.  Perhaps in decades to come, this comparatively brief moment of space pioneering will be known as "The Age of Explorer".

Ironically, one of the biggest poo-pooers of space exploration, at least of the manned variety, is the scientist who perhaps contributed the most to Explorer 1's design.  Dr. James A. Van Allen, Univ. of Iowa Director of Physics and Astronomy Departments, had this to say earlier this month:

Cover of TIME Magazine capttioned: SPACE and the RADIATION BELT PHYSICIST JAMES VAN ALLEN

"The Apollo missions, to me, are straightforward though immensely difficult tasks.  They do, however, yield relatively little in the way of fundamental understanding of nature. They are not scientific in that sense.  There is a longstanding controversy as to whether a manned spacecraft is a better way to conduct science in space than an automated, commandable spacecraft.  I’m sure there is no simple answer to that question.  As the general romance and entertainment value of manned flight tend to wear off a little, I think this question will be attacked in a thoroughly pragmatic way.

"[Apollo 11's lunar landing] might properly be compared to the explorations of Amundsen and Perry and Byrd in the Arctic and Antarctic, or perhaps Lindbergh flying the Atlantic. These are great achievements, heroic achievements, but the general potential of the Moon in its relationship to human life on a large scale is by no means obvious to me. I don’t think any competent person has found a significant, economic, human use for the Moon.

"[The Space shuttle and Skylab are feasible.] Whether or not it is sensible to pursue them, I have a great difficulty in judging."

President Nixon, Congress, and the majority of the American people seem to agree with the Professor.

What do you think?

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Movies

[March 28, 1970] Cinemascope: No Vacancy (The Bed Sitting Room)

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by Cora Buhlert

A Cold Night in Munich

In my last article, I wrote that a feeling of hope and optimism was permeating West Germany ever since the general election last fall. Sadly, on February 13, 1970, those good vibrations were disrupted by a reminder of the darkest time of German history.

It was a cold Friday night in the Glockenbach neighbourhood of Munich. The shops on Reichenbachstraße had already closed for the night and in the Victorian apartment buildings lining the street, people were enjoying the start of the weekend.

On of the buildings along Reichenbachstraße is the Munich synagogue, built in 1931. It was the only synagogue in Munich to survive the Reichskristallnacht on November 9, 1938, because the Munich fire brigade stopped the Nazi mob from setting fire to the building, insisting that a fire would spread out of control and burn down the entire densely populated street.

After World War II, the synagogue reopened and now serves as the main synagogue for the Jewish population of Munich. The Jewish congregation of Munich also purchased an adjacent Victorian apartment building to serve as a community centre, library, restaurant, kindergarten and as a home for elderly members of the congregation and students.

Shortly before nine PM, an unknown person or persons entered the community centre, took the elevator to the top floor and spread gasoline in the wooden stairwell on their way down. Then, they struck a match, lit the gasoline and fled. The resulting fire spread rapidly through the old building.

Arson at the community center of the Munich synagogue
The community center of the Munich synagogue on Reichenbachstraße all ablaze.

At the time of the arson attack, fifty people were inside the community centre, celebrating the sabbath. Forty-three of them were rescued by neighbours and the Munich fire brigade. However, the fire in the stairwell had cut off access to the upper floors of the building, trapping several resident in their rooms.

Munich Jewish community center fire 1970
A resident of the old people's home at the Jewish community center on Reichenbachstraße in Munich has been rescued and is taken to hospital.
Munich Jewish community center fire 1970
Medical student Sara Elassari escapes the fire.

Twenty-one-year-old medical student Sara Elassari, who lived on the top floor, managed to escape through the window and scramble down a drain pipe, from where she was rescued by the fire brigade. Seventy-one-year-old Meir Max Blum, who had returned from the US to his city of birth only the year before, jumped from a window and succumbed to his injuries. Six other residents aged between fifty-nine and seventy-one were found dead in their rooms. All seven victims had survived the Holocaust – some in hiding, some in exile, some imprisoned in concentration camps – only to be murdered in their homes in supposedly peaceful West Germany.

Burned out room at the Jewish community center in Munich
A burned out room at the Jewish community center in Munich.

Too Many Suspects

As of this writing, we do not know who is responsible for this terrible tragedy. The Munich police are following various leads. The obvious suspects would be the far right, since West Germany has no shortage of old and new Nazis. However, there is also evidence pointing at an eighteen-year-old far left radical with a history of arson, because Anti-Semitism does not thrive only among the right.

Finally, the arson attack might also be connected to the Middle East conflict, especially since a Palestinian terrorist group had tried to hijack an El Al plane during a stopover at Munich-Riem airport only three days before. The hijack attempt failed, but one passenger, thirty-two-year-old German-Israeli businessman Arie Katzenstein, was killed and ten other people were injured, some of them critically. On February 17, another hijack attempt was foiled, also at Munich-Riem airport but thankfully without casualties. Were the same terrorists also responsible for the arson attack? So far, we don't know.

Police officers examine the aftermath of the foiled hijacking at Munich Riem airport
Two police officers examine the aftermath of the foiled hijack attempt at Munich-Riem airport on February 10, 1970.
Munich Riem transit lounge trashed after foiled hijacking
The transit lounge at Munich-Riem airport after the failed hijack attempt.
Munich-Riem airport bus
The airport bus, where the would-be hijackers ignited a hand grenade, killing 32-year-old German-Israeli businessman Arie Katzenstein.

However, the sad truth remains that twenty-five years after the end of the Third Reich, eight Jewish people (the seven victims of the arson attack as well as the victim of the airport attack) were murdered and several others injured in the heart of Munich. The old venom of Anti-Semitism is back, if it ever left in the first place.

Nuclear War as Comedy

The Bed Sitting room German poster

When the world outside becomes too terrible to bear, the cinema offers a respite for an hour or two. And so I headed out to see a movie that debuted at last year's Berlin Film Festival, but is only now reaching West German cinemas. And since the movie was billed as a comedy, it would seem to guarantee a good time.

The movie in question is The Bed Sitting Room, the latest film by maverick director Richard Lester. Best known for helming the two Beatles movies A Hard Day's Night and Help!, Lester has also made a name for himself with anarchic comedies such as The Knack …and How to Get It or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. However, it's How I Won the War, an anti-war black comedy starring John Lennon, which piqued my interest in Lester's work, because parts of it were filmed around the corner from where I live with tenth-graders of Achim high school serving as extras and the Weser bridge in Achim-Uesen standing in for the Rhine bridge in Remagen, though no one who knows the Uesen bridge was even remotely fooled.

Ueser Bridge
The Weser bridge at Achim-Uesen during a military excercise. In How I Won the War, this bridge stood in for the Rhine bridge at Remagen.

Having enjoyed Lester's previous movies, I was eager to see his latest. Of course, the title The Bed Sitting Room sounds like one of those dreary kitchen sink dramas that are popular with socially conscious British directors. But this is a Richard Lester film and Lester doesn't do dreary.

Richard Lester
Richard Lester on the set of How I Won the War.

In many ways, the German title Danach (After) is more fitting, because The Bed Sitting Room is a movie about the aftermath of a nuclear war that lasted all of two minutes and twenty-eight seconds, including the time taken to sign the peace treaty. In a completely devastated Britain, a handful of survivors try to carry on a semblance of normality, while dealing with radiation, mutations, disease and each other. Sounds like a downer, right?

Keep Calm and Carry On

However, this is a Richard Lester film and so instead of a serious movie about the aftermath of a nuclear war, we get a black comedy. The royal family was incinerated along with forty million other Britons, so Britain is now ruled by Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone, former charwoman to Queen Elizabeth II and closest in line of succession to the throne. She certainly looks regal mounted on a horse beneath an arc of triumph fashioned from old refrigerators.

Mrs. Ethel Shroake
God Save Mrs Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone

Other British institutions carry on as well. The BBC is reduced to a single newsreader in a tattered suit who dashes from survivor to survivor to deliver the news sitting inside a broken television set. The National Health Service has been reduced to comedian Marty Feldman clad in a nurse uniform. The police consists of two officers patrolling what remains of Britain in the wreck of a Morris Minor suspended from a hot air balloon. St. Paul's Cathedral is mostly submerged and the vicar is performing services underwater.

The Bed Sitting Room
The always reliable BBC delivers the daily news.
The Bed Sitting Room police
The British Police or what remains of it.

Then there is Lord Fortnum of Alamein (Ralph Richardson) who has a problem. He is mutating due to radiation and slowly turning into a bed setting room. This is quite upsetting for him, because a bed sitting room is not at all a suitable form for a Lord. Nor is he the only one thus afflicted. In the course of the movie, a woman turns into a cupboard and her husband transforms into a parrot. The cupboard furnishes the bed sitting room, somewhat alleviating the post-war housing crisis, while the parrot feeds the survivors.

Lord Fortnum of Alamein
Lord Fortnum of Alamein is travelling in style.
Marty Feldman and Lord Fortnum of Alamein
The NHS examines Lord Fortnum of Alamein.

In addition to Lord Fortnum of Alamein, the closest thing to a protagonist this film has is Penelope (Rita Tushingham) who survived the war on the London Underground together with her parents. The family has been riding the Circle Line for the three years and subsist on raiding the chocolate vending machines on the station platforms. The London Underground surviving a nuclear war is one of the more believable things happening in this film. Though the Circle Line is a sub-surface line and would probably be destroyed, whereas deep level lines such as the Picadilly, Northern, Central and Victoria lines have a higher chance of survival.

Penelope's parents are worried about her, because she doesn't get out enough, tends to wander off and is also gaining weight. To the viewer, it's bleedingly obvious that Penelope is pregnant, though her parents are quite oblivious – at least until Penelope is late to return from one of her occasional walks. So her father goes in search of her and finds her in a compromising position on the floor of a tube car with a young man named Alan. After some misgivings, Penelope's parents accept Alan and he joins the family as they finally leave the tube to go in search of medical attention for the pregnant Penelope.

In a highly memorable image, the tube escalator drops Penelope, her parents and Alan onto an enormous pile of broken dishes. Other memorable visuals include wrecked cars half buried in the remnants of a motorway and a man digging through an enormous pile of boots. Lester shot the movie in various landfills and garbage dumps, lending the surroundings a highly surreal quality.

The Bed Sitting Room
Penelope and her family emerge from the tube.

Mutations and Marriages

Lord Fortnum finally does turn into a bed sitting room, though he insists that his "doctor" Captain Bules Martin (who is very much not a doctor and not much of a soldier either) put a sign in the window saying "No coloureds, no children and definitely no coloured children", because even as a bed sitting room, Lord Fortnum maintains his racism and class prejudice.

Meanwhile, Penelope's father sees a chance for political advancement – he wants to become prime minister – and arranges a marriage between Penelope and Captain Martin, neither of whom is at all interested in this arrangement, since Penelope is in love with Alan and Captain Martin more interested in his old friend Nigel than his new bride.

The Bed Sitting Room
Penelope and Captain Bules Martin celebrate a rather loveless wedding.

Things look grim, when Penelope's baby is born dead after seventeen months of pregnancy and the bed sitting room that used to be Lord Fortnum of Alamein is about to be knocked down. But the voice of God – and Lord Fortnum – intervenes in the nick of time. The police inspector – his sergeant has been transformed into a dog – informs the assembled population that scientists have developed a cure for the mutation problem via full body transplants and that it only took the entire population of South Wales to find it.

Penelope and Alan have another healthy baby and live happily ever after with the dog that used to be a police sergeant. Captain Martin and Nigel move into the bed sitting and live happily ever after as well. It all ends with a heartfelt intonation of "God Save Mrs. Ethel Shroake."

Nuclear War is a Laugh

The Bed Sitting Room is an utterly hilarious movie. There were many moments where I came close to rolling on the floor with laughter. On the other hand, it is also a deeply depressing movie, because it shows the survivors of a nuclear war trying to carry on and maintain a semblance normalcy under conditions that are anything but.

The Bed Sitting Room is to Peter Watkins' The War Game as Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is to Fail Safe. Both tackle the same subject, nuclear war and its aftermath, but one treats it as a tragedy, the other as an extremely bleak tragedy. The Bed Sitting Room will make you laugh, but the laughter will also stick in your throat.

Five stars and God Save Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone.

And now I hand over to my esteemed colleague Fiona Moore who also chanced to watch The Bed Sitting Room recently and offers her take below.


by Fiona Moore

Film poster for The Bed Sitting Room
Poster for The Bed Sitting room

“We’ve got to keep going.” “Why?” “Because we’re British.”

Last year’s movie adaptation of Spike Milligan and John Antrobus’ stage play, The Bed Sitting Room, directed by Richard Lester, has finally been released to critical acclaim in this country. A surrealist, absurdist comedy set in a near-future Britain devastated by a nuclear war, it’s being cited as a comedically nightmarish take on the anti-war genre, The War Game by way of Monty Python, or perhaps a cinematic expansion of Philip K Dick’s tragicomic story “The Days of Perky Pat”.

I have a slightly different take on it, and would argue that its postwar setting is simply a frame for a skewering of late twentieth century British society.

We have a middle-class nuclear (see what I did there) family straight out of a sitcom, consisting of Father (Arthur Lowe), Mother (Mona Washbourne), Penelope (Rita Tushingham) and her lover Alan (Richard Warwick), who start the movie literally living on the Tube (as many Londoners feel we do in a more metaphorical sense). No one appears to be driving the train, but it goes along anyway. The family’s petty concerns about things like whether or not Alan is suitable for Penelope, having the right train tickets, and whether or not they look like vagrants are more central to their lives than the fact that they emerge from the Underground into a devastated wasteland full of crockery and cars.

Scene from The Bed Sitting RoomLife in a desert of consumer goods

We have a member of the aristocracy, Lord Fortnum, who is physically turning into a bed-sitting room and is anxious that he should be in a good neighbourhood (“put a sign in my window—no coloureds!” he shouts upon learning that he is in fact in Paddington). We have a blatantly unhinged nurse named National Health Service (Marty Feldman), who insists that Mona Washbourne is dead because her death certificate has been issued; we have another confused individual named The Army (Ronald Fraser) and another called The BBC (Frank Thornton, who wanders the wilderness giving news bulletins). When Penelope, having been pregnant for eighteen months, gives birth, National Health Service tries to keep the child in the womb instead, as there’s no point in coming out.

Frank Thornton in the ruins of an evening jacket, kneeling in front of a TV with no screen and speaking through itThe BBC doing his job

The general impression is of a society that is degenerating into chaos, ruled by people who literally are property, and whose once-celebrated institutions have fallen into absurd bureaucracy. Throughout it, people keep to social rituals even though there is plainly no use for these any more, singing “God Save Mrs Ethel Shroake” (the closest surviving person to the throne), and one man (Henry Woolf) desperately riding an exercise bike in order to keep a lightbulb burning, saying that “electricity is the lifeblood of civilisation”. As society breaks down, people become more selfish and cruel. Father turns into a parrot and is eaten by the people in the bedsitter; Penelope’s baby dies and her bedsit-mates are oblivious to her grief; everyone avoids saying the word “bomb” and, when they do, it seemingly causes a wrecking ball to come out of the wilderness and attack the bedsitting room. The story is plotless, episodic and absurd, making as little sense as anything does these days.

While the ending is optimistic, it’s one which suggests Britian has to go through hell in order to achieve a new equilibrium, and the final scene has Penelope and Alan in a field of poppies, making anyone who’s seen Oh What a Lovely War wonder if they haven’t, in fact, died.

I feel like a stuck record saying this but, as with just about all British comedy (and indeed New Wave SF) at the moment, the main criticism I have is that this is largely an all-male revue. The only female characters are Penelope and Mother, who are walking ciphers whose lives are controlled by the men around them. No satire of British society can really be complete, in my opinion, unless it addresses the chauvinism that pervades our political, social and economic systems.

Nonetheless, as a scathing movie that contains much to offend the Establishment, it’s very much worth a watch and is likely to become a firm favourite of the student film societies and the local cinema’s more arty repertory evenings. Four stars.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 26, 1970] A Quartet of Whimsy (Satyricon, Skullduggery, Horton Hears a Who, Necropolis)

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A young white man with short hair wearing a navy P-coat, blue polo collar, and green t-shirt.
by Brian Collins

"Rome. Before Christ. After Fellini."

Federico Fellini is unquestionably one of the most beloved filmmakers in the so-called international arthouse circuit. Despite shooting Italian productions, working well outside the Hollywood system, Fellini has already garnered a back-breaking eight Oscar nominations. I won't be surprised if his latest, Fellini Satyricon (which henceforth I'll simply refer to as Satyricon), nabs him another nomination, despite its immense strangeness. United Artists, responsible for distributing Satyricon here in the States, have been shrewd in their marketing, seemingly aiming at the overlap between those who frequent arthouse theaters (people like me) and those who watch B-movies at the drive-in (also people like me).

Fellini Satyricon

Photograph of the title of the movie - Fellini Satyricon, crediting it as freely adapted from the novel by Petronio Arbitro

Normally, when writing about a film, or really any narrative, I try to give you a blow-by-blow of the plot; however, in the case of Satyricon, I don't think this would be feasible or desirable. This film is the latest effort from Fellini as both a fantasist and a storyteller who, at least since La Dolce Vita a decade ago, has clearly become disillusioned with traditional narrative. Satyricon is so loose in plot and yet so rich in imagery that to go over the plot would be doing it a disservice. I can at least give you the setup, though.

Photograph of a curly-haired blonde man wearing a belted mustard tunic, standing in front of a wall covered in graffiti
Martin Potter as Encolpius.
Photograph of a smiling, oiled, and tanned young white man, close cropped to only show his face and shoulders
Hiram Keller as Ascyltus.

We're in Rome in the time of Julius Caesar, or so it seems. The truth is that while the setting is ostensibly the time and place of the Roman Republic, it's a historical Rome fused with a Rome that only exists in one's dreams—or nightmares. Encolpius (Martin Potter) is a young man whose lover, Gitón (Max Born), has been taken by Encolpius's friend Ascyltus (Hiram Keller) and, as it turns out, sold as a slave to some depraved theatre actor. Encolpius rescues Gitón from the actor's clutches, but upon returning to their tenement building (one of several impressive sets in the movie), the feminine and elusive Gitón decides to become Ascyltus's new lover anyway. It's here that Encolpius, distraught, contemplates suicide, but an earthquake demolishes everything before he can reach for his sword.

It's here that Satyricon goes from strange to positively "far out."

Photograph of a ruddy-haired white person with bedroom eyes wearing a white strap of fur as padding under a golden strapped quiver, drawing an arrow in a golden bow, all against a backdrop of beaten brass.
The uncannily beautiful Max Born as Gitón.
Photograph of a multi-story stone and plaster building with a courtyard active with people, even as it grows dark.
The tenement building where Encolpius, Gitón, and Ascyltus live.
Photograph of an effects shot featuring a crowd of largely unclothed white people, gathered around a few white people clothed in brightly dyed clothes, and a Black woman wearing earth tones.  In the background the clouds are dyed the red of late sunset
Encolpius, soon after the earthquake, surrounded by mourners.

Something happens to Encolpius, although your guess is as good as mine. The most sensible explanation, both literally and symbolically, is that Encolpius and the others had been killed in the earthquake, sending them over to Hades, the Roman afterlife. There are, of course, quite a few things that go unexplained, even if we assume that everything after the earthquake is Hades. If this is indeed Hades, then nearly everyone here, including Encolpius, seems to be unaware of their own deaths. We meet many colorful characters along the way, as Encolpius voyages through this demented version of Rome in search of his lover and former friend. The most memorable of these might be the local despot Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), one of the few holdovers from Petronius's Satyricon. One of the eeriest scenes in the whole film is when Trimalchio sets up an elaborate rehearsal for his own funeral, complete with his slaves mock-crying near his still-living body.

Throughout the film, Encolpius and Gitón cross paths, but only rarely; rather the former is stuck with Ascyltus as the two men narrowly escape death, capture, or both. It's worth noting, at this point, that all three forementioned characters are men, and that Satyricon, on top of being immersed in death and sex, is especially focused on homosexuality. The topic was not exactly taboo for Fellini before, but here he explores romance and sex between men, indeed the psychology of the young homosexual, so overtly that it's both daring and unignorable. The love-hate relationship between Encolpius and Ascyltus, oscillating between antagonistic and homoerotic, is arguably the only thing keeping the movie together as a narrative. There's a tender and yet also perplexing scene where the two men, having taken refuge in a somewhat abandoned villa, have what the French call a ménage à trois with a servant girl (Hylette Adolphe), Fellini implying that the two men also have sex with each other.

Photograph of mourners covering their faces over a reclining and richly garbed elderly white person whose eyes are closed
The tyrannical Trimalchio rehearsing his own funeral.
Photograph of a bare-chested Black woman with long, braided hair smiling while gazing at two white people who are lying down and touching each other
The servant girl looking mighty pleased as Encolpius and Ascyltus cuddle.
Photograph of a smiling and tanned man pulling what appears to be a molded leather full-head mask of a bull up from over his head
George Eastman as the "Minotaur."

As I mentioned earlier, Fellini's Satyricon is loosely based on the ancient Roman narrative of the same name by Petronius—the problem being that the latter has been partly lost to time, including its ending. Much of the film, thus, is of Fellini's invention, although in a stroke of mad genius he apparently decided to not fill in the gaps of the original text. Scenes rarely ever connect with each other, in terms of setting and characters, not helped by the occasional frame narrative which the in-movie characters are being told about. Encolpius and Ascyltus are escorting a hermaphrodite with allegedly special powers in one scene, and just a bit later, without explanation, Encolpius has to fight a man (George Eastman) who's dressed as the Minotaur from Greek mythology. Stuff like that. If you've seen La Dolce Vita or 8½, then you already know Fellini has become increasingly sympathetic to fragmented and nonlinear narrative structure; with this in mind, it makes perfect sense that he would adapt a story that only survives in fragments.

Photograph of a picture of a costumed quartet, posing, painted on since-damaged plaster
Portrait of Encolpius and others on a fragment of wall.

Satyricon stands out as Fellini's most violent, erotic, and somehow most esoteric film to date, if not necessarily his best. At a little over two hours, one does start to feel as if the movie is spinning its wheels occasionally. Some will find the plot (or lack thereof) to be incomprehensible while still others will find Fellini's nonjudgmental treatment of sexuality to be too grotesque. While certainly fantasy, it is a sort of fantasy that stands apart from Professor Tolkien's holier-than-thou puritanism, and yet it's far more layered and sophisticated than your average sword-and-sorcery fantasy. I do suggest that anyone who sees cinema as a serious artform ought to watch Satyricon, if only because it is truly unique, and because it stretches the boundaries of what can even be done with a movie camera.

A high four stars, possibly five if I ever rewatch it.

BW photo of Jason Sacks. He's a white man, with short light hair, rectangular glasses, and headphones.
by Jason Sacks

And now for a film that's not exactly Fellini level…

Some friends and I decided to go to the movies on a cold and wet March Saturday in Seattle. We wandered to the tri-plex at scenic Northgate Mall. My friends went to see Patton again. My sister saw Start the Revolution Without Me. They all shared full and excited theatres. For me, well, I was committed to review the new film Skullduggery for this column. I was "lucky" enough to get a nearly private screening of this film in theatre 3 – I think the two couples in my theatre enjoyed the peace and quiet so they could have some intimate time together, away from the violence of Patton and the laughs of Revolution.

As for my reaction, well…

Skullduggery

Movie poster depicting a colour illustration of naked furred people fleeing through a jungle.  In the background, a gun wielding white hunter is cresting a hill alongside Black 'guides'.  Inset illustrations depict scenes of a white hunter awakening to see a furry woman examining his lantern, of a white man brutalizing a white woman while Black men stand by impassively, of furry people being used as slave labour in mines.

Skullduggery is a very bad film.

Oh, this film starts pretty well, as a high adventure story. Anthropologist Dr. Sybil Greame (Susan Clark) leads an expedition into remote Papua New Guinea to find ancient human remains. In her group is a handsome explorer named Douglas Temple (Burt Reynolds), with whom she has a quick romance. Soon, though, things change. Temple finds gold in those hills. Greame finds potential glory of her own, in the form of a tribe of apelike creatures. These creatures are called the Tropis and are enslaved by local humans. These primitive creatures just might be the missing link in the evolution of mankind from ape to person. The discovery of these strange creatures leads to pandemonium and confusion and the beginnings of an intriguing moral debate.

That debate is smashed before it really starts. When one of the Tropis is allegedly murdered, Temple is charged with the crime and is forced to stand trial. The latter half of the film examines what it means to be human, the complexity of a human/Tropi hybrid, even the nature of race relations in America.

Photograph of fuzzies.. or rather.. Tropis, crouchingly advancing up from the greenery-- people wearing tawny ape suits, with the heads replaced with a blend of makeup, false hair, and wigs

Skullduggery is a mess. It veers almost drunkenly from high adventure to comedy to tragedy to trial, lumbering from one topic to the next, seemingly without a lot of reflection on what has happened before. Reynolds seems dramatically miscast, Clark is remarkably uncharismatic, and director Gordon Douglas (a man who’s been working in film since the 1930s) shows little dexterity behind the camera, by and large employing few camera tricks.

This fiasco is a shame for a few reasons.

First, the early scenes of exploration (apparently filmed in Jamaica rather than the much more dangerous New Guinea) are legitimately lovely, all brilliant vistas and setting suns. However, Douglas moves to obvious soundstages and static, dull shots for the majority of the film, making all of this very boring.

Secondly, Reynolds obviously has talent and charisma. He could be a breakout star in the ‘70s, but he’ll be working in community theatre in Florida before long if he can’t find more suitable roles. I’ve seen him in a few things recently – the Jim Brown/Raquel Welch bomb 100 Rifles for one – but he needs to be in a film which clicks for him to show off his obvious charm.

Photograph of a dark-haired white man wearing a light suit leaning dramatically (even desperately) against a railing, while behind him, a Black bailiff stands against the court's wall

But most importantly, Skullduggery just never delivers on any of the promise of its core ideas. What would happen if the missing link suddenly was found? How would that change our perceptions of the past and how would that affect the religion/science dichotomy with Nixon’s Silent Majority?

Even with the strange trial of Temple, in which a white supremacist and a Black Panther are brought to testify, we're never even given much lip service about the lives of these creatures and their place in the world. In our turmoil-filled world of 1970, when racial tensions remain high and our country is deeply scarred, it seems like malpractice for a film like this one to openly avoid the very ideas it raises.

2 stars.

photo of Amber Dubin
by Amber Dubin

Horton Hears a Who, and You Should Too

If you were looking for a light, whimsical flight into a lovely fantasy land of the Seussian-variety, you will be disappointed by Horton Hears a Who. While this short, animated film is typical of the type of whimsical art and color we’ve come to expect from Dr. Seuss’s children’s stories and picture books, its plotline is anything but light.

Movie poster featuring a colour illustration of a wide eyed elephant facing the viewer, holding a fluffy blossom in his trunk.  Looming in the background are a couple of smirking blue apes, and in the foreground a kangaroo wearing a pince-nez rests her chin on her fist, eyes closed as though lost in thought.
Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, March 19th, 1970

We open whimsically enough, following a speck of dust along a gust of wind flowing through the Jungle of Nool as it circles closer to an elephant taking a carefree bath in a river. The elephant, named Horton, is soon shaken from his reverie by the speck of dust we’ve been following, as it seems to be issuing a plea for help. With Horton’s enormous ears, he picks up this call and goes to investigate a clover that the dust spec has alighted on.

Illustration of a fluffy dust mote on top of a shaggy pink clover blossom
The speck of dust that all the fuss is about

We come to know that this dust speck is actually a fully occupied world filled with a tiny populace calling themselves Whovians. The voice was coming from Dr. H. Whovie, classically cast as the lone possessor of the knowledge that their entire society literally balances on the head of a pin, or a clover as it were. Being in agreement with their desire to protect and shelter this delicate society, Horton and the Doctor join forces to make sure the world doesn’t fall victim to such devastating hazards as a drop of rain or a particularly rough gust of wind. The altruistic Horton dedicates himself to this cause so freely because he declares “a person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Illustration of a kangaroo leaning down over a clover blossom and inspecting it with opera glasses
Kangaroo Jane who can't keep her nose to herself

The trouble begins when a local busybody kangaroo overhears Horton’s conversation with the clover and proceeds to insert herself into the situation, determining that Horton must be talking to himself and thus is a crazy, dangerous menace to society. She turns the rest of the jungle’s occupants against Horton and finally conscripts the help of the Wickersham Brothers to more violently separate Horton from the clover, hoping that if it is destroyed, that will bring Horton back to his senses and he will stop talking about little people talking to him from dust specks. These Wickersham brothers, which are drawn more like horrifying gremlins than the apes they’re supposed to be, take the clover and conscript a vulture to fly it into a huge field of clovers.

Illustration of a trio of greenish apes mugging against a background of sallow-yellow-and-candy-pink flowers
The Wickersham brothers, creatures horrifying enough to inspire nightmares in adults and kids alike

Meanwhile, inside the dust ball itself, pandemonium has broken out, as the Whovians are suddenly forced to acknowledge the Doctor’s warnings and recognize that there is in fact a giant dangerous and bigger world outside the clouds that frame their existence. Through trial and tribulation, when Horton finally is reunited with Whoville, we find that their town has been thrown into disarray, buildings cracked and the townsfolk strewn about after the violent ride in the vulture’s beak. Horton assures them their troubles are over when he plucks them from the 3 millionth clover he checked and resumes caring for the now united peoples of Whoville.

Illustration of a silhouetted elephant on the cusp of entering an ocean frothing with pink clover-blossoms
Horton on his way through picking 3,000,005 clovers just to find his friends.

This reprieve is short lived when the Wickersham brothers, now bolstered by the entire Jungle of Nool, swarm upon Horton and rather upsettingly decide drastic action is necessary to keep his dangerous belief in tiny people from spreading insanity throughout the jungle. They threaten to cage him and boil the clover in “Beezle nut oil.” Backed into his last corner, Horton begs the citizens of Whoville to make as much noise as possible so that his tormentors finally hear them and believe they exist and are worth protecting. The Doctor rallies his people, getting every member of the town to participate to no avail, until the very smallest resident, Jo-Jo with his yo-yo, lends the final voice that breaks free from their clouds and finally reaches the encroaching mob. Furies are quelled, everyone reaches an agreement that “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” happy endings are had by all, and we drift away from the story just as the Doctor is gifted an even smaller world of his own on another dust speck that he must take care of, thus starting the cycle anew.

Illustration of a sprawling, swoopingly curved cityscape from above, its buildings all in yellow over pink grounds, with clouds shrouding the near buildings peaks
The beautiful yet tiny town of Whoville

There are obvious moral overtones stating that society is capable of great evil when fueled by routing out sedition, and that it is important to not lose sight of the humanity in our fellows, whether the evil we are being told we’re defeating is insanity, witchery or, more recently, communism. The production is, as usual, well done. It looks like a quality Dr. Seuss show, and it is.

However, I can’t help but respond to this with a personal sense of dystopia fatigue. Maybe it’s because I was expecting much more fun than despair, but I felt like this story was so overly harsh to the protagonist that I came away wishing that Dr. Seuss wasn’t trying so hard to scare the children. Why can’t they be allowed to chase talking dust specks or pick millions of clovers without being jailed for insanity? Aren’t they just children after all?

Illustration of an elephant in a cage having his trunk tied to a rope pulling him against the bars. A boiling pot over flame is beneath this tug-of-war, and at stake between the two is the blossom held by Horton
Is it a little extreme to threaten children with boiling their friends alive? Dr. Seuss didn’t think so.

While I do love the art and style of the piece, I feel the need to deduct a point for the storyline being a little more cruel and upsetting than I would have preferred from a children’s story.

4 stars

Illustration of a sadder but wiser elephant gazing teary-eyed at a blossom held by his trunk
Horton may have heard a Who, but comes to wish he hadn’t.

BW photo of a round-faced white man with fluffy dark hair. He is wearing a button-down and is looking over his shoulder, smiling faintly.
by George Pritchard

Necropolis

Movie poster for Necropolis, depicting what in black-and-yellow-posterised photograph appears to be a naked person, riding a horse bareback towards the left.  Their outstretched left hand holds a bow, and they're carrying what looks like a sheaf of arrows to their right.  The title is rendered at the base of image

I am on a brief holiday while my flat is getting treated for mold, so I decided to go see Necropolis, an Italian-British production, billed as a strange and fantastical film on the nature of evil.

After twenty minutes of filler involving a man in stereotypical “barbarian” furs searching for the Mona Lisa, there appears a beautiful man with a painted face and a green velvet suit. By this time, I confess that I was checking my watch in worry. “Perhaps this will all make sense in time,” I told myself, “perhaps it would immediately make sense if I were more familiar with Art, with the political landscape inhabited by the filmmakers, but I do not know for certain.”

Movie still of a bearded blonde man in leather and furs, saying "Mona Lisa? Isn't it her?". There is a woman behind him, sitting against a wall.
The first twenty minutes of this film.

Subtitles are played with, sometimes included and sometimes not, and sometimes the subtitles are used as title cards. Throughout the film, characters switch at random between English, Italian, and sometimes French. Apparently this was inspired by Warhol’s films, right down to including Viva in the cast list. I can’t say that I’ve ever felt much of anything while interacting with his art, so perhaps I am the wrong audience.

A movie still of a white woman with blonde curly hair. She is very thin, and is wearing a black turtleneck.
Viva!

The man in green wanders through a warehouse of red plastic sheets. He says, “The universe is in my head,” and with the ouroboros painted on his face, I believe him. ”If only I could convert you. If only I could communicate with you, then you’d know.”

A movie still of a blonde man dressed in green velvet, with an abstract snake painted on his face. He is laying back with red plastic curtains behind him, and says, "The universe is in my head."
A man who I do not trust, but who I believe.

All right, now we’re getting somewhere. This film feels like I am at a festival of short films — some are wonderfully strange, others are dull slogs. A witch in a cement pipe initiates a young man, in a ceremony that makes me think, after the first 40 minutes of this 118-minute movie, that the art film amateur hour has leveled out, and incredible images have begun to bubble up through the depths.

A movie still of a woman sitting in a cement pipe. The woman is silhouetted in moonlight, and a red rope hangs from the ceiling. The witch is saying, "the mysterious light of witchcraft".
A glorious moment that promises more.

Unfortunately, this hope is crushed directly after, and never fully recovers. Because just as we think there’s something good, it collapses again into joyless sitcom bits played out in a warehouse. Press papers describe this film as an exploration of evil. Perhaps this speaks to the misery of touch-and-go rasping against the nerves, but it seems more like an exploration of poor sound mixing. Annoying noises and annoying people, broken up with occasionally beautiful things. I would have liked to go into the projection room and clip a new copy for myself.

A movie still of a scene in a warehouse. In the foreground, a man in a red turtleneck and black slacks is sitting on the floor, facing Viva, who is sitting on a sad, green-tan couch. There is a grimy tan Pendleton blanket next to her on the couch. Just beyond the two of them, coffee is spilled in a puddle across the cement floor.
Fellow travelers…is this something you have seen play out in your own counterculture spaces? (observe the flagrantly spilled coffee, which no one is keen to clean up)

Unfortunately, this film drags for minutes at a time — people often speak and move in slow motion, and the 2-hour runtime is wholly unnecessary. The speeches are so slow that the subtitles only provide disjointed fragments. I never guessed that a film about evil would make me think of a Burma Shave road ad. I fell asleep halfway through, and so bought a second ticket in order to complete this review.

I can’t believe this movie has the gall to reference Kenneth Anger, and multiple times, at that. Mr. Anger makes beautiful, meaningful films, but most of all, they are short. There is an excellent Kenneth Anger-length film here, but there is so much to cut out around it that I cannot recommend Necropolis in good faith. I would recommend that anyone interested in this film should seek out Mr. Anger’s films, instead.

Two stars.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Magazine/Anthology

[March 24, 1970] 200 Not Out (New Worlds, April 1970)

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by Fiona Moore

Greetings from the Island of Formosa, more usually known as the Republic of China! Though the local name for the island is “Taiwan.” I’m here on a visiting fellowship at National Tsinghua University.

The Republic is a hub of electronics and engineering, and so there is a great appetite for SFF here. SF is regarded by the nationalist government as a way of encouraging young people into careers in science, and also SF, of the “if this goes on…” variety, is seen as a vector of “moral teaching”.

Nonetheless, for the past twenty years Taiwan has lagged behind Korea in the production of locally-written SFF. Most what is available is foreign SF works like Asimov and Clarke, in (often not very good, or indeed legal) translation. In fact, some translators leave the author’s name off the novel and pass it off as theirs! The scene is further hampered by restrictions on Japanese cultural products, an understandable reaction to 50 years of Japanese colonisation but nonetheless one which denies Chinese people a wealth of movie and comic-book content.

However, there are signs of change emerging, with the rise of a thriving short SF fiction scene. The appearance of Zhang Xiaofeng’s clone story Pandora in the China Times in 1968 has led to the publication of a lot of stories in mainstream newspapers and magazines, the creation of dedicated SFF magazines, and even an SF short story contest. The government is said to be encouraging the development of a “truly Chinese” SF. Some authors to watch include Chang Shi-Go, an electronics engineer by day and writer by night, Zhang Xiguo, and Huang Hai, who is rumoured to be putting together an anthology of near-future science fiction stories.

Meanwhile, my copy of New Worlds has followed me safely to Asia. It’s the 200th issue: will it mark a new direction for New Worlds, or will it be more of the same old worlds?

You can probably guess.

Cover of New Worlds April 1970. It shows the silhouettes of two human figures balancing on opposite ends of a seesaw that hinges atop the edge of a cliff.
Cover by Andrew Lanyon

Lead-In

In which Michael Moorcock celebrates New Worlds making it to 200 issues with a rant about how they won’t make it to 300 if the arts council grant doesn’t come through and/or more people don’t buy the magazine. Signs of trouble I fear.

The Dying Castles by Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delany and James Sallis

A black-and-white drawing of strange humanoid figures, with skyscrapers in the background.
art by Alan Stephanson

A half-page vignette in three sections, I assume written in round-robin style by the authors. It stops just when it seems to get going. Three stars for the prose.

Secret Identity by John Sladek

A line drawing of a white man in a suit, his back pressed against a wall, his face turned away from the viewer.
art by Andrew Lanyon

A modernist spoof of spy fiction. Well written for what it is, but I feel like we’ve been here before: writers have been sending up spy fiction since Ian Fleming got on the bestseller lists. Two stars.

The Floating Nun by M. John Harrison

A black-and-white photograph of a morris dancer costumed as a hobby-horse.
art by uncredited artist, possibly Andrew Lanyon as he is credited with the rest of the artwork on this story

An excerpt from a longer novel, The Committed Men, yet to be published. It's really quite gripping, featuring a group of travellers trying to cross a post-apocalyptic British landscape, full of mutants and dominated by a sort of perverted cannibalistic folk-horror Christianity. I’m definitely going to look for the full version. Four stars.

The Time Ship by Paul Green

A poem about, well, a time-ship spinning uncontrolled through history. Some good imagery. Three stars.

The Tarot Pack Megadeath by Ian Watson

A line drawing parodying the Five of Swords tarot card, showing a man who looks like Richard Nixon picking up swords in the foreground while two men run away in the background.
art by Judy Watson

Of course there’s an Ian Watson story (and there’ll be more Watson content later)—but again, I don’t mind, as he’s the most fresh and original thing in New Worlds at the moment. This is a piece about a US President facing total societal collapse, told through a tarot reading—one suspects that Watson did the tarot reading first and built the story around it, but that’s perfectly legitimate as a tool for inspiration. Sometimes the cards are described and sometimes they’re left for the reader to work out from the content. Four stars.

Two Stories by Gwyneth Cravens

The first is “Abbe Was I Ere I Saw Ebba”, a story having fun with palindromes and etymology. The second is “Literature and the Future of the Obsolete but Perpetual Present by Claude Rene Vague”, a mock essay sending up the more opaque and pretentious forms of literary criticism with a lot of French puns. It’s at least more readable than most experimental stories with a “clever” conceit are. Three stars.

Computer 70: Dreams and Love Poems, Part Two by D.M. Thomas

A black-and-white photograph showing an object through a distorting glass.
art by Andrew Lanyon

A continuation of last issue’s poem series. Like last issue’s, there’s some good imagery about machines and loves, but it all goes on a little too long. Two stars.

Gunk Under The Skin by Raymond Johnson

A black-and-white line drawing of a naked white woman from behind, her pale hair in a shoulder length cut, her skin covered with slash marks.
art by R. Glyn Jones

A short piece about a man who gets off on affixing green tape to his secretary’s skin, until she becomes entirely green. A bit creepy and fetishistic. Two stars.

The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod by Philip Jose Farmer

A black-and-white line drawing showing a kneeling Tarzan shooting heroin in front of a jungle scape.
art by Alan Stephanson

The premise for this one is “what if Tarzan was written by William S. Burroughs instead of Edgar Rice Burroughs?” and that’s as far as the joke goes. I got a laugh out of it, particularly its sending up of Tarzan story clichés like Jane seemingly being abducted every five minutes, but it got boring pretty quickly and there was a woman-hating edge to it that I didn’t really get on with. Two stars.

Comic Strip by Judy Watson

A 20-panel comic strip depicting a woman making herself beautiful and greeting a man, only to be rejected by him.
art by Judy Watson

Ian Watson’s wife Judy’s previous contribution to the magazine was the surreal cartoon interpretations of Japanese culture from the February issue. I’d thought they were impressive and clearly someone on the editorial staff did too, as she’s back with a visual meditation on women’s anxieties about attractiveness and relationships. Four stars.

Books

Bob Marsden reads the proceedings of the Alpbach Symposium 1968; Joyce (Not A Woman) Churchill thinks that British fantasy is in a dire place because someone is reprinting James Branch Cabell and John Norman has another so-called book out; James Cawthorn quite likes a book by de Camp and Pratt. Note to self: ask campus bookshop to order in the Cabell reprints.

The music review column seems to have been abandoned; on the one hand, this is a shame as it was at least something new for the magazine, but on the other, it wasn’t really contributing anything new to music reviewing.

An advertisement on p. 30 indicates that J.G. Ballard is exhibiting a sculpture called “Crashed Cars” at the Arts Lab. One wonders when he’ll get it all out of his system.

An advertisement for J. G. Ballard's Crashed Cars exhibition, depicting a Triumph Herald facing left in a scrubland.methinks Ballard is getting a bit big for his boots

Overall, this is definitely more a looking-back than looking-forward issue. New Worlds seems to be staying firmly in its wheelhouse for the most part, with the same writers covering the same themes and only the occasional new voice creeping in. Sorry, Michael Moorcock, but I’m afraid at this rate no, we won’t see an Issue 300.

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[March 22, 1970] Fashion: The Mystical is Going Mainstream

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by Gwyn Conaway

It’s spring of 1970, and already I feel like the winds are fierce, pushing us apart along generational and political divides. In these uncertain times, I take comfort in one universal truth: the artists will always pave the way.


The Fool, Mama Cass, and the cast of HAIR at the Aquarius Theater in Los Angeles celebrating the completion of their exterior mural.

Future generations will look at this era and see not the stodgy powers in their twilight years, clinging to the rigamarole of a more conservative and unified time. This moment will be remembered by its photography, animation, filmmaking, and poets. The bright lights and psychedelic colors. The escapism and magical nostalgia. The music and camp.

There is no doubt that the great music-makers are the festival gods of the twentieth century. But what of the artists that made their image? Do we not remember Bacchus and Dionysus by the hands of the artists that sculpted and painted them?


The Aquarius Theatre boasted the world's largest mural in 1968, painted by Marijke Koger and other members of The Fool from Holland. The mural included painting rainbows on the parking arrows and curbs. Like the Art Nouveau and Rococo movements before it, I sometimes wonder if we're living in another total art movement and don't even realise.

As I listened to my records with their radical album sleeves in my Los Angeles home, I found myself reminiscing about the mural painted by The Fool on the Aquarius Theater on Broadway Street. The Fool was an art collective that broke up not long after their HAIR murals that year, but the impact they’ve had is astounding. The Chariot and The Apple are two boutiques, for example, that carry their showstopping mind trip aesthetic.

Marijke Koger, in particular, is prolific. She’s one of The Fool’s founding members and has remained in Los Angeles. Her work is primarily in painted objects such as Eric Clapton’s “The Fool” Gibson SG guitar, John Lennon’s piano, and George Harrison’s BMC Mini. She also designed numerous stage costumes and album covers.


The Fool designed the costumes and guitars for Eric Clapton's band called CREAM in 1967.


The Astrobeam collection was aimed at the whimsy of young girls and their imaginations. Marijke Koger insisted that the collection use her own rainbow scheme rather than something less expensive to mass produce.

Her color is a dizzying celebration of life and love that will follow young defiance into the seventies, no doubt. Her “Astrobeam” collection was in Macy’s and Nordstrom’s last year and appealed to young Angelinos with its rainbow sorbet color palette, a sort of happy retaliation to the cold lack of acceptance surrounding them. Koger's vibrant spirit comes through in every form of art she embarks on.

Interestingly, she crossed paths with psychedelic photographer, Karl Ferris when The Fool designed the costumes and lettering for the cover of The Hollies’s 1967 album Evolution, confirming the old adage that the world is smaller than it appears.


Ferris reimagined The Hollies' new sound in this album cover by having them push through a plastic sheet, giving it the feel of pushing through a psychedelic veil of the mind.

Karl Ferris is rightfully described as the inventor of psychedelic photography techniques, and the world has taken notice. His photography has graced the albums of Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Hollies, and other gods of the music scene.

He has been particularly inspired by history. The Pre-Raphaelites of the Art Nouveau era and the Medieval periods both greatly inspired him as a boy. It’s especially obvious in his photography of Donovan and Jenny Boyd at Bodium Castle in 1967, which served as the album art for A Gift from a Flower to a Garden and its subsequent singles.


Wear Your Love Like Heaven is a single disc release from the A Gift from a Flower to a Garden album. The entire collection of photographs was first inspired by Ferris's youth cycling around the castles in the countryside.


Two other psychedelic shots in the collection play with the homemade aesthetic of the hippie movement when applied to the Medieval period and Medieval compositions of the divine triangle, catapulting musicians into the godly ranks.

This was of particular interest to me because of another rather influential artist, Sheilah Beckett. Beckett isn’t in the psychedelic scene, but her illustrations are full of imagination and allure. Specifically for children. She’s a children’s literature illustrator and the first woman artist at the Charles E. Cooper Studio when she was hired in 1942. Her work is playful and inspired by not only history but the current interests of the young and bold. The high contrast and frenetic aesthetic of the psychedelic movement lives in her work.


One of Sheilah Beckett's many masterful children's literature pieces. This is of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, which she painted in the 1954. Compare it to the psychedelic movement and you can see a strong through-line of imagination and color language associated with Medieval escapism, mysticism, and youthful rebellion.


The Fool's first album from 1968. Each of the members of the collective was represented by a tarot card they designed themselves. Note the medieval elements of their costumes, both above and in the album cover, bringing all three artists full-circle.

The music festival scene is less shocking than it was two or three years ago, but I don’t believe this is because its influence is fading away. To the contrary, I believe this rebellious movement is calcifying and going mainstream. The melted lettering, astrological themes, and cosmic palettes that were so defiant and niche will find their way onto wallpaper, teen magazines, and school supplies soon. Mark my words.

While some might find this to be a disappointing turn of events, I find it to be a victory. What better way to define the resistance to our horrors abroad and at home than with a brilliant explosion of life, color, and nostalgia? It will continue to reach impressionable minds and inspire their sense of rebellion for decades. Won’t that just tickle the conservative masses?

Maybe not, but it will sure tickle me.

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Magazine/Anthology, Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 20, 1970] Here comes the sun (April 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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photo of a man with glasses and curly, long, brown hair, and a beard and mustache
by Gideon Marcus

Out, damn spot!

A couple of weeks ago, Victoria Silverwolf offered us a tidbit on the latest solar eclipse.  I've since read a bit more about the scientific side of things and thought I'd share what I've learned with you.

It was the first total solar eclipse to be seen over heavily populated areas of U.S. since 1925, greeted by millions of viewers who crowded the beaches, towns, and islands where viewing was most favorable.  The eclipse cut a nearly 100 mile wide swath through Mexico, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Nantucket Island, Mass.  It was 96% total in New York City and 95% in the nation's capital.

A black and white collage of several photographs of a partial solar eclipse over a college building. Below the image, the headline reads Partial Eclipse as seen in North County.  The caption reads The partial eclipse seen by teh North County Saturday morning is superimposed over the Palomar College Dome Gym in this collage by staff photographer Dan Rios.  The maximum ecliplse in this area was roughly 30 per cent at 9am as shown in the fourth sun from the left.  Seven states were treated to a full eclipse.
a clipping from Escondido's Times-Advocate

But ground viewing was only the beginning.  NASA employed a flotilla of platforms to observe the eclipse from an unprecedented variety of vantages.  A barrage of sounding rockets (suborbital science probes) were launched during the eclipse to take measurements of the Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere.

In space, radio signals from Mars probe Mariner 6, currently on the far side of Sun, were measured to determine how the eclipse affected communications and to study changes in charged particles in earth’s atmosphere.

Two Orbiting Solar Observatories, #5 and #6, pointed their instruments at the Sun to gather data on the solar atmosphere, while Advanced Test Satellite #3 took pictures of the Moon's shadow on the Earth from more than 20,000 miles above the surface.  Three American-Canadian satellites, Alouette 1, Alouette 2, and Isis 1, all examined the change the eclipse caused in the Earth's ionosphere.

Earthside telescopes got into the mix, too: Observers from three universities and four NASA centers at sites in Virginia and Mexico not only got great shots of the solar corona, but also of faint comets normally washed out in the glare of the Sun.

I can't imagine anyone in 1925 but maybe Hugo Gernsback could have foreseen how much attention, and from how many angles such attention would be applied, during the 1970 eclipse.  It's just one more example of how science fiction has become science.

Waiting for the dawn

The last two months of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction weren't too hot.  Does the latest issue mark a return of the light or continued darkness?  Let's find out…

The cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction April edition. At the center of the dark cover, a bright swirl suggesting a star or sun is surrounded by darker wisps emanating in spirals from it.  Below it is an alien landscape with craggy mountains in teh distance and black-streaked hills in the foreground, in muted shades of blue and brown.
cover by Chesley Bonestell

Ill Met in Lankhmar, by Fritz Leiber

Because I didn't get into science fiction and fantasy in a big way until the early '50s, there are glaring gaps in my literacy.  One big hole is Leiber's Fahfrd and Gray Mouser stories, which were were hits in the '40s (I still need to crack into my complete set of Unknown) and were revived at Fantastic editor Cele Goldsmith's request in 1959.  I've read one or two, and I've enjoyed them, but mostly I know about the contents of the score or so stories set in Lankhmar only second-hand from the reviews of other Journeyers.

So I was quite delighted that the lead novelette in the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction not only features the hulking northman and his slate-swaddled companion, but details their first meeting!

On a dingy avenue in Lankhmar (is there any other kind), the two lay in wait, separately, to waylay a pair of thieves returning from a successful burglary.  They are handily successful and find that they are immediately compatible, both being fond of drink, both new to the city, both with comely and vivacious lady loves.  At a wine-fueled bash, we learn that Fahfrd's lady, Vlana, was roughly treated by Krovas, head of the local Thieves' Guild.  Ivrian, the Mouser's current flame, accuses Fahfrd of cowardice for not taking the robber lord's head, and with that, our newly united duo decide to sally forth tipsily and do just that.

Of course, taking on the entire Guild—and its rat-man sorcerer bodyguard—is not a task to be undertaken lightly…

There's a certain forced quality to this tale, as if Leiber is consciously trying to return to a pulpy histrionic style he has since grown out of.  I also take issue with having love interests introduced only to meet a gruesome fate so as to provide dramatic impetus for the heroes.

That said, boy can Leiber paint a lurid picture of a lived-in fantasy world, somewhere in sophistication between the rude settings of Conan and the rarefied towers of Tolkien.  His battle scenes are vivid and well drawn, his monsters fresh and intriguing.  There's no question but that I raced through the story without pause, eager to find how it resolved.

Four stars.

Books, by James Blish

Banner reading 'Books' with an illustration of a shelf of books bracketed on the one side by a miniature of a rocket staged for liftoff, and on the other with a diorama of an astronaut having landed on a book acting as a book-end

The books covered this time around include a book of SF poetry, Holding your eight hands, about which Blish says: "If you like poetry and know something about it, this volume will be a pleasant surprise…or perhaps even an unexpected doorway into the art."

Creatures of Light and Darkness, an SFnal rework of Egyptian myth by Roger Zelazny, gets a sour review.  "…the displacements from the world of experience involved in myth attempt to explain a world in terms of eternal forces which are changeless; the attempt is antithetical to the suppositions of science fiction, which center around the potentialities of continuous change."

George MacDonald's 1895 book, Lilith has gotten a Ballantine reprint, and Blish says it's worth reading for its influence on Lewis' "Narnia" and Carroll's Alice.

Dan Morgan's The New Minds is the latest in a series, which is essentially bad rehash of good Sturgeon.  Blish doesn't like this installment either.

Soulmate, by Charles W. Runyon

What could make Anne, an aging, but still lovely Black Widow, have such an emptiness at the center of her heart?  And when she consummates with marriage her seduction of a perfect, wealthy young man, fully intending to murder him for his money, just who is the hunter, and who the prey?

This is a beautifully dark story that, like The Graduate, manages to make an unpraiseworthy character somehow sympathetic.  I particularly liked the line: "Each disappointment is the end of an illusion.  I thank you, Anne, for a truly educational experience."

Four stars.

In Black of Many Colors, by Neil Shapiro

Cinnabar is Earth's only telepath, kept in cold sleep as a precious tool to be used only in case of emergency.  One has come up—the aliens of Beta Lyrae Three are implacably hostile and on the verge of developing spaceflight.  Only Cinnabar could possibly make contact and establish a peaceful rapport.

Cinnabar loathes the sharp-edged thoughts of humanity, and she thus has developed a strong death wish.  This is mitigated for the first time when she falls in love with the captain of the vessel taking her to Beta Lyrae.

What will win?  Her sense of duty (and desire for this to be her fatal swansong) or her desire for companionship?  And are the two mutually exclusive?

This really is a lovely tale.  In plot, it is not dissimilar to Silverberg's excellent novel, The Man in the Maze, but the execution, story, and cast are quite divergent.  The main room for improvement would be to get rid of the somewhat fairy-tale narration that accompanies the first half.  It's not necessary, and the story of a telepath should be internal, vivid and alien.  I think Shapiro had the skills to write that story (as evidenced by the latter half of the piece, which is better), but perhaps not the confidence.

Four stars.

The Brief, Swinging Career of Dan and Judy Smythe, by Carter Wilson

A handsome young California couple decides to answer an ad for swingers.  What seems to be a version of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice ends in supernatural horror.

It reads like something written for Playboy.  Perhaps Hugh rejected it.  After all, his magazine is meant to promote, not dissuade, this lifestyle.

Three stars.

The Wizard of Atala, by Richard A. Lupoff

The naval superpower of Atala is threatened by the invincible airships of Catayuna.  Only the might of Atala's wizard can stop them; only the pride of that nation's chief admiral, general, and strategist can thwart the sorcerer's mission.

I mostly know Dick Lupoff from his fanzine work (he and his wife won the Hugo in '63.  This story takes place either in the far past or the far future—it's one of those tales where the names of familiar places are distorted, but not so much as to be unrecognizable: Yorpa and Afric, for example.  Atala may be Atlantis or the Atlantic coast.

It's all kind of fantasy rote with traditional olde-type language, and it's a little tedious in the repetitious telling, but it's not bad.

Three stars.

Banner reading 'Science' with inset illustrations of an atom (in the style of Bohr), an optical microscope's view of microorganisms, an oscilloscope's view of a sawtooth wave, a satellite in orbit, and a spiral galaxy

The Nobel Prize That Wasn't, by Isaac Asimov

The Good Doctor, after regaling us with a tale of the day he seduced a buxom 18-year-old co-ed (apparently sometime last year), finishes explaining how the Periodic Table of Elements was solidified.  A fellow named Mosely determined the last piece of the puzzle that was the atomic interior: atomic weight.  Using x-rays, he was able to find out exactly how many protons any element's nucleus had (though he didn't know anything about the particles, just that there was something with positive charge inside) and that this number was the unique identifying factor for each atom.

What I find so fascinating about all this is how recent it was.  When I was going to high school in the '30s, this fundament of chemistry was taken as read.  And yet, just thirty years prior, there was as yet no real proof for the order the elements should be in.  It is tremendous what a sea change subatomic theory and Einstein were at the beginning of this century.  Will the 21st see such radical changes in understanding of the universe?

Four stars.

They All Ran After the Farmer's Wife, by Raylyn Moore

A down-on-his luck preacher from Ohio ends up as a laborer on a Kansas farm.  His only social contacts are the Bible-thumping farmer, his fantastically ugly wife, Bep, and their other employee, a swarthy fellow named Aza who never takes off his socks.  When the preacher and the farmer's wife begin an illicit relationship, it turns out that more than a little Scripture is involved in the proceedings.

While Christian myth generally leaves me cold as the basis for a tale, I did appreciate that this story hews away from the horrific, actually concluding with gentleness and redemption.  Even the greatest of sinners can be saved with kindness by the honest, is the message.

Four stars.

Here comes the sun

As it turns out, the eclipse is over, and the stellar magazine that is F&SF has returned ablaze.  Glad tidings for all.  The question now is how long the sun will keep shining.

Is there a literary equivalent of Stonehenge to pray at?

A cartoon depicting a man leaning out of an upper window in his house, looking up at a poorly-made antenna on his roof which is listing to the right.  The moon is just above the antenna, and stars fill the rest of the dark sky.  Through the other window of the house the man's television is visible, showing a screen full of static.
by Gahan Wilson

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 18, 1970] Future Cities and Past Visions (Vision of Tomorrow #7)

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Black & White Photo of writer of piece Kris Vyas-Mall
By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

My area of the UK (considered either the Northern Home Counties or Southern Midlands depending on who you speak to) is not a particularly densely populated region. Even with commuter growth since the War, there are only two towns within 50 miles that contain over 100,000 people. This is all set to change with a new government plan.

Milton Keynes Roadmap Plan with an indication of key travel routes and red dot in Bedford
Plan for new town (red dot is where I live)

The £700m plan for a new town has been approved. Called Milton Keynes (from a small village on part of the site) it is set to house 250,000 people before the end of the century and to be one of the biggest experiments in urban planning in British history.

Milton Keynes Housing Estate Plan showing square blocks on a grid system with large areas of green space
Example housing estate plan

First off, the city is designed to appeal to both ends of the social spectrum. For the upwardly mobile it is designed with the car-driving homeowner in mind. As many as half of properties are to be for sale rather than rented and with a density of 10 people per acre, to ensure that the managerial class don’t feel squeezed in. Also, the road system is designed on a grid to ease congestion with places of employment spread throughout the city, to stop rush hour traffic.

Colour coded plan of Milton Keynes
Zoning masterplan. Yellow is residential, purple employment, red commercial, blue education, green is for parks

For those less well off, there will be wide walkways for the handicapped to travel on easily and the development of a “dial-a-bus” service, ensuring that a bus will pick you up only a short walk from your house in a short period of time.

I could spend an entire article and not get close to all the experimentation to take place in Milton Keynes. The city of the future is coming soon!

Back in the magazines though, things seem to be heading in the opposite direction, as Vision of Tomorrow takes a turn towards the past:

Vision of Tomorrow #7

Vision of Tomorrow #7 Cover showing Jupiter as viewed from one of its moon's with two small astronuts in shaddow. In Bottom Left corner is listed Into The Unknown by John Russell Fearn
Cover Illustration: Jupiter as seen from Callisto by David A. Hardy

Editorial: Something Old, Something New by Philip Harbottle

Harbottle is back in the editorial space but for good reason. He wants to explain that the previously unpublished John Russell Fearn story in this issue came about due to the Impatient Dreamers articles. In digging through his old files on Tales of Wonder, Gillings found that Fearn had never requested its return and JRF’s widow gave permission for its reprinting here.

Rejection Syndrome by Douglas R. Mason

Image for Rejection Syndrome by Douglas R. Mason showing a man lounging back in a chair against the backdrop of a starfield
Illustrated by Eddie Jones

Martin Almond goes in to hospital and accidentally gets fitted with the cybernetic leg of Agent Hazard, an assassin.

At times it seemed like it was going to be similar to We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, but it ended up being more pedestrian with some outdated statements about women.

Two Stars

Zwoppover by Jack Wodhams

Zwoppover by Jack Wodhams illustrated with the image of the body of a womanin a bikini in puzzle pieces with two possible head pieces, one a man, one a woman
Illustrated by Eddie Jones

Zwopp is a planet where travel to and from is banned. This is because the predominant species, the Zwoppova, have the ability to swap bodies, leaving trails of mischief in their wake. When one arrives on Earth, it is up to Jodell to track it down.

Oh, another Wodhams comedy! What joy! And one that goes on for 13 pages. Obviously, someone must like these as they appear with such regularity, but I am always glad when they are finally over.

One Star

Rebirth by Lee Harding

Rebirth by Lee Harding illustrated wit a man leaning against a wall to hide from two men hovering on a bright energy field with a futuristic city in the background and a rocket flying overhead
Illustrated by Eddie Jones

At some time in the remote past, mankind spread out from the lost first world. Now the controllers are working their way backwards repopulating the lost planets of man with synthetic beings. However, on this particular world, their creations are ignoring their programming.

It is surprising to see such an old-fashioned tale from Lee Harding. This feels like it should have come out thirty years ago and, even then, it would probably have been considered forgettable.

Two Stars

Moons of Jupiter by David A. Hardy

A new science fact section for the magazine. This one giving us a quick rundown of Jupiter’s satellites.

Fine for what it is, but at only a single page it doesn’t feel that different from what I would read in an encyclopedia or children’s comic book.

Three Stars

Into the Unknown by John Russell Fearn

Into the Unknown by John Russell Fearn illustrated by a naked man and woman in front of a volcanic explosion
Illustrated by Eddie Jones

As is noted in the introduction, this is a previously unreleased story from Harbottle’s favourite writer. Dr. Cassell Turman has developed his own form of Time Machine. Time cannot be travelled on as a dimension but rather the forces of “progress” can be sent backwards, reversing time for inanimate objects and plants but leaving animals unaffected. Unfortunately, he fails to set up the forcefields correctly. The whole human race is tumbled back in time with there being no way of turning off the machine (as it no longer exists once progress has started).

This is a pulp-era take on the Counter-Clock World idea, but unfortunately not a very interesting one. Long conversations and over-descriptions accompany people plodding around the Earth until its birth (and their death). The best that could be said is it may teach some people facts about geology, but nothing I didn’t already know.

One Star

The Impatient Dreamers: Something Old, Something New by Walter Gillings

Fantasy Magazine issue 1 illustrating the Metal Menace by showing a robot with a human face being brought to life by a scientist at a control panel
Reproduction of the cover of the first issue of Fantasy showing Menace of the Metal Men. Illustrated by S. R. Drigin.

Gillings continues his journey through the early British SF magazines, comparing the contents of magazines Tales of Wonder and Fantasy before the Second World War’s paper rationing cut short their publications.

This section gets a bit too far into the weeds for my liking, but it is still good and may well appeal more to other fans. Of particular interest are the aims of the two magazines. Wonder believed the British public wasn’t ready for more imaginative science fiction, whilst Fantasy wanted to push the boundaries to be able to compete with American magazines.

Four Stars

Fantasy Review

Header for Fantasy Review showing a startship flying fast past planets and moons
Illustrated by Eddie Jones

Katheryn Buckley reviews William Temple’s The Fleshpots of Sanasto, which she felt worked well as traditional science fiction but has criticism of some sections, particularly his depiction of Autism. John Foyster reviews Jirel of Joiry by CL Moore, for which he has high praise, but is less impressed with Science Fiction Yearbook Number 3, criticizing it for containing a poor selection of tales compared with the prior volumes.

Limbo Rider by Sydney J. Bounds

Limbo Rider by Sydney J. Bounds illustrated by a grinning space pilot at a ship's controls with a spiral in the background
Illustrated by Eddie Jones

In order to colonise the galaxy, the Space-Time Shunt is developed, allowing ships to drop out of normal space into “Limbo” and then reappear across the galaxy. Although most of the bugs have now been worked out of the system the ghosts of those lost still reach out when in Limbo. As such, only schizophrenics are allowed to fly the colonist ships as they can survive repeated trips without losing their minds. Larry Comber is one such person piloting the starship Ganges, but he finds himself struggling to resist the siren call of Limbo.

A not very original tale, I was particularly reminded of the Out of the Unknown episode Lambda 1, but it is neatly told for a vignette.

A low three stars

Vision’s Australian Personalities and Contributors

Photo Collage showing Ron Graham, Lee Harding, Stanley Pitt, David Rome, John Foyster, Jack Wodhmas and Damien Broderick

And we finish with a photo collage of some regular contributors to the magazine. Strong beard representation here.

Neither economical nor poetic

Things to Come in future issues of Vision of Tomorrow, with the picture of a worm attacking a ship. Text says: "Man Meets a truly alien life form - with bizzare and horrify consequences! Peter Cave's exciting Lost in Translation is featured in our May issue, on sale May 1st. Other great stories by Ken Bulmer, KW Eaton, Philip E. High. Lee Hrding and other, plus all the usual featurs

Whilst Milton Keynes may evoke the names of a famous Poet and Economist, the same cannot be said for the contents of this issue of Vision of Tomorrow. After seeming like it was finally getting a handle on producing great modern science fiction, I felt as though I was back reading issues of Famous.

Looking at next month’s contents I am nervous at the return of Ken Bulmer and another John Russell Fearn story. Hopefully my fears are unfounded and Harbottle can build a truly modern city in these pages, rather than being the kind of forgotten footnote a new Gillings will write about in forty years.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]


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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[March 16th, 1970] The Fatal Flaw (Doctor Who: Doctor Who And The Silurians)

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By Jessica Holmes

Welcome back to our Doctor Who coverage, where today we’re wrapping up the latest serial: “Doctor Who And The Silurians”. With lives lost on the Silurian and human sides, will the Doctor be able to persuade those left behind to see sense?

The Younger Silurian and the Scientist Silurian huddle together having a conversation. They're a dull green colour and reptilian, with a third eye on their forehead.

In Case You Missed It

I’ll begin with a correction from last time: the bloke the Silurians captured, Major Baker (Norman Jones), isn’t from UNIT, he’s head of site security at the research centre. I got my notes mixed up.

Anyway, we’re halfway through the serial when we finally meet our cast of Silurians. There’s… Um. A small problem. None of them have names and I’m bad enough at telling human people apart. So there’s the shorter older-sounding one who is the leader (Dave Carter), and the taller younger-sounding one who needs anger management training (Nigel Johns). We’ll call them the Elder and Younger for the sake of clarity. There’s also a Scientist but he’s only important in one scene.

The Younger Silurian attacks the Doctor, claiming to have already seen soldiers down in the caves and killed them. The Elder stops him, urging restraint. Fortunately it turns out that the UNIT men, including the Brigadier, aren’t dead but trapped. Less fortunately, their air is running out.

The Brigadier kneels in a dark cave with a pair of UNIT soldiers. All three look worried and are wearing tan military overalls and white hard hats with lamps attached.

Despite Major Baker’s protests, the Doctor insists on trying to have a dialogue with the Silurians. He manages to persuade the Elder to let him out of the cage, and from there they get on quite well, with the Elder bestowing a pile of useful exposition on him. He explains that the Silurians used to live on the surface, but have been in hibernation ever since they saw a cataclysm approaching millions of years ago. What they didn’t realise was that this cataclysm was actually the Moon coming into orbit. By the time that became clear, their hibernation units had developed a fault and they couldn’t wake up without an outside power source.

So they had a very long wait while humanity crawled out of the mud and started banging rocks together. Now that they have access to the power from the nuclear reactor, they can wake everyone up and reclaim the Earth.

Given there’s already people living there, the Doctor urges the Silurians not to do that, instead offering to broker a deal with humanity where humans and Silurians might share the planet. Sharing? What a novel idea!

The Doctor talks with the Elder Silurian.

The Elder is listening, but unsure. There’s already been bloodshed, after all. Will the humans even agree to talk? The Doctor can only try, certain that all-out war would be catastrophic for the Silurians. Agreeing, the Elder releases the trapped UNIT troops.

However, a catastrophe is brewing. Mistrustful of the humans, the Younger Silurian urges the Scientist to join him in a coup. Together, they concoct a plan that will allow the Silurians to have the planet to themselves without having to risk going to war. They have a biological weapon in the form of a bacterium engineered eons ago as a form of pest control against humanity’s ancestors.

Don’t think too hard about the mangled pre-history. It will only give you a headache.

The traitor Silurians dump a disease-riddled Major Baker back into the caves and leave him to wander back to the research centre. Learning of their plan too late to stop them, the Elder Silurian gives the Doctor a sample of the bacterium to take back to the lab in the hopes that he’ll be able to discover a cure before it’s too late.

The traitors reward him for this act of compassion by killing him.

The Doctor and Liz in a lab. Liz looks over the Doctor's shoulder as he works. Both wear white lab coats.

What follows is a masterclass on ‘How Not To Handle An Unknown Biological Contagion’. Against the Doctor’s instructions, Baker takes an ambulance ride to the local hospital. He’s dead by the time he gets there, and only the first of many. What’s worse, while the Doctor was trying to chase Baker down at the hospital, the man from the Ministry, Masters (Geoffrey Palmer), picks now as the best time to go back to London. Via train.

Somewhere, an epidemiologist is crying.

The disease bumps off Dr. Lawrence, Masters, and a few dozen Londoners by the time the Doctor manages to find a cocktail of drugs that will kill it. But the day’s not saved yet. The Silurians have another plan.

Unfortunately this one is stupid and will make physicists cry.

The Doctor being accosted by three Silurians.

 

The Silurians are going to destroy the Van Allen belt. Okay. And?

Well, their idea is that without the Van Allen belt (or belts if we’re going to be pedantic. Which we are. It’s my raison d’être.) the sun’s rays would make Earth too hot for mammals, but reptiles like the Silurians would be fine.

Setting aside for a moment the total ecological collapse that would happen which would have knock-on effects for all life on Earth, that’s just not how the Van Allen belts work. Think of the Earth’s magnetic field as a fly trap but for charged solar particles. The Van Allen belts are a pile of flies. Not the safest place to traverse, but not a shield either. Get rid of the magnetic field on the other hand and then we’re in trouble from ionising radiation. But last time I checked, reptiles weren’t immune to cancer or radiation sickness.

I don’t know, I found the plague more compelling. That bit was more tense with a greater sense of mounting dread. This plot thread gets resolved a lot faster and it’s just not as interesting to me.

This attempt at eradicating humanity goes even more poorly for the Silurians, as the Doctor double-crosses them the first chance he gets, overloading the nuclear reactor and sending them scurrying back to their hibernation pods in fear of an impending explosion. The Younger Silurian even shows altruism for the first time in his life, volunteering to stay behind to die so that he can operate the hibernation mechanism.

The Doctor and the Younger Silurian standing in front of the cyclotron. It's glowing, red, and circular. The Doctor has taken off his lab coat and is wearing a white t-shirt and trousers.

The reactor isn’t actually about to explode, but they didn’t need to know that.

All’s well that ends well, it seems. The Doctor gets the reactor shut down, the Silurians are having a kip (well, except for the Younger Silurian, but the Brig takes care of him), and the Doctor’s hopeful that if he wakes them gradually he’ll be able to have some much more productive conversations.

Wouldn’t it be nice if that’s where the story ended?

Unfortunately the Brigadier has other ideas.

Waiting for the Doctor and Liz to leave the research centre, the Brigadier orders his men to place charges at the entrances to the Silurian base. When the charges go off, the Doctor can only watch in horror as he realises what the Brigadier has done. Liz assumes he must have had orders, but the Doctor is (rightly) no less disgusted. Orders or no orders, the Silurians were a race of intelligent beings, a people, a culture. There was hope for reconciliation with them, and the Brigadier snatched it away in the blink of an eye. You can’t reconcile with the dead.

The Doctor and Liz outside, both with ashamed looks on their faces. There is a fiery explosion in the distance.

Green-And-Grey Morality

I love stories with messy morality. Doctor Who isn’t usually all that messy, but this serial does a great job of shaking things up a bit. Malcolm Hulke might have a wobbly grasp on physics but he gets how people tick. Very few characters come across as morally unimpeachable in this serial. Most commit actions that are at best selfish and short-sighted, and at worst morally reprehensible. That’s not to say that most of the characters in this are evil. Far from it.

It would have been easy to cast one side or the other as straightforward villains, but really they’re all just people. Silurians suffer from the same fatal flaw as humanity: thinking of everything as ‘Us’ vs ‘Them'. For ‘Us’ to win, ‘They’ have to lose. Everything done to protect ‘Us’ is not only justifiable but imperative, or else ‘They’ might do it to ‘Us’, like the barbarians they are.

What I see is a bunch of people—human or otherwise—who are neither 'Good' nor 'Bad'. Every one of them is capable of either kind of action. I don't think they're simply hateful or angry, though of course both sides display a fair amount of that. More than that, I think they’re scared, which makes them a lot more dangerous.

Fear started this mess. Everyone was ready to assume the worst of everyone else from the outset, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fear exacerbated the situation, sowing distrust not just between humans and Silurians but also between the members of each respective group, eroding their ability to work together.

And finally, fear drove members of each side to commit the unthinkable in the belief that it would protect them.

It’s one thing to try and persuade someone to set aside anger and hatred based on the past. It’s not an easy thing to ask, by any means. But it’s a lot easier than asking them to set aside fear of the future, and what their enemies may do if they fail to stop them in the present. And while you’re waiting for that miracle, the cycle of violence keeps on turning, drilling a deeper and deeper well of fear and of hatred. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to break. And there’s only two real ways that can happen: either everyone finally agrees to draw a line under the past and build the future together, or they run out of people to fight.

It’s almost as if the best way to end a cycle of violence is not to start one in the first place.

The Doctor and the Elder Silurian shaking hands.

Final Thoughts

“Doctor Who And The Silurians” might take a little while to get going, but once the Silurians turn up this turns from a ‘pretty decent for a base-under-siege’ serial to a genuinely great serial. Pertwee’s on excellent form (a few very funny facial expressions aside) and the cast is solid with a bunch of characters believable enough that they sometimes gave me a migraine.

I’ll be curious to see how the Brigadier’s actions at the end of the serial affect the Doctor’s relationship with UNIT going forward. He’s stuck on Earth and I can’t imagine him turning his back on humanity, but I don’t know that he’ll ever see eye-to-eye with the Brigadier again. I hope that the Doctor makes the Brigadier better. I fear the Brigadier might make the Doctor worse.

I had expressed concern that the prominence of UNIT would result in problems being solved with killing which the Doctor could have solved with talking, but I didn’t expect to be proven right so quickly. Perhaps UNIT and the Brigadier will learn from this experience and do better the next time they encounter an alien intelligence. It’s a tragedy that the Silurians won’t get the same opportunity.

This is no surprise coming from the man who co-wrote The War Games, but "Doctor Who And The Silurians" is one of the more mature serials we’ve seen on this programme. Hulke asks the viewer to reject binary thinking and realise that two peoples can both have a right to live in the same place, and neither has the right to destroy or eject the other. People we assume are good can do bad things; and people we think of as monsters can do good. The righteousness of your cause and the righteousness of your actions are not the same thing.

As long as people continue to make these mistakes, this serial will always be relevant.

4.5 stars out of five for "Doctor Who And The Silurians".




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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction