Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 20, 1970] The Goat without Horns…among other things (August 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

Of horses and streams

Tom Paine is trying the most desperate of Hail Mary passes.  Aviation Weekly just published a piece that the NASA administrator is pitching the idea of an international space station with at least six astronauts from a number of countries, possibly even from behind the Iron Curtain, to be launched in the Bicentennial year of 1976.

The price?  Diverting Apollos 15 and 19 to the Skylab program, scheduled to start in 1972, and shifting Apollos 17 and 18 to the new space station.  As a result, only two more Apollo missions would fly to the Moon.

There's some logic to this—after all, the Soviets have given up on the Moon, and we've already been twice.  Moreover, the Reds are now focusing on orbital space stations (if the recent Soyuz 9 flight and the prior triple Soyuz mission are any indication).  Shouldn't we change course, too?

I have to think this idea a plan to save the Space Shuttle.  With Senators Proxmire and Mondale sharpening their knives to gut the space agency's budget, Paine figures that the way to keep the next-generation orbital launch vehicle in business is to give it a fixed destination.  After all, once the two Apollos have been used, the only way to get astronauts to the station will be on the Space Shuttle.

A Space Shuttle Orbiter docks with the NAR Phase B Space Station using a module deployed from its payload bay and linked to the docking port atop its crew cabin. Image credit: North American Rockwell.
A Space Shuttle Orbiter docks with the NAR Phase B Space Station using a module deployed from its payload bay and linked to the docking port atop its crew cabin. Image credit: North American Rockwell. (text by David Portree)

The timing is awfully tight, though.  The Shuttle won't be done until at least 1977, which means the station will have to lie fallow for a while until the vehicle is online.  That's assuming the advanced station can even be developed and deployed in six years, which seems doubtful.  Skylab is just an adapted Saturn V upper stage.  This proposed station would probably be something entirely new.

In any event, it seems foolish to squander Kennedy's legacy and barely scratch the surface of the Moon, scientifically speaking, when an infrastructure for further exploration is already in place.  Shifting course so rapidly stinks of desperation.  As Walter Matthau once said, playing a gambler in an episode of Route 66, "Scared money always loses."

Of dolphins and dreams

The realm of science isn't the only dubious one this month.  Take a gander at the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction to see what I mean…

Cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction's August issue, featuring 'The Goat Without Horns' by Thomas Burnett Swann and 'Isaac Asimov on astrology'-- the cover illustration is a black-haired nude white woman facing away from the viewer, standing thigh-deep in a claret sea and peering downward. Three improbably large & erect black dorsal fins tightly orbit her, cutting a circular wake, and an onyx platform floats above, out of her reach. Three crescent moons hang large in the sky, the largest one refracted through the only other feature projecting from the waves-- left of the woman is an enormous lenticular crystal within which is embedded vertically a chalky nude man, twisted to face the moon. Red and white flares lay a track of parabolic arcs charting from the horizon towards the crystal.
Cover by Bert Tanner

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[July 19, 1970] Dips in road (Maze of Death, The Eternal Champion…and others—July Galactoscope #2)

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For our second of July's Galactoscopes, we have quite the mixed bag: two winners and two losers.  Aren't you glad you've got us to navigate the dross for you?

Covers of four books. The first cover is for the novel Quest for the Future by A E van Vogt. The illustration shows a huge, green, tentacled monster about to eat a human whole. Text at the bottom right corner says: In the palace of immortality, all the probabilities of time are waiting for you. The second cover is for the novel The Eternal Champion by Michael Moorcock. The illustration shows a man sitting on a throne, holding a sword in one hand and a big, shiny crystal ball in the other. A naked woman is kneeling in front of him, pouring a drink into his mouth. The third cover is for the novel Anti-Man by Dean R Koontz. The illustration shows a multitude of people struggling to walk in order. In the foreground, a human face is half covered by a hand. The palm of the hand shows the eye that the hand covers on that face. Text in the middle says: Sam was a miracle being—and a curse to a dangerously overpopulated planet. The fourth cover is for the novel A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick. The illustration shows blue clouds half-covering an orange setting sun. Beneath the clouds, half-closed eyes look downward.

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[July 18, 1970] Two-star three step (July 1970 Galactoscope)

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We're breaking up this month's Galactoscope in two—and the dross leads the back. The next three books are all sub-mediocre, but the reviews are well worth the price of admission!

Covers of three books. The first cover is for the book A Harvest of Hoodwinks by Robert Lory. The illustration shows a man in an astronaut suit standing at the entrance of a cave, carrying a lamp. The floor, walls and ceiling of the cave are covered in thick webs. Text on the cover says, Sleight of hand in sciences and sorceries. The second cover is for the book Masters of the Lamp by Robert Lory. The illustration shows a human figure wearing a white robe, standing atop a pillar. Next to the human figure is a floating black octopus. Below, a human face is surrounded by five small planets. Text on the cover says, Send a spy to find a god. The third cover is for the book Operation Ares by Gene Wolfe. The illustration shows three flying saucers over a field where people and wolves are standing.

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[July 16, 1970] Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, Journey into Space

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

We here at the Journey pride ourselves on our international reach and viewpoint. We have writers from across the world, and we love to read work from a full spectrum of countries.

While we've dabbled a bit with Eastern European and Soviet fiction, this has been a bit of a blind spot for this zine.So when The Traveller asked me to review a new anthology of SF from behind the Iron Curtain, I jumped at the opportunity.

Other Worlds, Other Seas is a new anthology of  science fiction stories from Socialist countries, published by prestige publisher Random House and edited by expert Darko Suvin. Suvin was born in the Yugoslav province of Croatia, and emigrated to Canada where he teaches at McGill University in Montreal.

Suvin still has deep ties to his native region, and has gained a reputation as one of the foremost critics and experts on SF from that area of the world. As part of that effort, Suvin has assembled a collection of fiction from some of the most prominent writers from that region.

As Suvin himself says, this is by design a quick overview. Other Worlds, Other Seas is only 200 pages long, so longer pieces were unavailable, as were stories from countries like East Germany for various reasons.

What Suvin compiled here is a classic mixed bag of stories. A handful of tales here are brilliant, a handful feel pointless. Allow me to break down that roster below. Cover of 'Other Worlds, Other Seas, Science-Fiction Stories From Socialist Countries' in yellow text. featuring a surreal mountainscape with an appendage encircled by a disc sprouting from it. The bottom text reads in red 'Selected, edited and with a preface by DARKO SUVIN'. 

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[July 14, 1970] Hit For Six (Vision of Tomorrow #11)

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

So, Britain has a new Prime Minister. Edward “Ted” Heath (not the conductor). He couldn’t be more different from the last Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Hume. Heath is the son of a carpenter and a chambermaid. He worked in banking, is unmarried and has a passion for sailing yachts and playing the organ.

Black & White Photo of Prime Minister Edward Heath outside the door of 10 Downing Street, waving to the crowd Two microphones can be seen off the left hand side of the picture
Edward Heath moves into his new house

One of the first orders of business for him, as it would have been for Wilson, is a meeting with The Six, AKA the leaders of the six members of the European Economic Community, in order to discuss the possibility of Britain’s entry into the Common Market. This is a particular passion project for Heath, who is a known Francophile and whose previous negotiations in this era led to the press declaring him “Lord Heath of Brussels”.

In fact, Britain is not the only country trying to join. Ireland, Denmark and Sweden have all made applications to join and these have been going on for some time. There is however a reason this year will be different. That is the absence of Charles de Gaulle. Central to French politics over the last decade, he used his power to oppose any enlargement of the EEC.

Black and White Photo of the December Hague Summit 1969 showing people around a long table in The Hall of Knights in the Hague
The December Hague Summit

With his retirement and replacement by Pompidou, who has switched his approach to appeal to more liberal voters, the calculus has changed. Following the Hague Summit in December negotiations have officially begun again in Luxembourg. There are a number of points that are still subject to negotiation, but things appear to be moving forward.

In the pages of Vision of Tomorrow, Europhilia is on display and it is time for me to negotiate my way through six stories: some about major nations, some involving small grand duchies, but all will be covered with sufficient weight:

Vision of Tomorrow #11

Cover of Vision of Tomorrow #11 illustrating Last Vigil by Michael Moorcock with an advanced city with thin towering structures on a mountainous cliff edges above a stormy sea.
Cover by Eddie Jones

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[July 12, 1960] The New Generation (August 1970 Fantastic)

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black and white photo of a dark-haired white woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

Now that we're well into the first year of a new decade, it's possible to look back on the recently ended 1960's and acknowledge that it's been a time of extraordinary changes in society.  Music, clothing, civil rights, the peace movement, and so forth.  Even in the relatively tiny world of imaginative fiction, the so-called New Wave has hit the field like a tornado.

Many of these revolutions have been led by youths.  Recently, many young people in the United States have been demanding the right to vote at the age of eighteen instead of twenty-one.  (Shades of Wild in the Streets!)

A black and white photo of a group of young men and women marching down a street carrying handmade signs supporting lowering the voting age to 18.
A typical demonstration promoting the lowering of the voting age.  This one happened in Seattle last year.

On June 22 of this year President Nixon signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, requiring that the voting age be eighteen in all federal, state, and local elections.  However, the constitutionality of this extension is under question, so don't celebrate yet.

A black and white photo of the top half of the front page of the Chicago Tribune for Tuesday, June 23, 1970.  The top headline reads 18-Year Vote Bill Signed. The subhead reads Nixon Orders Test in Court.
Nixon had doubts about the constitutionality of the extension even as he signed it, so he ordered a court case to decide the issue.

The latest issue of Fantastic reflects the changes that have been going on, with the New Wave movement influencing a great deal of fiction and nonfiction in its pages.  Don't worry; there's enough Old Wave content to satisfy traditionalists as well.

The cover of the August 1970 issue of Fantastic Stories.  The title is in yellow block capitals across the top, and a list of featured stories goes down the left side.  The image shows a man in a futuristic space suit with clear glass helmet, tall boots, and elbow-length gloves.  He stands facing the sky with his fists clenched by his sides.  Behind him, the sun is rising bright yellow against a dark blue star-filled sky.
Cover art by Jeff Jones.  Note that the Fantastic Illustrated feature promised on the cover does not actually appear in the issue.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[July 10, 1970] Prison Break in West Berlin: The Liberation of Andreas Baader

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Tune in tonight at 7pm Pacific for the latest episode of Science Fiction Theater!

A color photo of several men and a woman, all in business attire, standing around a conference table in an office.

A color headshot of a white woman with long dark brown hair.  She is wearing a headband and a dark red turtleneck, and is smiling at the camera.
by Cora Buhlert

This is not the article I was planning to write this month. In fact, I was going to review the Ballantine Adult Fantasy collection Zotique, which reprints the haunting stories Clark Ashton Smith published in Weird Tales for the first time in more than thirty years.

However, Clark Ashton Smith will have to wait – he has been waiting for more than thirty years by now, after all – because there have been some most shocking developments in the West German leftwing sphere.

A Pleasant Spring Day in West Berlin

Two black and white postcards from Berlin-Dahlem.  Each is a collage of several photos, showing public buildings, tree-lined streets, and parks with statues and lakes.

Two black and white postcards from Berlin-Dahlem.  Each is a collage of several photos, showing public buildings, tree-lined streets, and parks with statues and lakes.

The Dahlem neighbourhood of West Berlin is a normally a quiet upper middle class suburb, where nineteenth and early twentieth mansions line leafy cobblestoned streets. There is little traffic here, birdsong can be heard echoing from the gardens and rarely are there sounds louder than a whirring of a lawnmower or the barking of a dog. But on May 14 at eleven AM, the quiet of Dahlem was interrupted by the sound of gunfire.

The source of those shots was a white mansion with dark green shutters, nestled in a garden with birch and pine trees on Miquelstraße. It was a warm and sunny spring day, so the windows on the ground floor were wide open. This mansion houses the library of the German Central Institute for Social Issues, i.e. not a place where anybody would expect gunfire.

A color photograph of a white plaster two-story building with trees in its front yard.  The upper floor has multi-paned windows with dark green shutters.  The bottom floor has wooden accents around the windows and door in the same green.  A green picket fence with brick pillars on either side of the gate is in the foreground.
The German Central Institute for Social Issues on Miquelstraße 83 in West Berlin

Shortly after the shots, an engine howled and a car raced down the street. Georg Linke, the 62-year-old janitor of the Institute, staggered across Miquelstraße, clutching his side, only to collapse in a driveway, bleeding profusely from gunshot wounds in his arm and his abdomen. He was found by a student who wanted to consult the library.

"That was the Meinhof woman," a man in uniform yelled from the open window of the Institute, while the student yelled back they should call an ambulance, because someone had been shot.

Initially, there was some confusion about what precisely had happened at the German Central Institute for Social Issues. But gradually, it became clear that the quiet Miquelstraße had just witnessed one of the boldest prison breaks in recent German history.

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[July 8, 1970] I'm Still Marching Some More (Orbit 7)

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By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

More than 1,000 women marched through armed cordons in Belfast a few days ago, in a surprising display of bravery and protest. How has such an act come to be seen on British streets?

Still from Black and White film of Women's March to Fall's Road, with a soldier trying and failing to block them.

Since last summer, when British troops were called in by Stormont, the violence has continued to worsen. When the so-called “battle of the bogside” took place in August, British troops arrived too late to stop loyalist violence.

Soon after, a split emerged in December within the IRA, with there now being two groups. First are the “official” IRA, who have adopted a Marxist platform and believe in political engagement to bring about a socialist workers republic. Second are the new militant “provisional” IRA who support armed defence of Catholic communities and believe that their campaign can only end in a single united republic of Ireland. Currently, the momentum seems to be with the provisional group, particularly with increasing loyalist violence. When a member of the official IRA came out to ask a Catholic group to disperse, he was stoned by the crowd.

Things have also been going south (pun intended) in the Republic. In April, a paramilitary group (possibly the provisional IRA or Saor Eire, but unconfirmed) committed a bank robbery and shot dead an unarmed member of the Irish Garda, Richard Fallon, the first to be murdered in the line of duty since the 40s. The next month, Jack Lynch, the Irish Taoiseach, was forced to fire his ministers of finance and agriculture as they are charged with trying to supply arms to paramilitaries in the North.

As tensions continued to ramp up between communities, it was inevitable we were in for another summer of violence. In the most recent incident, it is unclear as yet who struck first. Loyalist sources say the provisional IRA were using the imprisonment of Bernadette Devlin as an excuse to whip up violence. Republican sources say a loyalist mob were trying to drive Catholics living in the Short Strand area out of East Belfast. Whatever the cause, five people died and there was a huge amount of property damage. More importantly for what happened next, members of the provisional IRA used guns to fire back against loyalists in the Falls Road area.

A curfew was declared in the area as three thousand British Army went house to house, armed and firing tear-gas, in order to check for weapons and arrest potential IRA suspects. This, however, is not something that can be done quickly (there were more houses than soldiers) or easily, and took three days to complete. As such, supplies were running low for some households, as people even leaving to get food were liable to be shot.

This is where the march came in. Local Catholic women decided to take action themselves and marched in holding food, in full view of the press. They correctly made the calculation that the British Army would not shoot women armed only with bread and milk to be broadcast on the evening news. Some were blocked but many were able to get through and resupply the community.

Black and White film still of either police or soldiers, armed with riot gear.

It is unclear if the British raids will have done any more than American finding of caches in Vietnam but two things are definitely clear:

1. The Catholic community in the North are not going to have much trust of the British to protect them, if any indeed still remained.

2. Protection and support for the community is coming from the ground up, particularly women in these roles, rather than top down.

One place you can also see women regularly pushing things forward is in Orbit. Whilst not quite having an equal number, it is still the only place I can be certain to see multiple women writers between its two covers.

Orbit 7 ed. by Damon Knight

Cover of Orbit 7 edited by Damon Knight, listing the authors inside. The cover picture has an orange hue, showing a rocket and a set of small figures apparently trapped in a translucent dome. A sun rises over rocky mountains in the background
Cover by Paul Lehr

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 6, 1970] The Day After Judgment (August/September 1970 Galaxy)

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

Hello, Louie!

Enough talk about Cambodia, Israel, and the Race Problem.  How about some happy news for a change? 

Satchmo, sometimes known as Louis Armstrong, had a birthday this last Independence Day.  The famed trumpter and gravel-throated crooner, known for his ear-splitting smile and breaking racial barriers, has just finished his seventh decade.

"It's awful nice to be breathing on your 70th birthday, let alone feeling in the pink," he observed.

Photo of a smiling Louis Armstrong, with a cigarette and a bottle of cognac.

A big tribute was held in Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium for Armstrong on July 3rd, perhaps the most influential jazz musician since the genre was born.  While he did not puff his cheeks to blow his horn (he is still recovering from a kidney infection), he did sing for his audience, joined by a number of fellow jazz greats.  Proceeds from the event will go to the Louis Armstrong Statue Fund.

So, happy birthday to New Orleans' favorite son.  What a wonderful world.

Hello, Jimmy!

As Galaxy approaches its 20th birthday, I see it has reverted to the format the magazine took back in 1958: it is once again an overlarge bi-monthly (like sister mag IF, which means we essentially get three mags every two months).  On the one hand, this makes room for bigger pieces, like the superlative story that headlines this month's issue.  On the other hand, it means more room for dross like Heinlein's new serial that taillines the book.

Read on.  You'll be grateful I did the screening for you…

The cover of <i/>Galaxy. It shows a silver rocket, resembling a wide-winged airplane, speeding towards a futuristic city that is engulfed in an inferno of green, yellow, and red. A banner on the cover says, in all capital letters, 'LARGER THAN EVER — 32 MORE PAGES!'
Cover by Jack Gaughan

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[July 4, 1970] Coming Attractions (The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, Part Two)

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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

Our journey through this long (560 pages, in fact) and ambitious anthology continues. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One is, as Robert Silverberg more or less explains it, a survey of short genre SF from the Gernsback years up to just before the founding of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. These 26 stories are a mix of those the SFWA voted on and those which Silverberg had chosen at his own discretion. The oldest story here, Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey," was published in 1934, while the newest, Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," appeared relatively recently, in 1963. Most of these stories appeared prior to the Journey's advent.

Last time we read "Mimsey Were the Borogoves," a splendid story by C. L. Moore and the late great Henry Kuttner, under one of their joint pseudonyms. What do the next nine stories have in store for us?

Huddling Place, by Clifford D. Simak

Cover of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine for July, 1944. It announces the story Renaissance by Raymond F. Jones. The illustration shows a cloaked person alone in a huge room of tall columns. The equally huge window shows an urban landscape under a yellow sky. The lower third of the page is torn off.
Cover art by Fred Haucke.

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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction