All posts by Fiona Moore

[September 20, 1969] Cinemascope: Stitched from the past; schemed from the future (Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and The Italian Job)


by Fiona Moore

1969 continues to disappoint on the genre cinema front, at least in the UK. So here we have a middling horror picture, and a very good picture which is sort of SF, if you squint at it right.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed Poster
Poster for Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

After too long an absence from Hammer, it’s good to see Terence Fisher back at the helm of another Peter Cushing Frankenstein movie. This one sees the eponymous Baron on the trail of his former assistant Brandt (George Pravda), who has been confined to a lunatic asylum somewhere in Mitteleuropa. Frankenstein plans to extract from Brandt the secret of preserving brains on ice, in a homage to Frankenstein’s conviction in the first movie that he could use his technology to indefinitely prolong the lifespans of geniuses by transferring their brains from body to body. Frankenstein inveigles his way into the lives of a young doctor at the asylum, Holst (Simon Ward), and his fiancée, Anna (Veronica Carlson), using a combination of blackmail and psychological manipulation to gain their assistance. However, Brandt suffers a heart attack, meaning his brain must of course be transferred into another person’s body (Freddie Jones), and further violence and chaos ensues.

Hammer have clearly been taking notes from the recent success of Witchfinder General (1968), as the movie’s main strength is the psychological horror of the way Frankenstein encourages his victims on to more and more awful crimes. Frankenstein’s hold over Holst is that the latter has been secretly dealing narcotics in order to pay for medical treatment for Anna’s mother, a development which speaks to contemporary concerns about the ready availability of drugs and the moral questions surrounding their use. I should also warn viewers about a graphic rape scene which just about manages to stay within the bounds of being played for horror and not titillation, but is still rather disturbing.

Peter Cushing as the Baron in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
Peter Cushing terrifies as the sinister Baron Frankenstein

Cushing is genuinely and credibly terrifying in the title role, giving the Baron a more physical performance while retaining the psychopathic coldness and inhumanity of the previous films. Fisher retains his fondness for startling but appropriate juxtapositions, for instance following Anna’s remark to the Baron “you’ll find it very quiet here” with a cut to a screaming madwoman in the asylum. There’s a nice bait-and-switch early on regarding the Baron’s identity (and one which seems like a callback to the familiar saw about the Baron really being the monster), and we also get a suitably comic morgue attendant at one point. Production values are high for a Hammer film, with some very good creature makeup and a pyrotechnic ending.

The Creature in Frankenstein Must Be DestroyedFreddie Jones as The Creature cuts a pathetic figure

Nonetheless, the movie suffers from some annoying plot holes and character contrivances, as well as an opening scene which goes nowhere and adds nothing to the plot, and a resolution which I found lacking in credibility and, indeed, closure. There are also a number of Dickensian coincidences (a doctor at the very lunatic asylum the Baron wants to get into having a fiancée who runs a boarding house, for instance), which might be forgiveable as an element of the genre but do tend to grate. I would place this as the third best of the franchise, after Curse of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Created Woman: however, in a year where decent horror movies have been thin on the ground, it’s a welcome relief. Three and a half stars.

The Italian Job


Poster for The Italian Job

The Italian Job is a joyous heist comedy and a welcome counter to some of the divisive language finding its way into British social and political discourse. Britons from all walks of life—Cockneys, aristocrats, homosexuals, immigrants, professors and others—come together to pull off a clever theft and raise the proverbial two fingers to rivals on the Continent.

When his Italian partner in crime meets a surreal end on a mountain road courtesy of the Mafia, Charlie Coker (Michael Caine) enlists the help of Bridger (Noel Coward), a mastermind who doesn’t let a long-term prison sentence stop him from running a criminal empire, by appealing to his patriotism. Coker and a diverse variety of colorful associates plan and carry out a daring raid on a secure convoy carrying $4 million in gold, under cover of a traffic jam and an England v Italy football game. After a delightful set-piece involving red, white and blue Mini Coopers racing through, above and below the streets of Turin, the criminals seem to have gotten away with it—but have they?

Coker (Michael Caine) briefing his diverse band of criminals.Criminals from all walks of British life, in a planning meeting

The movie is technically SF, in that it contains a scene showing the way in which a computer might be compromised using a piece of malicious software on a magnetic tape—which, when introduced into the Turin traffic system, interferes with the cameras and allows our protagonists to conduct their raid. Happily this seems to be only a theoretical possibility at this point, but it’s an intriguing idea. The movie also draws liberally on the surreal comedy of recent television series like The Prisoner and The Avengers, which are often considered at least nominally science fiction.

The movie’s strengths lie in its pace, its spectacular driving set-pieces and its humour, which manages to be simultaneously proud and self-deprecating. Coker’s motley crew are variously dim-witted, incompetent, oversexed and lacking in foresight, and yet they manage to pull off a daring raid against the clearly much more organised Italian Mafia. The movie also makes satirical comments on the connections between crime and the Establishment in both Britain and Italy, and there’s a suggestion of Tati’s playful anti-technology message in the way in which the traffic system is brought to a standstill and joyous chaos erupts in its wake.

Mini Coopers driving through an Italian palazzo.The Minis! They're amazing! They go everywhere!

It's a little sad, though, that all this joy and unity comes at the expense of disliking our neighbours. Given that the current political situation suggests we need to join the Common Market, the jocular but nonetheless pointed sense of Britain isolated, fighting against Europe and, indeed, the world, could strike a worrying note. I also observe that Coker’s crew contains no one from the Celtic Fringe of this country (relatedly, women also seem to be excluded from the merry band, except as sex objects). However, to be fair, Coker’s raid is initially planned as a joint Italian-British enterprise, the money is coming in to Fiat from China, and there’s a long speech about the relevance of the Italian immigrant community in Britain. So perhaps I’m reading too much into it.

I suspect joining Europe is an inevitability for the United Kingdom. If so, it’s good that we’re coming in with a clear sense of common identity and national pride, showing everyone that we can laugh at ourselves and drive our tiny cars alongside the best of them.

Four stars.






[August 22, 1969] Peake District: New Worlds September 1969


by Fiona Moore

Hello! I’m taking over the New Worlds reviews from Mark Yon, which is a little intimidating, but I hope I’ll be able to live up to his excellent legacy.

On the UK Star Trek broadcast front, I missed “Mudd’s Women” due to having to take a work trip to Glasgow, but “A Taste of Armageddon” was decent anti-war satire if a bit heavy-handed. Having seen a few episodes in colour on trips to North America, I have to say it works less well in black and white, but at least we do get the idea.

Cover for New Worlds, September 1969Cover for New Worlds, September 1969

Lead-In (New Worlds 194) by The Publishers

This is brief, without the edge of hysteria from last month, which leads me to hope that they’ve got the financial issues under control. It’s also good to know that JG Ballard has a collection coming out, The Atrocity Exhibition. The lineup this month features regular contributors and well-known people on the New Wave scene, but perhaps it’s a little too conservative as a result. Three stars.

A Place and a Time to Die by JG Ballard

Picture from A Place and Time to Die by JG BallardArt by Mal dean

This story is about an implied Chinese Communist takeover of an implied USA, though with a degree of vagueness as to time and place. It follows two men attempting to hold the line as the invaders, or maybe exponents of an internal coup, come into town. This is a bleak description of warfare; no one is heroic and everyone is ugly. It also highlights how ideological takeovers can be more powerful than armed ones. Four stars.

Pictures from an Exhibition 9 and 10 by Giles Gordon

Illustration from Pictures from an Exhibition by Giles GordonArtist unknown

Two vignettes, inspired by pictures in a Sunday colour supplement, and part of a longer work. The two pictures have little in common apart from featuring in the same publication, and the point seems to be both to draw narratives out of the images and to highlight how newspapers juxtapose unrelated imagery, causing the reader to look for meaning. Three stars.

Transplant by Langdon Jones

Transplant by Langdon JonesThe text of Transplant, with concrete effects

A concrete poem about a heart transplant. It’s dramatic and evocative, making one think about how horrific even a life-saving surgical procedure really is. Cutting open humans and sticking new hearts in them is a horrifiying idea, and yet lives are saved. Four stars.

The Incomplete Science by B.J. Bayley

This is a non-fiction piece on economics, a concept SFF writers ignore far too often. The author presents two sets of economic dynamics, one relating to production and the other to land values, and concludes without reconciling them. The subject is very interesting but unfortunately it’s also very dry. Two stars.

The Capitol by George MacBeth

This is a series of sonnets that appear to be found poetry, a set of lines from newspaper stories all thrown together out of context. Like “Pictures at an Exhibition”, the only real meaning I could discern was to point out the absurdity of capitalism and journalism. I’m afraid it left me cold. Two stars.

The Party at Lady Cusp-Canine’s by Mervyn Peake

Illustration by Mervyn PeakeArt by, of course, Mervyn Peake

This is one of the issue’s highlights, including an essay by Langdon Jones. It seems that the original edition of Peake’s posthumous novel Titus Alone excluded a lot of good material and was poorly edited, and Jones has done a lot of work trying to develop a new edition which is closer to what Peake intended. As a Peake fan I’m thrilled by the news, and hoping that the revived Titus Alone will be something more in the style of the first two Gormenghast novels. The excerpt is certainly in line with Peake’s ascerbic wit, capturing the brittle nastiness of cocktail parties with a plethora of evocative animal names and similies. There is also brief news about another posthumous novel by Peake coming out, Mr Pye, which should be worth comparing to his earlier fiction.  Five stars.

Lines of White on a Sullen Sea by Maxim Jakubowski

Illustration for Lines of White on a Sullen SeaArt by Mal Dean

This is the latest in the ongoing shared-author story featuring Jerry Cornelius. It doesn’t make any more sense than the other ones, but making sense is less of a priority than evoking a mood. Jerry is preoccupied with a Chinese rival; a female Cornelius turns up; there are lovely descriptions of clothes, and characters with absurd names like Treblinka Durand. If you liked the previous entries you'll probably like this. Three stars.

Books (New Worlds 194)

This issue contains no less than five full pages of book reviews, making the reviews section longer than any of the stories. This is a bit much, particularly given the magazine’s current reduced page count.

Slum Clearance by John Clute

John Clute's book reviewsJohn Clute's book reviews

Clute reviews Omnivore by Piers Anthony, Let the Fire Fall by Kate Wilhelm, Retief: Ambassador to Space by Keith Laumer, Brother Assassin by Fred Saberhagen, The Mezentian Gate, an unfinished novel by by E.R. Eddison, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. He quite likes the Le Guin, is scathing about the Anthony, Laumer and Saberhagen, and mixed on everything else. Three stars.

Come Alive—You’re in the William Sanson Generation by Joyce Churchill

Churchill reviews Death Goes Better with Coca Cola by Dave Godfrey, Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada by Ray Smith, Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick, The Island Under The Earth by Avram Davidson, and Penguin Modern Stories. She doesn’t seem too happy with any of them, and her comments didn’t leave me wanting to read any of them other than out of morbid curiosity. Two and a half stars.

Getting it Out by Norman Spinrad

Spinrad’s book review article, unlike the other two actually has a theme: he focuses on the output of Essex House, a paperback line whose agenda is to be for pornography what the New Wave has been to SF, leading to a subgenre of “speculative erotic fiction”. He reviews Season of the Witch by Hank Stine, Biker by Jane Gallion, the Agency trilogy by David Melzer, Evil Companions by Michael Perkins and A Feast Unknown by Philip Jose Farmer. Spinrad makes some of them, at least, sound intriguing. I’m going to keep an eye out for the Stine, a gender-bending body horror that sounds up my street. Four stars.

While at first glance it looks like the magazine is back on an even keel after last month’s financial woes, I’m still a bit worried. The writers are all White men with one exception (who I suspect is also White). Meanwhile, a recent trip to see Yoko Ono’s latest show has reminded me that London’s art and film and literature scene is simply exploding with talented people from all over the world. If NW wants to survive, simply writing about sex isn’t original enough any more; it needs to bring in some of the new voices on the scene.






[August 12, 1969] Cat’s Got Your Tongue: Sal-Inma (A Devilish Homicide) (1965) & Report From South Korea


by Fiona Moore

Recently, on one of my travels to the Far East, I was invited to visit the Republic of Korea by Ewha Women’s University (the oldest women’s university in Korea, established in 1883 and therefore five years older than my own home institution, Royal Holloway College).

While there, I was able to take in a recent Korean horror movie, Sal-Inma (whose title is rendered into English variously as A Devilish Homicide and A Bloodthirsty Killer; I don’t know enough Korean to say which is the better translation).

Korean cinema is currently undergoing a strong revival, with numerous movies being produced in Korean every year and some even gaining international prominence. Sf, fantasy, and horror, which did not feature strongly in Korean popular culture before the war apart from Japanese imports, are also surging forwards, with a number of original SF novels being produced in Korean every year of this decade. However, the lack of works in translation means they are not really accessible to audiences outside the peninsula, and, similarly, the fact that the Korean film industry has made relatively few genre movies to date, means that a lot of this creativity is lost to Western audiences.

Poster for Sal-Inma (1965)
Poster for Sal-Inma (1965)

While low-budget, Sal-Inma really speaks to the creativity and abilities of Korean movie-makers and their grasp of the horror genre. The plot revolves around Lee Shi-Mak, a man with a successful business, a beautiful wife, Hye-Sook, and three children. Visiting an art exhibition, he’s astonished to see a picture of his deceased first wife, Ae-ja. Afterwards, the driver who is supposed to be taking him home, instead takes him to the house of the artist, Park Joon-Chul, who begs him to take the painting, before Ae-ja herself reappears and murders Joon-Chul. Ae-ja then collapses into inertia, seeming as if she were newly dead. Shi-Mak takes her to the family doctor, Dr Park (no relation—there are relatively few Korean surnames), who is also murdered by Ae-ja, who then disappears.

Returning home, Shi-Mak finds events continuing to unravel. Ae-ja reappears and kidnaps his older daughter. His mother is attacked by Ae-ja and subsequently starts to act like a cat; meowing, and grooming herself and her grandchildren with hands and tongue. His two younger children vanish mysteriously and a mysterious woman arrives without explanation. Ae-ja then murders Hye-Sook, and Shi-Mak, seeing that his mother’s reflection in the mirror is now that of a cat, kills her.

Ae-ja murders Joon-ChulAe-ja murders Joon-Chul

And this is where things take an even more interesting turn. Grieving and confused, Shi-Mak finds a document written by Joon-Chul, which subverts everything we have seen so far about the family, revealing, in flashback, strange and sinister things about the relationship between Ae-ja, Hye-Sook, Shi-Mak’s mother, Joon-Chul, and even Dr Park. With this information, the seemingly random events of the first two-thirds of the movie fall into place, as does the identity of the mysterious new arrival, and Shi-Mak is able to resolve the situation and lay the feline ghost to rest.

A good horror movie isn’t just about the events it portrays, though, and this one has plenty to say about contemporary Korean society, struggling with its past and the pace of modernisation. Japan plays an ambivalent background role in the story: it’s implied that Shi-Mak’s mother was widowed during the Japanese occupation; the events of the flashback take place while Shi-Mak is away in Tokyo on business, and Joon-Chul later flees to Tokyo in an attempt to escape supernatural retribution for his part in the events.

Putting it together, you can see the film as being about Korea’s need to come to terms with the occupation, and that Japan continues to be a source of trouble even as Koreans also have to work with the Japanese in order to succeed economically. In the end, the message seems to be that Koreans have to understand the traumas of the past, put them behind them, and move forward.

The old lady transforms into a catThe cat spirit manifests through Shi-Mak's mother

This ties in with the other major theme of the movie, the changes in the traditional Korean family structure since the occupation and in the postwar period. The Lee family seems very traditional on the face of it—man, wife, children and grandmother—and yet, we’re also shown that one of the reasons Shi-Mak’s mother turned against Ae-ja was her childlessness, and that Shi-Mak’s mother was herself engaged in a love affair without her son knowing. An insistence on traditional family structure thus only comes at the price of violence, and is a hypocritical position in any case. The end of the movie not only suggests that Shi-Mak’s family life will become far less traditional in the future, but also that this is approved of, even endorsed, by Buddhist religious figures.

The movie contains a few logic holes, but it also uses its low budget well. The effects suggesting that Shi-Mak’s mother has been possessed by a cat spirit could have been risible, but they’re sparingly and effectively used and are quite shocking in the end. Certainly if Korea is capable of this sort of genre movie-making, they’ll be a rival to the Japanese powerhouse in a few years. Four out of five stars.

The cat spirit revealed Cat spirit revelation

Korea itself is currently struggling to recover from a very difficult first half of the 20th century. Following the Japanese occupation and the devastating Korean War, the Republic has been governed by a succession of authoritarian regimes; the current leader, Park Chung-Hee, is a general who seized power following a student revolution in the early 1960s. However, despite widespread dislike of Park’s dictatorial style and his decision to bring Korea into the Vietnam War as a US ally, he is certainly bringing modernisation to the country through projects like developing transport infrastructure, and a policy of focusing on consumer exports.

And from a genre perspective, things are certainly looking up. Serialised SF by the likes of Han Nak-Won is winning over the young people, and a prestigious mystery fiction prize was recently won by a short story authored by Moon Yoon-Sung; a story which takes place in a 22nd century where only women survive. The country’s first official SF group, the Korean Sci-Fi Writers’ Club, was established by Seo Gwang-Woon just last year, and hope to publish their first collection soon. I would advise all fans of Asian SF to keep their eye on the peninsula for future developments.


The bustling capital of South Korea: Seoul






[May 24, 1969] Cinemascope: The [NOUN] of [PROPER NAME]’s [NOUN]: Blood of Dracula's Castle and Nightmare in Wax


by Fiona Moore

It’s exam time here at Royal Holloway College, and there’s nothing better than a bad movie to burn off the stress whether you’re studying or marking. As a break from examining sociology papers, I’ve taken in a double bill of new American movies to check out the state of the low-budget horror world in, well, the States.

Poster for Blood of Dracula's Castle
Poster for Blood of Dracula's Castle

A young couple (Gene O’Shane and Barbara Bishop) inherit a castle somewhere in Arizona (yes, really). Upon arrival, they find out that the tenants are Dracula (Alexander D’Arcy), his wife (Paula Raymond), his pagan priest butler (John Carradine and probably the best thing in the movie), a shambling moronic manservant named, for some reason, Mango (Ray Young), and a werewolf (Robert Dix). At this point the viewer should be wondering if this is, in fact, a spoof along the lines of The Addams Family or Carry on Screaming, but no, apparently it’s being done straight. It continues on in the same grab-bag-of-horror-cliches vein (pun intended), echoing the Mad Libs feel of the title, up to an ending which I think is a cargo-cult version of the climax of Witchfinder General.

A still from Blood of Dracula's Castle depicting four people chatting in the hall of a castle.
The Draculas: they're just regular folks.

Which is a pity, because I think there could be genuine satirical potential in a modern-day Dracula. He and his wife are living an affluent and luxurious Southwestern socialite lifestyle; rather than biting their victims to death, they have a cellar full of young women whose blood they periodically extract and drink from wine-glasses. It’s not too far a stretch to view this as a metaphor for the movie world, where the old and established prey on the young and naïve, and get away with it thanks to a permissive social environment. Their relationship with the werewolf, Johnny, is also one that could have been more interestingly explored, as they use him to do their dirty work so as to maintain plausible deniability. But this isn’t that movie.

I never like to be totally negative about a film, so I will say that the landscape is beautiful and is shot to its best advantage. The castle scenes were filmed at the real-life Shea’s Castle, a 1920s folly in the California (not Arizona) desert, and I’d like to see more of it. The opening features a groovy theme tune that really ought to make it into the charts.

A still from Blood of Dracula's Castle depicting a human sacrifice ritual.
There's also a human sacrifice scene, because you have to have one of those for some reason.

However, the acting is wooden, the script appears to be a first draft, there are a lot of time-wasting filler sequences and inexplicable character actions. For instance, the girls that the Draculas have chained up in the cellar apparently just hang there, not bothering to attempt escape or even conversation. A human sacrifice to the god (sic) Luna takes place right in front of our protagonists and neither of them do anything to stop it or even raise an objection. The horror is surprisingly chaste and bloodless (particularly given the movie’s title) so there isn’t even the benefit of titillation or a good cathartic wallow in gore. The opening section is a long and seemingly pointless advertisement for an aquatic theme park named Marineland.

One star, mostly for the castle.


Poster for Nightmare in Wax
Poster for Nightmare in Wax

Vincent Renard (Cameron Mitchell), a brilliant Hollywood makeup artist and lover of the beautiful actress Marie Morgan (Anne Helm), is disfigured when the studio head Max Block (Berry Kroeger), who has designs on Marie himself, throws a glass of wine at Renard just as the latter lights a cigarette. Some time later, Vincent is working at a Hollywood-themed wax museum; Marie’s boyfriends seem to have a habit of disappearing, and tribute mannequins of them winding up in Vincent’s wax museum. You can see where this is going, particularly as one can assume his revenge plan for Max is a bit more complicated than simple murder, though there’s a twist at the end which could have been better handled.

A still from Nightmare in Wax depicting a man working on a wax head.
How to get a head in Hollywood.

The performances are at least better than in Blood of Dracula’s Castle, with two weary policemen (Scott Brady and Johnny Cardos) trying their best to investigate the goings-on and Victoria Carroll providing some humour as Theresa, a mercenary blonde trying to get onto Max’s casting couch. There’s some knowing humour about Hollywood and its incestuous, venal culture, and, once again, there’s a groovy psychedelic dance number, albeit in the middle of the movie rather than the start.

We get a little more motivation for the main character than in the previous movie, through the interesting, if not terribly original, idea which comes in towards the end of the story, that Vincent is convinced everyone else is laughing at him and yet we also see that the other characters, in fact, respect his genius as an artist even if they think he’s a bit weird as a person. His turn towards misogyny is also credibly introduced, as his experiences with Hollywood cause him to believe that all women are simply interested in trading sex for career advancement.

A still from Nightmare in Wax depicting Vincent's laboratory.
I hope I wasn't the only one who shouted "Frying tonight!" at the sight of the boiling vat of wax.

Again, though, it’s all a bit tedious and bloodless, and the cliché of the bitter, scarred artist has been done, well, to death. This is another movie where the script could definitely have done with another draft: plot threads are left hanging, and the motivations of secondary characters left unexplained. The idea that Vincent is deeply insecure really ought to have been brought into the story earlier than it is. A movie director who is something of a Hitchcock figure, but young and handsome, is introduced with great fanfare, leading one to assume that he will be Marie’s new love interest and the one who saves her from Vincent’s twisted affections, but then he vanishes from the story with no explanation.

Two stars.

One conclusion I’m drawing from this slate of films is that the traditional horror genre is, for the moment at least, played out. Vampires, werewolves, twisted scarred genisues and imperiled ingenues don’t have much to offer these days. The future, on both sides of the Atlantic, is clearly with the folk horror movement.






[April 28, 1969] Cinemascope: Witchmaker, Witchmaker, Make Me A Witch: "The Witchmaker" (a movie) and "The Body Stealers" (a flick)


by Fiona Moore

The folk-horror movement shows signs of becoming a craze, and now the Americans are in on the game. The Witchmaker is a movie that makes a virtue of its low budget, though it’s let down by some low-level misogyny and a surprising degree of prudishness.

Poster for The WitchmakerPoster for The Witchmaker

The story involves a professor who studies psychic phenomena (Alvy Moore) and, since psychic powers are apparently vulnerable to interference by things like radio and electricity, takes a research team including himself, a reporter, his research assistant and a few students out to the backwoods of Louisiana. Their aim is to test the abilities of Anastasia, or “Tasha” (Thordis Brandt), a pretty blonde with witches in her ancestry, and apparently genuine psychic powers. They are also undeterred by the fact that someone in the area has been killing young women and draining them of their blood, which would seem a good reason to postpone the trip, but never mind. This turns out to be the work of Luther the Berserk (John Lodge), acolyte of a two-hundred-year-old witch (Helene Winston and Warrene Ott—she rejuvenates at one point in the film, hence the change in actress). Upon learning about the research team and Tasha’s powers, they resolve to add Tasha to the coven and sacrifice the rest of the researchers. The story ends with a twist which, while not unpredictable, was still fairly satisfying.

Luther the Berserk, aptly named
The aptly named Luther The Berserk

While the twist has caused a lot of early reviewers to compare the film to Rosemary’s Baby, I think a better comparator is actually The Devil Rides Out, given that we have a pair of older men who genuinely believe in psychic phenomena, attempting to rescue a vulnerable young person from a suspiciously international coven (the only non-White person in the story is one of the witches). Which also marks an interesting culture shift of recent years: a decade ago, this would have been a story of Science Versus Superstition, where older male authority figures would expose the “real” answer behind the witchcraft. Now, however, everyone’s a believer and witches are very real. I think people today are taking a more critical view of science and a more positive view of folk culture, and whether or not that’s a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

The main sticking point is an unexpected one. The film apparently wants to imitate British and European horror movies not just in terms of folk culture themes and making the most of a small budget, but in terms of prurient and gratuitous nudity and kinkiness. However, it also seems to be afraid of upsetting the censors too much, so we get scenes like a naked blonde running through the woods with her hands firmly clamped over her breasts so you can’t see the nipples, or the world’s tamest orgy with all whippings and rogerings taking place off-camera. There’s also a little bit of sexism in that the women in the movie are fairly obviously divided between Maggie (Shelby Grant), the Good Girl, who is “plain”, intelligent, and conservatively dressed, and Sharon (Robyn Millan) and Tasha, the Bad Girls, who frolic around in unsuitable nightwear and swimming costumes (in a swamp, in February?) and who both get stalked and punished for their sexual forwardness.

A naked blonde running while covering her breastsNo tits please, we're Americans

In any case, I would say that this isn’t an instant classic like Witchfinder General or The Devil Rides Out, nor is it a schlocky piece aimed only at titillation and diversion. What it is, is an interesting take on folk horror from an American perspective, and worth spending a couple of shillings on. Three and a half stars.


Elsewhere in cinema, the latest offering from Tigon is, despite the presence of Hilary Dwyer as the leading lady, definitely no Witchfinder General. The Body Stealers is a tedious alien-invasion story with an unlikeable protagonist that might have made a reasonable episode of an ITC adventure series if it were half its length.

Poster for The Body StealersPoster for The Body Stealers

The story begins with the mysterious disappearance of eleven paratroopers while skydiving. All of them have had training for space flight, a mysterious electrical discharge happens before each disappearance, and yet it isn’t until more than halfway through the movie that someone even suggests aliens might be responsible. One paratrooper turns up but with his biology changed so that he’s not human, and a mysterious blonde named Lorna (Lorna Wilde) is wandering the local beaches late at night and distracting the chief investigator, Bob Megan (Patrick Allen)—- but she also doesn’t seem to be human. After far too much time we eventually get an explanation by a very long expository speech, which I won’t reveal too much about except to say that if you’ve seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers you’ll have worked out what was going on much earlier. Lorna takes off in the Dalek spaceship from Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 AD (no, really), and the whole thing is a waste of everyone’s time.

Patrick Allen in knitwearBob Megan: rugged, sexy and a knitwear aficionado

This is the sort of story that, a decade earlier, might have been helmed by a Quatermass-figure scientist, but, times having changed, we now get a rugged James Bond type who chases literally anything in a skirt and uses harassment as a means of courtship, and for some reason this succeeds rather than getting him slapped and told off. There are a few witty lines in it (for instance, when Megan is asked what he wants, and he says: “A room at the Hilton”. “Try something smaller.” “Okay, a smaller room at the Hilton”). George Sanders has a rather delightful turn as a general and the cast are generally solid.

Alien spaceship from Daleks Invasion Earth, reused in The Body StealersRecognise this? You should

Unfortunately, as well as the story being slow and drawn-out, the characterisation is rather difficult to believe, and motivations are opaque or contradictory. There is, for instance, a surprising amount of resistance to the logical suggestion of grounding all parachute drops until they have a decent idea of what’s happening, and the ending requires the perpetrators of the kidnappings to do a 180 degree reversal of strategy for no good plot or character reason. One secondary character (played by Neil Connery, brother of the more famous Sean) dies offscreen and no one, not even his supposed best friend, seems inclined to pursue the matter. I could have forgiven at least some of this if the movie was any fun, but it wasn’t.

One star because I am fine with schlock but not boredom.






[April 16, 1969] The Men from Ipomoea (April 1969 Galactoscope)


by Fiona Moore

I was interested in reading this month’s Ace Double because I’d never read any Rackham, but had heard some good things about his writing. Ipomoea turned out to be a mixed bag, a pacy adventure story with some interesting themes that didn’t quite live up to its early promise.

Cover of the short novel Ipomoea
Cover of Ipomoea

The story takes place in a future society where interplanetary travel is as easy as taking an ocean liner is now, and a small number of people are making it rich on a trio of exoplanets which are within easy reach of Earth’s solar system. Our protagonist, Sam Hutten, is the son of one of those exoplanetary billionaires, but he has rejected his father and is now working as a sociologist on Earth. He receives, and obeys, a request to visit his father but clearly the request is more than social: assassination attempts, and contact with mysterious government agents investigating a new super-addictive drug going by the name of “Happy Sugar” (and derived from plants of the Ipomoea genus, hence the title), are to follow. When Hutten’s father turns up dead, Hutten investigates and finds a plot for universal domination by another of the billionaires, involving the drug and some gems capable of mentally conditioning their wearer.

There’s some very good and timely ideas here. The drug plot clearly draws on anxieties in the news about the possibility that the “tune in, turn on, drop out” culture of today might make people susceptible to influence by Communists or worse. There are also some good SFnal touches of imagined technology, with humanoid robots and a character who has, Frankenstein-like, been formed through melding three different people (meaning he lacks an ego and is therefore conveniently immune to psionic suggestion).

However, what I found most intriguing about the novella was the initial setup of a world where Japan has become the dominant economic and cultural power. Rackham’s argument is that the Japanese will come to this position through their production of cheap goods at low prices: “They made their stuff cheap not in competition, not to undercut anyone else, but because it could be made cheap.” Through pursuing excellence for its own sake, rather than in pursuit of conquest, they become top nation. While I’m not thoroughly convinced at the idea that the Japanese are non-competitive, the country’s recent technological and economic progress suggests that a Japanese-dominated twenty-first century might not be an outside possibility. This idea that success is achieved through non-competition and selflessness becomes a thematic link through the book, in that the villain enslaves his victims psionically through appealing to their subconscious desires, and it is only through sublimating the ego that one can resist.

Unfortunately, a lot of this early setup goes by the wayside. Apart from a few brief scenes, we don’t actually get much sense that this world is Japanese-influenced. Although this might be excused on the grounds that the villains, on the exoplanet, appear to be Europeans and into the idea of racial purity, one would expect a bit more comment on the distinction between their worlds and Earth from our protagonist.

Furthermore, we never get much exploration of why Hutten became estranged from his family, or why he became a sociologist beyond that this allows him long passages of exposition on the nature of society. Indeed, by about three-quarters of the way in Hutten’s profession appears to have been forgotten, as the story takes a sharp twist into James Bond territory. Hutten and his special agent friends must bring down a villain who is depressingly keen on making speeches explaining his plans for universal domination, and the resolution is telegraphed rather obviously to the reader.

It’s even more disappointing since, early in the story, Hutten argues, based on the rise of the Japanese, that “world domination will not work, either through force or persuasion… No government can long persist against the will of the governed,” which suggests that, if that theme were pursued, the villain would be defeated through collective action on the part of the people. Instead, we get superheroes with convenient powers saving the day, without any challenge to the economic status quo that, for all Hutten’s speechifying about the Japanese values of doing well by doing good simply for its own sake, has allowed eight billionaires to dominate its economy. A more self-aware novella might have made something of the cognitive dissonance between Hutten’s theories and the fact that the world he’s in doesn’t work that way at all (to say nothing of Hutten’s complete obliviousness of this problem), but not this one.

Two and a half stars, mostly for the setup.

Cover of the short novel The Brass Dragon
Cover of The Brass Dragon

I won’t say too much about the second half of the double, The Brass Dragon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It’s an oddly good fit with the Rackham but for the wrong reasons, namely that it also sets up an intriguing mystery only for the revelation to prove rather disappointing.

The story revolves around Barry Cowan, a young man who turns up in a Texas hospital with no memory of his past life other than a vague impression that he used to live in California, a few disconnected memories of some place that may or may not be Earth, and a little brass statue of a dragon in his pocket. The mystery builds as he is found by his (very normal) family and returned home, but is stalked by strange people apparently looking for something in his possession, and who threaten him and his family. Is he a time-traveler? An arrival from a parallel universe? An alien in human form?

About halfway through the narrative, his memory is restored, and everything falls into place for himself and for the reader. In case anyone here is planning on reading this, I won’t reveal too much other than to say that it becomes a fairly straightforward, even banal, space adventure. I’m also not quite sure who the intended audience is: the age of the protagonist (eighteen) suggests it’s supposed to be a juvenile, but there’s no real reason why he couldn’t be an adult.

Two stars, again mostly for the buildup.



By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

Six Gates from Limbo, by J.T. McIntosh: A Comparison

Six Gates To Limbo Cover depicting Adam and Eve in a glass bowl full of sea creatures
Cover Design by Colin Andrews

A funny thing happened to me on the way to my magazines recently. I had already read my copy of Six Gates From Limbo, from Michael Joseph when I saw it was being serialized in If. I delayed my reading of these issues but I did look at my colleague David’s reviews of them. This is when a few odd things occurred to me.

Firstly, it took place over two issues which also contained many other stories, yet my issues of If were not particularly thick to make up for this. In addition, I noticed David’s reviews stated how rushed the story seemed, when no such point had occurred to me.

Now I know magazines do cut down stories, but this had no explanation as this was essentially a novella version. When New Worlds is forced to cut down, they have given summaries of what has been excised and have been the subject of attacks in fanzines for losing parts of the original content. I have not yet seen anyone had comment on this in the case of If.

So, in the obsessive way I like to do things, I performed a chapter-by-chapter wordcount comparison to see what was lost. By my estimation, the serialized form constitutes only around 40% of the novel length!

Covers of magazine and book versions of Drowned World and Flowers for Algernon

This is not as much of a change between the novelette and novel versions of Flowers For Algernon but not dissimilar to the different versions of Drowned World. As such I thought some in-depth investigating was in order.

To start with, where have the changes been made? The answer is, throughout. The only chapter which appeared to be in-tact is the final one. This makes some sense as the final discussion between Rex and Regina is necessary to accentuate the themes. In addition, it is the shortest so there is less to remove.

Jack Gaughan illustration from the magazine serial showing Rex in the cathedral in Mercury

The only other without much cut from it is the next shortest chapter, Rex’s return to Limbo from Mercury. From the rest, all have between 40 and 80% of their content removed.

As such, the central plot remains predominantly the same. Three people awake in an idyllic artificial environment with six portals to other planets. They investigate through them but find each flawed in some way. They have to work out what has happened and what they will do about it.

What changes between the novel and magazine versions are the details and emphasis. To take the “return to Limbo” chapter that I mentioned before, the start provides a good example of what is often removed:

Here are the first few paragraphs in its serialized form:

His awakening in Limbo was the worst of the three he had experienced, but there was one good thing about it. Regina was there. She was crying. Vaguely he gathered he’d been gone seventeen days.

Tiny as she was, she had virtually carried him home and left him in the bathroom.

An hour later, desperately tired and weak, but clean, he managed to stagger to bed. He was surprised and hurt that Regina wasn’t anywhere upstairs.

Then through his fatigue he sniffed and found enough energy to get out of bed again. Regina was cooking grilled steak…

He went down in his pajamas. When he arrived, Regina was pouring the wine.

And in the book form:

Regina got him back to the house with some difficulty. She was crying – vaguely he gathered he’d been gone seventeen days. In Limbo it was night. She had rushed to the Gateway in her nightdress the moment she sensed his return.

This awakening was the worst of the three because he had no sleep and little food on Mercury. Only some twelve hours after the ordeal of transference, it had been repeated. The thirst was familiar, and the hunger, but this time there was also a desperate lassitude and weakness that put talking out of the question, other than the occasional gasped word.

Again he had his memory unimpaired and he wanted to restore himself the way that seemed natural to him, by crawling in the bushes, chewing fruit, drinking clear water and bathing in the lake. But the lake, Regina reminded him, was seven miles away, and the house less than one mile.

Tiny as she was, she had virtually carried him home and left him in the bathroom.

An hour later, desperately tired and weak, but clean, he managed to stagger to bed. He was surprised and hurt that Regina wasn’t anywhere upstairs.

Then through his fatigue he sniffed and found enough energy to get out of bed again. Regina was cooking grilled steak…It couldn’t be fresh killed meat, because Regina on her own would certainly not have killed a cow or a bull but it smelled far fresher than anything he had smelled in Mercury.

He went down in his pyjamas. When he arrived, Regina was pouring the wine.

As you can see the facts given are largely the same, but the serialized form lacks any reasoning or flavour. You do not need to know that Rex welcomes the return to the naturalness of life in Limbo compared to the artificiality of Mercury via his thoughts on food as a restorative, but it highlights the themes and makes him a more fleshed-out character.

But are there more substantive changes? Limbo is much more thoroughly explored in the novel, with details of the flora and fauna greatly expanded, along with the nature of their maintenance. With this it is also made explicit the parallels with Adam and Eve, with Regina believing the gateways are the serpent, along with many references to Greek mythology.

Another key element is that the magazine does not contain Rex’s vivid dreams. I can see that they could seem superfluous but I would argue they are, in fact, important for understanding the ending.

I do feel the book length version is more likely to appeal to the hippy crowd, with its rejection of society and the ecological themes.

As David noted, many of the planets get short shrift in the magazine version and that is definitely a notable difference. In addition to much more detail and complexity applied to the transfers, the six gateway worlds are expanded, even Mercury which had the longest section in the magazine. Along with the aforementioned discussions on the artificiality of food, there are also mentions of isolation, suicide kiosks, people overdosing on Pex and other such features of the city.

Possibly the most frustrating excision is almost an entire chapter laying the groundwork about the people on Cresta, why they are central to the final plan and then subsequent sections on what happened as a result. It is instead reduced to Rex making the gateway switch and saying he told someone on the planet about it. Which, even with the final chapter intact, likely makes it confusing for most readers.

So, would my opinion be that the book version is better? Unfortunately not, for there is another element that was expunged by Pohl and it is one I wish McIntosh had not included in his novel: the poor treatment of Regina. (Those of a sensitive disposition may be advised to skip the rest of this section).

Jack Gaughan illustation from the magazine of Regina dancing on stage in a skimpy outfit whilst people throw things at her
Regina in sexual slavery on Landfall. Not linked to her womanhood in magazine form.

McIntosh’s restrained descriptions of Regina in the serial brought praise from David. Unfortunately, this is definitely not the case in its book form. There Rex sees her as a “girl”, a young nineteen to his twenty-five, with regular descriptions of how pert her breasts are and “child-like” her body is. This is until she is almost raped and turned into a sex slave on Landfall. It is only at that point he can see her as a woman.

Unfortunately, this isn’t even the first rape scene. After his return from Mercury, Rex attempts to rape Regina declaring:

I waited, remember? But after a man and woman are wed, with or without ceremony, after they made love, he can’t rape her. You’re mine, Regina.

Mr. McIntosh is certainly not a devotee of Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir.

If you want my judgement each version succeeds and fails in different ways. Somewhere there is a full length-version which removes the questionable details but continues to expand on the more interesting themes and ideas McIntosh draws out.

Two Stars for both variations



by Brian Collins

Both of the novels I got for this month did not work out, sadly; but interestingly they're failures of different breeds, or rather they fail in different ways. I've read much of what Anne McCaffrey has written over the past few years while this is my first time reading Kenneth Bulmer. Both are pretty close in age, indeed being of the literary generation that preceded the New Wave. How have they adapted—or more importantly, how have they not?

Decision at Doona, by Anne McCaffrey

Cover by richard Powers depicting a psychedelic image of what seems to be a cat icon.
Cover art by Richard Powers.

Anne McCaffrey technically debuted over fifteen years ago, though she has only been writing consistently for the past few years. In those few years she has built quite the following. She became the first woman to win a Hugo in any of the fiction categories, and her Pern and "The Ship Who…" stories have undoubtedly been popular. I'm not a fan.

Decision at Doona is a new standalone novel from McCaffrey, with a premise that will sound familiar for those who remember the Good Old Days of science fiction—the early '50s, incidentally when McCaffrey sold her first story. It's the future, and humanity is scouting for habitable planets, mainly because there's no room left on Earth. Humans live in alcoves, like bees, and have basically depleted the planet's resources. Finding a planet fit for human colonization would already be difficult, but there's an extra criterion: the planet must be devoid of intelligent life comparable to mankind. Doona at first seems like the perfect candidate—until it isn't. The Hrrubans, a race of cat-like aliens, already live on Doona, keeping their existence secret from the first human scouts. The Hrrubans are about as "civilized" as the humans, but that's not going to help either party, as mankind finds itself at an impasse.

So, a first-contact narrative in which, by sheer coincidence, two advanced races meet on a planet which doesn't strictly belong to either of them. The humans are haunted by the collective memory of having encountered another intelligent race before, the Siwannese, which ended tragically. I will say, how the Siwannese became extinct is not what you would expect if you're familiar with colonialism in the Americas. Then again, I'm not sure McCaffrey did much research with regards to real-world colonialism. To give McCaffrey some credit she does delve into the subject, which is an inherently thorny one, with characters even referring to Christopher Columbus with some shame. The central question of the novel, though, that of whether the Hrrubans are indigenous to Doona (if they are then the humans must pull out, and if not then there's room for cooperation), is an odd one that assumes would-be colonizers have the best intentions with a would-be indigenous population.

The strangely tone-deaf optimism and belief in colonizers as basically good people (as opposed to people actively perpetuating a system of death and imprisonment) is a tune that will sound familiar to Analog subscribers. Indeed it's here where I think McCaffrey's key to success lies. While I'm not personally fond of McCaffrey's writing, it's not hard to see why she has become so popular in the past few years. Reading her must be a comfort for a lot of people. After all, in McCaffrey's world it's 1959 and not 1969. Ike is still in office, and Jack Kennedy is a strapping young senator—and alive. Vietnam is a country without any acreage in the minds of suburban Americans. Unfortunately Jack Kennedy is dead and so are we, in some metaphysical sense. We have cast the runes against our own souls. But for McCaffrey, and indeed for the humans within this novel, nothing much has changed since 1959. The distant future will not be too different from how it was in the Good Old Days. Now isn't that a comforting thought?

To make matters more worrying, McCaffrey is just not a very good writer. Even comparing her to some other conservatives (and I do believe McCaffrey is a conservative) in the field, like Poul Anderson and Larry Niven, her worlds and aliens are not as vibrant. Anderson, whose politics are very different from mine, can still be interesting because of his moodiness and at times surprising moral complexity, whereas McCaffrey might be living under a rock. The Hrrubans reminded me somewhat of Niven's Kzinti, but whereas the Kzinti can be easily distinguished from spacefaring humans, McCaffrey's aliens are more analogous to American indigenous peoples. And Doona itself is such a boring location, with barely any thought or writing given to description and mechanics. Surely we deserve better than this.

Two stars.

The Ulcer Culture, by Kenneth Bulmer

A rough drawing of a human with what appears to be seven breasts. Do I count seven breasts?
Cover artist not credited.

I got mailed this new Bulmer, a British import, because Kris Vyas-Myall is a Bulmer fan and I've not read any of his work before. This may have been a bad idea for a starting point. Firstly, what the hell is this cover? Who is responsible? The artist is uncredited so I'm actually not sure. The novel itself is evidently an attempt on Bulmer's part to get hip with the kids, so to speak. The Ulcer Culture is a dystopian SF novel all about drugs (especially drugs), sex, and violence; and yet I was still bored for much of it.

The plot doesn't really exist, and anyway it would be hard to summarize. The world of the novel is more the point, ya know. It's the future, in what I have to think is fish-and-chips merry goddamn England, and it's "the Age of Material Plenty." There are two groups of people, the Uppers (haha) and the workers, with the former keeping the latter in check with a hallucinogen called Joy Juice. The welfare state has gotten out of hand, with workers lounging around experiencing lifelike hallucinations, having a far-out time as it were. The real problem starts when, for no apparent reason, these hallucinations which normally would provide fantasies for the workers start turning nightmarish. Is the drug supply going bad? Are people's bodies adapting to the drug and having adverse effects? Who really killed Jack Kennedy? Why am I asking you?

Now, science fiction has had a storied history with drugs. When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World almost forty years ago, he theorized that drugs could be used to pacify the proletariat and reinforce subservience, through a Freudian understanding of pleasure. Baby wants nipple, baby cries until he gets nipple, baby acquires nipple, baby stops crying. Huxley would later change his mind profoundly on the subject of drug use, although it seems Bulmer has not gotten the memo. The problem for the reader is that The Ulcer Culture reads like a middle-aged conservative's attempt at trying to understand the hedonistic antics of the younger generation. This is a "New Wave" novel, but within limits. Sexuality plays a major role, yet women only appear in the margins and to a symbolic capacity; and despite the lack of female interest there's no mention of homosexuality. I thought the British were all about buggering each other. Is that the word? And there's basically no swearing either—no "cock," no "pussy," not even a token "fuck" thrown in as a treat.

At first I was led to believe Bulmer knew what he was doing, but then I realized he's merely puppeteering the corpse of some nonexistent New Wave writer with this outing—which, mind you, is a failure in writing that was not due to laziness or cowardice. I don't like it, but I at least respect the effort.

Two stars.



by Cora Buhlert

Conan with a Metafictional Gimmick: Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, by Gardner F. Fox

Kothar - Barbarian Swordsman by Gardner F. Fox

There has been an invasion at my trusty local import bookstore, an invasion of scantily clad, muscular Barbarians, sporting furry loincloths and horned helmets and brandishing gigantic swords and axes, while equally scantily clad maidens cling to their mighty thews.

The genre that Fritz Leiber dubbed "swords and sorcery" was born forty years ago almost to the day, when Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom" was published, instigating a veritable invasion of sword-wielding heroes and heroines into the pages of Weird Tales, Strange Tales and Unknown. The first Barbarian boom only lasted a little more than ten years, cut short by the death or defection of many of its authors as well as World War II paper shortages and changing reader tastes.

However, in the past ten years, Barbarian scouts have occasionally made forays into a landscape dominated by science fiction, making camp in the pages of Fantastic in the US and Science Fantasy in the UK, recruiting fans and authors penning new adventures for modern day Barbarians. Then, four years ago, the walls were breached with the runaway success of Lancer's Conan reprints and the Barbarian hordes invaded the bookstore. Nowadays, there is more sword and sorcery on the shelves than there ever was during the genre's heyday in the thirties.

These days, whenever I go to my local import bookstore, half-naked Barbarians greet me from the paperback spinner rack, illustrated by Frank Frazetta, J. Jones or their lesser imitators. And I have to admit that I inevitably reach for the books with these striking covers to read the blurb on the back. For while not every scantily clad Barbarian can hold a candle to Robert E. Howard's Conan or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser or even John Jakes' Brak, even the lesser entries into the genre are at the very least entertaining.

The latest Barbarian to invade the bookstore shelves is the aptly named Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, penned by pulp and comic book veteran Gardner F. Fox with a stunning cover by the talented J. Jones. The tagline promises that Kothar is "the mightiest fantasy hero of the enchanted, terrifying world before – or beyond – recorded time". With such hyperbole, how could I resist?

Two Distinguished Scholars – or are they?

However, the slim paperback does not open with Barbarian action. Instead, we get an introduction penned by one Donald MacIvers PhD. There are a lot of literary scholars in the world, but the number of academics who take pulp fiction and science fiction and fantasy seriously can be counted on both hands and Donald MacIvers PhD is not one of them. Fascinating…

MacIvers opens his introduction with a quote from Albert Kremnitz, whom he describes as "a German philosopher who is no longer widely read". Indeed, Albert Kremnitz is so little read that even my sixteen volume 1908 edition of the encyclopaedia Der Große Brockhaus has never heard of him. Hmm, the plot thickens…

MacIvers quotes Kremnitz stating that even though the Industrial Revolution would seem to have driven mysticism back, while science, technology and reason reign supreme, mysticism would rise again roughly in the middle of the twentieth century, bringing about a new Age of Heroes. For someone not even Der Große Brockhaus has heard of, Albert Kremnitz is certainly prescient.

MacIvers then informs us that this new Age of Heroes will lead to "the recreation of mythological supermen, or, as [Kremnitz] predicted with amazing insight, the invention of heroes so magnificent, so fantastically endowed with super-powers, that they exist only in the fantasy projections of man. Such a superhero is Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman."

At this point, I was beginning to suspect that Gardner F. Fox, who after all created the original Flash, Hawkman, Doctor Fate, and many other superheroes for National Comics, was pulling our collective leg here and that both Donald MacIvers PhD and Albert Kremnitz, a German philosopher so obscure that even Der Große Brockhaus has never of him, were in truth just alternate identities of Gardner F. Fox, who promptly describes himself as a "distinguished American writer".

But rather than begrudging Mr. Fox this little metafictional game, I was instead amused, especially since I have engaged in similar subterfuge, passing myself off as the American pulp fiction writer Richard Blakemore on occasion.

Besides, Fox in the guise of Donald MacIvers PhD actually makes an interesting point here, namely that the disenchantment of modern life has given birth to our desire for larger than life heroes, be they the costumed superheroes of comic books, the square-jawed spacemen and brass-bra wearing maidens of golden age science fiction or the muscular and scantily clad Barbarians that have invaded our newsstands and bookstores of late. The reasons these stories are so popular, no matter how much literary scholars may decry them, is because we need them to escape our day to day reality for just a little while.

To quote MacIvers or rather Fox, "Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman is an epic hero for any age, but it would appear that our age needs him more than any other."

Bad Luck Barbarian

After this introduction, we get – no, not sword-swinging action, but a prologue informing us that "The Universe is old. Old!" just in case we didn't get it the first time. Fox sets the stage by telling us that Kothar's adventures take place eons after mankind has conquered the stars and "an empire of Man was spread throughout the universe. This empire died more than a billion years ago, after which man himself sank into a state of barbarism." So Kothar's world is closer to Jack Vance's Dying Earth than Robert E. Howard's Hyborean Age.

Once this prologue, billed as a fragment of "The Lord Histories of Satoram Mandamor", is over, we at last meet our hero, Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman. Though it seems that Kothar is not long for this world or any other, for at the beginning of the story "The Sword of the Sorcerer" (like the Conan, Kull or Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, the novel is a fix-up of three novelettes) the sellsword Kothar is grievously wounded, having just lost a battle. On the run from enemy soldiers intent on capturing him and flaying him alive, Kothar stumbles into an ancient crypt, where he encounters the shrivelled corpse of the sorcerer Afgorkon. Raised from the dead by Queen Elfa, Afgorkon bestows upon Kothar the magical sword Frostfire, forged from a meteorite and able to cut through any substance, even steel. However, the blade comes with a curse, for as long as he wields Frostfire, Kothar must remain poor and possess nothing. Since Kothar is a mercenary, who fights strictly for gold and treasure, this is of course a problem.

However, before Kothar can figure out how to lift the curse upon his sword, he first has to defeat Lord Markoth, who has dethroned Queen Elfa. To no one's surprise, he succeeds, but not without picking up a second curse in the form of Red Lori, a beautiful witch in the employ of Markoth, whose spirit keeps haunting Kothar by day and night, appearing in a cup of ale and in his dreams, even though her body is imprisoned in a silver cage in Queen Elfa's castle.

The relationship between Kothar and the vengeful witch who haunts him is fascinating, especially since Red Lori is not above occasionally aiding Kothar, for none shall harm him until Red Lori has had her vengeance. It's almost a twisted love story.

After restoring Queen Elfa to her throne, Kothar, his devoted horse Greyling and the magical sword Frostfire, take off for more adventures and are hired to find "The Treasure in the Labyrinth", a treasure which happens to be guarded by all sorts of traps and monsters. After fighting his way through these traps and monsters – and rescuing a lovely and grateful maiden – Kothar faces the final guardian, a Minotaur straight out of Greek legend. Naturally, Kothar prevails and slays the Minotaur, but he is in for a surprise, for the Minotaur turns into a beautiful woman, the lover of a sorcerer who was cursed by his rival. Kothar has managed to lift this curse, though he still cannot lift his own and is promptly double-crossed by his employers, too, losing the treasure to them. However, Kothar's treacherous employers don't get to enjoy the treasure for long, before poetic justice strikes again…

In the final story, Kothar meets "The Woman in the Witch Wood", Lady Alaine of Shallone, who is forced to live alone in the woods, unable to leave due to a spell cast by the villainous Baron Gorfroi. Lady Alaine asks Kothar's help to free her and her people from this evil spell and sneak into the castle to slay the Baron and retrieve the means by which Lady Alaine is kept imprisoned, a lock of her white hair kept in a golden coffin. Unsurprisingly. Kothar succeeds, only to find himself double-crossed yet again by Lady Alaine who uses her magic to turn him into a dog. However, this time around, Kothar expected betrayal and in turn tricks the Lady Alaine…

Pure Barbarian Fun

Regardless of what Donald MacIvers PhD has to say, the adventures of Kothar are not as good as the works of past masters like Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith nor are they quite up to the standard set by the best of the modern practitioners of the genre such as Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny or Joanna Russ.

That said, Kothar – Barbarian Swordsman, is a lot of fun. It's the sort of book you will devour in one sitting – I did, interrupted only by consulting Der Große Brockhaus about the mysterious Albert Kremnitz – and smile throughout. Kothar may not be the most original of heroes, though there is enough to distinguish him from the other Barbarians clogging up bookshelves, and his adventures may not be the most original either, though there is usually at least one or two surprising twists. And while "the distinguished American author Gardner F. Fox" may not be Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber – but then who is? – he is a skilled enough writer to weave thoroughly entertaining tales. He is certainly a better writer than Lin Carter who pens similar stories.

I was debating how to rate this book. It's not a masterpiece nor Hugo material, but is so much fun that I shall give it four stars anyway. And should Mr. Fox ever decide to revisit Kothar – who after all is still suffering from the dual curse of sword-induced poverty and a sexy witch haunting him – I will certainly pick up further adventures of the sellsword from Cumberia.

Pure entertainment. Four stars.






[February 4, 1969] Potts, Caractacus Potts: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang


by Fiona Moore

The trees are down and the decorations put away, but the Christmas films are still clinging on at the cinemas. The splashiest of these, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, is a charming but over-long crowd-pleaser that can be best summarised as “James Bond, but for children.”

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang movie poster.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang movie poster

After all, it’s a screenplay by Roald Dahl from a story by Ian Fleming, produced by Cubby Broccoli, featuring a handsome protagonist who’s a mashup of Bond and Q, a love interest with a suggestively punny name, a magical car, glamourous footage of automobile races and international luxury travel, a cameo from Desmond Llewellyn, sinister Eastern Europeans who want to steal Western technological secrets….

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is actually two stories. The frame story involves Caractacus Potts, an Edwardian inventor (Dick van Dyke, who has fortunately decided not to bother attempting a British accent after his excruciating failure to sound like a Cockney in Mary Poppins). He is a widower with two children, whose inventions are charming and ahead of their time, including: a vacuum cleaner and a device for sending visual images by wireless; however, they fail to find a market.

He strikes up a friendship with Truly Scrumptious (Sally Ann Howes), daughter of a candy manufacturer (James Robertson Justice), who persuades her father to consider Potts’ latest invention, candy whistles called Toot Sweets, but when the whistles turn out to attract dogs her father is furious. Rejected, Potts decides to cheer up his children by buying and fixing up a roadster, which they name Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the noises it makes, and takes the children and Truly on a seaside picnic, where he and Truly fall in love.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang fliesChitty Chitty Bang Bang takes flight

And then we get the second story, told by Potts at the seaside to his children and Truly. In this story, the gadget-obsessed Baron of Vulgaria (Gert Fröbe, who played Goldfinger in the eponymous movie) sees the car and vows to steal it. After a long sequence where two bumbling Vulgarian spies try and fail to do this, the Baron succeeds in kidnapping Potts’ father (Lionel Jeffries), an absent-minded caricature of British imperialism. Potts, Truly and the children come to the rescue in Chitty, which is able to turn into a hovercraft and an airplane as needed.

They land in Vulgaria to discover that the country has no children, by order of the Baron, and the sinister Child-Catcher soon kidnaps Potts’ children as well. Aided by a toymaker (Benny Hill, of all people) and a cave-ful of children hiding away from the Child-Catcher, Potts and Truly rescue the children and their grandfather and bring about a “free state” in Vulgaria.

The Baron and Baroness of Vulgaria from Chitty Chitty Bang BangThe Baron and Baroness profess their love for each other

Back in the frame story, Truly’s father hits on the idea of selling the candy whistles as dog sweets, and offers Potts a contract for the invention. The Potts fortune is made, and Potts and Truly can marry and live happily ever after.

The story-within-a-story was, to my mind, the weakest part of the movie. The Eastern European stereotypes were more than a little silly and boring, there was an unnecessarily nasty undercurrent of misogyny in that the Baron is constantly trying, and failing, to murder his wife for no good plot or character reason, and I’m really, really uncomfortable about the Child Catcher, a big-nosed bad guy who kidnaps children and takes them off to an unspoken but terrible fate. I’m also finding it a little difficult to imagine Benny Hill, a comedian best known for racy sketches about chasing pretty young women who are less than willing to cooperate, as a cuddly child-friendly character, but presumably the younger people in the audience won’t have this sort of contextualising detail.

Robert Helpmann as the Child Catcher
See what I mean? Scary, and arguably antisemitic

Another problem, to my mind, is that despite Chitty Chitty Bang Bang itself being the named star of the movie, featuring heavily on the poster and other promotional materials, and getting a long opening montage showing its original career as a racing car, it’s barely in the story. It’s over an hour before Potts finally gets around to building the thing, and, after two exciting flying and hoverboating sequences, it disappears for ninety per cent of the Vulgaria storyline. If, like me, you were expecting a story centred around a fantastic car, you’re going to be disappointed.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as a hovercraft
We do get a car-versus-boat naval battle though

On the more positive side, the music is absolutely delightful, with songs like the title track, “Truly Scrumptious”, and “Hushabye Mountain” likely to be long-lasting hits. They were composed by the Sherman Brothers of Mary Poppins fame, who clearly know their stuff. Potts’ machines were designed by British cartoonist and found-object sculptor Rowland Emett, and they are well integrated into the action: a sequence where Potts cooks sausage and eggs for his children using a variety of silly contraptions is worth the price of admission, as is a brief sequence with an apparently sentient vacuum cleaner.

There are plenty of opportunities for van Dyke to showcase his skills as a dancer, in particular one in which he pretends to be a live-size marionette in order to infiltrate the Baron’s castle. The Edwardian setting of the movie is in line with the current craze for a kind of fantasy-Edwardiana of straw hats and candy stripes. British comedy fans can enjoy watching out for cameos from the likes of Barbara Windsor, Arthur Mullard and Richard Wattis.

The "Toot Sweets" production number from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
The "Toot Sweets" production number, a candy factory fantasy to a catchy tune

However, at nearly two and a half hours, the movie is really far too long: there was a fifteen-minute intermission at the cinema where I saw it, which was just as well. I’m tempted to suggest that it should cut the Vulgaria storyline, but unfortunately that’s the only part of the movie with any real cinematic action, and without it you’d just be left with a cute but low-stakes love story about an inventor and an heiress. Three stars—most of them for the production, music and dancing.






[January 12, 1969] Taking French Leave: Playtime (a movie) and The Green Slime (a flick)


by Fiona Moore

Jacques Tati’s newest movie, first released in 1967 but only recently screened at the Institut Français in London, is a tremendous achievement, dealing with many of the same themes as his earlier movies but in a much subtler and cleverer way. Although the box office has apparently been disappointing, the film is gradually accumulating the critical acclaim it deserves as it makes its way around the world.
The main theme is similar to that of Tati’s earlier comedy Mon Oncle (My Uncle, 1958): the idea that technologically-focused modernity is a superficial, soul-destroying philosophy which is ultimately doomed to failure. Playtime, though, takes a more subtle and arguably less conservative approach.


Playtime movie poster

We find ourselves in a fantasy Paris which is nothing but glass, chrome and concrete office blocks: the famous landmarks of the city, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, are only glimpsed in the reflections of windows. The theme is made clearer when we see a tourist bureau with posters advertising London, Stockholm, and Mexico, each with the same office building and a few superficial details (for instance Routemaster buses and Big Ben) to mark the supposed differences. We are in a futuristic fantasy world where every place is the same and the subtle, playful, unpredictable details have been erased. It isn’t an unhappy scenario: the streets are clean and no one is poor or sick. But the pleasure people take in it is superficial and vapid (a tourist exclaiming at a trade fair that “they even have American stuff!”), and they also don’t seem to know what they are missing.


The Eiffel Tower reflected in a window

The film opens in a building where the viewer is left for a long time with no idea as to its purpose: we see black and chrome sofas, glass frontage, small cubicles. An older couple converse in accented English; nuns pass by, as does a priest, and a nurse with a crying baby. Is it a hospital? A government office? Finally we see a man with suitcases and the nature of the building is revealed: it is an airport. Tati’s cinema persona Monsieur Hulot is changed, having shed his pipe and scarf and adopted a grey coat in place of his trademark brown macintosh, but a variety of other people wander around the story in M Hulot’s costume and are mistaken for him. We see office buildings full of filing cabinets which are revealed, when seen from overhead, to be cubicles; we see little dramas play out in an apartment building where all the walls are glass and face onto the street. At one point two groups of people in adjacent rooms watch the same television programme, completely unaware of this shared experience and unable to come together and commune over their enjoyment.


Apartment living: isolating and atomising?

Unlike the way in which Mon Oncle harked back to a nostalgic imagined past, however, Playtime sees the doom of this conformist, modernist approach as lying in the future. The glass-fronted modernity is fragile and superficial, and falls apart at the slightest pressure, and so can’t cope with the everyday fallibilities of humanity, whether M Hulot, who lopes and skips around an office building and a trade fair subtly creating chaos, or his female counterpart in the story, American tourist Barbara (played by Barbara Dennek), who is constantly getting separated from her tour, or even background characters like a group of glaziers whose window-fitting activities subtly become a dance routine, enjoyed by a crowd of Parisians watching them from the street.


M Hulot observing office work

The film’s message is encapsulated in a long, climactic sequence in a fancy restaurant whose superficial efficiency and organisation is a façade. We see a beautiful oasis of elegant food and décor, but when the backstage areas are revealed, we discover that the restaurant is still being built, that the waiters are swapping jackets to hide stains and damage, that the kitchen is chaos. The introduction of M Hulot breaks the boundary between front and backstage and sends the whole thing into a joyous spiral of anarchy: the glass door shatters, the ceiling decoration falls down, the decorous bossa-nova music turns into wild jazz. The lighting fixtures break. Random people wander in off the street. Chairs fall over. Waiters trip. A plastic sculpture of an airplane melts. A wealthy American businessman declares one section of the room his private bistro and invites tourists and workmen to eat and drink at his expense. A drunk is ejected and walks straight back in. The austere and ordered modernity is undermined from all sides.

The car carousel makes Paris playful again The car carousel makes Paris playful again

Afterwards, the patrons walk out into a transformed city, one which still includes the office blocks and grey concrete, but where the cars are now colourful, the buildings hung with bunting, and cheerful shops selling cheeses and scarves have replaced the trade fair. M Hulot buys Barbara a gift but, being unable to give it to her, delegates one of the Hulot impersonators to do it. Tati’s direction wittily turns a roundabout into a carousel, a car mechanic’s shop into a fairground ride. The message is not to destroy technological modernity, but to subvert it, and to find ways of making it joyful and playful. Five stars. Go and see it—if you don’t speak French don’t worry, most of the dialogue is in English and the physical comedy carries the action.



The Green Slime movie poster

From the sublime to the ridiculous! The other film I saw this week is the recently-released SF-horror The Green Slime, a Japanese production filmed in English with American and European actors. The plot involves a spaceman, Jack Rankin, sent up to a space station commanded by the man who has stolen his girlfriend, to lead a mission to destroy an asteroid which threatens Earth. In doing so, however, he and his crew accidentally bring back some of the titular slime which, when exposed to radiation, develops into alien monsters which must be fought while the two men and their love object reconcile their romantic interests.

I give this film more points than most reviewers because of the, possibly unintentional but definitely hilarious, Freudian message: a man’s jealousy over his ex-girlfriend’s new relationship causes him to unleash, through the medium of green slime, one-eyed tubular monsters onto the universe, and it’s up to him to bring them under control again. The modelwork is good and the characterisation unsubtle, giving the series the feel of what might happen if Gerry and Sylvia Anderson decided to work with live actors rather than puppets (as I’m told is soon to be the case), but without the budget of a Century 21 production. Definitely one to watch only when inebriated and in the right company, but very fun under those circumstances; I'm not sure if I was supposed to laugh all the way through it, but I did. One and a half stars.






[December 18, 1968] Sex, Drugs and Boris Karloff: Curse of the Crimson Altar


by Fiona Moore

Much as I enjoy the jollity of the festive season, I’m also firmly of the opinion that there is nothing better than a ghost story—or, failing that, a horror story—at Christmas. So I was quite delighted to learn my local cinema would be showing the latest British horror movie, Curse of the Crimson Altar.

Curse follows in the footsteps of this summer’s Witchfinder General in being a film where the horror is not supernatural but psychological, suggesting that this genre may be coming into fashion. Although the biggest creative obstacle Curse has to overcome is that someone behind the scenes, or possibly in the censor’s office, has meant that the actual catalyst for the horror remains subtextual throughout.

At the start of the movie, we get a quote from an unnamed “medical journal” about the influence of psychedelic drugs on the human brain: “drugs of this group can produce the most complex hallucinations and under their influence it is possible by hypnosis to induce the subject to perform actions he would not normally commit.” Thereafter, we get no reference to drugs at all, but it should be fairly clear to the viewer how we should interpret the proceedings.

The plot involves an antique dealer, Robert Manning (Mark Eden), going in search of his brother Peter, who has disappeared on an expedition to hunt for salable stock, sending Manning a single candlestick, a witchfinders’ bodkin, and a cryptic note on notepaper from a country estate, Craxted Lodge in the town of Greymarsh. Arriving at the estate, Manning finds Lord Morley (Christopher Lee) and his niece Eve (Virginia Wetherell) gearing up for a local Bonfire Night-type holiday, celebrating the anniversary of the burning of a local witch, Lavinia Morley (Barbara Steele), the Black Witch of Greymarsh. They claim never to have met Manning’s brother, but invite him to stay with them while he investigates. Manning begins suffering from strange erotic dreams about Lavinia Morley and sleepwalking episodes, and, with the help of a local historian and occult enthusiast, Professor Marsh (Boris Karloff), discovers he is descended from one of the people who sentenced Lavinia to death. Someone is out for revenge, but who, and how, and why?

Lascivious Lavinia as played by Barbara Steele
Lascivious Lavinia as played by Barbara Steele

The movie boasts a lot of familiar names behind and in front of the camera, being scripted by Henry Lincoln and Mervyn Haisman, creators of Doctor Who’s Great Intelligence and Yeti, and featuring Roger Avon, Michael Gough and scream-queen Barbara Steele in supporting roles. Gough in particular does a great turn as a manservant who is either under the influence of malign spirits, or else doped to the eyeballs, at all times. The casting of Lee and Karloff, both seasoned horror veterans who usually play villains but have turned their hand to more benign roles, keeps the suspense going as to who is behind the sinister events, and there's a cute nod to Karloff's role when Manning remarks that he feels “like Boris Karloff might pop up at any moment” shortly before, in fact, he does.

Michael Gough as a zombie manservant.
Michael Gough as a zombie manservant.

In many ways the story feels a little like an episode of The Prisoner or The Avengers, involving as it does a villain who is using psychedelic drugs and mind games to wear down an unsuspecting victim. The fact that the script can’t directly say that drugs are involved also helps to make the events more ambiguous, suggesting for most of the movie that Manning might really be haunted by the vengeful spirit of Lavinia Morley. The imagery of the dream sequences is very much drawn from British folk culture, with sinister figures in animal masks and references to the witch-hunts of the 17th century.

Unfortunately, the story is also a little uneven, with a long prurient episode featuring Eve having a debauched party with her young artist friends apparently going nowhere; presumably the intention was to suggest that Eve might be behind, or at least complicit in, the implicitly drug-fueled activities which follow, but it mostly seems to be included to cater to the crowd of people who like to tut about modern youth going wild while secretly enjoying the orgy scenes. Similarly I found the dream sequences more laughable than erotic, with supposed demons and witches walking around clad in strips of imitation leatherette. There are also some gaps in the narrative, which I won’t detail in order not to give away the denouement, and the ending felt rather rushed to me.

Another tedious sex party, ho hum. Another tedious sex party, ho hum.

All in all, I’d say this is a solid if uneven horror story that keeps the viewer guessing for a long time, and suggests that the non-supernatural horror based in British folk mythology is here to stay.

Three and a half stars.


I’d also like to devote a little time to the B feature on the night I saw Curse of the Crimson Altar, a short and cheap SF-horror from 1964 entitled The Earth Dies Screaming, directed by the supremely talented Terence Fisher. The scenario is straight out of John Wyndham: a test pilot, returning from a high altitude flight, discovers that almost everyone else on Earth has been killed—apparently through some kind of gas attack, as the few survivors are people who, for one reason or another, were not breathing the atmosphere at that point. Less Wyndham-esque are the eerie, silent robots now stalking around the deserted Earth, who bear such a strong resemblance to Cybermen that one wonders if it is simply coincidence or if Doctor Who’s design team had been at the movies before working on “The Tenth Planet”. The robots also have the ability to turn anyone they shoot into grey-eyed, mindless creatures who do their bidding.

See what I mean? That's a Cyberman, that is.
See what I mean? That's a Cyberman, that is.

Our hero joins a band of survivors seemingly calculated to provide optimum drama (society woman; hedonistic good-time couple; sinister man in a mac; teddy-boy mistrustful of anyone over 30 and his heavily pregnant young wife) and collectively they attempt to figure out how to survive and to stop the robots, despite the conflicting agendas in the group.

While suffering a little from uneven pacing and characterisation (the teddy boy, for instance, suddenly overcomes his suspicions of the establishment for no reason other than plot convenience), this is a pleasingly eerie 62 minutes. I quite like the sub-genre of apocalypse stories that just focus on a small group of people trying to cope with their changed circumstances, and the parallels with the aftermath of a nuclear war are clear without being didactic.

Three stars.





[September 12, 1968] I’ll See You In My Dreams: Valérian, Agent Spatio-Temporel


by Fiona Moore

I have been spending a lot of time lately at the Institut Français, both for their interesting lectures and films, and because they have a comfortable reading room which is handy for the universities and museums. This means I have been perusing more than a few copies of the comic magazine Pilote when I’m in town for a lecture.

While Pilote, edited by René Goscinny of Asterix fame, has an excellent variety of styles and artists from Francophone Europe, it’s very rare for it to venture into science fiction.

However, this seems to be changing, with the introduction late last year of a new series, written by Pierre Christin and drawn by Jean-Claude Mézières: Valérian, Agent Spatio-Temporel. Although possibly it ought to be called Valérian et Laureline, for reasons I’ll explain below. So far we’ve had one complete story and one nearly-completed: Les Mauvais Rêves (Bad Dreams) serialised from 9 November 1967 to 15 February 1968, and La Cité des Eaux Mouvants (The City of the Shifting Waters), which began on 25 July this year and is clearly moving towards a climax.

There's robots. Did I mention the robots?
There's robots. Did I mention the robots?

Les Mauvais Rêves is more loosely sketched, in all senses of the word, than its sequel. The story takes place in the year 2720, when the instantaneous teleportation of matter through time and space has been achieved. The result is that that the inhabitants of Galaxity, the planet-spanning empire, have no need to work, except for a small cadre of bureaucrats and agents who are mostly charged with protecting society from time-traveling pirates and scouting for new resources on distant worlds. Everyone else entertains themselves through dreaming.

When people start having nightmares, it transpires that the former head of the dream service, Xombul, has sabotaged the dream computers and fled to medieval France in the year 1000. Agent Valérian pursues him there, where he finds that Xombul is disgusted by humanity’s softness and addiction to dreams. Having learned a set of spells from a medieval magician that will turn humans into monsters and make them follow him blindly (this is, shall we say, not a historically accurate representation of eleventh-century France), Xombul plans to return to the future and take over as emperor of Galaxity. With the aid of a local young woman, Laureline, Valérian must thwart his plans.

Valerian and Laureline enjoying the benefits of the leisure society.
Valerian and Laureline enjoying the benefits of the leisure society.

In the second story, Xombul escapes from custody and flees again into the past, but this time, more cleverly, he has gone into the “Forbidden Zone” of 1986. We learn that the explosion of a hydrogen bomb in that year led to a four-century-long dark age on Earth, which the spatio-temporal agents are not supposed to visit. Valérian and Laureline, the latter of whom has now become a fully-fledged space-time agent, pursue him, of course, to a flooded mid-Eighties New York ruled by looter gang leader and free jazz enthusiast Sun Rae, but what Xombul is doing with his army of robots in the former UN headquarters remains a mystery so far.

Sun Rae in apocalyptic New York.
Sun Rae in apocalyptic New York.

The series as it currently stands shows a lot of promise. Unusually for a European comic, Galaxity is populated by people of all ethnicities who are represented without caricaturing or stereotypes: the same is also true of 1986 New York. There’s an explicit nod to the emerging sub-genre of African and African-American SF and fantasy in the character of Sun Rae, who is based on jazz musician and SF creator Sun Ra. He is portrayed as a shrewd political leader, who is possibly the only one in New York to have realised that the most valuable thing in the city is not the jewels and precious metals, but information and scientific knowledge.

The treatment of women is also exceptional: while there are only two women with speaking roles in the story, and while Laureline does tend to wear figure-hugging costumes, she is never a passive or helpless victim, and so far she has rescued Valérian from danger more times than he has rescued her. The relationship between the two, while affectionate, is also clearly professional, hence why I suggested that they might be regarded as co-protagonists rather than the male agent taking the most prominent position.

Laureline serving dinner with a soupçon of sarcasm.
Laureline serving dinner with a soupçon of sarcasm.

There are also some interesting hints at the way in which the story might develop. Galaxity is plainly not the utopia it claims to be, if most of the population are simply dreaming their lives away: totalitarian though Xombul is, one can see why he finds it so frustrating. It also appears to be governed by small, petty bureaucrats with whom it’s difficult to sympathise. We have not seen any aliens so far, and one wonders if this is a universe with only humans, or if their absence hints at something darker. I’m not quite sure what to make of the apparently unproblematic existence of magic in the story, where medieval France is apparently full of wizards and monsters: whether it’s a confusing mixture of genres or a clever, New Wave, challenging of what we interpret as science.

The story also has a pleasing wit, for instance a rather delightful sequence in La Cité des Eaux Mouvants where Laureline explains how she got from Brasilia, where she arrived in the past, to New York, where her lighthearted narrative of borrowing a plane from the President and hiding it in the suburbs, is belied by the cartoon panels showing her stealing the craft and crashing it into a barn.

Sun Rae's first appearance...
Sun Rae's first appearance…

So far, the most problematic aspect is the variable character art. While Mézières’ landscapes and cityscapes are beautifully rendered, whether a luxury pleasure-garden on Venus or an apocalyptic New York bleakly studded with advertisements, the characters are strange, often grotesque, and change shape from panel to panel. Sun Rae, for instance, gains a bewildering amount of weight between his first and second appearance in the comic. The writing, also, seems on firmer footing in the second story than the first, with Les Mauvaises Rêves involving a lot of plot conveniences and contrivances.

...and Sun Rae's second appearance.
…and Sun Rae's second appearance.

Despite this, I certainly plan to keep following the series, and I hope an English translation will soon be forthcoming, to bring it to a wider international audience. Comics aren’t just for kids, and Valérian shows how the graphic medium can be used to build a sprawling spatio-temporal SF epic.

Four stars.