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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 30, 1970] Praise for the Resident Witch (May 1970 Analog)

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

With the inflation scare going away, national protest attendance down to the tens of thousands, and a Supreme Court on its way to being filled, not to mention a lull in space news, I can finally turn my attention where it matters: this month's science fiction magazines!

I'm always grateful when Analog turns in a decent issue to round out the month, and this month's edition has some real bright spots.

The cover of Analog; a color image, showing a Viking riding horseback through a forest. Behind him rises a ruin, and in the sky above is outlined the faces of a woman, and a wolf.
by Kelly Freas, illustrating "But Mainly by Cunning"

But Mainly by Cunning, by John Dalmas

A few months ago, we followed the adventures of Nils the neoviking psychic in the serial novel, The Yngling, in which he spearheaded the defeat of the evil Turkish immortal, Baalzebub.  Now he's back in what seems to be an interstitial tale, roaming Bohemia in search of Ilse, the raw-boned beauty who taught Nils how to master his powers.

Black lines on white background depict three Nordic barbarians on horseback, riding out of ruins to approach an overturned cart in the foreground. Beside the cart, taking up much of the space of the page, is a desiccated corpse. Above the figures reads the title, and the legend 'The strong man is the one who can face realities and induce others to the same hard courage!'
by Kelly Freas

Though the back of Baalzebub's assault on Europe was broken in the previous adventure, thousands of desert horse barbarians still roam the countryside, pillaging and occupying so as to brave the upcoming winter.  Nils and his three Nordic companions attempt to rally a defense while they quest for our hero's lover (who, it turns out, has been captured by the marauding Arabs).

Dalmas continues to be an above-average depicter of scenery and character, and his tales read like history.  Nevertheless, there's precious little SF in this installment, and not a great deal of plot movement.  Again, this feels like a bridge piece.  I look forward to the main course after this appetizer.

Three stars.

MR Robot, by William L. Kilmer and Louis L. Sutro

A black and white photograph of a computer office. Various parts are labelled -- 'computer', 'stereo TV camera', 'long-persistence display', 'gray-scale display', and 'camera monitor'. One white man sits at the printout station, another stands in the background near the stereo TV camera.

This is a long, technical article about mimicing the human brain—specifically the sense processing and response subsystems—for implementation in Mars rovers.  Aside from this being an overly abstruse and dry piece, it has a rather fatal flaw.  Its premise is that the mind is a computer, so mimicing its structure an efficient way to design digital brains.  But the authors start their piece by modeling the brain as a computer in the first place, and then taking that model and applying it back to their theoretical rover.

That's a tautological application.  Who knows if the brain really works like a digital computer?  This all seems like an exercise in sophistry.  And it's boring to boot.

Two stars.

Resident Witch, by James H. Schmitz

An two-paneled image in black and white. On the right side, a white woman with long blonde hair and painted fingernails winds a string towards herself. This side is done with black lines on a white background. The string leads to the left panel, where the illustration becomes white lines on a black background. The string is part of many strands being pulled from a human form, which is in front of an embryo curled within an egg. Beneath the hands of the woman on the right is the title, and the following legend: 'Kyth Interstellar, a detective agency, had a problem that not even their highly skilled operatives could handle -- without Telzey, their Resident Witch!'
by Kelly Freas

Telzey Amberdon, the 16-year old psi who has been heroine of a clutch of prior stories, has returned.  This time, she is hired to find and rescue a rich magnate, who has been kidnapped by his jealous younger brother.  Said evildoer is holed up on an estate worthy of a Bond villain, with genetically modified guard dogs, dead-eyed security mooks, automatic defenses, and a psionic shield.  Telzey and her two employers must infiltrate the compound, incapacitate the abductor, and save the billionaire—if possible.

Schmitz is an excellent writer, weaving action, astral projection, and suspense with ease.  Telzey, in particular, is an interesting character: physically a teenager, but centuries-old mentally, due to her having touched so many consciousnesses telepathically.  Unfortunately, Schmitz doesn't linger too long on Telzey's interior personality, which renders her presentation a bit sterile.  Also, the depictions of the torturous depredations the tycoon suffers at the hand of his brother are a bit hard to take if you're of a squeamish nature.

Still, a well-earned four stars.

Caveat Emptor, by Lee Killough

An illustration, black lines on a white background, depicting three aliens and one human, in a rough line. From the left: A lion-headed man sitting on the floor and wearing a woolly sweater and fringed pants; a human man in a jumpsuit, holding a blanket and facing away from the viewer; a centaur with clawed feet and a foreshortened, donkey-like head; and a BEM wearing a loose tunic and pants, and checking off a clipboard. In the foreground, there is a bowl and three balls.
by Vincent Di Fate

An interstellar merchantman attempts to seal a trade deal with the human Federation.  It looks like the Terrans hold all the cards, forcing our alien hero to settle for a humiliating agreement…but sometimes a poor primitive has an ace up its sleeve.

Something of a forgettable piece, its greatest noteworthiness comes from having the extraterrestrial get the best of the human.  Analog editor Campbell has historically poopooed such tales, but I note they have been creeping onto his pages more often.  Perhaps he allowed it this time since the alien is a humanoid whose greatest distinguishing feature is his tail.

Three stars.

An illustration from the Department of Diverse Data, white lines on black background. Four creatures speed across the panel, looking rather like a cross between a flatfish and a shovelnose guitarfish. Four tubes come out of each of their back ends, streaming behind them. Underneath this image is typed the following legend: 'Jet propelled Fork-and-Platter bird Avis Messator. E.T. from Spica IX. Has an insatiable appetite but is rather untidy in its habits. Does not fly very well, due to rarified atmosphere.'
art by David Pattee

Heavy Duty, by Hank Dempsey (Harry Harrison)

This is the third tale (that I've read, anyway) set in Harrison/Dempsey's newest setting.  We are thousands of years in the future, and humanity is sending out teleportation stations out to planets settled centuries before by conventional space ships.  We follow Langli, an agent of "World Openers", as he transits to an almost uninhabitable world looking for survivors of an ancient colonization.

An illustration, black lines on a white background. On the left side, a craggy-faced spaceman tries to pull wrist restraints from a futuristic wall. On the right side, a bearded man in traditional taiga clothing crouches, ready to fling a short spear towards the spaceman. In the space above the spaceman's head reads the legend, 'What you get for nothing is worth it! And on a bleak, heavy planet -- the future can look like a free gift...'.
by Vincent Di Fate

The planet's gravity is 2.1 g, and even its summer is frigid.  Its settlers have, in fact, survived, but just barely.  Only two literate colonists are left: the chief and his beautiful (if stocky) daughter.  Their subsistence economy is on the razor's edge of viability.  They are left with the choice: sign an onerous exploitation contract with Langli's concern, or stumble onward to almost certain exctinction.

Once again, we've got an atypical story for Analog, which is something of an indictment of rapacious capitalism.  The color is interesting, too, with the setting and settlers reminiscent of (if more primitive than) the ones from Harrison's Deathworld.  Of course, the Crew/Colonist divide is reminiscent of Niven's Slowboat Cargo/A Gift From Earth.

My favorite story in this series so far, I give it four stars.

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

An illustration, white lines on a black background. Along a silvery river on the left side of the page, a massive satellite complex rises against the sky. On the right side, it is watched by a translucent bubble (so tall as to occlude the moon) surrounding a disembodied eye.
by Kelly Freas

Sadly, I cannot be so effusive about the conclusion to the latest Analog serial.  John Leigh, agent of SPI, infiltrates the Soviet radio telescope base to sabotage the facility, rescue the pretty Swedish biologist who guessed that the alien message picked up by the installation was really a Trojan Horse designed to subvert humanity to its own purposes, and bump off the Russian Chief Astronomer, already in the thrall of the alien Lorelei.

Maybe John Dalmas could have pulled it off.  The Carrigans are simply not up to the task.  They write amateurishly, often repeating turns of phrase in close succession.  Leigh succeeds almost at random, stumbling into lucky break after lucky break.  Really, if this were submitted to a publisher as the pilot of some kind of contemporary hero series, like James Bond or Sam Durrell (Assignment:) or Mack Bolan: The Executioner, I imagine it would have gotten rejected.  Campbell has lower standards, I guess.

Two stars.

Doing the math

A computer room, largely empty. There is only one person in the room, a white woman in a brown minidress, reading punch cards in the corner.
IBM 360

We end on a bit of a downbeat, especially since P. Schuyler Miller's book review column is strangely absent this month.  Nevertheless, there's enough good stuff in this issue to make it worth your while, rating just a hair under three stars in toto.  How does it compare with the other May-dated mags? 

A pretty middle-of-the-road bunch, actually. Galaxy's 3.2 barely edges out Fantasy and Science Fiction's 3.2. Both do better than Vision of Tomorrow (3.1), Amazing (3.1), IF (3), Venture (3), and the anthology "magazine" Infinity (2.8), but none are abyssmal.

Despite having eight short story sources this month, the four/five star material would fill just two of them.  Women wrote 7.8% of what was published.

So, my praise for Analog, the resident witch (since, as we know, witches are just humans with psi powers) is muted but not inaudible.  Still, would we rather have a very wide middle to our bell curve of science-fictional quality, or more superlative (and awful) outliers?

What do you think?

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


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Science / Space Race

[April 26, 1970] Red stars in space (Communist China and the USSR make leaps)

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by Gideon Marcus

It's likely you missed the other big news in space given how much the flight of Apollo 13 dominated the air waves.  But while we were busy ensuring that Lovell, Swigert, and Haise made it back home, the ChiComs and the Russkies were accomplishing some space spectaculars of their own:

If you look up in the sky, you'll see nine new stars, all of them Red!

The East is Red

Radio Peking announced the launch on its April 24th evening newscast, crediting Chairman Mao's leadership for the success.  This makes China (the Communist one that we don't recognize as existing) the fifth nation to orbit a satellite with its own booster (Japan having beaten its neighbor to the punch by just two months). Thousands of Chinese marched through Tien An Men Square in an organized demonstration clearly planned in advance.  To the sound of exploding firecrackers and the crashing of drums and cymbals, the young and old paraded with red banners and portraits of the Chairman while a People's Liberation Army group carried a man-high model of the Chinese ideogram for double-happiness, while downtown office buildings were lit with white lights and colored bulbs decorated trees along the Boulevard of Eternal Peace.

Colour photograph from an elevated vantage of large crowds of people gathered in Tien An Men Square, illuminated from above by brilliant lamps

Colour photograph of Chinese youth walking, holding up large portaits of Chairman Mao

The satellite is called DongFangHong, which means "The East is Red", and as it orbited, the spacecraft broadcast on 20.009 megacycles the revolutionary song of the same name.  Its eccentric orbit takes it nearly 1500 miles above the Earth and down to just under 300, circling the globe every 114 minutes.  The satellite masses a respectable 173 kilograms, suggesting a rocket similar in capability to our Delta (compare, say, Relay 1).  The satellite is being tracked closely both by the United States and by Nationalist China (Formosa/Taiwan).

B&W photograph of a globe-shaped satellite formed of quadrilateral panels assembled above and below a wide belt.  There appear to be whip antennae protruding from all four quadrants around the belt and up from the pole opposite what appears to be the bell of a thruster
The Dong Fang Hong satellite

America's reaction to the flight was something of a yawn. NASA Administrator, Dr. Thomas O. Paine, released this statement:

“This new development has been anticipated for some time. . . . It is a dramatic demonstration of the determination of the Chinese leaders, despite many problems, to put science and technology very high on their list of national priorities.”

Scientists at the Department of Defense and the Air Force displayed a distinct lack of surprise.  Indeed, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird told Congress on February 20 that he expected the Reds to try a launch soon.  One unidentified DOD scientist quoted by the Associated Press stated that the launch did not necessarily mean that the ChiComs had developed an ICBM, which makes sense—the Delta is derived from the shorter ranged Thor IRBM.  Still, Intelligence analysts estimated Communist China might be able to develop and deploy 10 to 25 intercontinental ballistic missiles by mid-1975, which could threaten the United States. 

Or as Tom Lehrer might sing, "China's got the Bomb, but have no fear—they can't wipe us out for at least five years!" 

Japan concurred, officials saying that if China had developed a guidance system for satellite launching, it soon would be able to fire intercontinental missiles with high precision.  Some have expressed concern that, with the Communist Chinese entering the missile race, ABM development will be accelerated, derailing the ongoing Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT). 

Colour photograph of a hardback book bearing the title 'Why ABM - Policy issues in the missile defense controversy Ed. Johan J. Holst and William Schneider Jr.

More positive were the U.K., whose Minister of Technology, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, congratulated Chinese government, their engineers and space workers on the launch, and West Germany, whose Bochum Observatory called the event a greater technological feat than the 1957 launch of Russia's Sputnik 1.

Meanwhile, the Soviets, long on the outs with their erstwhile sister country, devoted just 10 words on an inside page of Pravda to the launch.  Tit for tat—the Red Chinese don't talk about Soviet flights, either.  Romania, on the other hand, in a wider orbit from the USSR than other Warsaw Pact states, congratulated the Chinese for "fresh successes in the field of scientific investigation of outer space," and Albania, a long-time supporter of the Chicoms, also hailed the achievement.  North Vietnam's news agency said that the launching "brings out the supremacy of socialism and contributes to the development of science and technology in the interests of progressive mankind."  That rounds out the Communist response.

Pakistan President Yahya Khan, in a message to Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, called the launch a "great step forward," demonstrating the progress of China’s technology.  He said the feat "by our friendly neighbor has been received by us with a feeling of admiration."  It is no coincidence that India and Red China have been trading shots across their border, so even though Pakistan is far from a Communist country, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" seems to obtain.

Interestingly, Red China's first satellite is believed to have been the brain-child of Tsien Hsueh-shen, a former MIT and Cal Tech scientist who was a high-ranking Pentagon adviser during World War II.  He was later charged with being a Communist Party member and booted from America in 1955.

B&W Photograph of Tsien Hsueh-shen wearing a suit, looking directly at the camera as his body is turning to the left.  He seems to have a slightly wry expression
Tsien at his deportation hearing in 1950

Well, we certainly showed them!

Communist Octuplets

On the 25th, the Soviets brought off what I believe is their first eight-in-one satellite launch.  Kosmoses 336 through 343 went into medium Earth orbit around the 1000 mile high mark.  No information has been released about the spacecraft, but it reminds me a bit of how we launch eight Initial Defense Communications Satellite Program (IDCSP) satellites at a time on Titan rockets.  This suggests that the Soviets are developing a constellation of military communications satellites separate from their Molniya high-orbit comsats—perhaps for global military use, perhaps for use by missile subs or far-flung Communist countries like Cube or North Vietnam.  It also means that the Russians have perfected the "space bus" architecture for rockets, allowing the deployment of multiple satellites from a single vehicle.

Artist's rendering of a Transtage deploying IDCSP satellites
Artist's rendering of a Titan Transtage deploying IDCSP satellites similar to how the Soviets might have dispersed their Kosmoses

Incidentally, we (America) are a lot more on the ball with regard to Soviet satellites than I thought.  Not only are we able to identify which of the "science" Kosmoses are spy sats, but we can even determine trends in their cadence and capabilities.  Aviation Weekly had an article on it earlier this month, and it was fascinating reading.

Part 1 of a spread of two photographs of a chart where the rows represent years from 1966 at the bottom to 1969 at the top, and columns of January through June.  Distributed temporally are the blocks of time representing recoverable reconnaissance satellite launches
Part 2 of the two photograph spread, covering July through December and presenting a slim total at the far right, showing that the launch rate increased slightly in 1969 during the periods of border clashes with China, and otherwise maintaining a twice-monthly cadence

Chart of soviet launches of recoverable reconnaissance satellites for each year from 1962 through 1969 across two sites, showing both a steady increase, and that while Tyuratam was the initial site to be conducting launches, that the new Plesetsk launch site has recently surpassed it in capacity, and noting that the newer extended duration satellites debuted from the Plesetsk site

So, all in all, an exciting month for the Eastern Hemisphere.  Let's just hope that these developments presage the peaceful development of space…and not doom for the world

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[April 20, 1970] Not the final quarry (May 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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

Tunnel light

There have been a lot of happy endings recently.  The postal strike is over, thanks to the government agreeing to an 8% raise for federal employees.  Ditto the air traffic control strike.  Nixon's third nominee to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Justice Harry Blackmun, isn't somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan.  The Apollo 13 astronauts made it back home by the skin of their teeth.

Newspaper photo of Harry Blackmun

But of course, the old stories go on.  The Vietnam war has grown to include Cambodia—if Domino Theory is to be believed, we'll soon be fighting in the streets of Canberra.  Teachers are on strike in California; Governor Reagan says they're "against the children".  And actor Michael Strong says you can't walk the streets of the nation's capital without a good chance of getting mugged.

And so, it is appropriate that the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is a mixed bag.  Some of it will thrill you, some of it will leave you cold.  On the other hand, none of it will mug you.

The Issue at Hand

A robot sits on a nighttime apocalyptic desert reading a trail of issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction
by Mel Hunter

The Final Quarry, by Eric Norden

Two Englishmen are on the hunt in the backwoods of Thessaly.  One is a corpulent and uncouth Lord, looking to bag the last unicorn.  The other is his guide looking to bag the Lord and take the half million drachmas the noble carries on his person.  Gradually, we learn the exact year of this expedition (a little over half a century ago).  The timing is signicant.

An interesting story that intertwines unicorns with Christian theology and ties their extinction with the death of good things in the world.  The Book of Revelations…with hooves and horns.  It's all very visceral and sensory, with full descriptions of each meal, and with doom dogging every footstep.  A singularly F&SF sort of tale.

Four stars.

Scientist comes out of lab with sign reading 'the end is nigh'—associate says 'I don't like the looks of this!'
by Gahan Wilson

Books, by Barry Malzberg

The F&SF reviewer roulette ball has landed on Barry this month.  He laments that the SF writing community is small enough that one hates to disparage one's peers lest they end up crossing paths on some other project.  This does not keep Malzberg from condeming Moorcock's The Black Corridor ("It is really not at all good…[but] I remain convinced that someday Moorcock will write a subtantial novel, fully worthy of his pretensions and our expectations), Zelazny's Damnation Alley ("The flaw of the novella was that it had no characterological interior or true sense of pace; and instead of concentrating his novelization on those areas whih might have done some good (like ironic counterpoint), Zelazny has simply souped up and extended the action; and, if I don't miss my guess, he has put in a wee bit of sex."), and Orbit 5 ("…not so terribly happy with, and I am not sure why this is so.")

He also was disappointed with the SFWA's latest compilation, Nebula Award Stories Four ("These are good stories, but even the writers, I think, would attest to the fact that better work was published in 1968, if not by others, then by themselves.")

Better luck next time, Barry!

Runesmith, by Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon

If you combine Ellison and Sturgeon and then dedicate the story to Cordwainer Smith, you're setting yourself up for some high scrutiny!  Luckily, this tale (more or less) survives the heightened expectations.

The story's antihero is also named Smith, though perhaps his name is symbolic, for through a knowledge of the occult arts, he has wrought the near destruction of all of humanity.  Unknowingly cultivated and spurred on by the evil ones who lie just beyond the veil of sense, Smith has reduced virtually every city, slaughtered every person, all by casting knuckle bones from a bag and reading their divination.

Now, with guilt gnawing at him, and with the last few survivors aiming to gnaw on him, the true instigators of this hell-on-Earth lick their chops and prepare to return the world they once called theirs.

The problem with this (beautifully told) story is that it has a happy ending.  Now, I like happy endings (viz. the first paragraph of this article) but this tale doesn't really earn its.  It just decides to lurch in a positive direction with no setup, derailing a consistent tone and the macabre satisfaction at seeing just how destructive evil can be.  The conclusion comes off as twee and affected.

Three stars.

Voices Answering Back: The Vampires, by Lawrence Raab

The last couple of lines are the best part of this overlong proem.  Two stars.

The Fourth Tense of Time, by Albert Teichner

An old zillionaire has made his fortune through a talent for close-term prognostication.  He can see just a few hours into the future, which is enough for horse racing and the stock market.  But it comes at a cost: terrible migraine headaches.

When a scientist learns of the zillionaire's talents, he labors to identify the source, in the process, lengthening the rich fellow's future range.

But what happens when one's ability to foretell what's to come crosses over the barrier between life and death?

There's a lot of promise to this story, but there's also a bit of repetitious belaboring, and the conclusion's tea is somewhat weak.  Three stars.

The Fabulous Bartender, by Paul Darcy Boles

The Greek God Bacchus takes a short-term gig as a bartender.  Everyone has a good time.

That's all there is to this affable but longwinded story.  I guess the challenge to the reader is to see how long it takes him to figure out who's serving the drinks.

Two stars.

Nobody Believes an Indian, by G. C. Edmondson

We once again go South of the Border for a flip, steeped-in-Mexican-culture tale of Edmonsdon's "mad friend".  This time around, the narrator and his pal are guests of one of Pancho Villa's generales de dedo (brevet generals) who is rumored to be a pot grower, the kind subject to occasional field burnings to satisfy the Yankees up North.

Turns out that the indio general has got something significantly more harmful than marijuana between his rows.

Fun, frivolous, and more travelogue than tale, it passes the pages pleasantly.  Three stars.

Playing the Game, by Isaac Asimov

Magazine graphic that precedes the science article

The Good Doctor explains the Doppler effect and its application not only to sound waves but to light waves.  Nothing new for me, but it's a very cogent detailing of a fundamental astronomical principle.

Five stars.

Murder Will In, by Frank Herbert

Once again, we have a piece sprouting from the death of Douglas Bailey.  The opening passage is always the same—Bailey is euthanized.  But what comes after that is up to the commissioned author.

In this case, we find that Bailey has been inhabited for most of his life by a pair of thought beings: the Tegas, which seeks out those with inclination to murder as the easiest prey, and the Bacit, which seems to be superego to the Tegas ego (and id?)

The problem is, Bailey was euthanized in a future in which the greatest human technology is that of control.  There are precious few suitable hosts for the Tegas/Bacit to jump to in this mechanized, soulless age.  And when he does manage to escape the dying Bailey, the Tegas learns that humanity is onto him, killing his hosts to find the alien presence.  The alien presence finds himself at the mercy of an interrogator without emotion, only a driving motive.

But perhaps even the most passionless interrogator betrays a passion after all, one that makes him vulnerable to Tegas control…

I give this one marks for creativity, but it is told with the typical Herbert over-the-top quality.  Frank is rarely one for subtlety.  I'd half expected it to turn out that there were multiple Tegases on Earth, and they'd all sought refuge in the last human with emotion, but that turned out not to be the case.

Instead, we get a lot of vivid, emotionally charged passages; some innovative alien perspectives; but nothing particularly exciting.

Three stars.

Summing up

The star-o-meter puts this issue on the positive side of things, and that feels right.  Gone are heady days of the 1950s when Boucher was the editor, but things seemed to have stabilized for F&SF into something consistent and unique.  It's not so much The New Thing now—more of an aping of an old style by folks who don't quite remember the dance moves.  Still, it's good enough for the nonce.

And that's some kind of hope.

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 10, 1970] A Style in Treason (May 1970 Galaxy)

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[Be sure to tune in tonight at 7PM PDT for Science Fiction Theater!  It's Nimoytacular—plus Apollo 13 pre-launch coverage!]

A color photograph of Leonard Nimoy and a white woman standing together in front of a curtain.  He is looking down and to the right of the frame and the woman's eyes are closed as she leans on his shoulder.

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

Backlash in D.C.

50,000 people marched on Washington last week protesting the course of the Vietnam War.  Sure, you think, another day ending in "y", right?

Except these kooks were protesting for the war!

A black and white photograph of a pro-war protest outdoors in Washington DC.  Government buildings are in the background.  In the foreground a group of white women are holding up a long banner which reads Let's Demand Victory in Vietnam. The woman at the center of the banner is holding two American flags crossed over her chest.  Behind them a crowd of people are holding up signs.  The only one legible reads In God We Trust.
Photo taken by Tom Norpell

Organized by a fundamentalist coalition, religious fervor dominated the gathering.  That said, there were plenty of Birchers and Nazis in attendance, too, making this a truly ecumenical demonstration.

A black and white photograph of white men marching down a city street while carrying banners on long poles.  At the top of each pole is a symbol of a lightning bolt inside a circle.  Beneath that a sign reads NSRP, the acronym for the National States Rights Party.  The banner extending down from the sign also has the circle-and-lightning-bolt motif, with God Bless America written above and below it. A crowd of onlookers is in the background.
Photo taken by Tom Norpell

There were even counter-counter protestors.

A black and white photograph of a white man with chin length dark hair standing outdoors.  He is wearing a knit cap and leather jacket and smoking a cigarette. He has his hands in his pockets and is frowning.  Over his jacket he is wearing a pillowcase with arm and head holes cut in the seams.  On it is painted Thou Shalt Not Kill. -God.  The center of the O in Not has a button attached to it showing a hand making a peace sign. A woman in an overcoat and rain hood is standing behind him.
Photo taken by Tom Norpell

Which poses the question: can Nixon still call them a "silent" majority?

A black and white photograph from a newspaper showing more of the people attending the pro-war protest.  In the center front is a man in a wheelchair holding an Merican flag, with another man standing behind him guiding the chair.  A woman to his left is holding a sign with multiple slogans pasted on it, including Stand Up for America and Wallace 72. In the background other protesters are carrying American flags as well as other signs, mostly reading In God We Trust or Victory in Vietnam. The newspaper caption reads: March for Victory: Some of the estimated 50,000 people who took part in the parade advocating victory in Vietnam as they assembled in Washington yesterday.

Calm after the storm

There's really nothing to protest in the latest issue of Galaxy, which offers, in the main, a pleasant reading experience.

A color photograph of the cover of the May 1970 edition of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine Along the left side are listed stories by David Gerrold, James Blish, Avram Davidson, and Arthur C. Clarke.  The image shows a blue and black blob-like shape with multiple eye-like orbs embedded in it, against a yellow background.  Other orbs extend upwards from the blob, attached by black threads.  Parts of the blob seem to have been pulled up like pieces of dough around these upper orbs. The upper orbs have, from left to right, a green-cast image of half of a man's face (the other half is in shadow); A red-cast image of a man standing and looking outward; and a star or galaxy against a backdrop of outer space.
by Jack Gaughan for A Style in Treason

The DDTs, by Ejler Jakobsson

Our new(ish) editor starts with a rather odd screed against the banning of DDT.  What's a few birth defects compared to the plunge in malaria throughout the globe?

I understand the idea of "acceptable losses", but surely there must be a better way to combat disease than with malady.  Let's strive for the best of both worlds.

A Style in Treason, by James Blish

The two-page title spread for the story A Style in Treason.  The title, author, and story summary are written on the right-side page, superimposed over the image.  THe image shows a black and white charcoal collage-style drawing of many different faces of men and women in a variety of poses.  All are in light grey except one person near the center of the image who is drawn in stark black and white, looking up and to the left.
by Brock Gaughan

Two empires vie for control of the galaxy.  One is the realm of High Earth ("not necessarily Old Earth—but not necessarily not, either") .  The other is authoritarian Green Exarch, composed entirely of non-humans.  The humanoid worlds, and the ex-Earth planets, are fair game for both sides.  The plum of the spiral nebula, perhaps even the linchpin, is rich Boadicea, proud first to rebel against the cradle of humanity.  If one could claim that world as an ally—or a conquest—it could turn the galactic tides of fortune.

Enter Simon du Kuyl, Head Traitor (read: spy) of High Earth.  His plan is to appear to sell out High Earth but really buy Boadicea.  His sensitive information, that may or may not be true, is that High Earth and the Green Exarch are actually in limited collusion.  But the success of du Kuyl's mission lies in delivering this information to the right people at the right time, and perhaps even to be caught in the act.

This is an odd piece from Blish, a sort of Cordwainer Smith meets Roger Zelazny.  It feels a bit forced at times, and the ending is a touch opaque.  On the other hand, I like Cordwainer Smith, who is no longer offering up new sources.  And Zelazny's own works have been more than a bit forced (and opaque) these days.  In comparison, Blish's work feels the more grounded.

Four stars.

The God Machine, by David Gerrold

The two-page title spread for the story The God Machine.  The title, author, and story summary are written on the right-side page in a white space in the middle of the image.  It is unclear whether the image has been erased under the title or if there is simply a white space in the picture.  The picture is an abstract black and white drawing.  The outline is uneven and curves around the page, and is filled in with straight lines and cross-hatched shading.  At the center of the left-side page, a circular graphic is superimposed, consisting of seven birds surrounding and facing inward toward a circle with the letters SS inside it.
by Jack Gaughan

As I guessed might happen last time, the tales of HARLIE (Human Analogue Robot, Life Input Equivalents) the sapient machine continue.  This is a direct sequel to the first story, in which HARLIE occasionally "trips out", distorting his inputs so as to stimulate gibberish output.  Now we find out why he's doing it.

HARLIE wants to know the meaning of life, particularly the meaning of his life.  Auberson, his liaison and "father" is stumped.  After all, if humans haven't figured that out, how can we explain it to a machine, however human?

In the end, HARLIE decides religion is the answer…but whose religion?  His?

Once again, a pretty good tale, although the pages of CAPITAL LETTER DIALOGUE WITHOUT PUNCTUATION CAN BE HARD TO FOLLOW.  Also, Gerrold hasn't yet figured out how to write convincing romance.

Three stars.

Neutron Tide, by Arthur C. Clarke

This very short piece is mostly a set-up for a truly bad pun, but I appreciated how it takes the piss out of Niven's Neutron Star by demonstrating the physical impossibility of a close approach to such an object.

Three stars.

The two-page title spread for the story Neutron Tide.  The title and author's name are written on the right-side page, superimposed over the right edge of the image, which is mostly on the left-side page.  A series of concentric circles suggest a neutron star.  A blocky object appears to be flying toward it, with flames extending backward from it toward the viewer.
by Jack Gaughan

The Tower of Glass (Part 2 of 3), by Robert Silverberg

The two-page title spread for the story The Tower of Glass, Part II.  THe title and author's name are written at the top of the left-side page.  Below, and then extending upward toward the right, the image shows a tower extending toward the sky in sharply forced perspective. At its base, people appear to be congregating around a blocky machine.  In the right foreground, a woman with a scared expression extends a hand palm-out toward the viewer as if to stop something, while her other hand clutches her chest.
by Jack Gaughan

The tale of old Krug's tower, the one that will reach 1500 meters in height to communicate with the stars, continues.  Not much happens in this installment.  Krug's ectogene (artificial womb) assistant Spaulding demands to see the android shrine.  Krug's android right-hand man Thor Watchman misdirects him with tragic results: when two members of the Android Equality Party approach Krug, Spaulding assumes it is an assassination attempt, and he kills one of them.  This causes a crisis in faith among the androids who worship Krug as a redeemer.

If the pace is rather turgid, the philosophical points raised are fascinating.  Four stars.

Timeserver, by Avram Davidson

The title image for the story Timeserver.  The title, author, and story summary are written below the image.  The image shows charcoal line drawings of three men who appear to be inside a drinking glass. One faces down with hands on knees as though he had just finished a race.  One faces the viewer as though preparing to run.  The third stands upright but leaning to the side as if drawing back from something he is looking at on the ground.
by Jack Gaughan

This story is about a fellow who lives in an overcrowded, underloving future.  Surcease from gloom is gotten by scraping off the scarred outer layers of one's psyche, exposing the unsullied id for a short while.  Except our story's hero has been crushed by society so long, there's really nothing underneath.

These days, Davidson is writing nonsense that makes R. A. Lafferty scratch his head.  Both facile and confusing, I didn't like it much.  Two stars.

Galaxy Bookshelf (Galaxy, May 1970), by Algis Budrys

The title image for the Galaxy Bookshelf column by Algis Budrys.  The words are written in a calligraphic font inside a square border with rounded corners.  Stars and planets are drawn around and inside the words.

Budrys devotes his entire column to savaging Silverberg's Up the Line:

Maybe he just wanted to write some passages about Constantinople and going to bed with Grandma.  That would be a pretty smart-arse thing to do, though, considering how much auctorial effort and reader seventy-five centses are involved here.

It's a non-book.  I guess that's what Up the Line is.  It isn't sf — neither tech fiction nor any other previously recognized kind.  It's a new kind of non-book.  And as you may have gathered, it doesn't even find anything new in Grandma.

Whatever Became of the McGowans?, by Michael G. Coney

A black and white line drawing.  In the foreground stand three people who appear to be turning into trees.  Their arms end in branches, and twigs extend from their heads, backs, and shoulders.  They no longer have facial features.  In the background, two people stand in high grass.  They are holding hands and looking at the trees.  A stylized sun is overhead.
by Jack Gaughan

The planet Jade seems like a paradise—setting aside the complete lack of animal life and the eerie quiet.  A couple has settled down to raise Jade Grass for export; their only disappointment is that their neighbors, the McGowans, seem to have disappeared.

As the months go by, unsettling things happen.  Time seems to rush by.  The settler couple and their new baby develop a kind of jaundiced skin.  They feel compelled to spend all of their time naked in the sun.  Eventually, their feet grow roots…

The scientific explanation at the end the weak point of this story, just complete nonsense, and unnecessary.  The rest of the story, though, is really nicely told.  It feels very '50s Galaxy, which is not a bad mood to evoke.

Three stars.

Sunpot (Part 4 of 4), by Vauhn Bodé

The title images for the story Sunpot.  The title, author, and story summary are written above the images, which are in two panels like a comic strip.  The left shows a phallic spaceship above a planet, with a nearby star and its corona in the background among a sea of stars. The right panel shows the same spaceship and planet from a different angle - this time the planet is above the spaceship, and the sea of stars is below.

The Sunpot crashes into Venus. 

Two stars.

The Editorial View: Overkill, by Frederik Pohl

The ex-editor of Galaxy offers up a short piece noting the correlation between the rate of infant mortality and the era of above-ground nuclear bomb testing.  Apparently, kids were dying less and less in infancy…until Strontium 90 entered the environment in a big way.  For 15 years, until the Test Ban Treaty, infant mortality no longer declined.  Now it has resumed its drop.

Correlation is not causation, but folks are at least starting to investigate the possible connection.

Summing Up

And there you have it!  A perfectly decent read, trodding the middle road between The New Thing and Nostalgia.  I like Jakobssons's mag, and I intend to continue my subscription when it comes up.

A black and white image of the subscription reminder at the end of the magazine.  It reads: REMEMBER: new subscriptions and changes of address require 5 weeks to process!

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


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[April 4, 1970] Twixt Scylla and Charybdis (S&T's The Flight of the Goeben)

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

A little over half a century ago, the actions of two ships changed the entire course of human events.

Black-and-white photograph of a warship.
SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau bombarding Phillipeville on the French-Algerian coast (W. Malchin, 1915)

In 1912, two warships of the German Kriegsmarine were stationed in the Mediterranean.  The battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, in the event of war, were to raid French shipping between Africa and Europa.  When war broke out between Austria-Hungary and Serbia on July 28, 1914, the vessels were in the Adriatic port of Pola.  Admiral Souchon, commander of the German duo, decided he didn't want to be bottled up, so he took his ships to the central Mediterranean and waited for orders.

They arrived: head east for the Aegean Sea and ultimately the Dardanelles, the strait on which Turkish Istanbul was situated.  There, Souchon was to offer the two modern vessels to the aging and inefficient Ottomans.  In return, the Sultan would bring Turkey into The Great War on the side of the Central Powers.

Thus ensued a grand chase, which the British lost.  The rest is history.

But what if Souchon had been given different orders?  What if the British had had different priorities?  Such are the What Ifs that compelling parallel universes are made of—and the subject of the newest game to arrive in the magazine Strategy & Tactics.

The Game

Promotional logo for the game The Flight of the Goeben.

Flight of the Goeben is a two-player S&T magazine game, which depicts the cat-and-mouse game played between the small German task force (the titular Goeben and escort, Breslau) and the entire British Mediterranean fleet.  The British player has the twin tasks of hunting the German ships and also protecting a convoy of French ships escorting troop transports from Algeria to Marseilles.  The German player has a random objective that is not determined until six turns into the game; it could direct the Kriegsmarine ships to go to Turkey, as historically, or head out through Gibraltar to join the main fleet.  On the way, the ships may get points for shelling French ports and sinking the aforementioned transports.

The game is played blind, like Battleship, with each player having his/her own copy of the board—a strategic hex map of the Mediterranean.  Ship-to-ship combat is handled simplistically, though provisions exist for using the strategic game as a scenario-generator for detailed tactical ship combat.  Tactical rules, based on Fletcher Pratt's naval game, are published in the same issue. I have not played them yet.

There are very few counters: in the basic game, the Germans have two warships and three colliers. The British have seven warships, and the French have three warship group counters and three transport counters.  This all makes Goeben a very portable game, ideal for coffee-house playing!  Particularly given its short length: like Crete, a typical (basic) game takes 2-4 hours.

Photograph of assorted papers, notebooks, maps and dice on a long table with a red tablecloth. A white man is sitting in the background, looking at the camera.
Playing against Dan in our "War Room"

The Germans start in the Adriatic or Ionian seas three days before war has broken out between the British and the Hun.  All of the British ships start out in the island port of Malta.  The game is played in 6-hour turns from August 2 to August 12, during which both sides have variable (and secret) objectives.  The Germans do not know their victory conditions until they make their secret die roll in the middle of August 3, and the British don't know theirs until the end of the same day.

Nevertheless, one thing is known: the Germans have the overriding goal of getting their ships out of the Mediterranean before the game is done.  But the British get more or fewer points for preventing a German escape to the East or West, and more or fewer points for getting the transports safely to France. At the end of the game (once the Germans have escaped, been sunk or time runs out), whoever has the most points wins.

The Rules

Goeben really breaks away from the old operational hex-and-counters and Zones of Control dynamic.  Each turn, both sides move their ships simultaneously, 1-3 spaces per turn.  Each ship has a finite amount of coal, which gets burned up at increasingly rapid rates as speed increases.  Ships refuel in ports (the British can refuel in French ports, the German at Pola in Austria-Hungary; the Germans can also refuel slowly and illicitly in Italian ports or, somewhat faster, by linking up with one of their three unarmed colliers).  After all movement is concluded, if a player's ship entered a coastline or port or strait, he/she must inform the other player of this fact.  Except at night—then there is a 50/50 chance of making the move without being spotted.  Night turns take place on last six-hours of every day.  British ships cannot move along Italian coastlines because the Italians are neutral.  Sort of; the Germans have no such restrictions.

After movement, a player may search for the other in Battleship (or Midway) fashion.  First, the player calls out the Sea he (or she) has a ship in.  If the other player has a ship in that sea, the fact must be reported.  The searching player may then elect to call out the Area (subdivision of the Sea) containing a ship.  Again, the other player must answer.  Finally, the searcher may call out the Hex a ship is in.  If both sides have ships in the Hex, combat may occur—night offers the searched player a 50/50 chance of not having to report position. The same is true if the Hex being searched contains islands.

Photograph from above, showing the same game materials as the previous photograph.
Both game boards, side-by-side, from above

As can be seen, searching is a two-way street.  The more specific the searcher is, the more information passed on to the opponent.  The German colliers act as decoys as well as sources of fuel, and the British might chase one all over creation thinking it's the Goeben.  Once a ship is found, it can be pursued rather than detected in the conventional fashion.  The German ships tend to outrun their British counterparts, but it takes a lot of fuel.

Combat (forbidden until war breaks out on August 5!) is handled very simply.  Each side rolls a die for each ship, potentially damaging an opponent.  Big ships must fight big ships first.  Little ships get an adverse modifier when attacking big ships.  Little ships get sunk quickly.  Big ships can take speed and armament damage before sinking.

There are special rules governing the French ships in the basic game. The French battlegroups start in Toulon and, on August 3, make their way slowly to three different African ports, where they will escort the transports back to Toulon.  Once the convoys are underway, they can be attacked by the Germans.  The French get two shots at the Germans, and if the Germans survive (likely at least the Goeben will), the transports are sunk.

The Advanced game allows for all of the Mediterranean major powers' navies to come into play, and the French get real ships rather than escort counters.  Both sides also get to roll on the What-If tables, and all sorts of neat alternatives can happen, including the British and Germans getting extra ships to play with.

Gameplay

Photograph of the same game materials, this time on a cafeteria table. A white woman wearing eyeglasses looks concentrated on her game.
Playing against Janice at the local diner

Even the basic game presents a wide variety of strategic options.  The tricky part is that neither side knows what it needs to do at first.  It's easier for the British, who need to cover all of their bases.  The Germans have to watch out as, if they gamble too strongly on one direction early on, they may find they have to go clear across the map to get any victory points.  Using the night turns is essential to keep one's moves a secret—sailing through the Italian straits to get to the Western Med, for instance.  The Germans have to wisely use their colliers not only as mobile fuel depots but as decoys.

It is a tense nail-biter for both sides: f or the British, the Germans are elusive buggers who could be anywhere, and there are too many spots on the map that are far enough from Malta to be untenable stations for the coal-hungry vessels; for the Germans, the British seem to be everywhere, and the colliers are easy, slow targets.

From what I can tell, the game is pretty well balanced.  And because of the hidden victory conditions, no one really knows who's winning until the end.

Close-up photograph of a hexagonal game map and two small rectangular game tokens.
The Breslau is spotted by the second British cruiser squadron off the coast of Sicily

Conclusion

Dave Williams, the designer of Anzio and Anzio Beachhead, really hit it out of the park with this one.  It's innovative, fast, and very playable.  Strategy does not become quickly stereotyped.  I do not know how the advanced game plays yet (I suspect it is superfluous), nor have I tried the tactical game (which seems like it would only really be fun in the advanced game).  Even just taking the basic, strategic game, Flight of the Goeben is really quite fun.  It has already replaced Crete as my game of choice.

Five stars.

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


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Science / Space Race

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

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


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

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

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

Out, damn spot!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting for the dawn

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

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

Ill Met in Lankhmar, by Fritz Leiber

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four stars.

Books, by James Blish

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

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

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

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

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

Soulmate, by Charles W. Runyon

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

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

Four stars.

In Black of Many Colors, by Neil Shapiro

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

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

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

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

Four stars.

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

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

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

Three stars.

The Wizard of Atala, by Richard A. Lupoff

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

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

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

Three stars.

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

The Nobel Prize That Wasn't, by Isaac Asimov

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

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

Four stars.

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

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

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

Four stars.

Here comes the sun

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

Is there a literary equivalent of Stonehenge to pray at?

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

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


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[March 14, 1970] To Venus and Hell's Gate… are we Out of Our Minds?

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

To Venus!  To Venus!, by David Grinnell

A book cover in color, showing three astronauts in spacesuits pushing a small, tanklike vehicle up a rocky incline against a orange, cloudy backdrop. One of the spacesuits is bright red. Beneath the title is the legend 'S.O.S. from an analogue of Hell!'
cover by John Schoenherr

Warning: the latest Ace Double contains Communist propaganda!

The premise to David Grinnell's (actually Ace editor and Futurian Donald Wolheim) newest book is as follows: it is the 1980s, and the latest Soviet Venera has confirmed the initial findings of Venera 4, not only reporting lower temperatures and pressures than our Mariner 5, but spotting a region of oxygen, vegetation, and Earth-tropical climate.

And they're launching an manned expedition there in less than two months.

Of course, NASA doesn't believe the obvious Russian lies, but since they were planning on sending a nuclear-powered unmanned Mariner to the Planet of Love at the same time (taking advantage of the favorable orbital relationship between Earth and Venus that occurs every 19 months), why not put a three-man crew onboard?  That way, the Stars and Stripes can beat the Sickle and Hammer to put first boots on the superheated ground.

But upon landing, the Mariner descent module stumbles and wrecks, stranding the three Venus-nauts "in an analogue of Hell".  Now their only hope is to make the 100 mile trek to the Soviet landing site and hope there are actually cosmonauts there to help.

To Venus is a highly technical book, closely related to, say, Martin Caidin's Marooned (recently turned into a big-budget but turgid picture).  The characters are so much cardboard, only developing the rudiments of a personality on the Big Hike.  Much of the setup beggars imagination.  Setting aside an even partially inhabitable Venus, the idea that a manned mission to the second planet could be trained for and launched in 43 days is absurd.  Recall that Pioneer 5, originally intended for Venus, was turned into a generic long-distance probe because it couldn't be built and launched in time.

For the most part, though, the technical descriptions seem pretty reasonable.  This is the first story set on "real" Venus I've read apart from the first of the subgenre, Niven's "Becalmed in Hell" (interestingly enough, included in Wollheim's anthology of 1965's best science fiction—coincidence?) The Have Spacesuit, Will Travel-esque journey portion, which comprises the latter half of the book, is genuinely thrilling.

I think three stars is appropriate, maybe another half star if any of the above elements are your bag.

The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb

A book cover in color, showing a man in a bubble-headed spacesuit clambering through waist-high mushrooms. Behind him is a giant, ethereal figure in a red cloak. The figure has yellow skin and red eyes, and is holding a pale green bottle. In contrast to the title and author's name in black letters, the subtitle is in white, and reads 'He sought the needle of eternal youth in the haystack of quick deaths'
cover by Kelly Freas

Blink and you miss it—just two and a half years ago, Britisher E. C. Tubb introduced the starfaring adventurer, Dumarest.  I quite enjoyed his first outing, The Winds of Gath, and Blue found the sequel, Derai to be passable.

Well, here we are, 18 months later, and I find we've missed books 3 and 4 of the Dumarest series, and I've already got #5 in my hands!  We're talking Moorcock/Silverberg levels of prolific here.

Once again, the setting is a hellish world plagued with poverty.  This time, it is Scar, orbiting closely around a red sun with a rotation period of 120 days.  Thus, each "season" is really a quarter of a day.  The reason people inhabit the planet, which alternates between savage heat, monsoon rains, and bitter cold, is the profusion of fungi on it.  All manner of molds and mushrooms cover the land, blooming in the brief summer.  They offer foodstuffs, medicines, hallucinogenics.  Above all, people seek "the golden spore", whose product is the most valuable.

The cast of characters come from the same castes as in the first novel (and presumably the other books, too).  We have native partners, driven by profit-motive.  We have representatives of the United Brotherhood, whose creed emphasizes paucity, but whose adherents sometimes chafe at that requirement.  We have a cyber, akin to the mentats of Dune, devoid of emotion but not ambition…and fierce loyalty to the computerized hive mind of his kind.  And we have fate-obsessed Jocelyn, heir to the throne of the poor planet Jest, along with his harsh and grasping new bride, Adrienne.

Dumarest's immediate goal is to raise sufficient funds to get off the world.  His ultimate mission, as it has been since Book #1, is to locate Earth among the hundreds of thousands of possible systems in the galaxy.  Suffice to say, he does not locate Terra in this volume—but he does get just the least bit closer to divining its location.

This really is a fun series.  While this installment is not as compelling as the first book, and it shows every sign of having been composed in haste (particularly the inelegant repetition of certain turns of phrase, and the reusing of stock characters), I have to say that I am rather hooked by the series, which is sort of a cross between Dune (politics and technology) and Earthblood (the run-down worlds and the quest for Earth).

Three and a half stars.

A picture of a young Black woman, wearing an outfit with planetary patterns, as well as a silver necklace.
by Amber Dubin

Hell's Gate, by Dean Koontz

A picture of a book cover, in color. The letters of the title are red and white striped. There is a strange, spiky machine in the foreground, suggesting an airhose. Behind it, a purple-red humanoid figure is stepping into a fleshy, red and green glob, somewhat shaped like a heart. In small black letters beneath the author's name, a legend reads 'Time-lines clash as Earth becomes a battleground for alien creatures and men of the future!'
Cover by Kelly Freas.

Although Dean R. Koontz' first full-length work was only recently published in 1968, Koontz has already built a reputation as a true science fiction suspense thriller novelist. Hell’s Gate keeps up a pulse-pounding pace throughout its pages, fraught with action, violence, mind-bendingly creative integration of complex subplots, beginning with a psychological thrilling secret agent assassin, tying in an alien invasion, and even taking the time to incorporate a tender romance. Throughout, what maintains the tension is the fact that this story is accurately named, as the hero spends the whole of it desperately trying to close the gate separating the world as we know it from a certain doom of a merger with a fireless inferno.

Our unlikely protagonist is Victor Salsbury, a creation of yet-to-be-known scientific technology who appears like a 30 year old man. The history that has been loaded into his memory is that of a successful artist, whose real body has yet to wash up in a small-town American river in the fall of 1970. After a rather jarring awakening in an apple orchard down the river running through said small town, Victor blindly follows his internal programming, which guides him to sneak into an old house and murder its lone occupant. After retreating to a nearby cave to hibernate and heal his wounds suffered in the struggle, Victor awakens again to receive further orders from a computer hidden in the cave with him.

Victor goes on to make use of the implanted memories, orders, supplies and only slightly super-human powers of healing, reflexes, and combat competency to further the objective of the computer, buying the house from a beautiful real estate agent whose uncle happened to be the man he killed. As he gradually acclimates himself to humanity and reality, our hero discovers that he has been placed in this house as a sentry to guard a portal in the basement to a morally bankrupt alien world, intent on sending a force through this gateway to establish a foothold of control on earth.

The developments that ensue are all very straightforward until about two thirds of the way through this ride, when the reader suddenly takes an incredible left turn into a “Land of the Giants” meets “Planet of the Apes”. It was an incredibly inventive and entertaining romp, but I found myself counting the remaining pages because I felt skeptical that the author could successfully explore the sudden digression and still have enough time to return to its original objective in a satisfactory manner.

My only true discomfort with this story was the way it resolved. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say that the conclusion, while artful and delicately laid, doesn’t provide a comfortable wind down of the action. I didn’t exactly expect a neat and detailed epilogue, based on the tone set by the rest of the book, but I did find myself wanting at least a break in the rip-riotous pacing to take a step back and exhale. I understand that it probably would have been hard to make an ending that matched the energy and creativity of the rest of the story, but I did feel like more of an effort could have been made to satisfy the reader. That may be my personal bias, because all of my favorite books have the type of comforting, well-knit endings that make me feel like I just put down a comforting cup of hot chocolate and am now no longer thirsty or cold. I did feel a little of both when I closed and replaced this book on the shelf.

I would like to give this work 5 stars for the adrenaline rush, originality and consistently engaging plotline but I am particularly partial to stories with soft landings or at least ones that don’t end abruptly enough to give me whiplash from its final words.

4 stars

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

Out of Their Minds, by Clifford D. Simak

A picture of a book cover, in color. The background is black, contrasting against a stylized orange shape wreathed in pink flames. The stylized orange shape may be interpreted as a skull, a face, a heart, or a mass of machinery. White letters in a faintly psychedelic font spell out the title.
Cover by Richard Powers.

Horton Smith writes for a living, but has been having trouble with his current book-in-progress; so he decides to return to his hometown of Pilot Knot, which he has not seen in a good while now. While there he hopes to pay a visit to an old friend of his, an eccentric academic (but then don't we all have that friend) named Philip Freeman. Freeman has some funny ideas about the evolution of homo sapiens, or rather had, because it turns out Philip Freeman is dead. The reason for Freeman's death is implied to be much stranger than a mere heart attack, or even foul play. A run-in with a large dinosaur while on the road tells both Smith and the reader that something very unusual is going on, and the dinosaur, which disappears about as quickly as it appeared, is only the beginning. Mythical figures and fictitious characters, from Don Quixote to Satan himself, start flooding into the real world, and these figures largely and inexplicably have it out for Smith. What an unlucky guy.

This is another science-fantasy novel from Simak, who over the past few years has been determined to use his novels as canvases for blurring the line between the genres. I call Out of Their Minds "science-fantasy," but it is really rationalized fantasy, of the sort that frequently appeared in the long gone but not forgotten magazine Unknown, which I don't think Simak ever got to appear in. I could be mistaken.

Freeman, from beyond the grave, provides a scientific explanation for why made-up characters and things from the distant past (at one point Smith finds himself in the middle of Gettysburg, as in the American Civil War battle) have been appearing in "our" world, but it's such a loose explanation that I don't think even Simak believes it. Maybe buying into the explanation is not the point. These figures are unbelievable because they're quite literally figments of the human imagination that have been given flesh, at least temporarily. The only thing more unbelievable than Smith having a casual conversation with Satan (one of the best scenes in the novel, by the way) is his fast-growing relationship with Kathy Adams, a local teacher at Pilot Knot who becomes his designated love interest.

I've been reading Simak for the past 15 years, pretty much ever since I started reading science fiction with enthusiasm, and with one or two exceptions his novels are not him at his best. Indeed, it seems like he uses the novel format as a pretext for indulging himself rather than writing his best work. If you want Simak at his best, you read his short stories (his masterpiece, City, is really a bunch of short stories and interludes rather than a proper novel); but with his longer works, you encounter almost a different writer. Out of Their Minds, had it appeared thirty years ago in Unknown, would have probably been condensed to novella-length, which would have suited it best. On a scene-by-scene basis, it's rather enjoyable, especially once we actually arrive in Pilot Knot (it takes surprisingly long to get there) and a goblin-like creature known as the Referee appears. But even at just 190 pages, it's constipated in its pacing. It could be that, as with most of Simak's other novels, Out of Their Minds is still structured like a short story—one that's been stretched almost to the breaking point.

Yet, for all its apparent flaws, there is something basically admirable about not only Simak's breaking down of what is and is not SF, but his cautious optimism about the human imagination. For the past few years, since I started writing seriously about genre fiction, I've called Simak the anti-Lovecraft (incidentally H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu himself get mentioned in this novel) in the sense that he seems to believe it's not the vast, barren, amoral universe we should be worried about, but rather human folly. Conflict in Simak's fiction, nine times out of ten, arises from human error, and so it makes sense that the menaces in Out of Their Minds spawn from the human mind. Even so, with the drawbacks that come with it in mind, both Simak and Freeman believe that human creativity is ultimately both good and necessary for the race's survival. I have to admit, there is something deeply affirming about that message, even if it comes packaged in an overlong novel such as this.

Three stars. I'm a Simak fan, so I'm biased. You may feel differently.

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


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[March 8, 1970] They say that it's the institution… (April 1970 Galaxy and the incomplete Court)

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

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

There ain't no Justice

It was only a few months that President Dicky tried to ram a conservative Supreme Court justice pick through the Senate to replace the seat left open by the retirement of the much laureled Chief Justice Earl Warren.  Clement Haynworth's candidacy went down to defeat in the Senate on November 21 of last year.

Now up is G. Harrold Carswell, until last year, the Chief Justice of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida.  He was elevated to the Fifth Circuit Appellate Court last June.  To all accounts, he is no less conservative than his predecessor, and he's a (former?) segregationist to boot.  His jurisprudence is also lacking: 40% of his rulings were overturned on appeal!  As Senator McGovern observed, "I find his record to be distinguished largely by two qualities: racism and mediocrity."  Nebraska's Senator Hruska damned with faint praise in his reply, to the effect saying, "Sure he's mediocre…but don't the mediocre warrant representation, too?"

Black-and-white photograph of a white man wearing a judge's robes.
G. Harrold Carswell

But as LIFE and other outlets are noting, Nixon's soothing rhetoric thinly veils a deeply conservative agenda, cutting social programs, withdrawing from world affairs, and trying to stack the Court with allies.  Carswell's nomination passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 16 of this year.  We'll see if the Senate as a whole can stomach him for the Court proper.

Plus ça change

Galaxy's editor Eljer Jakobsson is like Richard Nixon (well, perhaps this is a stretch, but indulge me—I need some sort of transition here!) He is trying all of the styles at his disposal in this new decade of the 1970s and seeing what sticks.  The result remains inconsistent, but not unworthy.

This month's issue trumpets Silverbob's newest serial (sure to be novelized, perhaps as we speak) The Tower of Glass.  Stephen Tall has the lead "breakthrough novelette", which I presumed meant this was his first work, but checking my index cards, I see it's not, since he first wrote a story for Worlds of Tomorrow four years ago.  And then there's Ray Bradbury, undeservedly getting a third of the cover's masthead, presumably because of his pop culture stature.

The editor starts out the issue with an interesting piece, noting that even if there something to genetic races, it's meaningless anyway because none of us stick exclusively to our own (something folks of my persuasion blame on how lovely those shiksas always end up…) It's short and sweet.  Then it's onto the "breakthrough novelette".

Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall, by Stephen Tall

Ink drawing of the faces of three men wearing astronaut helmets, shown against a background of black space. Text next to the drawing says: Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall. Space history echoes with their achievements. If you haven't yet read about them, start now! Text further below shows the name Stephen Tall.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

The three names in the title belong to a trio of compatible astronauts sent on the first expedition to the Jovian moon, Callisto.  A biologist, a mathematician, and a computer engineer, the three have just barely settled in for the several month trip when the first of them, Tattershall, makes an interesing hypothesis: space is a near vacuum but not a complete one—what if the interplanetary cosmos harbors life?  Incredibly diffuse, extremely voluminous life, to be sure.  Unrecognizable at a passing glance, certainly.  But there, nonetheless.

Seek, and ye shall find.  As the Albratross sails for Jupiter, the ship sails by and inside a number of planetoid-sized creatures, sensed only by their abnormal particle densities.  Unfortunately for the "Callistonauts", one of them take a fancy for their krypton-powered engine, and their fuel supply soon becomes dangerously depleted.

If this story appeared in Analog, it'd be a thrilling (or maybe just turgidly technical) SF action piece.  In F&SF, maybe fantastically whimsical or horrific.  Here, it's… pleasant.  More inches are devoted to the genial interactions of the tic-tac-toe playing Allison and Carmichael, the blissful absorption in ant farms of Tattershall, and the dietary proclivities of all three.  Plus, lots of discussion of biology.

Frankly, I suspect space life as posited by Tall is impossible.  Things don't scale like that (and someone tell Irwin Allen…) Still, it's a nice story.

Three stars.

Discover a Latent Moses, by Michael G. Coney

Two-page spread. On the left-hand page is the title: Discover a Latent Moses, then the name of the author, Michael G. Coney, and text further below says: Green Earth was a memory, and memories were not for builders. On the right-hand page is an ink drawing of the top portion of a tower in ruins, the rest of which is covered by the sands of a vast desert.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Here are the adventures of Jacko, Paladin, Switch, Cockade, and the Old Man, a band of humans surviving the Fifth Ice Age perhaps fifty years from now.  They live under a dozen feet of snow in an entombed town, surviving on canned food and bottled booze.  But they dream of land in the warmer West… if only they can outmaneuver the winged, snow skiing, Flesh Eaters.  It reminds me of a bit of Michael Moorcock's series involving the ice schooner.

It's never explained what causes the big freeze.  The general consensus of scientists is that industrial emissions will cause a global warming, but I've read at least one article lately that suggests smog particles will block the Sun and cause cooling.  Maybe that's it.  Or maybe, like in Robert Silverberg's Time of the Great Freeze, the next Ice Age will trump any artificial effects.

Anyway, the story is excitingly told and the characters vivid, if cardboard.  It's enjoyable reading, but it brings little new to the table.

Three stars.

The Tower of Glass (Part 1 of 3), by Robert Silverberg

Two-page spread with an ink drawing of amorphous gelatinous blobs that seem alive. At the bottom of the right-hand page is the title: The Tower of Glass, the name of the author, Robert Silverberg, and text further below says: Krug rivaled God Almighty as the creator of Heaven and Earth and Man. Now he just wanted to talk to all three of them!
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Robert Silverberg sure loves him some dark futures.

Over the next several decades, the world will undergo plague and war that mow down the Third World.  Birth control and ennui take care of the rest.  But the productivity of the race remains as high as ever, thanks to mechanization, computerization…and the development of androids.  These perfect physical specimens range from moronic (the gammas) to brilliant (the rarefied alphas—someone's been reading Huxley), and they fill the role of technician, nanny, nurse, and (but only secretly) lover.

The much-reduced human population lives effete, rich, and pampered, interplanetary and even nearby interstellar, knit globally by a network of "transmats" that eliminate commutes and homogenize culture.  This, then, is the world 250 years hence, contemporary with Star Trek, but oh so different.

For one thing, this is no utopia.  The androids seem quiescent, but there is indication that they might be on the verge of insurrection, or perhaps being manipulated to do so by human interests.  And then there are the women…

Silverberg seems to hate worlds in which women are anything but shallow playthings.  There is no narrative reason for women to get such short shrift in this story, and they do in all of Bob's stories, so I suspect it's more tic, less deliberate intent.

Anyway, that's the background.  The story involves billionaire Simeon Krug and the constellation of relatives, top staff, and associates who surround him.  Krug is building a 600 meter transmission tower in the tundras of Ontario to reply to a message recently received from the stars: "2-4, 2-5, 1-3" repeated ad nauseum.

So far, the story seems to be about thwarted expectations: Krug is disappointed that the alien senders seem to hail from a bright O-class star, precluding anything akin to humanity.  His son is dissatisfied with both his unexciting human wife and his vat-produced android paramour.  The android foreman Thor Watchman is dissatisfied with a nameless something, probably attached to his inferior position in human society, even as one of the most powerful beings on Earth.

It's all written with Silverberg's usual, if somewhat overdramatic, brilliance and not a little emphasis on sex.  There are some very nifty concepts here, from the eternal dawn or noon that teleportation affords, to the "jacking in" to vast computet networks (the ultimate evolution of ARPANET, perhaps).

So, bad taste in my mouth aside, I am interested to see where this goes.  It's in the same vein as his blue fire stories, which I liked.

Four stars.

Darwin, the Curious, by Ray Bradbury, Darwin, in the Fields, by Ray Bradbury, and Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn, by Ray Bradbury

A trio of pointless poems from the master of mawk: what if Chas sat in a field all day, and on the way home, passed a fox?

Two stars—the illustrations illuminating them are nice.

The Rub, by A. Bertram Chandler

Two-page spread. On the left-hand page is an ink drawing of a woman looking in horror at a humanoid figure crawling on the ceiling. On the right-hand page is the name of the author, A. Bertram Chandler, additional text that says: Can anything be more terrifying than realizing all your dreams? and the title: The Rub. The text of the story begins below the title.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

The adventures of John Grimes, intrepid if cantankerous officer of the Space Scout Service, have been going on for more than a decade.  Like Horatio Hornblower, we've now gotten most of his career, from Ensign through Commodore.  There's not a lot of room left to fill.  How then can Chandler keep this cash cow going?

Why, by returning to the mystical planet of Kinsolving, where dreams become reality.  In this case, Grimes ends up in a nightmare parallel universe where, instead of meeting his lovely wife, Sonya, and advancing to flag rank, he instead marries a shrew and ends up in a dead-end job as commander of a fourth-rate backwater base.

And yet, even schlub Grimes has got a touch of that seadog magic…

I quite enjoyed this story, although it ends just a touch too abruptly.  Four stars.

Sunpot (Part 3 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé

Drawn illustration of an irregularly-shaped spaceship near a big round planet floating in black space. Above the illustration is text in cartoonish letters. First is the title: Sunpot, by Vaughn Bodé. Next to it is this text: Sunpot, the planet, moves across the quiet opulence of fat solar space like the great red phallic temple of Brother Mercury... White Venus awaits in the distance.
illustration by Vaughn Bodé

The adventures of the Sunpot continue to take turns for the worse—this time, the pages aren't even printed in the right order.

I said one star last time, but there's (a little) less sexism this time, and the pictures are pretty, even if the typeface is still illegible.

Two stars.

Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys

An elegant piece of calligraphy with the words: Galaxy Bookshelf, Algis Budrys. Tiny stars decorate the space around the letters.

The magazine's book column is devoted solely to The Universal Baseball Association, Inc, by J. Henry Waugh.  It is about a fellow who creates his own private universe, centered around a baseball team, using a self-devised chart and dice to randomly determine what happens next.  It's a bit like how Philip K. Dick created The Man in the High Castle (he used bamboo sticks and the I Ching.

As Budrys puts it:

It does convey a convincing approximation of how a God might be infinitely creative and yet not in direct control of his creation, omnipotent and yet prey to events, omniscient and nevertheless blind to the future.

Though not technically SF or F, and thus perhaps not sold in the same outlets as our beloved regulars, Budrys recommends in no uncertain terms that we read it.

No Planet Like Home, by Robert Conquest

Undecipherable drawing composed of multiple circular shapes that resemble eyes.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

A race of humanoid aliens, prone to frequent mutation, wrings their collective hands over what to do about a comically tragic pinhead nephew of a Senator.  The aliens scour the galaxy until they find a race that constitutes a close physical match so they can deposit the hapless lad on their world.

Three guesses which world, and the first two don't count.

Two stars for being obvious.

Kindergarten, by James E. Gunn

Heavily darkened illustration, probably shaped like a coastline seen from above.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Speaking of, here's a (charmingly illustrated) tale about a precocious child who creates a planet for his amusement, but its inhabitants are too dangerous to be allowed to live.  The world's genesis takes, of course, six days.  The name of the planet is…

Well, you already know the answer.

Two stars.

Diverging courses

The Supreme Court's constitution has evolved since 1950, becoming for a time one of the most liberal Courts in the nation's history.  The building remains the same, but the members change…and only time will tell if we'll be happy with the new direction.

The magazine that Gold launched in 1950 also continues its slow, insensible slide toward whatever lies ahead in the '70s.  It still retains the same dimensions as when it started, the same tactile feel to its cover and pages.  But its cover art, its typeface, its stable of authors, the literary style, all have evolved.  Perhaps not always for the better, but generally still worthy.

Sure, I'll renew.

Page of a magazine. At the top is a drawing of a man standing next to a crashed car. Below it is this text: It doesn't take a genius to figure out how much you hate missing the best story of you favorite writer or the major part of a great novel. But we can't compute a formula to stock every newsstand in the country with enough copies of our popular magazines to satisfy every reader. So we sometimes miss you and you miss us, and that's a double tragedy. But there's an answer. It doesn't take a genius to handle it either. All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon or write the information on a piece of plain paper and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. To the right of this text is a sample cover of Galaxy magazine, showing an illustration of a woman's face inside concentric curves. At the bottom of the page is a form to order a magazine subscription.

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


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[February 28, 1970] Revolutionaries… (March 1970 Analog)

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

Turbulent times

Unless you've been living under a rock the past two years, you know the shockwaves from The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are still reverberating.  The open fighting on the convention floor, the fascist polemic of Mayor Daley, the protests, the baby blue and olive drab helmets, and the crippled candidacy of the man tasked to thwart Dick Nixon from taking the White House.

Aside from the shambolic shuffle toward further embroilment in southeast Asia, two other phenomena have kept the convention in the public eye.  The first is last year's neck-clutch of a movie, Medium Cool.  Half drama, half documentary, Haskell Wexler's film follows a jaded Chicago news cameraman in the weeks leading up to the crisis point.  Indeed (and I didn't realize this at the time), the footage of Robert Forster and Verna Bloom in and around the convention hall during the clashes, hippie vs. fuzz, Dixiecrat vs. DFL, was all shot live. 

A brunette woman in a yellow dress walks in front of a line of police officers. There are hippies of various ages at the left side of the frame, including a young boy.
Verna Bloom, playing an emigrant from West Virginia, searches Grant Park for her lost son

If you haven't caught the film, check your local listings.  It may still be running in your local cinema.  Be warned: it will take you back.  If you're not ready for it, you will be overwhelmed.

A movie poster for <i>Medium Cool</i>. The tagline is
Robert Forster is the news man.  You'll recognize Marianna Hill (Forster's girlfriend) as a guest star in Star Trek's "Dagger of the Mind"

As for the other reminder, for the past two years, the papers have kept us apprised on the trials of the "Chicago Eight", charged by the United States Department of Justice with conspiracy, crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot.  They included Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale.

(in the midst of his trial, Abbie Hoffman jumped on the stage at Woodstock during the performance of The Who to protest the incarceration of White Panther poet and musician, John Sinclair—it was a trippy scene)

Abbie Hoffman: "I think this is a pile of shit!  While John Sinclair rots in prison…"

Pete Townsend: "Fuck off!  Get off my fucking stage!"

A blurry black-and-white still of a floppy-haired white man in a white tunic. The image is timestamped 02:10:56:06
Pete Townsend, just after recovering the stage

The verdicts came down on February 18, a mixed bag of positive and negative news for the accused.  Apparently, four folks on the jury held out until the bitter end, but eventually went with guilty for some of the charges.  The verdicts were:

Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin were charged with and convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot.  All of the defendants were charged with and acquitted of conspiracy; Froines and Weiner were charged with teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices and acquitted of those charges.  Bobby Seale had already skated when his case ended in mistrial.

Six men with long, wild hair stand smiling at the camera, arms wrapped around each other
Six of the "Seven": (l. to r.) Abbie Hoffman, John Froines, Lee Weiner, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden

So, it's jail time for five of the eight while their cases go to appeal.  You can bet that these results aren't going to lessen the flames of discontent in this country, at least for the vocal minority.

A news clipping, showing a crowd of people in front of a statue. Two people carry signs. One says 'COURTS OF INJUSTICE CANNOT PREVAIL!'. The other says 'FREE MARTIN SOSTRE'. The caption of the news clipping reads 'Protest rally in New York: Surrounded by demonstrators protesting the conspiracy trials of the Chicago 7 and the Panther 21, William M. Kunstler, defense attorney in the Chicago trial, addresses rally Monday in Madison Square Park in New York. One youth was injured in a clash with police, and windows were broken in several stores.'
From page 3 of my local paper on the 24th

Steady and staid

You wouldn't be aware of any of this turmoil if you lived under a rock and did nothing but read Analog Science Fiction.  It remains a relic and deliberate artifact of a halcyon past as envisioned by editor John Campbell.  The latest issue is a representative example.

The cover of the Analog issue. It shows a man with a gun looking over a desert cliff at a massive radio telescope facility.
by Kelly Freas

The Siren Stars (Part 1 of 3), by Richard Carrigan and Nancy Carrigan

First up, we introduce a new writing duo as well as a new James Bond-style hero.  John Leigh is a veteran, a fair hand with a souped up, armored Triumph sports car, and most importantly, a Physicist.  Shortly after serving his hitch in Korea, he is recruited by SPI—no, not the wargame company, but "Science Processing, Inc."

Leigh's latest mission is to infiltrate a Soviet radio telescope facility.  It seems that the Russkies have picked up signals from an alien civilization, and Leigh needs to take pictures of their dish to see which way it's pointing, and also to pick up the computer data tapes to see what the Reds have heard.

At the end of Part One, Leigh has infiltrated his own facility as a dry run for his attempt in the USSR, only to find that the Soviets are already trying to infiltrate the American base for some reason.

A two paneled image, white lines on a black background. There is a psychedelic image of a woman strumming a harp in a futuristic city.
by Kelly Freas

We get a lot of inches of Leigh driving his cool car, a lot of glimpses of incidental women through the eyes of men ("The blonde at the mail desk had been hired for her ornamental qualities as well as her fast hand with the correspondence…Like most men, [Leigh] approved highly of ornamental mail girls providing they didn't mangle the correspondence too badly."  "Emily Parkman was that rarity among women—the completely discreet human being.") and a lot of "thrilling" action, like a car chase in a parking garage.

I'm bored.  Two stars.

One Step from Earth, by Hank Dempsey

A single panel image, black ink on white background. Two figures are in insectoid spacesuits. One is standing on top of an jet engine, and the other is on the ground, holding a round ball. The legend at the top right reads 'ONE STEP FROM EARTH: The length of a step depends on how you measure distance -- and on who's trying to step on you!'
by Vincent DiFate

I hear tell Hank Dempsey is really Harry Harrison—I suspect he's nom d'pluming since this is going to be the first tale in a collection that deals with teleportation, coming out later this year.  Hey, if the apple will support multiple bites, why not chomp that baby?

Anyway, this is the story of our first manned trip to Mars.  A robot ship drops off a matter transmitter just big enough for a scientist to crawl through in a space suit.  The components of a base and a larger transmitter are teleported to the Red Planet.  Before their assembly can be finished, one of the two-man crew succumbs to a mysterious malady.  Our hero must decide between spending life in quarantine on Earth or becoming the first permanent resident of Barsoom.

It's fine for what it is, an episode involving grit, courage, and pioneering spirit.  Three stars.

Rover Does Tricks in Space, by Walter B. Hendrickson, Jr.

A grey image of a nuclear rocket on a black and white background. The background breaks the page in half vertically, and the grey rocket crosses it diagonally. On the white half, a legend in black leathers reads 'ROVER DOES TRICKS IN SPACE'

This is one of the best articles I've read on NERVA, the nuclear rocket stage being developed for use with the Saturn V.  Apparently, they've gotten the thing to work, which means that it could, if produced, perhaps triple the lifting capacity of our biggest rocket.  And once in space, NERVA engines could halve the trip time to our neighboring planets.

But here's why I suspect we'll never actually build the thing: the Saturn V assembly line is being shut down in the wake of the successful Moon landing.  NERVA is expensive, so its benefits only really manifest once a space program is mature, rockets are being made by the dozen, and orbital infrastructure has been established.  That doesn't like it'll happen any time soon.

Sure, NASA is working on its reusable, winged "space shuttle", which will reduce cost to orbit once it's operational, but that's a fair piece down the road, and I don't see a place for nuclear engines in that program.  Still, the option is there for someday.

In any event, four stars for this clear and interesting piece.

Protection, by Steven Shaw

A two panel image, black ink on white background. The left panel is of three muscled humanoid figures. They are all wearing helmets and armored vests, but only one is carrying a ray gun. The right panel shows some scientific equipment under shadowy trees.
by Vincent DiFate

This piece starts promisingly, alternating viewpoints between a native sentinel on an alien planet, squatting near the defensive line, and the security man providing protection for a scientific expedition.  When members of the team start crossing the line, they are slaughtered ignominiously by some unknown technology possessed by the aborigines.

I was enthralled until the story abruptly ended, the lead-up all in service of the "twist"—the aliens were using simple poison-tipped blowdarts.  What an allegory!  It's like our well-equipped troops getting aced by the "primitive" Viet Cong!  How the proud fall!

Except that it is repeatedly established that the security men are wearing body armor.  Last I heard, flak jackets repel bamboo reeds almost as well as bullets!  Moreover, were the humans really unable to recover the darts presumably still in the corpses, nor identify the poison coursing through their bloodstreams?

One star.

Ravenshaw of WBY, Inc., by W. Macfarlane

An two-paneled image, black ink on a white background. A floating platform hovers above the ground, with a fantastical astronomy lab atop it. There is a figure on the platform, facing away from the viewer. Two figures, a man and a woman, look up at the platform from the ground in the bottom left corner. The bottom right corner has the legend 'RAVENSHAW OF WBY, INC.: It takes a special sort of man to let logic go to hell -- and act on what he sees, even when he knows it's impossible!'
by Vincent DiFate

Here's a story that I found almost indistinguishable from the serial.  The hero is even named Leigh (in this case, Arleigh Ravenshaw).  He's a veteran with a knack for innovation—for instance, in Vietnam, he plied the local kids with ice cream to get them to turn in mines and weapons caches.  I'm sure it's that easy.

Ravenshaw is recruited to work for FBY (Flying Blue Yonder), a San Diego-based agency that entertains every crackpot in the region in the hopes that there might be wheat amongst the chaff (an endeavor Campbell surely thinks much of, but I can tell you, having worked with the publishing arm of the American Astronautical Society, which occasionally gets unsolicited papers, cranks are just that—cranks).  He is accompanied by a "palomino-haired" young woman with a "bitter-honey voice" and a penchant for dressing bright, clashing colors.

On their first mission, to the desert near Borrego Springs on the trail of the creators of a matter converter, they find a wall-less room that houses an iodine thief from a parallel universe…and what may be the younger version of Ravenshaw's female companion.

Apparently, this will be the first in a series of loosely connected (and rather tedious) tales.  Two stars.

An image, black lines on a white background, of a small alien going through grass. The alien resembles a hybrid of a stag beetle and a lawn sprinkler, and is about the same size. The title of the image is 'Department of Diverse Data', suggesting it is a comic series. The caption reads
by David Pattee

Wrong Rabbit, by Jack Wodhams

An image, black lines on white background, of two men in hazmat suits holding cattle prods, facing an alien stuck in a ring. The alien looks like an enormous sort of walrus-bear-cat thing, with blobby lobster claws.
by Vincent DiFate

Earth has a working matter transmitter setup, with each booth operated by a single technician linked psychically with her or his unit.  One day, wires get crossed, and the passenger of a similar, alien network ends up in a human booth…swapped with a human stuck in an extraterrestrial receptacle.  Chaos ensues.

Wodhams tells the tale in alternating viewpoints to illustrate that both races, despite being repulsively different from each other, have surprisingly convergent societies and thought processes.  Ultimately, the two reach a rapprochement and combine their networks.

I feel this tale would have been more effective had the two perspectives differed considerably.  I also felt the constant use of nonsense terms as shorthand for untranslateable concepts ("I cannot describe to you the feeling of kooig that permeated by slaktuc.") was silly given just how similar the two species turned out to be, at least in mindset.

Two stars.

Revolutionaries, by M. R. Anver

A two-paneled image, black on a white background. On the left panel, there is a bust of an old man looking outward, and two full-body drawings of women. One mostly-naked woman, or possibly alien, is looking down, holding a tool like a futuristic metal detector. The other woman is wearing a short dress, looking out at the viewer. The legend on the left-hand panel reads, 'REVOLUTIONARIES: Many things will be changed in an interstellar culture -- but some things haven't changed since Cheops was cheated by the Pyramid contractor!' On the right panel, another bust of an old man looks outward. There is a planet in the background, with two spaceships flying over its surface. Below the image of the planet are two futuristic-looking space cars.
by Vincent DiFate

Achates is a new Federation colony, a joint effort by humans and the blue-furred humanoids of Azure.  An important election is coming up, between Ronan, head of the bi-racial United Party, and the reactionary Manoc—who is willing to win at any price, including a coup d'etat after a potential UP victory.

In the middle of it all is John Cameron, a Federation observer, who appears to be playing both sides against the middle… but are his loyalties really in question?

Anver seems to have taken a page from Mack Reynolds' book, turning in a competent, but unexciting (and not at all SFnal), political action thriller.

Three stars.

The Reference Library, by P. Schuyler Miller

Analog's veteran book reviewer covers Orbit 5, which he notes wanders further from the truly SFnal than ever before, but he finds it a worthy effort, nonetheless.  He damns with faint praise the books we also didn't sing huge praises of: The Palace of Eternity, Masque World, and Galactic Pot-Healer—which just goes to show how good Miller's taste is!  Which means you should perhaps avoid J. T. McIntosh's Six Gates from Limbo and seek out Edmond Hamilton's World of the Starwolves, which we never covered, but Miller does.

Tallying the results

A woman in a blue dress, sitting at a printer desk. In the background, a man in a dark suit is punching into a large computer.
IBM 360 Model 65 with a woman at the IBM 1052 printer in the foreground, a man at the Direct-Access Storage Devices (DASDs) in the back

Analog these days reminds me nothing so much as Hugh Heffner's Playboy.  Where the latter magazine is aimed squarely at the smug youngish libertarian with delusions of yacht-hood, Analog is for the smug youngish libertarian with aspirations in engineering.  Every story reinforces the notion that, if you're a scientifically educated man, you too can save Democracy, make the girls swoon, and show up those stuffy institutionalists.  Perhaps Campbell sees his mag as a kind of Fountain of Youth to recover never-gained glories.  Or maybe this kind of slop is just the secret to getting 200,000 subscribers.

Regardless, I'm getting pretty tired of it.  Maybe others are, too.  If they rate tales as I do, this issue scored just 2.4 stars—the lowest of any mag this month.  It is beaten by Amazing (2.8), IF (2.8), Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.8), The Year 2000 (3), New Worlds (3), Galaxy (3.2), and Vision of Tomorrow (3.5)

The overall average this month was 2.9, and the four and five star material in the eight mags that came out would fill two full-size mags.  If you're keeping count, women produced about 9% of new short fiction published this month. 

Luckily, as you can see, Analog just constituted one end of the bell-shaped distribution.  Somebody's gotta be tail-end Charlie, I suppose.  I'm just regretting that I drew the short straw and have to be the one to review it every month.

On the other hand, I could have gotten John Boston's gig and suffered through Amazing since Goldsmith left its helm.  And anyway, since things are finally starting to look up for him over there, maybe there's hope on the horizon for this hoary, once-honorable magazine…

An advertisement for Universe Book Club, which allows you 4 books per year, for 98 cents plus shipping and handling. Subjects include astrology (described as 'The Space Age Science'), ESP, reincarnation, the supernatural, yoga, hypnosis, and 'the black arts'.
Does astrology really count as a science?  Space Age, my Aunt Petunia!

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


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