The other shoe dropped on February 17: Star Trek is officially canceled. Moreover, ABC won't pick it up for its "Second Season" in January. Fan efforts are being directed at CBS, but I can't say the prospects are promising.
One has to wonder if the decision was made due to the spate of lousy episodes that have plagued the second half of the Third Season. On the other hand, the decision was probably made based on the reaction to the first half of the season, which was actually quite good, so maybe Trek was always destined for the block.
This makes the latest episode, what appears to be the penultimate (if, indeed, they even air the last episode sometime in May after eight weeks of reruns and substitutions), particularly bittersweet. "All Our Yesterdays" is possibly Trek's finest hour, even as the clock ticks the show's last minutes.
That the show is so good comes as no surprise; writer Jean Lisette Aroeste wrote the sublime "Is There in Truth No Beauty", and director Marvin Chomsky ran the excellent "Day of the Dove". It is also an unique episode in many ways, from the profusion of excellent sets, to the complete absence of the Enterprise from the show (a phenomenon I cannot recall occurring in any prior episode).
For those who missed it, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet of Sarpedon, a civilized world doomed to be destroyed when its star, Beta Niobe, goes nova—in just a handful of hours. I guess they're there to pick up refugees (if so, there won't be very many…)
The Big Three find themselves in what looks like a post office or safety deposit box annex attended by an elderly Mr. Atoz. This fellow, assisted by several kindly replicas, is a "librarian" who has used his "Atavachron" (a great name for a time machine) to send all of the citizens of Sarpedon into the past, where they will be safe from the stellar explosion. Mr. Atoz assumes the three officers are Sarpedonites who are late to the party, and he gives them run of the archive to find eras to jaunt to.
"You've run up some considerable overdue book fines, young man!"
Well, through misadventure, Kirk ends up in Cromwellian England, where he is locked up under accusation of witchcraft, and McCoy and Spock end up in the planet's last Ice Age, risking frostbite and worse. Apparently, Sarpedon's past is identical to that of Earth, which would be egregious if we hadn't seen similar phenomena in "Miri" and "Bread and Circuses". Indeed, this is actually a welcome data point rather than risible.
"You're under arrest, guv'nor…for overdue book fines!"
"It's colder than a witch's left…" "Agreed, Doctor."
Luckily for Kirk, his judge is one of the refugees from the future, who helps him find the portal back to the library. Luckily for the other two, a lovely woman named Zarabeth, exiled from a time prior to the Enterprise's era, rescues them and gives them refuge in her cave. She quickly falls for Spock (who wouldn't?) and the half-Vulcan finds himself reverting to savagery as a result of his psychic bond with primordial Vulcans of five thousand years ago. Spock peeves at McCoy, moons at Zarabeth, and acts the least Spocklike we've seen him since "This Side of Paradise" in a very honest and affecting way.
Bones convinces Spock to go back to where they arrived in the Ice Age so as to find their way back to the library, which they manage with the help of Kirk. Returned to his time, Spock becomes himself again, but not without a touch of subdued regret at the loss of yet another opportunity at love.
The pacing for this episode is leisurely but consistent, really letting us soak in the environs, the characters, their emotions. The Act-end cliffhangers are unusual and sometimes not even danger points. All of the cast turn in masterful performances, and the guests do as well—standouts include Mr. Atoz (the actor last seen in "Bread and Circuses") and the magistrate who saves Kirk. Mariette Hartley (Zarabeth) is fine, and there is no question that she is lovely, but it's the pickpocket who Kirk rescues in his era, with her period speech and game manner, who is truly memorable. The optical effects are stunning, particularly the Atavachron portal effect.
"Just give the book back. No one will press charges."
Though something of a cul de sac in terms of development of the setting (time travel on Sarpedon only goes to Sarpedon, and the system blows itself up at the end of the episode), it is the opposite of a bottle show. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this episode, and so much that is right.
Five stars
Historically Inaccurate
by Erica Frank
In this episode, we see a mirror-image of the usual dynamic between Spock and Doctor McCoy. The doctor is the rational one, driven to find a solution that lets them get back to the Enterprise—while Spock is distracted by strange circumstances and a pretty lady, and he risks isolating them both because of his emotions.
He attacked McCoy over the epithet "pointy-eared Vulcan"… and although the insult was clear in McCoy's voice, it's also a simple fact: Spock is a Vulcan and his ears are pointy. McCoy has said more directly insulting things to him in the past, but this was apparently his breaking point.
You'd think if he wanted McCoy to shut up, he'd use the Vulcan neck pinch on him. Instead, he grabs him by the throat and brings him in close.
We are supposed to believe that tensions have come to a head because Spock is stuck in the past and atavistic patterns are controlling his behavior. That Spock reverts to savagery because the Vulcans of several thousand years ago were warlike barbarians who ate "animal flesh" and fought for dominance over petty insults.
The problem with that is…
Five thousand years ago on Earth, the Aegean Bronze Age was starting. Imhotep built the Step Pyramid of Djoser; around the same time, Stonehenge was built. Those were ancient human cultures, but they were not so alien from modern humans that a person transported to that time would find their entire nature changed. A modern human thrown back to that time — even with their cell structure and brain patterns adjusted to fit in — would act much like humans do today.
Our records show that human activities and motivations have been very similar throughout history, even as our technology and religions have changed. People complained about politicians, bemoaned their rebellious teenagers, and mourned the passing of beloved pets. Some fought over minor differences and more sensible people denounced those who could not get along with their neighbors. Some were involved in huge, elaborate projects that would not see completion in their lifetimes, and yet they found reason to participate and build on the work of those who had gone before.
Visitors at Stonehenge, perhaps considering what life might have been like 5,000 years ago on Earth.
"Stonehenge 1960s" photo by Annabel M, CC-BY 2.0
Are we to believe that Vulcans were violent barbarians much more recently than humans? That while humans were developing cuneiform and hieroglyphs, establishing the basics of accounting and medical texts, Vulcans were irrational and vicious—but have since surpassed humans in technology and developed powerful psychic abilities?
Something about this doesn't add up. I can more easily believe that Spock, badly disoriented by the trip through time and deeply worried about his friend's survival, latched onto the first viable way to cope: Accept that they are stuck here and focus on surviving in their new home.
Of course, this is only plausible if one believes that Spock would give up his friendship with Kirk for a life with McCoy and a woman he met an hour ago. That possibility raises even more questions.
Four stars. I can quibble over some of the "science," but the character dynamics were riveting.
Treasure from Trash
by Joe Reid
This week’s episode of Star Trek contained many interesting elements: a star about to go Nova, eliminating a solar system and the desperate race to find survivors. A man with duplicate copies of himself. A civilization with the power to travel in time. All interesting concepts that could fill volumes of science fiction. Sadly, these concepts were cheapened by the unnecessary common plot devices which ran rampant in this episode. From jumping to conclusions to failing to ask questions, there didn’t appear to be any characters in this episode unwilling to make critical mistakes that made situations worse than they already were.
Let’s start our examination on an individual level with Kirk and Atoz. Kirk and crew went to a doomed planet where everyone was gone, looking for people to save. Atoz, having saved everyone, was perplexed as to why these newcomers hadn’t escaped yet. This left us with a comedy of errors that shouldn’t have occurred. Had Kirk or Atoz not jumped to conclusions and taken a minute to fully introduce themselves and state their purposes, all parties would have been allowed to move on with their respective businesses without incident. Instead, we were forced to bear witness to two men fighting so hard to save each other they were willing to almost kill each other.
"Kirk, go to your room!"
The second cause of frustration in this episode revolved around the fact that questions were never asked during the times when people were the safest. Again, our two subjects are Atoz and Kirk, but mainly Kirk. Had Kirk asked before he leapt to aid the sound of a screaming woman, he might have saved himself some trouble. Even Spock and McCoy fell into the same situation, chasing after Kirk’s voice as he had the woman. Have none of them ever been taught that the time to ask questions is when you are still at the library, not after you’ve left? Eventually Kirk and crew were able to formulate questions after they found themselves in predicaments. They discovered the answers which led to their salvations. All completely avoidable.
At the end of the day, these mistakes lead to the exploration of fantastical places with many surprises. The journey to the frozen wastes, where Spock and McCoy find the lonely and beautiful prisoner, pushes Spock and McCoy to the brink both physically and emotionally. Kirk has to find unwilling allies in a strange past to save himself from his own prison, and after all that, has to fight to prevent re-imprisonment to save the lives of this crew. I found it amazing that this episode was able to push beyond the cheap narrative devices to deliver a worthy hour of TV. It ultimately rewarded the viewer’s patience for putting up with these forgivable follies to get to some good sci-fi at the end. All gripes aside, I enjoyed watching “All Our Yesterdays”.
Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States, is back from a tour of Europe. All of his visits made headlines, particularly when he went to the Vatican and a couple hundred students held signs that said, "Nixon go home!"
Hey now—we don't want him either!
The Dick met with the "Jesus of the Franks", General DeGaulle, for a high profile religious summit. Our President failed to return with the next Ten Commandments nor a commitment to allow Britain into the European Community (much less France's return to NATO).
Nixon is now back in the States. Apparently, Jack Benny managed to buy more than a gallon of gas at Texaco since he made it all the way to Andrews Air Force Base to amuse the President upon his return. Well, maybe the air fare was on the country's dime.
One of the places Nixon did not stop, but sent a staffer in his stead, was the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. The Jewish leader's death was rather a surprise, and his interim replacement is something of a dark horse: 70 year old foreign minister Golda Meir. She is the first woman leader of the Jewish state, and one of the few female national leaders this century. It is possible she will step down in favor of her party confederate Yigal Allon when he stands for the next regular election against conservative rival General Moshe Dayan.
Into the wild Blue/Black yonder
As I type this, Apollo 9 is currently in orbit, its crew practicing a series of maneuvers that will be duplicated on this summer's trip to the Moon. It's sort of like a Gemini training mission (two of the astronauts, Scott and McDivitt, are Gemini veterans) but with Apollo hardware. It is fitting, therefore, that the latest issue of Galaxy deals with space in almost all of its stories:
Centuries after a nuclear apocalypse, the Earth's four billions reduced to just one hundred million, humanity lives in a patchwork of low-technology communities. There are the farmers, who make up the vast majority; the villagers who comprise a rude middle class; the Luddites, barbarians who plunder, mostly for fun; the arrogant Neo-Scientists, who enslave many so that a few may reconstruct the wisdom of the past; and the Empires—petty states whose influence extends no further than their capital regions.
And there are the witch-doctors, who use "magic" to heal and educate, and the pilgrims, who seek the truth. "Witch Hunt" is the tale of two such pilgrims, their tour of America's degraded communities, and a survey of their relative merits and lacks. Of course, the story reveals the truth they have been searching for.
There is more than a whiff of Silverberg's Nightwings serial here, and while the prose is not quite so beautiful, it is serviceable.
Hobie was a precocious child whose life was irrevocably influenced by Star Trek, though the TV show is never mentioned by name.
A successful teen and, later, frustrated serviceman, he can't shake the feeling that he is somehow separate from the human race. The story's conclusion bears much in common with that of "Witch Hunt". I wonder if putting thematically-similar stories together was deliberate or coincidental?
Something about this story reminds me a bit of the works in our Rediscovery anthologies, or perhaps a bit of the works in the fanzines. In particular, the focus on Trek and also the fact that the protagonist is a minor for much of the piece set it apart from many of the stories we encounter regularly. I had to check the byline to make sure it wasn't by Evelyn E. Smith, or Rosel George Brown, or Zenna Henderson, for example.
As a whole the story isn't bad, but unfortunately, Tiptree botches the end. Three stars.
How Like a God, Robert Bloch
by Reese
Pride goeth before a fall: Mok is an incorporeal being who refused to surrender his personality to the group; as a consequence, the divine Ser confines him to an alien, physical body and banishes him to a planet of primitives. There, Mok becomes a kind of Prometheus, elevating the aborigines' culture and technology. But is Mok a God…or a serpent in the garden?
Kind of a neat piece. I think it falls on the lower side of the three/four star divide.
Simak loves to write "pastoral science fiction" set in his stomping grounds of Minnesota, and so, "Buckets of Diamonds" reads a bit like The Andy Griffith Show meets The Twilight Zone. Drunk Uncle Charlie gets locked up in the pokey one day when he is found staggering down the street, an Old Master's canvas under one arm, and carrying a bucket of diamonds. Later, he disappears from jail and turns up driving a hovercar alongside a sour-faced alien…who presently encourages all of the citizenry to dispose of their technological gadgets!
All of this is much to the chagrin of Charlie's nephew-in-law, a local attorney who must sort the mess out.
Not much to this tale, which ultimately doesn't go anywhere, or when. Three stars.
Slave to Man, Sylvia Jacobs
Tony is an editor for one of those schlock-houses that produces "the sexies" (prurient pulps). One day, he notices he's getting a lot of torn off covers from returns that say "Help! Help! I am being held in bondage! I am only 15 years old!"
Who he finds when he seeks the poor soul out, and how said soul revolutionizes the sexies industry is both amusing and, perhaps, prescient.
The saga continues of two immortal aliens destined for a final confrontation somewhere in 21st Century America. Last time, we learned that Gralgrathor had self-exiled from his stellar Federation to go native amongst medieval Vikings. His confederate, Lokrien, murdered 'Thor's wife and child to incentivize his return to galactic civilization.
In this installment, Lokrien, now fully healed from vicious scars he carried for decades, is looking for 'Thor, who now goes by the name of Grayle. Grayle, as you recall from last time, escaped from the Caine Island maximum security prison, where he had been languishing for over a century. Both immortals have assistants: Lokrien's is a mercenary cabbie who is efficient with his fists; Grayle has picked up a lovely woman named Anne who insists on helping him despite not knowing the whole story.
Meanwhile, an enormous whirlpool is growing in the middle Atlantic, generating hurricane force winds across the hemisphere. It seems to be powered by the newly online broadcast power plant on the Eastern seaboard. Attempts to shut down the plant are all thwarted by some unknown force. You can bet that the aliens are somehow involved, however…
Still interesting stuff. Four stars.
For Your Information: The Drowned Civilization, Willy Ley
This month's article is a potpourri dedicated to three questions: 1) how easy would it be for a planet to capture a new moon, 2) how would the Earth's land contours change should the ice caps melt, and 3) what kind of creature is the biblical zaphan?
Three stars.
There and back again
Well, that was rather fun! Nothing spectacular, but all in all, a rapid, enjoyable read. Galaxy remains my favorite of the monthlies, and I can't wait to see how the Laumer turns out. I am also happy to see that we're getting at least one woman writer each month again. The magazine was at its best when that was the case back in the '50s, and Sylvia Jacobs turned in one of my favorites of the issue.
Until next time…keep up to date with Nixon on Laugh-In, and science fiction on the Journey!
Four years ago (has it been that long?) Mariner 4 became the first space probe to sail by Mars. This event instantly destroyed a thousand dreams. The 21 grainy, black and white pictures returned by the spacecraft's TV cameras showed a cratered, lunar-type surface. The Martian atmosphere was found to be less than 1% as dense at the surface as that of Earth. Gone was the romantic Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett.
These findings should not have come as such a surprise—the abundance of craters and the thin atmosphere had already been suspected before Mariner 4 ever got there. But the photographic evidence was the final nail in the coffin. Mars is dead.
Or is it?
Mariner 4 was a rather limited spacecraft. We only got 21 pictures, after all. And while 7 millibars may not seem like much, that's a veritable atmospheric blanket compared to the Moon or Mercury. We need more data.
This is why a second generation of spacecraft, Mariners 6 and 7, are being sent to Mars. These are heavier spacecraft with more sophisticated equipment: infrared and ultraviolet radiometers (measuring Martian energy output in those wavelengths), a better TV camera, and the ability to reprogram the spacecraft in flight, as needed.
Mariner 6 took off last week on the 24th, and Mariner 7 will blast off March 21st. We've yet to have both members of a Mariner pair make it to its destination (Mariner 1 and Mariner 3 both had mishaps), but hope springs eternal. Come this summer, perhaps around the same time a man sets foot on the Moon, we will unveil more mysteries of the fourth planet.
I have a private joke that every Chris Anvil story for Analog begins (Mad Lib style):
[Military Rank] [WASPy male name] of [military organization] [verbed] down the [corridor/hall/base] lightly touching his [weapon] clipped to his [clippable article of clothing].
"Trap" did nothing but reinforce this cliché, and I hunkered down for a slog of a novella.
Instead, I got a reasonably interesting, technical tale about peaceably dealing with implacable aliens, who possess an unbeatable weapon. In this case, the planet is a swampy wasteland, the aliens have the ability to teleport anywhere they've been before, and the humans and Centrans (in an alliance since the 1956 story, "Paradise Planet") must find a way to make peace before the aliens find a way to teleport onto every ship and planet in both empires.
It starts a bit slow, but I found myself compelled. Certainly better than the fare Anvil usually offers us in Analog. Three stars.
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, by R. E. Allen
How does Mannie supply all the movies and music producers with the top talent? Why, by dowsing over each of the actor's/musician's headshots with a divining rod, of course!
Not much of a story. Not much science fiction. Two stars.
They're Trying to Tell Us Something (part 1 of 2), by Thomas R. McDonough
This month's science article is on those enigmatic, recently discovered interstellar radio beacons known as pulsars. Beeping on the radio dial on the average of once a second (some are faster, some are slower), they are significant for their unwaveringly precise timing and for their enormous power output—some one billion times the power output of all of Earth's civilizations!
There is a lot of interesting information in this article, but what annoys me is that McDonough seems convinced that pulsars are the work of "Little Green Men" (LGM), and presents his article accordingly. Nowhere in the piece is the general accepted wisdom that the regularity of the signals and the fact that they seem to carry no information (not to mention their tremendous power) indicates that pulsars are rapidly rotating stars, and likely rapidly rotating, collapsed dead stars called "neutron stars".
This isn't esoteric knowledge I gleaned from The Astrophysical Journal—it's from the Sunday Supplement of Escondido's rag of a paper, The Times-Advocate. So, its exclusion from McDonough's piece must be conscious, and that makes his arguments suspect. Perhaps he'll discuss neutron stars in the next piece, but they really should have been front and center.
Three stars.
Minitalent, by Tak Hallus
by Leo Summers
Alice Culligan, third mate and computer officer on the space ship Iphigenia, witnessed a crime: gun runners had smuggled cruel "nervers" to a race of aborigines. They were caught, but the company they're working for looks to get away scott free. They will do anything to ensure that verdict—including silencing Miss Culligan forever.
But Alice has an ace up her sleeve: a minor talent for telekinetics. And in a computerized world, sometimes a little push is all that's needed…
Similarly premised as Larry Niven's sublime "The Organleggers", this tale (Tak Hallus' first) is not as deftly told. That said, it is pretty good, and I liked the heroine very much. It's clearly in the vein of, say, James H. Schmitz, so if you like him, you'll like this.
By the way, Tak Hallus is simply Arabic for "pseudonym", so who knows? Maybe it really is Schmitz!
An assassin named Jagen performs a job and, with the help of a teleportation system, escapes The Great Despot's justice. But is there any ultimate evasion the efficient robot machines of the Despot's police force?
The well-written piece is really a setup for the philosophical question posed at the end. The answer is surprising for such a libertarian mag as editor Campbell's.
And now, the conclusion of Wolfling. By Gordy Dickson.
Jim Weil, archaeologist and Ace of All Trades (the term "bannou" (万能) is even more appropriate), had infiltrated the High-Born empire he was sent to detachedly examine, becoming a general in its armies. Having discovered a plot to destroy the imperial warrior race of Starkiens, Jim quickly returned to the throne world to thwart a plot on the Emperor, himself. He is successful in defeating the pretender, the Emperor's cousin, but now he must return to Earth and face treason charges for possibly incurring the imperial wrath on humanity.
In a dramatic courtroom scene, Jim explains his actions, how they saved the Earth, and the true origin of humanity vis. a vis. the High-Born. Did we come from them, or did they come from us?
The answer is rather disappointing, more along the lines of something I'd expect written in the pulp era than modern times. In addition, all of the energy-saber dueling seemed unnecessary; when everyone can teleport at whim, how do you keep your foe in the same room long enough to dispatch him? Or keep your foe from materializing behind you?
But most of all, I had expected a statement against eugenics, but instead got something of a defense of it. If not for the skilled writing, I might rate it more poorly.
Three stars for the serial as a whole.
On to the numbers!
You know, it's been quite a month! With Analog clocking in at 3.4 stars, it's near the top of the heap rather than taking its usual place in the middle. Ahead of it were Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.4) and IF (3.5). The good news is, the spread was pretty narrow: Galaxy scored 3.3, New Worlds 3.2, New Writings 14 3. Only Amazing scored below the three-line (2.7), and it was still better than usual.
In other vital statistics, women produced 11% of the new fictional content. The superior stuff this month would fill three full-sized magazines. Given that there were seven published this month, that's a good ratio.
Stay tuned for the end of next month when we find out how April's magazines do…and how Mariner 7 flies!
This week, the regional news has been filled with the death of a local hero. Aquanaut Berry L. Cannon, a resident of Sealab III off the coast of La Jolla, died while diving 610 feet to repair a helium leak in his undersea home.
It wasn't a matter of foul play or (so far as is currently known) an accident. The 33 year old Cannon, subject to the rigors of a deep dive and 19 times the pressure out of water, simply succumbed to a cardiac arrest. He was declared dead on arrival at the hospital.
The three other divers who had gone with him had no physical troubles. The repair effort had come shortly after the habitat had been lowered to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean pending long-term habitation by eight aquanauts. Cannon was a veteran of the second Sealab experiment, back in 1965.
We talk a lot about the space program here on the Journey, but it's important to know that humanity is pushing at all the frontiers, from Antarctica to the sea bottom. And in all such dangerous endeavors, there are tragedies as well as triumphs. Sacrifice is part of the bargain we make for survival of the species, but it never goes down any easier. Especially for his wife, Mary Lou, and their three children…
Davy Jones has company
In less tragic news, the latest issue of F&SF is filled with the kind of madcap, surreal adventures you might expect to find on the (sadly cancelled) The Monkees, particularly the first tale:
by Ronald Walotsky, illustrating the title story
Calliope and Gherkin and the Yankee Doodle Thing, by Evelyn E. Smith
Like, far out—two Greenwich Village type 17 year-olds, the Jewish "Gherkin" and his Black girlfriend "Calliope" are set up to take the biggest trip of their life. Like, they don't trip out on acid or pot, but literally are snatched for a jaunt to the stars, where they hook up with some of the sexiest green-furred cats you ever did saw.
Was it all an illusion? Or were they really summoned beyond the stars for stud duty? The plot thickens when Calliope begins to show in a motherly way…
This is the first I've seen of Evelyn E. Smith since she was a frequent star of Galaxy in the early '50s. Her chatty, droll style translates pretty well into the modern day, with her madcap, satirical melange of race relations, drug culture, and extraterrestrial high jinks. It runs, perhaps, a bit overlong, and also overdense, but it's not unenjoyable. Welcome back!
Three stars.
Party Night, by Reginald Bretnor
Carce is a scheming woman-user, all veneer and bitterness. When his multi-year attempts to seduce the woman he wants from her husband fails, he goes on a driving jag that plunges him further and further into a night determined to karmically repay him. The pay-off is horrific, though appropriate.
Typical Twilight Zone or Hitchcock stuff, but nicely presented.
Four stars.
by Gahan Wilson
After Enfer, by Philip Latham
A milquetoast of a man, paralyzed by fear, decides (at the urging of his wife) to find a better job than the museum position he's been stuck in for 16 years. He is recruited to explore the Nth Dimensions with an eye toward opening up tesseractal space for colonization, the world being intensely overcrowded.
We never get no details of the trip; we just know that no one has ever managed to deal with the terror of 3D+ space before. Frankly, without that, the story is just sort of frivolous and a let down.
Two stars.
The Leftovers, by Sterling E. Lanier
The latest Brigadier Ffellowes shaggy-dog-story-told-in-a-pub-setting is the least of the three Lanier has written thus far. This time, it's about a Paleozoic race of sinister, intelligent bipeds that inhabit the southern coast of Arabia, and how the Brigadier and his Sudanese sidekick narrowly escape their pursuit.
Lovecraft was doing such stories better many decades ago. A low three stars.
An Affair with Genius, by Joseph Green
Valence is a gifted biologist, plodding and methodical. For twelve years, he has been estranged from Valerie, a volatile genius in the same field, with whom he had shared a brief but remarkable relationshop. Success tore them apart, as she got the credit for their landmark discovery, and then seemingly abandoned him for a senior professor.
So, when she reappears in his life on the desiccating planet of Tau Ceti 2 where Valence had been researching the colony life forms that eke out a bleak existence, he is shattered, even to the point of contemplating her death.
Fate intervenes in the form of a sudden sand storm, and Valence must save Valerie's life. In the ensuing moment he comes to the realization that without her, he was nothing–just a persistent technician, while Valerie had all the real talent.
But the truth is more complicated; sometimes, it takes yin and yang to make a complete unit…
This is a beautiful story. Perhaps I'm just the intended audience, but I loved it. Five stars.
Just Right, by Isaac Asimov
The Good Doctor offers up, this month, a piece on the square-cube law—explaining why it's not possible to simply shrink or grow the scale of an object and think it will be subject to the same physical laws. He lambasts the TV show Land of the Giants in the process, as is appropriate.
It's a good article, and the final sentence is hilarious. Four stars.
The Day the Wind Died, by Peter Tate
An old man squats on his roof, in a senile dream reliving his days as an ace in World War I, planning to soar on artificial wings he has just purchased. His son Charlie, a harried weatherman, drops a mirror while shaving. His son notices that the wind around their house has abruptly stopped, and he believes his father caused it. He tells his friends.
And the plainclothes agents for the Bureau for the Investigation of Weather Incidents takes notice, certain that Charlie has stilled the wind for nefarious purposes—to ensure his father falls to his death when he takes to the sky on his wings.
Is Charlie a wizard? Who are these agents? Is this our world at all?
A surreal, rather puzzling story. I give it three stars.
Maxwell, an English teacher, wakes from cold sleep two centuries hence only to find the world crammed with people and utterly lacking in color. But beauty exists as long as poetry is possible, and Maxwell makes sure that his multi-great grandson has the power of simile before the teacher is sent to the euthanasia chamber at age 70.
The story is written in a hopeful tone, but the subtext is entirely cynical. As usual, McAllister shows promise, but there is still a rawness that holds his work back from greatness.
Three stars.
Coming up for air
A good issue, this, and thankfully, no one had to risk perishing to explore these frontiers. Then again, perhaps it is prose daydreams like the ones in F&SF that drive men to explore onward. No coin is without two sides, I suppose.
Here's to future expeditions, both literary and actual, and safe travels to all who undertake them!
For 12 days, 21,000 gallons a day of crude oil spilled into the Pacific ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara. Only on February 8 was the leaking undersea well finally capped. This debacle, courtesy of the Union Oil Co., has blackened the harbors and beaches of the San Gabriel Valley coastline, killing hundreds of sea birds. Even Governor Reagan is declaring this mess a disaster, making federal funds available for cleanup.
Nevertheless, the Governor did not relieve the oil company of its obligation to the government agencies and private citizens harmed by this catastrophe. It will likely take more than 1000 men three weeks to clean up the mess.
The silver lining is that only about 1% of the local seabird population has been affected, and virtually none of the seals. Indeed, the damage is only about a quarter of that caused two years ago when the super tanker Torrey Canyon broke up off the coast of Southwest England.
Still, if the best we can say is that this crisis is not as bad as the worst, I think we can do better.
The Good Kind
In refreshing contrast to the environmental incident described above, the latest issue of Galaxy is anything but a tragedy:
by Douglas Chaffee illustrating The Weather on Welladay
And Now They Wake (Part 1 of 3), by Keith Laumer
In 1981, just as broadcast power switches on for the first time, an inmate by the name of Grayle makes a daring escape from a New York prison. He is an enigmatic man, an inmate who looks 35, but who has been incarcerated since before World War 2. He also possesses an uncanny ability to heal from wounds.
At the same time, another fellow with similar powers stumbles drunk out of a bar, making his way to a steam room where he miraculously heals a profound set of scars and ejects an antique Minie ball from a wound in his back.
These events are coincident with the appearance of a tremendous water spout in the middle of the Atlantic, and interwoven with tales from a thousand years ago of a renegade from the Galactic Fleet named Thor, and his comrade-turned-betrayer, Loki.
by Jack Gaughan
Who are these two immortals, and why has their story suddenly come to a head? I don't know…but I'm hooked!
Four stars, so far.
The City That Loves You, by Raymond E. Banks
The Alpha Centauri city of Relax offers everything to its twenty million inhabitants—comfort, company, computerized guidance. But what happens when a citizen wants to leave? What if every inducement, soft and hard, is made to keep him there? Does the fellow really have a choice in the matter?
I read the whole story waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I was not displeased with the result. In the end, for a place to truly be paradise, there must be a way out. The socialiast utopias of the world, from Bulgaria to Beit Ha Shita, might take note.
Four stars.
Leviathan, by Lise Braun
An advanced submarine, akin to the Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea rescues a primitive fisherman lost at sea in the Atlantic Ocean. This inadvertently gives rise to a number of familiar legends.
This is an old-fashioned story; it would have been right at home in Imagination in 1954. I do like the clever, organic way Braun conveys that the action takes place thousands of years in the past, and the reading is pleasant, if not extraordinary.
The sodden, storm-lashed world of Welladay seems too bleak a world for settlement. However, schools of whales that inhabit it produce a valuable radioactive substance prized for medical applications. A team of hardy fishermen taps these whales for their lymphic treasure, braving the waves and weather.
But some pirate has been draining the whales dry, decimating the population and threatening the economy and health of the Federation. Is it one of the four fishers? The mysterious woman space pilot shot down at the beginning of the tale, who crashes on a lonely archipelago? Or someone else?
This is definitely one of McCaffrey's better stories, with far more atmosphere (no pun intended) and far less barely suppressed violence and hokey romance. It goes on a little long, and I find it improbable that this vast planet seems to have exactly six people on it, but I enjoyed it.
Three stars.
For Your Information: Collision Course, by Willy Ley
Mr. Ley's piece this month is on asteroids that cross Earth orbit, particularly Icarus, which precipitated the 49th end-of-the-world scare since the birth of Christ.
A sick scientist and his dying love make a multi-stop air flight around the world. At each landing, he makes sure to expose as many people as possible to what appears to be an aerosol for cold symptoms, and he feeds bread crumbs to migratory birds. As the story unfolds, told mostly in third-party reports, we learn the scientist was working on a deadly disease, and that he thinks of humanity as a blight on the Earth.
There's no subtext to the story—it's all on the surface—but it's beautifully told and very eerie. I liked it; my favorite from Mr. Tiptree so far. Four stars.
The Theory and Practice of Teleportation , by Larry Niven
Adapted from a lecture Niven gave at Boskone in front of the MIT Science Fiction Society, this is an interesting look at the effects of teleportation, in all its potential developmental paths, on society.
Four stars.
Greeks Bringing Knee-High Gifts, by Brian W. Aldiss
A darkly humorous story set in the near future, satirizing the world of executives. They all hate each other but are not allowed to express it or complain, so they do things that they can claim are generous as an act of passive aggression.
For instance, one gifts another with a genetically tailored midget Tyrannosaurus…which promptly eats the recipient's leg. Said giftee then names the dinosaur after the giftor's coquettish wife and turns up at the giftor's funeral with the creature to terrorise people, but in doing so claims it is a lovely tribute.
Rather obtuse and pointless. I didn't like it.
One star.
(with thanks to Kris for co-writing this review-let).
Godel Numbers, by J. W. Swanson
by Jack Gaughan
200 miles west of Cairo, archaeologists have dug up what they're calling the "Cairo Stone". It is a black tablet, obviously artificial, clearly advanced, and meticulously carved with a series of scratch marks. Dated to 3000 B.C., it could not have been made by a contemporary terrestrial civilization. It's up to three scientists, a melange of linguists and computer engineers, both to crack the code of the tablets and to fend off Soviet agents.
In the end, the tablet serves much the same purpose as the monolith(s) in 2001, jump-starting humanity's progress. It's an amiable, old-fashioned sort of tale, and so esoteric that it probably would have done well, if not better, in Analog.
Three stars.
Cleaning up
All in all, the latest Galaxy makes for pleasant, if not outstanding, reading. I would certainly much rather read about Godel numbers, teleportation, immortals, and isotopic pirates than oil slicks any day!
Winter is the wet season for Southern California, and we've been just drenched these past weeks. I understand seven inches of rain fell in the Los Angeles area, causing terrible mudslides, property damage, and injury. Apparently, things were made worse by a spate of arson last year that got rid of the stabilizing undergrowth.
Ontario's Foothill Boulevard looking west toward Red Hill Country Club Drive, flooded. (Daily Report photo)
I've had many friends ask if we're alright, afraid we might have been swept downstream in the torrent. Rest assured that Vista is disaster-proof (knock on wood), and our house is at the top of a hill. We had some deep pools of water in the backyard, but they've since drained. Our neighbors have gotten invaded by bugs seeking refuge from the storm, though.
A man runs past a station wagon that was washed two blocks down Carnelian Avenue, along with part of the road surface. (Daily Report photo)
Ups and Downs
If the physical world is getting washed away, one edifice that manages to stand firmly, if not always proudly, is Analog, science fiction's most popular magazine. Has this month's issue slid at all, or is it holding fast? let's see:
We're back in the world of psionic talents, perhaps related to the stories that involve ladies in towers. A pair of politicians want to pass a law protecting and enabling the psionically adept, legitimizing things like professional prognosticators and psychic manipulators. A Luddite strawman, name of Zeusman, is against it.
Meanwhile. Ruth is the wife of Lajos, a precog. She is frustrated because she has an unidentified talent, and also because she really wants to be a mom. Eventually, the latter frustration is relieved, and her daughter ends up demonstrating what Ruth's power really is.
Aside from the tale beginning with ten pages of conversation that reads more like a Socratic dialogue than a story, I just find McCaffrey's writing so flat and amateur. I'm sure all the psi stuff was music to editor Campbell's ears, including lines like "Those who truly understand psionic power need no explanation. Those who need explanation will never understand," but it doesn't work for me. Beyond that, McCaffrey's attitudes on the relations of the sexes is so atavistic, although I suppose she gets points for talking about sex at all. Maybe Campbell likes that, too.
Two stars.
You'll Love the Past, by J. R. Pierce
by Leo Summers
A time traveler from the 21st Century takes a trip in a time machine to the 24th Century. A war has transformed society: America is now largely mixed race, with the whitest of the population an inbred and stupid group. Socially, the continent is organized into placid socialist cooperatives run by religious Brothers, advanced technology provided by the Japanese. It's the sort of world one can be happy in…provided one is favored by the status quo. Every so often, one of the non-favored tries to escape.
Not a bad story, even if it seems to be obliquely casting aspersions on Communists of darker hue.
Three stars.
The Man Who Makes Planets, by G. Harry Stine
Photos by G. Harry Stine
A nifty piece by Analog's resident rocket enthusiast about a fellow who makes model planets for a living. I'd get one for my house, but they're a bit pricey—a quarter of a hundred large!
Four stars.
Extortion, Inc., by Mack Reynolds
by Leo Summers
Yet another piece set in the (anti-) Utopian future of People's Capitalism, where North America has become a stratified welfare state, and money is a thing of the past.
Rex, last of the private dicks, is engaged by a government minister to find out who stole the plans for a miniaturized nuclear bomb, and why said criminal is blackmailing him, threatening to distribute the plans should a ransom not be paid promptly.
The solution to this mystery is actually trivial, and the story isn't quite long enough for what it's trying to do. Nevertheless, I always find this setting interesting. And perhaps prescient. There was piece in last week's newspaper about the National Urban League's proposal for a universal income…
Back in part one, Jim Kiel was sent from Earth to study the intergalactic empire whose fringes were discovered when a Terran probe made it to Alpha Centauri. An anthropologist and ubermensch, Jim is essentially a spy, though the High Born of the empire don't know that—they think that he's an interesting curiosity, favored for his bullfighting skills and independent thinking.
This installment begins just after Jim's first encounter with the Emperor, a genial, capable man who, nevertheless, seemed to suffer a stroke. A stroke that no one but Jim noticed. Much of this middle installment is devoted to Jim's navigation of High Born society, attempting to master the reading machines to determine if Earth really is a long-lost colony of the empire or something else, and also how he discovers and foils an insurrection attempt with designs on incapacitating the empire's leader. In the last portion, Jim is promoted to the equivalent of a Brigadier General and sent to quell a rebellion. This is actually a trap designed to kill him, but he neatly sidesteps it. Now he wants to know why he's marked for death.
The pot continues to boil. There's a lot of the flavor of Dickson's Dorsai series, but with a different, perhaps even more interesting, setting.
Four stars.
A Chair of Comparative Leisure, by Robin Scott
by Leo Summers
A stammering professor somehow manages to be the most magnetic, as well as effective at conveying information. Does his technique go beyond the verbal?
(Yes. He has the power of psychic projection. Whoopee. Two stars.)
Calculating the damage
You win some, you lose some, and this month's issue clocks in at exactly three stars. While nothing could compare with the superlative four-star Fantasy and Science Fiction, three stars is still lower than New Worlds (3.3) and Galaxy (3.2). It does beat out IF (2.8) and Fantastic (2.2), however.
You could fill as many as three issues with good stuff out of the six that were put out—in large part thanks to how great F&SF was this month. Nevertheless, women contributed very little of that, with only 6.67% of new fiction written by female writers, most of that Anne McCaffrey's drudge of a story.
Still, in an uncertain world, I can't complain too much. Especially since, mudslides or no, the Post Office still manages to get me my magazines on time!
"Gideon"—the very name connotes greatness. Grandeur. Brilliance. Romance. Surely, any world with that namesake must be a living paradise. So it is no wonder that the Federation bought the reports sent from planet Gideon declaring it to be just that. No wonder that the Federation would tie itself in knots so as not to jeopardize the chances of welcoming Gideon to the Federation.
Unfortunately, Gideon has other plans.
From the moment Captain Kirk, the sole allowed representative of the Federation, beams down to Gideon, "The Mark of Gideon" catches your attention. We've seen Kirk on an empty Enterprise before—in "This Side of Paradise", "By Any Other Name", and (sort of) "Wink of an Eye", but it's no less effective for its repetition. Sure, it's just a re-use of the standing sets on Stage 9, but then so was "The Tholian Web", "The Omega Glory" and "Mirror, Mirror". Indeed, because we have seen the sets used to represent other ships and other dimensions, the audience has already been trained to think in terms of historical precedents rather than the true situation.
That true situation, of course, is that Kirk is actually in a fantastically detailed replica of the Enterprise, so good that it takes him a (credulity-stretching given how quickly Spock figures things out) long time to figure out that he's not on his beloved ship. But fairly quickly, the episode's focus returns to the real Enterprise and Spock doing his usual sterling job in command, the "Mark of Gideon" becomes less "Where is Everybody?" and more "Stopover in a Quiet Town" (respectively, the first episode of The Twilight Zone, and one of the very last).
The plot is quite simple: Gideon was once Heaven-on-Earth, but it has since become a Malthusian nightmare due to the one-two punch of no native diseases and a fanatical reverence for life. Only the very privileged get a few square meters of space to themselves (Holy Shades of the Soviet Union, Batman!) So, the Gideon council hatches a plan to capture Kirk, withdraw some of his blood, and use the lingering, though harmless, remnants of Vegan Meningitis therein to infect Odona, the council chair's daughter. She will then serve as an example and a vector to infect the rest of the population of Gideon, which presumably will be devastated before natural immunity kicks in (or enough Gideonites stop wanting to be sick).
"Father, could I have a Bayer? No other aspirin works better."
The real problem with this episode is not the story, nor the effective bits with Kirk and Odona on the empty ship, nor the entertaining segments featuring Spock sparring with Chairman Hodin. It's that the plot and the events don't match up.
Regarding the disease: it's not stated what happens if mortality turns out to be 100%, or what the Gideonites will do once the disease loses its lethality.
It's never explicitly stated, either, why (or how) the Gideonites went through the trouble of building a replica of a starship on their surface for the purpose of letting Kirk wander around in it. If all they need is his blood, he could have been kept unconscious for the nine minutes required to take his blood and then sent back to the Enterprise with some kind of cover story. Did the plan really require that Odona join Kirk in the simulated halls of the starship? Did she really need to fake falling for him?
"I have. to. kiss you. Odona. It's in…the script."
I really want this episode to work. Not just because it bears an absolutely terrific name, but because it is genuinely entertaining to watch from beginning to end. Our crowd advanced a few hypotheses that I like. The best was that the ship was Odona's idea, and like the Dolman from "Elaan of Troyius", she could be refused nothing. Moreover, there was an intense voyeuristic desire on the part of the Gideonites to see beings in a truly open space, so this plan killed two birds with one stone. Another is simply that Kirk was drugged when he woke up, and the mock-up didn't need to be perfect (a la last year's Assignment: Moon Girl).
As for the idea that it is hypocrisy for the Gideonites to value life yet hatch a scheme to indirectly kill billions (trillions?), I am reminded of the orthodox Jew who could not turn on a light switch himself on the Sabbath, so he cannily lifted his infant son (too young to be bound by mitzvot) to within flicking range of the switch. And religion is, indeed, in the crosshairs of this episode, for did not Pope Paul VI this summer enjoin Catholics from using The Pill, humanity's main hope of stopping the population boom?
I'm writing this piece in the cold light of day, when I should be more inclined to savage the episode in light of its inconsistencies and absurdities. But I find myself feeling charitable—perhaps it's because director Jud Taylor finally seems to be finding his sea legs (even if Shatner. did. employ many. unnecessary pauses. last week).
Three stars.
Deeply Creepy
by Jessica Dickinson Goodman
Maybe it was the feral cats yowling over my fence in the middle of the episode, but this is for my money the creepiest episode we've seen yet. Something about those yearning, horrifying disembodied faces just got me right in the shivvers.
It also had me thinking about ferality, about what happens when something once tamed becomes unruly. Consider pigeons. Tamed and bred by humans for 10,000 years as messenger birds, companions, and beauties, only to themselves over the course of a bare century transition back to a wild world that they had never been prepared for.
The people of Gideon likewise seem to be at the devastating mercy of a too-too civilized society whose very progress towards perfection endangers their lives. Yes, I felt the storytelling placed too heavy a burden on just telling us that they love sex too much to prevent vicious overcrowding — a cultural quirk that felt too big to swallow. But the feeling of confinement, of encroachment and enclosure came through loud and clear.
In a way, their whole society had become feral: bred and evolved for specific purposes and suddenly set adrift with all of that breeding and evolution still in place, but none of the supports and expectations which allowed it to happen in the first place. The individuals seemed civilized enough, grading on a curve of aliens we've seen thus far, but the entire concept of a society so desperately, brutally crowded seemed fundamentally wild to me.
Let's get to the criticism. As beautifully creepy as the premise was, the synthetic bodysuits and wobbling crowded walks outside the windows were closer to funny than horrifying. The question of where they got space to build a 1:1 model of the Enterprise also beggared belief. Some science fiction and fantasy writers believe you get one big lie, a total of one shocking premise that the audience will just go with you on because, hey, it's a genre story, them's table stakes. But you only get one.
For me, the Big Lie of this episode was that Kirk was lost and wandering around a completely empty Enterprise. That was disturbing enough. But then it turns out many of the assumptions we'd taken on faith as an audience were false and that just felt like being crudely manipulated. I watch shows to be manipulated, but I like it to feel earned, not like I'm being rushed from plot point to plot point, each more giddily hideous than the next. She's not just a fake damsel in distress, she's the weirdo ruler's daughter! And a national hero! And dying of some exotic disease! That she wanted! So they could cull their society like a dairyman shrinks his herd when the price of milk is down!
That's just too many additional premises in one story for me.
Even Spock is incredulous of this episode
I wish we'd kept the lens tightly on Kirk and the crew and the mysterious woman. I wish the weirdo ruler's throne room had given us a hint that claustrophobia was going to be the enemy of the day. And I wish we'd gotten more of the woman actress, she was doing so much with so little. I hope we see more of her.
Overall, this piece will be memorable for its premise and a few fine lines, but the execution was lacking.
2 stars.
How Crowded Is This Place?
by Erica Frank
Odona says, "There is no place, no street, no house, no garden, no beach, no mountain that is not filled with people." This sounds like the Earth of Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!: an overcrowded world, very little privacy, and extreme government measures to cope with the seemingly infinite population. (Can you imagine living on a planet with seven billion people, as we're expected to have on this planet by the year 2000?)
However, we get glimpses that imply it's worse than that. We are led to infer, from the masses of people in plain bodysuits visible behind the High Council room, that the planet is literally so crowded that they don't have space for a few rooms for office work. That aside from their fake Enterprise, there is no empty 20'-by-20' room on the planet.
The real question isn't "are there really that many people" but "why do they have a viewing window into the High Council room?"
I reject this notion. I believe Gideon is crowded, yes, but not that it's so packed that most adults spend their waking hours packed like sardines, slowly bumbling around in huge crowds.
If that were so, how would they even find space to make the fake Enterprise? What happened to the people displaced by it? No, while I can accept that Gideon is "full of people," I cannot believe they are literally shoulder-to-shoulder across the planet, nor even "…except for special cases" like childbirth and whatever space is needed to design and sew the High Council's uniforms.
Perhaps they're made of hexagons because they can be assembled by hand — no space for a sewing machine necessary.
Do the people have jobs? Families? How are children raised? How do they maintain a culture focused on the "love of life" if they are just walking around staring at nothing all day?
My answer: The people we see are probably tourists — visitors to the Capitol, hoping for a rare view of the Council chambers, which is separated by one-way glass. They may be required to keep moving; that gives everyone a chance to see the Council when the glass is raised, perhaps a few times a day.
This is a ridiculous conclusion, but the whole episode is ridiculous. A culture that refuses birth control on ethical grounds will use a fatal disease to cull their populace? How will they decide who to infect — will they be selected by computer and told to line up for it, as in A Taste of Armageddon? Or will they volunteer to die, these miserable people who reject diaphragms, IUDs, and condoms because life is too sacred to prevent?
The individual scenes of this episode were fascinating but the underlying story just doesn't add up. Two stars.
Old Fools
by Joe Reid
The story this week was about a people claiming to love life so much that they couldn't harm one another, and so long-lived that they developed an overpopulation problem. Overpopulation so severe as to cause them to lure a Starfleet captain who survived a deadly space disease to their planet to infect them with the pox. Why? Perhaps this seemed like the most interesting way to die? For people who love life their treatment of every life seemed to be just the opposite.
Let’s start off on the grand scale. Unlike most of the technically advanced races in the galaxy, the Gideonites lacked the most basic imagination when it came to needing more space. If there isn’t enough space where you are, go somewhere else and find some. Am I to believe that a people who could perfectly reproduce a spaceship as a ruse weren’t able to produce their own ships to take them to other planets to spread out? What weak imaginations these advanced humanoids must have had to not consider that most basic of solutions. During his career Kirk had been to dozens if not hundreds of worlds where a hardy race like the Gideonites could expand.
The next charge affirming the utter hypocrisy of the Gideonites had to do with how freely they lied. Although it might not be fair to lay this charge at the feet of all the people, their leaders certainly were not honest Abes. They lied about transport coordinates. The location of the captain. The girl lied about her origins, claiming to know nothing about Gideon. The entire fake ship was a lie. They only ever resorted to the truth after each specific lie was uncovered, and not a minute sooner. It might explain how these leaders came to power. Even in our world, you don’t come to power by telling the truth. It makes me wonder if the planet was even named Gideon, although saying, “welcome to the planet Marcus”, doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.
[Au contraire, mon ami. We've already had a planet Marcus 12 in "And the Children Shall Lead". If Odona emigrated from planet Gideon to planet Marcus 12, she'd be "Odona Gideon Marcus 12" (ed.)]
"Not only have we no space, but I am using the planet's only hairpiece!"
If they really did love life, it must only have been the lives of their own people. These Gideonites showed a complete lack of basic empathy for anyone who wasn’t them, for example, concocting a plan that lured an alien captain to their world to kidnap, imprison him, and bleed him dry. These actions sure sound out of character for the "lovers of life" they purport to be. In truth, the Gideonites were unimaginative in every sense of the word. Trapping their own people on a planet that can’t support them is evil for an advanced technical society. Using misdirection and bad faith negotiation tactics to carry out their shortsighted plan was contemptible. Making the incarceration and blood letting of an unsuspecting victim their plan to save a planet was morally bankrupt. Attempts by the leader's daughter to redeem their reputation by choosing to sacrifice herself in the end fell flat for me. There wasn’t enough good in the episode to salvage it from the bottom.
One star
[Come join us tonight (January 31st) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
The last quarter of 1968 had the newsmen on tenterhooks. After the flight of Zond 5, many suspected the Russians would try for a flight around the Moon. Would they get there before the hastily rescheduled Apollo 8?
They did not, and now it seems they are taking a different tack, trying to progress in endeavors closer to home. On January 14, the Soviets launched Soyuz 4 into orbit carrying a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Shatalov. This was ho hum stuff—the putatively multi-man Soyuz was once again carrying a single occupant. Ah, but on the 16th, Soyuz 5 took off with cosmonauts Boris Volnyov, Aleksey Yeliseyev, and Evegenii Khrunov, the first three-seat flight since Voskhod 1, four years ago.
More than that, the two craft docked in orbit, the first time two piloted craft have managed the feat. Then Yeliseyev and Khrunov donned space suits, opened their hatch, and walked next door. They weren't visiting for a cup of borscht; they were there to stay, and they bore gifts: newspapers and letters from after Shatalov had taken off! The next day, Soyuz 4 landed with the two new passengers. As of this article's going to press, Volnyov should have landed his Soyuz 5—safely, I trust.
The Soviets are already beging to hail the mission as the construction of the first station in space, and there's no doubt that a lot of firsts have been scored. On the other hand, the two Soyuz craft were only linked for a few hours, and there was no easy way to get between the two craft. Really, they haven't done anything that couldn't have been done during our Gemini program.
That said, this may only be the beginning. Unlike Voskhod, which only comprised a couple of flights, there have been a number of Soyuz missions, both manned and unmanned, so it's probably only a matter of time before a truly ambitious trek is managed, perhaps a real space station.
What's more impressive? American boots on the Moon, or a permanent Soviet presence in near Earth orbit? You be the judge.
Mail's in!
The latest issue of F&SF offers a myriad of treats that are, in some ways, as exciting as today's space news. Let's dive in:
Another splurty cover by Russell FitzGerald
Attitudes, by James H. Schmitz
Azard is one of the Malatlo, the group of peaceniks who have divorced themselves from the Federation of the Hub. Years ago, the Malatlo were given their own planet, far away, but next door to the Raceels, an up-and-coming race, so that the separatists might not be too lonely.
Now war has destroyed both worlds, and Azard is being escorted by three representatives of the Federation to a new world. It's a magnanimous mission…so why is Azard contemplating the murder of his benefactors? And is all really what it seems?
I found the telling of the story a bit talky and stilted, and yet, when I was done, I found the thing stuck with me, some of the scenes vivid in the extreme. So, four stars for a fine opening piece.
by Gahan Wilson
The Cave, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Per Sam Moskowitz' introduction, this is the tale of the end result of Communism as envisioned by a dissident writer in 1920 Leningrad. As winter sets in, an impoverished citizen in the "equal" society wrestles with the urge to steal wood from an advantaged neighbor. Soviet Marxism thus results in reversion to Stone Age sensibilities.
An interesting curiosity. Three stars.
Nightwalker, by Larry Brody
Frank Whalen is a super-spy with a secret: his body shoots off electricity at will. He also has a super suit, which confers stealth, but also has the annoying side effect of causing an all-over itch. This tale rather straightforwardly details an adventure Whalen has behind the Bamboo Curtain, and how he escapes from a Red Chinese jail.
Probably the first in an ongoing series, there's not really enough of Whalen yet to hang on to, character-wise. If you like superhero comics, you'll probably enjoy this one, in a superficial sort of way.
Saxton is an English author whose work generally fails to resonate with me, but this time, she channels her inner Pam Zoline with this beautiful, stream-of-consicousness story. It deals with a prematurely old widow struggling with inexplicable migraines, deep depression, and an uncaring medical system that seems tailor-made to perpetuate the problem with useless nostrums and a callous ear.
The solution? Wine and a bit of angelic help.
It's a beautiful, moving piece, and it was well on its way to five stars before the typically British, bummer ending. Still four stars.
Drool, by Vance Aandahl
Justice Stewart once observed (essentially) "I can't tell you what pornography is, but I know it when I see it." Aandahl proves that, "when correctly viewed, everything is lewd" (thank you Tom Lehrer) in this effective vignette.
Four stars.
Twin Sisters, by Doris Pitkin Buck
A short poem personifying the rain. I liked it. Four stars.
Pater One Pater Two, by Patrick Meadows
Two 21st Century disasters combine to doom the 24th Century: a doomsday weapon renders all of the Earth uninhabitable save for Greece and Asia Minor, and a birth control initiative backed by technology has gone awry, preventing all new births. It's up to Jacson and Marya from the island of Xios to topple the remnants of the past to save the future.
An interesting, innovative tale. Four stars.
Uncertain, Coy, and Hard to Please, by Isaac Asimov
For this piece, I felt it was important to have a female perspective—you'll understand why…
by Janice L. Newman
Asimov’s most recent “Science” article is on feminism. He never uses the word, but feminism is what it argues: that men and women are inherently equal, and that it is only cultural and artificial distinctions that keep them from being equal. It’s an excellent screed. For many women it would be a revelation, particularly if they have had no prior contact with feminist ideas.
Some might take exception to the description of the male/female relationship as slavemaster/slave, but I do not. For too long women have been considered property, unable to own anything: not money, not land, not their own work and discoveries, not even their own bodies. Even today a woman cannot open a checking account at the vast majority of banks without her husband’s or father’s signature. Consider how crippling this is for an independent person in modern society.
I can’t agree with every argument Asimov makes. While I concede that courtly love is an artificial construct, one need only look to the animal kingdom to find plenty of animals that mate for life, and which become despondent if one of the pair is removed. Nor can I dismiss fatherly love as purely cultural. Children look like their parents, after all, and men who cared for partners and offspring were more likely to have children that made it to adulthood.
However, these are minor quibbles. Overall the piece is well thought-out and logical and usually right, and I believe it should be required reading for all fen…indeed, all persons.
Including its author.
Asimov is well-known for groping women at conventions: grabbing their backsides or their frontsides, even seizing and kissing women who had approached him in the hope of getting an autograph. I am certain that he thinks such behavior is flattering–indeed, he lists the "smirk and the leer" as among the petty rewards of being a woman in today's society. I cannot speak for all women; likely some did feel flattered by such attentions. But having talked with some of his victims, I know that this was not so in many cases.
I have never met Asimov in person. Perhaps friends have deliberately kept me away from him at conventions to protect me. At this point, it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever meet him. But if I ever do, I would like to say to him, “You, too, wield the power of the slavemaster. The very ‘silliness’ that you decry as an artificial defense mechanism is exactly what is coming into play when you kiss a woman and she blushes and laughs awkwardly. Hers is a conditioned response born, at its heart, out of fear.”
Perhaps it is not surprising that Asimov apparently can’t make the extra leap to apply his reasoning to his own behavior. As excellent and revelatory as this piece is, it seems to come entirely from Asimov’s mind without any discussion with actual women. In fact, it’s unlikely that he’s had much opportunity to see things from a ‘feminine perspective’, considering the vast majority of media is from a male point of view. Not surprising, but it is saddening and frustrating.
I don’t know if I could convince him that he is not exempt, that however unthreatening he may think himself, society nonetheless places the slavemaster’s whip firmly in his hand. But perhaps, someday, he can: I think the man capable of writing such an important feminist piece could learn from his own words.
Five stars.
by Gideon Marcus
After All the Dreaming Ends, by Gary Jennings
A simple boy meets girl episode in wartime, just before the boy is to ship off to the European Theater of Operations. Except the girl isn't there—she's dying in a hospital bed 25 years later. To sleep, perchance to dream…and what a beautiful, romantic dream.
A sweet, wistful piece. I'm a sucker for love stories. Five stars.
A pleasant recounting
Well now—not a clunker in the bunch, and some Star material to boot. Indeed, this is the first 4-star issue of F&SF in the history of our reviewing the magazine! That's exciting news in the skies above and on the ground, and definitely enough to keep us renewing our subscription—to F&SF AND Aviation Weekly.
We've got a whopping ten titles for you to enjoy this month. Part of it is the increased pace of paperback production. Part is the increased number of Journey reviewers on staff! Enjoy:
From the author of Stand on Zanzibar, and also a lot of churned-out mediocrity, comes this mid-length novel. Can it reach the sublimity of last year's masterpiece, or is it a rent-payer? Let's see.
The band "Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" (great name, that) have a bit of a Be-in on a deserted beach south of London. Their frivolity is marred by the appearance of a flight-suited zombie, half his face eaten away.
Strange happenings compound: the lushy Mrs. Beedle, who lives in a wreck of a home by the beach, suddenly starts appearing in two places at once. Those who encounter her find themselves doused with some kind of acid. Meanwhile, Rory, a DJ on the pirate radio ship Jolly Roger, hauls up a fish on his line that transforms halfway into a squid before breaking free.
The local constabulary, as well as the scientific types in the vicinity, are increasingly alarmed and then mobilized, as the true nature of what they're dealing with is determined: an alien or mutated being with the power to digest and mimic anything it encounters.
In premise, it's thus somewhat akin to Don A. Stuart's (John W. Campbell Jr.) seminal "Who Goes There". In execution, it's not. The rather thin story is developed glacially, with lots of slice-of-life scenes that are not unpleasant to read, but don't add much. Indeed, one could argue that it is possible to unbalance things too far in the direction of "show, don't tell"—Double, Double is written almost like a screenplay, with endless little cliff-hangers, and always from the point of view of the various characters.
Beyond the writing, the premise is fundamentally flawed: digestion is never 100% efficient. Heck, I don't think it's 10% efficient. And this creature can not only digest but duplicate, down to memories? Color me unconvinced. Also, we are lucky that it chose to come to land as quickly as it did—if it had just stayed in the sea, all of the sea life in the world would have been these… things… in very short order.
All told, this is definitely a piece written for the cash grab, perhaps even a recycled, rejected script for the TV anthology Journey to the Unknown. It's not a bad piece of writing, but I'll be donating it to my local book shop when I'm done.
Three stars.
by Brian Collins
For my first book reviews as part of the Journey, I got some SF and fantasy in equal measure. Neither are really worth it, but here we can see the difference between a deeply flawed novel and one that is virtually impossible to salvage.
I know it’s only been a few months since Piers Anthony hit us with his second novel, Sos the Rope, but he has already given us another with Omnivore. That’s three novels in two years! For all his faults, you can’t say he’s lazy. It’s quite possible that in thirty years there will be more Piers Anthony novels than there are stars in the sky.
Omnivore is a planetary adventure, not dissimilar from what Hal Clement or Poul Anderson would write, but with some of those “lovable” Anthony quirks. Here’s the gist: A superhuman agent named Subble is sent to investigate three explorers who have returned to Earth from the “dangerous but promising” planet Nacre, each with his/her trauma and secrets as to what happened. Why did eighteen people die while exploring Nacre prior to these three, and what did they bring back with them? There’s Veg, who as his nickname suggests is a vegetarian; Aquilon, an emotionally fraught woman who now has a case of shell shock; and Cal, gifted with a brilliant intellect but cursed with a frail body. Veg and Cal love Aquilon and Aquilon loves both men. Romantic tension ensues. Anthony pulled a similar love triangle in Sos the Rope, but for what it's worth this one is not quite as painful.
Nacre itself is the star of the show, and it would not surprise me if Anthony were to return to this setting in the future. It’s a fungus-rich planet in which the land is covered in an unfathomable amount of “dust”—spores from airborne fungi. There’s so much airborne fungi, in fact, that the sun has been more or less blocked out, and the animal life has adapted not only to low-light conditions but to move about with only one (big) eye and one limb. Clement would have surely treated this material with more scientific enthusiasm, but Clement sadly is no longer producing his best work and this novel is a serviceable substitute for the not-too-discerning.
Omnivore is Anthony’s best novel to date; unfortunately it’s still not good. There are two crippling problems here. The first is that Anthony simply cannot help himself when it comes to writing women unsympathetically, and the first section of the novel (there are four, each focusing on a different character) is the worst. Veg, while heroic, is unfortunately a woman-hater. I don’t necessarily have an issue with characters having unsavory flaws, but the problem is that this dim view of women bleeds into the rest of the novel to some degree. It should come as no surprise that Aquilon, the sole female character, is also the only one driven purely by emotions as opposed to intellect. Subble himself may as well be a robot, but Anthony writes him as a human so that he can a) take drugs, and b) seduce Aquilon.
The second is that it’s clear that this novel is About Things, but I can’t figure out what those Things could be. There is obvious symbolism at work. The trio of explorers play off of elements (herbivore/carnivore/omnivore, brains/brawn/beauty, and so on), but I’m not sure what statement is being made here. This is especially glaring in a year where we got many SF novels that are About Things; indeed 1968 might’ve been the year of SF novels that try to say Something Very Important. Omnivore might’ve been fine in the hands of a Clement or Anderson, but rather than be true to itself (an Analog-style adventure yarn), it has delusions of importance. It doesn’t help that Anthony gives us a puzzle narrative, but then takes seemingly forever to tell us what the puzzle actually is. The solution, thus, is unsatisfying.
At the rate he’s progressing, Anthony may be able to pen a decent novel in another few years. Two out of five stars, maybe three if it had caught me in a very forgiving mood.
Swordmen of Vistar, by Charles Nuetzel
Cover by Albert Nuetzell
Now we have the latest in what's proving to be an avalanche of heroic fantasy releases, and this one is simply painful to read. We know something is amiss just from looking at the title; to my recollection Nuetzel never used "swordman" or "swordmen" in the novel itself, which leads me to wonder what he could've been thinking. The writing between the covers is no less clumsy.
Thoris is a galley slave, in an ancient world not far off from the mythical Greece of Perseus and Pegasus, when he and the princess Illa find themselves possibly the only survivors of a shipwreck. Thoris falls in love with Illa before the two have even had a full conversation together. They first arrive at an island of cannibals before escaping, only to fall into the clutches of the tyrannical Lord Waja and his sword(s)men of Vistar. Also imprisoned is the wizard Xalla, who is father to a woman named Opil whom Thoris had saved earlier. With no other options, Thoris makes a deal with Xalla to vanquish Waja and then free the wizard—on the ultimate condition that Thoris also take Opil as his bride.
The back cover compares Thoris to Conan the Cimmerian and John Carter of Mars, and indeed Swordmen of Vistar is supposed to be a rip-roaring adventure with a damsel in distress, a morally ambiguous wizard, and a giant snake. One problem: the prose is some of the most ungainly I've ever laid eyes on. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were not tender in their use of the English language, but they had a real knack for plotting which Nuetzel lacks. This is a 220-page novel and surprisingly little happens in it. I hope you still like love triangles, because this novel also has one. Lord Waja and his top henchmen are defeated by the end of the eleventh chapter, but we still have two more to go with Opil as the final obstacle. We need to pad out this already-short book, obviously.
With how much I've been reading about love triangles, I think God may be telling me to try acquiring a second girlfriend. If I were Thoris I would be stuck with a tough choice. Do I pick the tough-minded woman who clearly appreciates my swordsmanship, or the haughty princess who's been degrading me for much of the novel? Sure, the former threatens to kill me if I refuse her, but nobody's perfect.
By the way, Nuetzel may be excusing the awkward prose by stating in the preface that the Thoris narrative is a translation of an ancient manuscript that some academic had written up and given to him. Unfortunately academics, by and large, are terrible writers with no ear for English, and this shows in the "translation." It doesn't help that yes, this is derivative of the John Carter novels, along with a few other things; and while Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are often About Something, Nuetzel doesn't really have anything to say. If you've read hackwork in this genre then the good news is that you've already read Swordmen of Vistar, and so can save yourself the trouble of buying a copy.
Basically worthless, although the illustrations (courtesy of Albert Nuetzell) are at least decent. One out of five stars.
Bill Jarrett is a galactic adventurer, a man who spans the stars to find excitement, glory and money. He’s a flirt and a fighter and the kind of guy who can work himself out of situations. But when Jarrett gets abducted, has a mind-controlling creature strapped to his head, and is sent to overthrow a man who he’s told is a dictator, Jarrett finds himself in a situation he might not be able to win.
Well, yeah, of course, Jarrett does end up winning in the situation he finds himself in, with the help of his friends and a few mechanical contrivances. Because of course he does. As a galactic adventurer, that’s what you might expect from him.
The Star Venturers is an entertaining Ace novel, a quickie star-spanner with a handful of ideas which might stick to your brain. Author Kenneth Bulmer occasionally throws in a small element of satire or self-awareness which enlivens the plot; there’s a bit of a feeling of the author kind of winking at us as he tells this story. But there’s not nearly enough of that stuff to make this book stand out.
Bulmer does play a bit with an interesting concept, the sort of self-learning machine, a kind of artificially intelligent creature called a frug (which Jarrett nicknames Ferdie the Frug) which is placed on a person’s forehead like a headband and which compels the person to follow orders lest they feel horrific agony.
Mr. Bulmer with his wife Pamela
Bulmer takes pains to imply that the device is both mechanical and semi-sentient, a kind of uncaring vicious machine which Jarrett sometimes reasons with and almost treats like a pet – if the pet was a giant tumor which could only cause pain, that is. This idea of artificial intelligence dates back at least to the first robot stories, but the author gives the idea a fresh coat of paint here, and that concept is a real highlight for me.
Other than that, this is a pretty basic space fantasy Ace novel, which is entertaining for its two hour reading time but which will have you quickly flipping over to read the novel by Dean Koontz on the other side. At least it’s not About Things or Very Important. Instead The Star Venturers is just forgettable.
On the other hand, the flip side of this Ace Double is pretty memorable. Dean R. Koontz, an author new to me, has delivered a fascinating satire of a world which is easy to imagine and just as easy to dread.
In the near future, post apocalyptic America, television rules our world. All the people in America live for a special show which all can experience viscerally. That TV show, called The Show, has seven hundred million subscribers. Those subscribers watch a continuing story, kind of a soap opera, about the characters on the screen. But they don't just watch the characters, they also feel the same emotions as the characters. They feel empathy and pain for the characters. In a real way the characters and viewers are bonded.
Because the actors are so well known, so much a part of their audience's lives, even the act of replacing an actor can be tremendously fraught with stress and worry. The act of leaving The Show can be freeing but also terrifying. And when lead actor Mike Jorgova leaves The Show, it makes his life much more complicated. He becomes untethered, is trained to become part of a revolution, and discovers the deeper frightening truths behind a world he scarcely understood.
Young author Dean Koontz delivers a clever and exciting story which shows tremendous potential. He does an excellent job of creating his world in relatively few words, delivering character in just a few broad strokes and creating memorable villains and settings. The end action set-piece, for instance, is built with real suspense and ends with a thrilling struggle which is filled with energy.
Dean Koontz
Along with that aspect, young Mr. Koontz delivers two more elements which separate this book from many of its peers.
First, he paints a fascinating future which seems like a smart extension of McLuhan's concept that "the medium is the message." Koontz creates a TV show which feels like reality, in which the characters live in some semblance of real life while engaging in exaggerated, bizarre actions. That's a concept which feels all the more possible these days, with controversies about the Smothers Brothers and Vietnam dominating headlines about television in 1969.
Koontz also delivers a series of philosophical asides which discuss human evolution from village to society and the ways mass media both shrinks the world and expands our horizons. Nowadays we know everything about people who live across the world but nothing about the people who live next door to us, and that gap only promises to get wider. As our social networks grow, the strengths of our connections only shrink.
This is heady stuff for an Ace Double – and I've only touched on a few of the many ideas shared almost to overflowing here. In fact, the book is chockablock full of ideas but the ambition is a bit high for their achievement. Like many a new author, Koontz has many, many ideas he wants to explore but there are a few too many on display. Nevertheless, despite its thematic density, The Fall of the Dream Machine reads like a rocketship, hurtling ahead until it lands gracefully, sharing a thrilling journey for the readers.
Keep your eye on Mr. Koontz. I predict great things from him.
Poetry has always had a strange place in science fiction. Long before appearing in Hugo Gernsbeck’s magazines, poets have been attempting to explore fantastic themes. However, in spite of their regular presence in almost every SFF periodical, and many fanzines, they rarely seemed to be talked about, nor are they represented in either the Nebulas or the Hugos (although we here give out Galactic Stars to them).
Enter John Fairfax and Panther publishing, who have put together this anthology of responses to the space age. The selection inside is varied. Some are original and some are reprints. Some are SFnal, some are fantastical, others closer to reality. And, as the editor puts it:
Some poets are optimistic about the space odyssey, others view it with cynicism…and other poets do not care if man steps into space or the nearest bar so long as human relations begin with fornication and end with death.
As this book contains almost 50 separate pieces, I cannot hope to cover them all here; rather I want to give an overview and highlight some of the best.
Possibly due to my natural cynicism, Leslie Norris’ poems were among my favorites. He is willing to engage deeply with the future, but believes the same problems we have down here will continue there. For example, in Space Miner we hear of the fate of those travelling to distant worlds for such a job:
He had worked deep seams where encrusted ore,
Too hard for his diamond drill, had ripped
Strips from his flesh. Dust from a thousand metals
Stilted his lungs and softened the strength of his
Muscles. He had worked the treasuries of many
Near stars, but now he stood on the moving
pavement reserved for cripples who had served well.
Just a small part of one of his moving poems that raise interesting questions about where we are headed.
Closely related is John Moat’s Overture I. His works concentrate less on the science fiction but still wonder if we are heading in the right direction:
That twelve years’ Jane pacing outside the bar,
Offering anything for her weekly share
Of tea; those rats now grown immune to death –
I ask you, in whose name and by what power
Have you set out to colonize the stars?
This is only an extract and continues in that fashion. It ponders if what we are bringing to other planets is something they would care for.
Not all are so negative. Some, instead, write about the wonder and artistic possibilities of space travel. Robert Conquest (who SF fans may know from his anthologies or short fiction in Analog) produces a Stapledon-esque epic among the stars in Far Out:
While each colour and flow
Psychedelicists know
As Ion effects
Quotidian sights
Of those counterflared nights.
Yet Conquest still asks within, what is the value of these views to the artist? A complex piece for sure.
There are probably only two other names you have a reasonable chance of recognizing inside: D. M. Thomas and Peter Redgrove, both for their occasional appearances in the British Mags. As you might expect these are among the most explicitly science fictional. For example, in Limbo Thomas gives us a kind of verse version of The Cold Equations, whilst Redgrove’s pieces are trains of thoughts of two common character types of SFF.
However, it should not be thought others have written repetitively on the theme. These poems include such diverse topics as the difficulties of copulation in space, how to serve tea on a space liner, the first computer to be made an Anglican bishop, and explorers getting absorbed into a gestalt entity.
The biggest disappointment for me are the poems from the editor. It is to be expected Fairfax would have a number of pieces inside but, unfortunately, they are among the most pedestrian. For example, his Space Walk:
Around, around in freefall thought
The clinging cosmo-astronaut,
Awkward and expensive star
Dogpaddles from his spinning car.
The poem has nothing inherently wrong with it, but it does not feel insightful, nor does it do anything experimental. It more feels like what would win a middle-school poetry competition on the Space Race. Probably deserving of a low three stars but little more.
I feel, at least in passing, I need to point out we have the recurring problem of the British scene. In spite of the number of poems contained within, none of the poets appears to be woman. There are no shortage of women poets, either in the mainstream or within the fanzines, so I find it hard to believe there were no good pieces available. Hopefully, this can be remedied in a future volume. The Second Frontier, perhaps?
Either way, this is still a fabulous collection. Of course, it will not be for everyone. Poetry is probably the most subjective form of literature, and not everyone likes to sit down to read more than forty poems in a row. However, the selection here is a cut above what we tend to see from our regular science fiction writers (looking at you, de Camp and Carter) and I hope it helps raise the form to higher standards and recognition.
Four Stars for the whole anthology with a liberal sprinkling of fives for the poems I have called out.
Four new novels suggest the seasons, at least for those of us living in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Let's start with the traditional beginning of the year, as opposed to our modern January.
Cover art by Margery Gill, who also supplies several interior illustrations.
The first thing you see when you open the book is musical notation. The melody is said to be a very old French tune, and it plays a major part in the plot.
Those of you who can read music may be able to whistle along with the boy.
Christina, known as Kirsty, is a schoolgirl whose mother died a while ago. Her father remarried, this time to a much younger woman. Like many stepchildren, Kirsty resents her.
An opportunity to escape the awkward situation for a while comes when Kirsty gets a job picking fruit in Norfolk. She moves away from her home in Suffolk and lives with a kindly elderly couple.
Strange things start to happen when she hears music coming from an empty room next to her attic bedroom. She meets a local boy who experienced amnesia and sleepwalking when he stayed in the house. More alarmingly, he almost drowned when he walked toward the sea in a trance.
In addition to this mystery, which involves the supernatural, there are multiple subplots. Kirsty has to learn to get along with her young stepmother. A schoolfriend has no father, an alcoholic mother, smokes, admits to having tried marijuana, and is later arrested for shoplifting. One of her two young brothers suffers an accident.
Despite all this going on, and a dramatic climax, the novel is rather leisurely. The author captures the voice of her young narrator convincingly, and never writes down to her readers. There's a love story involved, and the book might be thought of as a Gothic Romance for teenage girls. In addition to this target audience, adults and even boys are likely to get some pleasure from it.
Two young men are hiking when they get lost in a storm. They wind up in a tiny village with only a handful of people living there. It seems that a dam under construction is going to flood the place, so most folks have moved out.
They spend the night in the home of an elderly couple whose son was killed in World War Two. (That may not seem relevant, but it plays a part in the plot.) The other inhabitants of the doomed village are an ex-military man, his adult son and daughter, a somewhat shady fellow, and the former showgirl who lives with him.
Things get weird when this quiet English village develops a tropical climate overnight. Bizarre plants, some like hot air balloons and some like birds, show up. The surrounding countryside changes into a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. What the heck happened?
We soon find out that people from a time thousands of years from now use time travel to transport folks hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Why? Because the future people face an all-encompassing disaster, and want to start human life all over again in the extreme far future.
(They only select folks in the past who were going to be wiped out of history anyway. The village was just about to be buried under a huge landslide, leaving no evidence behind.)
The rest of the book shows our reluctant time travelers exploring, figuring out a way to survive, and fighting among themselves. The two young women pair up with a couple of the men, but not in the way you might expect.
Near the end, the plot turns into a murder mystery, which seems a little odd. The conclusion is something of a deus ex machina. Otherwise, it's an OK read. The characters are interesting.
Fall is a time of nostalgia and anticipation. We gaze at the past, and ponder the future. Our next book features a lead character who has a lot to look back on, and plenty to concern him coming up.
The book takes its title from a famous painting by 19th century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin.
The artist created several versions of the work. This is one of them.
Francis Sandow, our narrator, started off as a man of our own time. (There are hints that he fought in Vietnam, or at least somewhere in Southeast Asia.) He went on to travel on starships in a state of suspended animation, so he is still alive many centuries from now. In fact, he's one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy.
(Some of this is deduction on my part. The narrator only offers bits and pieces of his life throughout the text. The same might be said about the book's complex background. The author makes the reader work.)
Francis made his fortune by creating planets as an art form. If that isn't god-like enough for you, he's also an avatar of an alien deity, one of many in their pantheon. It's unclear if this is a manifestation of psychic power or a genuine case of possession. The mixing of religion and science in an ambiguous fashion is reminiscent of the Zelazny's previous novel Lord of Light.
Somebody sends Francis new photographs of friends, enemies, lovers, and a wife, all of whom have been dead for a very long time. He also gets a message from an ex-lover (still alive) stating that she is in serious trouble.
This sets him off on an odyssey to multiple planets, as he tracks down an unknown enemy. Along the way, he participates in the death ritual of his alien mentor. The climax takes place on the Isle of the Dead, a place he created on one of his planets as a deliberate imitation of Böcklin's painting.
The bare bones of the plot fail to convey the exotic mood of the book, or Zelazny's style. His writing is informal at times; in other places, he uses extremely long, flowing sentences you can get lost in.
As I've suggested, this novel requires careful reading. Stuff gets mentioned that you won't understand until later, so be patient. I found it intriguing throughout. If the ending seems a little rushed, that's a minor flaw.
About fifty years before the novel begins, aliens arrived on Earth with what seemed to be benevolent intent. Well, you know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts.
The Kaltichs brought longevity treatments and advanced medical techniques that could replace any damaged organ. The catch is that Earthlings have to pay a high price for these things.
There's also the problem of overpopulation. The Kaltichs promised to give humans the secret of instantaneous transportation to a large number of habitable planets. It's been half a century, and we're still waiting.
Because the longevity treatments have to be renewed every ten years, and the Kaltichs deny them to anybody they don't like, Earthlings are subservient to them. We have to call them sire, and punishment with a special whip that inflicts extreme pain follows any transgression.
Our protagonist, Martin Preston, is a secret agent for S.T.A.R., the Secret Terran Armed Resistance. (I guess we're still not over the spy craze, with its love of acronyms.) The agency asks him to imitate a Kaltich and infiltrate one of their centers, which are off limits to humans.
(I should mention here that the Kaltichs are physically identical to Earthlings. That seems unlikely, but it's a plot point and we get an explanation later.)
Because the previous fellow who tried this had his hands cut off and sent back to S.T.A.R., Martin understandably refuses. An incident occurs that changes his mind. With the help of a brilliant female surgeon (who, like most of the women in a James Bond adventure, is gorgeous and sexually available), he sets out on his dangerous mission.
What follows is imprisonment, torture, escape, killings, double crosses, and the discovery of the big secret of the Kaltichs, which you may anticipate. The book is similar to a Keith Laumer slam bang thriller, if a little more gruesome. Hardly profound, but it sure won't bore you.
Three stars.
There you have it, folks. Take ten and enjoy all the new novels coming out. We'll be back next month to help you figure out which ones to put at the top of the pile.
China's got the Bomb, but have no fears—they can't wipe us out for at least five years…
So sang satirist Tom Lehrer in 1965 for the television show That Was the Week that Was. Well, here we are, about five years later, and the Chinese have graduated to the big time. 18 months ago, they tested their first H-Bomb, the big firecracker that involves nuclear fusion rather than fission, with a damage yield equal to more than 100 times that of the Hiroshima A-Bomb. A try at #2 last year was a dud, but one detonated less than a fortnight ago went off just fine, creating a 3 megaton blast.
Radio Peking announced the blast on December 29th, but the Atomic Energy Commission had detected the blast the day before. It was apparently timed in celebration of Mao Tse Tung's 75th birthday. (In China, if you go carrying pictures of the Chairman, you will make it with someone…)
The bright…uh…positive side to this is that China's missiles, if there be any, are probably mostly pointed at the Soviet Union. Apparently, the Russians have beefed up their border divisions, and inter-Communist relations are sub-frosty.
So perhaps we have another five years…
Bigger than a half-dozen magazines
On the homefront, the latest issue of Galaxy, the magazine with half again as much content as all the others, offers some boffo entertainment as well as a few duds.
by John Pederson Jr.
To Jorslem, by Robert Silverberg
The ever-productive Silverbob offers up what may (but may not) be the final installment in his vivid Nightwings series. I'm sure we'll see a fix-up soon, a la To Open the Sky. According to Bob, this is his modus operandi—sell novellas to Galaxy editor Pohl, and then corral them into a novel.
by Jack Gaughan
Following directly on the heels of the last story, the invaders have fully Vichy-ized the Earth. Tomis, formerly a star-surveying Watcher, and then an historian of the caste Rememberers, is now a Pilgrim. Accompanied by the haughty Olmayne, cast out of the Rememberers for her slaying of her husband to be with the (now dead) former prince of Roum, the two make their way toward the holy city of Jorslem. Tomis is burdened not only with Olmayne's company but also the knowledge that he has sold out humanity, giving the invaders records of the Terran subjugation of the aliens' ancestors—thus justifying the invasion.
The story is something of a travelogue, something of a search for redemption, and it's written absolutely beautifully. It's not New Wave, exactly, but it's qualitatively different from what filled Galaxy last decade (or, indeed, what continues to fill Analog). Maybe Silverberg is leading a one-man revolution.
"Jorslem" does not quite achieve five stars, however. The plot is thin, even as (and perhaps especially as) a climax to the series. The happy endings come too suddenly and a bit implausibly. Female characters exist to be lovers or harpies.
Nevertheless, the world is so beautifully rendered, and the prose so masterfully done, that you'll enjoy the journey regardless.
Four stars.
Now Hear the Word of the Lord, by Algis Budrys
An alien race has controlled the world since 1958, secretly and tirelessly infiltrating every level of our society. One lone voice, a representative of the World Language League, finds a member of this cabal and threatens to kill him in order to learn the true extent of the invasion. The truth is shocking enough to blow your circuits.
A humdrum plot, but excellent, sensual telling. Four stars.
Another aliens-among-us story. This time, the baddies are the Fnools, who perfectly ape members of a given profession—realtors, minor cabinet officials, what have you. Only one thing gives them away: they are all only two feet tall.
But what if there was an easily accessible way for them to grow to human height? All hope would be lost!
This is a silly story, and most of the goodwill it earns is thrown away by the rather tasteless ending.
Two stars.
Golden Quicksand, by J. R. Klugh
by Jack Gaughan
The ferret ship H.L.S. Solsmyga is running for its life from two Grakevi raiders at thousands of times the speed of light. Its crew are protected from the tremendous accelerations involved only by the use of liquid-filled, individual pods, linked by the computerized Shipmind. If only the Solsmyga could use its superior maneuverability to ditch its pursuers; but in fact, Commander Yuri Hammlin's mission is to lead the raiders into a trap.
The running battle is competently presented, with lush, pseudotechnical detail, and Gaughan peppers the story with pretty, albeit superfluous, pictures. Ultimately, though, it's just a combat story. There is an attempted stingy tail, but it's more of an appendix.
Three stars.
Our Binary Brothers, by James Blish
by Brock
A driven man achieves everlasting success on Earth, but that's not enough. Repelled by humanity's technological quagmire, he longs for a simpler, cleaner world. And he finds one orbiting a hitherto undiscovered dwarf star just a fifth of a lightyear away. There, he sets himself up as a God and slowly leads the unwashed masses there toward a better civilization.
But planets comprise multiple populations, and not all are as backward as the hill people first encountered by the Terran…
A well-written but one-note vignette. Three stars.
For Your Information: The Island of Brazil, by Willy Ley
This is a fascinating piece on a variety of Atlantic land masses that never were. It's a nice complement to his piece on Atlantis.
Five stars.
Kendy's World, by Hayden Howard
by Reese
Kennedy Olson was born to high hopes just before the National Emergency turned the United States into an increasingly autocratic police state. After the death of his hippie, goodnik father, the boy coasted through life on his athletic skills and his winning smile. Come his junior year in high school, "Kendy" had more than a dozen scholarship offers, but the most persuasive came from the small California campus of National University. Seemingly too good to be true, the old-fashioned college offered a well-rounded education, sports opportunities, and a chance to make a difference.
Except that NU is really a training ground for spies, and the big bad isn't the Soviets, but the unspeakable, top secret horror they found when they tried to land on Phobos…
From the author that brought us The Eskimo Invasion, this story appears to be the setup for another serialized novel. The writing is strictly amateur, and there's not much story here—just a series of unpleasant events. I am curious about the alien menace, though, if it ever be developed.
Two stars.
Finish with a bust
As promised, there's lots of good stuff, and a fair bit of mediocrity in this first Galaxy of 1969. Ending with the weakest tale probably makes sense, but it does leave a bitter taste in the mouth. Nevertheless, the issue finishes on the positive side of the three-star divide, and that's a good enough New Year baby for me!
How about two of them, with Dick Martin from Laugh-In…
![[March 18, 1969] What a way to go! (<i>Star Trek</i>: "All Our Yesterdays")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690318title.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[March 8, 1969] Around the Universe (April 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690308cover.jpg?resize=519%2C372&ssl=1)
![[March 1, 1969] Beyond this Horizon (March 1969 <i>Analog</i> and Mariner 6)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690301cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[February 22, 1969] Good and Bad Trips (March 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690222cover.jpg?resize=665%2C372&ssl=1)
![[February 12, 1969] Slick stuff (March 1969 <i>Galaxy</i> science fiction)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/690212cover.jpg?resize=662%2C372&ssl=1)
![[January 28, 1969] Slidin' (February 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690128cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[January 18, 1969] (February 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690118cover.jpg?resize=663%2C372&ssl=1)
![[January 14, 1969] Ten for the road (January Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690114covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[January 6, 1969] Booms and Busts (February 1969 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/690106cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
