Well, what do you know. A magazine I thought as dead as a doornail has risen from its grave. I've reviewed every issue of Worlds of Tomorrow from its birth in 1963 to its demise in 1967. After three years of mouldering in the grave, like John Brown's body, it has returned. Let's take a look at this revenant to see if it was worth digging up.
Cover art by Jack Gaughan.
The first thing to note is that the magazine is all fiction. No editorial, no articles, no letter column, no reviews. Oh, there's a one page thing by new editor Ejler Jakobsson, but it only discusses the stories briefly, in pretty much the same way most magazines provide a short blurb before each piece.
The next thing that catches my eye is that there's a heck of a lot of art, and that it's not credited. I had to do some detective work (visible signatures, stylistic clues, etc.) to name the artists, but I was not always successful, as you'll see below. I could take some educated guesses (I suspect that the names Gilbert and Gaughan would appear more often if I did) but I've tried not to go too far out on a limb. At least we know who the authors are!
In the Land of Love, by George H. Smith
Illustrations by Gilbert(full name unknown.)
In a vastly overpopulated future world dominated by India, folks in North America are crowded together in small rooms and survive on gruel. Our protagonist, an ex-soldier well over a century old, hates living like that. What really gets his goat is the fact that society has become a right-winger's nightmare of what might happen when the hippies take over.
Everybody is stoned all the time. They constantly talk about love, but consider political assassins to be heroes. They also approve of the fact that a motorcycle thug casually runs over people, killing adults and children on a whim. They consider it to be karma.
Super-Zapper, the killer cyclist.
The old veteran yearns for death to release him, but not even that is a sure way to escape from this hippie hell. However, maybe there's a way he can use this to his advantage.
Boy, George H. Smith (not to be confused with SF writer George O. Smith) sure hates hippies! This is very heavy-handed satire indeed. The twist at the end is mildly interesting, but that's all I can say about it.
Two stars.
Of Death What Dreams, by Keith Laumer
Uncredited illustration.
This requires some explanation. Fortunately, the Noble Editor has saved me some work, in his review of March issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I shamelessly steal his quotation from editor Ed Ferman:
Five of science fiction's best storytellers were asked to write a novella beginning from a common prologue (written by Keith Laumer), to be combined in a book called Five Fates. The Anderson story and one by Frank Herbert (coming up soon) will be published in F&SF. We suggest that you look for the book (out in August from Doubleday) in order to catch up with the others: by Keith Laumer, Gordon Dickson and Harlan Ellison.
The Poul Anderson story The Fatal Fulfillment appeared in that issue, where it won a middle-of-the-road three stars.
The Noble Editor has already reviewed the March issue of Galaxy, which featured Ellison's story The Region Between. That one earned a full five stars.
Let's see if Laumer's version gets an A, a C, or some other grade.
Illustration by Jack Gaughan.
Like all the other stories, this one begins with a guy named Douglas Bailey entering a euthanasia center and getting an injection that is supposed to kill him. In this case, however, he revives in a room with a woman who seems vaguely familiar present. Because he lost all his legal identity at the time of his attempted suicide, he has to join the criminal underground to survive. He also feels as if he's got some purpose he has to fulfill.
This is a rigidly hierarchical, vastly overcrowded future world. Bailey manages to put together enough cash to get himself a false ID as a member of the upper class, implant knowledge of the culture of the elite into his brain, and develop his body into that of a bodybuilder in a particularly painful way. He bluffs his way into the ruling class (who are literally high above the ordinary folks) for reasons that don't become clear until the end.
Illustration by Phoebe Gaughan, who is married to Jack.
Given that this is a yarn by Laumer, it's not surprising that it's got plenty of action, a complex plot, and moves at lightning speed. This is an example of the author in his serious mood, rather than his frequent attempts at comedy. The climax adds a couple of science fiction themes that aren't clued at earlier, so that strains credibility. Overall, worth a read, but no masterpiece.
Three stars.
The Bridge, by Piers Anthony
Illustration by Gilbert.
A guy wakes up to find a tiny woman in his bed. She insists that they make love. Alternating sections of the text reveal who sent her to him and why.
Illustration by Jack Gaughan.
Really, this is nothing but a description of a man of normal size having sex with a woman nine inches tall. It's pretty explicit. The explanation for what's going on is confusing and nonsensical. The whole thing boils down to an extended dirty joke.
An explanatory diagram that explains nothing.
One star.
Serum-SOB, by James Bassett
Illustrations uncredited.
A scientist discovers that human aggression is caused by a virus. He develops a vaccine that turns people into passive, agreeable folks. His main motive is to have sex with other women without his wife being upset. Once the whole world is inoculated, he finds another way to amuse himself, with serious consequences.
The effect of Serum-SOB.
The intent seems to be comic satire. I don't think it works. I guess I'm supposed to be amused by the scientist's cynical manipulation of other people. Nope.
One star.
Tell Me, by Edward Y. Breese
More uncredited artwork.
A space scout talks about his experience on a world populated by very human aliens at a fairly low level of technology. You'll probably be able to figure out who he is pretty quickly.
This thing depends entirely on its plot twist, which is telegraphed in multiple ways early in the text. It's not a terribly original idea, either. Maybe not quite as worthless as the two previous stories, but not good.
Two stars.
The State vs. Susan Quod, by Noel Loomis
Even more uncredited artwork.
The narrator tells us about his wife, who was a robot nearly indistinguishable from a human being. He didn't know this until the end of their relationship, but he tells the reader right away.
There are lots of these androids around, and they appear to be infiltrating positions of power. Somehow they've overcome the restrictions built into them.
The plot has something to do with the robot's grandfather taking control of the world's supply of gold, leading to economic chaos. The narrator is a political operative who is supposed to correct this. This leads to serious conflict with his wife, and a dramatic gesture on her part that reveals her true nature.
There's a lot of stuff about the narrator's desire for the stunningly beautiful robot and her refusal to have sex with him until they're married. This isn't particularly interesting, and the story is way too long.
Two stars.
Histoport 3939, by Mark Power
Illustrations by Jack Gaughan.
A guy joins folks mining a planet for rocks that produce a gas that causes antigravity. The place is inhabited by asexual aliens who don't seem to have any interest in the humans at all. Some of the miners, who must be pretty damn lonely, take the aliens as mates.
The guy tries to figure out a way to smuggle the gas, in some other form, out of the planet. It turns out the aliens eat the rock, and that suggests a way he can succeed. That involves marrying one of the aliens. Let's just say that things don't work out well.
A man and his mate.
Besides having an implausible plot (Antigravity gas? Humans taking spore-based, nonsexual aliens as mates?) this story is full of made-up futuristic words in almost every sentence. A little of that goes a long way. A centerfold of one of the aliens makes me suspect that I'm not supposed to take this seriously, but the story isn't funny.
Eat your heart out, Playboy!
Two stars.
The Mallinson Case, by K. H. Hartley
Yet another uncredited bit of art.
This takes the form of the transcription of a legal case. In the future, a person can put his or her consciousness into an artificial body that can be transmitted over something like three-dimensional television. A man used this to have an affair with a woman. Her husband sued for adultery, but the court decided the woman was not guilty, because she didn't have sex with the man's actual body.
Illustration by Jack Gaughan.
In the present case, the husband used the same technology to kill the man. Is he guilty of murder? Or is he innocent, just as the woman was acquitted of adultery?
The speculative technology is interesting, and the two legal cases are decided in a way that is logical. Besides that, the story makes for dry reading. I suppose that's realistic, anyway, but it's pretty dull.
Two stars.
Private Phone, by Rachel Cosgrove Payes
Yep; more uncredited illustrations.
A teenager wants — you guessed it — a private phone. Mom argues against it, but Dad gives in.
Typical teenager of the future.
The ending reveals why this story, despite its futuristic trappings, is science fiction at all. You'll probably see it coming a mile away.
Two stars.
Worth Reviving?
Let's face it; this was a lousy issue. Only Laumer's story even reaches the level of being worth reading. There's a lot of sex in this mag, mostly in forms that seem like male fantasies to me.
An ad in the magazine reveals that another old publication, that hasn't been seen since 1968 (in its first and, so far, only issue) is supposed to rise out of its coffin in the near future. It looks like it will contain Gordon R. Dickson's contribution to the Five Fates series noted above. My esteemed colleague Kris Vyas-Myall gave the premiere issue of Worlds of Fantasy a lukewarm review, which isn't promising.
While I long for the return of SF's heyday in the early 1950s, when there were 40 monthly/quarterly mags on the newsstands, I don't think this is the way to get there!
My sources in the publishing industry tell me that Dickson's story will be retitled Maverick when it appears in book form. No relation to the old Western TV show, I presume.
Henry Sutton is the pen name of David R. Slavitt, a highly respected classicist, translator, and poet. As Sutton, he wrote a couple of sexy bestsellers, The Exhibitionist and The Voyeur. Now he's turned his hand to a science fiction thriller. Let's see if he's as adept at technological suspense as eroticism.
The story begins with the President of the United States announcing that the nation will stop all research into the use of biological weapons. Instead, only defensive research will take place.
That sounds great, but it means very little. Figuring out how to defend oneself against such weapons means you have to produce them and study them.
Next, the author introduces a number of characters in a tiny town in Utah and at the nearby military base. Guess what kind of secret research goes on at the base?
Pilot error during an unexpected storm leads to a virus being released on the town. The deadly stuff causes Japanese encephalitis, a disease with a high mortality rate. Survivors often have permanent neurological damage. There is no cure.
When a number of people come down with the disease, the military seals off the town. The phone lines are cut. One character is shot in the leg while trying to leave. Meanwhile, politicians in Washington try to cover up the disaster.
Our lead characters are a widowed man and a divorced woman who happened to be out of town when the virus hit the place. (The disease is normally transmitted via mosquito bites rather than from person to person. That's why he gets away with a relatively minor set of symptoms and she isn't sick at all.)
Besides giving us the mandatory romantic subplot, these two figure out there's more going on than the military is willing to admit. The man manages to sneak out of town and sets off on a long and dangerous hike across the wilderness, looking for a place where he can make a phone call to a trusted friend with government connections.
This is a taut political thriller in the tradition of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. Like those bestselling novels, both adapted into successful films, it creates a cynical, paranoid mood. I can easily imagine Vector as a motion picture.
Less of a science fiction story than last year's similarly themed bestseller The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, Vector is a competent suspense novel. The narrative style is straightforward, meant for readability rather than profundity. The love story seems thrown in just to satisfy the expectations for mass market fiction.
This novel appeared a few years ago in abridged form in Galaxy, as To Outlive Eternity. The original title more or less gave the game away, so it's a good thing that Anderson (or someone at Doubleday) had it changed. Even had it not been based on an older serial, it would be hard to believe Tau Zero is a completely new novel, being cut from an old cloth and with a premise that is almost primordial in its simplicity. Anderson probably did not intend this, but Tau Zero reads as a companion piece to his much earlier novel Brain Wave; but whereas Brain Wave sees a whole planet thrown into chaos, Tau Zero packs as much drama into a single cramped space.
In a future where Sweden has apparently emerged as the world's sole superpower (also one of the novel's few attempts at a joke, and it's a good one), a ship called the Leonora Christine sets off for a neighboring star system, with the hopes of finding a planet suitable for human life. With a crew of 50, 25 men and as many women, the folks aboard expect to never see their loved ones on Earth again—only they end up being even more right than they had feared. While they had expected folks on Earth to grow old and die while only five years would pass inside the ship, a freak encounter with a nebula damages the ship in such a way that it is unable to decelerate; this is a problem, because while the ship can't reach the speed of light, it can get closer… and closer… with virtually infinite acceleration. The what-if question at the novel's core is thus so basic that a 10-year-old could've thought of it: "What if the ship went faster?"
Being stuck in what amounts to big tin can with 49 other people would drive anyone nuts after a while, so someone has to step in for the sake of the group's survival. The closest we get to a hero is Charles Reymont, a constable aboard ship and "pragmatism personified" who, for the greater good, cultivates what amounts to a police state in microcosm. His stoicism doesn't stop him from falling into a love triangle with two women aboard ship, Ingrid Lindgren (Swedish) and Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling (Chinese). Reymont is of course American, in attitude if not geography. Of the 50 people aboard, only maybe 10 are given any time on the page, and even fewer of those are given individual personalities. The most curious of the bunch might be the ship's captain, Telander, who starts out as heroic but who, between a combination of Reymont's increasing authoritarianism and the desperation of the situation, becomes more depressed and withdrawn. There's a high chance these people will die here, either through another accident or through living out the rest of their natural lives aboard a ship that's accelerating at such a rate that it might even outlive the lifespan of the universe.
Tau Zero is a bit of a paradox. It at once gives a sense of claustrophobia while also evoking a breadth of scale rarely seen in SF, especially these days. It helps that Anderson tries his best not to cheat, at least from a layman's (my) perspective, which is one of his virtues anyway. In just over 200 pages we're sent on a voyage beyond our own galaxy, indeed beyond the universe as we know, towards—what? What could possibly be at the end of that rainbow? You would have to read for yourself. I have to recommend it, even with its faults (namely the reliance on melodrama) in mind.
Four stars.
by Cora Buhlert
Blood on the Streets of West Berlin
The terrible events in Ohio and the US expanding the war in South East Asia from Vietnam to Cambodia and Laos did not go unremarked in West Germany. And so, on May 9, 1970, only a day after the 25th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, students and peace activists took to the streets of many West German cities, including Frankfurt on Main and West Berlin.
Protesters in Frankfurt on MainMore protesters in Frankfurt on Main. The banner reads "There is no neutrality against US imperialism".
Any kind of student, leftwing, or peace protest in West Germany has the unfortunate tendency to escalate into violence, largely due to a disproportionately severe police reaction. And exactly this is what happened in West Berlin, when 7500 overwhelmingly young people protested against the Kent State University shootings and the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in front of the America House on Hardenbergstraße. The West Berlin police was out in force – with 5000 police officers, i.e. one cop for one and a half protesters.
Protesters in West Berlin. The banner reads "Freedom for all Communists imprisoned in West Germany" and is most likely a reference to the imprisonment of the Frankfurt department store arsonists Andreas Baader, Throwald Proll and Han Söhnlein, whose release has become something of a cause celebre for the West German left.
The protest quickly got ugly. Protesters threw stones and shot steel balls with slingshots, a new tactic among the so-called "urban guerilla" that can lead to grave injuries. Some protesters even brandished knives. The police responded with truncheons and water cannons. In the end, 284 police officers, 22 police horses and an unknown number of protesters were injured. Two police horses were injured so severely that they had to be shot on site by their riders.
Protesters in West Berlin attack the police with stones and pieces of wood. They wear raincoats and hard hats as protection against police truncheons and water cannons.
In this case, I find that my sympathy lies squarely with the horses who are wholly innocent of the human follies which lead to protests turning violent with wearying regularity.
Poul Anderson is probably one of the most reliable writers in the genre today. He is highly prolific and whenever I peruse the paperback spinner rack at my trusty import bookstore, I usually find at least one new Poul Anderson book. Some of them are better than others, but they're usually at the very least entertaining.
Anderson's latest – with the intriguing title A Circus of Hells – is an adventure of Dominic Flandry of the Imperial Intelligence Corps, tasked with protecting the Terran Empire from threats both external and internal. The opening paragraph is fantastic and hints at many thrills to come:
The story is of a lost treasure guarded by curious monsters, and of captivity in a wilderness, and of a chase through reefs and shoals that could wreck a ship. There is a beautiful girl in it, a magician, a spy or two, and a rivalry of empires.
How could anybody resist such an opening? That said, Junior Lieutenant Flandry is initially less than thrilled, because his latest posting on the backwater planet of Irumclaw is not suited to one as adventurous as Dominic Flandry. However, he doesn't stay there for long before he leaves on an unsanctioned mission for the lost world of Wayland, long since abandoned and forgotten by the fading Terran Empire. In the good old days, Wayland used to be a mining world and the local mobsters of Irumclaw wonder whether there are still resources to be extracted from that lost world, so they hire Flandry for a fee – or rather bribe – of one million credits to investigate. And just so Flandry won't get any ideas, he is assigned a watchdog. Flandry isn't overly happy about this and requests the watchdog to be an "amiable human female".
This amiable human female turns out to be Djana, the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold. During their journey to Wayland, Flandry avails himself of her services (of course he does). Djana is very much a cardboard cutout, though Anderson attempts to give her some depth by letting us know that she is deeply religious and also has an agenda of her own.
Wayland turns out to be a tidally locked hellhole reminiscent of Mercury as it was depicted in Planet Stories some twenty-five years ago. Nor is it as deserted as expected, because no sooner do Flandry and Djana arrive than their scout ship 'Jake' is brought down by what appears to be birds. So Flandry and Djana must trek through a frozen wasteland on foot to an abandoned mining settlement, where a sentient computer and resources to repair the ship might be found, all the while dealing with hostile wildlife, which – surprise – turns out to be robots controlled by exactly that computer.
Anderson has another unpleasant surprise in store for Flandry, when Djana double-crosses him to deliver Wayland and its riches to a different mobster, who turns out to be a front for the Merseians, perennial rivals of the Terran Empire for galactic supremacy. Flandry and Djana are taken captive and enlisted by a Merseian scientist named Ydwyr to help explore the border world of Talwin, location of a Merseian outpost. More adventure awaits, unfortunately interrupted by the sort of exhaustive description of Talwin's flora and fauna that one would expect to find in the pages of Analog.
It's probably no surprise that Flandry survives this adventure. As for Djana, with Flandry's help she is able to free herself of serfdom and prostitution, though – equally unsurprisingly – there is no happily ever after for her and Dominic Flandry, because Flandry just isn't the type to settle down with any one woman.
"As for you," Djana tells Flandry as he leaves her, "I guess I can't stop you from having nearly any woman who comes by. But I'll wish this, that you never get the one you really want." This feels very much like foreshadowing – or rather aftershadowing – for last year's The Rebel Worlds, a novel set later in Flandry's career, where Flandry finds himself unhappily in love with a married woman who chooses her husband over him.
A notable problem with this novel is that Anderson abandons the mystery of Wayland halfway through to have Flandry investigate the mystery of Talwin instead. In many ways, A Circus of Hells feels like two disparate stories stuck together, probably because it is. The Wayland portion of the story appeared last year in the August 1969 issue of Galaxy under the title "The White King's War".
Dominic Flandry has been called "James Bond in space" and that's very much what A Circus of Hells is, a cloak and dagger spy adventure spiced up with plenty of sexual encounters. But where Bond's missions take him to Switzerland, Jamaica and Japan, Flandry's take him to Wayland, Irumclaw and Talwin.
The spy craze that gripped the entire world a couple of years ago seems to have subsided somewhat and even the latest James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service did less well than its predecessors, though personally I rather liked it. However, A Circus of Hells shows that there is still life in the good old spy novel, particularly when transported to a different setting than usual.
Another solid adventure for Dominic Flandry. Not outstanding, but definitely entertaining.
Due to the distinctive headgear worn by some of the construction workers, the incident has become known as the Hard Hat Riot.
In the chaos that ensued, with an estimated twenty thousand people in the streets near Federal Hall, the counter-protestors attacked the anti-war demonstrators while police did little to stop the violence.
The pro-war crowd later marched up Broadway and threatened to attack City Hall. They demanded that the building's flag, flown at half-mast in commemoration of the Kent State killings, be raised to full mast. In an example of grim irony, the hard hats and their allies also attacked nearby Pace University, a conservative business school.
About one hundred people were injured, including seven police officers. Six people were arrested. Only one of them was a construction worker.
With all of this going on, it's tempting to escape from the real world and allow our imaginations to run wild. As we'll see, however, the latest issue of Fantastic contains as much violent conflict as reality.
Cover art by Gray Morrow.
Editorial, by Ted White
The editor describes in great detail the tasks he performs to put out the magazine. I found this to be a fascinating look behind the scenes.
No rating.
Always the Black Knight (Part One of Two), by Lee Hoffman
Illustrations by Gray Morrow.
Our hero is named Kyning. His job is to take part in jousts for the amusement of folks on various planets. As the title implies, he plays the Bad Guy, who gets trounced by the White Knight. This is all just a simulation, of course. He gets a few bruises from time to time, but only fake blood is spilled.
(At this point, I was reminded of the new novel Six-Gun Planet by John Jakes, which I recently reviewed. Both stories feature people recreating romanticized versions of the past, complete with robot horses.)
An accident during a joust leaves Kyning severely injured. Several days later, he emerges from a coma, fully healed. The bad news is that his squire and the White Knight have left him stranded, blasting off for some other planet. With no money and a phony passport confiscated by the authorities, he's stuck here.
(Why the phony passport? We don't really know yet, although there are hints that Kyning doesn't want to talk about his past.)
Things could be worse. The folks who run the planet give him a place to live, with a roommate, and a small stipend. He's given the education needed to get a job, which boils down to TV repairman.
Kyning soon finds out that the populace is kept in a peaceful, passive state through a universally consumed drink containing tranquilizers, as well as subliminal messages to keep drinking the stuff. He convinces his roommate to stop swallowing the liquid, and gives him lessons in sword fighting.
A lesson gets out of hand.
It seems that, once released, the suppressed aggression inside the tranquilized folks can explode out of control. Despite this risk, the roommate convinces others to give up the drink.
Meanwhile, Kyning makes a pass at a pretty young women, only to discover that the tranquilizers also completely repress sexual desire. She doesn't even know what a kiss is. On this planet, people marry and have children only in order to maintain the population, without any pleasure.
So far, the novel fits the common science fiction pattern of somebody fighting against a repressive society. Once again, I'm reminded of a new book I reviewed recently. Like Ira Levin's This Perfect Day, we've got a peaceful world that is only kept that way by drugging the populace. It's keeping my interest so far, even if it's not outstanding in any way.
Three stars.
Psychivore, by Howard L. Myers
Illustration by Michael Wm. Kaluta.
On a planet full of carnivorous plants and other hazards, a boy orphaned by a recent war ekes out a living by gathering wild fruits and selling them at the spaceport. He meets a very old, very weak man, one of the original colonists. The fellow wears goggles over his eyes. The boy agrees to give the man a ride to the city. Along the way, his strange story emerges.
The man encountered a creature that feeds on the souls of others. When he looked into the thing's single eye, his mind went into the being's brain. The man now has the unwanted ability to project his mind into anybody who looks into his eyes, hence the goggles. Looking into an animal's eyes kills it, and gazing into a human's eyes drives that person insane.
(I may be explaining the premise badly, because I found it hard to follow. It's unique, if nothing else.)
An accident causes the boy and man to lock eyes. In order to avoid driving the lad mad, the fellow puts his soul into the boy, losing his life in the process. The rest of the story deals with the boy's wild adventures, now that he has the man's memories in his mind. These include trying to stow away on a starship and meeting the title soul-eater.
As I said, original but confusing. It's also outrageously implausible, even for this kind of complicated story, which throws in bizarre concepts left and right. And yet, it's still not bad to read.
Three stars.
The Time, by David Mason
A man quits his job, drops his girlfriend, and just sits in his apartment waiting. The impact of the story depends entirely on what he's waiting for, so I won't say much more. Suffice to mention that it reminds me of an old Ray Bradbury story, the title of which would give away too much. There's a striking final image, which you may or may not anticipate.
Our hapless hero is the world's worst computer salesman. He has to fake his records so it looks like his products don't match the needs of potential customers. Out of the blue, a mysterious fellow offers to pay cash for one of the advanced machines, as long as it's kept secret. Forced by his boss to get some publicity for the sale, he tracks the guy down and finds out what it's all about.
The mystery is intriguing at first. Why does the customer use a false name? Why did he remove a ring from his finger? The revelation about what's going on is less interesting. Without saying too much, I'll just note that there's a reason this story is in Fantastic and not Analog.
Three stars.
I of Newton, by Joe W. Haldeman
A new author gives us this variation on the old deal with the Devil theme. A mathematician accidentally summons a demon, who will answer three questions, but then the mathematician has to give it a task that is impossible to perform or lose his soul.
Given the premise, you'd expect the guy to ask the demon to find the last digit of pi or some other impossible mathematical feat. (You may recall the Star Trek episode Wolf in the Fold, which featured this notion.)
Nope. This tiny tale ends with a trivial joke instead. Decently written and inoffensive, but it falls flat.
Two stars.
In the Land of the Not-Unhappies, by David R. Bunch
Illustration by Jeff Jones.
More weirdness from a controversial New Wave writer. The narrator crosses a barrier (possibly mountains) and enters a land where the people emerge from identical domes to spend time sweeping the ground in one direction, then sweeping it the other direction. This is all explained by the machines that welcome the narrator.
You don't read Bunch for plot logic or characterization, but for strange concepts and allegorical content, often disturbing. In this case, the futility of human action seems to be the point. Your interpretation may be different.
Bunch is a matter of taste. Love him or hate him, there's nobody like him.
This issue's Fantasy Classic comes from the March 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.
Cover art by J. Allen St. John.
We've met our caveman hero Hok a few times before. He's already invented the bow and arrow. This story gives him an even more advanced weapon.
Some folks who live by the sea invade Hok's territory. Before the battle really begins, a meteorite lands at Hok's feet. A fragment knocks him out. He wakes up to discover that his people thought he was dead. Everybody panicked, understandably, when this big rock fell out of the sky. In the chaos, the bad guys kidnapped Hok's mate and son.
In an amazing set of unlikely circumstances, the meteorite ignited some coal just sitting around, so the iron and other stuff in the rock melted together, eventually cooling into a piece of steel in the shape of a sword.
No, I don't buy it either.
Anyway, Hok hones the edge of this hunk of metal and gives it a handle. He uses the new weapon against dangerous animals and, of course, the bad guys. Another extraordinary coincidence occurs at the climax.
I believe I once called the stories about Hok sword-and-sorcery yarns without swords and without sorcery. Well, now we've got a sword, but still no sorcery. (On the other hand, Hok's incredible good luck makes me wonder if his sun god has a hand in things.)
The use of footnotes, trying to convince me that this thing is a realistic portrait of the prehistoric world, doesn't help. If nothing else, old pro Wellman knows how to keep the action moving. Sensitive readers should be aware that this is an extremely violent story, with too many folks getting killed to count.
Two stars.
The Prince of New York, by Gregory Benford and Laurence Littenberg
Illustration by Steve Stiles.
A guy becomes filthy rich by borrowing a modest amount of money, using it to get a bigger loan, and so on. He enlists the aid of an acquittance to do some routine stuff. The other guy wonders why the rich fellow is doing things that might wipe out the economy. Curiosity killed the cat, and the inquisitive aide might face a similar fate.
The economic stuff that sets up the story doesn't really have much to do with anything, and what's behind the rich guy's scheme is pretty silly. I think this is a case in which two authors is one too many.
Fantasy Fandom: Science Fiction and Drugs, by Donald K. Arbogast
The real author of this essay is hiding behind a pseudonym because it discusses the use of illegal substances. It states that fans used to drink a lot of beer, but now there's more use of marijuana. Other psychedelic drugs are discussed. I don't even drink coffee, so I'm not the one to judge.
Three stars.
…According to You, by various
The readers discuss a possible change in the name of the magazine. Going back to the old pulp magazine title Fantastic Adventures is firmly rejected. I say leave well enough alone.
No rating.
Worth Fighting Over?
That was a middle-of-the-road issue, for the most part. From fake medieval battles on another world to slaughter in the Stone Age to threats from alien beings and denizens of Hell, this was a magazine full of real, ersatz, and potential forms of violence. I can only wish all readers more peace outside their recreational reading.
President Nixon meets with students on the day of the riot. A chance for peace?
The author is better known around these parts for his sword-and-sorcery yarns about Brak the Barbarian, firmly in the tradition of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan. This new novel is a horse of a different color.
Cover art by Richard Powers
The planet Missouri had a revolution some time before the story begins. Advanced technology and a bureaucratic form of government were replaced by nineteenth century ways of doing things and fierce individualism.
In other words, the place now resembles Hollywood's fantasy of the Old West. There are some so-called savages who play the role of American Indians. Towns are full of outlaws and dance hall girls. There are sheriffs around, supposedly to maintain law and order, but they aren't very effective.
Our long-suffering hero is Zak Randolph, a minor government worker who ekes out a living by supplying souvenirs (such as miniature outhouses) to tourists and staging phony shootouts to entertain visitors from other worlds. He also arranges to have local badmen sent to more civilized planets to amuse those who hire them.
This latter function gets him in trouble. One of the leased gunfighters heads back to Missouri before his contract runs out. Zak has to track him down or risk losing his position. (What keeps him on the wild-and-wooly planet at all are his girlfriend and the presence of native plants that supply minerals that can be made into jewelry. Otherwise, he's a peaceable sort who hates the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later culture of the place.)
Along the way, he has to deal with ruffians who despise him as a coward. There's also the mystery of a legendary gunfighter called Buffalo Yung. Zak isn't sure this terrifying figure really exists. Then he gets reports from various places that he's been shot dead, apparently more than once. And what does this have to do with the disappearing bodies of lawmen killed by Yung?
Jakes makes use of typical characters and situations from Westerns, often with tongue firmly in cheek. You've got the town drunk, the traveling merchant, the local undertaker, and so forth. It's no surprise that it ends with a showdown between Zak and Yung.
The author also has something serious to say about pacifism versus the law of the gun. Zak changes personality drastically over the course of the novel, and not in a nice way.
The plot moves along briskly, even if some of the events seem arbitrary. You'll probably be able to figure out Yung's secret pretty quickly. Fans of horse operas should be able to appreciate this space opera.
Millennia ago, the human race's push for scientific and technological achievement culminated in a proud interstellar empire dominated by the Psychocrat regime. They settled human colonies on habitable planets and wiped completely all memory of their provenance for the purpose of observing the development of civilizations, but some unknown force toppled their hegemony before they could see their experiments come to fruition. The Psychocrats left behind primitive human colonies with no knowledge of their origins, and ancient artifacts that held knowledge of extraordinary technological achievements — invaluable bounty to the intrepid explorers who comb the galaxy in search of them.
Roane Hume has been selected by her uncle, one such explorer, to accompany him on an expedition to the planet Clio, where a seeded colony of humans has spread over thousands of years into several feudal kingdoms ruled by monarchs. Roane and her team are forbidden by interplanetary law to reveal themselves to the people of Clio, but Roane becomes swept up in the royal interests of the kingdom of Reveny when she intervenes to rescue a young girl being kidnapped, only to discover her to be the Princess Ludorica, heir to the throne. The princess is in a desperate search for the lost Ice Crown, a crown which supposedly holds mystical powers and is the only way to legitimize her rule, lest her kingdom fall to squabbling nobles and bandit lords. Despite Roane's oath to secrecy, she feels herself drawn to the Princess, and at every turn disregards her responsibility in order to help Ludorica restore her kingdom.
Norton continues to excel at intermingling elements of both sci-fi and high fantasy. The heady science fiction concepts introduced in the beginning — intergalactic treasure-hunters, technologically advanced weapons and survival gear, as well as a colony of brainwashed humans unwittingly transplanted onto another world in the service of a long-abandoned experiment — are vivid and imaginative. I especially enjoyed that the unfolding horror of a race realizing that their proud history and religion were the result of enslavement to technology indistinguishable from magic did not go understated.
But I also love an epic fantasy, and I do feel that Norton delivered with her courts and castles and enchanted crowns and a princess determined to save her people at any cost. The aesthetic of the story was reminiscent of a fairy-tale, with enough court intrigue and subterfuge to ensure that those fantasy elements did not feel hastily grafted onto a story about spaceships and astronauts, but rather that astronauts and spaceships had unintentionally landed in the middle of an epic. I would have thought that the magic of Clio turning out to be the lingering effects of a technology so advanced that it apparently did not even warrant explaining to the reader might disenchant the epic, but it had the opposite effect on me; high-tech science became enchanting in a way that very few hard sci-fi novels can achieve from meticulous technical explanation alone.
Lastly, the relationship between the two protagonists, Roane and Ludorica, was so unique to this sort of pulpy sci-fi that it can't go unmentioned. How sadly rare it is for an intelligent, resourceful, defiant leading duo to be two teenage girls. Their instant camaraderie was so strong that their duality, one an astronaut and one a princess, allowed each of them to step into the world of the other in a way that I feel contributed greatly to the seamless melding of the genres. It was a sweet moment for space-hardened Roane to know how it feels to wear a gown and have a lady-in-waiting, and after her endless ordeals Princess Ludorica absolutely deserved to get to shoot someone with a blaster.
Recall Not Earth by C.C. MacApp was published in January, so I'm a little late to the party, but it intrigued me enough to want to include it this month. The people of Earth, in their hubris, decided to assert their interstellar superiority over the other races of their spiral arm in the Milky Way by picking an ill-advised fight with the Vulmoti Empire. Obviously, they lost.
The Vulmoti punished the earthlings by stamping out all life on Earth and leaving it an irradiated husk. The only living humans left were the cadre of spacemen led by Commodore John Brayson. But suddenly finding themselves the last survivors of their species, they scattered in despair across the galaxy to eke out a pathetic living as hired mercenaries for other alien races. Brayson himself retreated to the backwater planet Drongail to while away the rest of his life numbing himself with the highly addictive dron.
Brayson is coaxed out of his stupor and convinced to attempt one last mission when his old friend Bart Lange finds him to deliver news that seems too good to be true: that somewhere in the galaxy, a colony of living human women are in hiding. With this newfound glimmer of hope, Brayson and Lange reassemble their team and agree to hire themselves out to the leader of the Chelki, a race enslaved by the Vulmoti. The Omniarch of the Chelki promises Brayson knowledge of the location of the women in exchange for his help in the Chelki's struggle for freedom. Having nothing to lose, Brayson agrees to lead his men in battle one last time, all the while fighting the mind-addling effects of his drug addiction.
Going into this one I expected a sweeping space opera replete with different alien empires locked in battle for survival and dominance, and that's exactly what I got. Lots of spaceship dogfights, alien diplomacy, and pages upon pages of militaristic strategizing. I'll admit that last one is not my thing, but MacApp belabored the reasoning behind each maneuver and the minute differences between each imaginary weapons system so thoroughly that I have to commend the amount of thought that went into the details, even if it did make my head spin. Combine all that with the ever-present smaller human struggles like loneliness and addiction, and I think MacApp could have had enough material here to span a trilogy of novels.
The thing which most distinguished this book to me from others like it was the extent to which MacApp divorced himself entirely from the known laws of science, instead preferring to come up with laws of physics so profoundly unlike our own that I can only describe it as writing scientific fanfiction. Don't get me wrong, enough jargon and justification was given for his new laws of physics, such as the many pages dedicated to explaining how gravity is actually a force which repels matter, that in some places it felt as convincing as though I was reading a physics textbook dropped from some alternate dimension. I was fascinated by this brazen, meticulous rewriting of physics for little discernible reason. It’s a fun reminder to those of us who tend to get tangled up trying to understand how made-up technology fits into our understanding of science that it's not that serious, it's fiction and you can do whatever you want as much as you want to do it.
There were many parts of this book which did feel rushed, but that's unsurprising given how dense the story is and how much wonderful science nonsense we have to get through before the battles can commence and the damsels can be rescued. It was executed well, with almost no wasted space, and though all the militaristic babbling did hurt my brain a little, I'm going to give it…
Junk Day was my first encounter with the written works of Arthur Sellings. Published, thanks to the efforts of his widow, posthumously in 1970, following Sellings’ untimely death in 1968, there is some poignant irony in knowing the author’s final work portrays a world in ruins; the death of human civilization itself.
Junk Day begins with a man on a journey through the treacherous wilderness of post-apocalyptic London. At first, Douglas Bryan, a former painter, doesn’t seem to have a specific goal or destination in mind. He simply pushes forward, determined to defend himself from the grim realities of the violent hell-scape devoid of law, order, and morality the scorched earth has become.
When Bryan encounters a lone woman, the former nun-in-training, Vee, his initial reaction is suspicion. He cannot fathom that a woman could survive on her own following the collapse of human civilization, without a Man around to help her survive. Byran immediately shacks up with Vee. This relationship of convenience with Vee, who–it turns out– was formerly a man, leads to the pair setting off on a journey to find a more livable abode.
Homo-erotic tensions stir when Bryan brings Vee to his previous shelter where Eddie awaits the former painter’s return. While never said in so many words, one gets the distinct impression that Bryan’s relationship with the clingy , trauma-ridden younger man was more intimate than platonic. Though dismayed at having been replaced with Vee, Eddie swallows his anger, jealousy, and the last vestiges of his pride. He begs to join Bryan and Vee on their journey to find greener pastures. Bryan coldly rebuffs the desperate younger man, revealing the true callousness of his nature. Eddie gets left behind to spiral more deeply into murderous madness.
The protagonist, Douglas Bryan, is not likable. He is strangely dispassionate for a painter. Where are the high emotions, the romanticism, and thirst to pursue his craft? Where is his artistic passion, his sense of justice? He merely seems to go through the motions of being human and is far more concerned about the persona he is building up for himself than righteousness or caring about the fate of humanity.
The absence of growth in the main character is jarring. When Barney, a megalomaniac and dictator-in-the-making, attempts to engineer his own twisted version of society, Bryan pushes back, but his motivations seem more clinical than heroic. He refuses to bend to the machinations of the mysterious entities pulling the strings behind the scenes, but merely for the sake of being non-conformist. Junk Day ends with London gradually getting swallowed up by a new order, leaving the reader with more questions than answers. The ultimate fate of Douglas Bryan remains uncertain.
The faults in Bryan’s character may lead one to question Sellings’ skill in character development, but one can’t deny the possibility that this is deliberate. Douglas Bryan’s questionable character aside, Junk Day is a brilliantly written book; one I will happily revisit. Sellings was clearly a master of story craft. The images he painted of the dystopian remnants of civilization are vivid and arresting. It has made me quite eager to read his earlier works.
Five out of five stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
Folks living in certain parts of southern Mexico and the eastern coast of the United States and Canada were treated to a spectacular sight in the sky a few days ago. On March 7, there was a total eclipse of the sun visible from those areas of the globe.
The sun is about to completely disappear behind the moon.
I live in the southeastern corner of Tennessee, so I missed this extraordinary event. Let's see; when do astronomers think a total solar eclipse will be visible from my neck of the woods? Let me check my almanac.
August 21, 2017. Holy cow, close to half a century to go.
While I'm waiting, I can spend the time reading. Just as a solar eclipse causes the Earth to cool down, at least for a moment, the latest issue of Fantastic features a new novella from one of the masters of imaginative literature that is dominated by a sense of cold. Grab a cup of hot chocolate, wrap yourself up in a blanket, and join me as we dive into its icy pages.
Cover art by Jeff Jones.
Hey! An original piece of art on the cover instead of something borrowed from a German magazine! That's a good sign, as is the promise of a new sword and sorcery yarn from the greatest creator of such. (No offense, Conan fans.)
Editorial, by Ted White
The editor explains that readers have different tastes (obviously) and that he just selects the stories he thinks are the best (even more obviously.) He mentions a new member of the staff, Arnold Katz, who has the job (an unenviable one, to me) of selecting each issue's Fantasy Classic (i.e. reprint) from yellowing copies of Fantastic Adventures. Finally, he states that he goes through all the letters he gets from readers, separates them out by which stories they're commenting on (even cutting up ones that talk about more than one work), and forwarding them to the authors involved. Sounds like a lot of extra work, so wish him good luck.
No rating.
The Snow Women, by Fritz Leiber
Illustrations by Jeff Jones also.
We go back to the teenage years of Fafhrd, before he ran around with the Gray Mouser. (There's one tiny hint that he encountered his future buddy during a brief career as a pirate.) It's the dead of winter in his northern homeland. A troupe of actors is around to provide entertainment, with a fair amount of nubile female flesh on display, for the men only.
That makes it sound like Fafhrd lives in a male-dominated society, but in fact the women have a lot of power, some of it magical. They're also not reluctant to attack the men with snowballs, sometimes causing serious injuries. Fafhrd lives with his widowed mother, who tries to dominate him completely. He's also got a girlfriend, pregnant with his child, who is a tough cookie indeed.
Fafhrd and the tree where he keeps a cache of weapons and other supplies.
The plot gets started when Fafhrd gets mixed up with an alluring actress, who has a complex back story of her own. It seems that other northerners plan to buy her as a slave from the leader of the troupe. Suffice to say that a lot of complications follow. Wait until you find out how Fafhrd uses some firework rockets he steals from the actors!
It's no surprise that this is very well written, with wit, tasteful eroticism, vivid descriptions, and plenty of action. We also get quite a bit of insight into Fafhrd's personality. He's fascinated by the civilized, decadent south in comparison with the barbaric north. The female characters are fully developed, three-dimensional individuals, which is not something you can say about a lot of fantasy and science fiction written by men.
Five stars.
The Wager Lost by Winning, by John Brunner
Illustrations by Michael Kaluta.
This is one of a series of stories about a mysterious figure known only as the Traveller in Black. A couple of tales about him have appeared in British publications. (That's why I'm using the double-l spelling.)
He's a god-like being who wanders around a fantasy world. His mission is a little vague, but it somehow involves order and chaos. We get several brief sections of text describing how he fulfills the desires of those he encounters, often not to their liking.
The Traveller and an empty pedestal that plays a part in the plot.
The Traveller becomes involved with an aristocrat who has kidnapped the inhabitants of a peaceful village in order to use them as slaves that he can risk in wagers with other lords. The ruler believes that the local goddess of luck holds him in her favor. The Traveller makes a bet that she will turn her back on him. The wager plays out in an unexpected way.
The story is full of imaginative details, from the lazy entity who dwells in a lake at the peaceful village to the bizarre methods of gambling engaged in by the lords. The theme of Be Careful What You Wish For may be a familiar one, but there's a lot more to the story than just that.
Four stars.
Dear Aunt Annie, by Gordon Ecklund
Illustration by Michael Hinge.
This, the author's first published story, reveals a willingness to experiment and a fair amount of ambition for a newcomer. It's told from multiple points of view, and we don't get full information on what's going on right away, so it requires careful reading.
After a devastating war, the citizens of the United States are lulled into a state of complete nonviolence through a combination of drugs and psychotherapy. A problem develops when a woman writes to newspaper columnist Aunt Annie for advice, revealing that she attempted suicide. That's not supposed to be possible, so Aunt Annie sends one of her assistants to investigate. The situation leads to debate over how to handle the apparent return of human violence.
The exact nature of Aunt Annie and her assistants doesn't become clear at first, so I won't discuss it here. (The illustration is a clue.) This is more or less a New Wave story, particularly in its disjointed narrative style. I found it both intriguing and confusing.
Three stars.
The Freedom Fighter, by Ray Russell
The narrator is a movie director in the near future. Not only is she one of the few women in that profession (I guess things won't change much over the next few years), she's in trouble with her producer. It seems she doesn't make the kind of movies expected of her.
The story has only one point to make, so I won't give it away here. It's a simple reversal of current trends. The satire plays out as expected. I should note that the text contains derogatory terms for homosexual women and men, which is distasteful.
Two stars.
Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Hank Stine
Leiber praises the collections Daughters of Earth by Judith Merril and Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore. He also reveals that he has read the manuscript for the new novel And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ (under its initial title End of Chaos) and states that it describes fully what it would feel like to possess powers of telepathy and clairvoyance. (Our own Jason Sacks recently reviewed the same novel.)
Stine has high praise for the British television series The Prisoner, as well as for a novel, with the same title, based on the series by Thomas A. Disch. He is less enthusiastic for Number Two, another book based on the show, by David McDaniel.
No rating.
The Pulsating Planet, by John Broome
The September 1941 issue of Fantastic Adventures is the source of this reprint.
Cover art by Robert Fuqua.
Our two-fisted hero is a reporter. For some reason he's on an asteroid heading into the solar system. He claims that he saw a base of enemy aliens, but there's no sign of it. The military is about to arrest him for misleading them, but he manages to kidnap a corporal and head for where the base should be.
Illustration by Albert Magarian
The mismatched pair follow a dwarf into the hidden base. The dwarf is a Mad Scientist, so there's also his Beautiful Daughter for the love interest. Mix in the aliens, some of whom don't really want to invade Earth, and a weird monster for the hero to fight.
The explanation for fact that the alien base appears and disappears is really silly. Corny and poorly written, this is an example of the kind of pulp fiction that gives science fiction a bad name among the literati. If this is a Fantasy Classic, I'd hate to see the ones that didn't make the grade.
One star.
Fantasy Fandom, by Jeffrey Clark
Instead of the usual article reprinted from a fanzine, this is a long letter sent to the magazine's sister publication Amazing. Clark discusses Old Wave and New Wave, stating that there's room for both, and compares science fiction and fantasy with mainstream fiction. Decently done, but there's not a lot that's new here.
Three stars.
According to You, by Various Readers
Very much a mixed bag of letters, with no particular theme to them. Notable is the fact that controversial author David R. Bunch gently points out that one of his stories was announced to be coming soon under the name David Bloch.
No rating.
The Reader Who Came In From The Cold
Overall, a pretty good issue, enough to warm the heart of the lucky person who peruses it on a chilly night in early spring. A couple of disappointments, but the two lead fantasy stories are worth the price of the magazine.
As luck would have it, the first three novels to be reviewed this month were all by women! They all have something else in common—they each have both merits and demerits that sort of cancel out…neither Brown, Russ, nor Norton quite hit it out of the park this time at bat.
by Victoria Silverwolf
In Memoriam
An unavoidable note of sadness fills this review of a newly published novel. The author died of lymphoma in 1967, at the very young age of 41. With that in mind, let's try to take an objective look at her final novel.
This is a direct sequel to Sibyl Sue Blue. My esteemed colleague Janice L. Newman gave that novel a glowing review. In fact, our own Journey Press saw fit to reprint it in a handsome new format.
Sibyl Sue Blue is back. She's a forty-year-old police detective and a widow with a teenage daughter. She's fond of cigars, gin, fancy clothes, and attractive men.
After her previous adventure, she's on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Familiarity with the first novel would help get the reader oriented, but let me try to sum up the situation quickly.
The planet is inhabited by at least three varieties of humanoids. Those dwelling on the main continent can't mate with humans, and don't play much of a role in the plot. The folks living on an island are semi-aquatic, can mate with humans, and are the main focus of the book. The third kind, from a northern continent, supplies our story's antagonist.
Sibyl Sue Blue and her daughter are on the planet as part of a working vacation, enjoying the beach while acting as ambassadors from Earth. Sibyl is attacked by somebody and nearly drowns, but manages to fight off the bad guy handily. That's bad enough, but things get worse when her daughter, in a sort of trance, walks off into the ocean. What's going on?
Let's try to make a complex plot, a lot of which depends on what happened in the first novel, simpler. The antagonist, acting like a James Bond villain, plans to flood the planet by melting the ice caps. He's got a secret underwater lair, as well as a substance that turns air-breathers into water-breathers.
There are several other characters involved, and plenty of plot twists. Unlike the first novel, this one doesn't seem to have much in the way of social commentary. It somehow manages to be action-packed while also spending quite a bit of time describing Sibyl's wardrobe. There's a bit too much drinking of gin and smoking of cigars for my taste.
The antagonist has a very weird love/hate feeling for human women. Sibyl and he somehow manage to be lovers while also trying to kill each other. The speculative biology at the heart of the plot isn't much more plausible than this odd relationship.
Overall, I'd say this is a readable but forgettable potboiler. It's nice to have a middle-aged mother as the heroic protagonist, anyway.
Two months ago, I reviewed one of the worst books I’ve ever covered in this column: Taurus Fourby the absolutely deplorable Rena Vale. This month I review the second novel by promising newcomer Joanna Russ. In some ways And Chaos Died and Taurus Four have nothing in common. In other ways these books have a huge amount of thematic overlap.
I wish I could say Russ’s novel is completely successful. She’s clearly ambitious. And Chaos Died is a novel of heady ideas and language. Russ plays in fascinating ways with internal and external perspectives, delivering a novel of alternating views and alien attitudes. But I feel like she simply fails to reach the heady levels she's aiming for with this novel.
And Chaos Died and Taurus Four both have long sequences which take place on strange alien worlds. On those worlds, beings live in primitive states. Both worlds are Edenic, full of civilizations who are one with the land they live in. The locals in both novels are naked and unashamed, in a world of boundless plenty on a fertile plain. Vale took that setup and revealed her hatred for “primitive” society. Russ takes that setup and delivers something complex and uncanny.
Cover by Diane and Leo Dillon
See, the locals on the planet “speak” telepathically and have psionic ability. Children can speed up or slow down their aging:
"I'm nine," she went on pedantically, "but actually I'm fifteen. I've slowed myself down. That's called 'dragging your feet.' Mother keeps telling me 'Evniki, don't drag your feet,' but catch me hurrying into it!"
There’s playfulness about the ideas of language:
"By the way," she said in a low voice, "I know what it means to cannibalize; it means to eat something. I heard about that." She seemed to hesitate in the half-dark.
But tell me, please," she said, "what does it mean exactly—radio?"
And Russ gives us beautiful literary-minded ideas about perception and peace and communications which abound in this book – at least until Jai returns to an overpopulated, warlike Earth. A shift in global temperatures and climates has devastated our planet; wars and starvation and hatred have made our planet a dystopia. And Jai has been so changed by his experiences on the alien planet that he finally is able to see things on Earth as they really are.
I loved the wildly imaginative approach to this book. The writing here is elliptical and dense. The prose rewards slow reading and attention to detail, but I was never lost in the book. In fact, I often find myself swept away by its literacy and ambitions. At times Russ reads like a less academic, more playful Ursula LeGuin.
Joanna Russ
Russ has deeply inventive ways of putting readers in the mind of psychic people of all ages as well as the ordinary people who have to interact with the natives. The book deserves high marks for the sequences on the alien planet, though I found her Earth-bound scenes a bit cliched.
But the book has another flaw: its treatment of homosexuality.
Our lead character is named Jai Vedh, and very early in the novel Jai proclaims himself to be a homosexual. But partway through And Chaos Died, Jai falls into a relationship with a woman. We are led to believe Jai’s homosexuality is “cured” with that relationship, and he himself even declares his happiness in a “straight” lifestyle.
I know we live in a world in which the American Psychological Association still declares “gayness” as a mental illness. But I still find it unthinkable that an intelligent and well-spoken woman like Joanna Russ would ally herself with the idea that homosexuality can – or even should – be “cured”. Love is love, whether between genders or in the same gender, and I was shocked Russ has her lead character change his whole approach to intimacy so quickly.
I would expect that approach from a Rena Vale, but not from a Joanna Russ. It’s jarring to see, and it really hurt my opinion of the novel.
There’s really nothing wrong with falling short when taking on heady ambitions. Joanna Russ is clearly a talented writer with many ideas. She falls squarely in the cohort of new wave sf authors who are elevating science fiction to new levels and confronting our new decade with a revolution. And Chaos Died aims to feel revolutionary. I feel it’s merely evolutionary.
High Sorcery is an anthology featuring three short stories and two novelettes from Andre Norton. I had a good time with it, though it's not obvious to me why these particular stories were chosen, as any thread linking them together feels no stronger than that of any other in Norton’s body of work, which does have better to offer. Still, it felt like a pretty decent cross-section of her work, and her skill as a writer and storyteller is on full display.
by Gray Morrow
"Wizard’s World" opens on a world ravaged by nuclear war, scattered with mutants who have been subjugated and enslaved for the psychic abilities they developed in the aftermath. Craike is one such mutant, and we find him fleeing a mob wishing to hunt and kill him for his abilities. Unexpectedly, he falls through a rift between worlds and awakes in a land much unlike his own, less technologically advanced and more akin to the days of Medieval Europe. He discovers a man and woman being persecuted for the magical psionic powers they were born with, much like his own, and feels compelled to help them out of an affinity for the hunted.
This story – its premise, its characters, its plot and setting – feel very much at home in a Norton anthology. The dissonant combination of a post-nuclear apocalypse and an Old World fairytale landscape is very characteristic of her tendency to combine genre cliches or buck them altogether, and the equitable inclusion of women and characters of color is still unfortunately rare enough to be notable. I can’t fault this story on any technicalities. Rather, I simply felt that it didn’t quite live up to what we are now well aware the author is capable of.
Beyond our main character, who is given the moral high ground to an extent verging on gratuity, I didn’t feel that any other characters were fleshed out enough to make me properly care about them. Norton has a flair for slowly revealing information to the reader as it is discovered by the protagonist in a way that normally builds excellent suspense, but here I found it disorienting. I don’t even think I properly knew what was going on until far too late in the story, and the female main character’s skittishness toward the Craike meant that I effectively knew too little about her to form an attachment until the end. The ending itself was cut tantalizingly short just as things were happening that I could actually be bothered to care about.
"Wizard’s World" feels like an unfinished draft of a story that could have been excellent, but was forgotten by its author before she could add embellishment enough to distinguish it from any other second-rate fantasy pulp. Sorry, but just two out of five stars for this one.
[David reviewed the tale when it came out a couple of years ago in IF—he was not overly enamored, either (ed.)]
Fortunately, its only up from here.
"Through the Needle’s Eye" is a charming little short story about a young girl named Ernestine, crippled by polio and longing for connection with her able-bodied peers. She meets an older woman named Miss Ruthevan and is struck by her stately beauty, as well as the handicap they both share. Miss Ruthevan has a gift for creating otherworldly masterpieces with embroidery, and takes Ernestine under her wing to teach her the art. But under her tutelage, Ernestine begins to discover that Miss Ruthevan’s talent, passed down through generations of women, comes at a magical cost.
I love bite-sized stories like this; it takes a skilled storyteller to write one in a way that feels satisfying, but still trusts the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps. The portrayal of disability felt sympathetic without being pitiful. Miss Ruthevan is the type of scorned woman-turned-unsettlingly powerful witch that I love and appreciate. I also love to see a story making use of the underappreciated beauty of the fiber arts. It’s short, but it excels at what it sets out to do, so it's five stars from me. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head for days.
"By a Hair" (originally published July 1958, in Phantom) is another short one. This one concerns a small Balkan village struggling to rebuild and defend itself after being plundered by Nazis. The once-lovely Countess Ana was taken to an extermination camp and now returns maimed beyond recognition. She chooses to devote her now-reclusive life to midwifery and the supernatural arts in service of her small village. Meanwhile, the incomparably beautiful Dagmar has chosen to use her dangerous allure to scheme and climb her way to security. She requests that Ana use her occult powers in service of a treacherous gamble, and receives her desire at a tragically ironic price.
This story left less to the imagination, but was no less effective. Though both women were positioned as diametrically opposed foils of each other, I still found both of their motives perfectly understandable given the desperation of their war-ravaged lives. I could not bring myself to condemn Dagmar for her desire for self-preservation, and that made the ending of this story as bleak as its setting. Of course, it’s also possible that I may have a blind spot in my moral code for beautiful scheming women in a world that leaves them few options. Either way, four stars.
"Ully the Piper" is the final short story in this anthology. In the sleepy, idyllic village of Coomb Brackett, young Ully longs for a life of normalcy after a fall in his childhood rendered him paralyzed. One day he discovers a beautiful flute, and his time spent in the tranquility of nature inspires him to become a talented piper. He wishes to share his gift with the other villagers, until the town bully Matt antagonizes him by taking his flute and leaving him lost in the forest. But Ully’s musical skill did not go unnoticed by the ancient fae who called the forest their home long before it was Coomb Bracket, and it is by their favor that Ully receives his heart’s desire and rises above Matt’s torment.
This one feels like a true fairy tale in its simplicity. Its uncomplicated morals and expected ending did nothing to detract from its beauty. The fae were as mischievous and mysterious and beguiling as they are in all the best fairy stories. There isn’t much for me to say about this one, other than that it feels like the sort of enchanting bedtime story that was read to you as a child, the kind that echoes in the back of your mind when you find yourself wandering through nature alone on moonless nights. Four stars.
"Toys of Tamisan" is the longer of the two novellas, which thankfully left enough room to develop the scenery. Tamisan is a skilled “dreamer,” an occupation inhabited by those who possess the skill to create vivid imaginary worlds and share them with their clientele via a psychic link. She is hired to create engaging dreams for the entertainment of the wealthy Lord Starrex and his cousin Kas, but when she attempts to build a dream world that mirrors an alternate history of their own something goes horribly wrong. She loses control of the world she has created, and is stuck within it and left to devise a way out of her own dream.
The premise of this story certainly appealed to me. I felt that the idea of a dreamer effectively enslaved to create beautiful dreams for a wealthy lord was a poignant distillation of the way that employing artisans to use their creativity in service of creating capital for a wealthy ruling class demeans human creativity as a whole. Other than that though, the story did drag along a little slowly, and after a while I found myself losing track of the plot in a way that made me care even less. This was made even worse by the fact that the ending failed to tie up several loose ends, which made me feel a little silly for even trying to follow.
What did stand out to me, however, was how well-crafted the dialogue was. I think that Norton is uniquely good at writing incisive dialogue, and this was on display in a way that made me look forward to the next line that was about to be said, regardless of where it was about to take the story. It was impressive how economically Norton uses short lines to precisely convey ideas, tone, and mood. It was enough to keep me reminded that Norton is a master of her craft regardless of how boring this story was, and for me that’s enough to elevate the story to a three out of five [Which is also what David gave it when it came out in the May 1969 IF (ed.)]
That puts us at 3.4 stars for the collection, with the two non-reprints being some of the strongest work. It's probably worth 60 cents, even if it's not the best Norton can produce.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
A recent film has made many of us aware of the first year of the next century. But what about the last year of this century?
(You do know that 2000 will be the last year of the twentieth century and not the first year of the twenty-first century, right? I thought so.)
A new anthology of original science fiction stories attempts to offer a glimpse of that evocative year to come.
The Year 2000, edited by Harry Harrison
Cover art by Pat Steir.
Obviously, all the stories take place three decades from now. Other than that, they have a wide range of themes and styles, from old-fashioned tales of adventure to commentary on social issues to New Wave experimentation. Let's take a look.
America the Beautiful, by Fritz Leiber
The narrator is a poet and scholar who travels to the United States on an academic tour. He stays with a typical American family and has an affair with the adult daughter of his hosts. Despite the fact that pollution has been eliminated and racism is no longer a problem, there's something about the place that makes him uneasy. Part of it has to do with the fact that the USA is still involved in small scale wars, similar to the current conflict in Vietnam.
Although there is a fair amount of futuristic content (rocket transportation between North America and Europe, for example), this reads almost like a mainstream story, something that might be published in a future issue of The New Yorker. It's impressionistic and introspective. Given that it's by Leiber, it's no surprise that it's very well written. Perhaps it's a bit too subtle for me.
Three stars.
Prometheus Rebound, by Daniel F. Galouye
An aircraft that uses the Earth's magnetic field gets in trouble. The huge plane, which looks like a flying saucer, keeps gaining altitude, beyond the control of the pilots. Can an elderly veteran flyer of World War Two help the crew save the lives of all aboard?
There's a ton of technical jargon throughout the story, the vast majority of which went way over my head. The plot depends on a character doing something really foolish.
In Kenya, an area formerly used for raising cattle now serves as a wildlife preserve. The main character is a warden who has to prevent elderly people from following their traditional ways by tending cattle in the region. Part of the preserve is an amusement park, something like an African Disneyland. The protagonist visits the space-themed part of the park, which offers hope for his son's future.
The story offers a thoughtful look at culture change. The warden bitterly regrets what has been lost, but also welcomes improvements. He's an ambiguous sort, not always sympathetic, which adds depth of characterization. The author obviously knows the area and its culture very well, and depicts them vividly.
Four stars.
After the Accident, by Naomi Mitchison
The title disaster contaminated the Earth with radiation. Genetic testing is used to find out which persons would be likely to produce offspring without mutations. The narrator, a biologist and historian, meets a man who plans to send colonists to another world. She becomes pregnant with their child, who will have mutations that will allow it to survive on the planet.
This is a quietly disturbing story. The narrator's calm acceptance of the situation and decision to bear a mutant baby are the most chilling aspects of it. The speculative biology is convincing, the stuff about colonizing another planet less so.
Three stars.
Utopian, By Mack Reynolds
A social activist who was in suspended animation wakes up to find that the world has become the kind of paradise he imagined. There's no money, because everybody has everything they need. The folks who revived him tell him what they need from him.
The fellow went into suspended animation only because the people in the year 2000 used a sort of mental time travel to take over his mind and make him abscond with funds from his organization and then freeze himself. I found this aspect of the story gimmicky and implausible compared to the rest. The impact of the piece depends entirely on its punchline.
Two stars.
Orgy of the Living and the Dying, by Brian W. Aldiss
A man leaves his wife in England to work for a United Nations famine relief agency in India. He has an affair with a physician. When the facility is attacked by bandits, he battles them in an unusual way.
This synopsis makes the story sound like mainstream fiction, without futuristic elements. The main speculative premise is that the man hears voices, some of them seemingly precognitive. Excerpts of what he hears alternate with the narrative portion of the text, giving the work a touch of New Wave.
The author creates an evocative setting, if one that could easily be set today rather than in the year 2000. The man's lust for the doctor causes him to force himself on her at one point. It's hard to accept him as a hero later, when he comes up with a technological way to defeat the bandits. (This technique, by the way, is the part of the story that most evokes the feeling of science fiction, even if there is nothing futuristic about it.)
(The book just calls the author Bertram Chandler, but we know better than that, don't we? It's also no surprise at all that it's a sea story.)
A sea captain (of course!) who went into suspended animation for medical reasons gets thawed out, cured, and given a job commanding a gigantic, automated cargo ship. When things go wrong, he has to make use of his experience with sailing ships to save the day.
Chandler can't be beat when it comes to describing nautical stuff, and in this case he doesn't even have to pretend that his vessel is a starship. It may be hard to believe that a guy whose experience with ships is thirty years out of date would be given command of a futuristic vessel. It may also raise a few hackles to learn that the ship's troubles are caused by a female member of the crew, who messes everything up.
Three stars.
Black is Beautiful, by Robert Silverberg
New York City is populated almost entirely by Black persons, with only a few White commuters and tourists. The main character is an angry teenager who sees the mayor of the city as an Uncle Tom. He stalks a White teenager out of a sense of injustice and seeks revenge.
A White author writing from the point of view of a Black radical is taking a big chance, I think, and could be accused of depicting Black stereotypes. In this case, the gamble pays off pretty well. The teenager is passionate but naive, the Mayor cynical but effective. The story might be read as a debate between two styles of Black activism.
Four stars.
Take It or Leave It, by David I. Masson
Two sections of text alternate, both featuring the same characters. In one, they face challenges like local crime bosses and being forced to move in a technologically advanced society. In the other, they struggle to survive in a world devastated by a plague.
This reads almost like two different stories. The first one is full of futuristic slang and nouns used as verbs. (The word visited is replaced by visitationed, for example.) The second one has more direct language, but is very grim. People hunt cats to eat them, for one thing.
The tricks with language make the story difficult to read. Given the title, I wonder if the author is saying that an imperfect future is a lot better than a horrible one. This is one for New Wave fans.
Three stars.
The Lawgiver, by Keith Laumer
As a way to fight overpopulation in the United States, a controversial law makes it mandatory to terminate pregnancies unless the mother-to-be has a birth permit. (There's also the implication that she has to be married.) The Senator who pushed this law through Congress, against much opposition, confronts a woman made pregnant by his son.
Given the fact that abortion is only legal under certain circumstances in a handful of states, it seems unlikely that it would often be mandatory a mere thirty years from now. (And the story makes it clear that the procedure has to take place even if birth is imminent.)
The author doesn't seem to be making a case for or against abortion, as far as I can tell. The plot is melodramatic, throwing in a car crash to add excitement (and maybe some dark irony.) Still, I have to admit that it held my attention throughout.
Three stars.
To Be a Man, by J. J. Coupling
A fellow is seriously injured in battle and has almost all of his body except brain, eyes, and part of his spinal cord replaced by artificial parts, indistinguishable from the original. He returns from the war to confront his lover.
Much of the story consists of exposition, as the man explains in great detail how his new body works. This makes for dry reading. In sharp contrast to this is the sexual content: it seems that the fellow can be programmed to be a tireless sex partner. This results in an outrageous scene in which all the nurses in a battleground medical facility have an orgy with the guy. Pure male fantasy.
Two stars.
Judas Fish, by Thomas N. Scortia
A man works in a deep sea facility, altering the genetics of fish so that they will lead members of their species into the facility's chambers, to be processed into food for a starving world. Squid-like beings, having intelligence at least as great as humans, steal the fish away. The man's capture of one of the creatures leads to a strange transformation.
This is probably the most speculative story in the book, with a common science fiction theme that goes far beyond just extrapolating the next few decades. Not overly plausible, but readable enough if you're willing to suspend your disbelief.
Three stars.
American Dead, by Harry Harrison
Black guerrillas wage open warfare against the United States government, making use of weapons stolen from the military. An Italian journalist observes an assault by one of the Black commanders.
This is a gruesome vision of the worst possible outcome of current racial tensions in the USA. The manner in which the rebels fight is clearly based on tactics used by the Viet Cong. A powerful and disturbing tale.
Four stars.
Worth Waiting Thirty Years?
Overall, the book is OK, if not great. Some low points, some high points, mostly decent stories if not outstanding ones. Worth reading once, but don't expect it to be in print three decades from now.
That's a question that you can answer with more confidence than before, if you're willing to shell out a whole bunch of bucks. On Christmas Day the Japanese company Seiko introduced the world's first quartz wristwatch. (There have been clocks using quartz crystals, but not anything this small.)
As I understand it, quartz crystals vibrate in a precise manner when voltage is applied to them. Thus, the tiny bit of quartz inside the watch, powered by an itty-bitty battery, provides an unvarying pulse that supplies extraordinary accuracy.
The Quartz Astro 35SQ keeps time to within five seconds per month, which is said to be about one hundred times better than a mechanical watch of good quality.
The catch? You have to pay 450,000 yen for it. That's well over one thousand dollars. You can buy a nice new car for the price of two watches.
Quite a stocking stuffer.
If you like, you can use your fancy new timepiece to measure how long it takes to peruse the latest issue of Fantastic.
Cover art by Johnny Bruck.
Or maybe the publishers can measure how much time they saved by copying the cover art from yet another issue of Perry Rhodan instead of waiting for an artist to create a new one.
The title translates to The Cannons of Everblack. Note the use of English for what I presume is the name of a planet.
Editorial, by Ted White
This wordy introduction wanders all over the place. The editor states that the magazine is getting a lot more mail from readers. (See the letter column below.) He says that he doesn't like the name of the magazine, and suggests changing it to Fantastic Adventures, the name of the old pulp magazine from which reprints are often drawn. (The sound you hear is me screaming No!)
He discusses the old problem of defining science fiction as distinguished from fantasy. The essay winds up complaining about an article by Norman Spinrad that appeared in the girlie magazine Knight. Apparently Spinrad griped about SF fans and pros being hostile to the New Wave. Sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me.
No rating.
Double Whammy, by Robert Bloch
The author of Psycho leads off the issue with another shocker.
Illustration by Michael Hinger.
A guy who works at a sleazy carnival is afraid of the geek. If you don't know what a geek is, you haven't read William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, or seen the movie adapted from it the next year.
A geek is an alcoholic who has fallen so low that the only work he can get is pretending to be a so-called wild man and biting the heads off live chickens.
Our slimy protagonist seduces a teenager. When she tells him she's pregnant, he refuses to marry her, leading to tragic results. The girl is the granddaughter of a Gypsy fortuneteller, who has a reputation for supernatural revenge.
This is an out-and-out horror story that may remind you of the 1932 film Freaks. (Like that controversial film, it features a man without arms or legs.) The author saves his final punch to the reader's gut until the last sentence. If you don't like gruesome terror tales, it may be too much for you. I thought it accomplished what it set out to do very effectively.
Four stars.
The Good Ship Lookoutworld, by Dean R. Koontz
This space opera begins with a fight to the death between a human and a weird alien, apparently just as a sporting event.
Illustration by Ralph Reese.
This violent scene is just a prelude to a yarn in which the triumphant human recruits the narrator (another human) to join him in a mission to salvage a derelict alien starship. The vessel was operated by an extinct species of extraterrestrials who seem to have been nice folks. They just traveled around the universe bringing entertainment. Too bad a disease wiped them out.
The starship turns out to contain the headless skeletons of its crew. That's mysterious and scary enough, but when our heroes journey back to their homebase in it, parts of the ship disappear, one by one. Can they survive the long voyage before the whole thing vanishes?
This is a fast-paced adventure story with a twist in its tail. Given a few clues, you might be able to figure out the surprise ending. It's a little too frenzied for me, but short enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome.
Three stars.
Learning It at Miss Rejoyy's, by David R. Bunch
The narrator has dreamed about visiting the place named in the title since childhood, when his dad told him about it. The stunningly desirable Miss Rejoyy promises him an intimate encounter with her if he can meet the requirements. He has to pay to enter a room where his reactions to pain and pleasure will be measured.
The narrative style is less eccentric than usual for this author. The content, however, is just as strange. There are some really disturbing images. The point of this weird allegory is a very pessimistic one, which is likely to turn off many readers. Still, it has an undeniable power.
Three stars.
Hasan (Part Two of Two), by Piers Anthony
Here's the conclusion of this Arabian Nights fantasy.
Illustrations by Jeff Jones.
Summing things up as simply as I can, the title hero went through many adventures before stealing away with a woman who could turn herself into a bird, hiding the bird skin that gave her this power. More or less forced to marry him, she had two sons with him. She eventually found the skin and flew off to her native land with the children.
In this installment, he sets off on an odyssey to find her. This involves a whole lot of encounters with strange people and supernatural beings. In brief, he gets involved with a magician, rides a horse that can run over water, rides on the back of a flying ifrit, meets a group of Amazon warriors, faces an evil Queen, takes part in a huge battle, and witnesses an explosive climax.
Some of the many characters in the story.
A wild ride, indeed. This half of the novel has a fair amount of humor. The magician and the ifrit are particularly amusing. The plot turns into a travelogue of sorts, as Hasan journeys from Arabia to China, then to Indochina and Malaysia, winding up in Sumatra.
A helpful map allows you to follow the hero's travels.
A lengthy afterword from the author explains how he changed the original story from One Thousand and One Nights. He also offers several references. One can admire his scholarship.
The resulting story is entertaining enough. I'm still a little disconcerted by the fact that Hasan kidnaps the bird woman, and that she eventually decides that she loves him anyway. A product of the original, I suppose.
Three stars.
Creation, by L. Sprague de Camp
This is a very short poem about various legends concerning the creation of humanity by an assortment of deities. It leads up to a wry punchline. Not bad for what it is.
Three stars.
Secret of the Stone Doll, by Don Wilcox
The March 1941 issue of Fantastic Adventures supplies this tale of the South Seas.
Cover art by J. Allen St. John.
The narrator winds up on a paradisical Pacific island. He falls in love with a local beauty after rescuing her from drowning.
Illustrations by Jay Jackson.
Everything seems to be hunky-dory, but his new bride insists that she must make a journey to a part of the island kept separate from the rest by a stone wall. Because the islanders have a strong taboo against discussing fear or danger, she can't tell him what it's all about. Along the way, they meet a madman with a sword and the object mentioned in the title.
Apparently, he's a visitor to the island, just like the narrator.
I found this exotic, mysterious tale quite intriguing. The revelation about the woman's journey surprised me. (There's an editor's footnote — I assume it's from the original publication — that tries to offer a scientific explanation. This is just silly, and the story works much better as pure fantasy. The new editor's suggestion that it relates to something in Frank Herbert's Dune also stretches things to the breaking point.)
Maybe I'm rating this story higher than it might otherwise deserve because I wasn't expecting much from this issue's reprint. Unlike a lot of yarns from the pulps, it isn't padded at all, with a fairly complex plot told in a moderate number of pages. Anyway, I liked it.
Four stars.
According to You, by Various Readers
As the editorial said, there are a lot of letters. Bill Pronzini offers an amusing response to a reader who didn't like his story How Now Purple Cow in a previous issue. I didn't care for it either, so I'm glad he's a good sport about criticism.
The other letters deal with all kinds of stuff, besides talking about what kind of stories they want to see (offering proof that you can't please everybody.) One speculates about a combination of Communism and Christianity. (The editor dismisses this as unlikely.) Many react to an editorial in a previous issue about the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers TV show.
No rating.
Fantasy Books, by Fritz Leiber and Alexander Temple
Just like Fred Lerner did in the last issue, Leiber praises Lin Carter's Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings for its history of fantasy fiction, and condemns Understanding Tolkien by William Ready, while admitting that it has a few good insights. He praises The Quest For Arthur's Britain by Geoffrey Ashe and Isaac Asimov's The Near East: 10,000 Years of History as fine nonfiction books with subjects relating to fantasy fiction.
Temple very briefly discusses The Demons of the Upper Air, a slim little book of poems by Leiber. It's a lukewarm review, talking about his occasional careless choice of words . . . hardly to be compared with his prose and recommends it for Leiber fans only.
Worth Your Time?
This was a pretty good issue, with nothing below average in it. I imagine others will dislike some of the stories, but I was satisfied.
While admiring your new thousand dollar watch, don't forget to get a new calendar as well. I wonder how long I'll be writing 1969 on checks.
Did you make it to either of these groovy concerts?
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
Two new science fiction novels that fell into my hands are similar in many ways. Both are by British writers and might be classified as action-packed adventure yarns. Each features a rather ordinary hero who gets involved in a secret scientific project of epic proportions. Both protagonists fall in love along the way. Each has a touch of satire and a cynical attitude about politics.
The main difference is that one takes place in the present and the other is set some centuries from now. Let's take a look at the first one.
Our hero has just lost his job and his live-in girlfriend. He worked as a security expert at a research facility, but certain parts of it were off limits to him. A fellow claiming to work for the United Nations hires him to do some unofficial investigating of the place.
I should mention at this point that everybody the protagonist meets refuses to tell him everything that's going on. I suspect this is a way for the author to keep the reader in suspense. It's also worthy of note that the hero, who is also the narrator, casts a jaundiced eye on the world around him.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and members of the Warsaw Pact send troops into Czechoslovakia to suppress the liberal reforms known as the Prague Spring. This part of the novel is torn straight from the headlines.
As the Cold War heats up, things get complicated. There's an accident at the facility that causes two ambulances to rush away from the place, although there's apparently only one victim. The hero runs into a mysterious woman who knows more about the situation than she lets on (like a lot of characters in the novel.) She's also suffering from some kind of disease she won't discuss. As you'd expect, love blooms.
Add in a gigantic hidden complex of underground tunnels and automated submarines. The big secret behind everything involves Mad Science at its maddest. The protagonist and a few allies battle to stop World War Three from breaking out, and we'll finally learn what the numerical title means. (I suppose it's also an allusion to George Orwell's famous novel 1984, but that's not all.)
Not the most plausible plot in the world. You have to accept the fact that there could be a secret project extending over many miles without anybody finding out about it. If you can suspend your disbelief, it's a very readable page-turner.
Let's jump forward hundreds of years. People are rigidly assigned to different levels of society, with their jobs chosen for them. They can't even marry until the powers that be allow them to do so. There are some folks living in the wilderness outside this system. If the previous novel tipped its hat to 1984, this one owes something to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Our hero works for what seems to be the planet's only news agency. His job is only vaguely described, but it seems to be some kind of editing or proofreading position.
The daughter of the boss fancies herself one of those Spunky Girl Reporters from old black-and-white movies. (That's my interpretation, not the author's.) Somehow she came across a reference to something called (you guessed it) the Weisman Experiment. This happened a few decades ago, and the government has repressed all knowledge of it.
The boss tells the protagonist to help his daughter investigate the mysterious experiment. As soon as they set out, somebody tries to kill them. Whenever they track down one of the few surviving people who remember the Weisman Experiment, that person is murdered.
The hero and the daughter (who will, of course, eventually fall in love) are separated by the powers that be before they get too far. The protagonist goes through some brainwashing to straighten him out, but it doesn't quite work.
The rest of the novel takes us to North Africa, where the hero acquires an ally. (This character is a bit embarrassing, as she speaks in an accent and ends almost all her statements with I theenk.) Next we go to an underwater facility, where he's reunited with the daughter. Eventually, we wind up at the estate of an incredibly wealthy fellow, where we finally find out what the heck the Weisman Experiment was all about.
Like the other novel, this is a fast-moving tale with something to say about the way society is set up. Worth reading once.
Three stars.
by Brian Collins
We have two short novels from very different authors, one being a promising young writer and the other one of the more reliable workhorses in the field. Neither novel is all that good, but at the very least I needed something less demanding after I had recently covered Macroscope.
Vinge has written only one or maybe two short stories a year so far, but all of them have been interesting, if not necessarily good. Grimm’s World, his debut novel, is itself an expansion of the novella “Grimm’s Story,” which appeared in Orbit 4 last year. The novel is split into two parts, with the first being “Grimm’s Story,” which as far as I can tell Vinge did not change significantly. If I was just reviewing the first part, I would say it’s fairly good, certainly in keeping with Vinge’s other short fiction. High three to a low four stars.
Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there.
The short of it is that Svir Hedrigs is an astronomy student who gets roped into a scheme by the notorious Tatja Grimm and her crew, those who make the speculative fiction (although here it’s called “contrivance fiction”) magazine Fantasie, a publication that is so old (centuries old, in fact) that its oldest issues seem to have been lost to time, if not for maybe a handful of collectors. The world is Tu, a distant planet that, like Jack Vance’s Big Planet, is vast and yet poor in metals. (Indeed this reads to a conspicuous degree like a Vance pastiche, albeit without Vance’s sardonic humor, and thus it’s not as entertaining.) Something to think about is that characters in an SF story are pretty much never aware that they’re inside a work of SF, and indeed SF as a school of fiction is rarely mentioned, much like how characters in a horror story are often blissfully unaware (for the moment) that they’re birds in a blood-red cage. Yet in Grimm’s World, what we call speculative fiction these days is held as the highest form of literature. It’s a curious case of characters in SF basically realizing that their world itself is SFnal, and therefore the possibilities are near-endless.
Of course the scheme to rescue a complete collection of Fantasie turns out to be a ruse, with Grimm usurping the tyrannical ruler of the single big land mass on this planet, on the falsehood that she is descended from the former monarchy. It’s at this point that the first part ends, and there’s a rather gaping hole in continuity between parts, the result feeling more like two related novellas than a single work. The second part is considerably weaker. What began as a nice planetary adventure turns into something more military-focused, as the people of Tu are terrorized by a race of humanoid aliens, whom Grimm may or may not be in cahoots with. Said aliens take sort of a hands-off approach with the Tu people, provided that their technology doesn’t become too advanced (a high-powered telescope, “the High Eye,” becomes increasingly an object of fascination as the novel progresses), and also that the Tu people reproduce at a rate to the aliens’ liking. What the aliens intend to do with the human surplus is absurd and raises some questions which Vinge never answers. There’s also a love triangle (or perhaps a love square) that I found totally unconvincing, if only because Svir seems to get a hard-on for whatever woman is within his field of vision.
I liked the first part but found the second part a bit of a slog.
Anderson’s writing is comfortable and comforting: rarely surprising, but often (not always) a mild stimulant that can help one during trying times. Just when I think everything might be going to shit, there’s a new Poul Anderson novel—possibly even two of them. The Rebel Worlds is short enough that it could’ve easily made up one half of an Ace Double, except this is from Signet. A few years ago we got Ensign Flandry, which saw the early days in the career of Dominic Flandry, clearly one of Anderson’s favorite recurring characters (although he’s not one of mine). The Rebel Worlds takes place not too long after Ensign Flandry, with Flandry now Lieutenant Commander and with more responsibilities, but still very much the playboy.
Hugh McCormac, a respected admiral of the Empire, is imprisoned, only to break out and go rogue, taking those loyal to him along for the ride. The prison breakout blossoms into a full-on rebellion across multiple worlds, which is a rather big problem for the Empire. Flandry, despite knowing that the Empire is on the brink of collapse and that “the Long Night” will begin soon enough, stays aligned with those in power—perhaps a sentiment Anderson himself shares, given he supports the war effort in Vietnam despite said war effort turning more sour by the week. Indeed Flandry’s seeming contradiction, between his extreme individualism and his allegiance to what he knows is a dying government, is both the core of his character and something he shares with his creator. We also know, from other Flandry stories, that the Empire will in fact soon collapse and that the Long Night, a centuries-long era of barbarism and disconnect across many worlds, will soon commence. And we know that Flandry is in no imminent danger, for better or worse. The real tension, then, lies in McCormac and his wife Kathryn, who has been taken captive by the Empire on the basis that she might cough up valuable info on her husband.
Something I admire about Anderson, despite sharply disagreeing with his politics, is that he’s evidently fond of anti-heroes (Flandry, Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, Gunnar Heim), but he also sometimes concocts anti-villains, in that these characters are technically antagonists but meant to be taken as sympathetic or noble. Despite being a thorn in the Empire’s side, McCormac is basically a good man who cares about those who work for him, never mind he also loves Kathryn very much. Much less sympathetic is Snelund, a planetary governor who is horrifically corrupt, and who also wants to put his filthy hands on Kathryn while she is his prisoner; yet this man also watches over Flandry’s assignment. It should not come as a surprise then that Flandry rescues Kathryn and hides out with her on the planet Dido, which has some unusual alien life. It also shouldn’t be surprising that the two fall in love, although understandably Kathryn still cares for McCormac and isn’t eager to be swept off her feet. (I also must say Anderson tries what I think is a 19th century Southern aristocratic accent with Kathryn, and it’s a bit odd.)
So business as usual for Flandry.
The major problem with The Rebel Worlds is that it’s too short. This is a problem Anderson’s novels sometimes have, but it seems to me that scenes and maybe entire chapters that would have fleshed out the conflict are simply not here. Sure, the plot is basically coherent, but we’re far more often told about things than shown them, to the point where I wonder if Anderson was working with a deadline that he struggled with, even with his near-superhuman writing speed. It’s a fine novel that could have easily been better, with some more time.
A solid three stars.
by Cora Buhlert
A New Chancellor and a New Era
Willy Brandt is sworn in as chancellor of West Germany.
In my last article, I mentioned that West Germany was about to have a federal parliamentary election. Now, that election has come and gone and has led to sweeping political change. Because for the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, i.e. twenty years ago, the chancellor is not a member of the conservative party CDU.
Since 1966, West Germany has been governed by a so-called great coalition of the two biggest parties, the above mentioned conservative CDU and the social-democratic party SPD. The great coalition wasn't particularly popular, especially among young people, but due to their large and stable majority, they also got things done.
When the election results started coming in the evening of September 28 and the percentages of the vote won by the CDU and SPD respectively were very close, a lot of people expected that this meant that the great coalition would continue. And indeed, this is what many in the CDU and even the SPD would have preferred.
At home with the Brandts: West Germany's new chancellor Willy Brandt with his Norwegian born wife Rut and their youngest son Matthias.
However, SPD head Willy Brandt, former mayor of West Berlin and West German foreign secretary and vice chancellor in Kurt Georg Kiesinger's great coalition cabinet, had different ideas. And so he chose to enter into coalition negotiations not with the CDU, but with the small liberal party FDP. These negotiations bore fruit and the 56-year-old Willy Brandt was sworn in as West Germany's fourth chancellor and head of a social-democratic/liberal coalition government on October 22.
West German president Gustav Heinemann and the new chancellor Willy Brandt shake hands.
Personally, I could not be happier about this development. I've been a supporter of the SPD for as long as I've been able to vote for them (sadly, I spent the first years of my voting age life under a regime where there were no elections) and I have liked Willy Brandt since his time as mayor of West Berlin. What is more, Willy Brandt is not a former Nazi like his predecessor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, but spent the Third Reich in exile in Norway and Sweden. Of course, "not a former Nazi" should be a low bar to clear, but sadly West Germany is still infested with a lot of former Nazis masquerading as democrats. And indeed, the one blemish on the otherwise positive results of the 1969 federal election is that the far right party NPD, successor of the banned Nazi Party, managed to gain 3.8 percent of the vote, though thankfully the five percent hurdle keeps them out of our parliament.
Willy Brandt and his (very male) cabinet pose for a photo on the steps outside Villa Hammerschmidt, seat of the West German president.
In one of his first speeches as chancellor, Willy Brandt said he and his government want to "risk more democracy" and promised long overdue reforms. He also wants to initiate talks with East European governments to thaw the Cold War at least a little. I wish him and his cabinet all the best.
A Magical Mystery Tour: The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland
During my latest trip to my trusty import bookstore, I came across an intriguing looking paperback in the good old spinner rack called The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland. From the title, I assume that this would be a fantasy tale along the lines of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. The Unicorn Girl, however, is a lot stranger than that.
The Unicorn Girl starts off not in a far-away fantasyland, but in a place that – at least viewed from this side of the Atlantic – seems almost as fantastic, namely a coffeehouse cum performance venue called the Trembling Womb on the outskirts of San Francisco. Our hero Michael (a.k.a. Michael Kurland, the author) is sitting at a table, trying to compose a sonnet, while his friend Chester (a.k.a. Chester Anderson, the author of The Butterfly Kid) is performing on stage, when all of a sudden the girl of Michael's dreams walks in – quite literally, because this very girl has been appearing in Michael's dreams since childhood.
Michael does what anyone would do in that situation: he gets up and talks to the girl. Turns out that her name is Sylvia and that she's looking for her lost unicorn. Michael understandably assumes that Sylvia is playing a joke on him, especially since he had addressed her in the sort of pseudo-medieval language you'd hear at a Renaissance Fair. Sylvia, however, is deadly serious. She tells Michael and Chester that she's a circus performer and that her unicorn Adolphus ran away, when they stepped off the train. There's only one problem: train service into San Francisco ceased six years before. As far as I can ascertain from this side of the Atlantic, this isn't true and San Francisco does have train service, as befits a major metropolis, all which suggests that Michael and Chester live in the future, even though their surroundings seem very much like something you could find in San Francisco right now.
When Michael and Chester ask Sylvia, what year it is, she replies "1936", so Michael and Chester assume that time travel is involved. However, the truth is still stranger than this, for Sylvia seems to have no idea where she is. True, San Francisco today is very different from San Francisco in 1936, but you'd assume that Sylvia would at least recognise the name of the city. The fact that she keeps calling California "Nueva España" is also a clue that Sylvia hails from further afield than our version of 1936.
When Michael, Chester and Sylvia head out to look for the missing unicorn, they are met by some Sylvia's circus friends: Dorothy, an attractive but otherwise normal human woman, Giganto, a cyclops from Arcturus, and Ronald, a centaur. Upon seeing this strange trio, Michael and Chester immediately assume that they are experiencing drug-induced hallucinations – as do two random bystanders. It's a reasonable assumption to make, though two people normally don't experience the same hallucinations, even if they took the same drugs. And Chester swears that he hasn't slipped Michael any drugs…
Methinks we're not in Kansas – pardon, San Francisco – anymore
Before our heroes can get to the bottom of this mystery, they split up to search for the missing unicorn, only to find a flying saucer. There is a mysterious blip and Michael, Chester, Sylvia and Dorotha suddenly find themselves elsewhere and elsewhen, namely in the early Victorian era or rather a version of it that is very reminiscent of Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories. I guess they should count themselves lucky it wasn't "The Queen Bee" instead.
The sojourn in the Victorian era according to Randall Garrett ends, when our heroes find themselves falsely accused of jewellery theft (and the way the true culprits accomplished those thefts is truly fascinating). During their escape, there is another blip and our heroes find themselves in World War II in the middle of a battlefield…
For most of its pages, The Unicorn Girl is a picaresque romp through time, space and dimensions. Literary allusions abound, for in addition to the Victorian era according to Randall Garrett, our heroes also briefly visit J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. It's all great fun, though eventually, there needs to be an explanation for this weirdness. And so, Michael and Sylvia, who have been temporarily separated from Chester and Dorothy, figure out – with the help of Tom Waters, a friend of Michael's and Chester's who'd disappeared earlier – that the blips always happen in moments of danger and crisis. They provoke another blip and finally land in a world that at least is aware that there is a problem with visitors from other times and universes showing up in their world, even if they have no idea why this is happening.
Turns out that all the different time lines and universes are converging, which may well mean the end of this world and any other. Luckily, there is a way to fix this issue and send everybody back to their own universe. The drawback is that solving the problem will be very dangerous. What is more, Michael, Chester and Tom on the one hand and Sylvia, Dorothy and the unicorn (with whom Sylvia has been reunited by now) on the other will return to different universes, even though Michael and Sylvia as well as Chester and Dorothy have fallen in love amidst all the chaos…
A Trippy Delight
The Unicorn Girl is not the sort of book I would normally have sought out, since I'm not a big fan of psychedelic science fiction. However, I'm glad that I read this book, because it's a true delight.
The novel is suffused with humour and wordplay, whether it's the tendency of the Victorians from the Randall Garrett inspired world to speak in very long, very complicated sentences or Michael parodying a wine connoisseur by evaluating plain water. The dialogue frequently sparkles such as when Sylvia asks, "Do you not travel to far-off planets?" and Chester replies, "We barely travel to nearby planets."
The collection of Middle Eastern folktales known in English as Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights is familiar to folks all over the world. Case in point, as Rod Serling might say, is the recent Japanese animated film Senya Ichiya Monogatari, which is loosely based on the collection.
Japanese poster for the film. I don't know if it will ever show up elsewhere.
I should point out that this is not a cartoon intended for children. Like the work which inspired it, it contains considerable erotic material. If it ever gets released in the USA, it might get the infamous X rating.
I bring this up because the latest issue of Fantastic contains the first part of a new novel inspired by the same source as the film.
Cover art by Johnny Bruck
As is often the case lately, the cover is (ahem) borrowed from a German publication.
Die Herrscher der Nacht (The Ruler of the Night) is the title of the German translation of Jack Williamson's 1948 novel Darker Than You Think.
Editorial, by Ted White
The editor begins by telling us how the magazine's lead serial (see below) fell into his hands. Long story short, it failed to find a publisher, got reviewed in a fanzine, Ted White read it and liked it. He then goes on to relate the big changes in Fantastic and its sister publication Amazing. My esteemed colleague John Boston has already discussed this in detail, so let me give you the Reader's Digest version. Higher price, more words, only one reprint per issue. Nuff said.
No rating.
Hasan (Part One of Two), by Piers Anthony
Illustrations by Jeff Jones.
More than half the magazine consists of the first installment of this Arabian Nights fantasy adventure.
Hasan is a rather naive and foolish young man, living in Arabia around the year 800 or so. He meets a Persian alchemist who demonstrates how to turn copper into gold. His mother warns him not to trust this fire-worshipping infidel, but Hasan's greed overcomes what little common sense he possesses.
The wicked Persian kidnaps him and takes him on an ocean journey to the island of Serendip. (We call it Ceylon nowadays—the magazine provides a helpful map).
Despite this, Hasan still trusts the alchemist enough to perform the dangerous task of being carried to the top of a mountain by a roc, in order to gather the stuff needed to transform copper into gold. The poor sap doesn't realize that the Persian intends to leave him stranded on the peak, where he'll starve to death.
Suffice to say that, with a lot of dumb luck, Hasan makes his way to an isolated palace inhabited by seven beautiful sisters, who adopt him as their brother. He goes on to witness birds change into even more beautiful women, one of whom he is determined to have for his bride. (She has little say in the matter.)
Seeing her naked while she is bathing makes him fall madly in love.
Without giving away too much, let's just say that the further adventures of Hasan and the bird woman will appear in the next issue.
The author appears to be well acquainted with One Thousand and One Nights, given his accompanying article on the subject (see below.) As far as I can tell, he captures the flavor of this kind of Arabian folktale in a convincing way. Despite the fact that the hero is kind of a dope, and that the female characters (except Hasan's long-suffering mother) mostly exist to be alluringly beautiful, this half of the novel makes for light, entertaining reading.
Three stars.
Morality, by Thomas N. Scortia
Illustration by Bruce Jones.
It's obvious from the start that this is a science fiction version of the myth of the Minotaur, although the author doesn't make this explicit until the end. The legendary monster is an alien stranded on Earth, forced to serve an ambitious king while trying to contact his own kind.
There's not much more to this story than its retelling of the old tale. It plays out just as you'd expect.
Two stars.
Would You? by James H. Schmitz
A wealthy fellow invites an equally rich acquaintance to make use of a magic chair. It seems that it has the ability to allow the person seated in it to change the past.
I hope I'm not revealing too much to state that neither man chooses to alter his past, preferring to leave well enough alone. That seems to be the point of the story. A tale of fantasy in which an enchanted object is not used is unusual, I suppose, if not fully satisfying.
Two stars.
Magic Show, by Alan E. Nourse
A couple of guys watch a magic show at a cheap carnival. One of them heckles the magician, who invites him to take part in his greatest feat.
You can probably see where this is going. No surprises in the plot. I have to wonder why a real, powerful magician works at a lousy little carnival.
Two stars.
X: Yes, by Thomas M. Disch
An unspecified referendum always appears on the ballot in every election. Everybody knows that the proper thing to do is vote No. A woman chooses to vote Yes, just as children vote Yes during their mock elections.
Can you tell that this is an odd little story? I'm not sure what the author is getting at, unless it's something about conformity and rebellion. At least it's not a simple, predictable plot. Food for thought, I guess.
Three stars.
Big Man, by Ross Rocklynne
The April 1941 issue of Amazing Stories supplies this wild yarn.
Cover art by J. Allen St. John.
I can't argue with the accuracy of the title. A gigantic man — he's said to be one or two miles tall — walks through the Atlantic Ocean to Washington, D. C. The behemoth is under the control of a Mad Scientist, who intends to take over the United States government and run things the way he thinks they should be run.
Illustration by Robert Fuqua.
It's up to a heroic pilot and his girlfriend (who, in an incredible coincidence, turns out to be the sister of the young fellow who was transformed into the giant) to defeat the Mad Scientist and end the reign of terror of the Big Man.
Boy, this is a goofy story. I think the author saw King Kong too many times. The premise is, of course, absurd, and it's treated in the corniest pulp fiction manner imaginable.
One star.
Alf Laylah Wa Laylah — A Essay on The Arabian Nights, by Piers Anthony
As part of the magazine's Fantasy Fandom column, this article is reprinted from the fanzine Niekas. It discusses One Thousand and One Nights in detail, comparing English translations and offering examples of the kinds of tales it contains. Copious footnotes, some serious and some playful. The author clearly knows his subject.
Three stars.
Fantasy Books by Fritz Leiber and Fred Lerner
Leiber quickly gives a positive review of Captive Universe by Harry Harrison, praises Walker and Company for reprinting science fiction classics in handsome hardcover editions, defends the use of strong language in Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, gives thumbs up to A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle, and talks about Eric R. Eddison's fantasy novels. He ends this rapid-fire essay by comparing the way that Heinlein, Spinrad, and Eddison describe a woman's breasts. (The latter excerpt is a really wild bit of outrageously purple prose.)
Lerner, in an article reprinted from the fanzine Akos, talks about two nonfiction books about J. R. R. Tolkien. He dismisses Understanding Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings by William Ready as poorly written and overly interpretive, and praises Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings by Lin Carter for its discussion of epic fantasy in general.
No rating.
… According to You, by various
The letters from readers offer both praise and criticism. One of the editor's replies reveals that sales of the magazine went down when Cele Goldsmith was in charge, even though the quality of fiction improved. I hope that's not a bad omen for the way Ted White is taking the publication.
No rating.
Worthy of Scheherazade?
Not a great issue, although Anthony's novel and related essay are well worth reading. The new stuff is so-so and the reprint is laughably poor. It might be better to watch an old movie instead.
![[May 22, 1970] Back From The Dead (Summer 1970 <i>Worlds of Tomorrow</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/COVERSMALL-1-672x372.jpg)
![[May 20, 1970] <i>Circus of Hells</i>, <i>Tau Zero</i>, and <i>Vector</i> (May 1970 Galactoscope #2)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/700520covers-672x372.jpg)
![[May 12, 1970] War and Peace (June 1970 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/COVERSMALL-672x372.jpg)
![[April 16, 1970] Junk Day for Ice Crowns (April 1970 Galactoscope)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/700420covers-672x372.jpg)
![[March 10, 1970] Baby, It's Cold (And Dark) Outside (April 1970 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/COVERSMALL-672x372.jpg)
![[March 6, 1970] <i>The Waters of Centaurus</i>, <i>And Chaos Died</i>, and <i>High Sorcery</i>](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/700306covers-672x372.jpg)
Joanna Russ
![[February 10, 1970] Thirty Years To Go (<i>The Year 2000</i>, a science fiction anthology by Harry Harrison)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/THEYEARF51970.jpg)
![[January 10, 1970] Time On My Hands (February 1970 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/COVER-672x372.jpg)
![[November 16, 1969] Fun, Frivolity, and Flandry (<i>The Unicorn Girl</i> and more!)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/691116covers-672x372.jpg)
![[November 8, 1969] Arabesques (December 1969 <i>Fantastic</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/COVERARTSMALL.jpg)
