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[December 16, 1969] Holiday haul (December Galactoscope)

December 16, 2024 Gideon Marcus Leave a comment

We have a fine sextet of science fiction books for you this month: largely readable, with two clunkers and one superior read…

by Gideon Marcus

Ace Double 66160

Earthrim, by Nick Kamin

by Panos Koutrouboussis

A generation or two from now, the Earth is recovering from a devastating war between the Western World and the Chinasian alliance. At first, the latter was winning, surging into Australia and with a plan to cross the Bering Strait. Then things bogged down. Eschewing the use of nuclear weapons (for an unexplained reason), the death rate became fantastic.

One day, the war just stopped. Or, more specifically, someone stopped them. Sounds like a positive development, but whoever did it is now exerting dictatorial control over the globe, futzing with governments, economies, even population growth rates and somehow slowing the age of human maturity!

Now, a decade after the war, Michael Standard, a battered veteran of the Australian front, is the one man who can stop the war-stopper. He is equipped with a prosthetic arm which is set to fire its hand like a cannon when face to face with the entity who styles himself "The Rim".

In many ways, Earthrim is a conventional action yarn, not too different from the series hero paperbacks like the new "Executioner" series. Standard is an irascible brute who lurches from fight to fight, surviving by animal cunning and will to live. The world Nick Kamin (a new author) creates is not particularly visionary. There is one lady character, and she is a prostitute, existing for the sole purpose of 1) being Standard's lover, and 2) getting Standard to Rim.

But Kamin does some interesting stuff. He begins the story with a compelling hook: Standard is put under to have his prosthetic arm's shoulder put back into its socket, which brings a hapless doctor into the plot. Then we get scenes from Standard's past, woven in quite deftly, making his character more interesting and his personality a bit more palatable (though how he acts like a moron most of the time, but can whip out an erudite observation on topology is a bit strange).

The other characters are actually well drawn, from Jeannine the prostitute to Dr. Graystone. Even the cops on the trail of Standard get decently fleshed out, though their role is somewhat incidental. Kamin is also a compelling author. He's got the modern style down pat, and the lurid mode works well for Ace Doubles.

The biggest problem with the book is the revelation at the end that no character has exercised free will. Everything that happens is ultimately the will of Rim or Condliffe, the fellow who equipped Standard with the arm-gun. The journey is interesting. The writing is good. But the story is a steel lattice that the characters can only inhabit, not change.

Three and a half stars.

Phoenix Ship, by Leigh and Walt Richmond

by Jack Gaughan

The Richmond husband-and-wife team (supposedly, the wife does the typing, with the husband sending telepathic instructions from his living room easy chair) has another Ace Double for us. Stanley Thomas Arthur Reginald (S.T.A.R.) Dustin is an Earther, nephew to an asteroid belt-dwelling rabble-rouser named Trevor Dustin. Stan's dad wants his son to be nothing like his uncle, so he enrolls him in an arctic university for a proper indoctrination…er…education. Said education is most unusual. Stan gets weekly "inoculations" and then is given a series of exams. The questions are highly technical—impossible to answer without years of classes. Yes somehow, unconsciously, Stan seems to have the answers floating in the back of his mind.

Not content to let his hindbrain do the work, Stan spends all of his waking hours studying so that he could pass the tests even without the mysterious, subconscious aid. As a result, after four years, Stan has one of the most remarkable minds in the solar system. He finishes his schooling just in time for his uncle to lead a rebellion against Earth, winning independence for the Belt through a series of brilliant space naval maneuvers.

This makes Stan persona non grata on Earth, whereupon the school's headmaster sneeringly informs Stan that he has been drafted into the Marines, and he will have to report for duty in two weeks as one of Earth's finest. Well, Stan won't stand for that—he skips town, heads to orbit, and then off to the Belt…where he has a date with destiny and a second war with Earth.

Written in a much (much!) more juvenile vein than the Kamin, this is an odd duck of a book. With its cardboard characters, mustache-twirling villains, perfunctory inclusion of a single female (to be the love interest, natch), and its basic plot, it feels like something out of the 30s. On the other hand, the loving detail lavished on things like weightless maneuvers, dealing with explosive decompression, and space station construction are pulled from the current pages of Popular Science. There are tantalizing details on living in the Belt. Most interesting was that virtually all of its denizens are scarred or deformed, testament to the hostile environment, but no less human for it. Anderson and Niven have written about Belters, but the Richmonds have taken the first, if clumsy, steps to flesh out living in the Belt, I think.

The problem is neither Anderson nor Niven wrote this book, and the Richmonds really weren't up to it. The subject matter required twice its length. At the hands of a Heinlein, it could have been a second The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. As is, it's an occasionally entertaining, but largely turgid and by-the-numbers throwaway.

Two and a half stars.

by Jason Sacks

Lord of the Stars, by Jean and Jeff Sutton

Speaking of husband and wife writing teams… Lord of the Stars is a new juvenile sf adventure co-created by the husband-and-wife team of Jean and Jeff Sutton. Stars is readable and fun, but lacks the fire and flash of the best juveniles.

Like many juveniles, Stars is a coming-of-age story which tells the story of how a young boy discovers a world around him much more complex and interesting than he ever could have expected. As in many of these types of books, Danny has a destiny to fulfill, and as he learns of his destiny, the boy also learns the creature who had mentored him is evil, and he meets his true friends along the way.

Hmm, it occurs to me there is a lot of familiar archetyping in that description. That archetyping is a big part of the strength and weakness of this book. Because sophisticated readers know basically how a story like this will proceed, we're looking for signposts that indicate a different viewpoint or more complexity – as in the recent Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin. But the Suttons aren't after the same level of complexity as Panshin was, and that leaves this book as merely an average juvenile sf yarn.

Cover by Albert Orbaan

The Suttons center Lord of the Stars around Danny June. As we meet Danny, he's all alone on a mysterious planet. He's been lost on the planet since his parents' colonist ship blew up, wandering the planet with the help of an amazing telepathic octopus-creature named Zandro. Zandro has incredible abilities and is extremely intelligent, guiding our boy in his means to survive the planet, and seeming to groom Danny for a greater fate.

But others want Danny as well. The great Galactic Empire, spanning thousands of stars, is after Danny. In chapter two we are introduced to the 17th Celestial Sector of the Third Terran Empire, led by Sol Houston, who see Danny as the kind of creature who can destroy their empire.

That aspect of the book is dully familiar, but at least the Suttons bring in a bit of playfulness with the names of the Galactic leaders. For reasons lost in the fog of time, the names Sol and Houston are legendary, so the leader of the empire is named Sol Houston. And so on, names explained in fun and clever asides which added to my pleasure with this book.

Similarly, there's an amusing tangent in which a set of Empire bureaucrats try to figure out what they can do to affect the lives of Danny and his friends. The bureaucrats fall into an almost talmudic debate about which regs to follow, which rules can be broken. It's in those moments one can see real-life arguments with governments and school boards made manifest. (Jean Sutton works as a high school teacher while Jeff Sutton works as an aerospace consultant, so both know plenty about bureaucracy).

But the core of the book centers around Danny, his great psychic powers, and the attempts by his friends and allies to break Danny away from Zandro's influence. Along the way, Danny battles the plans of Gultur, Lord of the Stars; communicates psychically in subspace with a group of androids; and makes friends.

All of this is quite fun, since the Suttons bring just the right amount of seriousness to bear with Lord of the Stars. This is also a well-written, crisp little novel — no surprise since Jeff Sutton has written fiction and nonfiction since he left the Marines after the War. Still, Danny comes across as bit of a cipher and the plot machinations are a bit creaky.

Overall, a pleasant novel that's a bit of a throwback but still is worth the read.

Three stars.

by Victoria Silverwolf

The Best Laid Schemes o' Mice an' (Space)Men

Two novels in which interstellar voyages gang agley (with a tip o' the Tam o' Shanter to Bobby Burns) fell into my hands recently. One is by a Yank, the other by a Brit. Let's take a look at 'em.

The Rakehells of Heaven, by John Boyd

Wraparound cover art by Paul Lehr

Atlanta-born Boyd Bradfield Upchurch writes under the penname listed above. He's whipped out a couple of previous novels quickly. The Last Starship from Earth came out last year, and The Pollinators of Eden just a few months ago.

This latest work starts with a psychiatrist interviewing a spaceman who came back from his voyage too early. More concerning is the fact that it was supposed to be a two-man effort, and his partner isn't with him.

The text quickly shifts to first person narration by the astronaut himself. His name is John Adams, better known as Jack. (I'm not sure if his name is supposed to be an allusion to the second President of the United States or not.) He's a Southern boy, just like the author.

His missing buddy is Keven "Red" O'Hara, a stereotypical Irishman who has a toy leprechaun as a good luck charm and wears underwear with green polka dots. (The latter is actually part of the plot.)

We get quite a bit of background about their days before the spaceflight. Suffice to say that, after an encounter with an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher and his nubile daughter, Jack gets religion and Red gets the girl. (He actually marries her but, as we'll see, that hardly ties him down.)

Their mission takes them to a planet in another galaxy. (There's no real reason the place has to be so far away. In other ways, this isn't the most realistic space voyage ever to appear in fiction.) The inhabitants are very human in appearance, the main difference being very long, strong legs that are used in about the same way as arms.

The aliens live in a logical, technologically advanced society with no apparent form of government. Society is made up of what are pretty much universities. The two Earthmen are welcomed, and even allowed to teach classes.

It should be noted that the locals wear extremely short tunics and nothing else, not even underwear. This very casual almost-nudity (which really conceals nothing) goes along with the fact that they consider sex to be no big deal, just something they do when they feel like it. Children often result, of course, and never know who their fathers are.

For Red, this is an opportunity to have relations with as many of the beautiful young women surrounding him as possible. Jack, on the other hand, wants to convert the natives to Christianity. That includes dressing modestly, courting the opposite sex chastely, etc.

Can you guess that this is going to backfire?

Complicating matters is the fact that Jack falls in love with one of the aliens. It seems that Earth doesn't consider extraterrestrials to be human unless they meet a long list of very specific conditions. That includes being able to defend their planet from invaders. (Obviously this is a cynical ploy on the part of Earthlings to be able to enslave any aliens who are weaker than they are.) In essence, Jack is marrying an animal, legally, unless he can prove they meet all the conditions.

Things reach a climax during the performance of an Eastertime Passion Play, meant to convey the story of Christ's sacrifice to the aliens, who are entirely without religion. (Red, nominally a Catholic, goes along with Jack's evangelism, mostly because he enjoys putting on shows.)

Yep, that's not going to go at all well either.

This is a satiric novel, not quite openly comic although it's got some farcical elements. There's also quite a bit of sex. This may be the only science fiction book I've read with a detailed description of a woman's genitalia.

The last part of the novel, which goes back to the psychiatrist, has a twist ending that doesn't quite make sense. Maybe the best way to describe this odd little book is to compare it to an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke.

Three stars.

The Black Corridor, by Michael Moorcock

Cover art by Diane and Leo Dillon

Prolific author and controversial editor Moorcock needs no introduction to Galactic Journeyers.

A fellow named Ryan is aboard a starship heading for a supposedly habitable planet orbiting Barnard's Star. The trip will take five years, and three have already gone by. He's the only person awake on the ship. In hibernation are his wife, their two sons, and other relatives and friends.

(We'll find out, by the way, that a couple of the men have two wives each. This drastic change in Western European society [everybody is British] is taken for granted, with no discussion.)

Flashbacks take us to a future Earth that is rapidly disintegrating into chaos. Tribalism rears its ugly head. Ryan, the manager of a toy company, fires a kindly employee just because the fellow is Welsh. Things get much, much worse as the book continues. Ryan and the others hijack the starship in order to escape Earth, which they feel is doomed.

Aboard the ship, Ryan suffers nightmares. These are often surrealistic. At times, the text turns into words in all capitals that are placed on the page to form other words. These typographical tricks contrast strongly with the main parts of the narrative, which use simple language to convey truly horrific happenings.

It's hard for me to say much more about what happens, because Ryan is quite obviously experiencing a mental breakdown. You can't trust that what you're told is real.

This is a very dark and disturbing book. The New Wave narrative technique associated with the nightmares is a little gimmicky, but otherwise the novel is compelling in its portrait of both individuals and society in general falling apart.

(It should be noted that, according to scuttlebutt, many of the scenes set on Earth were written by Hilary Bailey, who is married to Moorcock. He rewrote that material, and added everything set in space. The resulting work is credited solely to Moorcock, apparently with Bailey's consent.)

Four stars.

Only one book from me this month, and unfortunately it's not a very good one. It's also, for better or worse, a familiar face. John Jakes has been writing at a mile a minute this year, with The Asylum World being what must be his fourth or fifth novel of 1969. Unlike some previous Jakes novels (a couple of which I reviewed), which lean more towards fantasy, this one is very much science fiction. If anything, the changing of genres is for the worse.

The Asylum World, by John Jakes

Cover of the book The Asylum World. Text on the cover says: A mind-blowing science fiction satire of our times. The illustration shows a human figure with a mirror instead of a face. A night landscape is visible in the mirror and behind the human figure. — Cover artist not credited.

The year is 2031, and while mankind still lives on Earth, to an extent, a widespread race war between blacks and whites (I am not kidding) has resulted in not only Earth being split into Westbloc and Eastbloc (obviously a futuristic equivalent of our current cold war with the Soviets), but, I suppose on the bright side, a Noah's Ark of humanity has been established on Mars, where people live in domes, more or less in racial harmony. Sean Cloud is young, brash, and a "subadministrator" of this Martian colony. He's also hopelessly in love Lydia Vebren, who likes Sean but is hesitant due to his mixed racial heritage. Sean is half-black and half-white, is apparently unable to pass as the latter, and Lydia has a prejudice against black men.

There's also another, larger problem: a fleet of alien ships is making its way through the solar system, to Mars, possibly for peace, but also possibly to make war. The Martian colony does not have the armaments to defend itself, so Sean and Lydia are sent to Earth to bargain with the leadership in Westbloc, which itself is on the verge of turning to shambles.

The back cover says The Asylum World is satire, which strikes me as a bit odd, because in my experience satire is supposed to a) be humorous, and b) provide a topic on which the author may try to prove a point. No doubt this novel is Jakes's attempt at providing commentary on the current political climate in the U.S., especially racial strife over the past decade, not to mention that yes, tensions between the Americans and Soviets have resulted in us nearly blowing ourselves to bits at least once already. The problem is that I'm not sure what the hell he is trying to say, other than to make some center-of-the-road statements such as, for example, bemoaning the irrelevance of the family unit in this not-too-far future. There's a general sentiment of "Why can't we just get along and learn to speak honestly with each other?" which is all well and good, but men around my age and younger are dying. Sean's mixed racial heritage, which seems like it should be fodder for symbolic meaning (he is, after all, the offspring of two races, and now he must join Westbloc with Mars), but Jakes does very little with this.

I could continue to berate Jakes's political naivete, and I could also delve into how even at 170 pages this novel spins its wheels a fair bit (it really could have been a novella); but instead I'll focus some on how, despite taking place several decades into our future, The Asylum World strikes me as having been written only in the past year, maybe in the span of a month or two (why not? Michael Moorcock has written novels in a matter of days), and that I do not see how it could remain relevant in say, another ten years. When Sean comes to Earth he spends most of the novel at the "Nixon-Hilton." Sure. There's also the "Statue of the Three Kennedys." The bubbling conflict between Westbloc and Eastbloc is more or less what we are now dealing with, despite the very real possibility that the Soviet Union may not exist in 2031. Or indeed the United States. This seems like a novel written specifically to be published in 1969, so that readers may "get it" while it still gives the impression of being timely—at which point, having finished the novel in a day or two, said readers will toss it aside. At least Jakes is now slightly less at risk of having to beg for money on a street corner.

Two stars. I will surely forget about it.

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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[December 8, 1969] Do Better (January 1970 Amazing)

December 8, 2024 John Boston 1 Comment

by John Boston

The January 1970 Amazing continues in its newly-established course—“ALL NEW STORIES Plus A Classic”—though it’s fronted in the all-too-long-established manner, with another capable enough but generic cover by Johnny Bruck, reprinted from a 1965 issue of Perry Rhodan. Editor White has acknowledged this practice and, I suspect, is looking to end it when circumstances and the publisher permit.

by Johnny Bruck

The usual complement of features are here, starting with a long editorial meditation about the Moon landing, reactions to it, the progress (or lack thereof) of technology generally, and a note of cogent pessimism about the future of the space program: we can do it, but will we? The book reviews continue long and feisty, with White slagging James Blish’s generally well-received Black Easter, concluding: “At best, then, Black Easter is not a novel, but only an extended parable. At worst, it is a tract. In either case, it pleads its point through the straw-man manipulations of its author in a fashion I consider to be dishonest to its readers.” The milder-mannered Richard Delap says that Avram Davidson’s The Island Under the Earth “isn’t a horrid book like some of the dredges of magazine juvenilia we’ve seen recently; it’s soundly adult and imaginative but just too uneven and incomplete to be a good one.” Damning with faint praise, or the opposite? New reviewer Dennis O’Neil, a comic book scripter and “long a friend of SF, and a one-time neighbor of Samuel Delany,” compliments Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration: “Of all the adjectives which might be applied to Camp Concentration—‘artful,’ ‘brilliant,’ and ‘shocking’ come to mind—maybe the most appropriate is ‘heretical.’ ” He then reads the book in terms of Disch’s assumed religious background. “Catholicism is a hard habit to kick. James Joyce didn’t manage it, and neither does Tom Disch.”

The regular fanzine reviewer, John D. Berry, is on vacation, so White turns the column over to “Franklin Hudson Ford,” apparently a pseudonym of his own, for a long and praiseful review of Harry Warner’s fan history All Our Yesterdays. The letter column is even more contentious than the book reviews, with one correspondent addressing “My Dear Mr. Berry: You and your coterie of comic-stripped idiots” (etc. etc.). John J. Pierce, he of the “Second Foundation” and denunciations of the New Wave, explains that he really does have some taste: “If the romantic, expansive traditions of science fiction are to be saved, they will be saved by the Roger Zelaznys and the Ursula LeGuins, not by the Lin Carters or the Charles Nuetzels”—a point I had not realized was in contention. William Reynolds, an Associate Profession of “Bus. Ad.” at a Virginia community college, tries to correct White about the operation of the Model T Ford and provokes a response as spirited as it is mechanical. One Joseph Napolitano complains about “new wave stories”: These new wave writers “don’t want to work. Its [sic] not easy to come up with an idea for a story and they just don’t want to take the time and use what little brains they have to do this.” (Etc. etc.)

After all this amusing contention, it is unfortunate to have to report that the fiction contents of this issue are pretty lackluster.

A. Lincoln, Simulacrum (Part 2 of 2), by Philip K. Dick

I’m a great admirer of Philip K. Dick’s best work, and some of his less perfect productions as well. So it’s painful to report that A. Lincoln, Simulacrum, is a bust. It has its moments, but there aren’t enough of them and they don’t add up to much, even though the novel’s themes reflect some of Dick’s long-standing preoccupations.

Protagonist Louis Rosen is partner in a firm that manufactures and sells spinet pianos and electric organs. But now his partner Maury is branching out into simulacra—android replicas of historical persons, designed by his daughter Pris. They’ve started with Edwin M. Stanton, President Lincoln’s Secretary of War. How? “. . . [W]e collected the entire body of data extant pertaining to Stanton and had it transcribed down at UCLA into instruction punch-tape to be fed to the ruling monad that serves the simulacrum as a brain.” Ohhh-kay.

More importantly, why? Because Maury thinks America is preoccupied, in this year of 1981, with the Civil War, and it will be good business to re-enact it with artificial people. Pris is now working on a Lincoln simulacrum.

by Michael Hinge

Staying over at Maury’s house, Louis meets Pris, recently released from the custody of the Federal Bureau of Mental Health, which provides free—and mandatory—treatment for people identified as mentally ill per the McHeston Act of 1975. Louis mentions that one in four Americans have served time in a Federal Mental Health Clinic. Pris was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and committed, in her third year of high school.

Louis asks her to stop her noisy activities because it’s late and he wants to go to sleep. She refuses, and says, “And don’t talk to me about going to bed or I’ll wreck your life. I’ll tell my father you propositioned me, and that’ll end Masa Associates and your career, and then you’ll wish you never saw an organ of any kind, electronic or not. So toddle on to bed, buddy, and be glad you don’t have worse troubles than not being able to sleep.” Louis thinks: “My god. . . . Beside her, the Stanton contraption is all warmth and friendliness.”

In a later encounter: “Why aren’t you married?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you a homosexual?”
“No!”
“Did some girl you fell in love with find you too ugly?”

In addition to this finely honed nastiness, Pris is also capable of considerable depression and self-pity. After the Lincoln is completed:
“Oh, Louis—it’s all over.”
“What’s all over?”
“It’s alive. I can never touch it again. Now what’ll I do? I have no further purpose in life.”
“Christ,” I said.
“My life is empty—I might as well be dead. All I’ve done and thought has been the Lincoln.”

Louis is shaken by these encounters. He sees a psychiatrist and gives a paranoid account of events to date, threatening to kill Pris. Further: “I was not kidding when I told you I’m one of Pris’ simulacra. There used to be a Louis Rosen, but no more. Now there’s only me. And if anything happens to me, Pris and Maury have the instructional tapes to create another.” Later he reiterates, in a conversation with the Stanton: “I claim there is no Edwin M. Stanton or Louis Rosen any more. There was once, but they’re dead. We’re machines.” The Stanton acknowledges, “There may be some truth in that.”

And if you’ve missed the point about humans and simulacra, here it is from the other direction. The Stanton says he would have liked to see the World’s Fair. Louis says: “That touched me to the heart. Again I reexperienced my first impression of it: that in many ways it was more human—god help us!—than we were, than Pris or Maury or even me, Louis Rosen. Only my father stood above it in dignity.”

The characters get involved with Sam Barrows, a rich guy who is the talk of the nation, in hopes of a profitable business relationship. Barrows is selling real estate on the Moon and other extraterrestrial locations. He sensibly trashes Maury’s idea of Civil War re-enactment, but his proposal is hardly an improvement; he wants to create simulacra of ordinary folks to go live in his off-planet housing developments and make them seem homier to potential buyers. (Sounds very practical, right?)

Pris then takes up with Barrows and begins calling herself Pristine Womankind. Meanwhile, Louis is getting progressively crazier, propelled by his obsession with Pris, and eventually winds up committed to the Federal Bureau of Mental Health—and is glad. There are a few more events and revelations I won’t spoil.

So, what follows from this prolonged but foreshortened precis?

First, this is not a very good SF novel, because it doesn’t follow through on its SFnal premises and also doesn’t make a lot of sense in general. It starts with the premise that historical replicas can be convincingly manufactured, and can exercise volition and easily adapt to a world a century in their future. OK, show me. But Dick doesn’t. We actually see relatively little of the Stanton and the Lincoln over the course of the novel. Further, we’re told that these artificial people are variations on models developed by the government. For what? And where are they and what are they doing? There’s no clue about the effects of this rather monumental development, other than allowing an obscure piano company to tinker with it.

The novel’s envisioned future doesn’t add up either. We’re told the setting is the USA in 1981, but there is routine space travel and colonization of the Moon and planets. More mind-boggling, there is the Federal Bureau of Mental Health—created by statute in 1975!—under which the entire population must take mental health tests administered in schools, and those deemed mentally ill are committed to a mental health clinic. As already noted, a fourth of the population has been committed at some point. And what political or cultural crisis or revolution has not only countenanced such an authoritarian regime, but also come up with the money for such a gigantic system of confinement?

Dick also seems to have made up his own system of psychiatry. Louis is diagnosed with a mental disorder requiring commitment through the James Benjamin Proverb Test. While interpretation of proverbs is sometimes used in psychiatric diagnosis, I can’t find any indication that this Benjamin Test exists anywhere besides Dick’s imagination.

Louis is asked to interpret “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

“ ‘Well, it means a person who’s always active and never pauses to reflect—’ No, that didn’t sound right. I tried again. ‘That means a man who is always active and keeps growing in mental and moral statute won’t grow stale.’ He was looking at me more intently, so I added by way of clarification, ‘I mean, a man who’s active and doesn’t let grass grow under his feet, he’ll get ahead in life.’
“Doctor Nisea said, ‘I see.’ And I knew that I had revealed, for the purposes of legal diagnosis, a schizophrenic thinking disorder.’”

Turns out the correct answer—which Louis says he really knew—is “A person who’s unstable will never acquire anything of value.” But if any of the other interpretations of this deeply ambiguous platitude—or acknowledgement of its ambiguity—proves one a schizophrenic, I guess I’d better turn myself in. (Cue soundtrack: “They’re Coming to Take Me Away.”)

The doctor goes on to explain that Louis has the “Magna Mater type of schizophrenia”:

“ ‘The primary form which ‘phrenia takes is the heliocentric form, the sun-worship form where the sun is deified, is seen in fact as the patient’s father. You have not experienced that. The heliocentric form is the most primitive and fits with the earliest known religion, solar worship, including the great heliocentric cult of the Roman Period, Mithraism. Also the earlier Persian solar cult, the worship of Mazda.’
“ ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding.
“ ‘Now, the Magna Mater, the form you have, was the great female deity cult of the Mediterranean at the time of the Mycenaean Civilization. Ishtar, Cybele, Attis, then later Athene herself . . . finally the Virgin Mary. What has happened to you is that your anima, that is, the embodiment of your unconscious, its archetype, has been projected outward, unto the cosmos, and there it is perceived and worshipped.’
“ ‘I see,’ I said.”

Now, nowhere is it written that an SF writer can’t invent future psychiatry, any more than future physics or sociology, or alternative history. But plopping this scheme down in the America of 12 years hence, without support or explanation of how we got there from here, is incongruous and implausible. And the nominal date of 1981 is not the issue. The novel is firmly set in the familiar USA of today or close to it, with androids, spaceships, and psychiatry based on ancient religions in effect stuck on with tape and thumb tacks.

Of course, absurdity and incongruity are far from rare in PKD’s work, but they generally appear in the context of madcap satire or grim lampoon (consider Dr. Smile, the robot psychiatrist-in-briefcase in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, whose function is not to cure, but to drive the protagonist crazy so he can evade the draft). But that’s not what’s going on here. This novel, though it has its witty moments, presents overall as thoroughly sober and serious, assisted by Louis’s flat first-person narration.

So, if it’s not good SF, is it good anything else? Editor White said in the last issue, “It’s more of a novel of character than any previous Philip K. Dick novel, and in writing and scene construction it approaches the so-called ‘mainstream’ novel.” Pris is an appallingly memorable character, both for her conduct and for her effect on others, and her part of dialogue is finely honed. A novel that closely examined her and her effect on those around her might be quite impressive. But in a novel that starts out with android historical figures and ends up in a national coercive mental health system, with spaceships and moon colonies along the way, there’s too much distraction for Pris and her relationships to be adequately developed.

The bottom line is that the author has mixed up elements of SF and the “mainstream” novel without developing either satisfactorily or adequately integrating them.

In the last chapter, the author makes a conspicuous effort to bring the novel’s disparate elements together, and winds things up in the most quintessentially Dickian fashion imaginable. In fact, it all seems a little too pat. But wait. Remember editor White’s cryptic statement in last issue’s editorial that this serial was not cut, but was “slightly revised and expanded” for its appearance here? There’s a rumor that this last chapter was not actually written by Dick, but was added by White. True? No doubt we’ll find out . . . someday.

A readable failure. Two stars.

Moon Trash, by Ross Rocklynne

Ross Rocklynne (birth name Ross Louis Rocklin) started publishing SF in 1935 and became very prolific in the 1940s, placing more than 10 stories most years through 1946, many in the field leader Astounding Science Fiction, but most in assorted pulps. After that his production fell off, he disappeared from Astounding, and ceased publishing entirely from 1954 to 1968, when he reappeared with a burst of stories in Galaxy. He was a heavyweight by production, but seemingly a lightweight by lasting impact. Only five of his stories were picked up in the explosion of SF anthologies of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, and to date he has published no books.

by Ralph Reese

Moon Trash is a contrived piece about young Tommy, who lives on the Moon with his cranky old stepfather Ben Fountain; his mother seems to be dead though it’s not explicit. Tommy has bought the official ideology of keeping the Moon spick and span, and Ben gets annoyed when Tommy picks up things that Ben has dropped along the way. Then Tommy finds a bit of trash that somebody dropped about a million years ago, and it leads them to a cave full of artifacts of an alien civilization, including precious gems.

Ben’s not going to tell anybody and is going to see how he can make money from this find, but in his greed he pulls a heavy statue over and it kills him. Tommy reports that Ben fell down a crater wall, returns the artifact Ben had taken to the cave, tells no one about it, and resolves he’s going to work and become a big shot on the Moon. The obvious subtext of the title is that even on the Moon there will be people who are down and out or close to it—people like Ben are the Moon trash, though young Tommy is a class act. Three stars, barely.

Merry Xmas, Post/Gute, by John Jakes

John Jakes had been contributing to Amazing and other SF magazines, mostly downmarket, since 1950, to little notice or acclaim until he devised his Conan imitation Brak the Barbarian for Fantastic. In his very short Merry Xmas, Post/Gute, an impoverished author tries to get the last remaining book publisher to read his manuscript, only to be told it is closing its book division as unprofitable. It’s as heavy-handed as it is lightweight. Two stars.

Questor, by Howard L. Myers

Howard L. Myers—better known by his very SFnal pseudonym, Verge Foray—contributes Questor, a semi-competent piece of yard goods of the sort that filled the back pages of the 1950s’ SF magazines. Protagonist Morgan is part of a raid brigade attacking Earth, without benefit of spaceships, which are passe in this far future. He’s a Komenan; Earth is dominated by the Armans; it's not clear why we should care. Morgan is special; his assignment is to pretend to be a casualty and fall to Earth; but he’s hit by a “zerburst lance” and both he and his transportation equipment are injured. He lands in a Rocky Mountain snowbank and emerges, after some recuperation, to find himself in a valley he can’t climb out of.

by Jeff Jones

But all is not lost. A talking mountain goat, named Ezzy, appears (intelligence and fingers engineered by long-ago humans), and offers to help him out. We learn just what Morgan is looking for on Earth—it’s called the Grail! Or, the goat says, “it can be called cornucopia, or Aladdin’s Lamp—or perhaps Pandora’s Box. . . . The only certain information is that it has vast power, and has been around a long time.” Morgan later adds, “We only know it appears to assure the survival and success of whatever society has it in its possession.” Can we say pure MacGuffin? And of course there is a wholly predictable revelation at the end involving the goat. Two stars for egregious contrivance.

The People of the Arrow, by P. Schuyler Miller

by Leo Morey

This month’s “Famous Amazing Classic” is P. Schuyler Miller’s The People of the Arrow, from the July 1935 Amazing, and it does not impress. Kor, the leader of a migrating prehistoric tribe (having recently dispatched his elderly predecessor), returns with a hunting party to discover that their camp has been attacked by ape-men (he can tell by their footprints). They have wreaked terrible carnage and have carried off the women they did not kill. So the hunting party pursues the ape-men and wreaks terrible carnage on them with their superior armament (see the title). Miller does make a credible attempt to suggest the workings of Kor’s mind and his appreciation of the changing landscape he traverses, but it’s all pretty badly overwritten and mainly notable as a large bucket of blood. Miller—now best known as book reviewer for Analog and its predecessor Astounding—did much better work later. Two stars.

The Columbus Problem: II, by Greg Benford and David Book

Last issue’s “Science in Science Fiction” article asked how difficult it would be to locate planets in a star system from a spaceship traveling much slower than the speed of light. This issue, they ask how difficult it would be from a spaceship traveling much faster—say, a tenth of light-speed. (The authors say flatly: “To the scientific community, . . . FTL is nonsense.”) Then they take a quick turn for several pages of exposition about how an affordable and workable sub-light spaceship could be designed. The Goldilocks option, they suggest, is that proposed by one Robert Bussard: a ramscoop (magnetic, since it would need about a 40-mile radius) to collect all the loose gas and dust floating around in space and channel it into a fusion reactor.

Sounds great! Once you solve a few technical problems, that is. And then finding planets is a breeze. They’ll all be in the same plane, as in our solar system—it’s all in the angular momentum. Approach perpendicular to that plane, and Bob’s your uncle. Then a fly-by can reveal basics of habitability—gravity, temperature, what’s in the atmosphere—but looking for existing life and habitability for terrestrials will require landing, preferably by remote probes of several degrees of capability.

This one is denser than its predecessor, but as before, clear, clearly well-informed, and aimed at the core interests of, probably, most SF readers. Four stars.

Summing Up

So, assuming one agrees with me about the serial, there’s not much of a showing here for this resurrected magazine, though it’s far too early to be making any broad judgments. Promised for next issue are (the good news) a serial by editor White, who has demonstrated his capabilities as a writer, and (the bad news) a story by Christopher Anvil! No doubt a Campbell reject. Let’s hope the promising overcomes the ominous.

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 28, 1969] Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan

November 28, 2024 Winona Menezes 5 Comments

[We are proud to introduce our newest associate, late of Texas and now a confirmed Golden Stater. Don't let her self-effacing first paragraph mislead you—Winona is not only a brilliant young engineer, but she has a talent for prose, as you will soon see…]

by Winona Menezes

Several weeks ago, I was plucked from obscurity off the streets of San Diego by the Traveller himself. He was quite taken to hear that I was a long-time fan of the same books and magazines, and I had quite a lot of thoughts on them, if only anyone cared to listen. Wasn’t it fortunate, then, that he did know lots of people who might care? You can call it a chance encounter, serendipity, dumb luck–but me personally? I think somebody up there likes me.

He invited me to cut my teeth on something easy, something that was near and dear to my heart. And so, I’d like to start with one of my favorites, a satirist’s take on religion, morality, and free will. This one is not a recent publication but I do find myself going back to it, clinging to it when it feels the world is spinning a little too fast.

The Sirens of Titan is the second of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, first published in 1959. It is a convoluted interplanetary melodrama centered on the life of Malachi Constant, the richest man in America through no merit of his own. Having inherited and further amassed a staggering fortune through sheer luck, he finds himself enjoying a hedonistic lifestyle while quietly, passively longing for a lightning-bolt of fate to give his life a higher purpose. This lightning-bolt does come – from the apparition of New England billionaire Winston Rumfoord, whose pleasure-seeking space expeditions have turned him and his faithful dog into incorporeal, semi-omniscient wavelengths and sent them undulating throughout the solar system.

The plot unfurls erratically, as though Vonnegut himself is along for the ride as much as his characters. Constant is invited by Rumfoord on a planet-hopping journey through space, promising him adventure and treasure and women of incomparable beauty. But when Constant declines, already not being in want of anything on Earth, he is told that he will have no say in the matter. His fate has been decided for him, and his life will culminate in a meeting with Rumfoord on Titan regardless of any actions he takes to the contrary–all that remains to be seen is the in-between.

Malachi, along with the cast of characters whose stories entwine with his, are plucked from their lives and scattered like chess pieces across the solar system. Our spoiled, iniquitous protagonist with the world at his feet is suddenly a hapless pawn in a cosmic journey so sprawling and incomprehensible that each move from one place to the next feels chosen at random. As a result, the culmination of each loose end being gathered up one-by-one and woven seamlessly back together in the ending is masterfully executed. Any disorientation felt by the reader as unwitting characters are flung through spacetime by the narrative is replaced by a deeper, longer-lasting discomfort as the machinations of fate are slowly unveiled to be much more deliberate, though no less insipid.

Still, the novel is dotted with moments of lucidity on the parts of the characters, whose determination to understand and derive meaning from their lives only grows as it becomes increasingly clear how little control they have over their own destiny. These moments are as stars in a sky of absurd nihilism, and it is left to Constant and company—and the reader—to string them together into constellations of meaning.

Vonnegut’s satirical voice, whetted on his first novel (Player Piano, 1952), is wielded now with the skill and precision of a scalpel. Darkly ironic humor disarms the reader just enough for them to be thrown full off-kilter by a constant subversion of expectations. The ridiculously circuitous route the novel takes to find its conclusion seems fitting; the answers to the questions the book raises are even more elusive and slippery in real life. It’s a small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless to read our own struggle for meaning through the lens of a protagonist whose comical shortcomings as a self-absorbed chauvinist make him a difficult character to like, at least in the beginning. If the illusion of free will must give way to an existential nightmare against which we must find our own meaning, it may as well be funny.

Sirens of Titan is over a decade old by now, but there’s never a wrong time to come to terms with the futility of your own existence. Maybe, like me, it can help you find your footing in an ever-changing world. Five stars.

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

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Book, Horror, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 18, 1969] Weird Rising (Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos)

November 18, 2024 Brian Collins 2 Comments

Thirty years ago, Arkham House was founded as a small but luxurious publisher, with the intention of preserving the works of H. P. Lovecraft via hardcover editions that would last through the decades. Lovecraft died in 1937, before the vast majority of his work got to be published in book form, and indeed some of his finished work, such as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, would not see publication at all until after his death. Arkham House's ambitions soon grew, and it's still going strong, even if works by the old pulp writers are now seeing affordable paperback releases.

Cover art by Lee Brown Coye

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos is a bulky new anthology, here to celebrate four decades of weird fiction in connection with Lovecraft; and while it has a limited run of some 4,000 copies, you should consider yourself one of the lucky few if you can acquire it. Because of its length, and also it combining reprints with original stories never before published, the reviews are split between me and my good colleague George Prichard, I focusing more on the reprints while he takes most of the original stories. This should be fun, and a little spooky.

The Cthulhu Mythos, by August Derleth

Derlath has been the primary chronicler of Lovecraft’s career for the past thirty years, ever since he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei all those years ago; so it only makes sense he would provide a history (as he sees it, anyway) to the so-called Cthulhu Mythos. As Derleth points out, Lovecraft never referred to the Mythos as such, but it was a name those in his circle were keen on adopting—those in the circle including Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, the much missed Henry Kuttner, among others. Bloch wrote “The Shambler from the Stars” when he was but a teenager, and Lovecraft wrote “The Haunter of the Dark” as a response to Bloch’s story. Both are included here, along with a distant followup from Bloch titled “The Shadow from the Steeple,” all three presented “for the first time together in chronological order.” Otherwise Derleth sought to present these stories more or less as they appeared in publication order, the Mythos thus being showcased in a mostly linear fashion.

No rating for this introductory essay.

The Call of Cthulhu, by H. P. Lovecraft

First published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales.

While not strictly the first Mythos story, Derleth considers “The Call of Cthulhu” to be the proper genesis of this loose series, so it goes first. I’ve read this story a few times over the years and find myself warming up to it more with each reread. It’s one of Lovecraft’s more unconventionally structured stories—what we might call a compressed novel rather than a traditional short story. An anthropologist rummages through the papers of his recently deceased uncle and uncovers, gradually, a conspiracy involving an ancient cult, a young sculptor whose fever dreams were telepathically linked to unrelated parties, a Norwegian sailor who narrowly survived an encounter with one of the “Great Old Ones,” and of course, a statuette of the many-eyed and -tentacled Cthulhu. The opening paragraph is perhaps the most iconic in all of weird horror, a perfect mission statement on Lovecraft’s part. His obvious disdain for non-European cultures can be nauseating, but it’s also hard to deny the sheer density and sense of foreboding with his writing here.

One last thing: I noticed the narrator mentioning Arthur Machen and Clark Ashton Smith by name—the latter for his poetry, as at that time (Lovecraft wrote “The Call of Cthulhu” circa 1926) Smith had yet to break through with his prose fiction. But he would, soon enough.

Four stars.

The Return of the Sorcerer, by Clark Ashton Smith

First published in the September 1931 issue of the long-forgotten Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror. I highly suggest tracking down copies, as H. W. Wesso did really striking covers for all seven issues.

Here we have the first of two Clark Ashton Smith stories, and this one is delightfully gruesome and gothic. A down-on-his-luck narrator agrees to work for the eccentric John Carnby as a typist and translator. Carnby lives in a decrepit mansion by himself, where supposedly there’s a bit of a rat problem—only the strange noises the narrator hears at night turn out to not be rats. His job is to type up many pages of manuscript, but also to translate passages from the Necronomicon, a cursed book penned by “the mad Arab” Abdul Alharred. (Readers may know, of course, that the Necronomicon is a fictitious text of Lovecraft’s invention.) Smith is often a joy to read simply for the elaborateness of his style, which seems to have its own kind of hypnotic pull; but the main draw of “The Return of the Sorcerer” is how Smith weaves together a narrative about a haunted mansion (haunted not by ghosts but rather a dark past), a man obsessed with the occult, and a creeping revenge plot. There’s also a surprising amount of gore, and while the twist is easy to anticipate, the execution of it is exquisite.

Four stars.

Ubbo-Sathla, by Clark Ashton Smith

First published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales.

Paul Tregardis is a normal Londoner, except for his fascination with antiquity and the occult—a fascination that may well spell his doom. A chance encounter with a strange crystal in an antique shop will send Paul on a voyage the likes of which he could not have anticipated. This is a short moody piece that serves first of all to stitch together the Mythos with Smith’s own Hyperborea series. Hyperborea itself is an alternate distant past in which magic and sorcery ruled, and one sorcerer in particular, Eibon, was able to contact unspeakably ancient horrors for his own ends. Eibon himself is more spoken of than seen, although we do meet him in Smith’s “The Door to Saturn.” But The Book of Eibon, mentioned in “Ubbo-Sathla,” is perhaps Smith’s biggest contribution to the Mythos. Smith at his best can compress a mind-bending trek through time and space into just a handful of pages, and the climax here, in which our hapless protagonist travels backwards through time in a “monstrous devolution,” stands out as one of his most pyrotechnic and hallucinogenic passages.

Four stars, especially if read while on mind-altering substances.

The Black Stone, by Robert E. Howard

First published in the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales.

The creator of Conan the Cimmerian also wrote a few stories which clearly took after Lovecraft, with “The Black Stone” being the best of them. An unnamed narrator ventures out to Stregoicavar, an obscure village in the mountains of Hungary, a totally unassuming place if not for an ancient black monolith that lies just outside of town. About four centuries ago the area of the village belonged to a people of mixed ancestry, “an unsavory amalgamation,” who tormented the people in the lowlands, i.e., the ancestors of those who now live in Stregoicavar. But there was a war, in which the Turks had invaded and exterminated the mixed-race people, with only some ruins and the Black Stone to show for the ordeal. What separates “The Black Stone” from most of its ilk, indeed what it does better than the vast majority of horror now being written, is its sense of location and history. I had read this story before, when it was recently reprinted in a Howard collection, and on a second reading it’s still immensely eerie and mysterious. What the narrator witnesses when he spies on the Black Stone on Midsummer Night is one of the more disturbing passages in classic weird fiction.

Basically a masterpiece. Five stars.

The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long

First published in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales.

This is sometimes considered the first non-Lovecraft Mythos story, although Long’s own “The Space-Eaters” predates it by a year. Lovecraft would incorporate the titular hounds in at least one later story of his, and it’s not hard to see why. This is a story concerned partly with a topic I’m sure some of us are familiar with: drugs. Frank is a normal man who happens to be friends with Chalmers, a scientist-mystic who, in concocting an experimental drug, seeks to break down the fourth dimension (time), which he hypothesizes is an illusion. Needless to say the experiment goes very badly. We never see the hounds, although the late great Hannes Bok did depict them quite memorably once upon a time. They are, in keeping with Mythos lore, amoral more than anything, “beyond good and evil as we know it.” What could be a formulaic horror yarn is much elevated by Long’s admirable attempt at combining cosmic fear with scientific rationalism, resulting in a story that bends the mind as both horror and science fiction. It may have helped inspire Lovecraft to take a more SFnal direction with later Mythos stories like “The Dreams in the Witch-House” and “The Shadow Out of Time.”

Four stars.

The Space-Eaters, by Frank Belknap Long

First published in the July 1928 issue of Weird Tales.

Here’s Long again, this time with a less conventional (but also less satisfying) tale of unseen horror. This verges on being more of an autobiographical commentary on Long’s friendship with Lovecraft than a fictional narrative, but Long does not take the leap that would have pushed it over the edge. If Chalmers in “The Hounds of Tindalos” was a bit of a stand-in for Lovecraft then the narrator’s friend in “The Space-Eaters” is much more so: he is even named Howard, and is also a writer of weird fiction. There’s something about a creature with tendrils lurking in the woods, which similarly to the hounds moves through extra-dimensional space (although not through angles), such that normally it goes unseen. A local drunk falls victim to the titular eaters, with a strange gaping wound in his head, before the narrator and definitely-not-Lovecraft run the risk of meeting the same fate. As a story it’s a bit of a mess, and a bit too long, not to mention that this is more obviously an early Long story; but as a glimpse into the early days of the so-called Lovecraft circle, it’s certainly worth a read.

Three stars.

The Dweller in Darkness, by August Derleth

First published in the November 1944 issue of Weird Tales.

Apparently not content to include other people's stories, Derleth took it upon himself to include two of his own, which are both connected with the Mythos. "The Dweller in Darkness" is the slightly stronger of the two and easily the longer (bordering on a novella), but I can't say Derleth's skills as a writer have been sorely missed as of late. This one involves Rick's Lake, a shunned area in rural Wisconsin (a favorite locale for Derleth, understandably given he's from there), two educated friends trying to solve a mystery, and an enigmatic professor of the occult named Partier. There's also an unfortunate local "half-breed" named Old Peter who is deathly afraid of what may be lurking in the area, and who gets taken along for a ride—of sorts. The atmosphere is quite rich, and I suspect Derleth took some inspiration from the Loch Ness monster mystery/hoax with both the locale and the lengths the narrator and his college friend go to witness the hitherto unseen horror. Unfortunately it's overlong, and the payoff is a little too reminiscent of Lovecraft's "Cool Air," only without the tragic grotesquery of that story's ending.

A high three stars.

Beyond the Threshold, by August Derleth

First published in the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales.

Once again Derleth, and once again in rural Wisconsin. The narrator and his cousin visit their grandfather's mansion to study leftover papers from a deceased relative—one who had gone "beyond the threshold," perhaps ventured into another dimension. The grandfather is perhaps a little too determined to follow his leader, and the results are predictably tragic. This one starts off promisingly but then becomes a perfectly serviceably cross between Gothic and cosmic horror—a mixture I think Clark Ashton Smith pulled off with far more elegance and spectacle in "The Return of the Sorcerer." Something I didn't mention with "The Dweller in Darkness" is that both of Derleth's stories take place in a world where Arkham and Miskatonic University are real places, yes, but Lovecraft's fiction is also real, which I found to be distracting. For example the narrator will read a copy of The Outsider and Others, which Derleth himself had published. A little self-congratulatory, yes?

Barely three stars.

by George Pritchard

“The Shambler from the Stars”, by Robert Bloch
“The Haunter of the Dark”, by H.P. Lovecraft
“The Shadow from the Steeple”, by Robert Bloch

I am grouping these three stories together, as they are interlinked. As in the Derleth stories (and, later, the J. Ramsey Campbell one), Lovecraft's stories are both real, and exist in the world. Unlike my fellow reviewer, I found this added depth to the work. Perhaps it is simply due to my own experience, or that Bloch is a better author than Derleth is — both are possible. The three stories describe the accidental summoning of a creature (the titular Shambler), its aftermath, and partial defeat. Robert Blake, a Weird Fiction author from Milwaukee and a stand-in for Bloch, takes center stage for much of the first two stories, until his death at the Shambler's tentacles. From there, the narrative is taken over by William Hurley, who reaches out to Lovecraft himself to find out what happened to this "Blake" fellow!

I can think of no better tribute, from one horror writer friend to another, than dramatically killing each other off at the dastardly tendrils of a blood-soaked horror.

Four stars.

“Notebook Found In A Deserted House”, by Robert Bloch

This story, written in the form of a journal entry, suggests a sharper miniature of “The House on the Borderland”, with a strong American voice coming through. The USPS is apparently familiar with shoggoths.

Bloch’s great strength, amongst Weird Fiction authors, is his Artful Dodger-like ability to “do the voices”. Different characters sound different, speaking and thinking in distinctive ways that nevertheless seem natural to them. Too often, the characters in Weird Fiction “sound” the same, having similar cadences to whichever author is writing them, from Machen to Hodgeson. Furthermore, Bloch is willing to write characters further down the class ladder than other Weird Fiction authors. The genre may love M.R. James and the Decadents, but that mistrust for anyone who wasn’t an Oxford man of good standing has left marks that may never be worn away.

Four stars.

Hello again. I still have one more reprint, plus an original story here.

The Salem Horror, by Henry Kuttner

First published in the May 1937 issue of Weird Tales.

Kuttner died in 1958, tragically young like Robert E. Howard (Howard shot himself, and Kuttner was struck down by a heart attack at only 42), but he wrote a great deal in a short time. "The Salem Horror" is very early Kuttner, and admittedly I sense some DNA left over from his very first story, "The Graveyard Rats," what with the claustrophobic setting and the close encounters with rats.

A novelist in the midst of writer's block moves to Salem to stay in a house that belonged to a witch, many decades ago, and which has since become a place of ill repute in the already-infamous town; but the novelist is convinced he may find inspiration there, and he may be more right than he knows. Kuttner was not a poet like Lovecraft or Smith, or even Howard when he was really trying; but the pulpy vividness of his style gives this tale of dark corners and growing obsession an immediacy that elevates what is mostly a one-man show into one of gripping eeriness. Kuttner, in trying to pay the bills, could repeat himself, but "The Salem Horror" very much builds on the sort of dread introduced in "The Graveyard Rats" rather than simply rehashing it.

A light four stars.

The Haunter of the Graveyard, by J. Vernon Shea

Elmer Harrod owns the house closest to a "disused" cemetery, which nowadays mostly is visited by vagrants and young lovers. Harrod himself hosts a late-night TV show in his own home, having the right setting for such a thing—a Gothic mansion that seems out-of-place in the 20th century. He shows and commentates over trashy horror movies, some of which are based on Lovecraft's fiction. (Yes, this is another story where Lovecraft's writing exists in the world of the story, but it's used to more interesting ends here.) Immediately you can tell "The Haunter of the Graveyard" was written in the past few years partly because of the role TV (and made-for-TV movies) plays, but also it very much takes place in a world (one very much like ours) where the Mythos stories have not only been vindicated to some degree but have even inspired other works of horror. Unfortunately the ending is a letdown, and I feel like Shea could have gone farther with his premise; but putting that aside, it's a little "far out," in a good way.

A high three stars.

by George Pritchard

“Cold Print”, by J. Ramsey Campbell

Sam Strutt is a compellingly loathsome figure. A PE teacher in England, he spends his free time seeking out transgressive gay pornographic literature, and being disgusted by the grime and filth of the world around him. He enjoys his work in a particularly sadistic fashion, both on and off the clock, though this is derived from Strutt’s personality rather than his sexuality. And yet, Campbell writes so that there is something compelling about Strutt, about his dedication and knowledge to the seeking out of the books he loves. Horror readers may recognize themselves in that seeking out of the awkward, the hidden, the forbidden, no matter the cost to oneself or to others.

An understanding is sought out, and an understanding is achieved…

And now, if you'll excuse me, my thoughts on this piece:

We exist in a world after Hemingway. After Hemingway, after Steinbeck, and after Jackson.

We exist in a world where Edward Bulwer-Lytton is no longer one of the most influential authors alive, and there are greater monsters than Joris-Karl Huysmans. While hugely popular during his lifetime, Bulwer-Lytton is now best known for contributing the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night…" to Peanuts. Huysmans, meanwhile, codified not only the descriptions of sexually charged Satanic ritual in the modern day through his novel Las-bas, but the type of character now referred to as "the Lovecraft protagonist" comes from his Decadent novel Against the Grain.

It is frustrating, then, to see re-imaginings, re-writings, and reckonings of Weird Fiction through the lens of Lovecraft, as though the genre had only been composed by one hand, for good and for ill.

I would be the first to admit that Weird Fiction has always lagged behind when it comes to depictions of sexuality. Some of Arthur Machen’s stories have had elements of sex, such as in “The White People”, and “The Great God Pan”. And I confess that Lovecraft’s own “Dagon” has always set both my Jungian and Freudian tendencies abuzz. But most often, Weird Fiction has enshrined its horror in physical and mental solitude. (Putting this at Lovecraft’s feet gives M.R. James short shrift, as well as avoiding Weird Fiction’s long standing conversation with the Decadent literary movement. How strange, to have this peculiar little offshoot outlast the others! One thinks of the relation between elephants and the common hyrax.)

What makes “Cold Print” so refreshing is that it doesn't shy away from sexuality. This has been a decade of seismic shifts, one of the greatest of those being in regards to portraying sex on the page, or speaking openly about it, putting sexuality and desire forefront in SF and fantasy fiction. Some of these examples have been better than others, but it is Ramsey Campbell’s “Cold Print” which has finally allowed Weird Fiction to put its hat in the ring. Let the other fellow beware—this is a "Campbell" worth watching.

Five stars.

“The Sister City”, by Brian Lumley

A kinder, yet more engaging, version of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. After this, I am sure that I will not be the only one wandering the fens, hoping to encourage the Second Change!

Four stars.

“Cement Surroundings”, by Brian Lumley

Giant centipede vs. Gatling gun. Need I say more?

Four stars.

“The Deep Ones”, by James Wade

A psychic researcher arrives in San Simeon to help with dolphin research. But trouble is in the waters — a peculiar love quadrangle begins to form between the psychic researcher, the project head, the comely assistant, and their prize dolphin! All the while, a mysterious hippie group wants the research to end. But why?

This is not strictly a bad short story, but in comparison to the rest of the collection, it’s definitely the weakest. What it lacks is a full sense of focus. “The Deep Ones” is not sure if it wants to be a serious yet dreamlike story, or a parody of Ballard, Lovecraft, hippiesploitation, and Weird Fiction. When you write something like this, you need to either fish or cut bait.

Three stars.

“The Return of the Lloigor”, by Colin Wilson

A deliberate rundown of Weird Fiction’s greatest hits, eagerly gathering them into a true culmination of a “mythos”. All the density of the genre’s best, without the awkward meandering! Unfortunately, about halfway in, the author reveals that he has not bothered to update any of the story’s politics since Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. A strong beginning, and a weak end.

Three stars.

Summing up

Many Weird Fiction authors are fascinating in their own right, regardless of how well they are remembered today. William Sharpe, for all his activism in life, has dropped to the bottom of the proverbial stack; while Robert Chambers’ one slim volume has outlasted his numerous romances. I am overjoyed that I have been allowed to help welcome in a new generation of the Weird, of what is now being called the Cthulhu Mythos. With no story in the collection dropping below three stars, I highly recommend you run (or swim and crawl, slither or creep or ooze) to purchase a copy of this work. Let nobody say that August Derleth does not extend his influence as wide and deep as the King in Yellow himself!

Four stars for the whole.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 16, 1969] Fun, Frivolity, and Flandry (November 1969 Galactoscope)

November 16, 2024 Victoria Silverwolf Leave a comment

by Victoria Silverwolf

Compare and Contrast

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.

98.4, by Christopher Hodder-Williams

Cover art by David Stanfield.

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.

Three stars.

The Weisman Experiment, by John Rankine

Cover art by Richard Weaver.

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.

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.

Grimm's World, by Vernor Vinge

A kind of island in the middle of an ocean, with a few sailing ships around it. — Cover art by Paul Lehr.

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.

Barely three stars.

The Rebel Worlds, by Poul Anderson

A man and a woman on top of a rhino. — Cover artist not credited.

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 being sworn in as chancellor on October 22, 1969 — 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.

Willy Brandt with his wife Rut and his youngest son Matthias — 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.

Gustav Heineman and Willy Brandt shake hands. — 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 cabinet outside the Villa Hammerschmidt — 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.

For starters, The Unicorn Girl is actually a sequel to The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson, which my comrade-in-arms Kris Vyas-Myall reviewed last year. Like Kid, it's also a book where the author and his best friend, i.e. Michael Kurland and Chester Anderson, are the protagonists.

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."

A fabulous adventure. Four stars.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[November 6, 1969] I Can See For Miles (Piers Anthony's Macroscope)

November 6, 2024 Brian Collins 2 Comments

No, this is not Galactoscope, which is still a week-and-a-half off, but a review (I suppose in keeping with the subject's rather large girth) presented on its own.

Last year, I believe almost to the day, we got Piers Anthony’s previous novel, Omnivore, which I reviewed a few months later. (There are so many paperbacks out now…) I didn’t like it, but it was, at the very least, a step up from Chthon and Sos the Rope—mind you that the bar was basically on the floor. I was not looking forward to Macroscope, his latest novel, and yet I have to admit, when I weighed this new paperback in my hands (480 meaty pages, courtesy of Avon), I was… morbidly curious. Macroscope is longer than Anthony’s previous two novels combined, and while it certainly feels that way, it also shows Anthony putting a very different level of effort in his writing craft. For better or worse, it will no doubt be one of the most memorable SF releases of 1969.

Macroscope, by Piers Anthony

Ivo Archer is a 25-year-old wanderer who has been struggling to make it in life, on account of being visibly of mixed racial features (taboo today and apparently still the case in the 1980 of the novel’s world), but he’s about to be given some direction when he reunites with an old friend, Brad Carpenter. Ivo and Brad were classmates of a sort, in what is only called “the project,” an ambitious eugenics program in which, over the course of two generations, people were carefully bred to have mixed racial heritages, in the hopes that such a program would produce geniuses. It did not—for the most part. Ivo has a pretty decent IQ of 125, but Brad is a genius, with an IQ of over 200, the only problem being he hides his intelligence (as well as the fact that he isn’t completely white) around his current girlfriend, Afra Glynn Summerfield. Afra is a Georgia girl with (by her own admission) prejudiced views on race, as well as a strange preoccupation with intelligence: people less intelligent than her bore her, but then she also resents people who are too smart, hence Brad’s secrecy. For Ivo it’s love at first sight with Afra, which is hopeless given that Afra is already taken, is a racist, and would find Ivo’s intelligence unimpressive.

This brings us to the macroscope, which itself ends up being rather tangential to the plot, but the idea is that it serves the exact opposite function of a microscope: rather than give detailed images of extremely small objects it gives detailed images of extremely large objects that are also extremely far away. It also serves as a kind of time viewer. The macroscope doesn’t use light, but rather a particle Anthony made up called macrons, which provide both efficiency and clarity, allowing people on the macroscope station to not only view life on other worlds vividly but to view these worlds as they were thousands or millions of years in the past. The good news is that there is (or at least was) intelligent life on other planets; the bad news is that these alien races have invariably gone downhill, even resorting to cannibalism on a mass scale. Why? The answer seems to be a one-way signal coming from an unknown distant planet, no doubt an intelligent race, called “the destroyer,” which if intercepted would turn any intelligent being with an IQ of over 150’s brain to jelly. The higher one’s IQ, the harsher the effect. Brad finds this out, quite tragically, although Ivo suspects his friend wanted to commit mental suicide. But with the loss of one of the station’s top minds, and perhaps more importantly a visiting US senator with a similarly high intelligence, the UN looks to dismantle the station, and so the macroscope will be lost.

Unless it can be hijacked, somehow.

The barrier to entry with Macroscope is a bit high, because if what I just said regarding its plot sounds like gibberish, it is gibberish to some extent. This is the kind of mind-melting and yet far-ranging pseudo-science that A. E. van Vogt excelled at two decades ago, which sadly he no longer seems capable of delivering; but that doesn’t stop Anthony (truly an unexpected successor to van Vogt) from picking up that torch with grace. Nearly every type of science fiction you can think of worms its way into this (admittedly loose) narrative, from time travel (of a sort), to contact with aliens, to robotics (a helpful non-sentient robot named Joseph), to space opera, and even beyond all of those. Astrology, a total non-science which Anthony treats with a kind of disarming (or annoying, depending on who you are) reverence, is discussed extensively through Harold Groton, who spends much of his time lecturing Ivo and Afra (not to mention his wife Beatryx) on horoscopes and the intricate symbolic implications of star signs. Despite the monstrous length of the thing, we’re mostly stuck with four characters (Brad being written out after the opening quarter), although there is a fifth, named Schön, whom Brad hopes can act as a workaround for the destroyer. Schön is a “primitive genius,” which is to say he is unspeakably intelligent but with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old, acting as the Kurtz to Ivo’s Charles Marlow, or as the mischievous god Pan lurking in the woods. There are so many twists and turns in how character relationships change over the course of the novel that I would be writing a dissertation in trying to describe them; and anyway, seeing Anthony get a surprising amount of mileage out of such a small cast of characters is part of the fun.

In terms of scale, Macroscope is easily the grandest SF novel I have read this year, to the point where it becomes dizzying. The closest I can think of as a comparison, aside from van Vogt’s glory days, would be John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar; but whereas that novel is a panorama, Macroscope is much more like a sandbox, in which Anthony has given himself some very fine toys to play with. This is by no means a perfect novel, of course. For one, its jack-of-all-trades approach to subject matter means that aside from maybe astrology, nothing is dwelt on for too long or too thoroughly. A recurring issue I’ve had with Anthony also rears its ugly head, if only for a relatively short time here, in the form of his ogling at women. There’s a protracted and rather wince-inducing scene in which, for plot-related reasons, Ivo is “forced” (by that I mean the author is forcing his character’s hand) to feel all over Afra’s body, in great detail. Thankfully nothing quite like this happens again, but I suppose Anthony had to do such a thing to remind us that it was indeed he who wrote this novel. On the positive side, while Afra starts out as a pretty thorny piece of work, she ends up being by far the most psychologically complicated of Anthony’s female characters (I understand that, again, the bar was low), to the point where she becomes as much a protagonist as Ivo. The length can also border on terminal, with the final chapter alone being over a hundred pages long(!), and this last stretch being (excuse my French) such a "clusterfuck" that the reader may become worried about whether there is a light at the end of that tunnel.

As you can see, this is a lot of science fiction for $1.25. Anthony had enough ideas for a few short novels but decided to weave them together in a way that borders on masterful. It is, if nothing else, deeply intriguing and intoxicating, even taking the bogus science into account. It’s a novel that somehow tackles both inner and outer space, being a space opera that’s also a voyage to the center of one man’s psyche. It is like 2001: A Space Odyssey if written by someone who is much more enthusiastic about “free love” and astrology than Arthur C. Clarke can ever muster, being basically a fable about mankind’s maturity and finding a place in the known universe. Macroscope is such a deeply strange and ambitious novel that even its flaws mostly retain a certain nobility, as if those flaws were reasons for buying a copy in the first place. I didn’t think Anthony had such a work in him, and there’s a decent chance he may never write another novel of this caliber.

It almost pains me to say this, but four stars. I see it getting a Hugo nomination, and possibly a Galactic Star nomination as well.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[October 16, 1969] The March Goes On (October 1969 Galactoscope)

October 16, 2024 Victoria Silverwolf Leave a comment

by Gideon Marcus

Unusually for the Galactoscope, our monthly round-up of new science fiction publications, we're starting this article with a stop press. It's simply too big an item to ignore.

If you read the papers this morning, you know the big news was that the Mets played the winning game of the World Series last night, against the Orioles. Competing for inches on the front page was the largest, the most coordinated, the most widespread anti-war demonstration this country has yet experienced.

Demonstrators in Washington

One million people, in every state of the union, participated in Vietnam Moratorium Day. Originally planned as a nationwide strike, instead, attendees made highly their protests highly visible—and peaceful. A quarter of a million marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation's capital, echoing Dr. King's march on Washington in 1963. 100,000 gathered in Boston, with similar numbers protesting in New York (where Mayor John Lindsay is rumored to have given tacit support) and Miami. My local rag reported that there were counter-protests, too, but I have to wonder how big they were.

Closer to home, 1,500 gathered in Los Angeles to burn their draft cards. And at Palomar Community College, just ten minutes from my home, hundreds of students gathered for a "Teach-In". When word got out that protestors might take down the flag in front of the student union, a squad of football players was stationed at its base. No altercation occurred.

Protestors at Palomar

Will this demonstration alter the course of a war, which has killed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese? A spokesman for Richard Milhouse Nixon said last night, "I don't think the President can be affected by a mass demonstration of any kind." Comedian Dick Gregory retorted to the crowd in New York, "The President says nothing you kids do will have any effect on him. Well, I suggest he make one long-distance call to the LBJ ranch. "

Card-burners in Los Angeles

In any event, this may be just the first salvo fired in a peace offensive. Washington protest organizer Sam Brown said last night, "If there is no change in Vietnam policy, if the President does not respond, there will be a second moratorium."

And now on to book news—are this month's science fiction titles as noteworthy?

By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

Heartease by Peter Dickinson (as serialized in Look and Learn)

Copies of Ranger and Look and Learn from my collection inside the official binders

Regular readers of the Journey will probably know I am a big fan of British comic books. They may even recognize the name Look and Learn due to it containing the multi-Galactic Star winning Trigan Empire (formerly of Ranger).

However, I have not talked much about Look and Learn itself. It is by far the most expensive comic book on the market at 1/6-, almost triple the price of your standard copy of June or TV Century 21. In spite of this it has retained a significant market presence by presenting itself as an educational magazine for young people, in contrast to the naughtiness of Dennis the Menace, or the pulp space adventures of Dan Dare.

This, however, is not merely a trick. They have both some of the best comic strips on the market and non-fiction articles–better than you see in most magazines aimed at adults. Looking at the contents of a June issue we have:

Ongoing comic book adaptation of Ben-Hur
How to prevent forest fires and how to apply for a career in forestry
A short story on a Gypsy boy winning the Natural History Prize
The life of the current Prince of Wales
An interview with a Chicago police officer on what crime fighting was like in the 1930s
Story of the ship Emile St. Pierre in the American Civil War
How the Magna Carta came to be
Regular series of identification of coins, planes, stamps and trains
Rob Riley comic: Adventures and daily life of English school boys
Laugh with Fiddy: Short uncaptioned humour comics
Wildcat Wayne: Action adventures of a troubleshooter for an oil company
Trigan Empire: Tales from the history of an interstellar empire, centering around its ruling dynasty
Dan Dakota – Lone Gun: Western comic
Origin and meaning of the saying The Widow’s Mite
Diary entries from James Woodforde in 1786
The history of RADAR in British aviation
Ongoing prose serialization of The Mark of the Pentagram, a tale of slavery in the 18th century
How tea came to be imported to Britain
Marsh land reclamation efforts on river estuaries
How William and Dorothy Wordsworth influenced each other’s work
Picture series on how heavy loads have been transported over the centuries
Feature on the novel Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell
About the game Takraw
Picture series on Iceland.

As such, it is much easier for a kid to justify dropping their pocket money on this each week when they can also show their parents a page on the lifecycle of a butterfly and give them a series of facts from the life of Jane Austen between reading about spaceflight and the adventures of cowboys.

Example illustations for I Am David (left) and Tarka the Otter (Right) (uncredited)

However, outside of the comic strips Space Cadet and Trigan Empire, SF content is rare inside. Keeping to its educational mode, it tends towards historical fiction or uncovering the natural world. With serials tending to be works like The Silver Sword, Tarka The Otter or I Am David.

In fact, I cannot recall any prose serials that have been science fiction, before now. As such, with adult responsibilities getting the better of me, I hadn’t paid too much attention to these pieces. It was only when flicking back through them recently that I perked up at the name Peter Dickinson.

Last year he published The Weathermonger, a book that was much enjoyed by the folks here. This was not only by the same author but Heartsease also takes places in England under The Changes. It was serialised in 10 parts (from 8th March to 10th May 1969).

This is set in an earlier time in the history of this world. Whilst Weathermonger is set when The Changes are a well-established way of life, this is in the earlier stages of these events. As we are told at the beginning:

This is a story about an England where everyone thinks machines are wicked. The time is now, or soon; but you have to imagine that five years before the story starts, because of a strange enchantment, people suddenly turned against tractors and buses and central heating and nuclear reactors and electric razors. Anybody who tried to use a machine was called a witch or stoned or drowned.

Illustrator uncredited

In the Cotswolds, Margaret and her cousin Jonathan live with her Aunt Alice and Uncle Peter, plus two servants Lucy and Tim, the latter of which is unable to speak. Near their village, an outsider is found using a radio and is sentenced to be stoned as a witch.

The horror of witnessing the stoning seems to break Jonathan out of the hatred the adults have, so he works with Margaret, Lucy and Tim to free the man condemned for witchcraft. Hiding him he reveals his name is Otto, he is an American sent to investigate the situation in Britain when he was caught. The children agree to get him back to his ship.

However, the local Sexton, Davey Gordon, is still on the hunt for Otto. What’s more he is suspicious of Lucy and Tim, given the latter’s disability. They all form a plan to help him escape using an old tugboat called Heartsease.

Illustrator uncredited

I can understand why this would appeal to the editors of Look and Learn. With the removal of technology, it resembles historical fiction and does not have the magical elements of The Weathermonger. In addition, it contains information on how locks work, so it can be marketed as educational.

It is a much smaller tale than The Weathermonger, just about young people trying to do the right thing as they get caught up in horrific events. But, for that, it becomes a bit of a deeper tale. As well as having plenty of adventure, it looks at how we treat others and posits some darker reasons why things may be happening than is revealed in the prior novel:

“…they’ve done so many awful things they’ve got to believe they were right. The more they hurt and kill, they more they’ve been proving to themselves they’ve been doing God’s will all along.”

Gollancz book edition. Unknown illustrator

Based on some fag-packet-maths I estimate the word count here is somewhere between a third to a half of what is in the book version, so there is likely more story to be told.

But for this serialized form, I will give it Four Stars.

by Victoria Silverwolf

Bigger and Better?

Two novels that are expanded versions of earlier, shorter works fell into my hands recently. Will this added verbiage improve them? Let's find out.

Worlds of the Wall, by C. C. MacAppp

Anonymous cover art. Human and pterodactyl number one.

This book started life as a novelette called Beyond the Ebon Wall in the October 1964 issue of Fantastic. I reviewed it at the time, giving it two stars. That's not a good omen, but let's not give up hope.

Our hero is inside an experimental starship. He winds up near a planet that seems to be missing an entire hemisphere. Forget all this science fiction stuff, because the rest of the book is pure fantasy.

Landing on the weird world, the guy finds out that the place is divided in half by a gigantic wall. He sees two naked men fighting and an elderly fellow with a scarred face. The latter seems very familiar, which is a clue as to the novel's major plot twist.

The protagonist passes through the seemingly solid wall as if it weren't there. He meets a double for the elderly guy and hears a huge magpie recite an enigmatic poem. This begins an odyssey that involves becoming a galley slave, taking part in a hunt for a gigantic beast (which develops a bond with a hero), and battling a pirate captain allied with a sorcerer. It all winds up where it started.

This is the plot of the novelette, so what's new? The middle section of the novel, detailing the hero's adventures as a galley slave, is much longer. There's a vivid scene of the protagonist and his shipmates climbing down a gigantic cliff.

The new version is a slight improvement on the old one. The explanation for what's going on, involving multiple continua and time travel, still doesn't make much sense, but it's a little less incoherent that before.

Two and one-half stars.

Thbe Avengers of Carrig, by John Brunner

Cover art by Jack Gaughan. Human and pterodactyl number two.

A shorter version of this novel appeared in 1962 as half of an Ace Double, under the title Secret Agent of Terra. It was reviewed by my esteemed colleague Rosemary Benton, who gave the twin volume four stars as a whole.

The setting is a planet settled by human refugees from a nova that wiped out another colony world many centuries ago. The survivors have evolved into a medieval, feudal kind of society. Carrig is the dominant city-state. The place has an ancient ritual of choosing its leaders in an unusual fashion.

Contenders for the title of regent board gliders and try to kill the biggest and strongest specimen of the giant flying beasts that inhabit the planet. (The winner is called a regent because the creature is considered to be the true king.) If nobody slays the animal, which definitely puts up a good fight, the former regent retains the title.

A couple of strangers show up, one of whom easily kills the so-called king with what is obviously highly advanced technology. It's clear to the reader, if not the locals, that they're from another world. Along the way they kill a fellow who discovers their nefarious plan.

The victim was secretly an agent for the folks who keep an eye on refugee planets like this one, being careful to avoid interfering with their natural development, but also making sure other people don't take advantage of them.

When the dead man stops sending messages back to his superiors, they send a fledging agent, along with an older, more experienced one, to the planet to find out what happened. (The young agent is something of a snob and unpopular with the others, so this is one last chance for her to prove herself during what is supposed to be a routine mission.)

They don't know the bad guys are there (they think the deceased agent has gone silent for some other, less sinister reason) so they're taken completely by surprise when an enemy spaceship attacks. The young agent winds up in a frozen wasteland. We don't find out what happened to the older man until later.

As luck would have it, she joins forces with the fellow who was the favorite to become the next regent. Both of them win an unexpected ally in the form of one of the flying creatures, who turns out to be a lot more intelligent than they thought.

Like MacApp's novel, this is strictly an adventure story. The big difference is that Brunner offers a tighter, more unified plot (even if it does depend on some remarkable coincidences.) It's not a complex, ambitious work like Stand on Zanzibar or The Jagged Orbit, but it's highly competent entertainment.

Three and one-half stars.

Masque World, by Alexei Panshin

by Jason Sacks

Last year I reviewed the first book in Alexei Panshin's "Anthony Villiers" series, Star Well . I praised the book for its wry, often post-modern take on heroic fiction, digging Panshin's frequent absurd sidebars and silly takes on events.

Now the third book of the Villiers series is out, and Masque World offers much the same as his earlier book: it's absurd and wise, clever and sometimes frustrating, and a pretty delightful "shaggy dog" story.

cover by Kelly Freas

This time Villiers and his pal, the Trog named Torve (a deliberately odd alien creature who is thoroughly uncanny for most people) have found their way to Delbalso, "a semi-autonomic dependency of the Nashuite Empire," as the introductory text informs us. When there, the duo gets deeply involved in all kinds of affairs in the kingdom, many centered around Villiers's uncle Lord Semichastny who is obsessed and addicted to melons (did you know there are over 100 different types of melons? Semichastny can tell you all about that topic, and many more, as if he's some sort of savant or young child in adult form).

Cultures are games played to common rules — for convenience. The High Culture, while not superior to very much, is a fair-to-middling game, and that is all.

There's also an angry robot bulter who seems to resent his subservient role and who tells spooky stories to the other mechanical creatures in Semichastny's castle, and there's a Semichastny friend who gets transformed when he puts on a costume, and there's a cult who seem incredibly happy – perhaps too happy for their own good.

Monism promises only one thing, to make you very very happy. There is a catch, of course. To be happy as a Monist, you must accept Monist definitions of happiness. If you can — you have a blissful life ahead of you. Congratulations.

A lot of this story, therefore, centers around the idea of identity, how to shed identity and how to transform identity; how identity conforms to crowds and how identity stands alone. This all does a wonderful job of showcasing Panshin's elusive commentary on the human condition. As becomes clear by the end, it's the humor and commentary which matter here, not the story.

Do places dream of people until they return?

For the longest time I kind of fought this book, trying hard to make sense of the twists and turns of its plot. Until, that is, I realized that plot is meant to be arbitrary and somewhat confusing. Its twists and turns reflect the mindset of Mr. Panshin, and that and his wordplay – highlighted here as excerpts – are the key things he wants to share with readers.

Holidays are no pleasure for anyone but children, and they are a pleasure only for children only because they seem new. Holidays are no pleasure to those who schedule them. Holidays are for people who need to be formally reminded to have a good time and believe it is safer to warm up an old successful party than to chance the untried.

Masque World is very loose and fun, a bit arbitrary and silly, and I enjoyed it alright. The book feels a bit indulgent at times, and Panshin's having a bit of a goof, but it's well worth 60¢ and 3 hours of your time.

The ending promises a fourth book in the series, to be called The Universal Pantograph. I do hope we get to spend more time in this wildly discursve world of the one and only Anthony Villiers.

3 stars

The Shadow People, by Margaret St. Clair

by Tonya R. Moore

I had never encountered any works of fiction written by Margaret St. Clair before reading The Shadow People. The story’s premise is wonderfully dark and imaginative but the reader’s sense of wonder is drowned out by the book’s glaring faults.

cover by Jeff Jones

Aldridge, our hero, descends into a strange and alien underworld in search of his girlfriend who has gone missing. He finds her while navigating this strange dimension, but something about her has been irrevocably altered. Even so, Aldridge seeks a way back to the human world for himself and for the love of this life. When he/they finally returns to the surface, he finds that during his absence, human civilization was twisted into a dark, futuristic dystopia where people are now heavily policed and managed like cattle.

The fact that a female author would center a male character in her work feels like some kind of betrayal. I understand that science fiction tends to be a male-dominated genre, where only men can be the heroes and only men are expected to save the day. But Carol is the one who disappears into the fae realm first. Why does she need to sit on her laurels and wait for The Man to come and save her?

Furthermore, Carol is transformed into a mindless shell of a human, devoid of any ability to express any will of her own or even think for herself. Ultimately, The Man must dictate the woman’s fate. So much for the Women’s Rights Movement. There is a part of me that expects female authors to push back against such demeaning notions and St. Clair, in very bad taste, seems to capitulate to this male chauvinist ideology. Perhaps it was this bias that made it impossible for me to resonate with this story’s protagonist.

Aldridge is a canned character. He is everything a heroic male protagonist “ought” to be and possesses very little depth or complexity in personality. He responds “correctly” to every situation and never seems to doubt or question himself. This leaves a discerning reader with little choice but to question his humanity.

Another possible reason the story rankled was the way elves are portrayed in The Shadow People. St. Clair's version runs counter to the commonly held mental image of elves, portraying them as grotesque and malevolent, instead of beautiful, good-willed, and elegant. St. Clair’s elves are more like the lesser known spriggans of elven lore. This, I agree, is very clever of St. Clair but still, broadly classifying these beings as “elves” felt like needlessly shattering the average reader’s fanciful notions about fae-kind.

There are some disconcerting allusions here to the alienation and institutionalized oppression of the Negro people. As a black woman, I felt that there was a certain lack of sensitivity in drawing these parallels while also side-stepping the cruel reality plaguing modern society.

The imagery in The Shadow People is visceral and draws the reader into every moment. The events of the story are quite dramatic and would make a great film. For some reason, though, none of this resonated with me. I could not fully appreciate or enjoy reading this book nor could I quite rid myself of the vague suspicion that this author had to be a man, a misogynist at that, writing under the guise of a female author.

2.5 stars.

West of Sol

by George Pritchard

Postmarked the Stars

Cover by R. M. Powers

There is a phrase, deja vu, which refers to feeling or seeing something that you have not interacted with before, yet seems intensely familiar. These are now believed to be psychic echoes, but it is a useful term for Andre Norton's latest work, Postmarked the Stars. I was excited to begin this, as the last thing I read of hers was Star Man’s Son, which I enjoyed deeply and still own a copy of.

I want to emphasize that I did not hate this book, nor did I find it incompetent, but reading Postmarked feels like watching a piston engine. Smooth and efficient and automatic, but always quite obviously a machine. This is the fourth entry in the Solar Queen adventures, although no previous books need to be read to understand this one. The previous book in this series came out a decade ago, but I am not particularly familiar with what interest there was, or is.

Dane Thorson, assistant cargo master to the Free Trader ship Solar Queen, discovers that a strange, radioactive box on board is causing the creatures near it to change, becoming larger and more intelligent. Before the crew can figure out what to do with this information, the ship is caught in a tractor beam, and they are dragged to the planet’s surface. Dane, Tau the medical officer, and the psychic cat end up separated into a search party. A group of dead miners are found, an enormous insect monster is battled, before another tractor beam drags them and the planetary ranger onwards towards a secret base in unexplored territory. It all seems to be connected to that strange, radioactive stone!

Is there indeed gold in them thar hills?

One thing I have always enjoyed about Norton's writing, particularly given the genres she works in, is the equal footing she gives to non white characters. Even the names she gives to background characters vary in ways that speak to strength in differences amongst the stars — names from the Indian subcontinent right alongside Welsh, Jewish, and Chinese! For another example, a prospector type is introduced, and it's only mentioned half a chapter later that he is dark-skinned.

This story is a space Western, plain and simple. The recent movie, Moon Zero Two [review coming out October 18] is my immediate point of comparison, but this has been a rich vein in the genre for a long time. The potential for racism in the story is, for better or worse, replaced by that dullest of Westerns, the claim jumper plot, combined with the Pony Express or stagecoach robbery.

Norton has been publishing continuously for almost two decades at this point. Maybe she needs a break, taking a chance to look at the New Wave trends and use them for her own. I know that, given time, she can make them shine the way Star Man’s Son pushed the boundaries of boy’s adventure novels. Norton can do better, and has, but Postmarked the Stars does nothing at all.

Two stars.

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Book, Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[October 8, 1969] Suddenly . . . (November 1969 Amazing))

October 8, 2024 John Boston 3 Comments

by John Boston

. . . Amazing has become a normal science fiction magazine. (Stop snickering.) It’s been moving in that direction, but this November issue’s editorial says: “Beginning this issue, our old policy of reprints has been thrown out the window. . . . We will be publishing one, and only one classic story in each issue, and it will be a bonus to the fully new contents of the magazine.” Or, as the cover blurb puts it, “ALL NEW STORIES plus a Famous Classic.”

by Johnny Bruck

That phrase may seem oxymoronic, but here’s how editor White figures it: the magazine, with its new, smaller typefaces allowing more wordage, now contains about 70,000 words of new material, plus another 15,000 words, making a total per issue greater than any of the other SF magazines and allowing him to call the remaining reprints bonuses. Thus the booster’s reach exceeds the mathematician’s grasp, but I’m not complaining.

Promotion aside, congratulations to White for finally prying publisher Sol Cohen loose from his prolonged insistence on filling as much as half the magazine with reprints of (euphemistically) uneven quality. White says he “cannot truly say it was a result of my actions alone”—presumably meaning Cohen had been softened up by the complaints of his predecessors—but good for him for finally getting it done.

So what we have here are one quite long serial installment, a novelet, and two short stories, plus a reprinted short story from 1942, all new, as well as the usual complement of features. As promised last month, there is a science article by Greg Benford and David Book, and as then implied, Dr. Leon E. Stover is conspicuous by his absence, and not missed.

A book review column, shorter than usual but just as vehement, features editor White’s praise of Lee Hoffman’s The Caves of Karst and a new reviewer, Richard Delap, whaling on Bug Jack Barron: “Science fiction’s answer to Valley of the Dolls has now made the scene with all the pseudo-values of its mainstream counterpart unrevised and intact in a transposition to pseudo-sf.” Delap also doesn’t care much for the new collection of old stories The Far-Out Worlds of A.E. van Vogt, but this disappointment is expressed more in sorrow than in gusto. These two reviews are reprinted from a fanzine, but Delap will be contributing regularly to this column going forward.

The fanzine reviews and letter column fill out the issue. In the letter column, White notes that James Blish has moved to England and his book reviews will be less frequent. Other highlights of the letter column include Joe L. Hensley complaining in kind about the misspelling of his name on last issue’s cover, Bob Tucker reviving his 36-year-old beef about staples, to White’s consternation, and both White and John D. Berry, the fanzine reviewer, weighing in on the purpose of that column in response to a complaining reader. White takes issue with a reader who thinks the use of “sci-fi” is only a minor problem, and announces to another reader that he has dropped the movie reviews for the present. He also notes that he continues to write stories but his agent insists on sending them to Playboy—where, I note, nothing by White seems yet to have appeared.

Oh, the cover. I almost forgot. It’s the good cover by Johnny Bruck that we’ve been waiting for—not especially attractive, but very interesting. Foregrounded is an African-looking face peering out from what at first looks like the fur-lined hood of one of the Inuit or other far-North American peoples, but on closer examination is a collage of partial images of pieces of equipment and (I think) living things. It’s a surreal picture that, unusually, doesn’t look like imitation Richard Powers. Provenance is the German Perry Rhodan #250, from 1966.

On the contents page, Greg Benford’s story Sons of Man is listed as “The story behind the cover.” White said last issue that he doesn’t have control over the covers, but he’s been able to commission stories, including Benford’s, to be written around the pre-purchased covers. So I guess Sons of Man is actually the story in front of the cover. Inside, the story is illustrated by none other than editor White—his first professionally published art. It’s adequate, but he shouldn’t quit his day job. In other interior illustration news, Mike Hinge has done small illustrations for the headings of the editorial, book reviews, and other departments.

A. Lincoln, Simulacrum (Part 1 of 2), by Philip K. Dick

The biggest news in this issue is Philip K. Dick’s serial, A. Lincoln, Simulacrum. Per my practice, I won’t read and rate this until both installments are available, but there’s plenty of talk about the novel here. White’s editorial says without elaboration that it is totally uncut—in fact, it’s “slightly revised and expanded” for its appearance here.

by Mike Hinge

White does leave us with a bizarre anecdote. Several years ago, he showed Dick a photo of himself looking rather like Dick (both with full beards and dark-rimmed glasses). Dick asked for a copy, since his agent was after him to provide a photo for a British edition of The Man in the High Castle. So Dick sent the photo of White—and it appeared on the book. White says: “So here’s a chance to say, ‘Thanks, Phil,’ for the chance to associate myself, albeit deceitfully, with one of his best books.”

About the novel, White says:

“. . . Phil told me, ‘I put a lot of myself into this one—I really sweated into it.’ It’s more of a novel of character than any previous Philip K. Dick novel, and in writing and scene construction it approaches the so-called ‘mainstream’ novel. It is also something of a ‘root’ novel, planting as it does in 1981 many of the themes and constructs which pop up in later books of his loose-limned future history. And it is the first and only Philip K. Dick novel to be told in first person by its protagonist.”

Sons of Man, by Greg Benford

by Ted White

Greg Benford’s Sons of Man is a well crafted story using the familiar device of telling two unrelated stories in parallel, gradually revealing that they are not so unrelated after all. In one, Livingstone, who has moved to the northwestern wilderness to get away from civilization, finds a man named King collapsed in the snow near his cabin with severe burn injuries of no obvious origin, then sees a face peering into his window, and later, bare footprints two feet long. King’s been Sasquatch hunting and they seem to be hunting him back.

Meanwhile, on the Moon, Terry Wilk is trying to make sense of the records of an ancient spacecraft that crashed after visiting Earth early in human prehistory. Members of the New Sons of God cult are looking over his shoulder to make sure he doesn’t find out anything heretical. The story reads like it might develop into a series but stands on its own. The style seems a little awkward at the beginning, as if it’s something Benford started earlier in his career and came back to later, but overall, it’s very readable, cleverly assembled, and generally enjoyable. Four stars.

A Sense of Direction, by Alexei Panshin

Alexei Panshin’s short story A Sense of Direction is set in the same universe of “the Ships” as his Nebula-winning Rite of Passage. The interstellar Ships lord it over the people of the colonies that they established. Arpad, whose father married into a planetary culture and left (was left by) his Ship, was reclaimed for the Ship when his father died. He’s miserable in its unfamiliar culture, and makes a break for it during a landing on another planet. But the folkways there are so bizarre and repellent that he quickly changes his mind and sneaks back. So, like most of Panshin’s work, it’s Heinleinian: The (Young) Man Who Learned Better, capably done but just a bit too schematic and pat. Three stars.

A Whole New Ballgame, by Ray Russell

Ray Russell contributes A Whole New Ballgame, a compressed soliloquy on a theme previously aired by Larry Niven (in The Jigsaw Man), with a first-person semi-literate narrator. It’s just about perfect in its small compass and inexorable logic. Four miniature stars.

Sarker’s Joke Box, by Raymond Z. Gallun

The “Famous Classic” this month is Sarker’s Joke Box, by Raymond Z. Gallun, from the March 1942 Amazing. It’s yet another testament to the corrupting effects of Ray Palmer’s editorship. It begins: “Clay Sarker had me covered with his ugly heat-pistol. Kotah, the little Venusian scientist he’d held captive for so long, crouched helplessly chained, there, in one corner of Sarker’s cavernous mountain hideout. My life wasn’t worth the cinders in a discarded rocket-tube.” “Gimme bang-bang” wins out again! Pull out your copy of the June 1938 Astounding Science-Fiction, or the anthology Adventures in Time and Space, and compare Gallun’s much classier Seeds of the Dusk to this one.

by Robert Fuqua

But the story is not a total loss. The narrator is a cop, and he and his buddies have rousted Sarker out of his last stronghold in the Asteroid Belt. Now he’s trapped in a cave on Earth while the other cops are closing in. But Sarker—“that black-souled demon of space”—turns his heat-pistol on Kotah and then on his own apparatus that fills the cave, which blows up quite satisfactorily, then enters a metal cylinder and closes and seals it behind him. When the main body of cops arrive, they try to penetrate it, but—it’s neutronium! They can’t scratch it. And to compound matters, Sarker’s lawyer appears and announces that since they’ve declared Sarker to be in custody, they’ve got to try him within 60 days or he goes free. So the cops redouble their efforts to get through the neutronium. At this point, the story turns into a scientific puzzle without (much) further resort to hokey melodrama. It’s perfectly readable and commendably short. Three stars.

The Columbus Problem, by Greg Benford and David Book

Greg Benford’s second appearance in the issue is the first “Science in Science Fiction” article, done with David Book. It’s called The Columbus Problem and it starts out with a quotation from a Poul Anderson novel about a spaceship arriving at a new star system: “The instruments peered and murmured, and clicked forth a picture of the system. Eight worlds were detected.” Benford and Book then explain just how difficult and time-consuming it would actually be to detect the planets of an unfamiliar star system upon arrival at it, with our present technology or likely enhancements of it. They do a fine job of plain English explanation without becoming tedious. It beats hell out of Frank Tinsley’s earlier science articles for Amazing and edges Ben Bova’s. Four stars.

Summing Up

So, deferring judgment on the serial, here’s a lively issue of which much is quite good and nothing is a chore to read. Amazing!

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 16, 1969] September 1969 Galactoscope

September 16, 2024 Victoria Silverwolf 6 Comments

[And now, for your reading pleasure, a clutch of books representing the science fiction and fantasy books that have crossed our desk for review this month!]

by Victoria Silverwolf

Ye Gods!

Two new fantasy novels, both with touches of science fiction, feature theological themes. One deals with deities that are now considered to be purely mythological, the other relates to one of the world's major living religions. Let's take a look.

Fourth Mansions, by R. A. Lafferty

Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon.

The title of this strange novel comes from a book written by Saint Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Christian mystic of the sixteenth century. This work, known as The Interior Castle or The Mansions in English, compares various stages in the soul's spiritual progress to mansions within a castle. From what I can tell from a little research, the Fourth Mansion is the stage at which the natural and the supernatural intersect.

(I'm sure I'm explaining this badly. Interested readers can seek out a copy of Saint Teresa's book for themselves.)

I understand that Lafferty is a devout Catholic, so this connection between his latest novel and what is considered to be a classic of Christian literature must be more than superficial. Be that as it may, let's see if we can make any sense out of a very weird book.

Our hero is Fred Foley, a reporter who is said to be not very bright, but who seems to have some kind of special insight or perception as to events beyond the mundane. (A sort of Holy Fool, perhaps.) He gets involved in multiple conspiracies of folks, who may be something other than just ordinary human beings, out to change the world.

There are four such groups, said to be not quite fit for either Heaven or Earth. Each one is symbolized by an animal.

The Snakes, also known as the Harvesters, are a group of seven people who blend their psychic powers to influence the minds of others. They are intent on bringing about a sort of hedonistic apocalypse. Their connection to Foley and other characters allows for telepathic communication, and sets the plot in motion.

The Toads are folks who are reincarnated, or somehow take over new bodies. (It's a little vague.) Foley's investigation into one such person starts the novel. They intend to release a plague, wiping out most of humanity and ruling over the survivors.

The Badgers are people who are something like spiritual rulers of a kind of parallel world that most ordinary people can't perceive. Foley pays a visit to a couple of these seemingly benign people for information. In one case, this involves a trip to a mountain in Texas that shouldn't be there.

The Unfledged Falcons are would-be fascists, military leaders trying to take over the world by force. Only one such person appears in the book, a Mexican fellow named Miguel Fuentes. He gets involved when the Snakes try to influence an American named Michael Fountain (see the connection in names?) and wind up entering his mind by mistake.

I would be hard pressed to try to describe all the bizarre things that happen. Lafferty has a way of describing extraordinary events in deadpan fashion. (We're very casually told, for example, that one character brought a dead man back to life when he was a boy. One very minor character is a demon, and another one is an alien.)

The book's combination of whimsey and allegory is unique, to say the least. There's a lot of dialogue that sounds like nothing anybody would ever say in real life. Did I understand it all? Certainly not. Did I enjoy the ride? Yep.

Four stars.

Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny

Cover art by James Starrett.

Zelazny's recent novel Lord of Light offered a futuristic twist on Buddhism and Hinduism. This one makes use of ancient Egyptian gods, as well as a bit of Greek mythology. There are also a lot of original concepts, making for a very mixed stew indeed.

The time is the far future, when humanity has settled multiple planets. Don't expect a space opera, however.

We begin in the House of the Dead, ruled by Anubis. He has a servant who has lost his memory and his name. Anubis gives him the name Wakim, and sends him to the Middle Worlds (the physical realm) to destroy the Prince Who Was A Thousand. Meanwhile, Osiris, who rules the House of Life, sends his son Horus on the same errand.

You see, Anubis and Osiris keep the population of the Middle Worlds in balance, bringing life and death in equal amounts. The Prince threatens this system with the possibility of immortality. Although the two gods have the same goal, they are also rivals, so their champions battle each other as well as the Prince.

This is a greatly oversimplified description of the basic plot. A lot more goes on, with many equally god-like characters. There's a sort of scavenger hunt for three sacred items, with the protagonists hopping around from planet to planet in search of them.

Zelazny experiments with narrative techniques, from poetry to a play. There's some humor, as demonstrated by a cult that worships a pair of shoes. (They actually play an important role in the plot.) The pace is frenzied, with plenty of purple prose.

Full understanding of what the heck is really going on doesn't happen until late in the book, when we learn the actual identities of Wakim and the Prince. Suffice to say that this requires a lengthy description of apocalyptic events that took place long before the story begins.

Some readers are going to find this novel disjointed and overwritten. Others are likely to be swept away by the richness of the author's imagination. I'm leaning in the latter direction.

Four stars.

by Fiona Moore

Damnation Alley

Roger Zelazny’s been busy this month! His new novel Damnation Alley expands his novella of the same name into an action piece which is exciting enough but ultimately unsatisfying, a sort of postapocalyptic pony express with futuristic vehicles and implausible characters.

Cover of Damnation Alley by Jack Gaughan

The story is set in a relatively near-future USA after a nuclear war which has split it into isolated states within a radiation-ravaged wasteland, the only relatively safe passage through which is a corridor known as Damnation Alley. There are pockets of radiation, giant mutant animals and insects, tornadoes and killer dust storms. The descriptions of these is the book’s real strength, with some of them verging on the genuinely poetic. Our protagonist is Hell Tanner, a former Hell’s Angel who is offered a pardon for his crimes by the State of California, if he’ll deliver a shipment of vaccines to Boston, which has been hit by an outbreak of plague. Of course, this necessitates driving through Damnation Alley, but never fear, Tanner is also driving a super-tough vehicle bristling with weaponry.

The whole thing is almost laughably macho in places, and I say that as someone who really quite likes both cars and adventure stories. Tanner is that implausible archetype, the bad guy who nonetheless somehow has other people’s best interests at heart. However, there’s also some nice contrasts set up between Tanner and the criminal world he inhabits and the much more normal parts of society he encounters on his journey, where people seem to be on the whole generally decent and kind, making Tanner’s casual violence seem all the more out of place.

The book has a lot of problems. Some are clearly the result of padding it out to novel length, with several episodes which go nowhere and add little to the story. The characterisation of everyone aside from Tanner is weak to nonexistent. In particular, the main female character, Cordy, is a frustrating cipher: she is a woman who Tanner essentially abducts, and yet she shows none of the emotions one might expect under the circumstances, while Tanner seemingly comes to think of her as his girlfriend despite neither of them making any moves in that direction.

However, the biggest problem is that there are too many holes in the story for it to stay afloat. Despite the devastation of the land around it, the state of California somehow still has the resources to build giant armoured cars bristling with every kind of weapon from bullets to flamethrowers. Only two human beings are apparently capable of making the trip from California to Boston, which is surprising given the aforementioned level of technology and that there is clearly no shortage of young men with a death wish. Tanner makes it almost to Boston before encountering anyone who makes a serious effort to steal the vaccines, which I also find somewhat implausible. And so on, and so on.

Damnation Alley held my attention for the duration of a train journey and had nicely surreal, well-paced prose in places, but it was just too unbelievable for me to really enjoy it. Two and a half stars.

Since he returned to writing some half a dozen years ago, Robert Silverberg has tried to reintroduce himself as a more “serious” writer. This is not to say his rate of output has slowed down in favor of more refined work; if anything the past few years have been the busiest for him since the ‘50s. This year alone we have gotten enough novels from Silverberg that a bit of a catch-up is in order. The first on my plate, Across a Billion Years, hit store shelves a few months ago, from The Dial Press (I believe this is Silverberg’s first book with said publisher), and it seems to have flown under the radar—possibly because there’s no paperback edition, and also it might be aimed at younger readers. The second book we have here, To Live Again, is from Doubleday, and it too is a hardcover original; but unlike Across a Billion Years, To Live Again is a new release, fresh out of the oven.

Across a Billion Years, by Robert Silverberg

Two faces framed within a circle. — Cover art by Emanuel Schongut

It’s the 24th century, and humanity has not only spread to other worlds but encountered several intelligent alien races along the way. Tom Rice is a 22-year-old archaeologist on an expedition to find the ruins of a bygone race called the High Ones, who apparently lived a billion years ago (hence the title) but who have since vanished. Whether or not the High Ones have gone extinct is one of the novel’s core mysteries, although Silverberg takes his time raising this question. The novel is told as a series of diary entries, or rather messages Tom sends to his sister Lorie. In a curious but also frustrating move, Lorie is arguably the most interesting character in the novel, yet we never see or hear her, as she’s not only away from the action but stuck in a hospital bed for an indefinite period. Lorie is a telepath, and enough people are “TP” to make up their own faction, although telepathy only works one-way and Tom himself is not a telepath. The one positive surprise Silverberg includes here is finding a way to tie telepathy together with the mystery of the High Ones, but obviously I won’t say how he does it.

As for bad surprises, well…

Even taking into account that Tom is a young adult who also has personal hang-ups (his father wanted him to enter real estate), his treatment of his colleagues is abhorrent in the opening stretch. He dismisses the aliens on the team as mostly “diversity” hires and has a standoffish relationship with Kelly, the female android on the team, whom he more than once compares to a “voluptuous nineteen-year-old.” Why someone of Tom’s age would make such a comparison is befuddling…unless you were really a lecherous man approaching middle age and not a recent college graduate. There are a few other humans here, but the only human woman present is Jan, whom Tom gradually takes a liking to—just not enough to do anything when he sees Leroy, a male colleague, sexually assault Jan near enough that he could have intervened. This happens early in the novel, and I have to admit that Tom’s indifference regarding Jan’s wellbeing, a weakness in character he never really apologizes for, cast a cloud over my enjoyment of the rest of the novel. I kept wondering when the other shoe would drop. That Tom and Jan’s relationship turns romantic despite the former’s callousness only serves to rub salt in the wound. The bright side of all this is that while some of Silverberg’s recent work has bordered on pornographic, Across a Billion Years is relatively tame, almost to the point of being old-fashioned.

Indeed, this feels like a throwback to an older era of SF, even back to those years when Silverberg (and I, for that matter) had not yet picked up a pen or used a typewriter. In broad strokes this is a planetary adventure of the sort that would have been serialized in Astounding circa 1945. We’re excavating alien ruins on Higby V, a distant planet where High Ones artifacts have been supposedly found. During a drunken escapade one of the alien diggers stumbles upon (or rather breaks into) a piece of High Ones technology, something akin to a movie projector, not only showing what the High Ones look like but revealing a clue as to the location of their homeworld. This should sound familiar to most of us, and I suspect Silverberg knows this too, because this novel’s biggest problem and biggest asset is how it uses perspective. We’re stuck with Tom as he sends messages to Lorie, recounting events in perhaps more detail than he has to, knowing in advance that his sister won’t receive these messages until after the fact. As with a disconcerting number of Silverberg protagonists, Tom can be annoying, and honestly quite bigoted; and since he is the perspective character we’re never relieved of his oh-so-interesting remarks. But, and I will give Silverberg this, he does put a twist on the epistolary format very late in the novel, which does the miraculous thing of making you reevaluate what you had been reading up to this point.

In other words, this is not an exceptional novel, but it does have its points of interest, and with the exception of an early scene and its ramifications (or lack thereof), nothing here made me want to throw my copy at a nearby wall. For the most part this is inoffensive—possibly even decent. Three stars.

To Live Again, by Robert Silverberg

A minimalist drawing of a half-silhouetted faced. — Cover art by Pat Steir.

Those who want a bit more sex with their science fiction can do worse than this one, which looks to be the fourth (or maybe fifth—I’ve lost count) Silverberg novel of 1969. It’s the near-ish future, and the good news is that for those with enough money, death is not necessarily the end. Courtesy of the Scheffing Institute, a person can have their memories stored periodically, making copies or “personae” of themselves, which can be transplanted to the brain of a living host. The host and the persona will cooperate, lest the latter erase the former’s personality and become a “dybbuk,” using the host’s body as a flesh puppet.

The infamous businessman Paul Kaufmann has recently died, with his persona waiting to be claimed. Paul’s nephew, Mark, and Mark’s 16-year-old daughter Risa each see themselves as ideal candidates for Paul’s persona, but one of the rules at the Institute is that close family members can’t host each other’s personae: the implications of, for example, a teen girl hosting her grandfather’s persona, would be…concerning.

While we’re on the lovely topic of incest, let’s talk more about Risa, who must be one of the thorniest of all Silverberg characters, which as you know is a tall order, not helped by the fact that Silverberg describes, in almost poetic detail, every curve of this teen girl’s nude body—and she does strut around naked a surprising amount of the time. Risa is such a depraved individual, despite her age, that she at one point tries seducing an older male cousin and rather openly has an Electra complex (they even mention it by name), which Mark is understandably disturbed by—with the implication being that Mark has lustful thoughts about his own daughter. This is the second Silverberg novel I’ve read in two months to involve incest, which worries me.

The only other major female character is Elena, Mark’s mistress, whom Risa sees as a rival for her father’s affections and who (predictably) starts conspiring against Mark. Not content to ogle at just 16-year-olds, Silverberg also takes to describing the nuances of Elena’s body in wearying fashion, which does lead me to wonder if he was working the typewriter one-handed for certain passages. It’s a shame, because there’s an intriguing subplot in which Risa acquires her first persona, a young woman named Tandy who had died in a skiing accident—or so the official record claims. Tandy, or rather the persona of Tandy, recorded a couple months prior to her death, suspects foul play. Of the women mentioned, Tandy is the least embarrassingly written, but then she is only tangentially related to the plot and, what with not having a physical body, Silverberg is only able to ogle at her so much.

I’ve not even mentioned John Roditis and his underling Charles Noyles, business rivals of Mark’s who are clamoring for Paul’s persona. You may notice that this novel has more moving parts than Across a Billion Years, and certainly it’s the more ambitious of the two, the problem being that its shortcomings are all the more disappointing for it. Silverberg raises questions that he can barely be bothered with answering, and he alludes to things that remain mostly unrevealed. Much of To Live Again is shrouded in speculation, which is to say it uses speculation as a night-black cloak to cover things we sadly never get to see.

Another rule at the Institute is that a persona has to be of the same gender as its host, a rule that characters mostly write off as bogus. And indeed why not? Why should a male host and female persona not be able to coexist? Or the other way around. The prohibition has to do with transsexualism, which is certainly uncharted water for the most part. There has been very little science fiction written about transsexualism or transvestism—the possibility of blurring and even crossing gender lines. Unfortunately the novel does little with the ideas it presents. There are multiple references to religion and mythology (the word “dybbuk” refers to an evil spirit in Jewish mythology), including lines taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s a minor subplot about white Californians appropriating Buddhist practices, in connection with the Institute, but this is so tangential that the reader can easily forget about it.

Finally, I want to mention that I was reminded eerily of another novel that came out this year, Philip K. Dick’s masterful and deranged Ubik, which I have to think Silverberg could not have known about when he was writing To Live Again. Both take cues from the Buddhist conception of reincarnation, although in Dick’s novel people who have died are kept in a state of suspended animation called “half-life,” whereas Silverberg’s characters die the full death, or “discorporate,” only that their personalities (up to a point) are kept intact. Not to make comparisons, but given that Silverberg’s novel is longer than Dick’s I have to say he does a fair bit less with the shared material. Of course, these are both talented writers, who at their best do very fine work indeed. Silverberg has become a major writer, but sadly he is not firing on all cylinders with either of the novels I’ve covered.

Hovering between two and three stars on this one.

by George Pritchard

The Glass Cage by Kenneth W. Hassler

The mockery for this book writes itself:

This book made me think of a Bulwer-Lytton novel for the Space Age.
This book could make Damon Knight take back everything he said about van Vogt.
This book made me long for the complexity of Commander Cody shorts.
This book’s style is so out of date that I think it fell out of the TARDIS.
This book wishes it had the character depth of a Lin Carter work.

And yet, I can't hate it the way I hated Light A Last Candle. That book was one mass of forgettable hate, but The Glass Cage is not hateful. It's incompetent at every turn, from line editing to plot development (I really don't know how it got the hardcover copy I received), but the overall effect is an oral record of a children's game.

There's this guy, Stephen, he’s twenty! He's a neophyte to the priests of the computer, TAL! It keeps life going in the city beneath its glass dome! Stephen is a perfect physical specimen, and his only flaw is being too curious about things. But that's because he’s secretly a spy for the Rebellion outside the glass dome!

The sentences are short and rarely have the benefit of internal punctuation. The characters are, generally, exactly how they appear — wicked characters with their close-together eyes, good characters with their strong jaws, straightforward manner, and perfect blonde hair. If this is chosen for adaptation, Tommy Kirk is made for the lead part.

The treatment of nuclear power seems to come from another time, where the leaders of interstellar development are in the Baltimore Gun Club rather than NASA. The giant computer, TAL, is attached to a nuclear bomb, to go off at a certain date, destroying the whole glass dome and the people within! No need to worry, though, Stephen and his various Rebellion people get most everyone out in time, except for the bad guy head priest of TAL, who is determined to die with his machine. Stephen and the gangster leader of the in-Dome Rebellion try to get him out, but to no avail! The nuclear bomb is about to go off, so the two of them hop on their air-sled, turn it skyward, and smash through the glass dome, just as the nuclear bomb goes off! Luckily, the nuclear bomb just pushes them a few miles away from the blast, where they are safe and unharmed.

One point of the book that is surprisingly forward-thinking is its treatment of one of the main characters being severely disabled. Despite being paralyzed from the neck down, he is a leader of the Rebellion, commanding through his immense psychic ability. But that cannot keep me from giving it…

Two stars

[A bit of a downer note to leave on, but at least there's some fine stuff upstream. See you next month, tiger!]

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[September 14, 1969] More Gems from the Pulps: Bran Mak Morn by Robert E. Howard and Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore

September 14, 2024 Cora Buhlert 2 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

For a Modern West Germany

The streets of West Germany are currently plastered with campaign posters, because a federal election, the sixth since 1949, will happen on September 28.

1969 CDU campaign poster — This campaign poster by the conservative CDU reminds us that the chancellor is important.

1969 SPD campaign post Willy Brandt — This SPD campaign poster features foreign secretary and vice chancellor Willy Brandt and asks people to vote for him so we can live in peace tomorrow.

SPD campaign post 1969 Karl Schiller — This SPD campaign poster features the popular secretary of the economy Karl Schiller, who promises a stable economy and secure jobs.

1969 SPD campaign poster featuring Helmut Schmidt — This SPD campaign poster features social democratic floor leader Helmut Schmidt who promises to create a modern Germany with vigour and energy.

1969 campaign post FDP — The liberal party FDP forgoes the usual black and white headshot and promises to abolish antiquated customs and laws.

The posters are eerily similar across parties, usually consisting of a party logo, a slogan in Helvetica typeface and a black and white photo of a candidate. Hereby, the conservative CDU mainly points out that they provide the current chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and that he does a good job (which is debatable).

1969 SPD campaign poster — This SPD campaign poster features images of the modern West Germany they want to create and also reminds voters that the SPD "has the right men".

The SPD, meanwhile, has made "For a modern Germany" the focal point of their campaign, though the tagline "We have the right men" made quite a few woman voters grumpy. In response, the SPD launched a campaign where women – both celebrities like actress Inge Meysel and ordinary citizens like Johanna Lammers, miner's wife from Castrop-Rauxel – explain why they vote SPD.

SPD campaign poster Johanna Lammers — Johanna Lammers, miner's wife from Castrop-Rauxel, poses with her sewing machine in this SPD campaign flyer and praises secretary of the economy Karfl Schiller for preserving mining jobs.

SPD campaign flyer Inge Meysel — Popular actress Inge Meysel explains why she votes SPD in this campaign flyer.

In general, it is notable that the SPD enlisted several celebrities, including writers Günther Grass, Siegfried Lenz and Heinrich Böll, actors Romy Schneider, Götz George, Marianne Hoppe, Sabine Sinjen, Inge Meysel, Horst Frank and Horst Tappert, TV personalities Peter Frankenfeld and Hans-Joachim Kuhlenkampf, directors Victor de Kowa and Wolfgang Menge and singer Katja Ebstein, to campaign for them, something that is common in the US, but almost unheard of in West Germany.

SPD campaign poster with celebrities — This SPD campaign poster lists all the celebrities who endorse the SPD.

A Small Step

But whatever the outcome of the September 28 election, it's very likely that the current great coalition of the conservative CDU and the social-democratic SPD will not continue.

Due to its large majority, the great coalition actually got a lot done in its three years in office, for better or for worse. Under "for worse", most people would classify the controversial and unpopular emergency powers act, which passed last year – in spite of massive protests.

On the positive side, there is the Great Reform of the Criminal Code, which passed in June and took effect on September 1, which got rid of outdated laws (many of which dated back to the Third Reich or even the Second German Empire) and brought particularly morality related offences more in line with our modern age.

Among other things, adultery is no longer a criminal offence in West Germany. The so-called "Kuppelei" paragraph, which under the guise of combating prostitution forbade landlords from renting apartments and hotels from renting rooms to unmarried couples, and prevented parents from allowing their adult children's boyfriend or girlfriend to sleep over, has been significantly modified.

But most importantly, homosexual relationships between men have been decriminalised, at least if both participants are over twenty-one and there is no employment or service relationship between them. Homosexual prostitution remains illegal.

These are small steps forward, especially since most of the legal limitations applied to homosexual relationships between men do not apply to heterosexual relationships or relationships between women. But they are important steps, because every year between two thousand and three thousand men are tried and convicted for consensual homosexual relationships on the basis of a law dating back to the Second German Empire and significantly tightened by the Nazis.

The end of WWII is often viewed as a liberation, but for homosexual men incarcerated by the Nazis it was anything but, for they remained in prison, while other victims of Nazi persecution were set free. And while the Federal Republic of Germany distanced itself from the Third Reich, it displayed the same zeal in persecuting homosexual men. In 1950, the public prosecution of Frankfurt on Main dragged some 170 men into court on homosexuality charges, based on the questionable statements made by a nineteen-year-old male prostitute named Otto Blankenstein, later revealed to be a notorious liar. Many of the accused were found guilty and jailed, six men committed suicide, others lost their jobs or were forced to flee Germany.

Otto Blankenstein, the nineteen-year-old male prostitute who set off an unprecedented persecution of homosexual men in Frankfurt on Main in 1950, when he ratted out his clients to save himself from prison.

In the light of events such as those that happened in Frankfurt nineteen years ago, the decriminalisation of homosexual relationships between consenting adults is an important step forward. And indeed, the immediate effect of the new law was not the sudden eruption of homosexual orgies in West German streets that conservatives feared but that many men who had been convicted under the old law were set free, because there was no reason to keep them in jail any longer.

More Treasures from the Pulps

But while old and outdated laws are best left behind, older fiction is often ripe for rediscovery. Particularly the pulp magazines of thirty to forty years ago contain many hidden gems and secret treasures just begging to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers. And thanks to the twin success of Lancer's Conan reprints and the Ballantine paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings, many other fantasy works from the first half of the century are coming back into print.

I recently got my hands on two paperbacks reprinting some fantasy gems that until recently could only be found in the crumbling pages of thirty to forty year old copies of Weird Tales.

The enormous success of Lancer's Conan series has also brought other works by Robert E. Howard, either long forgotten or never published at all, back into print. In a previous article, I already took a look at recent reprints of the adventures of Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, and Almuric, as well as Wolfshead, a collection of horror stories by Robert E. Howard. Now another of Howard's heroes from the pages of Weird Tales has made it into paperback form.

The Last King of the Picts: Bran Mak Morn by Robert E. Howard

Bran mak Morn Paperback — cover by Frank Frazetta

Nowadays, Robert E. Howard is mainly remembered as the father of what Fritz Leiber called sword and sorcery. However, Howard was also fascinated by history and wrote a lot of historical fiction, with or without fantastic elements. The Bran Mak Morn stories sit on the boundary between fantasy and history. The titular hero is the king of the Picts, a native tribe living in Scotland in ancient times.

Howard was clearly fascinated by the Picts, because they appear throughout his work. The best friend and frequent saviour of Kull of Atlantis is a Pictish warrior named Brule the Spearslayer. The Picts also appear in two Conan stories, "Beyond the Black River" and "The Treasure of Tranicos", where they are portrayed as fierce warriors and sworn enemies of Conan's people, the Cimmerians.

The Bran Mak Morn stories take the Picts out of fantasy and into history, though it must be noted that Howard's Picts bear scant resemblance to what little we know about the actual ancient inhabitants of Scotland. Mostly set in Roman Britain during the second or third century AD, the stories recount the conflict between the technologically superior Roman colonisers and the Picts, who at this point in their history have devolved into Neanderthal-like primitives. Their king Bran Mak Morn knows that his people are doomed, but he is not willing to go down without a fight.

The Lost Race by Robert E. Howard — Cororuc is about to meet an unpleasant fate in "The Lost Race" by Robert E. Howard-

Though the first story in this collection, "The Lost Race", does not feature Bran Mak Morn at all, but instead follows Cororuc, a traveller in Roman Britain, who is captured by Picts and taken to their underground lair. The Picts are described as diminutive – in Howard's time some historians believed they were pygmies – and the likely source of legends about dwarves and little people. They are quite hostile and want to burn Cororuc at the stake – after a history lesson delivered by their chief. But Cororuc's life is spared due to the intercession of a werewolf he'd saved earlier.

"The Lost Race" is one of Robert E. Howard's earliest stories, published in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales, when Howard was only twenty-one, and is clearly the work of a beginning writer. Three stars.

Bran Mak Morn does appear in "Men of the Shadows", though once again the protagonist is another character, a Norseman who became a Roman citizen and legionnaire. He's part of a squad sent north of Hadrian's Wall on a mysterious mission. The legionnaires are slaughtered in a series of battles with the Picts, until only a handful remain. The survivors try to make it back to safety beyond Hadrian's Wall, but are picked off one by one, until there is only a single survivor who is captured and brought before Bran Mak Morn himself. The Picts want to kill him, but Bran spares his life and also reveals the reason why the legionnaires were sent into Pictish territory, namely because a wealthy Roman had taken a liking to Bran's sister and wanted to take her for his own. Bran's refusal to kill the legionnaire leads to a staring contest between Bran and a Pictish wizard upset that Bran is forgetting the old ways. Bran wins the contest, whereupon the wizard launches into a lengthy explanation of the history of the Picts and also prophesizes the fall of the Roman Empire.

This story was never published in Howard's lifetime and it's easy to see why. It's a disjointed mess and Howard forgets both the plot and even the protagonist, once the wizard launches into the extended history of the Picts. We never even learn what happened to the legionnaire. Perhaps he was bored to death by the lecturing wizard. Two stars.

Kings of the Night by Robert E. Howard — A ghostly Kull appears on the battlefield in the interior art for "Kings of the Night".

In "Kings of the Night", Bran Mak Morn is preparing for battle against a Roman legion marching on his land. Bran's Picts have joined forces with Gaels and Britons, but Bran also needs to persuade a group of Norsemen to join the battle. However, their chief has been killed and the Norsemen refuse to fight until they find a new leader. So the Pictish wizard Gonar casts a spell and conjures up none other than Kull of Atlantis, brought forward through time. Kull is understandably confused and mistakes Bran for his Pictish friend Brule the Spearslayer, implying that Bran is a descendent of Brule. However, he also agrees to lead the Norsemen into battle. But is the victory worth the price in blood?

First published in the November 1930 issue of Weird Tales, this is a highly enjoyable story and the return of Kull of Atlantis is most welcome, though it's interesting that Bran outbroods even the traditionally broody Kull. Four stars.

Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard — Bran Mak Morn confronts the witch Atla who wants his body in "Worms of the Earth".

"Worms of the Earth" starts with an incredibly visceral and brutal crucifixion scene. A Pict is executed for killing a Roman merchant who'd swindled him. Presiding over the execution is Titus Sulla, Roman governor of Eboracum (nowadays known better by its British name York), as well as a Pictish emissary. Unbeknownst to the arrogant Sulla, this emissary is none other than Bran Mak Morn in disguise.

Infuriated by the way the Roman colonisers treat his people. Bran vows revenge upon Titus Sulla and he is willing to go to great lengths to get it. And so against the warnings of the wizard Gonar, Bran enlists the aid of the titular worms, the remnants of a pre-human civilisation who may be descendants of the Serpent Men from the Kull stories. But in order to find the worms, Bran first has to consult the witch Atla, who is not entirely human herself, and whose price is nothing less than Bran's virtue. So Bran leans back and thinks of the Picts, while Atla has her way with him.

Bran finally locates the worms and they agree to help him get his revenge on Sulla. But things don't go the way Bran expects…

Published in the November 1932 issue of Weird Tales, this is a great story, which perfectly balances sword and sorcery, history and horror. "Worms of the Earth" is the highlight of this collection and worth the price of admission alone. Five stars.

"The Night of the Wolf" is another story which remained unpublished during Howard's lifetime. Set during Arthurian times, it's the tale of Cormac Mac Art, an Irish reiver who gets embroiled in a conflict between Vikings and Picts in the Shetland Islands, where Cormac tries to negotiate the release of an important prisoner.

"The Night of the Wolf" is a well written story full of action and excitement, but I'm not quite sure why it was included in this collection, because it is not a Bran Mak Morn story, even though the Picts appear. Four stars.

Weird Tales December 1931 — The statue of Bran Mak Morn gloomily looks on, as the kidnapped Irish maiden Moira is about the escape a forced marriage by the only means she can.

Bran Mak Morn does appear in "The Dark Man", at least after a fashion — because the story is set in the ninth century during the Viking invasion of Ireland, i.e. at a time when Bran is long dead. Instead, he appears in the form of a statue that is worshipped by the surviving descendants of the Picts.

Our hero is an Irish outlaw named Turlogh Dubh O'Brien who's on a mission to rescue his childhood sweetheart Moira, daughter of an Irish chieftain, who was kidnapped by Vikings. Turlogh comes across the statue of Bran and decides to take it along. He crashes the forced wedding of Moira to the Viking chief Thorfel and takes bloody vengeance. The statue of Bran, the titular dark man, comes in handy as well, for where Bran goes, or rather his statue goes, the Picts are not far behind and they are still formidable warriors.

First published in the December 1931 issue of Weird Tales, "The Dark Man" is another fine historical adventure story and unlike "The Night of the Wolf", it has at least some connection to Bran Mak Morn, albeit rather tenuously. Four stars.

I have to admit that I was very eager to finally get my hands on Robert E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn stories. Though I have no Scottish ancestry, I recognise the parallels between Bran and his Picts struggling against Roman rule and the history of my own homeland. For just like the historical Picts, my own ancestors, the Germanic tribes of Northern Germany, managed to kick the Romans out of North Germany and drive them back beyond the Limes Germanicus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

Postcard of the Hermann Monument near Detmold, which reminds us that Arminius knocked the Romans out of their sandals somewhere around here.

The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest is extremely important to German history. The so-called Hermann Monument near Detmold, a 53 meter tall statue of the Cherusci chieftain Arminius a.k.a. Hermann, is a popular destination for school trips and much beloved. Whenever I'm in the area, I always pay a visit to good old Arminius, even if the statue is not even remotely accurate and the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest most likely did not take place anywhere near Detmold. Archaeologists are still looking for the actual location of the battle

Arminius is to the Germans what the Gaul leader Vercingetorix is to the French, a national hero who fought back against the arrogant Roman invaders. Unlike Vercingetorix, Arminius was victorious and lived to tell the tale. And just like the fictional Bran Mak Morn, Arminius was driven by vengeance, for according to legend he was an officer in the Roman army who turned against his former allies, when the Romans paraded his pregnant wife Thusnelda naked through the streets of Rome in triumph. The veracity of the tale of Thusnelda is debatable, but it is a compelling story and always made me sympathise with Arminius. Bran's story and motivation, though entirely fictional, are just as compelling and I'm sure that Arminius and Bran would find a lot to talk about over a jug of ale or mead.

For all that, the actual collection is a little bit of a letdown. Robert E. Howard just didn't write very many stories about Bran Mak Morn, so Dell topped off the collection with unpublished stories and fragments, poems, juvenilia and vaguely related stories that feature the Picts.

Nonetheless, "Worms of the Earth" is a top tier Howard story and most of the other stories are at the very least entertaining, even if Bran isn't actually in them.

Four stars.

Women's Lib, Sword and Sorcery Style: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore

The yellowing pages of Weird Tales contain treasures beyond the stories of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, whose work Arkham House is doing a good job of keeping in print. One of those treasures that I was extremely excited to get my hands on are the stories C.L. Moore wrote about the medieval French swordswoman Jirel of Joiry. At last the stories are available again for the first time in more than thirty years.

Weird Tales October 1934 — Jirel kisses the Black God in Margaret Brundage's cover art for the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales.

"Black God's Kiss" first appeared in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales and introduced Jirel of Joiry to the world. The story opens with the iconic and much imitated scene of the warlord Guillaume conquering Castle Joiry. The captured lord of the castle is brought before Guillaume in full armour. When Guillaume orders his captive's helmet removed, the Lord of Castle Joiry is revealed to be a lady, the red-haired firebrand Jirel. Guillaume is quite delighted by this discovery and forces a kiss on Jirel. Jirel is considerably less delighted and tries to bite his throat out.

The revealing of Jirel's gender is an iconic scene and remains impactful even thirty-five years later. I can only imagine how female readers in 1934 reacted to this revelation, even if the surprise was spoiled both by Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage and interior artist H.R. Hammond.

Black God's Kiss interior art — H.R. Hammond's interior art for "Black God's Kiss" sadly spoils the revelation of Jirel's gender.

For her troubles, Jirel is thrown into her own dungeon, but she quickly escapes, plotting revenge against the overbearing Guillaume. She has no illusions about what Guillaume will do to her, namely rape her and then either kill her or sell her into slavery. So she goes to see Father Gervase, the resident priest of Castle Joiry, to ask for his help and forgiveness. For in order to avenge herself on Guillaume, Jirel is willing to descend into hell itself. And luckily, there happens to be a passage to the underworld deep beneath the foundations of Castle Joiry. It's interesting how much this scene mirrors the scene in "Worms of the Earth" where Bran Mak Morn plots revenge against Titus Sulla. Both Bran and Jirel are willing to do whatever it takes, even if it means selling their soul (and in Bran's case, his body) and enlisting demonic aid. And in both cases, their spiritual advisors, respectively Gonar or Gervase, strongly advice against this course of action, noting that some weapons are too terrible to use.

Like Bran, however, Jirel is determined and so she descends into the underworld beneath the castle. The bulk of the story is given over to Jirel's journey through the underworld and the fantastic things she encounters there. It is notable that even though Jirel wears a crucifix which she has to discard in order to enter the underworld and has a theological argument with a Catholic priest earlier in the story, the dreamlike land underneath Castle Joiry does not resemble the traditional Christian depictions of hell in the slightest—it is much stranger.

Jirel finally finds the titular black god in a temple in the middle of a lake of fallen stars and begs him to give her a weapon against Guillaume. The black gods grants her this wish, but just like Bran Mak Morn in "Worms of the Earth", Jirel realises that the revenge she gets isn't what she wanted after all.

This is an amazing story that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best the sword and sorcery genre has to offer. Five stars.

Only two months later, in the December 1934 issue, Weird Tales published the sequel to "Black God's Kiss" entitled "Black God's Shadow". Jirel is still haunted by the events of the previous story. She's having trouble sleeping, the memories of Guillaume forcing a kiss on her keep resurfacing and by night, Jirel hears Guillaume's voice, begging her to save his soul from hell.

Jirel's feelings towards Guillaume are very conflicted. On the one hand, he was an overbearing pig who assaulted her, but on the other hand Jirel was also attracted to him. So she decides to descend into the underworld once more to save Guillaume's soul. But in doing so, Jirel will not only have to fight the black god, but also her own conflicted emotions and come to terms with what happened to her.

This story is more quiet and philosophical than its predecessor and the battles Jirel fights are purely in her mind. From a psychological standpoint, this story is fascinating, because Jirel's feelings and reactions mirror those of women who have been sexually assaulted or raped, suggesting that Guillaume did more than merely steal a kiss.

An unusual but excellent story. Five stars.

"Jirel Meets Magic" first appeared in the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. The title is rather weak, especially since Jirel already encountered more than her share of magic in her first two adventures.

The story opens with Jirel leading the charge against a castle, whence the evil wizard Giraud has fled. Once again, the hotblooded Jirel is out for vengeance, because Giraud had ambushed and killed some of her men. However, as Jirel and her men comb the castle, Giraud is nowhere to be found. Bloody footprints lead to a window, which doubles as a portal into a fantastic world. Undeterred, Jirel climbs through the window in pursuit of Giraud and quickly finds herself tangling not just with the wizard, but also with his patroness, the sorceress Jarisme.

This story establishes what will become a pattern with the Jirel of Joiry stories, namely that Jirel keeps venturing into fantastic dream landscapes. "Jirel Meets Magic" is not quite as dark as the Black God duology, but still a great story. Five stars.

Weird Tales January 1936 — Not Jirel either, but a strikingly erotic cover for a Seabury Quinn story, courtesy of Margaret Brundage.

"The Dark Land" opens with Jirel lying in bed in her castle, mortally wounded in battle. Father Gervase is called in to give her the last rites, when Jirel abruptly vanishes. When she comes to, she finds herself in yet another fantastic dreamland called Romne. Its king Pav informs Jirel that he saved her from death, because he wants her to be his bride. Jirel has other ideas, especially once she learns what happens to Pav's discarded wives…

Published in the January 1936 issue of Weird Tales, this is a good story, but not quite as strong as the previous tales. Four stars.

"Hellsgarde" opens with Jirel on her warhorse outside the haunted castle of Hellsgarde. The castle, we learn, has been shunned and abandoned for two hundred years, ever since its previous lord stole a mysterious treasure and was tortured to death by those eager to take that treasure for themselves.

Jirel has come to Hellsgarde for just this treasure, though she doesn't want it for herself. No, a villainous nobleman named Guy of Garlot has taken several of Jirel's men hostage and demands the treasure of Hellsgarde as ransom.

As the previous stories have shown, Jirel is perfectly willing to descend into hell itself and so she enters the haunted castle to face of the horrors awaiting her within. As for Guy of Garlot, he fares about as well as all overbearing men who try to force Jirel to do something against her will.

First published in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales, "Hellsgarde" is a very much a haunted house story, but what a haunted house story it is. Five stars.

Reading the Jirel of Joiry stories in the year of the lord 1969, it's hard to image that these stories are already more than thirty years old, because they feel so very modern, both with regard to Jirel's adventures in psychedelic dreamlands and her conflicts with overbearing men which many a modern feminist will sympathise with. Jirel is very much a heroine for the 1960s, a strong woman willing to brave even hell itself to get what she wants.

C.L. Moore only ever wrote six stories about Jirel of Joiry (one of which, a story featuring Jirel and Moore's interplanetary outlaw Northwest Smith, is not included in this collection) and sadly retired from writing altogether after the untimely death of her husband Henry Kuttner eleven years ago. However, the Jirel stories are so good that I hope that Moore will eventually return to writing and revisit this groundbreaking character.

If you are looking for the two-fisted adventures of Conan or the hijinks of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, this collection is very much not that. Jirel's adventures are internal conflicts given form in her journey through dreamlike and often nightmarish landscapes. Nonetheless, these stories are among the best the sword and sorcery genre has to offer. Five stars.

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55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction