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[April 16, 1970] Junk Day for Ice Crowns (April 1970 Galactoscope)

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Tune in tomorrow morning (April 17) for FULL APOLLO 13 SPLASHDOWN COVERAGE!!!

black and white photo of a dark-haired white woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

Six-Gun Planet, by John Jakes

The author is better known around these parts for his sword-and-sorcery yarns about Brak the Barbarian, firmly in the tradition of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan. This new novel is a horse of a different color.

The cover of Six-Gun Planet.  The title is written in red block capitals across the top.  Beneath, the story summary reads: This is the story of the planet Missouri, whose revolutionary goals were to duplicate in the 23rd century the Terrafirman Old West, even if they had to use robot pintos for special effects.  Below the text, three images are superimposed over a background of psychedelic swirls in bright primary colors.  The first, at the top left, shows the planet Jupiter with its storm spot, encircled by a bright yellow aura.  In the center, a rope noose descends from the top of the image.  Inside the loop, an orange sunset sky surrounds a cowboy drawn in black and white in the foreground.  He is wearing a tall hat, gun belt, and cowboy boots.  His legs are bowed and his hands appear to be reaching for his gun as he stares malevolently at the viewer from under his hat brim.  In the background, two smaller cowboys, also black and white, appear far in the distance. On the right, three sandstone mountains in shades of yellow and orange appear to be blasting off into space supported by rockets shooting fire beneath them.
Cover art by Richard Powers

The planet Missouri had a revolution some time before the story begins. Advanced technology and a bureaucratic form of government were replaced by nineteenth century ways of doing things and fierce individualism.

In other words, the place now resembles Hollywood's fantasy of the Old West. There are some so-called savages who play the role of American Indians. Towns are full of outlaws and dance hall girls. There are sheriffs around, supposedly to maintain law and order, but they aren't very effective.

Our long-suffering hero is Zak Randolph, a minor government worker who ekes out a living by supplying souvenirs (such as miniature outhouses) to tourists and staging phony shootouts to entertain visitors from other worlds. He also arranges to have local badmen sent to more civilized planets to amuse those who hire them.

This latter function gets him in trouble. One of the leased gunfighters heads back to Missouri before his contract runs out. Zak has to track him down or risk losing his position. (What keeps him on the wild-and-wooly planet at all are his girlfriend and the presence of native plants that supply minerals that can be made into jewelry. Otherwise, he's a peaceable sort who hates the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later culture of the place.)

Along the way, he has to deal with ruffians who despise him as a coward. There's also the mystery of a legendary gunfighter called Buffalo Yung. Zak isn't sure this terrifying figure really exists. Then he gets reports from various places that he's been shot dead, apparently more than once. And what does this have to do with the disappearing bodies of lawmen killed by Yung?

Jakes makes use of typical characters and situations from Westerns, often with tongue firmly in cheek. You've got the town drunk, the traveling merchant, the local undertaker, and so forth. It's no surprise that it ends with a showdown between Zak and Yung.

The author also has something serious to say about pacifism versus the law of the gun. Zak changes personality drastically over the course of the novel, and not in a nice way.

The plot moves along briskly, even if some of the events seem arbitrary. You'll probably be able to figure out Yung's secret pretty quickly. Fans of horse operas should be able to appreciate this space opera.

Three stars.

A photo portrait of Winona Menezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Ice Crown, by Andre Norton

The book jacket for Ice Crown, by Andre Norton, shown unfolded so that both the back and front covers are visible.  The background is an abstract painting of intersecting lines and circles.  The shapes formed by these intersections are painted in different colors, all muted cool shades of green, blue, and purple with occasional soft golds.  The background extends from the back cover around to the front.  On the front, the middleground shows a man and a woman looking pensively off to the left. The man is wearing armor in shades of brown, painted in the same intersecting-line style as the background.  He wears a medieval-style helmet that extends down to his chin on the sides, with cheek guards but the rest of his face exposed.  He has a parted pencil mustache. His gauntleted hands are steepled in front of his chest.  The woman, standing slightly in front of him, appears to be wearing the titular ice crown, which is a white imperial-style closed crown with a cap above the coronet.  It has a star at the very top. She wears a purple cloth head covering under the crown and her body is enclosed by a long cloak, also painted linearly in shades of brown but with some purple and yellow accents.  In front of them is superimposed a smaller image of three soldiers fighting.  On the left, a white man with dark hair is wearing a white space suit with no helmet.  He is firing a blaster at the two men on the left, who are wearing tan medieval-style tunics and hoods, with hose and boots that lace up to the knee.  They are brandishing swords toward the first man.  The shot from the blaster extends past the first medieval man and over the head of the second man, who has fallen against the shield of the man behind him as if wounded.
Cover art by Lazlo Gal

Millennia ago, the human race's push for scientific and technological achievement culminated in a proud interstellar empire dominated by the Psychocrat regime. They settled human colonies on habitable planets and wiped completely all memory of their provenance for the purpose of observing the development of civilizations, but some unknown force toppled their hegemony before they could see their experiments come to fruition. The Psychocrats left behind primitive human colonies with no knowledge of their origins, and ancient artifacts that held knowledge of extraordinary technological achievements — invaluable bounty to the intrepid explorers who comb the galaxy in search of them.

Roane Hume has been selected by her uncle, one such explorer, to accompany him on an expedition to the planet Clio, where a seeded colony of humans has spread over thousands of years into several feudal kingdoms ruled by monarchs. Roane and her team are forbidden by interplanetary law to reveal themselves to the people of Clio, but Roane becomes swept up in the royal interests of the kingdom of Reveny when she intervenes to rescue a young girl being kidnapped, only to discover her to be the Princess Ludorica, heir to the throne. The princess is in a desperate search for the lost Ice Crown, a crown which supposedly holds mystical powers and is the only way to legitimize her rule, lest her kingdom fall to squabbling nobles and bandit lords. Despite Roane's oath to secrecy, she feels herself drawn to the Princess, and at every turn disregards her responsibility in order to help Ludorica restore her kingdom.

Norton continues to excel at intermingling elements of both sci-fi and high fantasy. The heady science fiction concepts introduced in the beginning — intergalactic treasure-hunters, technologically advanced weapons and survival gear, as well as a colony of brainwashed humans unwittingly transplanted onto another world in the service of a long-abandoned experiment — are vivid and imaginative. I especially enjoyed that the unfolding horror of a race realizing that their proud history and religion were the result of enslavement to technology indistinguishable from magic did not go understated.

But I also love an epic fantasy, and I do feel that Norton delivered with her courts and castles and enchanted crowns and a princess determined to save her people at any cost. The aesthetic of the story was reminiscent of a fairy-tale, with enough court intrigue and subterfuge to ensure that those fantasy elements did not feel hastily grafted onto a story about spaceships and astronauts, but rather that astronauts and spaceships had unintentionally landed in the middle of an epic. I would have thought that the magic of Clio turning out to be the lingering effects of a technology so advanced that it apparently did not even warrant explaining to the reader might disenchant the epic, but it had the opposite effect on me; high-tech science became enchanting in a way that very few hard sci-fi novels can achieve from meticulous technical explanation alone.

Lastly, the relationship between the two protagonists, Roane and Ludorica, was so unique to this sort of pulpy sci-fi that it can't go unmentioned. How sadly rare it is for an intelligent, resourceful, defiant leading duo to be two teenage girls. Their instant camaraderie was so strong that their duality, one an astronaut and one a princess, allowed each of them to step into the world of the other in a way that I feel contributed greatly to the seamless melding of the genres. It was a sweet moment for space-hardened Roane to know how it feels to wear a gown and have a lady-in-waiting, and after her endless ordeals Princess Ludorica absolutely deserved to get to shoot someone with a blaster.

Five stars out of five.

Recall Not Earth, by C.C. MacApp

The front cover of Recall Not Earth.  The title is written in yellow block capitals with red drop shadows.  Above the title, the book summary reads: The last survivors of mankind - fighting annihilation in a war between the galaxies.  The text is superimposed on a black sky with a series of planets or moons extending into the distance.  Below the title, a red spacecraft with many rods and circular attachments extending all around it sits on the surface of a planet, its lower half obscured by a cloud of dust.  A line of peaks appears in shadow behind it.  In front of the craft a group of people in white spacesuits with closed helmets is walking toward the viewer across a tan sandy expanse.
Cover art by Jerome Podwil

Recall Not Earth by C.C. MacApp was published in January, so I'm a little late to the party, but it intrigued me enough to want to include it this month. The people of Earth, in their hubris, decided to assert their interstellar superiority over the other races of their spiral arm in the Milky Way by picking an ill-advised fight with the Vulmoti Empire. Obviously, they lost.

The Vulmoti punished the earthlings by stamping out all life on Earth and leaving it an irradiated husk. The only living humans left were the cadre of spacemen led by Commodore John Brayson. But suddenly finding themselves the last survivors of their species, they scattered in despair across the galaxy to eke out a pathetic living as hired mercenaries for other alien races. Brayson himself retreated to the backwater planet Drongail to while away the rest of his life numbing himself with the highly addictive dron.

Brayson is coaxed out of his stupor and convinced to attempt one last mission when his old friend Bart Lange finds him to deliver news that seems too good to be true: that somewhere in the galaxy, a colony of living human women are in hiding. With this newfound glimmer of hope, Brayson and Lange reassemble their team and agree to hire themselves out to the leader of the Chelki, a race enslaved by the Vulmoti. The Omniarch of the Chelki promises Brayson knowledge of the location of the women in exchange for his help in the Chelki's struggle for freedom. Having nothing to lose, Brayson agrees to lead his men in battle one last time, all the while fighting the mind-addling effects of his drug addiction.

Going into this one I expected a sweeping space opera replete with different alien empires locked in battle for survival and dominance, and that's exactly what I got. Lots of spaceship dogfights, alien diplomacy, and pages upon pages of militaristic strategizing. I'll admit that last one is not my thing, but MacApp belabored the reasoning behind each maneuver and the minute differences between each imaginary weapons system so thoroughly that I have to commend the amount of thought that went into the details, even if it did make my head spin. Combine all that with the ever-present smaller human struggles like loneliness and addiction, and I think MacApp could have had enough material here to span a trilogy of novels.

The thing which most distinguished this book to me from others like it was the extent to which MacApp divorced himself entirely from the known laws of science, instead preferring to come up with laws of physics so profoundly unlike our own that I can only describe it as writing scientific fanfiction. Don't get me wrong, enough jargon and justification was given for his new laws of physics, such as the many pages dedicated to explaining how gravity is actually a force which repels matter, that in some places it felt as convincing as though I was reading a physics textbook dropped from some alternate dimension. I was fascinated by this brazen, meticulous rewriting of physics for little discernible reason. It’s a fun reminder to those of us who tend to get tangled up trying to understand how made-up technology fits into our understanding of science that it's not that serious, it's fiction and you can do whatever you want as much as you want to do it.

There were many parts of this book which did feel rushed, but that's unsurprising given how dense the story is and how much wonderful science nonsense we have to get through before the battles can commence and the damsels can be rescued. It was executed well, with almost no wasted space, and though all the militaristic babbling did hurt my brain a little, I'm going to give it…

Four stars.

A photo of Tonya R. Moore, a brown skinned woman with black hair, wearing a mondrian-styled dress in yellow, white, and black.
by Tonya R. Moore

Junk Day, by Arthur Sellings

The cover of Junk Day.  The word Junk is written in a bright blue psychedelic font with pale blue drop shadows.  The word Day is written smaller, in serifed capitals in the same shade of bright blue but no shadows.  The title is superimposed on a black and white image of the front window of a junk shop, where glass bottles, small statues, a baby doll, a trophy cup, and other objects are lined up haphazardly.
Cover art by Richard Weaver

Junk Day was my first encounter with the written works of Arthur Sellings. Published, thanks to the efforts of his widow, posthumously in 1970, following Sellings’ untimely death in 1968, there is some poignant irony in knowing the author’s final work portrays a world in ruins; the death of human civilization itself.

Junk Day begins with a man on a journey through the treacherous wilderness of post-apocalyptic London. At first, Douglas Bryan, a former painter, doesn’t seem to have a specific goal or destination in mind. He simply pushes forward, determined to defend himself from the grim realities of the violent hell-scape devoid of law, order, and morality the scorched earth has become.

When Bryan encounters a lone woman, the former nun-in-training, Vee, his initial reaction is suspicion. He cannot fathom that a woman could survive on her own following the collapse of human civilization, without a Man around to help her survive. Byran immediately shacks up with Vee. This relationship of convenience with Vee, who–it turns out– was formerly a man, leads to the pair setting off on a journey to find a more livable abode.

Homo-erotic tensions stir when Bryan brings Vee to his previous shelter where Eddie awaits the former painter’s return. While never said in so many words, one gets the distinct impression that Bryan’s relationship with the clingy , trauma-ridden younger man was more intimate than platonic. Though dismayed at having been replaced with Vee, Eddie swallows his anger, jealousy, and the last vestiges of his pride. He begs to join Bryan and Vee on their journey to find greener pastures. Bryan coldly rebuffs the desperate younger man, revealing the true callousness of his nature. Eddie gets left behind to spiral more deeply into murderous madness.

The protagonist, Douglas Bryan, is not likable. He is strangely dispassionate for a painter. Where are the high emotions, the romanticism, and thirst to pursue his craft? Where is his artistic passion, his sense of justice? He merely seems to go through the motions of being human and is far more concerned about the persona he is building up for himself than righteousness or caring about the fate of humanity.

The absence of growth in the main character is jarring. When Barney, a megalomaniac and dictator-in-the-making, attempts to engineer his own twisted version of society, Bryan pushes back, but his motivations seem more clinical than heroic. He refuses to bend to the machinations of the mysterious entities pulling the strings behind the scenes, but merely for the sake of being non-conformist. Junk Day ends with London gradually getting swallowed up by a new order, leaving the reader with more questions than answers. The ultimate fate of Douglas Bryan remains uncertain.

The faults in Bryan’s character may lead one to question Sellings’ skill in character development, but one can’t deny the possibility that this is deliberate. Douglas Bryan’s questionable character aside, Junk Day is a brilliantly written book; one I will happily revisit. Sellings was clearly a master of story craft. The images he painted of the dystopian remnants of civilization are vivid and arresting. It has made me quite eager to read his earlier works.

Five out of five stars.

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


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Book, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[April 6, 1970] Uncovered (May 1970 Amazing)

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Apollo 13 coverage starts tonight and goes on for the next two weeks!  Don't miss a minute.  Check local listings for broadcast times.

A black-and-white photo portrait of John Boston. He is a clean-shaven white man with close-cropped brown hair. He wears glasses, a jacket, shirt, and tie, and is looking at the camera with a neutral expression.
by John Boston

Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

The May Amazing presents a new face to the world.  That is, the cover was actually painted for the magazine, as opposed to being recycled from the German Perry Rhodan.  It’s not by one of the new artists editor White was talking up in the last issue, but rather by John Pederson, Jr., who has been doing covers on and off for the SF magazines since the late 1950s.  Ditching the second-hand Europeans is a step forward in itself, though this particular cover is not much improvement: a slightly stylized picture of a guy sitting in a spacesuit on a flying chair with a disgruntled expression on his face, against an improbable astronomical background.

Cover of May 1970 issue of Amazing magazine, featuring a painting of what appears to be a spaceship (made for maneuvering within an atmosphere a la a contemporary jet plane) flying away from a pair of planets.  Overlaid over that space scene, there is a picture of an aging white man in a space-suit seated in what appears to be a command chair with lap controls.
by John Pederson, Jr.

But it is an interesting development for a couple of reasons.  First, in the letter column, White goes into more detail than previously about the European connection, in response to a question about why the covers are not attributed.  White says: “The situation is this: an agency known as Three Lions has been marketing transparencies of covers from Italian and German sf magazines and has sold them to a variety of book and magazine publishers in this country, including ourselves.  These transparencies were unsigned.  One of our competitors credited its reprint covers to ‘Three Lions;’ we felt that was less than no credit at all.  Therefore, unless the artist’s signature was visible, we omitted the contents-page credit.  As of this issue, however, Amazing returns to the use of original cover paintings by known U.S. artists.”

So much, then, for Johnny Bruck, and a hat tip to the diligent investigators who have identified all his uncredited reprint covers as they were published.  In addition to Pederson, White says, he’s obtained covers from Jeff Jones and Gray Morrow, and in fact a Jones cover is already on last month’s Fantastic.  Further: “I might add that, beginning with our last issue, the art direction, typography and graphics for the covers of both magazines has been by yours truly.” So White has pried one more aspect of control of the magazine from the grip of Sol Cohen, presumably all to the good, though the visible effect to date is limited.

The editorial this issue is a long response to a letter about the state of SF magazines, from a reader who gets a number of things wrong.  White sets her straight, describing at length the economic and other constraints of publishing SF magazines, though little of what he says would be a surprise to the sophisticated readership of the Journey.  He also notes that Alan Shaw will be the new Assistant Editor and will take over the proofreading, and not a moment too soon.  White has acknowledged that spelling is not his long suit and regularly proves it, e.g. by beginning a story blurb “Scenerio for Destruction.”

In this issue’s book reviews, the chief bloodletter is Alexei Panshin, who says of Robert Silverberg’s three-novella anthology of stories on a theme set by Arthur C. Clarke that “there is no reason why the . . . book should be so mediocre.” He says Silverberg’s own story is “cheap science fiction,” while Roger Zelazny’s is “merely cheap.” James Blish’s entry, though, “is something else and something better”—but Panshin then says because it’s only novella length, it “carries the joke out to thinness but does not allow true in-depth examinations” of character and motive.  A few pages later, he says of the Wollheim and Carr World’s Best Science Fiction 1969, “This is not a book that I would recommend to the uncommitted.” But the problem is not with the editors.  “The trouble is that the science fiction short story is the limited corner of an extremely large field.  It is an almost inherently trivial form used for forty years for the illustrations of moralities, for the drawing of fine scientific distinctions, and for the building of psionic sandcastles.  There simply seems to be no room left for much beyond restatement or a trivial refinement of the already trivial.” The fault is not in the editors but the whole enterprise!  I guess everyone should quit and go home.

Less flamboyantly, Greg Benford offers measured praise for Bob Shaw’s The Palace of Eternity, Richard Lupoff gives less of the same to Dave van Arnam’s Starmind, Richard Delap provides a very mixed review to Burt Cole’s The Funco Files, and Lupoff is about as nice as possible to a 67-page vanity press book authored by a high school student.

By Furies Possessed (Part 2 of 2), by Ted White

The main event here is the conclusion of editor White’s serial By Furies Possessed, which starts out like a standard Heinlein-flavored SF novel (“It was a routine run.  We made liftoff at 03:00 hours and were down on the Moon three meals and two naps later.  I always slept well in freefall.”).  But then it turns into another flavor of Heinlein, or two: The Puppet Masters vs. Stranger in a Strange Land.  Which will win?  Will everyone grok?  Or will it be “Death and Destruction!,” as Heinlein so elegantly put it in The Puppet Masters?

The first-person narrator Dameron, field investigator at the Bureau of Non-Terran Affairs (and rather far down in the hierarchy), is on the Moon for the arrival of the Longhaul II, returning from the colony of Farhome, which has been isolated for generations.  He’s to meet Bjonn, the Emissary from Farhome, and show him around on Earth. 

Bjonn is a weirdly impressive character—tall, with white-blond hair, burnished walnut skin, pale blue eyes.  When he shakes hands with Dameron, “[t]he contact was electrical.” Bjonn hangs on to his hand and looks into his eyes.  Dameron is flustered.  Later: “his movements had a cat-like grace. . . . There was something more there than simple suppleness—he had a body-awareness, a total knowledge of where every part of his body was in relation to his immediate environment.” Dameron mentions the fact that Bjonn’s friends and family will all be 30 years older when he returns, and he remarks, strangely and without explanation: “True.  And yet, I am the Emissary.  I could not have stopped myself from coming here, even had I wished.”

At this point, plausibility problems begin to emerge.  When they arrive on Earth, “a Bureau pod was waiting” for them—but no higher-ranking welcoming dignitaries, functionaries, or spies.  Dameron takes Bjonn to his hotel suite, and Bjonn suggests ordering up room service for two.  “I felt the blood leave my face, and my limbs went watery.  I all but collapsed into a handy chair. . . .” It seems that on Earth nowadays, as Dameron puts it, “The act of food-partaking, like its twin and consequent act, is man’s most jealously guarded privacy.  It is an unbroachable intimacy.  I shall say no more.  It is not a subject I can or care to discuss.” We later learn that eating and “its twin and consequent act” are actually done together, sucking pureed food through a tube while sitting on a glorified toilet seat.

Now this is happening in a seemingly ordinary default American-style mid-future, though it’s called “NorthAm” and not the U.S. of A.  The population has grown and sprawled; transportation is faster and easier (Dameron commutes to his job in Megayork from Rutland, Vermont, where he can still see trees out the window of his high-rise).  There are a few flamboyant details from the playbook, such as women going bare-breasted in public.  But the eating taboo?  How did we get there from here?  There’s not a clue.  Religious movement?  One is mentioned, but has nothing to do with alimentation.  Cataclysm after which civilization had to be rebuilt?  Nope.

But onward.  Dameron has fled to his office, where he gets a call from his boss Tucker telling him that Bjonn is out on the town.  Dameron suggests his work buddy Dian come with him, and they find Bjonn easily because he’s had a surveillance device planted covertly under his skin.  Dameron shortly departs leaving Dian with Bjonn.  Later he learns Bjonn also propositioned her for a meal in order to share a “customary ritual” with her.  Dameron suggests to her that maybe she should see Bjonn again and consider accepting his offer.  She’s repelled, but she’s thinking about it.  Later, she calls and asks Dameron to come to Bjonn’s room.  When he gets there:

“Something had happened.
“Dian was changed.
“ ‘It’s so marvelous, Tad—so wonderful,’ she said.  ‘We want to share it with you.’ ”

It’s a meal she wants to share, of course, and Dameron flees again, throwing up on his shoes in the elevator.  And he goes home without reporting to anyone.

Black and white halftone illustration of a black-haired white woman staring intently at the viewer, reaching to offer a bowl whose contents splash out sprays of pseudopods.  In the foreground, a blond-haired white man reacts with fear and horror, recoiling at the prospective meal
by Gray Morrow

So let’s review the bidding.  Earth establishes contact with a lost colony after generations, and brings back an emissary who acts and talks in a strange and overbearing manner.  When he arrives, he is met and escorted to Earth by a single low-level government agent, who takes him to a hotel room and leaves him there.  There’s no other escort, protection, or surveillance other than his subcutaneous tracer, and there are no meetings or ceremonies planned or conducted for him with any higher-level officials.  Bjonn offends his contact with an offer that violates this society’s most fundamental taboo, which, as already noted, is not explained at all.  This can’t have been an ignorant mistake since (as Dameron notes) Bjonn has been on a spaceship with a crew from Earth on a several-month voyage to Earth, but there’s apparently been no report to Dameron’s agency of his not knowing of the taboo or seeking to breach it.  Dameron's superior now knows about this (though not yet about the last encounter with Bjonn and Dian) and hasn’t put on any greater security or surveillance, and as far as we know hasn’t reported it up the chain of command (his position is not stated but it’s clearly middle management at best, and we don’t see anyone higher up). 

This is some pretty major and implausible contrivance, the sort that might ordinarily warrant throwing the book across the room.  But White is a smoothly readable writer, so disbelief or exasperation gives way to wanting to see what happens next.  Which is: Dameron’s supervisor Tucker wakes him up in the morning demanding to know what happened to Dian.  He tells Tucker that she’s gone over to Bjonn—has shared a meal at his suggestion and has become “alien.” Tucker is not pleased, especially since Dian and Bjonn have vanished and Bjonn has removed his tracker.

Turns out, they’ve split for the Coast.  Dameron gives chase, doesn’t find them, gets called back East, and goes back to his routine work.  So no one, it appears, is paying attention to the mystery and potential menace of a weird alien with the power to transform human personality running around loose.  This changes only when Dameron attends a decadent high-society party which features (in addition to much corporeal sex ‘n drugs) erotic 3-D projections, one of which features Bjonn and Dian.

So, back on the trail!  Dameron gets on his infomat (seems like a miniature computer with a radio or telephone connection) and learns easily that Bjonn and Dian are still in California, just north of Bay Complex, and have set up a religion called the Brotherhood of Life, which offers the Sacrament of Life.  Dameron goes out and visits them, gets nothing but doubletalk as he hears it, and leaves, grabbing a girl named Lora from the lawn and taking her forcibly back to the local Bureau office for a biological examination.

Now somebody pays attention.  Dameron and Tucker are called to Geneva where they are informed that Lora's examination showed that she has been invaded by an alien parasite which has “created a second nervous system, directly parallel to her own.” So what are they going to do about it?  “Religious freedom is always a touchy issue.  Instead, we want you, Agent Dameron, to join his Church.”

Here I will stop with the plot synopsis, and say only that Agent Dameron returns to carry out his mission in an atmosphere of growing paranoia, and ultimately essays a far-fetched, long-odds, last-ditch plan to save humanity—though, of course, things don’t go as planned, nor are they as they seem.

But one more thing.  Along the way, White has sown clues that Dameron, though useful for his intuitive talent at making sense of fragmentary information, is—and is regarded as—a bit flaky and unreliable, possibly related to his upbringing (father dead, mother relinquished him to a “den”—a futuristic orphanage, not much better than present and past literary orphanages).  Just before he’s summoned to Geneva, he makes an appointment with a psychiatrist—his mother.  I have mixed feelings about how successful White is in developing the motif of Dameron’s psychological issues and how they affect his perceptions and actions (the Furies of the title have more than one referent). But it’s an interesting effort to wrap around the frame of an otherwise conventional SF novel.

So—an ambitious but flawed attempt to upgrade yer basic mid-level SF novel, whose flaws are smoothed over by capable writing.  Nice try.  Three and a half stars. 

As I mentioned last issue, the protagonist’s name is a slight variation on that of a distinguished jazz composer and musician.  The novel also contains a fair amount of “Tuckerization,” the practice initiated by Wilson (Bob) Tucker of using names from the SF community in SF writing—starting of course with Dameron’s boss, Tucker.  More elaborately, when Dameron goes looking for the roommate of disappeared Dian Knight, the names over the doorbell are “Knight—Carr.” The very well known fan Terry Carr, now an editor at Ace Books as well as author of a story in this issue, was once married to a woman named Miriam, who later became Miriam Knight.  When we see Ms. Carr’s full name, it’s Terri Carr.  There’s more: e.g., reference to the old Benford place, and later to Benford's son Jim (Greg and Jim Benford are brothers).  Exercise for the reader: Bjonn.

The Balance, by Terry Carr

Crosshatched ink title illustration for 'The Balance', featuring a dawn scene with a bare-chested white woman emerges from the peak of a mountain on the left, scaled as though wearing it as a skirt.  She looks away from the sun to lower right, but her left arm is outstretched, hand raised, holding the string of a pendulum which stretches all the way to the ground.  In the starry sky above her head, a saucer-shaped ship holds station.
by Michael William Kaluta

And here is the real Terry Carr himself, whose story The Balance displays a kind of schematic cleverness entirely too characteristic of the SF magazines.  Alien planet has two intelligent species, and the only thing they can eat is each other, so they have a cooperative relationship in which each hunts and eats the other only after their respective breeding seasons to avoid exterminating one and thereby starving the other.  They call this way of life the balance.  But there’s now a substantial human population on the planet, and some of them, including the protagonist, are trading knives and guns, which threaten to make the hunting and killing all the more efficient.  How to preserve the balance then?  There's only one logical response.  The protagonist gets a hint from a human tourist he’s dating and hastily leaves the planet, trying to warn “the local Federation office” but without much success.  A reluctant three stars—well turned, but entirely too formulaic.

Blood of Tyrants, by Ben Bova

Ben Bova’s Blood of Tyrants is presumably a satirical allusion to Thomas Jefferson’s pronouncement that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Boffins develop a program to take urban gang leaders off the street, hook them up to teaching machines so they can learn to read competently, instruct them in civic values, and prep them to go back into their communities and provide a more constructive sort of leadership.  It doesn’t quite work out that way, though the program certainly succeeds in making some of its subjects more effective leaders.

Black and white cartoon illustration of the door of a (apparently open) tobacconist's shop, liberally plastered with advertisements reading 'Canada is Dry' and 'Baby Ruth/Outasite', and a cigarette advertisement suggesting 'Be as ahead today, ZIF spring zepher'.
by Michael Hinge

This is essentially a Christopher Anvil-style reactionary fable, except competently written.  Bova presents it in movie-treatment form: “STILL PHOTO . . . Fast montage of scenes . . . Establishing shots. . . .,” etc. etc.  My first reaction was “Oh no, another casualty of Stand On Zanzibar,” but he makes the technique work, and it permits him to cut out a lot of connective tissue in service of a crisp narrative.  Three stars and a hat tip. 

Nobody Lives on Burton Street, by Greg Benford

Greg Benford’s Nobody Lives on Burton Street is another in the vein of Blood of Tyrants, but it suffers from the comparison.  The main characters are police supervisors who manage Burton Street, which is a sort of mock-up, like a Hollywood set, for people to riot in.  So who’s rioting today?  “The best guess—and that’s all you ever get, friends, is a guess—was a lot of Psych Disorders and Race Prejudice.  There was a fairly high number of Unemployeds, too.  We’re getting more and more Unemployeds in the city now, and they’re hard for the Force to deal with.  Usually mad enough to spit.  Smash up everything.”

Black and white line & wash drawing of two armored humanoid figures, labeled '5' and '7', with cannister backpacks sprouting antennae, carrying what appear to be rifles
by Jeff Jones

So as the rioters pour down the street, our heroes send in the AnCops, and later firefighters, who are all androids, and whom the rioters are allowed to abuse without limit, and after they all mix it up for a while, the rioters move on and the reclaim crew comes in to clean things up.

The idea seems to be that people who engage in disorderly protest are just angry in general, and all you have to do is provide a fake outlet for their anger and they’ll calm down until the next round.  There is a sort of contemptuous depersonalization here—the rioters are reduced to capitalized categories—which contrasts poorly with Bova’s story, cynical as it is.  There, at least, the bad guys are recognizable human beings.  There’s also another theme lurking here: apparently there’s a means for the more respectable elements like the police characters to manage their own anger and frustration; whether it’s chemical, psychosurgical, or other is never made clear.  Anyway, two stars.

A Skip in Time, by Robert E. Toomey

Black and white illustration with concentric layout, where the center depicts a humanoid working at some room-sized machine, where the expanding rings are capped with XII, suggesting a sequence of midnights, expanding out to the outer rings where pterosaurs fly in clouded skies
by Michael William Kaluta

Robert E. Toomey’s A Skip in Time is the kind of jokey and trivial story that has saved the back pages of SF magazines from blankness since Gernsback started receiving manuscripts.  Protagonist is drinking in a bar when there’s a commotion outside: a brontosaur is running loose and wrecking things.  He meets a guy on the street who explains he did it with his time displacer.  He invites protagonist to come see the time displacer.  After some more drinking, protagonist agrees to go back in time and try to scare away the brontosaur so it won’t be (or won’t have been) picked up by the time displacer.  Etc., with more drinking.  I’ve been tired of this kind of stuff for years, but this one is slickly done.  Three stars for competence.  This is Toomey’s third professionally published story.

Saturday’s Child, by Bill Warren

Saturday’s Child, by Bill Warren, is a cliched tear-jerker.  It’s the one about the old space dog who wants nothing more than to blast off again, but he's too old and sick.  In this variation, 600-plus-year-old Captain Dorn, and his telepathic hunterbeast (who adopted Dorn on some planet long ago) are rusticating on an unnamed and barely inhabited planet when an “earnest young man in Space Force black” informs him that the sun’s going nova, time to go, and by the way we’ve already packed up your possessions and taken them to the ship.  Dorn of course is having none of it, but they kill the hunterbeast and bundle Dorn up and the takeoff kills him, but not before he forgives them all and gets a final look out the window into space.  Cue the violins.  Well, it’s competently written.  Two stars.

Master of Telepathy, by Eando Binder

Black and white two-page spread for Master of Telepathy featuring illustrations of a pair of scientists, one man working over a complex assortment of electromechanical devices and glassware, with the other looking up in astonishment, hands poised over their instruments.
by Robert Fuqua

This issue’s Famous Amazing Classic is Master of Telepathy, by Eando Binder, from the December 1938 Amazing.  Professor Oberton, a psychologist, is studying extrasensory perception, having picked up quickly on the 1934 researches of Prof. J.B. Rhine, who is given due credit in the text and a footnote.  Young and shabby Warren Tearle shows up because he needs the five dollars that Oberton is paying to anyone who makes a high score on his tests.  Tearle aces them and, now better paid, becomes a daily fixture in Oberton’s lab, rapidly developing his powers not only of telepathy but also of clairvoyance and command.  Or, as he puts it to Darce, the professor’s beautiful assistant (you knew that was coming):

“I have reached the third level of psychic perception!  I now have practically unlimited clairvoyance and telepathy.  It was like having dawn come, after the dark night.  Professor Oberton had some inkling of what it would mean, but he had no idea of how much power it gives.  I can read thoughts, Darce, as easy as pie.  But more than that, I can give commands that must be obeyed! . . .
“My mind is not in direct contact with what the professor called the main field of the psychic world.  It is a sort of crossroads of all thoughts, all ideas, all minds, all things!  I can see and hear what I wish.  But more, I can force my will where I wish, carried by the tremendous power of the third level!”

So the world is at the mercy of an omnipotent megalomaniac!  But Professor Oberton figures out a way to use his own invincible powers against him, and the world is saved until the next issue.

This is actually a pretty well-written and developed story in its antiquated way, probably well above average for its time (well, maybe better five or six years earlier).  For ours . . . three stars, generously.

Where Are They?, by Greg Benford and David Book

Greg Benford and David Book contribute another “Science in Science Fiction” column, this one titled Where Are They?—Enrico Fermi’s famous question about intelligent extraterrestrials. They start by knocking off the notion that we are extraterrestrials, survivors of an ancient shipwreck or emergency landing.  Next, they point out that interstellar exploration would be fabulously expensive and extraordinarily boring, since faster-than-light travel is not in the cards or the equations.  Why bother?  And why keep at it after you’ve found a few other solar systems?  Colonization?  Forget it; if that were realistic, it would already have happened.  Exploitation of raw materials?  Too expensive.  Knowledge and ideas?  Now we’re talking.  Send probes, not space travellers, and if anybody’s there, try to open communications.  But this assumes the aliens are like us; if they are sea dwellers, would they look on land?  And what about the time scale?  If there’s life, but not usefully intelligent life, probes could wait and listen for radio signals.  Etc.  That’s a little over half the length of this dense and fertile run-through of possibilities, imaginative and thorough if long on speculation.  Four stars.

Summing Up

The issue is not bad, not great, but then what is among the current SF mags?  Even if there’s nothing here for the ages, the news about White’s progress in getting control over the magazine’s visual presentation is encouraging.

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


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

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

To Venus!  To Venus!, by David Grinnell

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

Warning: the latest Ace Double contains Communist propaganda!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Jester at Scar, by E. C. Tubb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three and a half stars.

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

Hell's Gate, by Dean Koontz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 stars

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

Out of Their Minds, by Clifford D. Simak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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[March 6, 1970] The Waters of Centaurus, And Chaos Died, and High Sorcery

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As luck would have it, the first three novels to be reviewed this month were all by women!  They all have something else in common—they each have both merits and demerits that sort of cancel out…neither Brown, Russ, nor Norton quite hit it out of the park this time at bat.

photo of a dark-haired woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

In Memoriam

An unavoidable note of sadness fills this review of a newly published novel. The author died of lymphoma in 1967, at the very young age of 41. With that in mind, let's try to take an objective look at her final novel.

The Waters of Centaurus, by Rosel George Brown

A book cover, primarily black and white. The image suggests a twisted, futuristic, mechanical face, with odd orange-pink lips. The letters of the title and author are in white, and somewhat mechanical in shape as well.
Cover art by Margo Herr

This is a direct sequel to Sibyl Sue Blue. My esteemed colleague Janice L. Newman gave that novel a glowing review. In fact, our own Journey Press saw fit to reprint it in a handsome new format.

A book cover, showing a dark-haired woman in a blue cocktail dress with matching gloves, holding a cigar. There is a futuristic city behind her. The title reads
Order a copy today!

Sibyl Sue Blue is back. She's a forty-year-old police detective and a widow with a teenage daughter. She's fond of cigars, gin, fancy clothes, and attractive men.

After her previous adventure, she's on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Familiarity with the first novel would help get the reader oriented, but let me try to sum up the situation quickly.

The planet is inhabited by at least three varieties of humanoids. Those dwelling on the main continent can't mate with humans, and don't play much of a role in the plot. The folks living on an island are semi-aquatic, can mate with humans, and are the main focus of the book. The third kind, from a northern continent, supplies our story's antagonist.

Sibyl Sue Blue and her daughter are on the planet as part of a working vacation, enjoying the beach while acting as ambassadors from Earth. Sibyl is attacked by somebody and nearly drowns, but manages to fight off the bad guy handily. That's bad enough, but things get worse when her daughter, in a sort of trance, walks off into the ocean. What's going on?

Let's try to make a complex plot, a lot of which depends on what happened in the first novel, simpler. The antagonist, acting like a James Bond villain, plans to flood the planet by melting the ice caps. He's got a secret underwater lair, as well as a substance that turns air-breathers into water-breathers.

There are several other characters involved, and plenty of plot twists. Unlike the first novel, this one doesn't seem to have much in the way of social commentary. It somehow manages to be action-packed while also spending quite a bit of time describing Sibyl's wardrobe. There's a bit too much drinking of gin and smoking of cigars for my taste.

The antagonist has a very weird love/hate feeling for human women. Sibyl and he somehow manage to be lovers while also trying to kill each other. The speculative biology at the heart of the plot isn't much more plausible than this odd relationship.

Overall, I'd say this is a readable but forgettable potboiler. It's nice to have a middle-aged mother as the heroic protagonist, anyway.

Three stars.

BW photo of Jason Sacks. He's a white man, with short light hair, rectangular glasses, and headphones.
by Jason Sacks

And Chaos Died, by Joanna Russ

Two months ago, I reviewed one of the worst books I’ve ever covered in this column: Taurus Four by the absolutely deplorable Rena Vale. This month I review the second novel by promising newcomer Joanna Russ. In some ways And Chaos Died and Taurus Four have nothing in common. In other ways these books have a huge amount of thematic overlap.

I wish I could say Russ’s novel is completely successful. She’s clearly ambitious. And Chaos Died is a novel of heady ideas and language. Russ plays in fascinating ways with internal and external perspectives, delivering a novel of alternating views and alien attitudes. But I feel like she simply fails to reach the heady levels she's aiming for with this novel.

And Chaos Died and Taurus Four both have long sequences which take place on strange alien worlds. On those worlds, beings live in primitive states. Both worlds are Edenic, full of civilizations who are one with the land they live in. The locals in both novels are naked and unashamed, in a world of boundless plenty on a fertile plain. Vale took that setup and revealed her hatred for “primitive” society. Russ takes that setup and delivers something complex and uncanny.


Cover by Diane and Leo Dillon

See, the locals on the planet “speak” telepathically and have psionic ability. Children can speed up or slow down their aging:

"I'm nine," she went on pedantically, "but actually I'm fifteen. I've slowed myself down. That's called 'dragging your feet.' Mother keeps telling me 'Evniki, don't drag your feet,' but catch me hurrying into it!"

There’s playfulness about the ideas of language:

"By the way," she said in a low voice, "I know what it means to cannibalize; it means to eat something. I heard about that." She seemed to hesitate in the half-dark.

But tell me, please," she said, "what does it mean exactly—radio?"

And Russ gives us beautiful literary-minded ideas about perception and peace and communications which abound in this book – at least until Jai returns to an overpopulated, warlike Earth. A shift in global temperatures and climates has devastated our planet; wars and starvation and hatred have made our planet a dystopia. And Jai has been so changed by his experiences on the alien planet that he finally is able to see things on Earth as they really are.

I loved the wildly imaginative approach to this book. The writing here is elliptical and dense. The prose rewards slow reading and attention to detail, but I was never lost in the book. In fact, I often find myself swept away by its literacy and ambitions. At times Russ reads like a less academic, more playful Ursula LeGuin.

A BW photograph of Russ. She is a slim, raw-boned woman, sitting in a theater seat and wearing a velvet sweater.Joanna Russ

Russ has deeply inventive ways of putting readers in the mind of psychic people of all ages as well as the ordinary people who have to interact with the natives. The book deserves high marks for the sequences on the alien planet, though I found her Earth-bound scenes a bit cliched.

But the book has another flaw: its treatment of homosexuality.

Our lead character is named Jai Vedh, and very early in the novel Jai proclaims himself to be a homosexual. But partway through And Chaos Died, Jai falls into a relationship with a woman. We are led to believe Jai’s homosexuality is “cured” with that relationship, and he himself even declares his happiness in a “straight” lifestyle.

I know we live in a world in which the American Psychological Association still declares “gayness” as a mental illness. But I still find it unthinkable that an intelligent and well-spoken woman like Joanna Russ would ally herself with the idea that homosexuality can – or even should – be “cured”. Love is love, whether between genders or in the same gender, and I was shocked Russ has her lead character change his whole approach to intimacy so quickly.

[I had a similar issue when I reviewed an excerpt of the novel, published as a stand-alone story earlier this year. (ed.)]

I would expect that approach from a Rena Vale, but not from a Joanna Russ. It’s jarring to see, and it really hurt my opinion of the novel.

There’s really nothing wrong with falling short when taking on heady ambitions. Joanna Russ is clearly a talented writer with many ideas. She falls squarely in the cohort of new wave sf authors who are elevating science fiction to new levels and confronting our new decade with a revolution. And Chaos Died aims to feel revolutionary. I feel it’s merely evolutionary.

3 stars.

A photo portrait of Winona Menezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

High Sorcery, by Andre Norton

High Sorcery is an anthology featuring three short stories and two novelettes from Andre Norton. I had a good time with it, though it's not obvious to me why these particular stories were chosen, as any thread linking them together feels no stronger than that of any other in Norton’s body of work, which does have better to offer. Still, it felt like a pretty decent cross-section of her work, and her skill as a writer and storyteller is on full display.

A faintly Frazetta-like cover, showing a man in a winged helmet pulling out a sword. He is facing a black-haired woman in a clinging, semi-transparent white dress. Large letters first say
by Gray Morrow

"Wizard’s World" opens on a world ravaged by nuclear war, scattered with mutants who have been subjugated and enslaved for the psychic abilities they developed in the aftermath. Craike is one such mutant, and we find him fleeing a mob wishing to hunt and kill him for his abilities. Unexpectedly, he falls through a rift between worlds and awakes in a land much unlike his own, less technologically advanced and more akin to the days of Medieval Europe. He discovers a man and woman being persecuted for the magical psionic powers they were born with, much like his own, and feels compelled to help them out of an affinity for the hunted.

This story – its premise, its characters, its plot and setting – feel very much at home in a Norton anthology. The dissonant combination of a post-nuclear apocalypse and an Old World fairytale landscape is very characteristic of her tendency to combine genre cliches or buck them altogether, and the equitable inclusion of women and characters of color is still unfortunately rare enough to be notable. I can’t fault this story on any technicalities. Rather, I simply felt that it didn’t quite live up to what we are now well aware the author is capable of.

Beyond our main character, who is given the moral high ground to an extent verging on gratuity, I didn’t feel that any other characters were fleshed out enough to make me properly care about them. Norton has a flair for slowly revealing information to the reader as it is discovered by the protagonist in a way that normally builds excellent suspense, but here I found it disorienting. I don’t even think I properly knew what was going on until far too late in the story, and the female main character’s skittishness toward the Craike meant that I effectively knew too little about her to form an attachment until the end. The ending itself was cut tantalizingly short just as things were happening that I could actually be bothered to care about.

"Wizard’s World" feels like an unfinished draft of a story that could have been excellent, but was forgotten by its author before she could add embellishment enough to distinguish it from any other second-rate fantasy pulp. Sorry, but just two out of five stars for this one.

[David reviewed the tale when it came out a couple of years ago in IF—he was not overly enamored, either (ed.)]

Fortunately, its only up from here.

"Through the Needle’s Eye" is a charming little short story about a young girl named Ernestine, crippled by polio and longing for connection with her able-bodied peers. She meets an older woman named Miss Ruthevan and is struck by her stately beauty, as well as the handicap they both share. Miss Ruthevan has a gift for creating otherworldly masterpieces with embroidery, and takes Ernestine under her wing to teach her the art. But under her tutelage, Ernestine begins to discover that Miss Ruthevan’s talent, passed down through generations of women, comes at a magical cost.

I love bite-sized stories like this; it takes a skilled storyteller to write one in a way that feels satisfying, but still trusts the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps. The portrayal of disability felt sympathetic without being pitiful. Miss Ruthevan is the type of scorned woman-turned-unsettlingly powerful witch that I love and appreciate. I also love to see a story making use of the underappreciated beauty of the fiber arts. It’s short, but it excels at what it sets out to do, so it's five stars from me. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head for days.

"By a Hair" (originally published July 1958, in Phantom) is another short one. This one concerns a small Balkan village struggling to rebuild and defend itself after being plundered by Nazis. The once-lovely Countess Ana was taken to an extermination camp and now returns maimed beyond recognition. She chooses to devote her now-reclusive life to midwifery and the supernatural arts in service of her small village. Meanwhile, the incomparably beautiful Dagmar has chosen to use her dangerous allure to scheme and climb her way to security. She requests that Ana use her occult powers in service of a treacherous gamble, and receives her desire at a tragically ironic price.

This story left less to the imagination, but was no less effective. Though both women were positioned as diametrically opposed foils of each other, I still found both of their motives perfectly understandable given the desperation of their war-ravaged lives. I could not bring myself to condemn Dagmar for her desire for self-preservation, and that made the ending of this story as bleak as its setting. Of course, it’s also possible that I may have a blind spot in my moral code for beautiful scheming women in a world that leaves them few options. Either way, four stars.

"Ully the Piper" is the final short story in this anthology. In the sleepy, idyllic village of Coomb Brackett, young Ully longs for a life of normalcy after a fall in his childhood rendered him paralyzed. One day he discovers a beautiful flute, and his time spent in the tranquility of nature inspires him to become a talented piper. He wishes to share his gift with the other villagers, until the town bully Matt antagonizes him by taking his flute and leaving him lost in the forest. But Ully’s musical skill did not go unnoticed by the ancient fae who called the forest their home long before it was Coomb Bracket, and it is by their favor that Ully receives his heart’s desire and rises above Matt’s torment.

This one feels like a true fairy tale in its simplicity. Its uncomplicated morals and expected ending did nothing to detract from its beauty. The fae were as mischievous and mysterious and beguiling as they are in all the best fairy stories. There isn’t much for me to say about this one, other than that it feels like the sort of enchanting bedtime story that was read to you as a child, the kind that echoes in the back of your mind when you find yourself wandering through nature alone on moonless nights. Four stars.

"Toys of Tamisan" is the longer of the two novellas, which thankfully left enough room to develop the scenery. Tamisan is a skilled “dreamer,” an occupation inhabited by those who possess the skill to create vivid imaginary worlds and share them with their clientele via a psychic link. She is hired to create engaging dreams for the entertainment of the wealthy Lord Starrex and his cousin Kas, but when she attempts to build a dream world that mirrors an alternate history of their own something goes horribly wrong. She loses control of the world she has created, and is stuck within it and left to devise a way out of her own dream.

The premise of this story certainly appealed to me. I felt that the idea of a dreamer effectively enslaved to create beautiful dreams for a wealthy lord was a poignant distillation of the way that employing artisans to use their creativity in service of creating capital for a wealthy ruling class demeans human creativity as a whole. Other than that though, the story did drag along a little slowly, and after a while I found myself losing track of the plot in a way that made me care even less. This was made even worse by the fact that the ending failed to tie up several loose ends, which made me feel a little silly for even trying to follow.

What did stand out to me, however, was how well-crafted the dialogue was. I think that Norton is uniquely good at writing incisive dialogue, and this was on display in a way that made me look forward to the next line that was about to be said, regardless of where it was about to take the story. It was impressive how economically Norton uses short lines to precisely convey ideas, tone, and mood. It was enough to keep me reminded that Norton is a master of her craft regardless of how boring this story was, and for me that’s enough to elevate the story to a three out of five [Which is also what David gave it when it came out in the May 1969 IF (ed.)]

That puts us at 3.4 stars for the collection, with the two non-reprints being some of the strongest work.  It's probably worth 60 cents, even if it's not the best Norton can produce.

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


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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 18, 1970] Time Trap, This Perfect Day, Whisper from the Stars, and The Incredible Tide

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[We've saved the best for last this month—one of these books is sure to be a pick for the Galactic Stars.  Read on about this remarkable quartet of science fiction tales…]

BW photo of Jason Sacks. He's a white man, with short light hair, rectangular glasses, and headphones.
by Jason Sacks

Time Trap, by Keith Laumer

Sometimes a back cover blurb sells a book. “ABE LINCOLN IN AFRICA?” the cover reads in breathless bold sans-serif type. “He was seen – and photographed – in a Tunisian bazaar.” Hooked yet? How about the mention on the cover of “an ancient Spanish galleon, fully crewed with ancient Spaniards, was taken in tow off Tampa by the Coast Guard…”

Yeah, you probably thought, take my 75¢ plus tax, because that’s a book I have to read. Especially if it’s scribed by the always delightful Keith Laumer, he of the wildly satirical Retief series. At the very least, Time Trap has to be readable, right?

Well, yes, Time Trap is readable, very much so in fact. I flew through its 143 pages in near lightspeed. But there’s just no there there. Time Trap is like a Big Mac: enjoyable at the time but utterly devoid of any nutrition.

Laumer’s latest is fun, sure, but maybe it’s too much fun. Because the novel is just too silly, too whimsical, too full of absurd wordplay and pointless tangents and the sense that Laumer was scripting little bits of this story between partying with friends and warming up for his next, more serious novel.

A BERKLEY SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL KEITH LAUMER author of the 'Rebel
cover by Richard Powers

You know those kind of classic Twilight Zone episodes where a character leaves a place to go on a journey, only to end up at the same place they left? Laumer starts Time Trap with a scene similar to that, and I was initially intrigued. My receptors came up, the same way they do when I flick on channel 11 at 6:30 and spend some time with ol’ Rod. But Serling always gives us a twist in the tail that lays a moral lesson on us, gives us something to think about. Laumer, on the other hand, just never really builds on the idea time loop.

Instead the book turns its focus on a different guy, Roger Tyson. His crappy car breaks down on the side of a dark country road on a wretched, rainy night. When a motorist, impossibly, happens to drive down the remote road, Tyson wildly waves his hands to beckon them to stop. The driver turns out to be a girl riding alone on a powerful motorcycle. But, oh no, the cycle crashes into a heap of destruction on the side of the road. The girl is dead… but with her last words, she passes an earpiece over to Tyson.

And there his adventure begins.

It’s a wild and wooly adventure as Tyson and his pals (including the girl, Q’nell, who’s not actually dead but kind of is actually dead– it’s complicated) journey from the deep past of Earth to the far future, all over the world, dodging dinosaurs and armies and molten lava and all manner of obstacles along the way. There’s a body swap and some crazy weapons and an alien who’s a higher level being and all kinds of over-the-top silliness. And all along the way Tyson plays the fool: frightened, confused, acting like a Doctor Who companion who traveled without the Doctor.

The adventure is fun enough read episodically, one chapter per night or something. Reading it all at once was a dive into a short attention span I found exhausting. It all would have been worth it if the destination was entertaining.

But Laumer doesn’t quite nail the landing in any sort of thrilling way; instead, the book ends like one of those human- Meets-God moments which grew so tiresome on Trek (to mix my TV metaphors). The threats to wipe out all life on Earth seem a bit breathy and unconvincing, too much connected to the cliches and not quite as wackily transcendent as Laumer clearly wants them to be.

So, yeah. Time Trap. It’s goofy, silly fun. But where most of Laumer’s other comedic works are smart while also being silly, this is pure silliness. It’s a good book to read to clear your head after watching images from Vietnam on the 6:00 News, but this book probably won’t keep looping in your mind. It will likely be forgotten by the time the Twilight Zone comes on tomorrow.

3 stars.

photo of a dark-haired woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

Seems Familiar

Blue book cover of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, adorned with a globe and a small plane in the forefront. White waves radiate throughout.

Back in 1958, Aldous Huxley published a nonfiction book that took a look back at his 1932 novel Brave New World.

A Light yellow and blue stroped book cover entitled BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED, Aldous Huxley

Why do I bother to mention this fact, which is familiar to science fiction fans and literary mavens alike?  Because a new novel by a bestselling author reminds me so much of Huxley's classic satiric dystopia that it, too, might have been called Brave New World Revisited.

This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin

Tan book cover depicting a bisected face. One eye green, the other blue. The face only has half an upper lip on the righthand side. The caption reads IRA LEVIN THIS PERFECT DAY A NEW NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR OF ROSEMARY'S BABY
Cover art by Paul Bacon.

Levin is, of course, best known for his popular novel Rosemary's Baby and the smash hit film adapted from it.  Can he handle science fiction as successfully as he did horror fiction?

Some centuries from now, the world is inhabited by people who all look very much alike, with a few minor exceptions.  The central authority tells folks where to live, what kind of work to do, who they should marry, and whether or not they should have children. 

The populace is kept under control through the mandatory administration of drugs that keep them calm and unaggressive.  Words like hate and fight are profanities.  Starting at adolescence, people have sex once a week. 

Television viewing, apparently for the purpose of propaganda, is a daily ritual.  Everything is planned by a huge computer.
Everybody wears a bracelet that is difficult, if not impossible, to remove, and which much be scanned everywhere they go.

Our protagonist is Li RM35M4419, known as Chip.  That's because his grandfather, who isn't quite as much a conformist as younger folks, thinks he resembles his great-great-grandfather, and calls him a chip off the old block.

I might note here that there are only four first names for women and an equal number for men.  That symbolizes the rigidness of the society, I suppose, but it also seems like a pointless restriction.

Chip is an oddball because he has one green eye and one brown eye.  Grandpa takes him to see the real computer, hidden underneath a false facade that is meant to satisfy tourists.  This becomes a plot point much later in the book.

We see a lot of Chip's childhood and teen years.  Suffice to say that he eventually joins up with a small group of rebels.  It turns out to be really easy to avoid the constant bracelet scanning, which makes me wonder why there aren't a lot more rebels.  Quite a bit later, Chip discovers a way to avoid the tranquilizing drugs.  This is almost as simple as skipping the scanners.  Not the most efficient totalitarian dystopia ever imagined!

There's a lot of back and forth running around, but let's sum up.  Chip falls in love with one of the rebels, who has gone back to her old tranquilized ways.  He kidnaps her and takes off for an island of rebels.  Again, this is remarkably easy to do, but at least this time there's a reason, revealed in a plot twist.

I have to mention that Chip rapes the woman he supposedly loves.  When she comes out of her drugged state, she accepts this as natural, and their romance continues.  Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Long and somewhat tedious climax short, Chip leads an attack on the computer, leading up to a surprising revelation as to what's really been going on.  This part of the novel is very melodramatic, in sharp contrast to the rest, which is often as bland as the world in which it's set.

Neither original nor plausible, this simply isn't a very good book.  It could benefit from some serious editing.  Keith Laumer would have told the same story in one-third the length.  Robert Sheckley would have made it more satiric.  Stick to the scary stuff, Ira.

Two stars.

A photo portrait of Winona Menezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Whisper from the Stars, by Jeff Sutton

Book cover of a dark haired man on a red planet covered in sprawling tower architecture a large string of beads comes from the foreground and passes behind his right shoulder. The caption reads He wrenched open the door to strange, multiple worlds WHISPER FROM THE STARS BY JEFF SUTTON.
cover by Paul Lehr

The year is 2231, and jet-setting science journalist Joel Blake is at the top of his field. His glamorous job has him rubbing shoulders with the brightest minds of his age, and affords him a level of comfort that rarely has him challenging the technological utopia that Earth has become thanks to the control of a world government determined to maintain peace and progress… at any cost. His easy complacency is rattled for the first time when he meets the brilliant astrophysicist Ann Willett at a party she doesn’t want to be at; her aloofness betrays a discontent with the world that he finds fascinating. All his probing yields from her is a frustration at the government’s unwillingness to fund research into any field without an immediate profit motive, leaving her feeling like a great discovery lies just beyond her reach. He’s never met a mind like hers, and he doesn't meet another until work assigns him an interview with the visionary polymath Mark Randall.

Randall’s scientific work spans multiple fields, with seemingly nothing beyond the grasp of his prodigious mind. Feeling as though he has conquered the known world of science, he has turned his attention to the unknown: dimensions beyond human perception, elongation and reversal of the passage of time. Randall and Willett immediately find kindred spirits in each other, leaving Blake to feel insignificant under the shadows of their intellects. But when the tyrannical rulers of their gilded world discover their attempts to liberate mankind from the order they’ve imposed, both scientists are forced to flee into the cosmos, and Blake is left behind to piece together their radical vision for the future of humanity.

Now, I don’t feel that this book did anything I haven’t seen before: the oppressive government, the predictable utopia, the geniuses turned space-fugitives. Randall is very much a stock genius character, as though Sutton wished to rely heavily on our shared cultural knowledge of the Sci-Fi Genius to fill in the gaps left by his sparse characterization. It's all familiar, but familiar in the way my favorite blanket is familiar. If I didn’t like this genre with all its conventions, I wouldn’t be here. No, the reason I connected with this book lay in its smaller details.

The character of Ann Willett was so interesting to me, and though she could (and should!) have been explored in greater depth, I did also get the sense that the tantalizingly sparse but dense scenes centering her character contributed to the air of mystery, the self-imposed isolation that so intrigued Blake and drew him to her. Sutton’s intimate descriptions of spaceflight were scattered with those delightfully technical imaginative flourishes that always betray a writer’s engineering background. Blake’s charmed life as a high-society journalist is simply everything I’ve ever wanted, and I brimmed with envy the entire novel.

My absolute favorite detail was Willett’s violin motif. I’ve always found it hard to put into words the way that the sound of a violin can sound so haunting to me, so profoundly lonely. It fills a room with sorrow and longing in a way to which no other sound compares, and this is the motif through which Sutton conveys Ann Willett’s loneliness. She expresses her solitude in the melodies she plays on her violin, and the invocation of violin music had such a visceral sensory effect on me that she instantly became one of the more unforgettable characters I’ve read. I was so enchanted to read Sutton put into words the lonely beauty of violin song and to know the feeling is more universal than I thought.

It was the details in Whisper From the Stars that appealed to me, minutiae small enough to pass by a reader unnoticed but which felt tailor-made to suit my sensibilities. On its face it's a good, solid, unremarkable book, but it’s so rare and wonderful to recognize so much of your own eccentricities in a book that I’m going to have to give this one four stars.

Society's Fears Made Uncannily Manifest


by Amber Dubin

The Incredible Tide, by Alexander Key

A red book cover depicting a red ten Winged bird in front of a face. The caption reads THE INCREDIBLE TIDE by ALEXANDER KEY
by Davis Meltzer

I cannot think of a more fitting name for Alexander Key's stunning piece of fiction than The Incredible Tide. This fast moving ride of a story immerses the reader immediately with a forcefully aggressive pace and doesn't release one's attention until it has crashed upon the shores of its abrupt conclusion. It takes what appears to be a fantastical hero in a uniquely broken world and anchors to a coming of age anti-fascistic message so masterfully that the reader truly feels the author’s societal warning.

In order to dispel all doubt that the story within is meant as a warning, Alexander Key begins The Incredible Tide with the ominous dedication “To a people unknown, of a land long lost – for surely what is written here has happened before. It depends upon us alone whether it is a reflection or a prophecy.” It is thusly that the reader embarks on the plot like a scavenger unearthing a sandy message in a bottle. Like a freshly unburied treasure, the remarkable 17 year old castaway, Conan of Orme, shakes himself loose of his seemingly unsurvivable circumstances, marooned alone on a tiny cluster of rocks with only birds as companions. It is revealed that he has endured in this solitary state for five years after a catastrophe coined “the incredible tide” drowned a previously Earth-like environment in endless water.

He is “rescued” involuntarily by elderly, frail representatives of one of the fascist factions responsible for plunging the world into this regrettable state. Once taken prisoner, it is revealed to Conan that the New World Order, an Axis-powers-like force, is still greedily fighting over the scraps of this decimated planet, clinging to the totalitarian, short-sighted ways that caused its own destruction. Thankfully, all hope is not lost because Conan and his ilk possess certain super human abilities of perception and telepathy, and they use these powers along with the sometimes equally powerful and very human capacity to love, empathize, and connect with each other and a very strong spiritual source. Conan and all his allies will need to use every opportunity they can to be able to survive and ultimately overthrow the oppressive, greedy and powerful government whose obsession with clinging to its own past threatens to doom the entire future of humanity.

In my experience of dystopian world creation, The Incredible Tide's is vague and as enshrouded in mists as their planet is presently, but I don't think this takes away from the story. I felt like the story could have been longer and the character development and relationships could have had more room to take wing, but there was also something beautiful in the story's conciseness. The way Alexander Key was able to somehow balance a Lord of the Flies-esqe uprising on one shore with a colliding tsunami of Animal Farm oppressive governmental takeover was particularly masterfully done in a short amount of pages. I was also impressed by the way he was able to communicate the absurdity of maintaining an Orwellian Big Brother police state (a la 1984) on the remains of an actively rotting planet. Intriguing too, is a moment very much reminiscent of the unheard warnings that Superman's parents conveyed to the stubborn oligarchs on the planet Krypton before their willful self-destruction; though I felt the way it was communicated here was much more gritty and frustratingly human than the comic book version.

Overall I found The Incredible Tide to be an awe-inspiring, page-turning, and unique adventure that deserves a singular place alongside many other powerful works of dystopian fiction, and I'm rather pleased to see another heavy-hitting ominous warning make it into the 70s, as it has been decades since we've seen such cautionary tales as were more commonplace in the 40s and 50s.

5 stars

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


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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 14, 1970] Spock must Die!, Starbreed, Seed of the Dreamers, and The Blind Worm

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[For this first Galactoscope of the month, please enjoy this quartet of diverting reviews…which are probably more entertaining than the books in question!]

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

Spock Must Die!, by James Blish

Star Trek is dead. Long live Star Trek!

No sooner had Trek left the air at the end of last year's rerun season than it reentered the airwaves in syndication. And not just at home, but abroad: the BBC are playing Trek weekly, exposing yet more potential fans to the first real science fiction show on TV.

While new episodes may not be airing on television, new stories are being created. I am subscribed to a number of fanzines devoted to Trek. There aren't quite so many these days as once there were, but there's also been something of a distillation of quality. For instance, I receive Spockanalia and T-Negative with almost montly regularity. These are quality pubs with some real heavy hitters involved. They are crammed with articles and fiction. As to the latter, a lot of it is proposed fourth season scripts turned into stories—by people who really know the show. The stories by such Big Name Fans as Ruth Berman, Dorothy Jones, and Astrid Anderson (of Karen/Poul Anderson lineage) are always excellent.

There have been few commercial Trek books to date. You had Gene Roddenberry/Stephen Whitfield's indispensible reference, The Making of Star Trek, released between the 2nd and 3rd seasons, and Bantam has published three collections of Trek episodes turned into short stories by James Blish (rather sketchily, and not overly faithfully). There was Mack Reynolds' juvenile Mission to Horatius, which wasn't very good.

Cover of an orange novel featuring two converging Spocks. The caption reads A STAR TREK NOVEL SPOCK MUST DIE! BY JAMES BLISH AN EXCITING NEW NOVEL OF ITERPLANETARY ADVENTURE INSPIRED BY THE CHARACTERS OF GENE RODDENBERRY CREATED FOR THE FAMOUS TELEVISION SERIES

Now Bantam has released the first "real" Trek novel, one aimed at adults. It is also by James Blish, who liberally sprinkles footnote references to prior episodes he has novelized. The basic premises are two-fold:

The Enterprise is on a farflung star-charting mission on the backside of the Klingon Empire, which is in a grudging armistice with the Federation enforced by the mind-being Organians (q.v. the excellent episode, Errand of Mercy) . Lieutenant Uhura reports to Captain Kirk that the Klingons have somehow managed to neutralize Organia and launch a surprise attack that knocks the Feds back on their heels.

Chief Engineer "Scotty" bungs together a long-range transporter that will allow Mr. Spock to reconnoiter Organia and report back his findings. However, the journey has an unexpected consequence: the first officer is duplicated—and the replica is irretrievably evil. Can Kirk and his crew resolve the Organia issue before the bad Spock destroys them all?

Put like that, the story seems awfully juvenile, but the slim novel (just 115 pages) is actually quite a good read.

Characterization is weak, relying on the reader's knowledge of the show, but it is rather truer to the cast than prior Trek novelizations. Everyone is a bit more technically savvy and erudite than normal: Star Trek as an Analog hard SF story. Scotty's accent is lovingly, if not quite accurately (to Doohan's variety) transliterated. Uhura and Sulu are given some good "screen time". Spock (both incarnations) are particularly well-rendered. Kirk is a bit of a cipher, and McCoy is more logical than usual. Also, the captain keeps calling him "Doc" rather than "Bones", which is a little jarring (though true to early 1st season Kirk). I did appreciate when Kirk mused, early on, "What was the source of the oddly overt response that women of all ages and degrees of experience seemed to feel toward Spock?" Blish certainly has kept up with the fandom!

As for the plot, well, it's a series of short chapters that read like episode scenes, the novel as a whole divided (informally) into a series of acts. It's a bit overlong for a TV show, but it would make a decent movie. Technical solutions are hatched out of nowhere, implemented, and moved past. One gets the impression that the Enterprise is responsible for half of the Federation's scientific innovations; it's a pity that most are forgotten about after they are developed.

The novel's climax is suitably exciting, and it's quite momentous. The Trek universe is substantially changed as a result…so much so that Blish has probably pinched off his own parallel continuum. Read it, and you'll see why.

I liked it. It's not literature for the ages, but it is at least as good as the best fanfiction (not a slur), and I think it sets a standard going forward.

3.5 stars.

[We were very excited to get this next review from someone who has worked behind the scenes at the Journey for a long time—please welcome Frida Singer to the team!]

photo of a fair-complected woman with long red hair in a plaid dress
by Frida Singer

Starbreed, by MARTHA deMEY CLOW

A book cover depicting an orb of humanoid faces of all colors shapes and sizes. The caption reads MARTHA deMEY CLOW HE WAS A HYBRID- STRONGER, CLEVERER, FASTER, THAN ANY HUMAN- AND FAR MORE DEADLY STARBREED .
cover by Steele Savage

Starbreed begins with a port-side interlude when a frustrated Centaurian merchantman (cross-fertile with other hominids, somehow) exercises his resentment by raping a pubescent prostitute. On discovering the consequent pregnancy, the never-named girl seeks refuge in a local convent. There, nuns present us an America where parentage is a licensed privilege (thanks to the problems postulated by that old dastard Malthus), where the 'defects' of crime mandate sterilisation, and where remote towns have euthanasia clinics.  The Soviet Union and China both remain, but the promise of communism has never truly flowered again, while American capital trips gaily forward, with bigotry her bold escort.  Eighteen years have passed since Centaurian traders first made contact, and thus far they have exploited their contracts, plying a colonial trade monopoly across the seas of space.

The child is raised in the shelter of the convent after his mother dies in childbirth. Thanks to his mixed parentage, by the age of 14 he's already a bizarre demigod of self-sufficiency, and so flees across the border of the American trade zone to Guayaquil.  Taking the alias ‘Roger’ after the slur ‘rojo’ which the border guards used, there he and a cohort of other half-Centaurian teens play at larceny, revolution and revenge. He conceives the idea that, through the time dilation of Centaurians superluminal transport (20 years in a few weeks subjective), he may evade the capital crime of being a child of miscegenation—by being older than would allow for his existence. With stolen money, he invests in a new identity and a working berth on a Centaurian trade vessel, burning to discover the secrets of their design.

Not a soul seems happy, and few afford one another grace. The story reads like something written by Ellison were he smidgen less misanthropic.  Imagine, if you will, Vogt's Slan, but the antagonist is our protagonist.  A Khan of the Eugenics Wars, but molded out of the pain of rejection rather than to the designs of some military-industrial complex.  Books, in the end, are Roger’s only solace, and he bitterly resents his social isolation, fixing on attaining power to secure for himself that which he feels he has been denied.  Women all seem to be playing to scripts which evoke John Norman: prizes to be conquered into obedient adoration, mothers to be outgrown, and artifacts of abjection.  Often it feels as though they’re only set-dressing for the quintet of rational, hale, golden-eyed men who scheme to seize the future as continental hegemons.

This is a bitterly comic, almost Wildean novel where every patronizing impulse seems bound to erupt with the pus of profound condescension, framed within a nesting-doll of layered imperialist exploitation, where the genocide of the Watusi is but a historical footnote. It strives to be a warning klaxon against the simmering of the dispossessed, and fails most profoundly where it relies on racial caricature, or lacks follow-through. I don't expect to re-read it, but I might refer it to others with a taste for maror, willing to subject themselves to stories about eugenics for reasons other than enjoyment.

3 out of 5

photo of a man with short dark hair and goatee
by Brian Collins

With the latest Ace Double (or at least the latest one to fall into my hands), we have two original short novels—although one of them is closer to a novella than a true novel. The shorter (and better) piece is by Emil Petaja, a veteran of the field, who seems to be as productive as ever. The other is (I believe) the second novel by a very young Englishman (he's only 21, so let's take it easy on him) named Brian Stableford. Stableford was apparently sending letters to New Worlds and the dearly missed SF Impulse years ago, when he was a snot-nosed teenager; more recently he's tried his hand at writing professionally.

Ace Double 06707

Double book covers, the first featuring the head of a man and a robot with the caption Emil Petaja Seed of the Dreamers The heroes of the Earth must live again! The second book cover depicts a long sharp green, blue and purple abstract figure with an eye atop, with small humanoids weilding swords below. the caption reads. Brian M. Stableford THE BLIND WORM Complete the Quadrilateral -and the universe is yours
Cover art by Gray Morrow and Jack Gaughan.

Seed of the Dreamers, by Emil Petaja

Brad Mantee is a tough and hard-nosed enforcer for Star Control, an intergalactic empire which Petaja, in his narration, explicitly calls fascist. Brad is here to take one Dr. Milton Lloyd to prison, for the doctor, while undoubtedly brilliant, is also responsible for an experiment gone wrong, killing over a dozen people. The journey goes wrong, however, when, upon landing, Brad meets a beautiful young woman who, unbeknownst to him, is Dr. Lloyd's daughter. Harriet Lloyd, the heroine of the novella, is bright like her old man, but what makes her different is twofold: that she works for TUFF, a league of what seem to be space-hippies, undermining Star Control's tyranny in subtle ways; and two, she has psi powers, these being more or less responsible for the rest of the plot. While Harriet is distracting Brad, Dr. Lloyd hijacks Brad's ship and takes off for what turns out to be a seemingly uninhabited planet, which Harriet christens as Virgo (she's interested in astrology).

The rest of the novella (it really is a lightning-quick hundred pages) is concerned with Brad and Harriet having to cooperate with each other once it becomes apparent Dr. Lloyd has crash-landed on Virgo, and may or may not be dead. This would all be a pretty derivative planetary adventure, and indeed during the opening stretch I was worried that Petaja had not put any effort into this one; but the good news is that Seed of the Dreamers has a neat little trick up its sleeve. It soon dawns on Brad and Harriet that they are not the only people on this planet—the only problem then being that said people have apparently spawned from the old adventure books Brad is fond of reading (secretly and illegally, since Star Control has long since outlawed fiction books). They meet and nearly get killed by some tribal folks out of the pages of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard, and really it's off to the races from there.

Seed of the Dreamers reads as a sort of reversal of L. Ron Hubbard's Typewriter in the Sky, since whereas that novel involves a real person getting thrown into a world of fiction, in Petaja's novella the fictitious characters have decided to bring the party to the real world. Virgo is thus strangely populated with characters from different real-world books, including but not limited to King Solomon's Mines, The Time Machine, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and more. There's even a Tarzan lookalike named Zartan (I assume for legal reasons Petaja cannot use "Tarzan" as a name), who appears in one scene. These characters from books all live by what they call "the Word," which is clearly a joke about the Bible, but it's also in reference to each character's programming, or rather their characterization according to each's source material.

Petaja has a lot of fun with his premise, although Seed of the Dreamers is, if anything, too short. Brad and Harriet coming across one fictitious character after another makes the adventure feel almost like a theme park ride, and most of the supporting cast (excepting Tsung, a Chinese mythological figure) only get a chapter or two before Petaja quickly becomes bored of them, like a bratty child throwing away his toys. It's also mind-numbingly stupid, between the planetary adventure aspect, Brad and Harriet's fast-moving (and thoroughly unconvincing) romance, and Petaja's attempts at explaining scientifically a world that seems more aligned with fantasy. But most of it is good fun.

A hearty three stars.

The Blind Worm, by Brian Stableford

Stableford's novel is much longer than Petaja's, and unfortunately much worse. Indeed, this might be the first time I've reviewed a book for the Journey where I've loathed it simply due to how poorly it's written. The Blind Worm is a far-future science-fantasy action romp, in which humanity has all but died out, with only a tiny number of people living in Ylle, "the City of Sorrow," surrounded by the Wildland, a vast forest front that for humans is almost impossible to traverse. John Tamerlane is known as the black king, being black of both skin and clothing. He seeks to solve the Quadrilateral, a puzzle that seems to connect parallel universes, and which could provide a new beginning for mankind. Unfortunately, the black king and his cohorts must contend with Sum, an alien hive-mind with godlike powers, and a synthetic humanoid cyclops called the Blind Worm. Both the black king and Sum want to solve the Quadrilateral, but only the black king has the "key," in the form of Swallow, one of his aforementioned cohorts.

I would describe this novel, which mercifully clocks in at just under 150 pages, as like a more SFnal take on The Lord of the Rings, but only a fraction of that trilogy in both quantity and quality (I say this already not being terribly fond of Professor Tolkien's magnum opus). There is a big existential battle between good and evil, in a landscape that feels somehow both desolate and overgrown with vegetation; and then there's the Blind Worm, who acts as a third party and a sort of walking plot device. The Blind Worm is the invention of one Jose Dragon (yes, that is his name), a nigh-immortal human who had created the Blind Worm as a way to combat Sum and the Wildland. This is all conveyed in some of the clunkiest and most pseudo-philosophical dialogue I've ever had to read in an SF novel, which does make me wonder if Stableford had intended his characters to talk this way. It doesn't help that he mostly gives these characters, who are generally lacking in life and individual personality, some of the worst-sounding names you can imagine.

Given Stableford's age, I was inclined to grade The Blind Worm on a curve—but it took me four days to get through when it really should have only taken two. The dialogue and attempts at describing action scenes border on the embarrassing. Of the strangely large cast of characters, maybe the most conspicuously lacking is Zea, the single woman of the bunch. Clearly Stableford has certain ideas as to what to do with Zea, as a symbol with arms and legs, but as a character she does and says next to nothing. This is not active woman-hating like one would see in a Harlan Ellison or Robert Silverberg story, but rather it descends from a long literary tradition of contextualizing women as ways for the (presumably male) writer to work in some symbolism, as opposed to giving them Shakespearean humanity. The issues I have with Zea, more specifically with her emptiness as a character, feel like a microcosm for this novel's apparent deficiencies.

The shame of all this is that I would recommend Seed of the Dreamers, albeit tepidly, but it's conjoined to a much longer and much less entertaining piece of work.

One star.

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


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Book, Conventions/Performances, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[February 8, 1970] Boldly going to the Region Between (March 1970 Galaxy)

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

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

A pleasant Escapade

Little fan conventions are popping up all over the place, perhaps thanks to the popularity of Star Trek.  The first adult science fiction show on the small screen, Trek not only thrilled existing fans (who have been putting on conclaves since the '30s), but has also galvanized millions of newfen who previously had lived outside the mainstream of fandom.

Last weekend, I went to a gathering of Los Angeles fans called "Escapade".  It differs from most fan conventions in that it focuses almost exclusively on science fiction and fantasy on the screen rather than in print.  Moreover, the emphasis is not on the SFnality of the works, but on the relationships and interactions of the characters.  This is the in-person culmination of the phenomenon we've seen in the Trekzines, where the stories and essays are about Spock or Kirk or Scotty—the people, not so much the adventures they go on.

Another distinction is that most of the attendees were women.  Most SF conventions, while not stag parties, are male-dominated.  The main difference I noted was that panels were less formal, more collaborative.  Instead of folks sitting behind a table and gabbing with each other, they were more like discussion groups…fannish teach-ins, if you will.  I really dug it.

If Escapade represents the future of fandom, then beam me up.  I'm sold!

And since the photos are back from the Fotomat, here's a sample of what I snapped:

Photo of a bearded man in glasses and a paisley shirt holding up a copy of a fanzine next to a tall woman in a Trek gold tunic flashing the Vulcan salute
That's David, holding up the latest issue of The Tricorder (#4) and Melody dressed as a Starfleet lieutenant

Photo of a dark-haired woman in a blue Star Trek uniform, smiling at the camera. She is carrying books in one arm, and behind her are tables of fannish items for sale.
And here's Melody again in sciences blue—who says you can't make a Vulcan smile?

A picture of a smiling brunette woman in a ribbed white sweater, sitting on the floor with an equally smiling baby about one year old.
If you can't recruit a fan…make one!  (this one isn't Lorelei's…but it's probably giving her ideas)

An image projected onto a wall, showing an image from the Star Trek episode 'The Enemy Within', where Kirk is drinking, faced by a Security woman in a beehive hairdo.
Lincoln Enterprises had a stall in the Huckster Hall—I got this clip from The Enemy Within!

The New Thing in America

It's been eight years since folks like Ballard and Aldiss started the New Wave in the UK.  It's leaked out across the Pond for a while, but this is the first time an issue of a Yank mag has so embraced the revolutionary ethos.  The latest issue of Galaxy was a surprise and delight that filled my spare moments (not many!) at the aforementioned convention.  Let's take a look.

Cover of Galaxy magazine featuring a ghostly male figure half-submerged in a multi-hued representation of the universe, dozens of planets swirling near him
cover by Jack Gaughan

The Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys

A black-and-white ink image of the article's title in a bubble, surrounded by stars
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Budrys' focus is on fandom this month.  He notes that SF fandom differs from all others (that of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Conan, etc.) in that we are omnivorous.  We contain multitudes, digging all of the above and much, much more.

We also are directly responsible for the plaudits of our passion—whereas the Oscars, Edgars, and Silver Spurs (and Nebulas, for that matter) are given out by organizations, the Hugos are awarded by the fans themselves (well, those that have the $2-3 to shell out for a World Science Fiction Society membership).  Which means that all the nominations that Galactic Journey (hasn't) got are really worth something!

After a lengthy and entertaining discussion of what fandom means to Budrys, he goes on to review the indispensable The Index of Science Fiction Magazines 1951-1965, compiled by Norman Metcalf.  It's not only a useful reference, but it's fun to read what all your favorite authors have produced, and also to see the commonalities and differences of stories that end up next to each other when ordered alphabetically.

He also recommends Adventures in Discovery, an anthology of science fact articles by science fictioneers (including reliables like Asimov, Ley, and de Camp, but also unusuals like Silverberg and Poul Anderson).  It's put together by my dear friend, Tom Purdom, and you can bet we'll be reviewing it soon, too.

Now on to the fiction!

The Region Between, by Harlan Ellison

A three-panel image, showing a burst of white, raylike lines against a black background. The title is also in white letters, with the smaller legend 'Death came merely as a hyphen. For it was only when Bailey died that he began to live'. The third panel is black ink on a white background, showing a man in a circle, surrounded by astrological lines and symbols. The circle and man are upside down, set on top of framing black lines, emphasizing chaotic disruption.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

In Ellison's story, the universe is filled with warring factions: beings, societies, and races that play God with the lesser forces in an endless struggle for dominance.  The other truth of Region: the soul is immortal, and death merely a transition.  Your essence is also poachable, in death and in life—and a whole gaggle of Thieves has sprung up to take advantage of this.  When the soul that is snatched from a still-living being is too valuable to one of the squabbling tin pot deities, that's when it calls in the Succubus.  The Succubus deals in souls, too, thwarting the Thieves by replacing snitched spirits with ones from his collection.

One such is William Bailey, late of Earth, so tired of the pointlessness of it all that he picks euthanasia over enduring, but possessed of such anger at his lousy universe that he proves a true son-of-a-bitch.  A real Excedrin headache.  A turis.  A pain in the ass.  (Sound like any diminutive titans we know?)

Every body he inhabits, every pawn in every war, game, conquest, he subverts.  Through logic and sheer force of will, he convinces the shell personality of his host to allow him control, enough to stick it to the Man who pulls the strings of His minions.  And after each successful wrenching of the gears, the Succubus, too busy to note the peccadilloes of a single errant soul, tosses him off to his next assignment to wreak havoc.

It's the ultimate implementation of hubris and nemesis, an eye-stick against solipsism.  Not only are you not God, but watch out: your dicking around with creation may be just the thing that causes your uncreation.

The New Wave has all kinds of literary and typographical tricks—if you read New Worlds, you've seen them all.  This is the first time I've really seen them used fully in service of the story rather than being fripperous illumination.  They are special effects for the printed page, as impressive as any Kubrick rendered in his 2001 for the cinema.  I wouldn't want all of my stories to look like this, and Ghod help us if Ellison inspires a new New Wave of copycats who absorb the style and not the subtance.

But, my goodness, five stars.

The Propheteer, by Leo P. Kelley

A black-and-white sketch, briefly rendered, of a twisted robot sitting in a futuristic hammock, facing a wall of screens. The legend reads 'The Propheteer's people smiled for their lives -- or lost them!'
illustration by Jack Gaughan

"We can predict crime with absolute precision.  We can tell who will commit a crime and when.  We can even predict the exact nature of the crime."

Sounds like Dick's story, The Minority Report, though in Kelley's piece, what keeps crime from happening isn't a trio of precogs, but one man who monitors and controls the chemical balance of every human on Earth, ensuring tranquility and crimelessness throughout the planet.

Except, that man twiddles meaningless knobs and dummy switches.  Another man is in control of humanity, and he wields a stick, not an endocrine carrot…

It's a little too histrionic and pat, and less effective than the stories which preceded it (including an Analog story from 1962 by R. C. Fitzpatrick)

Two stars.

A Place of Strange, by George C. Willick

A pencil drawing of a knapped stone item, looking both like a knife and a deity. Above it reads the legend 'What would you call a place where men planned war?'

Humans teach primitive beings to hate, to fight.  The moral, like something from a less than effective Star Trek episode is stated: "There must be a way for simple survival to change into civilization without war.  There must be."

Indeed, there must be.

Two stars.

Downward to the Earth (Part 4 of 4), by Robert Silverberg

A pencil illustration showing the alien elephants, called the Nildoror, spattered in black goo.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Silverbob wraps up his latest serial, detailing the end of Gunderson's quest toward redemption on the colony he once administrated.  Of course, it ends with the unveiling of the mystery of Rebirth, which is revealed in the dreamy, avant-garde style that typifies the rest of the story.  We also learn the relationship between the two sapient races of Belzegor, the elephantine Nildoror and the apelike Sulidor.  It is both fascinating and also a little disappointing.  Without giving anything away, I suppose I was most interested in the concept of a world with two intelligent species sharing a planet; in Silverberg's story, it turns out they are less a pair of distinct beings and more two sides of the same coin.

There is a fascinating, hopeful note to the conclusion that elevates the story above a personal salvation story, even if the whole thing is more an exercise in building a setting than presenting an actual narrative.

I'd say four stars for this installment, three-and-a-half for the whole.  It may get consideration for the Hugo, but the year is young, and I imagine there is better to come—probably from Silverberg, himself.

Sunpot (Part 2 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé

A cartoon panel, primarily showing a spaceship in orbit. The caption reads, 'The giant Sunpot complex hangs high above the Russian side of the Moon...it hangs like a bloated Siamese bowling pin in the afternoon motionlessness of space...'. The lettering, kerning, and bolding are all disastrous.
illustration by Vaughn Bodé

The adventures of the Sunpot continue, as does the illegible lettering.  I was dismayed to see Belind Bump, who had appeared to be an intrepid heroine, reduced to a host for boobies.  Fake boobies at that (as we are reminded multiple times throughout the strip).

A waste of space.  One star.

Reflections, by Robert F. Young

Last up is this sentimental tale of two humans of the far future teleporting to Earth for a tour of the cradle of their race.  Evolved far beyond our ability to ken, they are incorporeal beings of nostalgia and love.

Pleasant, but eminently forgettable.  It's that style (the type is interestingly arranged in reflecting columns and meandering rivers) over substance thing I just worried about above.

Three stars.

Summing up

That's that for this experiment in printing.  There were unfortunate casualties: the Silverberg was printed with compressed carriage returns between lines, which made it harder to read.  Also, with all the illustrations and text tricks (not to mention the comic), we probably got about 80% of the usual content—the Silverberg compression notwithstanding.

The stuff that isn't the Ellison or the Silverberg (or the Budrys) is also pretty disposable.  That said, the Ellison and the Silverberg comprise 80% of the issue, so who's complaining?

I definitely won't quit now… unlike Tony Curtis.

An advertisement showing a man in a doctor's uniform. The ad copy says, 'I got sick and tired of coughing and wheezing and hacking. So I quit. I quit smoking cigarettes. Which wasn't easy. I'd been a pack-a-day man for about 8 years. Still, I quit. And, after a while, I also quit coughing and wheezing and hacking. Now, the American Cancer Society offers every quitter an I.Q. button. To tell everyone you've got what it takes to say not quitting.' In smaller letters, there is an additional message: 'Get your I.Q. button from your local Unit of the American Cancer Society.'"/>
This campaign is everywhere—commercials, Laugh-In, the back inside cover of Galaxy…

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


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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 25, 1970] Alien Island, Enchantress from the Stars, The Winds of Darkover, and The Anything Tree

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

A photo portrait of Brian Collins. He is a casually dressed white man with closely cropped dark hair, moustache, and beard (both kempt). He is casually dressed and reading an issue of 'Fantasy and Science Fiction'.
by Brian Collins

You may look at the byline for today's book of mine and wonder if your eyes are deceiving you; but no, that really is T. L. Sherred, who some older readers may remember as having written a few SF stories more than 15 years ago. Indeed, it has been so long since Sherred last appeared that it seems as if JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF had been born and then crucified in the interim, what with how much the field has changed since 1955. Now Sherred comes to us with what is apparently his debut novel.

Alien Island, by T. L. Sherred

Book cover, featuring a psychedelic illustration juxtaposing the round earth (with autumn trees and clouds inset) against a warped cube of space featuring a landscape of white peaks and pink shadows.  Large artificial structures of the same white material dominate the space proximal to the earth
Cover art by Carol Inouye.

The gist of it is that humanoid aliens, called the Regans, have come to Earth, in the name of a kind of cultural exchange; it just so happens that they've landed in Sherred's home state of Michigan. Dana Iverson holds part-time jobs as a barmaid and cafeteria worker, but secretly she works for the CIA, thus acting as our eyes and ears for the story that unfolds. A barfly buddy of Iverson's, Ken Jordan, gets randomly (or at least it seems random) selected as Earth's ambassador for the meeting with the Regans. For the Regans' part, they've provided the unrealistically gorgeous space captain Lee Kay Lukkari. The idea is that Jordan and Lukkari merge personalities and memories, quite literally, such that they learn of each other's cultures in about as direct and intimate a way as one can imagine. The neutral ground, which Jordan soon enough transforms into a kind of Xanadu, is the island of the book's title, positioned on the US-Canada border, just outside Michigan.

What could possibly go wrong? Actually, quite a lot.

Readers with good memories may recall a very good story of Sherred's from a very long time ago, "E for Effort," which involves a seemingly innocuous invention (a time-viewer that the characters use to their economic advantage) but which soon comes to have apocalyptic consequences. I have to say I'm a bit confused as to why Sherred, who for all I know has spent the past 15 years selling used cars, should suddenly emerge from hibernation with this specific novel. It's not that Alien Island is a bad novel exactly, but rather that while it follows a similar trajectory to that minor classic of Sherred's that I mentioned, and while it seems to come from the same place of pessimism regarding humanity's future in the wake of the atomic bomb, this is a narrative that doesn't benefit whatsoever from being rendered a novel. Certainly it would have worked better as a novella, given the small cast of main characters, the claustrophobic setting, and the single-mindedness of its message. The sad part is that it's by no means a bad message.

The other question I have to ask is why Sherred waited until, say, the past few years to write this novel of his. True, there are passages wherein the characters discuss sex, in a pretty inoffensive fashion (those expecting steamy human-on-space-babe intimacy will come away disappointed), but the language is more or less clean. I will say, it's not often you read an SF novel by one of "the old guard" these days and have the protagonist/narrator be a woman; that much of Iverson's conflict comes from her jealousy of Lukkari and her ill-hidden affection for Jordan is not as steep a price to pay as it sounds. Another thing to its credit is that Alien Island is a satire with a point to make, which I understand is going off of a low bar, but it still distresses me how many alleged satires strike me as utterly vacuous. Similarly to "E for Effort," this is basically a story about the pinhead humanity stands on, between nuclear annihilation and possibly ascending to a higher place. With "E for Effort" it was a time-viewer, whereas with Alien Island it's intervention on the part of some benign, if hard-to-read aliens.

One more thing: Without giving away specifics, I was worried that Sherred's novel would repeat the black hole of nuclear doom that "E for Effort" headed for by its end; but this novel's ending, which has a strangely biblical resonance, could be considered cautiously optimistic. Incidentally, "cautiously optimistic" is how I also feel about Sherred returning to the field after so long.

Three stars, but I was hoping for more.

A photo portrait of Winona Menezes. She is a woman with light-brown skin, long black curly hair and dark eyes. She is smiling at the camera.
by Winona Menezes

Ace Double 89250

The Winds of Darkover, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Book cover, featuring a painted illustration of a snow-swept landscape with a walled city in the background, its towers just catching the light of a crepuscular red sky.  In the close foreground, separated from the city by a great distance, we see four figures with trousers, knee-high boots, tunics, metallic helmets and sleeves, gauntlets, and brightly colored capes.  Red, yellow, and green are running in a line with swords drawn towards blue in the middle distance
by Kelly Freas

This month’s Ace Double gives us the fifth story set in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover universe. A standalone story, The Winds of Darkover requires no prior knowledge of the series.

Generations removed from the colonists from whom they descended, the people of Darkover, a little waystation planet, live in an archaic feudal society lorded over by a ruling class with psychic abilities. Deep in the mountains, one of these noble families is thrust into turmoil when a bandit tribe lays siege to Storn Castle, and to save her family Lady Melitta of Storn is forced to flee in search of aid.

Seemingly unrelated, high above the planet a disgraced spaceport dispatcher named Dan Barron is unceremoniously relieved of his position after a paralyzing psychic vision renders him useless in an emergency and endangers the lives of several pilots. To salvage his employment he is sent on a humiliating planet-side mission at the request of the Darkovan Lord Valdir to instruct his men in the construction of lenses used in telescopes. Barron agrees reluctantly, but the psychic visions that cost him his job continue to plague his mind and body.

Bradley’s setting is dazzling; Darkover is unmistakably reminiscent of the Middle Ages, but filled with enough alien wonders and ancient history to give the impression that this world is much bigger than the little story it contains. The story, unfortunately, does its world little justice. Each event feels cobbled together out of necessity, and the sum of the parts is a story that jerks from one scene to the next with little regard for cohesion. The third act is so brief that the resolution feels unearned. My biggest issue, however, was the baffling choice to write one of its main characters out of importance.

Melitta of Storn is driven from her besieged home with the fate of her family entirely dependent on her wit and bravery, and seems like the obvious candidate for the heroine of a pulp fantasy. Rather than do the obvious, however, Bradley is apparently content to allow Melitta to gradually fade into the background with little impact on the plot. Until, of course, it is time for her to be the milquetoast half of a romance with Barron so under-baked I found myself checking to make sure I hadn’t accidentally skipped any pages.

The Winds of Darkover is a serviceable but ultimately skippable installment in the Darkover saga. It is buoyed only by its fantastical setting, and the story a disappointingly uninspired patchwork of genre fantasy staples. Two stars.

The Anything Tree, by John Rackham

Book cover, featuring a surreal illustration of a brown tree with neither ground nor sky, against a background of green leaves.  The lower part of the tree is shaped as a great and solemn mask, and limbs like arms rise from the convolutions of the bark
by John Schoenherr

The other half of this Ace Double is The Anything Tree by John Rackham, and I found myself enjoying this one a lot more than I thought I would upon reading the opening pages. The first few paragraphs describe the heroine flippantly enough that I thought the rest of the book was going to be dismissive of her, but once the plot picked up I was pleasantly surprised.

Selena Ash is a covert agent sent on a mission by her father’s company to locate the planet of a tree with miraculous properties, and she does so under the guise of a thrill-seeking socialite who enjoys interplanetary racing. A mysterious sabotage sends her ship crash-landing onto a lush forest planet that she believes to be uninhabited… until she runs into Joe, a fellow explorer who has inexplicably “gone native” and made this planet his home, loincloth and all. Joe acts as Selena’s guide as they traverse this obscure planet to escape her adversaries, and she slowly begins to understand that Joe has a certain kinship with the plant life that populates this planet. As she grows to share his affinity for the friendly alien flora, she realizes that his solitary existence might be less lonely than she had initially believed.

Some of the inciting incidents of the plot feel a little contrived, but I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy this fantastically verdant paradise of a planet. Selena’s awareness of the existence of a kind of sapience possessed by the plants, not so much intelligence as base creature instinct, grows gradually enough to coax the reader along into an unwitting empathy with vegetation. Even the romance feels earnest and sweet, as the two protagonists are brought mentally and spiritually into togetherness by willingly joining the plants in their blissful existence. This unfamiliar way of existing is joyful in its inhumanity, compelling enough for me to ignore any plot contrivance or cliché and just be one with the greenery.

Maybe the contempt at the beginning of this story was justified, by Selena and all of humanity, me included. Rackham’s reverent wonder for the criminally unappreciated plant rings clear as a bell, compelling enough for me to set aside my dumb human logic and be reminded by the flowers of the joy of existing as a living creature. Four stars.

A photo portrait of Jessica Dickinson Goodman. She is a white woman with straight dark hair pulled back behind her head.  She wears a zipped up jacket, and is smiling at the camera.
by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

Enchantress From the Stars, by Sylvia Louise Engdahl

Today, 230 young women are undergraduates beginning their Spring semester at Yale where this time a year ago, none were. The education of women is a profession as old as learning, but has only recently been taken up by a range of our nation's institutions of higher learning. Stories about young women's minds, as opposed to their bodies or the uses men find for them, are as welcome and necessary as air.

Book cover, printed in yellow with black accents, featuring what appears to be a background pattern of clouds in half-tone with the title in an otherwise emptied circle above a triptych of circular prints in the lower-half of the cover, overlapping in a triangle.  Each of the circles bears a different image of a person, printed three times at horizontal offsets.

Enchantress from the Stars is a story of a young woman's exploration of her world through the worlds – and worldviews – of others. This story has three alternating perspectives but Elana's view is the central one, with scenes through Jarel and Georyn's eyes weaving around it but never overwhelming the forthright and careful way Elana approaches her story.

This is a story fans of Star Trek would deeply enjoy, with its Federation and moral imperatives not to interfere, its mix of timelines and technologies, and most of all, its earnest heart. It brings a duty-bound respect for and curiosity about all living things that fans of Nurse Chapel and Lieutenant Uhura – as well as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov – might enjoy.

Elana's world is divided into thirds, with her society at the top, as those who have control over the power of both machines and minds. Jeral's society is second tier, with control over mechanicals like space ships and mining engines and laser weapons, but no psychic powers. Georyn's world languishes in the bottom third of the power hierarchy, medieval with no machines and no mental powers, but he does hold a belief in magic that allows him to understand the world around him in some ways that are initially lost on Jeral.

The "dragon" that appears early in this story shows the deep potential for this tripartite frame. First, we hear of a dragon from Georyn and the number of people who have gone to fight it and never returned. Then we see through Jarel's eyes it is a fire-breathing forest clearing machine from the empire he serves in a junior capacity, and that the people Georyn has lost to the "dragon" are actually imprisoned by Jeral's colonizers. Finally, and most complexly, we understand the dragon through Elana's eyes, as both the monster of myth and of man, its terribleness and terror flowing from both wellsprings.

Enchantress from the Stars invites readers to engage in the kind of profound and transformative empathy that the best of science fiction and fantasy can draw from us. We see events from our own views as readers, from hers, from those of her father and coworker and the people she seeks to protect and those whose aggression she seeks to defuse. As I read, I found myself reinterpreting everything Georyn and Jeral said through Elana's view, a pleasant mental and emotional stretch that only grew more satisfying the more practice I had at it.

That juxtaposition between science fiction and fantasy is in a way at the heart of what makes Enchantress from the Stars so magical and remarkable, because the genre shifts depending on who is telling the story. Georyn's fantasy is Jeral's horror is Elana's science fiction. Most books ask us to walk in one stranger's shoes, and leave us better off for doing it; Enchantress from the Stars invites us to several views and gives us the tools to truly understand them.

In this moment where professors are having to learn to address their students as "ladies and gentlemen" and not merely "gentlemen," I believe we could all use as much practice expanding our worldviews as possible, to include new genders, new perspectives, and as many new ways of being as we can in a never ending effort to fully understand what it means to be human.

Americans today live under a constitution that does not once include the word "she" or "woman" or "girl." It has been nearly 50 years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced and it still, still has not passed. Maybe some of those young women at Yale will get it passed or their colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, which is celebrating its 100 year anniversary of admitting women this year, will see it through.

Like Elana's world, ours is unequal. It is full of dangers and arbitrary death, patriarchies that bind and urge conformity and restrict human potential. It is also full of girls like Elana, boys like Georyn and Jeral, young people who are willing to challenge what they can see with their own eyes is wrong in the world. Who are willing to take what they are given by their fathers, older brothers, commanders, and societies and say: no, this is not for me; for me, I choose another way.

Enchantress from the Stars gives them and us the time and space to question, to discern what our worlds are and should be and can be. It is a novel that gives us readers a breath of time, a bare string of moments, to consider: what have we received today that we will reject, reform, and remake tomorrow? Who will we teach ourselves and others to be? Who will we become?

Who do we want to be?

(Four stars)

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


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[January 18, 1970] Below par (The Long Loud Silence, Sex and the High Command, Beachhead Planet, and Taurus Four)

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

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

The Long Loud Silence, by Wilson Tucker

Book cover, featuring a posterised illustration of a middle-aged white man with dark hair and sun-glasses looking down in the foreground, while in the background there appears to be a distant nighttime inferno, with four great faces appearing to partially emerge molded in the smoke plume

It's been a while since we've heard from Wilson Tucker, fan-turned-pro-but-still-very-much-a-fan. Hence, I was delighted to see that he had a new book out last month. Except, of course, it's not new at all, as I soon found out.

The story: Corporal Russell Gary, Fifth Army, veteran of "Viet Nam" and now Stateside on a recruiting stint, has gone on a bender for his 30th birthday. When he wakes up in a seedy motel room in a small town outside of Chicago, he finds that everyone in town is dead. Several days dead.

Turns out that some unnamed enemy has ravaged the American northeast with atomic fire and plague. Within 48 hours, almost everyone east of the Mississippi has died. West of the river, what's left of the country has set up a nationwide blockade, ensuring that the pestilence remains contained. No attempt is made to give succor to the thousands of Americans who have proven immune to the diseases.

Silence follows Gary as he braves the increasing barbarism until he can make his way back to civilization. Not a particularly bright nor sympathetic character, but with the instinct and training for survival, he partners up when convenient, kills without compunction when advantageous. He never becomes a brave hero or a romantic figure. Aside from a brief reference to New Orleans' straggling along, there are no enclaves of east-bank recovery. This is a holocaust from which no one is trying to rebuild. Just bands of increasingly hungry and desperate marauders, of which Gary is simply the one Tucker chooses to make his viewpoint.

There is no happy ending—indeed, there can't be. Gary is a disease carrier. The western United States has abandoned the east, and the east is a rotting corpse. And so, we have a story that starts like Andromeda Strain, continues like Alas, Babylon, and ends like a sour version of Spawn of the Death Machine.

Per the copyrights page, The Long Loud Silence originally came out in 1952, and was "specially revised and updated" for this release. That sparked my curiosity—how adroitly would Tucker handle the modernization? 17 years is a fair stretch, so it didn't seem like a slap of paint would be sufficient.

It wasn't. The story feels very much of its time (right around the time I got into science fiction, actually). There are no hippies, no reference to television. Lots of talk about radio and movies. The attack on the country is localized, believed to have been launched from Greenland…because ICBMs hadn't been invented yet. I'm pretty sure the Soviets now have missiles that can hit any part of the country. Certainly the new Russian bombers could hit Los Angeles as easily as New York. There's also a point in the book where a misprinted dogtag is an issue, and the implication is that it dates to the early 40s, which would match if Gary had been a WW2 war vet, which (having gotten a copy of the '52 release) it looks like he originally was. In fact, comparing the two versions, it looks like Gary's war background is the only change.

Setting that aside, and just reading "Europe" for "Viet Nam", how is the book? Well, it reads extremely well up through page 81. Gary teams up with interesting characters, including a fellow soldier/school-teacher, a jewel-mad girl named Irma, and a starving refugee named Sally. Seeing the ravaged geography and following the details of survival are compelling. The abortive probes of the Mississippi are exciting and tragic.

But after that, not only does Gary become more and more unlikable, but the author keeps repeating himself, copying whole passages from earlier in the book. The story just isn't long enough to need reminders like that.

I do appreciate that Tucker was willing to write an anti-hero, gritty and realistic. On the other hand, it means the narrative and the message of Silence is necessarily limited. The journey is interesting, but it doesn't say much other than that everyone is something of a bastard, civilized or otherwise.

Still, I actually finished the book, and quickly, which is more than I can say for the other two books I received last month.*

3.5 stars.

*The Yellow Fraction by Rex Gordon, is about a planet settled by a generation ship. There are three factions: the greens, espousing the terraforming of the world; the blues, espousing adaptation of humans to the world; the yellows, asserting that landing was a mistake. The yellows were right, but the totalitarian government doesn't want to hear about it. I lost interest around page 40.

*Star Giant, by Dorothy E. Skinkle, is about a seven foot humanoid alien genius who is exiled to Earth. It was too juvenile and silly for me.

photo of a man with dark fluffy hair
by George Pritchard

Sex and the High Command, by John Boyd

I used to know a follower of Aleister Crowley, back in California. A little flighty and blustering, like most of his sect, but he told me something that’s stuck with me ever since:

“If you can't be good, be bad.”

That is a phrase that was in my mind throughout reading Sex and the High Command, the new novel by John Boyd. His last novel, The Rakehells of Heaven, was reviewed last year by Victoria Silverwolf. She described it as "an episode of Star Trek combined with a dirty and blasphemous joke." This novel is much the same, although it has far more dirty jokes than blasphemy. Dedicated “For Aristophanes and Lenny Bruce”.

Ugh. We haven’t even started the book and I’m already rolling my eyes.

Book cover, showing women walking away from a large domed metal building
by Paul Lehr

Our story follows Navy Captain Benjamin Hansen, captain of the UNS Chattahoochee, bringing his crew to Norfolk, VA, after eighteen months in Antarctica. But the docks are strangely peaceful…

It transpires that a peculiar new drug from California called Vita-Lerp is allowing women to orgasm without the involvement of a man. I have it on good authority that this is possible without drugs, but Vita-Lerp also allows for “self-childbirth” — women are able to reproduce independently, although it seems to result in no boy children being born to those women. Dr. "Mother" Carey, who developed Vita-Lerp, is also president of a movement called the FEMs, which has created cells through women’s meetings and book clubs. These cells have also taught the women “New Logic” and “New Grammar”, which puts a feminine ending on all masculine nouns, and has only female and “neuter” genders.

To help defend against the obsolescence of men, Captain Hansen is brought into the confidence of the highest offices of US power, as well as a crewman of his, Chief Water Tender McCormick. The latter has been chosen for President against Dr. Carey, as he is “Lothario X”, the ideal lover. In return, he asks for a wife of his own, one guaranteed to be “uncorrupted” by the FEMs movement. According to him, ”’I’m not particular, sir. I just want me some pretty little mountain doozy, not over eighteen, with a good shape, who can cook crackling bread.’”

(I’ve never understood that, the belief that women are most desirable when they’re teenagers. Everyone is so awkward and gangly, and pimply besides.)

A man named John Pope is sent to find the woman in question. He is a man’s man, and is the most likeable character in the book by a fair margin. However, not long after he completes his mission, Pope is killed by a prostitute and framed to look as if he died while having sex with another man. Is that the worst fate in the world? Is that the only context in which homosexual love can be imagined by this author?

It is discovered that Vita-Lerp may be used as a rectal suppository, and allows men to become women. The remaining men immediately accept the transformed person as "she” and a woman, an enlightened attitude which is surprising, given how stupid everything has been up to now. Speaking of which, Hansen is eventually taxidermied as an example of the now-extinct male species.

I have had real trouble writing this review, because I couldn’t decide how to go about it. Do I address it as science fiction? As a comedy? If the latter, what humor is there? If I am unable to understand the humor, what conclusions can I draw from the book itself?

”After the ceremony, Dr. Carey’s all-girl crew got the yacht away from the dock at Newport News with a minimum of scraped paint and the loss of only one bollard off the dock.”

Is this funny? I know that there is a stereotype of women not being able to drive well, but I think that is a matter of the limited practice time often afforded them. Beyond the plot’s suggestion of Lysistrata (a play by Aristophanes about women denying their warring husbands sex until they negotiate peace), there doesn’t seem to be much to suggest Aristophanes' wit, either.

The best thing I can say about this book is that it’s never boring. I always was interested in learning what happened next, no matter how stupid or silly.

If you can’t be good, be bad.

Two stars.

photo of a dark-haired woman with vampiric eyebrows
by Victoria Silverwolf

Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover

Book cover, a dynamic, if somewhat cartoonish, illustration of a man bearing sword and shield, dressed only in loincloth, boots, and necklace, peering down while standing atop a sickly green dragon's brow
Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

Let's see; this sure looks like it's a sword-and-sorcery yarn, with a mighty-thewed hero and a dragon. Too bad that has nothing at all to do with what's between the covers. More false advertising, I'm afraid. Nevertheless, let's take a look inside and see what we've got.

Beachhead Planet, by Robert Moore William

We begin at an abandoned gold mine and ghost town that have been changed into a tourist attraction. A guy wearing nothing but a pair of torn shorts runs out of the mine. A ten-foot-tall monster with two heads blasts him with something that causes him to explode from the inside out. There's also a helicopter full of tourists, so old Two Heads blasts them, too.

That gets the reader's attention, anyway. We next meet our hero, a brilliant scientist who has a vast organization working for him. Among his employees are a guy who tells fortunes with a deck of cards and a woman who uses a crystal ball.

Why all this mystical stuff? It seems this guy also uses psychic methods to figure things out. He and his colleagues have a way of looking into their minds, kind of like mediation, and getting glimpses of the future.

Anyway, a military officer shows up and asks our hero to check things out at the site of the helicopter disaster. Heading for the same place, but separately, are two of his associates, a statuesque woman and a ape-like fellow.

(At this point, I was reminded of the old Doc Savage yarns that Bantam Books has been reprinting as slim paperbacks for the past few years. In a lot of ways, this new novel harks back to the pulp magazines of the 1930's.)

From this point on, the chapters alternate between the hero and his two pals. Suffice to say that they all get captured and wind up underground. Besides the two-headed monsters, we've got small robot miners and a bunch of kidnapped humans brainwashed by invisible aliens intent on taking over the world. Did I mention that there's also a Mad Scientist and his Beautiful Daughter?

At times, I thought the author was pulling my leg. There's a fair amount of teasing banter between the hero's two friends, and constant arguments between the monster's two heads. Then there's the scene in which the hero and the Beautiful Daughter keep their conversation secret from the aliens by speaking in Pig Latin . . .

This is a very silly book. Despite what I've said above, I can't really call it a satire or a comedy, because there's also some pretty gruesome violence. It's a quick read, and too goofy to be boring, but hardly worth slapping down four bits at your local drug store.

Two stars.

BW photo of Jason Sachs. He's a white man, with short light hair, rectangular glasses, and headphones.

by Jason Sacks

Taurus Four, by Rena Vale

When writing reviews, it’s generally a good habit to separate the writer from the work. We reviewers have a responsibility to consider a book or story based on the quality of its writing, characterization and themes. We feel obligated not to fixate on a writer’s personal life nor on their political beliefs. Whether that creator supports Reagan or Brown, McCarthy or Nixon, is less important than their ability to write a compelling piece of fiction.

That’s true unless their personal life or political philosophy fuels their fiction – and most especially if that fiction is propaganda for that writer's philosophy.

Taurus Four by Rena Vale is a work of propaganda which shows the true colors of its author. This novel is sexist, pro-colonial, anti-Women’s Lib, anti-hippie, anti-Communist propaganda. Its author is one of the more repulsive creatures to be part of California’s political scene since World War II.

Those are strong words, I know, but please hear why I say them.

Rena Vale has been associated for many years with the work of the California Un-American Activities Committee (CUAC), even into the last decade.  She has actively worked against the efforts of anti-War protesters, framed the questions the CUAC used to interrogate their witnesses, and painted the Free Speech Movement a communist plot.

Book cover, with the title 'The Red Court, The Story of the Revolution to Come' appearing to be partly scratched in relief of a blood spatter, all printed in scare red
Rena Vale's 1952 treatise on the evils of Communism

Vale has the feeling of a zealot, because she was a convert away from Communism. During the 1930s, she briefly joined the Communist Party, attending meetings alongside luminaries as John Steinbeck, but she felt pushed out by sexist Party members. Vale believed Steinbeck’s research into The Grapes of Wrath demonstrated that the acclaimed author was looking to advocate communism. Vale even claimed that in 1936, while still dabbling with Communist Party membership, she attended a Party meeting at the home of Lucille Ball. Yes, Rena Vale believes Lucille Ball is a Communist.

Vale, in short, is a conspiracy theorist who sees an evil Communist around every corner and a traitorous subversive behind every anti-War protester. She tracked civil rights activists as early as 1963, cataloging the daily lives of members of the Ad Hoc Committee to End Racial Discrimination, the Berkeley Peace Center, the Free Speech Movement and other Northern California organizations into a massive compilation of detailed information which might have rivaled that of the national HUAC.

Thus Vale has a significant and long-lasting role in the anti-Communist crusade. That crusade led to loyalty oaths, repression of free speech, and to groups like the Hollywood Ten, skilled screenwriters whom studios denied employment (in fact, I'm reviewing the 'comeback' film for one of those blacklisted writers later this month. Ring Lardner Jr. is credited as the screenwriter of the new film M*A*S*H).

Vale is an avowed anti-Communist. She's a woman who makes her living through the organized and brutal oppression of those who disagree with her.

Vale believes science fiction can be used as propaganda to further her repugnant beliefs. And though science fiction has been used for propaganda since at least the days of H.G. Wells (see The Shape of Things to Come, among other works by him), authors must demonstrate some real grace to make that propaganda compelling.

Book cover, bearing a mixed-media depiction of a man, wearing only a strap harness and a bubble helmet, holding an enormous blossom as parasol over a roman marble statue of a pubescent girl
Cover by Robert Foster. It has has absolutely nothing to do with the book.

There is little grace in Taurus Four. The propaganda is not compelling. I think this brief excerpt will give you a bit of an idea of why I was repulsed rather than compelled by the ideas in this novel.

To communicate, to permit one’s self to become involved emotionally with alien creatures, brought doubt of the total rightness of Earth and Mankind. Did the strong and virile men of the American old West (sic) ever doubt the rightness of white Yankees in pushing westward to the Pacific Ocean? Were there any among them who had the bad judgment to listen to the redman’s tale of woe? If so, history obliterated them. History recorded the words of the strong, not those of the weaklings who fell by the wayside.

Taurus Four is peppered with ideas and phrases like that fragment. At its base in her novel is the pessimistic thought – pessimistic to Vale anyway – that at the end of the Cold War, the Soviets “dictated fashion as well as many other social, political and scientific customs,” that Soviet supremacy “was accepted and [it] became a matter of historical record that the ‘bourgeois-capitalist’ countries were decadent, the people degenerating into pulpy softness.”

From that world we meet our protagonist, Dorian Frank XIV, a pudgy and henpecked 32-year-old “space sociologist” from that soft society who can’t even pilot his landing vessel correctly. Frank crash-lands his ship on Taurus Four, and rather than obey orders and stay close to his ship, Frank decides to wander off in search of food.

More concerned with protecting his tender feet and avoiding sunburns than with prudence, Dorian eventually finds himself in a strange village settled by descendants of 1960s San Francisco war protesters. Those people have gone wild in the 300 years since their ship landed on this distant world: living naked, not cutting their hair or nails, descending into a kind of pidgin English, and eating only fruit from the sacred “manna” tree. They are ruled by a cruel and despotic leader who orders sacrifices to a native god.

While most of the members of the tribe resemble American Indians, the chief’s daughter looks more European-descended: her “skin was almost white instead of the reddish tan of the others; her hair was fine and pale, muscles firm, stomach flat and breasts perfect.”

The girl, Teeda, is racially superior to her peers from a colonial standpoint, which helps cause Dorian to fall for her – despite the fact she’s just 14 years old. Yes, this girl has a man twice her age admiring her breasts (I feel a little sick just quoting that line). But that sexualization is all fine in the context of the novel because, well, the couple barely even kiss before Dorian is rescued. And even beyond that, Teela is hard-wired for the traditional work of women. Despite the fact she’s lived naked all her life, when asked to wash clothes she embraces the work: “I wash now. I think I do more better than you.’ He laughed. ‘It's instinctive I guess—something carried in the genes that makes women want to wash clothes!”

photo of a pair of typewritten cards bearing a C.V.
An example of the cards Vale maintained as part of CUAC, this shows how John Steinbeck's activities were tracked.

Frank adopts a paternalistic approach to Teeda – perhaps logical since she is practically young enough to be his daughter. But he also takes a paternalistic approach to the colonists, embracing a James T.  Kirk-style approach to upending their peaceful life and introducing chaos and worry into a long-stable existence. Of course, this peaceful society embraced communal property, lack of individual rights, and a feverish devotion to their absolute monarch. All those attributes could be found in the Soviet Union, so by definition they are evil philosophies which must be destroyed.

Therefore Frank, quickly coming into his own as an aggressive man who has even lost his baby fat, is the logical man to redeem these primitive people. He grows into a true Colonial whose mission becomes the need to modernize the natives’ civilization. Frank won't listen to "the redman's tale of woe."

I’ve already written 1000 words on this essay, and I hope my points here are cogent. But I’d like to note one more thing: this book is just not well written.

Oh, sure, Vale is literate. Her sentences aren’t too long, and her settings are vivid enough. But she struggles badly with characterization, she writes a pathetically clichéd villain, and the details of this world are sketchy at best. Over and over, I found myself slightly compelled by a hint of gracefulness in Taurus Four, only to become overwhelmed by bland events of political grandstanding or a disgusting glimpse into her politics.

The book feels amateurish, like the work of someone who understands the mechanics of writing but has no idea of its skills. Since she is 72 years old, I don’t expect Rena Vale to improve.

This is not a good book, and I can’t recommend it. Furthermore, I don’t want Vale to receive another penny of anybody’s money.

1 star.

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


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[January 12, 1970] A Glimpse into the Future: Drug of Choice by John Lange and Crime Prevention in the 30th Century, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson

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by Cora Buhlert

A New Decade and a New Hope

It's January 1970, the start of a new decade, and at least in West Germany, it also feels like the start of a more hopeful time.

The new chancellor Willy Brandt and his social-democratic/liberal coalition government have been in power for not quite two months yet and the wind of change is already in the air, as the Brandt government has initiated talks with the governments of East Germany and other Eastern Bloc countries to thaw the ice of the Cold War a little.

A store selling fireworks in West Germany in 1969
Fireworks for sale
Fireworks over Delmenhorst on New Year's Eve 1969
The town of Delmenhorst welcomes the new year and the new decade with fireworks.
People dancing at a New Year's Eve ball in 1969
Some people welcomed the new year and the new decade with glamorous balls.
People are sitting around a table in a living room in West Germany in 1969, celebrating New Year's Eve.
Meanwhile, many private New Year's Eve celebrations in West Germany looked a lot like this: a family or a group of friends gathered in a living room decorated with paper streamers to celebrate… while at least one person fervently wishes they were somewhere, anywhere else.

And so the annual New Year's Eve celebrations felt a little cheerier, the fireworks were a little brighter and everybody seemed more optimistic, even though much of West Germany is currently covered in a thick layer of snow.

Adults and children are frolicking in the snow on wooden sleds
Old and young are frolicking in the snow on sledding hills around West Germany.
A child stands on skis, while another pulls a sled.
You're never too young to learn to ski.

But before New Year comes Christmas and this year, Santa left two new books under my tree, both of which offer a glimpse into a future that is not quite as optimistic as West Germany feels at the moment.

A Paranoid Nightmare: Drug of Choice by John Lange

Drug of Choice by John Lange

One of the brightest rising stars of the thriller genre is John Lange. He burst onto the scene in 1966 with the heist novel Odds On and has been delivering entertaining thrillers, usually set in exotic locations and often laced with science fiction elements, at a steady clip since then. I reviewed two of them – Easy Go and Zero Cool – for the Journey.

Eventually, we learned that John Lange was the pen name of a young Harvard medical student named Michael Crichton, who released a novel under his own name last year. The Andromeda Strain, reviewed here by my colleague Joe Reid, was unambiguously science fiction and also drew on Crichton's medical knowledge, since it is about a deadly microbe from outer space.

A Case of Need by Jeffrey Hudson

What is more, Lange/Crichton also wrote a medical thriller called A Case of Need under yet another pen name, Jeffrey Hudson. The novel deals with a controversial issue, namely illegal abortion and the fact that it often leads to the preventable deaths of young women, which is probably why Crichton chose a different pen name to distance it from his John Lange thrillers and the novels under his own name. In spite of the controversial subject matter, A Case of Need won a highly deserved Edgar Award last year.

But whatever name he writes under, John Lange a.k.a. Michael Crichton a.k.a. Jeffrey Hudson is always worth reading. And so I was excited to read his latest novel, Drug of Choice.

Drug of Choice once more draws on Lange/Crichton's medical experience, for protagonist Roger Clark is a medical resident at Los Angeles Memorial Hospital. One day, a Hell's Angel is brought in, comatose after a motorbike accident. It seems like just another day in the emergency room, until Clark notices that the biker has no visible injuries…. and that his urine is bright blue. Clark assumes that some unknown drug is to blame for the young man's condition. However, the next day the biker awakes from his coma as if nothing had happened… and the colour of his urine is back to normal.

The case is certainly strange, but Clark quickly moves on. But then it happens again. Up and coming actress Sharon Wilder is brought to the hospital, comatose for unknown reasons. And her urine is blue. This triggers Clark's inner Sherlock Holmes and he begins to investigate. Clark learns that both Sharon and the biker were patients of the same psychiatrist. Contrary to medical ethics, Clark also gets involved with Sharon herself and winds up accompanying her on holiday to San Cristobal, a new island resort in the Caribbean, which is billed as the perfect vacation spot.

San Cristobal indeed seems to be paradise and Clark enjoys wonderful days with Sharon Wilder. But absolutely nothing is as it seems at San Cristobal, for instead of a luxury resort, the hotel is just a few dingy rooms where the guests are kept in a state of comatose bliss by a mysterious drug, which also has the side effect of turning urine blue. Behind everything is the mysterious Advance Corporation… who want to recruit Roger Clark to work for them and they won't take "no" for an answer.

Similar to A Case of Need, Drug of Choice starts out as a medical thriller, dealing with a hot social issue, in this case drug abuse. However, once Clark gets to San Cristobal and sees the disturbing reality behind the glamorous façade, the novel takes a turn into Philip K. Dick territory – a world of paranoia, drugs and shadowy powers that one man cannot beat… or can he? Indeed, if you'd given me the novel in a plain brown paper wrapper and without an author name, I would have assumed that this was Philip K. Dick's latest novel. Except that from a purely stylistic point-of-view, Lange/Crichton is a better writer than Dick.

From the entertaining adventure thrillers of a few years ago via his Edgar winning A Case of Need to last year's The Andromeda Strain and now Drug of Choice, John Lange/Michael Crichton keeps getting better and better and is quickly becoming one of the most exciting new voices in both the thriller and science fiction genre.

Supposedly, Michael Crichton earned his doctorate last year, which means that the reason he started writing, namely to pay his way through medical school, no longer applies. Nonetheless, I sincerely hope that he will keep writing, under whichever name he prefers, because John Lange/Michael Crichton is too good a writer to lose him to medicine.

A paranoid nightmare of a thriller in the vein of the best of Philip K. Dick. Four and a half stars.

Crime Prevention in the 30th Century, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson

Crime Prevention in the 30th century, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson

Another hot button issue of our times, particularly in the US, is rising crime rates that plague particularly the big cities and plunge their citizens into fear. However, crime rates are also rising in West Germany, albeit more slowly, and those crimes which most impact the average citizen such as burglary and theft also have fairly low detection rates, whereas the 1969 West German crime statistics boast high detection rates for offences such as abortion or sex between adult men (recently decriminalised) which many people believe should not be criminalised at all

In his introduction to the anthology Crime Prevention in the 30th Century, Hans Stefan Santesson, former editor of Fantastic Universe and The Saint Mystery Magazine and therefore familiar with both science fiction and crime fiction, addresses the fact that many people in the US and elsewhere fear rising crime rates, but also points out that crime isn't a new phenomenon, but has always been with us and always will. Just as there will always be a need for police officers and detectives to investigate those crimes.

"Jack Fell Down" by John Brunner

Science Fiction Adventures March 1963

First published in the March 1963 issue of Science Fiction Adventures, this novelette introduces us to Marco Kildreth, a cybernetically enhanced engineer who is out fishing in a ferocious storm on the Atlantic, when he makes an unexpected catch – a dead body. A closer examination reveals that the dead man did not drown, but was dropped into the sea from a great height. What is more, Marco recognises the dead man as one Jack Yang, member of a delegation from the colony planet Morthia who was on Earth for an important conference. Marco Kildreth not only happened to attend the same conference, but negotiations to give Morthia and its neighbour planet a so-called Builderworld, an automated factory planet to supply all needs of the population, were blocked by the Morthian delegation, giving Marco a motive to want to get rid of Yang.

Marco Kildreth did not murder Jack Yang. But after some investigations of his own, he has a pretty good idea who did…

John Brunner uses the structure of the traditional murder mystery to tell a greater story about the post-scarcity Earth of the future and the colony world Morthia which is governed by a genetically determined feudalism. The establishment of an automated Builderworld to produce anything the impoverished population of Morthia needs would threaten the elevated position of Morthia's ruling elite, which is why the Morthian delegation is vehemently opposed to this.

As a science fiction story, "Jack Fell Down" is an excellent look at one or rather several future societies and manages to create a vivid setting in only 39 pages. As murder mystery, however, it is unsatisfactory. We do learn who committed the murder and why, but the clues are never properly planted.

Two stars, mostly for the background world.

"The Eel" by Miriam Allen deFord

Galaxy April 1958

First published in the April 1958 issue of Galaxy, this story follows the titular Eel, a particularly slippery thief who is wanted on eight planets in three different solar systems. The Eel does not operate on his homeworld Earth, though Galactic Police there wants him, too, to extradite him to the worlds where he committed his crimes.

After twenty-six years, the Galactic Police finally get lucky and catch the Eel. There's only one problem. Where should he be extradited, considering that he committed crimes on eight different planets, all of which are extremely interested in putting him on trial and punishing him according to their respective laws?

The Eel is finally extradited to Agsk, a world which does not have the death penalty, but which punishes criminals by executing the person they love most in front of their eyes. There is only one problem. The Eel has neither family nor friends and apparently never loved anybody except for himself. But just when the Agskians are about to execute the person the Eel loves most, namely himself, the Eel reveals that he has one more ace up his sleeve…

"The Eel" perfectly shows off Miriam Allen deFord's gift for dark humour and the solution for how the Eel wiggles out of his punishment is ingenious.

Five stars.

"The Future Is Ours" by Stephen Dentinger

The first mystery posed by this story is "Who on Earth is Stephen Dentinger?" The resolution to that one is quite simple: Stephen Dentinger is a pen name of prolific mystery writer Edward D. Hoch (the "D" stands for Dentinger) who also dabbles in science fiction and horror on occasion.

The story follows a police officer named Captain Felix who is about to test drive the time machine, or rather chronological manipulator, invented by one Dr. Stafford. Captain Felix plans to travel to New York City in the year 2259 AD to learn about new techniques for police work. What he finds, however, is not at all what he had expected…

This very short (only three pages long) tale is a typical example of the "twist in the tail" story that was popular twenty-five years ago, but has become rare since. This type of story relies on the twist being good and in this case it is.

Three stars.

"The Velvet Glove" by Harry Harrison

Fantastic Universe November 1956

First published in the November 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe, this novelette follows Jon Venex, an unemployed robot living on a future Earth beset by anti-robot prejudice. One day, Jon responds to a job ad asking for a robot with his specific skills, and gets much more than he bargained for, when he finds himself strapped to a bomb and forced to work for a gang of drug-runners. Worse, he finds the remnants of his predecessor.

Jon uses all his robotic skills to alert the authorities without violating his innate programming never to harm a human being. But even if he succeeds, will a robot ever be treated as an equal on this future Earth?

Like John Brunner's "Jack Fell Down", Harry Harrison uses the structure of a crime story to present his vision of a future Earth. However, Harrison is a lot more successful at blending science fiction and crime fiction and "The Velvet Glove" manages to work as both. What is more, Jon Venex is a very compelling protagonist.

Four stars.

"Let There Be Night!" by Morris Hershman

Saint Mystery Magazine, November 1966

Morris Hershman is another author better known for mysteries than for science fiction. His vignette "Let There Be Night!" first appeared in the November 1966 issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine.

Curt Yarett is unhappily married to Edna, an alcoholic. However, alcohol abuse is a criminal offense in this brave new world of the future and so Curt has the perfect way to get rid of his wife by reporting her to the authorities…

The focus of this brief vignette is less on the "crime" committed and more on changing mores and laws, particularly with regard to intoxicating substances and how what is illegal in one time may well be considered perfectly acceptable in another. Considering the rise in drug use in recent years, this is certainly an important topic. However, the story itself is too brief to truly delve into the questions it raises.

Two stars.

"Computer Cops" by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch puts in his second appearance in this anthology—this time under his own name—with this tale about a crime-fighting agency called the Computer Investigation Bureau, CIB for short, fighting electronic crime in the not too far off future of 2006 AD.  It is one of the two non-reprints in the anthology.

One day, Carl Crader, director of the CIB, is summoned by Nobel Kinsinger, one of the richest men in the world, for someone has been using his SEXCO machine, a computer used to buy and sell stocks at the New York Stock Exchange, without authorisation. Crader quickly homes in on two likely suspects, John Bunyon, Kinsinger's assistant, and Linda Sale, his secretary. However, the truth turns out to be quite different…

Of the various stories in this anthology, "Computer Cops" matches the theme – how will law enforcement agencies investigate and hopefully prevent crime in the future – the closest. "Computer Cops" is very much a so-called police procedural, i.e. a type of mystery which delves into the methods the police uses to investigate crimes. To me, it felt very much like a futuristic version of the popular West German pulp crime series G-Man Jerry Cotton. "Computer Cops" also succeeds both as a science fiction and a crime story.

However, there are two problems with this story. The first is that the female characters are relegated to secretaries in miniskirts or bodystockings – all the investing and investigating is done by men. Compare this to Tom Purdom's "Toys", which features a female police officer, and John Brunner's "Jack Fell Down", which features a woman as the Secretary of Extraterrestrial Relations as well as a female professor of sociology and which also casually notes that not everybody in the future is white.

The other problem with this story is that 2006 AD is not very far off at all, only thirty-six years in the future, which means that many of us may well live to see it. As a result, this also means that many of the predictions that Hoch makes, either as part of the plot or casual off-hand remarks, may well turn out to be completely and hilariously wrong. Of course, it's reasonable to assume that New York City's World Trade Center, currently under construction and the tallest building in the world, once completed, will still be standing in 2006. Using computers to make deals on the stock market seems quite likely and billionaires getting involved into politics to the point of bankrolling or even leading invasions of independent countries sadly isn't too farfetched either. However, the assumption that Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba will crumble in the next few years may well turn out to be premature.

Probably the most successful blend of science fiction and crime fiction in this anthology.

Three stars.

"Apple" by Anne McCaffrey

The second new story is Anne McCaffrey's novelette, which opens with a seemingly impossible crime. A priceless fur coat, sapphire necklace, haute couture gown and jewelled slippers, have been stolen from the display window of a high-end department store in the brief time lag between security camera recordings.

The only way this crime could have been committed is via telekinesis. This is what brings in telepath Daffyd op Owen of the North American Parapsychic Center, an organisation which identifies and trains people with parapsychic talents and also works to end prejudice against them. All Talents at the Center were present and accounted for, when the theft occurred. This means that the thief must be a so-called "wild Talent", i.e. a Talent who's unregistered and unknown to the North American Parapsychic Center. Worse, this crime endangers the passing of a bill providing legal protection for Talents.

So the hunt is on for the telekinetic thief. Daffyd op Owen's Talents quickly zero in on an apartment block in a deprived part of town and find an apartment full of stolen goods – but not the thief. One of the Talents tracks the young woman – it is quickly determined that the thief must be female, because a man would only have taken the necklace and fur coat, but not the dress or the shoes – to a train station, where she uses her abilities to throw a baggage cart at her pursuer and crushes him. In spite of the girl killing one of his people, op Owen wants to bring her in alive and unharmed. But sometimes, there are no happy endings…

In recent years, Anne McCaffrey has been more interested in the dragons of Pern than in good old Earth, but she has also written a few stories about the Talented and their struggle for recognition.

"Apple" clearly shows McCaffrey's strengths as a writer. The action scenes are frenetic and there is some interesting characterisation, too, in the scenes where op Owen and his police counterpart Frank Gillings butt heads. However, this story also displays the issues I've always had with McCaffrey's work, namely latent prejudice that underlies much of it – ironic in a story that is about overcoming prejudice. And so the thief is the proverbial bad apple, because she is a) poor and b) of Romani descent, though McCaffrey uses a much less polite term.

A otherwise good story, marred by some of McCaffrey's persistent issues.

Three stars.

"Rain Check" by Judith Merril

Science Fiction Adventure May 1954

Originally published in the May 1954 issue of Science Fiction Adventures, "Rain Check" follows a shapeshifting alien who was brought back from Mars and is being taken to see the US president aboard a secret express train. However, the alien escapes during a refuelling stop – not for malicious reasons, but out of pure curiosity.

After some time spent as a large package on the platform, the alien takes on the shape of a human woman and wanders into an all-night diner. However, the alien's appearance attracts the attention of Mike Bonito, the man behind the counter, who promptly tries to chat up what he thinks is an attractive woman.

Turns out Mike Bonito is a civil defence warden, when he's not bartending, and was specifically told to be on the lookout for the runaway alien, though all they have to go on is a vague description of a male human. However, there will be an important meeting of all civil defence wardens in the city later that day. The alien, now named Anita, gets herself invited to come along, after manifesting a civil defence badge.

The American astronauts who captured the Martian believe that the alien's special abilities will help them win a war. However, "Anita" has a reason of her own for wanting to explore Earth.

This is not so much a crime story, but a cloak and dagger type spy story. Of course, being a Judith Merril story, it's also very well written and "Anita's" observations about life on Earth and particularly the persistent rain, so alien to a Martian, are fascinating.

Five stars.

"Toys" by Tom Purdom

Analog October 1967

"Toys" begins with a hostage situation. A group of children and their "pets" – an elephant, a gorilla, two dragons (created via genetic engineering) and two tigers – have taken a family hostage and demand that a committee made up of parents negotiate with them. Meanwhile, various adults are congregating outside and threatening to enter the house and beat up the children.

Police officers Charley Edelman and Helen Fracarro are called in the deal with the situation. They storm the house and find themselves fighting off both the "pets" and the children who have transformed their educational toys such as genetic engineering kits into surprisingly effective weapons. Will Charley and Helen be able to diffuse the situation before someone – adults, kids or pets – gets killed?

Our founder Gideon reviewed this story upon its original publication in the October 1967 issue of Analog and also adds some interesting background notes from author Tom Purdom who is a good friend of the Journey.

"Toys" is an action-packed story and offers some interesting speculation about how even in an increasingly affluent world, there will always be those who have less than others, even if they would have be considered wealthy as recently as thirty or forty years ago. Anne McCaffrey's "Apple" makes a similar point and is also largely set in a modern housing estate like those that are increasingly replacing the slums of old, raising the living standards of the working class, while not changing their economic status.

"Toys" also succeeds at blending science fiction and police procedural. Charley and Helen are compelling protagonists and I wouldn't at all mind a series of Charley Edelman and Helen Fracarro futuristic police procedurals.

That said, I also had a big problem with this story and that is that I intensely dislike stories about evil children. Now fear of children and young people is a common theme in science fiction. With the children of the postwar baby boom now in their teens and early twenties, an age when they begin to have political opinions and demands that don't necessarily match their parents', we have seen an uptick in dystopian stories about tyrannies set up by young people such as Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson or the movie Wild in the Streets. But there are older examples as well such as the 1944 story "When the Bough Breaks" by Lewis Padgett a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore about a couple terrorised by a superhuman baby. "Toys" certainly fits into the tradition of science fiction terrified of young people having a mind of their own. But though it is well written, I just don't care for stories of this type.

Three stars.

"Party of the Two Parts" by William Tenn

Galaxy August 1954

First published in the August 1954 issue of Galaxy, this story is an epistolary tale in the form of a galactogram from one O-Dik-Veh, a patrol sergeant on duty out in the galactic boondocks, to Hoy-Veh-Chalt, desk sergeant at headquarters and O's cousin, wherein O recounts his latest case.

O has been assigned to watch over the third planet of Sol a.k.a. Earth to make sure that its inhabitants don't blow themselves up before they have matured enough to be inducted into the great galactic community. Much like "Anita" from Judith Merril's "Rain Check", O finds Earth damp and unpleasant. What is more, the patrol office had to be erected on Pluto, a planet O describes as "a world whose winters are bearable, but whose summers are unspeakably hot". These few paragraphs tell us both clearly and very entertainingly that whatever O and Hoy are, they are very much not human. O also refers to their commissioner as "Old One" and is mentioned to have tentacles, so I imagined O and Hoy as something like H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu, only as a cop.

O's latest problem started when L'payr, a career criminal from the planet Gtet, escapes on the eve of the trial that will put him behind bars for life, steals an experimental spaceship and ends up on Earth, specifically the suburbs of Chicago. However, L'payr, who is basically a telepathic amoeba, can't survive on Earth for long, so he needs supplies to get his ship spaceborn again. So L'payr telepathically lures high school chemistry teacher Osborne Blatch to his hideout to trade alien pornography for chemical components from the high school lab. Though Blatch is less interested in the pornography – it is amoeba pornography, after all – and more in learning about where the mysterious puddle-shaped alien came from. L'payr, however, doesn't stick around to discuss the state of the galaxy with Blatch, but legs it once he has all the chemicals he needs. Blatch, meanwhile, finds an excellent use for the amoeba pornography he acquired and publishes a biology textbook with detailed illustrations of amoebas reproducing.

We haven't heard much of William Tenn lately, ever since he became a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. This is a pity, because Tenn's satirical science fiction has always been a delight. And indeed "Party of the Two Parts" starts out utterly hilarious, but then gets bogged down in a lengthy debate whether pornography is pornography, if it doesn't titillate anybody due to not depicting remotely the correct species and whether a crime has been committed that allows for L'payr to be extradited back to his homeworld. The way that O entraps L'payr and L'payr – with some help from Osborne Blatch – tries to wiggle out of his extradition are both ingenious and funny, but the story is still longer than it needs to be.

Four stars.

Police Work of the Future

All in all, this is a solid anthology of stories blending science fiction and crime fiction. That said, the title Crime Prevention in the 30th Century is something of a misnomer, since the stories are more focussed on police officers solving crimes or criminals committing crimes and trying to evade the law than on the prevention of crimes. What is more, none of the stories are explicitly set in the 30th century.

Nor is this anthology particularly useful as a blueprint for policing techniques of the future – only Edward D. Hoch's "Computer Cops" even remotely offers a look at what actual police work might look like in the future. However, Crime Prevention in the 30th Century is not a police academy textbook, but a science fiction anthology and as such it offers an entertaining look at several very different futures. I find that the stories which are at least somewhat humorous work better for me than the more serious tales.

Three and a half stars for the anthology as a whole.

A man leans to a shed drinking a cup of coffee next to several skis also leaning to the shed.
After a long day of skiing, nothing is better than a hot cup of coffee, preferably fortified with something a little stronger.

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


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