With Parliament in recess, most of the politics today involces sniping backwards and forwards between Mr. Wilson and Mr. Heath from their holiday destination. So I am going to take a break from Parliament for a while to celebrate some of the great culture coming out from Britain right now.
The Hill
British cinema continues to produce a variety of different pieces whether they be period comedies like Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, serious dramas like The Hill, science fiction like Dr Who and the Daleks, or the controversial The Knack …and How to Get It.
Irene Shrubik, producer of Out of this World
Launched just last year, BBC2 is already proving its worth as a channel, where we currently have a rerun of last year's fabulous version of The Count of Monte Cristo and a modernisation of Theseus and the Minotaur, The Legend of Death. The best looks to come however with Irene Shrubik producing a new followup series to Out of this World for the channel, Out of The Unknown.
The Royal Shakespeare company continue to produce innovative plays, with two young radio playwrights, Clive Barker and David Wright, creating Strike!. A play that will explore the years between the end of the First World War and the General Strike using film, music and dance of the time.
One of Dame Laura Knight's most famous pieces, Self-Portrait With Nude, 1913
This year will mark the first time a female artist is to get a large scale retrospective at the Royal Academy with around 260 pieces by the trailblazing Dame Laura Knight to be on display.
And, at last, the book review at the heart of this article.
British science fiction and fantasy is going through something of a renaissance right now. With New Worlds and Science Fantasy going monthly, New Writings remaining quarterly and other anthologies like The Fourth Ghost Book and Weird Shadows from Beyond coming out, I believe we may have more SFF short fiction coming out than ever before.
Thankfully this does not seem to have resulted in poor quality publications, with the most recent New Writings being one of the best anthologies I have read.
We are now on to the second year of these quarterly anthologies and this marks a slight uptick in quality. Whilst the authors are still a combination of Carnell’s old favourites and some new hands to the British magazine, there are no reprints this time around and it feels like there is a willingness to push the boundaries a little more and publish fewer old fashioned problem stories.
Potential by Donald Malcolm
In the opening story, John Edward Maxwell, director of D.R.E.A.M. (Dream Research Establishment) in London, is conducting research to discover whether increasing the quantity of dreaming did indeed increase the volunteers’ mental ability to work better. However, the dreams of one of the volunteers, MacLean, seem to contain strange mathematical formula and Maxwell wants to find out why.
This is a good mix of solid science fiction and the more experimental touches of the new wave. Whilst it does meander a little in the middle the story is engaging and the ending is a very interesting choice.
Four Stars
The Liberators by Lee Harding
Long ago a machine called The City was determined to do everything it could to ensure the survival of the race that once inhabited it, and those dreamers inside had come to believe that their only purpose was to serve the machine. Then, one day, from outside came a being called The Poet, who convinced them there could be another way…
This is a truly staggering story told in a fractured non-linear style. Lee Harding manages to evoke an amazing atmosphere through his use of lyrical prose. Right from the first sentence:
“They tumbled blindly through the endless twilight of the tunnel under The World, pallid little creatures with faces like a polished pebbles washed smooth by time, and pursued by a growing sense of guilt.”
I was absolutely enraptured. The first classic to come out of the New Writings collections.
Five Stars
Takeover Bid by John Baxter
Bill Fraser is brought in to investigate what has gone wrong with a new force field test that has apparently destroyed the mind of the test subject. Throughout this story we get an interesting investigation that sets up a really fascinating problem and asks a lot of philosophical question. What could be a really pedestrian idea, Baxter manages to make something new.
On particularly notable feature that raises this up is the presence of Col. Talura. He is a member of the Arunta people, and marks the first instance I can recall reading of an Aboriginal Australian who is not shown as a stereotype.
Four Stars
Acclimatization by David Stringer
It wouldn’t be a British science fiction publication without a story from Keith Roberts! Thankfully this one is better than the last under this pseudonym. In this piece we largely follow the thoughts of one man, Gerry, a spacer who is suffering from melancholy as he returns to Earth.
This is a really powerful piece about what the future of space exploration could look like to the people who take part in it. Simple idea beautifully done.
A strong four stars
The Expanding Man by R. W. Mackleworth
Algie Ryan encounters a man in park, who calls himself Smith, and they discuss Ryan’s encounter with another mysterious stranger.
I have read this a few times and I am not entirely sure what the point is meant to be. Mackleworth does it well but it feels a bit hollow, particularly compared to the strong stories that came before it.
Two stars.
Treasure Hunt by Joseph Green
Dr. Soames finds himself catapulted into a strange fairyland style environment, but a voice tells him he is merely a mental pattern implanted on another mind. Whoever has brought him there is told he is needed to find the fresh laid egg of a firebird, the most beautiful object in the galaxy.
This is a thoroughly readable blend of fantasy and science fiction which has interesting things to say about life and death.
Three Stars
Sunout by Eric C. Williams
Having appeared in the July New Worlds and the August Science Fantasy, Williams manages to complete the hat trick of the British SF field in a very short period of time.
In his longest piece to date, he produces a tale with a very literal title. A group of scientists discover the sun is going to go out very shortly. However, trying to get anyone in power to be willing to talk to them proves to be an immense challenge.
Combines two of the most recent trends in science fiction, the dark absurdist satire and apocalyptic fiction, rather well. This is no Doctor Strangelove but still likely to give you a grim chuckle nonetheless.
Three Stars
Outro
On the whole, the latest New Writings is an excellent anthology this time around. The first half is stronger than the second but, even then, there is only one vignette that did not work for me. Hopefully this upswing will continue and it can become the norm, not the exception.
And I'll see you later this month with another exciting anthology!
[Want to visit London of 1965? Don't miss this lovely tour prepared by Fellow Traveler, Fiona!]
It has been nine months since the tragic death of H. Beam Piper. Truly, it's a terrible thing to have lost such a talented author from the world. Not to mention one who was a prolific contributor within the science fiction community. Fans and casual readers can at least take some joy in the knowledge that his death is not the last thing we will remember about him. This month, with the help of Ace Books, the final installment of Piper's Paratime series has been formatted and been released into our local bookstores – Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.
In honor of the continued memory of one of my favorite authors I wanted to take a look at not only his newest posthumous publication, but the entirety of the Piper's Paratime series. How does it all tie together? How did it evolve? And most importantly, how does Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen stand as a final installment to the series?
For Hostigos!
The stories within the Paratime series all center around the exploits of the Paratime Police and other citizens from the "First Level", an alternative timeline of Earth with the exclusive knowledge of how to travel between parallel dimensions and timelines. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen is the seventh book in the series and picks up directly after the events within Time Crime (1955). The novel continues to follow the usual crowd we have come to know within the Paratime Police, with the added bonus of introducing a full cast of highly developed new characters including the titular Lord Kalvan, a former Pennsylvania State Trooper by the given name of Calvin Morrison.
We open with Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police, who is set to retire with the decorated Paratime officer Verkan Vall slated as his successor. The last thing he needs to go wrong right now is the accidental displacement of a person from a "Fourth Level" timeline. It's clear what has to be done – either locate the poor man in time to return him to his own Earth, or if need be kill him before he can cause a major disturbance to the local population and disrupt paratime activities.
Meanwhile, Corporal Calvin Morrison finds that his background as a Korean War veteran and his formidable knowledge of military history from his own time are exceptionally useful in his current situation as an unwitting interloper on a parallel Earth. The world into which he has dropped, confused and with only the supplies on his belt, is a feudal version of North America colonized by Indo-Europeans who went East instead of West, and eventually crossed the Siberian land bridge.
The technology of these people is very limited. The only producers of gunpowder, or "fireseed", are the priests within the cult of Styphon. Knowing how to make gunpowder is a guarded religious secret that has allowed the religious sect to grow immensely powerful, wealthy and influential. But with the arrival of Calvin, a man who can sweep the board with his advanced understanding of military strategy and basic knowledge of chemistry, that monopoly is quickly turned on its head. In short order Calvin becomes "Lord Kalvan" in his adopted kingdom of Hostigos, and the war for control of the region and the destruction of the Styphon cult is underway.
A Quick History of Paratime
Piper built the Paratime series from humble origins. The first installment was a novelette published in the April 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction titled, He Walked Around the Horses. The plot itself is simple. It’s an epistolary work that recounts a mysterious 1809 disappearance of an English envoy from our own dimension, and his jarring reentry into a parallel timeline. Other than being a small foray into the concept of alternative histories existing on neighboring worlds, there isn’t anything within He Walked Around the Horses that is essential to Piper's Paratime series.
The cannon of the Paratime stories really takes off in Police Operation, first published in the July 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. This story is a fast, engaging read that does a fine job of presenting the necessary framework for the burgeoning Paratime series. In quick, fluid succession we learn who the Paratime Police organization is, who some of the main players are in the police force, what function they serve, how the society they hail from is structured, and what fundamental science the society works on – namely that of lateral space and time travel.
Piper went on to divulge the exploits of the Paratime Police and the citizens of the other levels in "Last Enemy" (1950), Temple Trouble (1951), Genesis (1951), and Time Crime (1955). The short story which would become Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen came out in the November 1964 issue of Analog. Titled "Gunpowder God", it suffered from a number of issues including unbelievable character progression (i.e. Kalvan's ability to learn the language of Hostigos in record time and his ability to assume control basically overnight), and lagging development of the supporting characters.
With a serious rewrite, Piper was able to address nearly all of the criticisms of Gunpowder God. Rylla, the princess heir of Hostigos, became her own person and an instrumental warrior. Other supporting characters like Uncle Wolf and Chartiphon were given more lines and things to do, thus entrenching them as vital players in the war against House Styphon rather than set pieces in the story. For the fans of detailed military accounts within their science fiction, they will be very pleased with the even richer detail Piper put into the battle scenes.
Calvin's acceptance into the nobility of Hostigos still feels somewhat rushed, but I would argue that this has more to do with the abilities assigned to his character (his knowledge of military history and strategy is described as "genius" by nearly everyone) and his almost too successful jump into military leadership within Hostigos. Still, given that this is a story about a modern man displaced into an early European Renaissance-era society, it’s not so far-fetched that his preternatural knowledge or science, engineering and strategy would have impressed a few people.
The Piper Method
The best thing that Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen has going for it is its signature H. Beam Piper attention to the subtle nuances of the world within the book. As with his other writings, Piper's characters often encounter the conundrum that what is right and just is not necessarily the most ethical choice. This in turn demonstrates the tedious and sometimes impossible task of those in power balancing violence with necessity.
Throughout the Paratime series we see this again and again. How should an alternative Earth's population be misled in order to protect the secret of paratime travel? Should it be through lies, subtle murders, cults, or open war? And what of the displaced people who are transported to other Earths when they are caught in the field of a First Leveler traveling between timelines? What can, or should, they do to survive?
As an acute example we now have Lord Kalvan who must tread the fine line of local customs while forcing them through scientific and military progress. Corporal Calvin Morrison is not a believer in any god, be they those of his home Earth or the new Earth he finds himself stranded on. He does know, however, that he has to maintain appearances and to do that he must do such things as massacre the priests of Styphon's House in cruel ways, offer tributes to the local gods and credit them with success in battle. Calvin is not ignorant of what he is kindling between the princedoms, either. He is well aware that he is instigating a religious war, and restates this fact on a number of occasions.
"A religious war, the vilest form an essentially vile business can take. Priests of Dralm and Galzar preaching fire and sword against Styphon's House. Priests of Styphon rousing mobs against the infidel devil-makers. Styphon wills it! Atrocities. Massacres. Dralm and no quarter! And that was what he had brought to the here and now”.
While I can certainly recommend this title for the detail given to the battle scenes or the developed new characters, I wouldn't be able to recommend this title nearly as much without that signature moral dilemma that Piper places on the shoulders of his creations.
H. Beam Piper
"Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen" Within the Paratime Series
When put side by side with the other stories in the Paratime series it is immediately evident that this novel does significantly deviate in style from the previous installments. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen is far less focused on the Paratime Police than its predecessors (with the exception of He Walked Around the Horses). Usually the Paratime Police are main protagonists, but after Calvin Morrison is dropped onto the alternative Earth the First Level inhabitants have very little involvement in the plot. Aside from providing some tension when we learn that Verkan Val is tasked with murdering Calvin before he can cause too much trouble, the presence of any paratime users is really unnecessary.
The murder plot becomes moot very quickly in any case. Verkan realizes that 1) Calvin is now too publicly entrenched in the politics of Hostigos to simply quietly assassinate, and 2) Verkan finds his integration into the Fourth Level Earth’s culture to be a fascinating case study. After that point the Paratime Police cast only show up to provide exposition on what Lord Kalvan has achieved, and to give his work observational critique.
Since Piper already had a universe set up in which dimensional displacement was established and explainable, it does make sense for Lord Kalvan's story to be tied into the Paratime series. It’s just a little unfortunate that the Paratime Police were not given more to do in the story.
That being said, it does feel like a fitting ending to the series. As Lord Kalvan ascends to the rank of Great King Kalvan the First, we see the leadership switch hands within the Paratime Police. Characters we have come to cheer for and relate to on the First Level are all moving on with their lives and onto other projects. If Piper had lived I’m sure that he would have continued to write about Great King Kalvan's exploits, maybe even going so far as to put the Paratime Police on the retirement shelf.
The care with which he wrote about Lord Kalvan's moral dilemmas as a leader, the detail into which he wrote about his military exploits, and the closure Piper found for the Paratime Police crew all speaks to the growth of the series into something else. Unfortunately we will never know what Piper had in mind for the future of this series, but as does happen perhaps we will see his work revisited by others in the future. There is certainly plenty of fertile material to work with.
One of the fundamental tenets of quantum physics is that one cannot observe the universe without fundamentally affecting it. In ancient times, the stars and planets were objects of mystery. They lay fixed in crystal spheres; they influenced human affairs with strange forces; they were Gods; they were little fires.
And then we observed them with telescope, and the fuzzy waveforms collapsed into particles. The stars were just the Sun's brethren. Planets were actually spheres of matter, and the Earth was one of them. These discoveries did not make the celestial bodies any less interesting, but it did more narrowly confine the bounds of their possible natures.
Still, that left lots of wiggle room for imagination. Why, Venus must be a primeval swamp or perhaps a vast desert. Mars was clearly the home of an elderly civilization, huddling close to their dying canals. Even the Moon might be home to a hardy lichen on its surface (and perhaps a society of aliens beneath it — perhaps they nourished themselves on green cheese).
Then came the Pioneers, Rangers, and Mariners. The Pioneers told us that the Moon had no atmosphere at all, and the Rangers confirmed that Luna was a dead, cratered world. Then Mariner 2 dashed our carefully wrought picture of Venus, revealing a searing inferno of a planet.
Now Mariner 4, which zoomed just 6000 feet over the surface of Mars on July 14, has slain another fantasy land. Preliminary data show that the Red Planet has a much thinner atmosphere than expected and no magnetic field. Without significant erosion from wind and rain, and without a liquid core to drive vulcanism and resurfacing, Mars is probably a cratered wasteland like the Moon. We'll know more when photos start coming in (look for an article on the 20th from Kaye Dee).
Again, this does not make Venus or Mars any less interesting…to science. But for science fiction, the stories are yet again constrained. They still exist: Niven's recent Becalmed in Hell takes place in the new Venus; perhaps he'll be the first to set a story on the new Mars. But for the most part, increased knowledge has excluded our solar system from fantastic speculation.
It's no surprise, then, that the very newest science fiction, that coming out in our monthly magazines, has turned to other settings: other dimensions and faraway stars. Or focused closer to home, offering up cautionary and satirical stories of human, terrestrial society.
Though it cautiously stays on the safe side of the weird, more nuanced New Wave that has started to flood the pages of our books and digests, this month's Fantasy and Science Fiction offers a nice survey of the current frontier of science fiction:
At the dawn of the 21st Century, the feminist revolt is complete and there is, with one exception, complete equality between the sexes. This doesn't sit well with one P. Edward Pollyglow, a clothier who finds that demand for his made-for-men jumpsuits has dropped to nil. So he tries to restore le difference between the sexes by reviving that most manly of garments, the codpiece. In so doing, he sets off a revolution that restores men's clubs, dueling, and other brands of overt masculinity.
There are two major flaws in this story. The first is that the piece has no real through line. Things happen, get more ridiculous, and the masculinist revolt eventually overripens and collapses.
The second flaw is the doozy, however. From the second page:
Women kept gaining prestige and political power. The F.E.P.C. started policing discriminatory employment practices in any way based on sex. A Supreme Court decision (Mrs. Staub's Employment Agency for Lady Athletes vs. The New York State Boxing Commission) enunciated the law in Justice Emmeline Craggly's historic words: "Sex is a private, internal matter and ends at the individual's skin. From the skin outwards, in family chores, job opportunities, or even cloting, the sexes must be considered legally interchangeable in all respects save one. That one is the traditional duty of the male to support his family to the limit of his physical powers–the fixed cornerstone of all civilized existence.
I'm sure everyone was fine until the part at the end (bolding added by me). It straw(wo)mans the feminist movement. What women want to day is equality, the freedom to pursue a life as unfettered in opportunity, as rewarding in ambition and compensation as that enjoyed by men. I don't know any women espousing for equality in all fields and a free ride on the back of men.
Thus, what could have been a piquant tale is a flop at the beginning and end, destroying the value of any droll cleverness inbetween.
One star.
I'm not sure how this month's Gahan Wilson piece does any more than fill a page.
Explosion, by Robert Rohrer
The starship Southern Cross, crewed by a mixed complement of Terrans and feline Maxyd, encounters an ancient missile that threatens to destroy the ship if its shields are not raised in time. Unfortunately for two Maxyd, repairs had been underway when the Captain made his fateful decision, and they are killed. The missile turns out to be a dud.
However, the ancient hatred between the two races of the crew, only thinly papered over since a brutal war in recent memory, flares brightly. A mutiny ensues, completing what the ancient alien warhead could not.
In defter hands, I suppose this could have been something. As is, Explosion is both heavy handed and forgettable. Two stars.
Crystal Surfaces, by Theodore L. Thomas
In the future, Thomas posits, data will be stored not with chemical residue (pen/pencil) or magnetic charging (computer tape) but the careful positioning of atoms. Thus, information will be stored and conveyed at the maximum possible density.
Neat idea. Three stars.
Everyone's Hometown Is Guernica, by Willard Marsh
A starving painter adopts a scraggly kitten and, almost simultaneously, is consumed with an art idea he must commit to canvas. As he pours his soul into his work, the kitten disappears, replaced by an alluring, independent woman who cooks and cleans for him, never saying a word. I won't betray the ending, which is powerful, sad and poetic.
This is definitely the standout piece of the issue. Four stars.
The 2-D Problem, by Jody Scott
Things slip into mediocrity again with the subsequent nonsensical piece from Jody Scott. Apparently, folks from Callisto have the ability to translate fiction into reality. This becomes problematic when one Callistan, slated to be an ambassador of sorts to Earth, gets a hold of a comic book and brings Little Orphan Annie to life. Flat life, but life nevertheless.
It's never explained how this power works, and the humor is about as flat as the story's subject matter.
Two stars.
First Context, by Laurence M. Janifer and S. J. Treibich
Speaking of Mariner, it is the subject for this punchline-focused vignette in which the human race gets fined by aliens for letting a probe go errant into a restricted zone.
First Context is like one of those four panel comics that should have ended on panel three.
Two stars.
Behind the Teacher's Back, by Isaac Asimov
A sequel of sorts to Asimov's article in the April issue on the uncertainty principle, Dr. A. describes the discovery of the third of the four presently known fundamental forces of the universe. There's nothing in here I didn't already know, thanks to my time as an astrophysics major, but the energy version of the uncertainty principle is one of my favorite subjects.
You tell me if he succeeded in conveying what he was trying to convey.
By the turn of the 21st Century, retirement comes at 50 and boredom soon after. What's left to do when one's salad days are in the rear view mirror, the kids are off to college, and the spouse fails to excite? Have your mind exchanged with someone from a "primitive" culture, one which still values the important things in life!
Stick seems more a vehicle to denigrate the upcoming decadent, materialistic life we seem to be headed for. On the other hand, the sting in the story's ending is pretty clever.
A solid three stars.
The Immortal, by Gordon R. Dickson
Hundreds of parsecs behind enemy lines, the ancient fighting ship La Chasse Gallerie, struggles its way home over a series of ten light-year hops. Its pilot and sole crewmember, who left Earth a young man, is now a staggering two hundred years old. Yet he continues to fend off enemy interceptors, always gustily singing one French shanty or another.
Back on Earth, it is concluded that this survivor, who has somehow pushed the boundaries of the human life span, might hold the key to immortality. A risky penetration and rescue mission is executed.
The first ten pages of this story are rather dry and slow, and I can't help but think they could have been condensed into a page or two. Also marring this piece is the melodramatic portrayal of the leader of the rescuing task force, a bitter battle-fatigued man with a death wish, and the geriatric specialist assigned to his ship.
But The Immortal eventually hits its stride, and if the end result is not perfection, it is not unsatisfying.
Call it a high three stars.
The New Frontier
Science fiction, like science, seems to be in a transitional stage. As writers explore the new, as-yet unsurveyed realms of the universe, the resulting stories should only grow in quality and scope. Until, of course, some new probe upends everything again!
What frontier's literary exploration do you look most forward to?
The newest Ace Double is an absolute blast. On the one side is veteran writer John Brunner's new novel The Altar of Asconel, which was previously covered in serialization by David Levinson. On the other side is the first solo project of science fiction fandom superstar – Ted White. Android Avenger! The very title of this book sings with promise of action and adventure, and while it certainly delivers I would say that it goes well beyond a short fun read.
Out of Place in Plain Sight
The story takes place in a future on Earth where maintaining sanity has become the objective of the human race. There is an orderly mundanity to everything, and deviation from this norm in any form, from rebellious fashion choices to antisocial tendencies, is punishable by death. Such executions are merged into the daily lives of the citizens of the metropolitan areas. Just like jury duty, anyone of legal age can be called upon to be part of the assembly that collectively pushes the button on the condemned's electric chairs.
Living his own mundane life is Bob Tanner, a resident of Manhattan who, oddly shaken and distracted after attending to his Citizen's duty as an executioner, has a mishap and gets his leg mangled in one of the city's moving walkways. Upon waking up to find that he is entirely healed from such a grievous injury, he overhears some disturbing information about the results of the scans that were run on him while he was unconscious – his bones are made of metal and he may not be entirely human.
Since extreme physical deviancy is also considered an unacceptable trait, Bob realizes that he must run for his life. Planning on journeying out into the countryside where there are fewer police and mental scanners, Bob manages to escape the hospital. Unfortunately his plans quickly careen off course when control of his body is seized from him. Piloted by unknown individuals for unknown reasons, Bob is made into the murderous pawn of one of the best kept secret societies in the city.
Ultimately our protagonist is put in the precarious position of balancing his human identity with the purpose for which an automaton such as himself was created. The story ends on a relatively upbeat note with Bob successfully regaining his autonomy, accepting his mission as an android, and still maintaining a precious, personal human identity. But after reading White’s book and thinking on it, one is still left wondering if technology unknowingly guiding humanity is such a good thing after all.
A Little Background
Ted White is an extremely active member of the fandom community. He is a regular contributor, editor and a fanzine founder. He’s also got an impressive number of letters and essays reviewing, dissecting, and speculating on the numerous subgenres and authors out there.
Currently White is the assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. To date this opinionated author has four professional writing credits to his name: three collaborative stories (two with Terry Carr and one with Marion Zimmer Bradley) and of course, Android Avenger. With such a passion for the genre, it was only a matter of time before White began releasing his own lengthier original works of science fiction.
Breaking Down the Components
First and foremost, Ted White is to be congratulated on telling a compelling story of android self-realization mixed with a heavy dose of noir elements. The intensity of Bob Tanner's character as he struggles with his body betraying societal norms, his self doubt when he begins to question his own mind and consequently his basic sense of self – all of this speaks to the fatalism and moral ambiguity of noir. Yet it is encased in a science fiction paperback.
This blend of genres in turn segues nicely into White's talent for writing action sequences that are clean cut and descriptive without being too wordy. The events of this book are fast paced. So much so that the reader, like the protagonist himself, might feel thrown and unable to get their feet under them before they are swept up in another scene. It’s destabilizing without being disruptive to the flow of the novel. It’s just enough to keep us guessing at what will happen next right there alongside Bob.
Finally, White is to be commended on the excellent job he does writing the protagonist's first person narrative. Successfully accomplishing this type of narration is no small feat for a writer. It's very easy for the tension to be sucked from a book if the storyteller is untrue to their inner voice, specifically in terms of their changing perspective and the information they are aware of at any given point in the story.
But in Android Avenger the reader is never given too little to work with, and even when the events get pretty surreal it's all brought back down to Earth with well written dialogue and succinct descriptions. It may not be the deepest intellectual exploration of humanity and technology, but judged on sheer enjoyability this book is well worth a five star rating.
That puts it well above what my colleague, David, rated Altar, but ACE Double M-123 is still well worth picking up!
Ace Books: Pirate Publisher?
by Erica Frank
In addition to its usual science fiction double, this month, Ace is releasing the second and third books of Tolkien's famous Lord of the Rings trilogy. The first, Fellowship of the Ring, has been selling amazingly well at its new low price of 75¢, a scant fraction of the former hardcover price. Ratatosk 12 had a brief review of Fellowship:
I am not all that crazy about Jack Gaughan's cover (tho other, less critical Tolkienists have expressed satisfaction with it), and there is no mention that the title illo is borrowed from the d/w of the American edition b*u*t: illos are not a book, and the fact that the volume is now available at less than 1/6 of the original U.S. price is a Very Good Deal. The typography is clear, and I have as yet found no typos to stumble over in reading.
While professor Tolkien was adamant that his works not be published in so "degenerate a form" as paperback, it appears that Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of the U.S. hardcover editions, failed to properly copyright them — and so the works are in the public domain here.
Feast your eyes upon either a stealth mission to evade the enforcers of a corrupt empire, or a dastardly attack against the rightful rulers of the text. You decide.
Photo by Gwydion M. Williams
Fanzine Focal Point 8 mentions a few of the details:
Houghton Mifflin, the hardbound publishers of the Ring Trilogy in the United States, was either too cheap or too stupid to have the finest fantasy epic of our century copyrighted in the United States; they ran, instead, a notice that the book was copyrighted in England, which only protected the work until it was published in the United States.
The way copyright law works, in this case: Nations that have joined the Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, agree to honor the copyrights of member states' works as if they had been published in their own country. So: a work copyrighted in the UK, is protected in the US; a publisher can't just grab a book and publish it here. However… once it's published here, it's subject to normal US copyright law, not the UCC. By publishing it in the US without a proper copyright notice, the work falls into the public domain. (Or so the claim goes. I am not a copyright lawyer. Don't quote me in court.)
So Wollheim gave up on trying to arrange licensing with Tokien and decided to meet the demand of the fannish readers, and all's well in the world of epic tales of elven adventures, yes?
…Perhaps not. Tolkien has protested the publication, claiming it is an infringement of his author's rights, and his publishers in the UK and the US are working to print a new authorized edition while he investigates his legal options.
So for now… buy quickly; these editions may not stick around for long.
Today is Independence Day, traditionally celebrated with a dazzling pyrotechnic display. And so it is appropriate that the book I'm sharing with you today deals with the biggest bang humanity can make: the atomic bomb.
I use astonishing in all its meanings: it's surprising, it's impressive, it's full of constant surprises, and Dr. Bloodmoney left me a bit breathless when I finished it.
This is also a weird book. Even for Philip K. Dick, who has written some of the oddest science fiction books in recent years (heck, just look at my review of his Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich for one very recent example), this book is… well, very strange indeed.
But that strangeness makes it endearing, and a compulsive page turner, and, oh heck, let's just dive into my uncategorized thoughts.
How We Got Along Before the Bomb
Many of Philip Dick's short stories and novels start after the atom bomb is dropped and mankind is looking to pick up the pieces. For instance, his outstanding Penultimate Truthdelivers a post-atomic world of claustrophobic underground burrows and vast overground demesnes.
Dick takes a different approach with Dr. Bloodmoney, setting up the world before the bomb drops with three chapters depicting what seem to be rather prosaic events. We witness a strange man visit a psychologist, see a vaguely annoyed salesman, watch a phocomelus achieve his dream job of fixing TV sets. All this scene setting feels normal and yet also weirdly off-kilter, as if the world is about to change and as if all this seeming normalcy is about to get swept away and as if the characters, deep in their beings, need that normalcy to be swept away in a way that it will never be resurrected.
As always with Dick, however, that apparent normalcy is an illusion, a lie people tell themselves to prevent themselves from madness. Dick's characters are almost always miserable and complicated. They are obsessed with existential doubt and a general frustration at their positions in the world. For one relevant instance, the man going to the psychologist is named Bruno Bluthgeld, who has good reason to need help. As his psychologist realizes in a moment of epiphany:
This is Bruno Bluthgeld, the physicist. And he is right; a lot of people both here and in the East would like to get their hands on him because of his miscalculation back in 1972. Because of the terrible fallout from the high-altitude blast, which wasn't supposed to hurt anyone; Bluthgeld's figures proved it in advance.
The salesman, Stuart McConchie by name, is also deeply unhappy for reasons around envy, ambition and stymied luck due to race (McConchie is black, a fact the book dwells on to its detriment). Dr. Bloodmoney opens with McConchie sweeping the sidewalk in front of the shop he works at. All the while he ponders the misery of Bluthgeld and feels vague jealousy for the happiness of the phocomelus.
That Thalidomide baby is named Hoppy Harrington, and we soon find out he's one of the few characters in this novel who's not filled with miserable existential doubts. Hoppy seems to have telekinetic powers like Manfred Steiner in Dick's great Martian Time-Slip, and we see him fix appliances without having to use his cumbersome metal arms. Hoppy's powers will take on more importance after the inevitable atom bomb drops.
How We Got Along During the Bomb
Dick's depiction of the events while the bombs are dropping is typical for him: weird, astonishing and striking for its subjective way of depicting the nuclear holocaust.
As the bombs are dropping over Dick's beloved Berkeley, we witness each character's reactions to the events. I was especially struck by this interior monologue from the psychologist Doctor Stockstill:
And then, in the middle of his cursing, he had a weird, vivid notion. The war had begun and they were being bombed and would probably die, but it was Washington dropping bombs on them, not the Chinese or the Russians; something had gone wrong with an automatic defense system out in space, and it was acting out its cycle this way — and no one could halt it, either. It was war and death, yes, but it was error; it lacked intent.
Even as people flee the city in terror, have a final, quick, end-of-the world-so-why-not sexual fling in the back of a car, and consider their futures, still it is clear to these characters that this calamity is the result of a simple accident. It seems to be random chance, a bug in the military's ENIAC that triggers the bombs. Considering we all have the near-death experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis in our recent memories, this "friendly fire" experience is even more terrifying.
And yet, this is a Phil Dick novel we're talking about here, so nothing is quite as simple as it seems.
How We Got Along After the Bomb
In the world after the bomb drops, the most astonishing thing is how normal things feel for readers — at least at the beginning of that segment of the story. It is seven years after E Day, as the people call the day of the holocaust, and the world has been changed in innumerable ways. Rats are smart, cats gather in gangs, dogs can talk, and the people are barely getting by on a subsistence basis.
This section of the book focuses on a small community in Marin County which includes most of the characters from earlier in the book. McConchie is part of the town, still working as a salesman, and is miserable (we witness a deeply humiliating failure he has trying to buy electronics early in this segment of the story). Dr. Bluthgeld is in the town, under an assumed name, living with his existential misery. The couple who had furtive sex, Bonny Keller and Andrew Gill, also live in the area. Gill has become a kind of cigarette magnate while Keller has become a kind of civic leader. Bonny became pregnant during her tryst with Andrew, and she gave birth to a very strange set of twins who become central to the story's plot.
Hoppy Harrington is also in Marin, working as the town's all-around fix-up man. In a weird way, the Bomb has made Hoppy's disabilities more normal. In a world in which few people escaped deep scarring from the bombs, Harrington is no longer an outcast as a man with no arms or legs. Instead, as a trusted oracular figure, he's able to be content and grow arrogant in his place in the world. It's striking that one of the few characters in this novel – heck, one of the few characters in Dick so far – who is genuinely happy turns out to be the antagonist of the novel.
Central to the novel is the one character outside of the small Marin County village. Walt Dangerfield had been on his way to Mars when the bombs fell. Trapped orbiting the Earth, his folksy way of speaking ("Hoode Hoode Hoo! Now let me give you a tip on how to store gladiola bulbs all through the winter without fear of annoying pests.") and love of sharing reading to a world desperate for entertainment, Dangerfield unites the world to listen to his voice like FDR used to unite us all with his fireside chats.
It's in this section of the novel that I found myself more and more enraptured in the world Dick creates. In his beautifully flat and unadorned style, Dick is brilliant at conveying character with just a few words. Emotions, motivations, passions and fears seem to radiate off the page from these characters. It feels like Dick wrote in a frenzy, these characters living in three dimensions in his vastly creative mind. Characters grow, change, evolve. McConchie slowly becomes content; Hoppy slowly becomes resentful; the twins grow from being an oddball curiosity to the moral centers of this tale. There's a sense of plot, character and setting oozing out between words, a parallel universe Dick sees through his imagination's gateway. Though this is a short book, it carries the heft of a book twice its length, and in the West Marin township, Dick slowly and shambolically leads to a fascinating conclusion in which Hoppy's ambitions prove to be his tragic fall like a Greek hero too filled with pride.
Some readers may not love the way the main plot of the story mainly wraps up offscreen, but the events leading up to it are rendered so beautifully by Dick that I scarcely cared. There is a scene near the end of this novel, depicted through the eyes of an owl, that was so lyrical that for a moment I thought I was reading Ray Bradbury instead of Philip K. Dick.
In The End
This is the fifth Dick book to be released in the last 18 months. It appears the man's work continues to improve. I was deeply moved and impressed by this novel. The characters are vivid, the events powerful, and Dick's wonderfully subjective way of showing action is unique in my experience. Dr. Bloodmoney is an astonishing achievement.
5 stars, and for me this is the leading candidate for the Hugo Award for Best Novel so far this year.
Above I described Dick's writing as beautifully flat and unadorned, and that's true, but this book also ends on a lovely note which speaks to the curious optimism and faith in the human spirit which runs throughout this book.
The business of the day had begun. All around her the day was awakening, back once more into its normal life.
In the wake of an atom bomb, life slowly returns to its new normal. Humanity will bounce back from even the worst we can imagine. It's hard to get more optimistic than that. In these troubled times, we all need to be reminded to be optimistic.
On the subject of books, please go to this article and give it a read. It's as important now as it was when it was posted — perhaps more. It's been a tough few months.
Modern Man, Primitive Man (Robert Nathan's The Mallot Diaries)
The Mallot Diaries is a new science fiction drama from novelist Robert Nathan. The author, best known for his 1940 fantasy mystery novel Portrait of Jennie, is a highly prolific individual whose style primarily balances satirical allegories with poetic waxing on the transient nature of the world.
Given that he has some stories which have been categorized as supernatural/horror and generally fantastical, I was eager to pick up what I thought would be a merger of high literary talent exploring themes commonly found in popular literature. A story about modern man interacting with a species lost out of time? Now that’s a fruitful area for an author such as Nathan! What The Mallot Diaries turned out to be was far more unsettling.
First Contact
The book takes place in the present day within the remote regions of Arizona. It is written from the titular firsthand accounts of an Associate of Anthropology at Meriden College named Professor Mallot. He, along with his fellow academic Professor Osgood, Curator of the Archaeological Wing of the Museum of Natural History in Yuma, set out to look into rumors of an elusive tribe of indigenous peoples who have resisted contact with the outside world. Their inquiries with a local Apache man quickly lead them to the very people they seek. Having made contact with the tribe, they soon deduce that the people are actually the remnants of a Neanderthal group who are part of the Bear worshipers that Mallot is studying.
The elected leader of the tribe welcomes them after they provide reassurances that the purpose of their visit is neither to kill his people or "take away their god". This tribal leader, or "Jefe", declares that the two men may stay with them in order to act as historians who will document the history and culture of the People of the Bear. Things quickly get messy, however, when the internal power struggles of the tribe begin to draw the outside observers in – both due to their desire to document the People of the Bear, and because of their own weaknesses of the flesh.
The World Before Recorded History
The modern-day discovery of a lost tribe of Neanderthals is a solid enough base for a good story. Nathan does an admittedly decent job of working in the wonder and respect that his main characters feel as they begin to understand the world of their hosts. It’s refreshing to read a story in which the modern world explorers would be able to appreciate that the only real differences which separate modern humans from their primitive roots are as superficial as looks or clothing choices.
It’s pessimistic, but Nathan writes on page 73, "I often think of Professor Osgood's remark, that man has not changed in a hundred thousand years. He is still a scoundrel". To this point he again and again drives home the facts that things such as wealth, status, lust and ambition are as alive and well in the predecessors of homo sapiens as they are in modern man himself. At times these parallels come off as a little too trite, however.
The Youth Revolution
Perfect examples of this are the implications within the buildup to the children's revolution at the climax of the book. This plot thread is clearly a thinly veiled satire of today's youth culture. Under the current leadership of the tribe, children (meaning anyone under the age of 21) are not subjected to any forms of rules or consequences for their bad behavior.
The Jefe indulgently dismisses rude or violent acts as just youthful arrogance. Ultimately this lack of discipline for any crimes, from adultery to assault, results in the 109 children of the tribe taking up spears and killing the elders.
Heavy handed satire aside, by far the worst flaw of Nathan's book is the sensuality with which young girls are described and the societal sexualization of the youths in the tribe, some of whom are as young as eight years old.
As the story progresses and the anthropologists learn more about the internal politics and social structure of the tribe, both of Nathan's protagonists develop very disturbing feelings for two of the young girls, one of whom is twelve and the other is between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.
Highly Disturbing
This attraction is in part explained as being an effect of the two professors integrating into the tribe. Thirteen is the current age of consent amongst the Neanderthals and young girls and boys are not strictly forbidden from sexual exchanges, but it’s still a very disquieting turn in the story that comes into play over and over again.
The touting of pedophilia as romantic, cute and "basic human nature" frankly ruins the experience of reading The Mallot Diaries, and because of it I can’t recommend this book at all.
If Nathan was trying to write the next Lolita he has not succeeded. I have to give this book only a half star. Even with the pointed realizations about humanity which Nathan occasionally drops during the plot, the fetishization of young girls as well as the repeated attempts to write blatant pedophilia off as star crossed love makes The Mallot Diaries a book that is best avoided at all costs.
By Jason Sacks
On a much lighter note…
Sometimes it's exhilarating to read a book that seems to be positively overflowing with ideas, a book where the author seems thrilled to share a whole universe of concepts and drag an empathetic reader along in a journey that feels complex and rich, even if the book is short.
And sometimes it's just exhausting to read a book like that.
The Martian Sphinx, by journeyman science fiction author Keith Woodcott, is an exhausting book. It's full of clever moments, great excitement, and some intriguing alien races. Sadly, in this case, the whole of this brief 160-page Ace novel is not greater than the sum of its parts.
The Cork Floats to the Top
The protagonist of this novel is a graduate student named Jason Lombard, who is attending the finest college in Africa but who is ostracized due to his European birthplace. Lombard may be part of a miserable minority, but his brilliance wins the day. Despite his neurotic worries, Lombard is a genius level scientist who has thought through the deeply troubling problem of the Earth's decaying orbit around the sun.
Lombard comes across as a compelling character in the early chapters of this book, albeit in the Philip K. Dick tradition. Jason is a worrier, an outsider, a man who feels deeply ostracized from the university he's attending. It's hard not to see in Lombard echoes of the children integrating Southern elementary schools and college these days, though filtered through a different sort of personality.
I would happily have read a whole book exploring Lombard's world, with its overpopulated Europe and the advancement of the Red Chinese to the top of the world's most advanced societies. Sadly, Woodcott wanders elsewhere before exploring that theme enough to satisfy the reader's curiosity. I wish he had taken a stand to explore the problems of overpopulation, as that problem seems richly deserving of exploration in sci-fi.
The Power of Gravi
A second intriguing theme in The Martian Sphinx depicts how the world has moved beyond its dependence on fossil fuels and has learned to use a safe and endless source of power which is all around us. Gravipower sends a spaceship into space, provides all the energy the world needs, and essentially acts as a magic handwaving plot device to move the story along.
Again, the development of gravipower would alone have been enough for an entertaining book, because its effects on the book's characters is intriguing. But, again, we just don't get to spend much time considering what is essentially only a plot device.
First Contact
Instead, the heart of the book is a trip Lombard and a team of astronauts take to Mars to investigate a strange alien contraption dubbed "The Martian Sphinx." I'll get to the "Sphinx" in a paragraph or two, but first I should mention the aliens who are also questing after the object.
Two races swiftly land on Mars when the Terrans land there, and both alien races are bizarre, unique and totally fascinating in their vast differences from mankind. One race attacks the other, and the effects of the battle make up some of the most passionately written sections of the novel. Though these creatures are as different from people as insects are from us, readers are still made to feel the aliens' pain and fear. I was legitimately moved by a scene in which a number of the beings slowly die due to the battle.
In a way, their very alienness added to the pathos of those those scenes. Readers feel themselves in the boots of Lombard and his companions, struggling to make sense of the cryptic, unexplained war that lands on humanity's doorstep and the terrible toll that war takes on everyone involved. Again, this section alone might make for an intriguing novel of its own, maybe as a parable for our deepening conflict in Vietnam.
Not this Sphinx…
The Sphinx
Lastly, at the heart of the book but far from the center of its action is the "martian sphinx" of the book's title. An alien obelisk on our nearest planetary companion, the sphinx is a perplexing object which bespeaks of a long-lost alien civilization and seems to promise a fascinating future for humanity.
Woodcott makes the sphinx intriguing but it ultimately delivers mostly riddles rather than answers. Though that makes its name appropriate, the sphinx also deserves more than the space it receives here to begin to reveal its secrets. It's a rich enough idea for a whole series of novels, and I hope Woodcott can write those novels.
One of Mr. Woodcott's previous novels
Few Riddles Answered
The Martian Sphinx is Woodcott's fourth published novel and it overflows with ideas. Sadly, perhaps due to the brevity of this book, none of those ideas pay off in fulfilling ways. It's easy to ponder how a writer like Philip K. Dick or John Brunner might explore these ideas which read similar to some of their best work. Sadly Woodcott is no Brunner and this novel just doesn't fulfill its considerable potential.
3 stars.
[I am looking forward to the interesting mail we receive in regard to Jason's last statement. I suppose Woodcott is no Brunner much like Winston P. Sanders is no Poul Anderson and Cordwainer Bird is definitely no Harlan Ellison…]
[Kris Vyas-Myall and Cora Buhlert team up to cover two of the better Ace Doubles to have come out in a while. Enjoy!]
by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall
The Ballad of Beta-2, by Samuel R. Delany, and Alpha, Yes! Terra, no!, by Emil Petaja (Ace Double M-121)
I have generally been disappointed by the Ace Doubles so far this year. Those I have read have seemed to me to be quite old fashioned and I had been wondering if they were going to be heading into a more conservative route with them this year. Thankfully, this new Double I have found has been one of their best:
I have been a fan of all four of Delany’s Ace novels, however I approached this with some excitement but also trepidation. For three of those former works were in the same Toron series and The Jewels of Aptor was also set in a similar post-catastrophe future. So, whilst I know he is an excellent writer I wondered how he would do with a generation starship story. I can definitively say he has not only succeeded but produced his best work to date.
This is an interesting take on the well-worn theme, where the generation starship became obsolete long before the crew reached their destination. The inhabitants found hyperdrive had resulted in the systems already being colonized and they themselves were outdated relics who were simply content to live on their ships. At the same time, it appears some form of reversion has taken place and those on board lack much of the knowledge they would have had at the start of the voyage.
Galactic anthropology student Joneny is forced to do an assignment on these Star Folk’s culture, specifically the titular “Ballad of Beta-2”. Originally Joneny assumes that the ballad is nothing but meaningless “cotton candy effusions”, but as he investigates further, he discovers this may hold the truth of what terrible fate befell the Star Folk on their long voyage.
This story starts off fairly leisurely and I assumed this was going to be a sedate academic kind of novel, travelling around exploring the starships. However, as it goes on you do discover that the terror listed on the front cover is justified, my heart pounding as I read some passages. And it should be said there are multiple unforeseen twists within its pages.
Delany clearly has a gift for poetry, with the ballad itself being a beautiful piece and with a clearer understanding of metre and imagery than may others in the fantasy field. He also uses a number of other clever literary devices which I loved, such as building up a mosaic story from framed narratives.
Throughout this Delany explores numerous interesting ideas. First is the value of the fantastic in storytelling and how easily it is dismissed by literary critics (something I am sure we have all seen).
Second is the problem of unchecked biases in academia. The only first-hand account Joneny can find is the original contact when the Star Folk entered the system and the Ballad was only picked up by sending in a robot to record, which the original anthropologist changed the lyrics he thought were clearly incorrect. It is off the back of this information that the common truth about the nature of the Star Folk is held.
Third is the danger of cultural assumptions. Thinking about who is civilized and what it truly means to be human. Throughout we are called on to challenge what we think we know and reassess that which we hold to be true.
Then this also acts as a reality check on the space romances, that see an ease to zipping around the universe, showing how hard this could really be. But then the story dives further into the dangers of anti-intellectualism and religious fundamentalism.
I could keep on about all the ways this work is fascinating. It should be noted this part of the Double is pretty short, only 96 pages, but within it he crafts a story with more depth than most writers manage in triple that time. And yet I would not say any of the concepts are treated at a surface level, he weaves it all together like a stout rope and you can see more ideas every time you look closer.
Needless to say, I fell in love with this short novel. I would recommend it for everyone, but it is not for the faint of heart or those looking for a light read. It is tough, intellectually challenging and really brutal at times.
Delany has once again proven himself to be one of the most exciting new voices in science fiction. If he is not to be my favourite writer of the year, someone else is going to have to produce something spectacular in the next six months!
Emil Petaja is an old hand of the genre but has been out of the writing game for almost a decade, only just beginning to sell new short stories and (I believe) this is his first novel. As such I was very curious what it would be like.
Humanity has fully conquered the Solar System and is preparing interstellar ships for further expansion. In Alpha Centauri they had been initially deflecting ships with their barrier, but the tribunal has decided it will be necessary to wipe out humanity completely.
The novel opens with an alien from Alpha Centauri arriving in San Francisco and ending up mingling with the homeless of the city. This person (who is initially called The Tourist but who will have more names as the story unfolds) has psychic powers and uses them to take a look at the differences in humanity and what life is like on Earth. However, his mission is not authorized, and a tracker has been sent to kill him.
Trying to summarize beyond this jumping on point seems like a fool’s errand as it become very complex. This story then evolves into a tapestry of life across the solar system, all of it linked together through a range of different characters, touching on ideas of power, mythology, belief and humanity.
Petaja makes a real effort to show what a future of ever-growing space colonization would be like rather than purely projecting the present into the future. This drive is leaving ordinary people’s lives in shambles as everyone has their eyes on space; crime and unemployment are rampant. Drug use is common. The natives of the planets that are being colonized are being exploited but it only manifests as power for a small number and as a means to fuel further expansion.
The author has an easily readable style which is useful as what he is doing could easily collapse under its own weight but somehow, he manages to juggle it. There were times when I would have to backtrack to check I was indeed following everything that was happening, but I never found myself becoming lost. I do think he could possibly have done more if this had been a full-length novel rather than squeezed down into one half of a Double, but he still works admirably with the page count he is given.
I expect this will be compared to Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (although that itself is an old concept, dating at least as far back as Montaigne’s Of Cannibals) but it is really doing something different. This more a dialogue on humanity’s future weighing up the optimistic and pessimistic views we have emerging in science fiction and considering whether there is something worth saving in us.
So overall, Petaja’s return has proved to be a welcome surprise and I will be interested to see what he comes up with next. He clearly has a great affinity with Finnish myths, so perhaps a book based around that would be welcome?
Rating: Four Stars
by Cora Buhlert
The Rithian Terror and Off Center by Damon Knight (Ace Double M-113)
Summer has come to West Germany, though you wouldn't know it by the wet and miserable weather we've been having.
Nonetheless, there are some good news. My hometown team Werder Bremen has won the West German football (soccer to our American friends) championship for the 1964/65 season.
The Werder Bremen team celebrates winning the 1965 West German football championship
The 83rd Kieler Woche, one of the biggest sailing regattas in the world, kicks off today in Kiel-Eckernförde. In addition to the sailing competition, there is also a parade featuring 23 tall ships from all over the world.
The West German police boat SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN and the French tall ships ETOILE and BELLE POULE, the Swedish tall ships GLADAN and FALKEN and the Chilean tall ship ESMERALDA at the Kieler Woche.This striking minimalist poster, designed by Michael Engelmann, advertises the 1965 Kieler Woche sailing regatta.
On to reading: In the spinner rack of my local import bookstore, I came across yet another Ace Double, No. M-113 to be precise. This one contained a novel as well as a short fiction collection by Damon Knight. In the past, I have enjoyed Damon Knight's works of literary criticism, so how would his fiction stand up?
Monster Hunt
Quite well, it turns out. The novel The Rithian Terror starts out with Security Commissioner Thorne Spangler, currently the most important official in the Earth Empire, on the hunt for a monster. That monster, the titular Rithian terror, is a tentacled horror that can take on the appearance of anybody it wishes. Seven Rithians came to Earth, but only one is still at large.
However, Spangler is certain he has the monster cornered. After all, there are house by house searches and roadblocks on every street, where everybody has to pass through a scanner. This is the one test a Rithian can't pass, for the scanner detects human skeletons and Rithians have none.
Spangler is accompanied by Jawj Pembun, an official from Manhaven, one of Earth's colony worlds, which recently gained its independence. Manhaven has regular contact with the Rithians, so Pumbun was brought in as an expert.
Spangler clearly resents Pembun's involvement in what should be his moment of glory. For starters, Pembun comes from a small backwater planet, one that only gained its independence, because the Earth Empire with its 260 planets let them. Furthermore, Pembun speaks in heavy dialect, while the Empire prizes precise language. Finally, Pembun is a black man, descended from African and Caribbean colonists, and Spangler is the sort of person who is very bothered by this and not shy about expressing it.
I have to admit that after the first fifteen pages or so, I came close to throwing the book against the nearest wall. There are enough racists in the real world, so I really don't need to spend time with racist characters while reading. However, I quickly realised that Knight was a better author than that. For even though Spangler may be the POV character, we're not meant to sympathise with him or his Empire. After all, Spangler and the Empire he serves are rigid, overorganised, xenophobic, have a massive superiority complex and are racist to boot. Spangler is also unpleasant in his personal life, a social climber who only courts his girlfriend Joanna because she is a member of a patrician family and will be useful to him. At one point, he even hits Joanna.
As a result, I quickly found myself sympathising with Pembun and cheered as he deflated Spangler and his smug compatriots. For starters, those scanners at every roadblock that Spangler is so proud of won't work, for while Rithians don't have skeletons, they could just swallow one to pass the test. Also, if the Empire wants to capture a Rithian alive, then maybe shooting six of the seven Rithians who crashlanded on Earth dead is not the best idea. Finally, Pembun casually drops the bombshell that the Rithians have hypnotic abilities as well as a nasty sense of humour.
A Game of Spies
What began as the hunt for an alien spy quickly turns into a game of cat and mouse between Spangler and Pembun. Spangler decides that Pembun must be a traitor and wastes a lots of resources trying to catch him redhanded. But the meeting of supposed offworld insurrectionists Spangler has his forces storm only turns out to be a Christmas party, where Pembun hands out gifts to children while dressed up as a legendary figure called the Grey Parrot.
While Spangler fails at every turn due to his rigid mindset, Pembun's unorthodox methods get results. And so Pembun manages to unmask the Rithian two thirds through the novel, using the Rithian's sense of humour against him. It turns out that the alien is posing as a junior member of the very committee dedicated to hunting him down. However, in the attempt to apprehend the Rithian, the alien is killed and Colonel Cassina, the military official the Rithian had hypnotised into giving him access to the security headquarters, is grievously wounded.
However, the crisis is not yet over. For the Rithians have planted bombs on Earth as leverage against the Empire. The key to the location of the bombs is in Colonel Cassina's head, only Cassina will not talk. And once Spangler's people finally manage to extract the message, destroying the Colonel's mind in the process, it turns out to be useless.
For Pembun points out that even though language has frozen and standardised in the Empire with every word having only a single meaning, it continued to evolve on the colony planets, where the same term can have many different meanings. So the location given in the message could be anywhere on Earth. Spangler and his security forces have no chance of locating the bombs. The Empire is finished, destroyed by its own rigidity, and so is Spangler's career. However, Spangler and Pembun have developed a grudging respect for each other and Pembun offers him a place on his homeworld Manhaven. Spangler's girlfriend Joanna, who up to now had refused to marry him, knowing fully well that Spangler wanted her not for herself, but for her position, agrees to go with him.
A Tale with Multiple Meanings
As a linguist, I enjoyed that the solution to the central mystery of the novel lies in the ambiguity of language. Another thing I liked was that Pembun's native tongue, which he occasionally speaks throughout the novel, is a Creole based on French, Spanish and English. I have no idea if Knight used a real Creole language, but it certainly feels convincing enough.
Just like the solution of the linguistic mystery, The Rithian Terror is a novel with multiple layers and meanings. On the surface, it is a hunt for a literal bug-eyed monster that has infiltrated Earth. However, it is also a John Le Carré like spy novel about two agents, both nominally on the same side, trying to outmanoeuvre each other. Finally, The Rithian Terror is a novel about colonialism and the slow decline and death of empires.
It is this last aspect that is also the most topical, for in the past fifteen years, we have seen the once great colonial empires of Britain and France as well as smaller powers like Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy slowly fall apart, as more and more nations in Africa, South East Asia and the Caribbean gain independence. And it is certainly no accident that Pembun, the representative of a newly independent world, is also a black man speaking Creole, while his counterpart Spangler is an overly rigid white man with the proverbial stick shoved up his backside. Knight makes it very clear to which of these two very different men the future belongs.
Four stars.
Off Center
Of Immigrants and Dolpins
Off Center, the second half of this Ace Double, is a collection of five pieces of short fiction originally published between 1952 and 1964.
The first story "What Rough Beast?" is the story of a young immigrant named Mike Kronski trying to make his way in America. However, Mike is not the simple East European immigrant he appears to be. He comes from far further afield, from an alternate universe. He also has the ability to bend reality to his will and has accidentally changed his world into ours.
Through a series of misadventures, Mike meets a young woman called Anne with burn scars on her body. He uses his ability to heal Anne's scars, which causes Anne's father and a greedy friend to capture Mike to exploit him. Mike tries to run away and is shot. In his terror, he accidentally erases New York from existence. Only Anne remains. Mike takes her to a different version of New York, where she can feel at home, and then departs to a new reality, hoping that this time, he will fit in.
A touching tale about the alienation and profound sense of homesickness many immigrants feel. Knight captures Mike's voice and his imperfect English well. Our editor Gideon Marcus also loved the story.
"Second Class Citizen" is the story of researcher Charles Craven and the subject of his studies, the dolphin Pete. Craven has taught Pete to understand and speak English, spell simple words and even do chemical experiments. While Craven patronisingly presents Pete to some visitors, we learn from background conversations that there is an international crisis going on. Craven is convinced that this crisis will blow over, like any other crisis before.
However, Craven is wrong, for shortly after the visitors have left, the TV program is interrupted for a special bulletin before dropping out altogether. Craven correctly deduces that war has begun and manages to dive to the underwater station of his research base just before heat bombs fall all around him. Craven survives the attack, but once his food runs out, he will be doomed, unless he manages to catch enough fish to survive. However, Craven has no idea how to catch fish. Then Pete appears, easily catching the fish. The roles are reversed now, the teacher has become the student.
The novella "Be My Guest" is the story of Kip Morgan, a young man who finds himself possessed by four bickering ghosts after a poisoning attempt gone wrong. Kip also has another problem, he as well as two women of his acquaintance have become invisible to everybody but each other.
The novella follows Kip through his increasingly desperate attempts to get rid of his unwanted tenants and solve his invisibility problem. Kip finally realises that everybody had multiple ghosts living inside them and that these ghosts influence their decisions. He also realises that his invisibility problem is a form of quarantine to keep Kip from talking about the ghosts. Eventually, he blackmails some very powerful ghosts inhabiting the body of a rich man into lifting the quarantine and make sure that he and the two women are given only beneficial and helpful ghosts. Finally free, Kip also realises that the woman he thought he loved is not the person who's really good for him.
"Be My Guest" is an fascinating attempt at a science fictional ghost story. Knight viscerally conveys Kip's growing desperation. It does feel a little long, though, and would probably have worked better as a novelette or short story.
"God's Nose" is a short vignette that does exactly what it says on the tin. The unnamed narrator and his female friend debate what the nose of God would look like. Eventually, her lover Godfrey arrives. He has a very prominent nose.
Inconsequential without much in the way of plot or point.
The final story "Catch That Martian" feels very much like a mix between The Rithian Terror and "Be My Guest". Once again, we have a dangerous alien, the titular Martian, who can take on the appearance of any human being. And once again, we have people abruptly taken out of the real world and turned into "ghosts". A young police officer is determined to crack the mystery of the ghosts and catch the Martian in the act. He deduces that the ghosts must have annoyed the Martian somehow, mostly via making noise, and that the Martian has a taste for musical theatre. So the narrator traces the Martian to a Broadway theatre, determined to apprehend him. But before he can give chase, he falls into the orchestra pit, straight onto a bass drum.
Well written and Knight once again captures the distinctive voice of his first person narrator perfectly. However, the story is also slight and a little silly, particularly compared to the two similar stories in this Ace Double.
All told, Off Center is a nice collection that showcases Knight's writing skills, even though some of the stories are a little slight.
Three stars.
[Don't miss the next episode of The Journey Show, featuring singer-songwriter Harry Seldon. He'll be playing a mix of Dylan, Simon, and some unique original compositions!]
SF anthologies are not neutral vessels. They are shaped by editors with agendas. Sometimes these are as simple as “what can I throw together to make some money,” but usually they advance the editor’s conception of what the field is, or should be.
The first “best of the year” compilation in SF was the well-received The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949, edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T.E. Dikty, published by Frederick Fell in 1949 but containing stories from 1948. The Bleiler-Dikty anthologies spawned a companion series, TheYear’s Best Science Fiction Novels (i.e., novellas), which ran from 1952 through 1954. Bleiler left the project in 1955, to the detriment of its quality, and the series died with a final single volume from Advent, a small specialty publisher, in 1958.
by Frank McCarthy
There was abortive competition along the way. Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books, a long-time anthologist, published Prize Science Fiction (McBride, 1953), containing 1952 stories supposedly comprising the winners and runners-up for that year’s Jules Verne Prize, an award and a book title that were not heard of again. The next year August Derleth, another veteran anthologist, published Portals of Tomorrow (Rinehart, 1954), collecting stories from 1953 and pointedly subtitled The Best of Science Fiction and Other Fantasy. The editor described it as “covering the entire genre of the fantastic: not only supernatural and science-fiction tales, but also every kind of whimsy and imaginative concept of life in the future or on other planets,” apparently distinguishing it from the Bleiler-Dikty series without mentioning it. There was no second volume.
But Judith Merril achieved ignition, and kept it. Her series of annual anthologies shows no signs of flagging after nine years. The first, SF: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, appeared in 1956, with 1955 stories, from the SF specialty publisher Gnome Press, in an unusual publishing arrangement: a Dell paperback edition appeared in newsstands, drugstores, etc., more or less simultaneously with the publication of the Gnome hardcover, rather than after the usual year or so interval before paperback publication. After four volumes, as Gnome tottered towards oblivion, Merril jumped to Simon and Schuster, which published the fifth through ninth books. We await the tenth, slated for December.
by Ed Emshwiller
Merril’s angle from the first was good SF as good literature, accessible to the non-fanatical reader, with emphasis on character—not necessarily character-driven, but more concerned with the perspective and experience of recognizable human individuals than much SF. Her taste in cherry-picking the SF magazines was near-impeccable. She also looked beyond the SF magazines and the writers identified with them.
The latter practice has been both a strength and a weakness, bringing to the SF-reading public many worthy stories that they otherwise would never have heard of, but also including some items that seemed trivial or misplaced but came from a prestigious source or with a prestigious byline. As a result, the Merril series has become woolier and more diffuse in focus over the years. Her last volume included stories from Playboy (two), the Saturday Evening Post, the Saturday Review of Literature, the Peninsula Spectator, The Reporter, and the Atlantic Monthly, and such large literary bylines as Bernard Malamud and Andre Maurois, the latter with a novelette that may have been the best of 1930, when it was first published. Oh, and three cartoons. Of course it also included, as always, a large and solid selection of indisputable SF and fantasy, both from the genre magazines and from other sources.
Merril’s agenda is clear. Let her tell you about it. In her introduction to the last of the Gnome volumes, she wrote:
“The name of this book is SF.
“SF is an abbreviation for Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy). Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy) is really an abbreviation too. Here are some of the things it stands for. . . .
“S is for Science, Space, Satellites, Starships, and Solar exploring; also for Semantics and Sociology, Satire, Spoofing, Suspense, and good old Serendipity. . . .
“F is for Fantasy, Fiction and Fable, Folklore, Fairy-tale and Farce; also for Fission and Fusion; for Firmament, Fireball, Future and Forecast; for Fate and Free-will; Figuring, Fact-seeking, and Fancy-free.
“Mix well. The result is SF, or Speculative Fun.”
English translation, if you need one: What she thinks the SF field is, or should be is . . . not really a field. That is, not categorically distinguishable in any clear-cut way from the general body of literature, though having a somewhat different set of preoccupations than the typical contemporary novel or short story.
You can debate her argument, but I’m not inclined to. I think if Merril did not exist it would be necessary to invent her, or someone similar, to help rescue the field (that word again!) from excessive insularity. I am also glad to have her book to read each year, exasperating as some of its contents may be.
Yin and Yang
But not everyone feels that way, and it is not surprising that there is once again some competition. Donald Wollheim is back for a second try, with co-editor Terry Carr, a long-time SF fan and shorter-time author now working at Ace Books, with that publisher’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965, a chunky original paperback with a distinct “back to basics” air about it, though there’s no comment at all about Merril’s book and nothing that can be read as a disguised dig at it.
So what’s the more overt angle, besides “here are some stories we think are good”? First, the title does not include “Fantasy,” a word which for Merril covers a multitude of exogamies. And the “World’s Best” in the title is not ceremonial; the editors make much of having scoured the world, and not just the US, for stories. The back cover says “Selected from the pages of every magazine regularly publishing science-fiction and fantasy stories in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the rest of the world. . . .” The yield: five non-US stories, of seventeen in the book. Two of these are from the British New Worlds, which is not exactly news, but the others are from less familiar sources, though they are closer to the Anglo-American genre core than some of Merril’s catches.
First of these three is Vampires Ltd., by Josef Nesvadba, a Czech psychiatrist and well-known SF writer, the title story of his recent collection, about the current preoccupation with fast automobiles; the protagonist accidentally gets his hands on an especially fine one, and per the title, finds out that it doesn’t really run on gasoline. We reach that denouement by way of a surreal and hectic series of events which makes little pretense to plausibility. But that is beside the author’s point, which is satire. It’s an interesting look at a different notion of storytelling than you will find in the US SF magazines. The Weather in the Underground, by Colin Free, best known for his work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, from the Australian magazine Squire, is more consistent with US conventions. It takes place in an underground habitat where part of humanity has fled for safety, leaving the rest to freeze in a new ice age. This life is made tolerable by constantly renewed psychological conditioning, but our protagonist’s conditioning never quite took hold, so he’s miserable and maladjusted, leading to banishment and a sorry end. It’s a strikingly vehement story, very tightly written and forceful, and one of the best in the book.
The third non-US/UK offering is What Happened to Sergeant Masuro?, by Harry Mulisch, from The Busy Bee Review: New Writing from the Netherlands. Mulisch is apparently a notable Dutch literary figure, with eight books published. Sergeant Masuro was a soldier in a Dutch patrol in Papua New Guinea; one of the other soldiers raped a native girl, or tried to; the headman was later seen skulking around; and Sergeant Masuro began to undergo a terrible transformation. The story is the report to headquarters by the patrol’s superior officer, who recounts both the events and his own anguish at some length. Amusingly, the plot—white men go into the jungle, transgress against the natives, and are cursed—is a long-familiar pulp plot of which dozens of examples could no doubt be exhumed from Weird Tales, Jungle Stories, and the like. The literary gloss doesn’t add much to it.
Aside from these foreign trophies, the book is a stiff gust of de gustibus. Of the five stories which one of us at Galactic Journey thought worthy of five stars (excluding several outright fantasies from Fantastic), none are included. Nor are any included from our longer end-of-the-year Galactic Stars list. Of the stories that are in the book, only two were awarded four stars, and one—Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow—fled the wrath of Gideon with only one star.
And much of what is here is remarkably pedestrian or worse. The editors seem determined to reproduce the genre’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. Starting the book is Tom Purdom’s Greenplace, which features such lively matters as a psychedelic drug and a man in a wheelchair being beaten by a mob, but is essentially an extremely contrived and implausible warning about a genuine problem: how democracy can survive, or not, as psychological manipulation becomes more sophisticated. Next, and proceeding downhill, Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis’s Men of Good Will is an equally implausible, but more trivial, story built around a scientific gimmick that’s not even entirely original (remember Jerome Bixby’s The Holes Around Mars?).
This is followed by Bill for Delivery, by that faithful purveyor of contrived yard goods Christopher Anvil, about the problems some salt-of-the-earth spacemen have carrying a cargo of unruly and dangerous birds from one star system to another. At this point, a reader who bought the book thinking it was time to check out this “science fiction” stuff people are talking about would probably start to think “How can anybody possibly be interested in this?” and toss it or leave it on the bus.
There’s more of this ilk later on: C.C. MacApp’s weak and gimmicky For Every Action, and Robert Lory’s The Star Party, an annoyingly slick rendition of an original but silly idea. And Leiber’s When the Change-Winds Blow answers the question that hardly anyone is asking: “What does a talented author do when he can’t think of anything of substance to write?”
But that’s the bad news. The good news is a number of worthwhile stories. Four Brands of Impossible by new writer Norman Kagan is at once an amusing picture of aspiring math and science brains in their element, and a chilling one of the uses to which their talents may be put, wrapped around an interesting mathematical idea. William F. Temple’s A Niche in Time is a smart time travel story that goes off in an unexpected direction. John Brunner’s The Last Lonely Man (one of the New Worlds items) develops a clever piece of psychological technology in the author’s earnest and methodical way. Edward Jesby, another new writer, contributes the stylish and incisive Sea Wrack, which starts out as a tale of the idle and decadent rich in a far future where some humans have been modified to live undersea, and and turns into a story of class struggle, no less.
Philip K. Dick’s Oh, To Be a Blobel! is a sort of slapstick black comedy updating Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Thomas M. Disch’s Now Is Forever is a sharp if overlong piece of sociologizing about the effects of wide availability of matter duplicators, which kick the props from under everyone’s getting-and-spending way of life. New writer Jack B. Lawson’s The Competitors is a breezy rearrangement of stock SF elements that reads to me like a facile parody of the genre, probably done with A.E. van Vogt in mind.
To my taste the most striking item here is Edward Mackin’s New Worlds story The Unremembered, a sort of religious fantasy framed in SF terms. In the automated and urbanized future, lives have been extended for hundreds of years, but the show seems to be closing from sheer ennui: the birth rate is falling and the youth suicide rate is rising, and older people are queueing up at the euthanasia clinics. Apparitions of people are appearing and disappearing seemingly randomly, because (it is hinted) the human span has become divorced from its natural length. The elderly protagonist becomes one of the apparitions, and his consciousness takes a Stapledonian journey through the cosmos before arriving at the final revelation. C.S. Lewis would appreciate this one if he were still around. It is quite different from anything I’ve seen from Mackin before, or from anybody else for that matter.
But that’s the only really strikingly memorable story here; closest runners-up are the Colin Free and Edward Jesby stories, based mainly on their intensity in presenting relatively familiar sorts of material. The writers who are pushing the SF envelope in notable ways are not here—no Lafferty, no Zelazny, no Ellison, no Cordwainer Smith. And there is too much overt dross.
So, the bottom line: a pretty decent book with much solid material, but it mostly fails the “Surprise me!” test. Maybe the next one will be more startling. Meanwhile, Merril will be back to argue with in a few more months.
[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge! Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]
May's second Galactoscope reviews the latest works by two of the field's titans. Sadly, it looks like their best contributions are behind them, as the following article will demonstrate:
Andre Norton is a gem among authors. She is able to write everything from short stories to novels in quick succession, continues to be picked up by publishers (no small feat in the writing world), and has been able to carve out a reputation for herself as an author who can write extensive background lore into her stories.
That being said, I feel like Norton is in a bit of a writing funk lately. It hasn’t slowed her down, but her writing is starting to feel unbalanced. In particular, the trait that once was her strength – world building – is starting to weigh down her work. By the end of Three Against the Witch World, the third and newest short novel in the Witch World series, Norton successfully introduces better character development with respect to the earlier entries, but the world building is still too overpowering.
The Next Generation
Three Against the Witch World begins with a very condensed introduction to the early lives of Simon Tregarth and Lady Jaelithe's triplets. Told from the first-person narratives of the children, we learn that the first two decades of life have not been easy for anyone in the nation of Estcarp.
After the destabilization of Karsten at the conclusion of Web of the Witch World, a warlord stepped up to fill the power vacuum left by the former ruler Yvian and his extra-dimensional allies, the humanoid beings called The Kolder. Between the Alizon nation, the remains of Karsten and the formidable Falconers, Estcarp is locked in a long term guerrilla war that is slowly bleeding them dry.
Amazingly, despite marrying Earth man Simon Tregarth and thereby disavowing her role as a Witch, Lady Jaelithe still retains traces of the innate magic known (allegedly) only to be accessible in select virginal women. Unsurprisingly, given that Simon is also a Power user (albeit one from another planet), the couple's triplets Kyllan, Kemoc, and Kaththea are also born with strong magical tendencies.
They are soon left on their own after their parents depart on vague and mysterious missions. Kyllan, Kemoc, and Kaththea must contend not only with the front-line defense of the Estcarp nation, but with the jealousy and hostile machinations of the power hungry Witch Council. The Women of Power are determined to undermine the influence of Simon and Jaelithe, and the best way to do that is to take their daughter Kaththea for their own ranks.
By 20 years old the triplets are adrift in a highly unstable time with no nearby allies in all of Estcarp. Upon the ruthless kidnapping of Kaththea by the Witches, Kyllan and Kemoc decide to journey forth into the larger world to gain information and allies crucial to reclaiming the safety of their family.
What follows is a journey across all mapped nations, even into the twisted and nebulous eastern regions of the world – a massive mountain range interspersed with magically tainted creatures. It is literally a place which people are incapable of imagining due to a powerful collective compulsion in the human population. It's a race against time to save Kaththea, save Estcarp and prevent a horrific ancient accident from being repeated in the name of protecting their homeland.
The Witch World Lives On
Sounds like an amazing story, right? It's certainly an interesting premise with a solidly entertaining, if grandiose, climax. But is it a good read?
As I've noted in my review of Norton’s Witch World(1963) and its subsequent installment, if you like fiction liberally layered with lore and societal structures you will find this series intriguing. But just like before, Three Against the Witch World leaves the audience wanting a deeper connection to the main characters.
My, Oh My, Is It Ever So Dry
Stories that sacrifice character development for world building only engage their audience for so long before boredom begins to surface. With Kyllan, Kemoc and Kaththea as the beacons through Three Against the Witch World, it is a comparatively less tedious task to read through the extensive world history of Norton's realm. Three is still massively overwritten, but at least we have the enjoyment of seeing some of the cast grow instead of remaining stagnant cardboard cutouts.
Admittedly the triplets are not completely unique. They are rather standard fantasy warrior, scholar and sorceress/witch characters, but they are given more individuality than the previous protagonists of the series. Kyllan and Kemoc's strategics get much keener via increasingly difficult obstacles they face. Limitations are realized for Kemoc as he pieces together the knowledge held in Lormt, ancient bastion of scholarship, and Kaththea has to adapt to her increasing power.
However, Norton continues to hold her characters at arm's length. Her writing in general has been suffering of late because of this tendency: she is much more prone to showing her characters in action rather than letting us into their heads. Thus, the changes we see the triplets go through still have but a superficial connection with the audience. In short, within Three Against the Witch World we see that the series is still tripping over itself to engage with its audience.
Three Strikes and You're Out
At three entries into the series, the Witch World books continue to feel like Norton is far more interested in telling us about the mechanics of her world rather than the people living within it.
For existing Witch World fans, Three Against the Witch World offers new races and mysterious god-like entities, and I did appreciate Norton's attempts at expanded characterization. Nevertheless, that's not enough to save the series. After reading three books in the same series, I should have more than the shallowest of connections with the main characters. I should have a strong desire to continue to read further installments about their lives. The fact is, after reading Witch World, I don't. I know that Andre Norton is capable of better as a word smith and a story teller. Unfortunately, Three Against the Witch World is only worthy of a two and a half star rating.
Okay, that’s kind of unfair. It’s not that I read the man’s work and didn’t like it. Instead, I decided at a relatively early age that I didn’t want to read his juvenile sci-fi novels.
While some of my closest sci-fi loving middle school friends loved Smith’s Galactic Patrol stories, I never read any of his work, and the one time I borrowed one of his books from a friend I just never got around to cracking the cover. Maybe I felt an odd sort of aversion because I wanted to defy my pal Danny Alvarado’s deep love for Smith – you know, the way boys create friendly rivalries over nothing.
But that may be psychoanalysis after the fact. More likely I didn’t read Smith because I always wanted to read above my age group. Why read juveniles when there was so much great material being published by the likes of Asimov, Dick and Clarke?
Since I had never read any Smith as a kid, now seemed the perfect time to try out ol’ Doc’s work. I’ve grown older and mellowed a bit in my tastes in the last few years. So when my fine editor offered to have one of us staffers review a limited edition publication of Smith’s latest novel, Subspace Explorers, I jumped at the chance. Why not try a classic author, albeit one in the twilight of his career? I could either validate my pal Danny’s passion or smugly smile at myself that I made the right choice to skip Smith.
Well, young Jason is vindicated.
The rather bland cover of Doc Smith's latest novel
Subspace Explorers is an odd book. It’s breakneck space opera sci-fi juxtaposed against a sort of exploration of psionics which in turn is juxtaposed against a kind of screed about a battle between virtuous business leaders and corrupt trade unionists. If you’re wondering how these odd elements all fit together in the space of some 200 pages, well, the answer is that they don’t.
The sci-fi and psionic stuff works the best in this book. The first chapter sets the stage with a disaster in space and the few survivors of that battle. This section speeds along in a kind of hurtling, breathtaking tumble of events in which the action seems never to stop, no matter that readers don’t have much of an idea who these characters are.
Once all the action begins to play out, we find there are nine survivors of the accident: four mafiosos, a genius, two officers, and two women. One of the women has the amazing psionic ability to detect any metal in space. After the mobsters are defeated, the women and officers very quickly get married and each of the couples have a baby after a pregnancy which is elongated by their time in space. Their kids inherit the psionic abilities and form a union of explorers who drive the rest of the book.
Right there in that quick summary of the crazily energetic beginning, you can see the joys and flaws of this book. It’s got energy and thrills. It’s got oddball ideas and puzzling events. It’s got thin characters and arbitrary plotlines. It’s got a lot of good and a lot of bad and I’m not sure I want to get into the discussions of labor unions which might embarrass Barry Goldwater in their stridency.
Even there, I might have enjoyed this book either as a grouchy polemic or the rambling of “an old man screaming get off my lawn,” as they say. But the shambolic plot, which seems assembled from several half-finished novels with the barest plot threads to connect them all, left me more baffled and annoyed than thrilled. If Doc wanted to produce a fun throwback space opera, why add the strange political notes, and if he wanted to write a screed, why include classic cardboard characters with psionic powers to muddy the waters?
Doc himself
Publisher Canaveral Press is well known for their lovely Edgar Rice Burroughs reissues, most with lovely art by Roy Krenkel and J. Allen St. John. This book boasts of the same high production values as the Burroughs books. It’s just too bad this book isn’t nearly a match for those classics.
Maybe Smith can pull his disparate storylines together if he writes a sequel to Subspace Explorers, but for a book released in hardcover in a limited edition with a matching grand cover price, this is a tremendous disappointment. Sorry Danny. Hope we can still have lunch together and discuss more pleasant things.
Normally, I'd open up with a discussion at length of the news of the day. Like how the United States is still knee-deep in the Dominican Republic, losing soldiers to snipers every day despite the ceasefire between the current military-civilian junta government and the supporters of ousted President Bosch.
Or that Collie Wilkins Jr. was acquitted by a 10-2 hung jury in a trial for the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, shot in her car after the Selma rallies. Wilkins' defense attorney's statements included language so profane and racist that I cannot transcribe them here.
Or that the comedy/news show, That was the Week that Was, had its final show on May 4th.
And then, having given my report, I'd tie it pithily to the subject at hand, namely the June 1965 Galaxy science fiction digest. But the fact is, there's lots to cover and I'm anxious to get it all down while it's still fresh in my mind. So, you'll just have to pretend that I was clever and comprehensive in my introduction. On to the important stuff:
Bob Sheckley and friends
by George Schelling
As is happening more and more often, the king-sized bi-monthly, Galaxy, is dominated by a short novel this month. This time, it's by a fellow who probably was the best SF short story writer of the 1950s. Bob Sheckley has turned to novels of late with something less than (to my mind) great success. The Journey of Joenes, The Status Civilization, Time Killer — none of them were triumphs, though some disagree. Will this time be different?
Young Marvin Flynn is bored to death of living in the bucolic New York town of Stanhope, desperate enough to risk "mindswap." And so, Marvin exchanges minds with the Martian, Aigeler Thrus. Unfortunately, Thrus' body was currently occupied by the unscrupulous Ze Kraggash, who had taken residency to elude the police after a crime. Thrus is entitled to his body; Kraggash has Flynn's. This leaves Flynn six hours to find a body, any body, or be extinguished forever.
by George Schelling
An increasingly frantic Flynn ends up bopping across the galaxy, first as a collector of sentient ganzer-eggs on Melde, somewhere near Aldeberan; then on to Celsus for a stint as a professional victim wearing a ticking time bomb gift; and ultimately to a reality-bending place called The Twisted World.
It's complete fluff, vaguely satirical and fun-pointing, but for the most part, pointless. I went along with it, mildly amused for about 60 pages, before my tolerance ran out and I skimmed the rest. Unlike Harrison's brilliant and cutting Starsloggers, Mindswap is just self-indulgent…and far too long.
Two stars.
Servant Problem, by Otis Kidwell Burger
On the dreary, sandstorm-plagued planet of Dexter, there's little for the married couples to do but drink and kvetch about their house-servants, a race of off-putting aliens that only look like middle-aged spinsters. After an endless seven pages of this stuff, we learn that the servants are actually the masters, and the humans are being evaluated for their level of social development. Turns out they're in the emotional equivalent of kindergarten.
Yeah, I didn't get it either. Two stars.
Blue Fire, by Robert Silverberg
Nat Weiner, visitor from newly terraformed Mars, the "Sparta of space," arrives on Earth to sample the luxuries of an overcrowded, decadent world. Assigned to escort him is Reynolds Kirby, a "major bureacrat who gets paid like a minor one." Together, they attend a spiritual gathering of the devotees of Vorster, a pseudo-scientific cult that preaches the unity of humanity and worships at the altar of the cobalt reactor.
Vorsterism is just one of many avenues of relief against the physical and mental crush of living amongst 10 billions; hallucinogens are also popular, and the upperclassmen, like Kirby, favor the sensory deprivation "Nothing Chambers". Cosmetic replacement of external features with metal and plastic substitutes is popular.
by Jack Gaughan
As the tour of the once-proud homeworld progresses, Weiner becomes increasingly belligerent, resolved to steal a Vorster nuke and put it to "worthwhile use" as an energy-generating reactor on Mars. Through Kirby's interactions with Weiner, and with the Vanna, a Vorsterian with a face modifed to inhuman grotesqueness, Kirby comes to see his own life as a hollow shell of an existence and reconsiders all of his carefully created precepts.
Blue Fire is a day-in-the-life of a fellow on the edge of a midlife crisis in a tired world. With deft writing and vivid imagery, Silverberg accomplishes in 25 pages what usually takes Philip K. Dick a full novel.
Poetess Anderson offers up a latter-day space shanty. It might make a decent filk, but it will likely leave no great impression on you.
Three stars.
For Your Information: The Observatory on the Moon, by Willy Ley
Observatory on the Moon, by Donald H. Menzel
An Eye For Selene, by R. S. Richardson
The idea that astronomy is better conducted on the Moon than Earth is an old one. Not only is Earth's celestial neighbor airless, but its slow rotation makes it much easier to do long film exposures.
This should be a fascinating topic; instead, this is probably the least interesting article Ley's ever written. A truly disappointing development for a column that was a major selling point when I first began my subscription to Galaxy 15 years ago.
The short counterpoint following the main article is equally undistinguished. Richardson's comments, on the other hand, are interesting.
Sam Murdock speeds across the Great Central Plain of a post-apocalyptic United States in his sentient car, name of Jenny. His monomaniacal mission: to destroy the black Devil Car and his minions, who have been savaging the continent. Though Murdock's conviction never wavers, Jenny is torn between her programmed loyalty to her driver, and to the Devil Car's sirensong call to join his pack.
Plausible? Not for a second. Slick and enjoyable? Absolutely. Four stars, and I'll bet this gets optioned for a movie or episode of a Twilight Zone revival.
Last up is the third short story from this promising new writer, which may or may not take place in the same universe as his recent short novel, World of Ptavvs. The passenger liner, Hogan's Goat, has an accident in hyperspace on the way to Earth. It ends up at the right place but billions of years in the future. The Sun is a burned out husk, and humanity's home is an airless world with one face permanently locked toward its star. With no way home and nowhere to go, Verd Spacercaptain, his crew and passengers, and their increasingly debilitated computer Brain must find a way to survive.
I'm not entirely sold on the science of this piece, but Niven has a way of creating a very rich world in just a few pages. It's also obvious that Niven is a new writer: his cohort has no problem with presenting women as equal partners and in roughly equal numbers to men; moreover, he displays no preference in terms of skin tone or ethnicity.
Four stars.
Satisfaction
How to judge the latest Galaxy? It contains a full issue's worth of slag, but then again, it contains almost a full issue's worth of gold. Perhaps it needs to be a regular length bi-monthly?
Especially since editor Pohl is crowing about how next month's novel will be even longer, and by Frank Herbert.
God help us all…
Our last three Journey shows were a gas! You can watch the kinescope reruns here). You don't want to miss the next episode, May 9 at 1PM PDT, a special Arts and Entertainment edition featuring Arel Lucas, Cora Buhlert, Erica Frank…and Dr. Who producer, Verity Lambert! Register today and we'll make sure you don't forget.
![[August 16, 1965] New Writings in S-F 5](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/New-Writings-in-SF5.jpg?resize=220%2C339&ssl=1)
![[August 6, 1965] Last Call for Paratime Passengers (H. Beam Piper's <i>Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/LordKalvanOfOtherwhen.jpg?resize=244%2C372&ssl=1)
![[July 16, 1965] To Fresh Woods (August 1965 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/650716cover-scaled.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[July 12, 1965] A pair of Aces (July 1965 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/650712covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[July 4, 1965]: Hoode Hoode Hoo (<i>Doctor Bloodmoney</i> by Philip K. Dick)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/dr-bloodmoney.jpg?resize=600%2C372&ssl=1)
![[June 26, 1965] Disappointing Duo (June Galactoscope #2)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/650626covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[June 20, 1965] Ace Quadruple (June Galactoscope #1)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/650620cover.jpg?resize=397%2C372&ssl=1)
The first story "What Rough Beast?" is the story of a young immigrant named Mike Kronski trying to make his way in America. However, Mike is not the simple East European immigrant he appears to be. He comes from far further afield, from an alternate universe. He also has the ability to bend reality to his will and has accidentally changed his world into ours.
"Second Class Citizen" is the story of researcher Charles Craven and the subject of his studies, the dolphin Pete. Craven has taught Pete to understand and speak English, spell simple words and even do chemical experiments. While Craven patronisingly presents Pete to some visitors, we learn from background conversations that there is an international crisis going on. Craven is convinced that this crisis will blow over, like any other crisis before.
The novella "Be My Guest" is the story of Kip Morgan, a young man who finds himself possessed by four bickering ghosts after a poisoning attempt gone wrong. Kip also has another problem, he as well as two women of his acquaintance have become invisible to everybody but each other.
"God's Nose" is a short vignette that does exactly what it says on the tin. The unnamed narrator and his female friend debate what the nose of God would look like. Eventually, her lover Godfrey arrives. He has a very prominent nose.
The final story "Catch That Martian" feels very much like a mix between The Rithian Terror and "Be My Guest". Once again, we have a dangerous alien, the titular Martian, who can take on the appearance of any human being. And once again, we have people abruptly taken out of the real world and turned into "ghosts". A young police officer is determined to crack the mystery of the ghosts and catch the Martian in the act. He deduces that the ghosts must have annoyed the Martian somehow, mostly via making noise, and that the Martian has a taste for musical theatre. So the narrator traces the Martian to a Broadway theatre, determined to apprehend him. But before he can give chase, he falls into the orchestra pit, straight onto a bass drum.
![[June 12, 1965] The Number of the Bests](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/wollheim-cover.png?resize=382%2C372&ssl=1)
![[May 24, 1965] Two faded stars (May Galactoscope #2)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/650524cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[May 8, 1965] Skip to the end (June 1965 <i>Galaxy</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/650508cover.jpg?resize=535%2C372&ssl=1)
