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[June 10, 1963] Foma: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle)

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by Victoria Lucas

When a friend lent Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s newest novel, Cat's Cradle to me, I thought, “Oh, I know this book!" because I saw, as I flipped through it, the "ice-nine" and "Bokonon" I'd heard people buzzing so much about.  So I was glad to read it and understand the phenomenon.

But that's where my joy ended.  Vonnegut is a fine writer.  His style is idiosyncratic, askew; this is a novel novel.  But no one would accuse him of being optimistic or hopeful about the human future.  No Pollyanna he.

So in this account of the immediate future of our species, not only is there "The Bomb" to worry about, but there is a complex web of events that involves a new Doomsday Machine (ice-nine) and a new prophet (Bokonon), as if we didn't have enough of both of those.

The narrator, John, was recently divorced by his second wife because, as an optimist, she found it impossible to live with him, an ostensible pessimist.  He has writer's block ("loafing") on a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (title: The Day the World Ended), and slowly he is drawn into the events of the story by actions he has taken to get to know members of the Hoenikker family, children of the "father" of the bomb.

It is hard to say what Vonnegut means by pessimism, because nearly every time something happens in the book, good or bad John seems surprised.  I thought pessimism meant expecting the worst in all situations.  On the other hand, he is surprised when one of the few good things in the book happens: the music Hoenikker's daughter plays is not just good but exquisite.  Just when he thinks he has the world figured out as a terrible place, there it is–beauty!  "I shrieked at Julian Castle, who was transfixed, too, 'My God–life!  Who can understand even one little minute of it?'" Obviously not John. 

And this turns out to be part of his religion, the belief system written by a black man named Boyd Johnson but called Bokonon in the dialect (of what language?) used on an island called San Lorenzo — an island on which events will shortly cause the whole world to end.  The author quotes The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, with the title "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"  The Fourteenth Book answers in one word: "Nothing."

In case I haven't already made it clear, this is a work of apocalyptic fiction.  In explaining how the doomsday tangle of vectors one might call a "cat's cradle" occurred and how attempts to untangle it failed, John uses a new vocabulary invented by Bokonon that has a certain ring to it.

For instance, Boku-maru is an act of intimacy and worship performed by two people placing the soles of their feet together.  The members of John's (or any) group who are fated to act together in something important are a "karass."  I particularly like "granfalloon," the word for an imaginary connection that (unlike the linkage of a karass) has no real significance (alumni of a school, for instance, or people from a particular state). 

"Foma" are "harmless untruths" to be distinguished from the "damned lies" of politicians and corporations which Mark Twain (or Benjamin Disraeli) placed in his famous phrase in my title.  As for the statistics, John mentions his two wives, 250,000 cigarettes, and 3,000 "quarts of booze" preceding the events of the book. 

About "foma," Vonnegut's epigraph reads, "Nothing in this book is true.  'Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.'  The Books of Bokonon.  I: 5" Of course the existence of the "Books of Bokonon" is also fictional, but several of the quotations from it, when not black humor or bordering on it, seem almost optimistic.  This one, for instance, asserts that a person can believe in lies that make one happy.

This book of foma didn't make me particularly happy, but, dripping with irony, it was entertaining, and it has probably stirred up the college students all over the US as it has on my campus, so I'll give it a 4 out of 5.  I recommend it to anyone with a sense of humor who doesn't mind feeling slightly depressed about prospects for human peace and a long and healthy human future.

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[June 8, 1963] The Future in a Divided Land (An Overview of Science Fiction in East and West Germany) Part 1

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[The Journey is joined today by talented author and fan, Cora Buhlert, who expands our coverage of the world significantly…]


by Cora Buhlert

Living in Germany, you cannot help but feel cut off from the wider world of science fiction. Therefore, I always look forward to receiving the latest issue of Galactic Journey in my mailbox, because it allows me to keep up with the latest developments in the genre in the US, the UK and elsewhere.

As a big fan of the Journey, I was thrilled to be asked to give you an overview of the current state of science fiction in Germany. Everybody who regularly follows the news will of course know that since 1949, there are not one but two Germanys: the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly referred to as West Germany, and the so-called German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany. In the past fourteen years, the border between the two Germanys has become increasingly insurmountable, culminating in the construction of the Berlin Wall two years ago.

I am fortunate enough to live in West Germany and therefore the main focus of this article will be on West German science fiction. However, I will also take a look at what is going on in East Germany.

In the US and UK, science fiction is very much a magazine genre, even if paperback novels are playing an increasingly bigger role. In West Germany, there are a couple of science fiction publishers, such as the Balowa and Pfriem, which specialise in hardcovers aimed at the library market, as well as the paperback science fiction lines of Heyne, Fischer and Goldmann. The three paperback publishers focus mainly on translations, whereas the library publishers offer a mix of translations and works by German authors. Though Goldmann has recently started publishing some German language authors such as the promising new Austrian voice Herbert W. Franke in its science fiction paperback line.

However, the main medium for science fiction and indeed any kind of genre fiction in West Germany is still the so-called "Heftroman:" digest-sized 64-page fiction magazines that are sold at newsstands, gas stations, grocery stories and wherever magazines are sold. Whereas American and British science fiction magazines usually include several stories as well as articles, letter pages, etc…, a "Heftroman" contains only a single novel, technically a novella. "Heftromane" are the direct descendants of the American dime novel and the British penny dreadful – indeed, they are also referred to as "Groschenroman", which is a literal translation of "dime novel".

There is a huge range of "Heftromane," covering various genres. The most popular are probably the western and romance, with subgenres such as aristocratic romance, alpine romance or doctor and nurse romance. Crime and mystery series are also popular, as are adventure and war stories. By comparison to these flames, science fiction is still a small but growing flicker.

There were shortlived German language science fiction "Heftromane" published in the late 1940s in Germany, Austria and in Switzerland. However, the postwar era of (West) German "Heftroman" science fiction began exactly ten years ago in 1953, when Pabel, one of several publishers of "Heftromane", introduced its latest series Utopia – Jim Parkers Abenteuer im Weltraum. Though the first issue was anything but utopian, considering that it was set in a penal colony on the moon, where convicts are forced to shovel nuclear waste. The protagonist is Jim Parker, an American space ship commander in the employ of the Atomic Territorium. Together with his German pal Fritz Wernicke, Parker spends the next 43 issues bouncing around the solar system, while tangling with the villainous "Yellow Union". The Jim Parker stories were written by one Alf Tjörnsen whose identity remained mysterious for many years. Though Tjörnsen has recently been revealed as a pen name for author Richard Johannes Rudat.

Compared to American science fiction, the Jim Parker stories felt old-fashioned, a throwback to the 1920s and 1930s. The science was often laughably bad as well. And so, after 43 biweekly issues of Jim Parker's adventures in space, Utopia changed its name to Utopia Zukunftsroman and began alternating standalone novellas with the Jim Parker stories. Initially, those standalone stories were written by German authors, usually operating under house names, but from 1955 on, Utopia also published translations of American science fiction by authors such as John W. Campbell, Leigh Brackett and Murray Leinster, as well as Britishers like Eric Frank Russell. Due to the constraints of the "Heftroman" format with its 64 page limit, these translated works were heavily abridged. Nonetheless, to many German fans they served as the first introduction to the wider world of American science fiction.

The success of Utopia Zukunftsroman spawned several spin-offs. The first of these was Utopia Großband, a thicker 94-page "Heftroman" which debuted in 1954 and allowed for publishing translations of American science fiction novels, though once again many novels were mercilessly cut to fit the format. Utopia Sonderband, later Utopia Magazin, an anthology magazine in the style of the American science fiction magazines, followed in 1955. The final spin-off of the Utopia family was Utopia Kriminal, which debuted in 1956 and billed itself as a series focussed on futuristic crime novels, inspired by the success of the Edgar Wallace thrillers with their mixture of suspense, science fiction elements and outright horror. Utopia Kriminal published a lot of translated weird fiction by writers such as Frenchman Jean David and Americans Norvell W. Page and A. Merritt.

However, after its initial success Pabel's Utopia franchise has fallen on hard times of late. Utopia Kriminal and Utopia Magazin were cancelled in 1958 and 1959 respectively and Utopia Großband followed this year. Utopia Zukunftsroman is still hanging on for now, though the quality of the authors and stories translated has declined notably in recent years.

The reason for this is increased competition in the German science fiction market. Inspired by the success of Utopia, the "Heftroman" publisher Moewig launched its own science fiction series Terra Utopische Romane in 1957. The format was similar to Utopia Zukunftsroman, a mix of standalone science fiction novels by German authors and translations of American science fiction. However, the imitator quickly eclipsed the original, for Terra offered higher quality translations and quickly snapped up the A-list of American science fiction authors, leaving only second and third rate works for its competitor Utopia. Indeed, in some cases one novel in a series would be published under the Utopia banner, while the sequel appeared in Terra, to the frustrations of many readers. Like Utopia, Terra also spawned two spin-offs. Terra Sonderband, a thicker 96-page 'Heftroman" similar to Utopia Großband, premiered in 1958. And only last year, the reprint series Terra Extra debuted.

West German genre readers in general and science fiction readers in particular tend to be very americanophile. And so "Heftroman" publishers quickly noticed that translations of American science fiction tended to sell better than works by German authors. The fact that homegrown science fiction wasn't always up to the snuff, especially when compared to the best of American science fiction, did not help either. So magazines eventually stopped publishing original science fiction by German authors and focussed solely on translations. As a result, it became very difficult for budding German science fiction writers to persuade a publisher to take a chance on their work.

One of those budding German science fiction writers was Walter Ernsting, who first encountered science fiction while working as a translator for the allied forces after World War II and quickly fell in love with the genre. In 1955, Ernsting cofounded the Science Fiction Club Deutschland, Germany's biggest fan club. By the mid 1950s, Walter Ernsting was working as an editor and translator for the Utopia line, but was unable to get his own novels published. So the enterprising Ernsting passed off his own writing as the work of a fictional British author named Clark Dalton and promptly had it accepted. Clark Dalton's stories were well received by the readers of the various Utopia titles and so Ernsting kept on writing and publishing as Clark Dalton, even after the secret of his identity was revealed. Nor was Walter Ernsting the only German writer who circumvented publisher prejudice by writing under a British or American sounding pen name. Instead, westerns, science fiction and crime 'Heftromane" are full of German writers pretending to be Americans with varying success. 

In 1958, Ernsting left Pabel for competitor Moewig to work on the Terra line of 'Heftromane". Terra was more open to publishing German authors than Utopia and one of their stars was K.H. Scheer, a prolific young author who had gotten his start writing for the library hardcover lines of Balowa and Pfriem.

Together, Ernsting and Scheer came up with the idea to create an ongoing science fiction series focussed on the adventures of a central character. Now "Heftroman" series following the exploits of a single character are popular in the crime genre – the best know example is probably G-Man Jerry Cotton, which chronicles the adventures of a fictional FBI agent in New York City – but were largely unknown in science fiction following the demise of the rather bland Jim Parker. Nonetheless, Ernsting and Scheer persuaded Moewig to take a chance on their idea and retreated to Ernsting's home in the idyllic Bavarian village of Irschenberg to hammer out the details and come up with a rough plot outline for the first ten issues.

The result, entitled Perry Rhodan – der Erbe des Universums (Perry Rhodan – Heir to the Universe), debuted on September 8, 1961 and has quickly become a sensation in the twenty months since, turning into West Germany's most successful "Heftroman" series with a monthly print run of approximately one million. Unlike the old-fashioned and rather dull Jim Parker stories, Perry Rhodan literally starts with a bang and only keeps getting better. Initially planned to last between thirty and fifty issues, Perry Rhodan is now closing in on issue 100. If the authors manage to keep up the quality, I can see this series lasting a very long time indeed.

And that's it for today. Next time, I'll give you an overview of the Perry Rhodan series and the competitors spawned by its enormous success. I hope you have enjoyed!

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[May 14, 1963] Behind the times (Ace Double F-195)

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by Gideon Marcus

This morning, Gordo Cooper's Faith 7 Mercury spacecraft didn't blast off into the heavens.  It's the kind of disappointment that makes one look in science fiction for a bit of solace.  And so, I have for you, that reliable well of SF adventure (and often mediocrity), the latest Ace Double.  This particular one features two wildly different tales, and yet, both have an air of age about them (in a creaky-jointed way, not a venerable one) that ensures that neither will be stories for the ages.  Nevertheless, they scratch an itch while we wait for NASA to get its act together.  Let's take a look:

Battle on Venus, by William F. Temple

A lone spaceship descends through the thick clouds of the Venus, humanity's first expedition to the Second Planet, only to land in the midst of a planetary war.  Automated torpedo ships, mini-tanks, and oversized buzzsaw wheels terrorize the barren landscape, which is strangely devoid of people.  When the terran spacecraft is damaged in the fighting, wet-behind-the-ears crewman, George Starkey, is sent off in a helicopter to find assistance.  At the end of the grueling trek lies maturity, love, and revelation of the source of the madness that's afflicted the misnamed Planet of Love.

Several factors make Battle on Venus feel like a throwback.  For one, Temple's Venus is wildly archaic in conception, with a breathable atmosphere and comfortable temperatures.  Its inhabitants are human in all but name.  And the romantic subplot could have been lifted (like virtually everything else) straight from a Burroughs novel — all it needed was a scene in which the characters exclaimed that they'd always loved each other; they were just certain the other party didn't return their feelings.

That said, two things make Venus work as a story, if not as science fiction.  For one, the British Temple writes in a mildly droll manner that makes the book feel like a deliberately ironic satire.  Some of the conversational exchanges are genuinely funny, and occasionally even border on profound.  Temple may not conform to the rules of science, but there is internal consistency, in plot and in style. 

But the big selling point for Venus is Mara, a Venusian native who is clever, resourceful, well-developed, and (miracle of miracles) even gets to be the viewpoint character for a decent portion of the book.  She is the real protagonist of the story, far more than the rather hapless George, and you can't help but like her. 

It takes a little while for Venus to engage, but once it does, it's a fun (if frivolous) read.  Three stars.

The Silent Invaders, by Robert Silverberg

After ten long years among the stars, Major Abner Harris is coming home to Earth.  Except the Major is actually Aar Khiilom of the galaxy-spanning Daruu, and his mission is to covertly make humanity allies of his race against the squamous Medlin.  His disguise as a human, which runs surgically deep is perfect — too perfect.  He quickly falls in love with a terran named Beth Baldwin…who turns out to be a Medlin in similar disguise.

It turns out that not only are the Daruu the bad guys of the galaxy, but that the Medlin have been coaxing the birth of a new generation of humans, ones with such telepathic and physical prowess that they will be come the new masters of the galaxy, ending the petty existing squabbles.  Aar must choose between carrying out his mission or becoming a traitor to his people.

Robert Silverberg ("Silverbob") wrote the first version of Invaders five years ago, publishing it in the October 1958 Infinity shortly before that magazine disappeared forever.  That original was a third the length of the novelization.  The plot is identical, however, and 90% of the language was carried over verbatim.  The novel adds local color and ratchets up Aar's uncertainty, both of which don't hurt the story.

What does hurt the story is Silverberg's immature style.  He wrote the bulk of this in his 20s, before he'd obtain much life experience, and it shows.  The emotions don't ring true, and there is an amateur quality to the writing.  Moreover, while the setup is interesting, the introduction of the race of superhumans is a handwave too far.  The book just isn't big enough for two big revelations. 

As a piece of far future worldbuilding, particular with regard to technology, Invaders is something of a success (I particularly liked a scene in which a cabbie is unsure as to the location of an address, so he asks his computer to guide him).  But as a story, and as a piece of literature (such as it is), it's barely fair.  2.5 stars.

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[Apr. 19, 1963] One way Via (Wallace West's book, River of Time)

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by Gideon Marcus

Time travel.  It's been a fixture of science fiction ever since H.G. Wells wrote the seminal work, The Time Machine.  And what could be a more seductive topic?  Instead of being confined to our plodding day-by-day, one-way march to the future, one could take great leaps in any direction — forward and back.

Wells' book dealt only with trips to the far future, a feat that is both more technologically feasibly and less fraught with challenges than journeys to the past.  After all, it would just take a sophisticated suspended animation system and a timer, and one could sleep one's way to a different time.  Going backwards requires a direct confrontation with a host of physical laws. 

Moreover, any trip you take to the past brings you face to face with your own history.  Your very presence inserts a variable that wasn't there before, one with endless possibilities for destroying your present.  Take the classic Grandfather Paradox: You go back in time and kill your grandfather. before he has children.  How do you still exist?  And if you don't exist, how do you kill your grandfather?

Some books take the premise seriously.  John Brunner's Times without Number, for instance, has all the time jaunts causing an increasingly unstable timeline, ending in the un-invention of time travel, itself!  Such would seem the inevitable fate of any universe in which time travel is possible.

Wallace West's new book, River of Time takes a different, more fanciful tack.  Instead of needing a machine to sail the time stream, instead, the past and present have something of a symbiotic relationship.  When times are troubled, a gateway to the past is formed to a similar crisis in the past.  Resolution of one fixes the other.

So it is that Ralph Graves, an overweight, under-achieving 23 year old with a Master's in Physics and a lowly news-writing gig, ends up driving his car into the Revolutionary War.  The 1964 he left was in the midst of a Cold War on the verge of heating up.  This dire situation is mirrored in 18th Century America, where the rebels are in dire straits. Returning to the present, Graves channels Paine, writing a stemwinder of a speech that gets picked up and rebroadcast across the country, raising national morale.  The result: supplies reach the ragged colonials in time for them to withstand the onslaught of the Redcoats, and the Revolution is saved.

This is just prelude to the novel's main story-line, one that teams Ralph with thin and nervous chemist, Larry Adams, all-American fighter jock and engineer, Hugh Woltman, and temperamentally stable psychologist, Mary Peale.  Just as tensions snap between East and West and the bombs begin to fall, the mother of all time rents appears sending Ralph and his group back to a crisis of similarly great proportion: just after the assassination of Julius Caesar.  Can this misplaced modern squad save the Roman Republic and, thereby, the 20th Century?

First things first: River of time is a fun book, and if its premise be fantastic, so much the better.  West has a deft, light style that paints complete pictures with enviable economy of words.  The book moves.  The first third of the book comprises two enjoyable self-contained bits that were published as short stories in 1950 and 1954.  They're a lot of fun, and the second piece is remarkable in that it conceives an effect of time travel I've not seen before or since.

As good as the earlier sections are, the book really shines when present meets past on the steps of the Senate.  Our heroes cleverly parlay their collection of parcels from 1965 into a better order for the Mediterranean in a rewarding romp.  I particularly loved the abundance of strong female characters: level-headed Mary; Publia, canny wife of Cicero; and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile.  All are vital to the success of the enterprise. 

Alas, while I would love to give my highest rating to West's latest, I'm afraid there's a component that mars the package.  It is demonstrated early on that Mary Peale is highly susceptible to suggestion, and even though she does many important and vital things throughout the story, much of what she does, and her ultimate fate, are influenced by factors beyond her control.  I found her lack of agency disturbing.

To sum up, River of Time is a quick and enjoyable read, a worthy addition to the ever-growing library of time-travel related stories.  Four stars.

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[April 5, 1963] The Best Laid Plans (Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth)

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by Victoria Lucas

Ten days after my 21st birthday last October, a 13-day “crisis” began that got people wondering anew whether the world would end soon, if nuclear bombs would start falling.  When the crisis (and not the world) ended, like others, I felt a sense of relief, but the Cold War wasn’t over, and it isn’t over now.  It most certainly isn’t over in Walter Tevis’s novel of the near future, The Man Who Fell to Earth.  A shadow of something big and ineluctable hangs over the book.

It is somewhat genre-bending, and I didn't recognize it as a work of science fiction when I started reading it.  But the first clue was the starkness of the prose.  The author has, as I understand it, been teaching English, but nevertheless it lacks a certain richness, contains a type of get-to-the-pointedness that I've come to associate with science fiction, even though I've read little of it.  "Let's just gloss over that" description, embarrassing fact, indescribable circumstance, not draw too much attention to details that would take a long time to explain and have no relevance to the plot.  "Just the facts, ma'am," as they say on Dragnet.

Of course my next clue was that, gradually, the main character, Thomas Jerome Newton, reveals that he is not from Planet Earth. 

Tevis is the man who gave us "Minnesota Fats" and "Fast Eddie," the author of the 1959 book The Hustler, made into a film 2 years ago.  That was his first novel, this his second.

This novel's characters answer the question: What if the aliens came (in this case only one) and H. G. Wells was right, disease was the cause of defeat, but it wasn't a physical disease in the same sense as the one that infected Wells's Martians, it was something that has been popularly regarded as a character flaw, as a funny stereotype?  Like alcoholism.  (Warning: There are no happy people in this book.)

I noticed that the catalog record shows "alcoholism" as a subject.  I wondered at that until I had read to a certain point in this cautionary tale of the best laid plans of mice and aliens.

At first it is noted that Newton “had only recently begun drinking wine, pleased to find that it had, apparently, the same effect on him as it did on men of Earth.” But when he meets Betty Jo, a woman who takes him in when he breaks both legs in an elevator because the G forces are too much for him, he sees that she is fond of gin—a little too fond, in fact—and he begins to join her. 

The first character to suspect that Newton is not human is Nathan Bryce, a college-level teacher of chemistry who quits to come to work for him, but "he smiled at himself, at the cheap, science-fiction level of his own private discourse.  If Newton were a Martian or a Venusian, he should, by all rights, be importing heat rays to fry New York or planning to disintegrate Chicago, or carrying off young girls to underground caves for otherworldly sacrifices."  Having taught at colleges, he would of course think of "science fiction" in this way because these are still common ideas among academics.  This is Bryce’s opinion, but Tevis must have seen a lot of such themes preparing to write short stories such as his "The Ifth Of Oofth" in a 1957 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.

Nevertheless, Bryce thinks Newton must be "either the world's most original inventive genius, or an extraterrestrial" and sets out to find out if his misgivings are true, in the process unconsciously undoing everything Newton has done toward his goal.  By the time Newton visits Bryce in his apartment when “the Anthean” (as Newton’s people are called) is well along in his project, Bryce observes early in the evening that Newton "had already finished his first gin drink and had poured himself another.  A drunken Martian?  An extraterrestiral who drank gin and bitters?"  It doesn't seem to occur to him that the "drunken Martian" has caught a fatal human disease, probably because Bryce himself drinks heavily on occasion.  The expression “it’s all downhill from there” comes to mind.

I was intrigued by the fact that in several places, Newton's thoughts allude to his race and humans having the same origin, or previous visits to Earth by his people that jump-started human development of language and religion.  My research indicates that there was a book in French published in 1960 by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (Les Matin des magiciens) that includes these ideas, but I have no indication that Tevis knows French.  Another possibility is that Tevis read H. P. Lovecraft (B-r-r-r-r-r!), some of whose work reportedly has this theme. 

Eventually, of course, we find out that Newton has come to the attention of the American government, despite hiding his project away in Kentucky (Tevis's home).  While the CIA seems more interested in studying his nervous system and psychology to find out whether they can coddle or torture weapons information out of him, the person whom Newton considers his best friend on the planet (Bryce) wants him to save the humans.

Curiously, it never seems to occur to the humans to save themselves.

What holds us back?  Tevis seems to me to put his finger on some factors restraining political problem solving.  They are incarnate in the characters of the cynical Bryce, who is selfish, greedy, and apathetic; Newton’s patent lawyer and business agent, also afflicted with selfishness and greed; his woman friend Betty Jo, a female stereotype of unselfishness who drowns any intelligence she might have in booze; and the government agents—as cynical and lacking in compassion as Bryce—who would have no qualms about using any sort of world-destroying weaponry they might tease out of Newton on our fragile planet.  A type of mental short-sightedness is endemic and finally culminates in Newton’s very real blindness that is nevertheless also symbolic.

Answering a question from Bryce about what he was trying to do, Newton says, “I was not at all certain what I was up to” because, although his project was to build a lifeboat to bring the surviving remnant of his people to Earth, “I’m not certain that my people will be able to stand your world."  But he did become certain that they would have nothing to do here but "wait for the bombs to fall."

All in all, I found it a depressing book.  But perhaps that’s only because, like Newton, I’m living under the shadow of the Cold War, and I take it seriously.  So aside from those who are curious about what else the author of The Hustler wrote, or about a possible future around 15 years hence, or about how aliens or alcoholics are portrayed, I think I would recommend this to anyone in the future who wants to know what it felt like to live through (?I hope) the Cold War.  The book has a few flaws, for which I would give it 3 out of 5 stars.

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[March 6, 1963] Generation Gap (Ace Double F-177)

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[While you're reading this article, why not tune in to KGJ, Radio Galactic Journey, playing all the current hits: pop, rock, soul, folk, jazz, country — it's the utmost…]


by Gideon Marcus

It was only a few years ago that Drs. Watson and Crick discovered DNA, that magical double-helix of protein molecules that are the blueprints for our genetics.  Now we know that our biology is coded, like so many punch cards, and that's why people are people, puppies are puppies, amebae are amebae.  An embryo with human DNA cannot grow up to be a horse.  A bear-coded blastula won't transform in utero into a giraffe.

There is a coding that runs almost as deeply as that in our chromosomes.  It derives from the society in which we are raised and the circumstances under which we grew.  Thus, a Dixiecrat is not wont to clamor for Civil Rights, and no one in my family is likely to abandon shul for Mass. 

Science fiction authors have their own genetic code.  While writers can be more flexible than politicians or religionists, they nevertheless tend to remain of a type, composing in a style forged early in their career by the prevailing trends and markets at the time. 

As evidence of this, I submit to you two short novels by a pair of authors whose output couldn't be more different despite appearing bound together within the pages of the recent Ace Double, #F-177. 

The Star Wasps, by Robert Moore Williams

The world of the 21st Century is a tidy, orderly place.  Free will is an illusion.  People live for their jobs and medicate for their moods.  Commerce and society hum along smoothly under the control of one Erasmus Glock, a shadowy figure whose hold on the strings of power is absolute. 

There is a fly in the ointment, however — John Derek is a man who would set society free.  With his base on the Moon, a cadre of die-hard loyalists, and his little glass spheres that instill a yearning for freedom, he is poised to lead a revolution.

Unfortunately, the ointment also has a wasp in the form of an invasion of interstellar killers called "the viral."  Incorporeal blue creatures, invisible to most humans, have been inadvertently teleported to our planet by the well-meaning scientist, Dr. Cotter.  These shimmering aurorae bring death to anyone they touch, and their numbers grow by the day.  This plague threatens both the stultifying profiteering of Glock and the freedom-fighting agenda of Derek.  Glock and Derek must work together, along with Cotter and Derek's new recruit, Jennie Fargo, to defeat the alien foe.

Robert Moore Williams was first published in the pre-Campbell days of Analog.  He has since written more than a hundred stories for a variety of magazines, but his DNA was baked in the Golden Age of science fiction.  The future world of The Star Wasps is an archaic, mechanistic one.  Society simplistically hinges on the activities of a half-dozen people.  There is a Resilient Woman Character whose primary role is to be the Love Interest.  After the intriguing set-up, Wasps degenerates into a figurative car chase, with people running around and pulling levers until the enemy is defeated.

Also, Williams writes like he's still getting a penny a word, writing in a redundant manner that only gets worse as the story drags.  Gems like:

As Jennie watched, with terror tightening the band around the bottom of her heart, the circle changed and became a ball of tiny dancing blue lights.

Under other circumstances, she would have thought the lights and the changing form and the color were beautiful. 

Now she knew they were death.

Was death beautiful?  Not to her.  She wanted life.

The Coelacanth fish, thought to be long-extinct until a specimen was hauled out of the Indian Ocean in 1938, is what's known as "a living fossil."  The Star Wasps is a similar relic from a time long passed.  I'd throw it back.  Two stars.

Warlord of Kor, by Terry Carr

The flip-side of F-177 is an entirely different matter.  Terry Carr is a new writer, as well as a Big Name in the fan community.  He is one of a new wave of authors steeped in the more nuanced works of the Digest Era of science fiction that began in 1949. 

Kor is set on a dusty world at the edge of Terran settlement, the site of humanity's first encounter with living sentient aliens.  The Hirlaji are a dying race of telepathic saurians, their once burgeoning culture reduced to a mere handful of aged specimens due to an unknown catalytic event thousands of years prior. 

Lee Rynason is the archaeologist tasked to discover the mystery of this societal sea change.  Why did the shift happen so abruptly?  Why is Horng, possessor of the Hirlaji's race memory, so reluctant to divulge this secret? 

Rynason's efforts are hampered by the ambitions of his superior, Rice Manning.  Manning has designs on the governorship of the planet and is willing to scapegoat the Hirlaji as a threat to do so — especially when it appears that the aged reptiles might somehow be related to The Outsiders, a long-vanished alien civilization that left its traces throughout the galaxy. 

Sketched in thumbnail, I suppose the plot of Warlord of Kor doesn't sound much better than that of The Star Wasps.  The lurid title doesn't help either (Ace loves its lurid titles).  But Kor is no pulpy tale.  It is the sensitive story of first contact, of discovery, of racial understanding, and of morality — of a piece with Bone's The Lani People and Piper's Little Fuzzy in illustrating the worth and importance of other, different cultures.

Plus, the characters are beautifully drawn with a spare efficiency that Williams would have done well to emulate.  In 97 pages, we learn far more about Rynason and Manning, as well as the other pivotal characters — the quietly strong colony quartermaster Mara Stephens, and the cynical heretic Rene Malhomme — than we do about William's characters in 126 pages.  It doesn't hurt that Kor has a very satisfying ending. 

If there's any drawback to Kor, it's that Rynason and Stephens seem a little slow on the uptake.  I was always a step or two ahead of them in solving the mystery, even when they had access to the same clues as the reader.  That's a small quibble, though.  Warlord of Kor is an excellent, quick read, and it's worth the 40 cent book price all by itself.  Four stars.

Speaking of collections of old and new, this month's Galaxy is a collection of stories by veterans and novices alike.  Come see how this amalgam of generations fares in the Journey's next article.  Stay tuned!

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Your ballot should have arrived by now…]




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[January 5, 1963] The Trial on Trial

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by Victoria Lucas

Have you been following the talk about Orson Welles’s latest movie, one he personally wrote and edited?  While not precisely science fiction, it does overlap thematically, enough so that I'm certain you'll enjoy a summary.

I was fortunate enough to catch the interview with him by Huw Wheldon on the BBC, or “The Beeb” as people across the Pond say.  First off, Welles talks about changes he made from the novel by Franz Kafka.  He says the main character (Josef K.) “doesn’t really deteriorate, certainly doesn’t surrender at the end” like the character in the novel.  That’s true, more or less, but listen carefully to Anthony Perkins playing K. at the very end and ask yourself why he doesn’t throw what he is reaching for.

I know, I know, what am I doing writing a review for a movie that hasn’t been released in the States yet.  Well, it was released in Paris, and quite a lot of people had something to do with the production and showing.  I hate to tell you this, but a copy somehow found its way into the hands of a friend of mine.  I can’t tell you any names, and I know no more than the name of my friend.  The copy is a bit, all right, under par, not like seeing it in a movie house, but it’s exciting to see the film many months before I possibly could have otherwise.  The earliest premiere in the US is in NYC, and I stand a snowball’s chance in hell of making that or any showing not in Tucson or Phoenix.  I would prefer to watch a non-bootleg copy and probably will sooner or later, but beggars can’t be choosers.

When the beginning title hits the screen, the recently discovered (1958) and orchestrated “Adagio in G Minor” by Tomas Albinoni begins a beat of what I can’t help but think of as a dirge before we see the opening parable, done in something called “pinscreen” graphics.  The title, by the way, is most remarkable for the fact that there is no trial in “The Trial.”

Of course we must keep in mind that a German word for "trial," the title of the film and the Franz Kafka book that “inspired” it (according to Welles), is Der Prozess.  Also spelled "Process," this word in German means "process, trial, litigation, lawsuit, court case."  There are other words for "judgment, tribunal, trial": "das Gericht," which at least has the word "right" in it; and "die Verhandlung," meaning "negotiation, hearing, trial." 

It turns out there are numerous words that might apply to what we in the US would call a "trial" by judge and/or jury or any litigation: there are also "die Gerichtsverhandlung," "die Instanz" (which also means "authority, court."  Why did Kafka choose "der Prozess," and why are some of the words feminine rather than masculine (like Prozess) or even neutral?  These are fine points of German as a language that I cannot reach from my one college semester of German.  It just appears to me that German has as many words for legal proceedings as the Eskimos are said to have for snow.  However, in this case the word "process" in English is fitting, because we never see a trial, only one hearing, during which the protagonist, Josef K. (with only an initial and not a full name, as if the author was protecting a real person) speaks and brands himself as a troublemaker.  (All legal proceedings in this alternate system of law are supposed to be secret.)

What we see in this film is a process indeed, a destructive process during which an innocent is exposed to corruption and chaos he never dreamed existed.  The book makes it much clearer that the system that crushes Josef K. is not related to the uniformed police and visible court system.  In fact, near the end, as K. is being frog-marched to a place of execution, he aids his captors in avoiding a policeman to whom he might have complained to prevent what was, after all, an abduction.  This network is underground, with courtrooms and file rooms in attics throughout the unnamed city.  Those enmeshed in it are “The Accused” as well as (illegal) Advocates and various officers and employees of the “court,” not to mention families who move their furniture and abandon their flats so that hearings can occur.  One character remarks (in both the book and film), “There are court offices in almost every attic” and “Everything belongs to the court.”

Welles changes this secrecy and underground nature to connect “the law” to the visible law courts by having K. exit a massive public building (actually in Rome or Zagreb), having entered it through a tenement at the back, in line with his view that “this is now 1962, and we’ve made the film in 1962.” During this century the classism and racism that were beneath public consciousness but engraved in the law, as well as officially tolerated or encouraged vigilantism, came into the open in a big way, like the difference between law practice in a makeshift courtroom and that in Grecian-style marble halls supported by uniformed officers of court and police. 

The author of the original book, Das Process was killed by an early 20th-century epidemic we now call tuberculosis, dying at age 40 in Austria.  (I am tempted to say, “died like a dog,” as K. characterizes his own murder or, in the logic of the book, execution.) Born Jewish in the kingdom of Bohemia, Kafka was a lawyer who worked for insurance companies.  This book would have been destroyed had his executor followed his instructions, but instead the order of the written chapters (mostly finished, apparently—I saw only one chapter labeled “unfinished”) were determined by his editor/executor and the book was originally published in 1925, a year after Kafka’s death.  Welles mentioned the Holocaust in the BBC interview as his reason for changing the ending, choosing “the only possible solution” (rather than the “Final” one) to negate the choices made “by a Jewish intellectual before the advent of Hitler.” So I feel justified in seeing much that relates to racism, not to mention sexism and classism.  Kafka was reportedly a socialist with some tendencies toward anarchism. 

According to Welles, the movie was filmed partly in Zabreb, Yugoslavia (exteriors), with most interiors in Paris (the Gare d’Orsay and a Paris studio), and some exteriors in Rome.  Welles would have filmed in Czechoslovakia, but Kafka’s work is banned there.  The last scene was shot in Yugoslavia, and so were the scenes with 1,500 desks, typewriters, and workers in a huge room for which they could locate no place but the Zabreb “industrial fair grounds” (scenes at K’s workplace, which do not correspond with the descriptions in the book). 

The partly abandoned Gare d’Orsay, in contrast to the other locations, was a huge seminal find for Welles, one that appeared to him at the end of a long day in which he learned that sets in Zagreb could not be finished in time to make his schedule or possibly even the film, if he could not find another location quickly.  Originally the Palais d’Orsay, subsequently a railroad station with platforms that became too short for long-distance use, the station was mostly abandoned, but the building included a 370-room hotel.  Welles quickly changed his plans from sets that dissolved and disappeared to one that was “full of the hopelessness of the struggle against bureaucracy” because “waiting for a paper to be filled is like waiting for a train.”

The gossip is that producer Andrew Salkind agreed to underwrite Welles’s project only if he could find a book to base it on that was in the public domain.  They both thought this work by Kafka was such a book, but discovered that they were wrong and had to pay for the use of the story, reducing the budget for the film.  Several people are credited with the writing, with Welles himself reading the titles at the end, but he says he wrote as well as directed and acted in it.  Rumor also says he wanted Jackie Gleason (yes, “Honeymooners”) to play the role he played, that of a lawyer Kafka named Dr. Huld (German for “grace” or “favor”) but that Welles christened “Hastler” (hassler? what the lawyer should do to the courts but not to the clients?).

There are some problems with Welles’s editing, the main one in my view concerning a scene with a wall of computers at the bank where K. is a middle-rank executive.  As it is, the scene is quite pointless and appears to exist only to show how up-to-date the film is compared to the 1925 novel.  However, it was originally a 10-minute scene in which Katina Paxinou (a face on the cutting-room floor) uses the computers to foretell K’s future (wrongly…OK, mostly wrongly).  It was “cut on the eve of the Paris premiere,” according to my notes on the BBC interview—in other words done in haste and, as in the proverb, made waste, but Welles clearly felt there was something wrong with the scene and saved us from most of it. 

Nevertheless, on the whole Welles felt good about “The Trial.” In the BBC interview he summed it thusly, “So say what you like, but ‘The Trial’ is the best film I have ever made.” I’m not sure I agree, but it’s definitely worth watching, even taking the time to compare it with the book.  (But beware of any resulting depression.)

[P.S. If you registered for WorldCon this year, please consider nominating Galactic Journey for the "Best Fanzine" Hugo.  Check your mail for instructions…]




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[December 26, 1962] Diversions. (Ace Double F-161: Brunner's Times without Number, Grinnell's Destiny's Orbit)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

Ace Doubles are like an insurance policy for scientifiction readers.  Hungry for a decent yarn after a couple of lousy mags?  Want something more filling than a short story but that requires less commitment than a novel?  Did you miss a serial when it debuted across several issues of an sf digest?  Ace Doubles are what the doctor ordered: back-to-back dual publications, attractive in their lurid colors and never too intellectually demanding.

One of 1962's latest, F-161, is a particularly representative example.  Highly recommended by fellow Journeyer, John Boston, it kept me smiling throughout December…though not always for the reasons the authors intended…

Times without Number, by John Brunner
(or Worlds of the Imperium, the unauthorized sequel)

Sideways-in-Time stories have become very popular of late.  Just in the last few years, we've seen Andre Norton's Crossroads of Time, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, and Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium.  Joining them now is the latest from a new British author who has stormed out of the gate with some excellent work.

Times without Number, a fix-up compilation of three stories, looks as if its inception was strongly influenced by Imperium.  If you'll recall, the premise of Laumer's work was that an infinity of parallel timetracks existed and could be traversed with Maxoni-Cocini cross-time vehicles.  The Earth of our timeline is something of an isolate, the neighboring universes having almost all been blighted by runaway vehicle reactions.  In fact, one has to go about 400 years back in time to find a stable point of divergence that doesn't result in catastrophe.

And in fact, the milestone of difference in Times is a successful Spanish invasion of England in 1588 (just about four centuries ago).  The resulting present sees an ascendant Hapsburg Empire, a powerful China, an antagonistic Turkish Sultanate, and a series of petty states from the Vistula to the Gobi.  Technologically backward in many ways, the denizens of this world possess the secret of time travel.  In the Spanish lands, this power is protected by the Licentiates of the Order of Time, a brotherhood that acts something like Poul Anderson's Time Patrol, ensuring the sanctity of history.

Don Miguel Navarro, one of the Licentiates, fulfills the role that Bayard did in Imperium, engaging in a series of increasingly high-stakes adventures to preserve his timeline in a kind of temporal Cold War, to the point of (as in Laumer's book) treating with treasonous members of his time-traveling fellowship.  Brunner even goes so far as to provide for Don Miguel a strong-willed Scandinavian partner/girlfriend named Princess Kristina (an analog of the noble Swede, Barbro, from Imperium). 

Nevertheless, despite the superficial similarities in setting and style, Brunner's story breaks new ground, particularly at the end.  In fact, Brunner's commentary on the ultimate fate of a universe that allows time travel is, alone, worth the price of admission.

3.5 stars, especially if this kind of thing is your bag.

Destiny's Orbit, by David Grinnell

Ajax Calkins, spoiled young scion of the Calkans industrial empire, weeps for having no more worlds to conquer.  The Earth has been thoroughly explored and settled, from Antarctica to the ocean depths.  Mars is also crowded, there by an harmonious consortium of benevolent aliens.  Venus is a hellish wasteland, and the asteroids are under the firm grip of the Earth Mars Space Agency (EMSA).  Beyond Jupiter, the outer reaches of the solar system lie under the domination of the nefarious and inhuman Saturnians.  Only the fifth planet and the worlds of its orbit remain up for grabs, a sort of neutral zone between the two space powers.

And so, when Calkins is approached by asteroid miner, Anton Smallways, with dreams of colonizing a Trojan asteroid (named Ajax, no less!), he is more than happy to lend his vast resources and the use of his space yacht to the cause.  But is Smallways really just a meek servant?  Can Ajax the First and Last of the Kingdom of Ajax maintain a third-way between EMSA and the Saturnians?  And what of the meddling of the plucky EMSA agent, Emily Hackenschmidt, who is single-mindedly determined to end Calkins' schemes? 

Let's be clear — Destiny's Orbit is as subtle as a brick, a brick that was thrown out of the Society of Bricks for lack of subtlety.  It is juvenile space opera with as much moment as a two-inch crowbar.  It raids from the same larder as Leinster's The Wailing Asteroid and The Alien, by Raymond F. Jones, not to mention Burroughs and Doc Smith, etc.  It makes sense – "Grinnell" is really former Futurian Donald Wolheim, a pulp era editor and writer whose sensibilities were baked during the Golden Age [and, as John Boston informs me, this story was originally printed in the early 1940s!]

That said, Destiny's Orbit makes for easy reading as it is thoughtfully broken up into bite-sized chapters, and the content is pleasantly undemanding.  Moreover, the real star of the piece is the resourceful Emily, who is always fun (heroines paradoxically were given more to do "back then;" what I would have given for her to have been the viewpoint character!) So while I may scoff at the content and literary level of Wolheim's work, I did enjoy it. 

2.5 stars, objectively, but in my heart, it's a three-star work.

[P.S. If you want the chance to nominate Galactic Journey for Best Fanzine next year, you need to register for WorldCon before the end of the year! (or have registered last year… but then you can only nominate, not vote.) The Journey will be at next year's WorldCon, so don't miss your chance to meet us and please help put us on the ballot for Best Fanzine!]




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[December 2, 1962] They Came From the Mainstream (SF Books Not Published As SF)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Victoria Silverwolf

Science fiction is a marketing category.  Readers who enjoy this genre look for familiar names and for covers featuring rockets and robots.  Our esteemed host has done an excellent job reviewing nearly all the books published as science fiction this year.  But what about those which contain speculative content, but which are not marketed that way?

As the year draws to an end, let's take a look at some of this camouflaged science fiction:

Two new collections of translated stories by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, Ficiones and Labyrinths, contain many tales which will appeal to SF fans.  In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, for example, the author describes an alien world.  An entire universe, consisting of every possible book, is the setting for The Library of Babel.  These and other elegantly written stories appeal more to the intellect than the heart.

Prolific British author Anthony Burgess offered two very different visions of dystopian futures this year.  A Clockwork Orange is narrated in futuristic slang by a teenage criminal.

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening . . .

Disorienting at first, this Russian-influenced language of tomorrow becomes clear through context, and is brilliantly used by Burgess to take us into a frightening world of random violence and government mind control.

Overpopulation leads to repression of heterosexuality, pregnancy becoming a crime, war used as a form of population control, and cannibalism in The Wanting Seed.  The language of this novel is not as difficult as A Clockwork Orange, but it deals with many important themes which require careful reading.

Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabakov, best known for his controversial novel Lolita (toned down somewhat in this year's film adaptation), creates a very unusual structure in his new book, Pale Fire.  It consists of a poem of 999 lines by an imaginary poet, followed by footnotes written by an equally fictional critic.  Read together, the poem and footnotes come together to form a plot of impersonation, exile, and murder.  What makes this a work of science fiction is the fact that it takes place in a world different from our own.  The story deals with the deposed king of the European nation of Zembla.  It takes place in an alternate version of the USA, which contains the states of Appalachia and Utana. 

Although all of these books were published as literary fiction, science fiction fans should not dismiss them, in Hamlet's words, as "caviar to the general."  They are all well worth reading, and produce the special sense of wonder that comes from our favorite genre. 




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[November 6, 1962] The road not taken… (Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle)

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[if you’re new to the Journey, read this to see what we’re all about!]


by Gideon Marcus

What if the good guys had lost World War 2?

Imagine a United States split in three pieces: the East Coast is a protectorate of the Reich.  The West has been colonized by the Japanese.  A rump free state sprawls across the Rockies and western Plains.  The Holocaust has extended to Africa, and the two fascist superpowers are locked in a Cold War with stakes as high, if not higher than in our real world.

Philip K. Dick has returned to us after a long hiatus with a novel, The Man in the High Castle.  It is an ambitious book, long for a science fiction novel.  Castle's setting is an alternate history, one in which the Axis powers managed to defeat the Allies…somehow (it is never explained).  Dick explores this universe through five disparate viewpoint protagonists, whose paths intertwine in complex, often surprising ways:

Major Rudolf Wegener: An agent of the Abwehr, the German foreign espionage service known for its subversive, anti-Nazi activities. Wegener is desperate to make contact with the Japanese government to inform them of a German plan to turn the Cold War hot – a conflict the Japanese cannot win.  His contact intermediary is…

Nobusuke Tagomi: Head of the Japanese trade mission in San Francisco, a deeply spiritual and traditional man who abhors violence.  Like many Japanese posted in the former United States, he has an outsized fancy for American antiques such as those provided by…

Robert Childan: A prissy antiques dealer, who accepts the superiority of the ancient civilizations of the Far East, having adopted the Japanese mindset almost entirely.  He is resolved to dismantle the cultural heritage of his nation one little treasure at a time – that is, until he discovers a new American culture growing like a flower in a footprint, a culture represented by the art whose creator is…

Frank Frink: Formerly a forger of American historical artifacts, he has turned his expertise to the creation of exquisite modern jewelry.  He is a Jew in a world where being a Jew is a capital crime.  He is married to but long-separated from…

Juliana Frink: A ravishing beauty and Judo expert living on her own in the Rocky Mountain States.  She links up with a mournful Italian truck driver who turns out to be an SD (Nazi secret police) assassin tasked with murdering the author of…

The Grasshopper lies heavy: A sort of sixth character that unites the protagonists.  It is a novel of alternate history in which Germany and Japan lost the Second World War.  Banned in the Reich and Reich-controlled countries, it is a best-seller elsewhere.  Its window on a world in which fascism did not triumph offers a scrap of hope, a vision of a world where sanity prevailed.  It is interesting to note that the timeline of Grasshopper is not that of our universe, but one in which the British and Americans are the post-war superpowers. 

There is a strong suggestion that what makes the world of Grasshopper so compelling is that it is, in fact, the real world.  This goes beyond wishful thinking.  At one point, Tagomi actually wills himself away from Castle's timeline.  Castle's author, Hawthorne Abendsen confesses that he did not so much write Grasshopper as simply draft it per the dicta of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle book whose use is widespread in the Japanese-influenced regions, and which Abendsen consulted throughout the writing of his book.

Castle takes a good third of its length to really get started.  Ostensibly a thriller of an alternate Cold War, it is really a character study focused on the myriad minutiae of interaction.  How do conqueror and conquered interact?  How complete can cultural assimilation be?  What is the character of pride in a defeated race?  These are all good questions, and Dick does a decent job giving his take on their answers.

There are significant problems with Castle, however.  For one, it suffers from lazy worldbuilding.  The book is an opportunity for Dick to draw a wide cast of characters and depict their complex web of interactions.  But the underpinnings of the world they inhabit are implausible.  First and foremost, it would have been impossible, logistically, for the United States to have fallen to the Axis Powers.  For that matter, I have doubts that the Soviet Union was ever in existential danger.  Certainly the Reich never came close to making The Bomb – their racial theory-tinged science wouldn't have allowed it.  It is sobering when you realize that the Allies managed to fight two world wars and develop the most expensive and powerful weapon ever known all at the same time.  An Axis victory in World War 2 resulting in the conquest of the United States is simply a nonstarter.

Setting that aside (since we'd have no book otherwise) the Nazi feats in Castle, accomplished in just 17 years and including the colonization of Mars, Venus, the moon; as well as the damming of the Mediterranean(!) are just silly.  In fact, a clever touch would have been to suggest that those feats were actually purely propaganda.  They might well have been, but Dick plays it straight in the book. 

Dick also seems to have not done much homework before writing Castle.  The politics and depictions of Nazi characters could have been (and likely were) derived from a cursory read of Shirer's recent instant classic, Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, without much elaboration or extrapolation.  Fair enough.  Dick spends most of his time in the Japanese-occupied Pacific States of America, anyway, so he doesn't need to develop the German side too much. 

There again, however, we have no depth.  The inner monologues of the Japanese (and the most Nippophile of subjects, Childan) are distinguished mostly by Dick's eschewing of the definite article.  In other words, there is no "the" and precious few pronouns.  That is technically how the Japanese language works, but it's not as if those concepts don't exist – they're simply implied.  Moreover, it doesn't make sense that Childan would speak and think this way.  The execution is clumsy.  It makes the Japanese come off as pidgin-speakers, incapable of erudition in English.

The Japanese and Easternized Americans also exhibit a painful stiffness, and utterly spartan adherence to the ancient arts and ways.  It's as if Dick had read Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture (one of the recent wave of books the Japanese have released to rehabilitate the image Westerners have of them) and took it as representative of all Japanese culture.  I've been to Japan ten times.  I've studied Japanese for two decades.  I have a great many Japanese friends.  They are as varied as any other set of people, and this monodimensional portrayal does them no favors – nor does it interest particularly. 

Add to this the sterile, detached atmosphere of the book, as if the words were cloaked in gauze, and it makes for an often sloggish read.  I understand that the style underscores the bleak hopelessness of life in the new America, but there should have been some variation among the characters.  They all think similarly.  A sort of cynical weariness.  It's even justifiable, but it's oppressive and monotonous. 

The reason for Dick's long absence from the science fiction genre (alternate history is not strictly science fiction; one of Dick's characters even says as much in Castle, but let's not split hairs) is that he, like Sturgeon and many others, tried to make it big with a mainstream book.  Like Sturgeon, he was not successful, so it appears he has tried to bridge the gap between SF and the mainstream by picking a particularly popular topic.  Shirer and Suzuki have certainly plowed the field for Dick, and early buzz around Castle is strong. 

But unlike Heinlein's mainstream success, Stranger in a Strange Land or Sturgeon's less successful (but better) Venus Plus X, I find it difficult to discern an overall message in Castle.  I find myself comparing Castle unfavorably with Orwell's 1984, a book that was not only an excellent novel, but also a profound cautionary tale against Communism and the pursuit of power for power's sake.  Castle doesn't really say much other than "life under the Japanese would be pretty lousy, albeit better than under the Nazis."  The interesting relationships between characters, and what Dick tries to convey through them, are subverted by the lack of plausibility of Dick's alternate 1962 and by the flawed and flat portrayals of those who live in it. 

Of course, maybe these flaws are intentional.  The ending suggests that the world of Castle isn't even real, just some sort of half-baked flight of fancy.  One might conclude that all of the stereotypes, all the shallow history, the mind-numbing sameness of the characters are just beams to support the structure of a colossal cosmic joke.  That Castle really is just a Dickian daydream set to paper, and that the styling of its components is designed to underscore the unreality of the story's proceedings.  Seen in this light, Castle would be subtly brilliant.

However, I suspect that gives Dick too much credit.  I think Dick was really just throwing vague ideas out there and hoping we'd Rorschach them into something coherent.  Castle is a readable book, a well-timed book, and it knits a number of characters together somewhat entertainingly, at times profoundly.  But it's also a sensational, shallow book.  An overwrought, affected book.  It's not bad – Dick is never bad – but it is not the masterpiece I think many people feel it is destined to be. 

Three stars and a half stars.

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