Category Archives: Magazine/Anthology

Science Fiction and Fantasy in print

Magazine/Anthology, Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[August 18, 1970] Landed minority (September 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

August 18, 2025 Gideon Marcus 5 Comments

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

Venus or Borscht

Just three days ago, the USSR launched its seventh probe to the second planet, continuing to run up the score against America in the exploration of that world.

Black & white photograph of a rocket on its launchpad surrounded by a gantry framework
Venera 6 on the launchpad—presumably, Venera 7 was launched by a similar rocket

In four months, Venus 7 will complete its 217 million mile trip. Like its three predecessors, Venuses 5 and 6 and Venus 4, the seventh Venus probe is designed as a lander. Of course, there's a little dispute between the two superpowers as to whether any of the prior trio actually reached the surface. Several Western scientists contend that Venuses 4-6 all burned up on their way through the seething, hot atmosphere.

Perhaps Venus 7 will make it all the way down. It weighs 105 pounds more than its predecessors, tipping the scale to 2,596 pounds. Maybe some of that is armor or insulation. Either way, at least Venus 7 is safely on course, which is better than some of its predecessors. Many Soviet "Cosmos" satellites are suspected to have been would-be interplanetary probes whose rockets failed to refire once the craft reached Earth orbit.

Black & white photograph of five white-coated engineers gathered around a all sides of a complex machine approximately four meters in height. Various hoses and pressure chambers are in evidence around the probe's chassis, and there appears to be an umbrella-like dish facing towards the camera
Engineers working on Venera 6 (we don't have pictures of Venera 7 yet)

Since Neil Armstrong first set foot on the lunar surface, the Soviets have maintained that they were never in the Moon Race, preferring, instead, to concentrate on exploring the planets and building space stations. Indeed, it's likely the Reds will put up a Venus 8 within the week, just as they sent Venuses 5 and 6 as twins last year. We've only managed two (highly successful) flybys so far.

Ad Venera per aspera. I don't care who explores the planets so long as I get to read the research results!

Summertime

The results are in, however, for the latest issue of F&SF. Plus, I've got a little surprise for you at the end. Let's see what the Ferman family has for us this month:

Cover of the September issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, featuring Thomas Burnett Swann, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, and David R Bunch. The illustration is of a softly burnished robot waiting impatiently at a 6th avenue cross-walk, arms on hips and vacuum tubes aglow, where both sidewalk and street have been been decayed by time into sand and dust
by Mel Hunter

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

(August 16, 1970) It All Comes Tumbling Down [Vision of Tomorrow #12]

August 16, 2025 Kris Vyas-Myall Leave a comment

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By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

Last month, I was so optimistic. Plans were afoot to expand the Graham Publishing SF magazines into three. First, as I touched on previously was to be Sword and Sorcery.

This was to be a fantasy-oriented magazine edited by Ken Bulmer, which already had a bunch of great names attached to its first issue, including Michael Moorcock, John Brunner and Brian W. Aldiss. This project went as far as to have proofs printed, some of which have been making their way around fan circles (if someone has one, I would appreciate a copy).

The other was a Walter Gillings-edited venture called Vanguard. This would have been a reprint magazine akin to Famous Science Fiction but with more focus on British and Australian authors, John Russell Fearn in particular.

However, Graham has decided to instead cut his losses and has pulled the entire venture. Therefore, not only are the other two projects stillborn, this is going to be the final ever issue of Vision of Tomorrow.

Just as with the various New Worlds problems, this untimely demise seems to owe more to behind-the-scenes issues than to the actual quality of the magazine. Firstly, the distribution problem. I buy direct in order to avoid any such difficulties, but most people rely on shops stocking the magazine. New English Library are supposed to be the distributor but I know that even determined fans have struggled to see a copy out in the wild.

There has also been the global paper cost rise. As economies have expanded throughout the prior decade, paper demand has skyrocketed. Unfortunately, you cannot easily just harvest more trees into wood pulp and expand the number of saws in a mill. The whole cycle of expanding the forest areas to be harvested can take decades. There have been experiments with faster growing materials and moving to storing of more records on microfiche, but these are in the early stages and unlikely to be instituted in newly industrializing countries around the world. This all means that the average cost of printing a magazine has gone through the roof, which has made new ventures very difficult.

Finally, there seems to have been some commotions behind the scenes. The associate editor was removed from his post a few months back and there are reports of disagreements over content and format between Graham and Harbottle. How much this impacted the overall fortunes of the magazine I cannot confidently to say, but it is hard to imagine it has made anything easier.

So let us all raise our glasses and toast to the final issue of Vision of Tomorrow, an underappreciated venture, and mourn for what could have been:

Vision of Tomorrow #12

Cover by Stanley Pitt, and, to my eyes, the best they have done

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Book, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 12, 1970] New Worlds of Fantasy #2

August 12, 2025 Winona Menezes 1 Comment

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by Winona Menezes

Cover by Kelly Freas

After the success of New Worlds of Fantasy, despite being almost exclusively a set of reprints, Terry Carr has put together a second fantasy anthology, including a several stories published herein for the first time. There are many unsurprising names in the list, but there are also some plucked from relative obscurity. No two stories have much in common, but all share an evocative, dreamlike quality that give the collection its sense of cohesion.

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

[August 10, 1970] Orn-ery (September 1970 Amazing)

August 10, 2025 John Boston 3 Comments

by John Boston

The September Amazing has a new and rather pleasing look. Editor White recently announced that he had wrested control of the magazine’s visual presentation from Sol Cohen and would be using American artists and dropping the former bulk purchases of covers from European magazines. The home-grown covers started a couple of issues ago, and now here is “The New Amazing Science Fiction Stories,” in a new and reasonably attractive type face, over an agreeable cover by Jeff Jones portraying a slightly fuzzy figure in a space suit floating in the void, with a planet almost totally eclipsing its sun in the background. Only problem is that the figure looks a bit like it’s sitting on the inside bend of the thin crescent of light at the edge of the planet, recalling entirely too many cartoonish advertisements of previous decades. Oh well. It still looks nice if you don’t think about it too much.

by Jeff Jones

The departments are as usual, with the book reviews fortunately restored after last issue’s absence. Most notable is Greg Benford’s review of Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died, which begins: “Reading this, I began to feel that it just might be the best sf novel ever written”; continues: “It is sad, then, to see this marvelous spirit succumb to an escalation of philosophical level the book just can’t support”; and ends: “Novels this ambitious always fail. But it is seldom that you see an artist writing over the heads of 90% of the writers in this field (including me), and it is a welcome sight. This is a great book. Read it.” After that, Dennis O’Neil on The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Benford again on Vernor Vinge’s Grimm’s World, and O’Neil again on James Blish’s Star Trek novel Spock Must Die, all seem anticlimactic.

The letter column begins with a different sort of fireworks, with James Blish in at least medium-high dudgeon over editor White’s review of Blish’s Black Easter, which he says “contains so many errors of fact or implication that I must ask you to publish these corrections.” White responds sharply and at length, stating among other things “You have not commented on my principle [sic] charges of dishonesty. . . .” Something tells me we won’t be seeing any more of Mr. Blish in Amazing’s review column, or anywhere else in the magazine. Also notable is a letter from Hector R. Pessina of Buenos Aires describing the SF magazine landscape (rather sparse) in Argentina. In his responses to other letters, White corrects one correspondent: the publisher’s string of SF reprint magazines doesn’t cost money, it makes money to help support Amazing and Fantastic. And in response to SF scholar R. Reginald, he relates the true history of his collaborative pseudonym Norman Archer.

White’s editorial includes comments on the editing of the serial Orn, discussed below, and also on his general policy toward serials—avoid cutting, run them in two parts because of the magazine’s bimonthly schedule (and there’s no plan to take it monthly) and because the point of running them is “to publish important new novels, not to coerce you into buying our next issue.” White thinks “Most modern sf readers . . . want at least one ‘major’ item into which they can sink their teeth. . . . . at least a piece of sufficient length for the author to stretch out and probe his protagonists, and one in which they, as readers, can ‘live’ for a while,” and they want it in chunks large enough to be emotionally satisfying.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[August 2, 1970] Fimbulsommer (September-October 1970 IF)

August 2, 2025 David Levinson 2 Comments

by David Levinson

Protecting the environment

Americans are becoming increasingly concerned about the environment. Smog and litter have been common complaints for many years, but people are now paying attention to things like pesticides and other chemicals in the ground and water. Some say that the current attention began with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, but 1969 may have been the tipping point.

Last year began with the disastrous oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. A few months later, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire (and not for the first time). The mayor of Cleveland tried unsuccessfully to use it as a springboard for cleaning up the river, but Time magazine picked up the story and used pictures of the more dramatic 1952 fire to launch its new “Environment” section. As the year drew to a close, the environment was also the subject of several papers presented at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. All of which contributed to the massive participation in Earth Day back in April.

The government has noticed and begun to take action. Back in December, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to submit a report on the effects of planned projects on the environment. President Nixon signed it on New Year’s Day, declaring, "the 1970s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment." The Nixons even participated in Earth Day by planting a tree on the South Lawn of the White House.

One of the problems is that there are dozens of government agencies overseeing various aspects the environment and environmental policy. Sometimes they work at cross purposes or their goal is at odds with protecting the environment at large. For example, the bodies that oversee the approval of pesticides or fertilizers are concerned only with the improving crop yields, not with the larger effects on insect life or algal blooms far downstream of farms.

On July 9th, President Nixon submitted Reorganization Plan No. 3 to Congress. The plan proposes the creation of an Environmental Protection Agency into which all the various departments and agencies will be folded. The goal is to create concerted action, unified monitoring, and hopefully to eliminate conflicts of interest. This actually seems like a pretty good idea. It’s now up to Congress to approve or reject this reorganization.

The Nixons participating in Earth Day.

Taking the science out of science fiction

I’m not one to indulge in all the shouting about the Old School and the New Wave. Eventually, the two will reach a balance, and something new will emerge. The focus on character and society is all to the good; the fripperies of style over substance will soon be forgotten. But some of the stories in this month’s IF are enough to make me throw up my hands in despair and join the old guard in kvetching about what the New Thing is doing to science fiction.

Suggested by “Fimbulsommer.” Art by Gaughan.

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Magazine/Anthology, Science / Space Race, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 31, 1970] Not so Brillo… (August 1970 Analog)

July 31, 2025 Gideon Marcus 4 Comments

Don't miss tonight's Spocktacular edition of Science Fiction Theater! Starts at 7PM Pacific. Also featuring the last appearance of Chet Huntley on the Huntley/Brinkley Report!

by Gideon Marcus

Paine-ful exit

The proverbial rats are leaving the sinking ship. Not too long ago, a clutch of NASA scientists departed America's space agency, citing too much emphasis on engineering and propaganda. Now, Thomas O. Paine, who took NASA's reins from its second adminstrator, Jim Webb, has announced his resignation. He leaves the agency on September 15. He lasted less than two years; contrast with Webb, who was there seven and a half.

Paine did not characterize his departure as any indication of disagreement with the agency's current direction. He said he was leaving NASA in strong shape, and that this was the most appropriate time for his departure. He's going back to a management position with General Electrics.

But Paine cannot be very happy with how things have been going lately. NASA's work force has been gutted–from 190,000 to 140,000 personnel; the last Saturn V first stage will be completed next month; and the future of Apollo's successor, the Space Shuttle, is in doubt. The poor director has watched the space agency go from the pinnacle of human achievement to a nadir unseen since the late '50s. If only we'd adopted the Agnew "Mars Plan"…

Deputy Administator George M. Low will take Paine's place for the time being. A replacement has not yet been tapped. Stay tuned!

Painful effort

If Paine left willingly, Analog editor John Campbell, on the other hand, seems determined not to let his magazine go until he does. Which is sad because this month's issue is yet another indication of how far the once-proud property has fallen in quality."Two astronauts meet one another between a large satelite.

Cover by Kelly Freas

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[July 20, 1970] The Goat without Horns…among other things (August 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

July 20, 2025 Gideon Marcus 1 Comment

by Gideon Marcus

Of horses and streams

Tom Paine is trying the most desperate of Hail Mary passes. Aviation Weekly just published a piece that the NASA administrator is pitching the idea of an international space station with at least six astronauts from a number of countries, possibly even from behind the Iron Curtain, to be launched in the Bicentennial year of 1976.

The price? Diverting Apollos 15 and 19 to the Skylab program, scheduled to start in 1972, and shifting Apollos 17 and 18 to the new space station. As a result, only two more Apollo missions would fly to the Moon.

There's some logic to this—after all, the Soviets have given up on the Moon, and we've already been twice. Moreover, the Reds are now focusing on orbital space stations (if the recent Soyuz 9 flight and the prior triple Soyuz mission are any indication). Shouldn't we change course, too?

I have to think this idea a plan to save the Space Shuttle. With Senators Proxmire and Mondale sharpening their knives to gut the space agency's budget, Paine figures that the way to keep the next-generation orbital launch vehicle in business is to give it a fixed destination. After all, once the two Apollos have been used, the only way to get astronauts to the station will be on the Space Shuttle.

A Space Shuttle Orbiter docks with the NAR Phase B Space Station using a module deployed from its payload bay and linked to the docking port atop its crew cabin. Image credit: North American Rockwell. (text by David Portree)

The timing is awfully tight, though. The Shuttle won't be done until at least 1977, which means the station will have to lie fallow for a while until the vehicle is online. That's assuming the advanced station can even be developed and deployed in six years, which seems doubtful. Skylab is just an adapted Saturn V upper stage. This proposed station would probably be something entirely new.

In any event, it seems foolish to squander Kennedy's legacy and barely scratch the surface of the Moon, scientifically speaking, when an infrastructure for further exploration is already in place. Shifting course so rapidly stinks of desperation. As Walter Matthau once said, playing a gambler in an episode of Route 66, "Scared money always loses."

Of dolphins and dreams

The realm of science isn't the only dubious one this month. Take a gander at the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction to see what I mean…

$Cover of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction's August issue, featuring 'The Goat Without Horns' by Thomas Burnett Swann and 'Isaac Asimov on astrology'-- the cover illustration is a black-haired nude white woman facing away from the viewer, standing thigh-deep in a claret sea and peering downward. Three improbably large & erect black dorsal fins tightly orbit her, cutting a circular wake, and an onyx platform floats above, out of her reach. Three crescent moons hang large in the sky, the largest one refracted through the only other feature projecting from the waves-- left of the woman is an enormous lenticular crystal within which is embedded vertically a chalky nude man, twisted to face the moon. Red and white flares lay a track of parabolic arcs charting from the horizon towards the crystal.$
Cover by Bert Tanner

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 14, 1970] Hit For Six (Vision of Tomorrow #11)

July 14, 2025 Kris Vyas-Myall 2 Comments

By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

So, Britain has a new Prime Minister. Edward “Ted” Heath (not the conductor). He couldn’t be more different from the last Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Hume. Heath is the son of a carpenter and a chambermaid. He worked in banking, is unmarried and has a passion for sailing yachts and playing the organ.

Edward Heath moves into his new house

One of the first orders of business for him, as it would have been for Wilson, is a meeting with The Six, AKA the leaders of the six members of the European Economic Community, in order to discuss the possibility of Britain’s entry into the Common Market. This is a particular passion project for Heath, who is a known Francophile and whose previous negotiations in this era led to the press declaring him “Lord Heath of Brussels”.

In fact, Britain is not the only country trying to join. Ireland, Denmark and Sweden have all made applications to join and these have been going on for some time. There is however a reason this year will be different. That is the absence of Charles de Gaulle. Central to French politics over the last decade, he used his power to oppose any enlargement of the EEC.

The December Hague Summit

With his retirement and replacement by Pompidou, who has switched his approach to appeal to more liberal voters, the calculus has changed. Following the Hague Summit in December negotiations have officially begun again in Luxembourg. There are a number of points that are still subject to negotiation, but things appear to be moving forward.

In the pages of Vision of Tomorrow, Europhilia is on display and it is time for me to negotiate my way through six stories: some about major nations, some involving small grand duchies, but all will be covered with sufficient weight:

Vision of Tomorrow #11

Cover by Eddie Jones

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 12, 1960] The New Generation (August 1970 Fantastic)

July 12, 2025 Victoria Silverwolf 3 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

Now that we're well into the first year of a new decade, it's possible to look back on the recently ended 1960's and acknowledge that it's been a time of extraordinary changes in society. Music, clothing, civil rights, the peace movement, and so forth. Even in the relatively tiny world of imaginative fiction, the so-called New Wave has hit the field like a tornado.

Many of these revolutions have been led by youths. Recently, many young people in the United States have been demanding the right to vote at the age of eighteen instead of twenty-one. (Shades of Wild in the Streets!)

A typical demonstration promoting the lowering of the voting age. This one happened in Seattle last year.

On June 22 of this year President Nixon signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, requiring that the voting age be eighteen in all federal, state, and local elections. However, the constitutionality of this extension is under question, so don't celebrate yet.

Nixon had doubts about the constitutionality of the extension even as he signed it, so he ordered a court case to decide the issue.

The latest issue of Fantastic reflects the changes that have been going on, with the New Wave movement influencing a great deal of fiction and nonfiction in its pages. Don't worry; there's enough Old Wave content to satisfy traditionalists as well.

Cover art by Jeff Jones. Note that the Fantastic Illustrated feature promised on the cover does not actually appear in the issue.

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Magazine/Anthology, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 8, 1970] I'm Still Marching Some More (Orbit 7)

July 8, 2025 Kris Vyas-Myall 3 Comments

By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

More than 1,000 women marched through armed cordons in Belfast a few days ago, in a surprising display of bravery and protest. How has such an act come to be seen on British streets?

Since last summer, when British troops were called in by Stormont, the violence has continued to worsen. When the so-called “battle of the bogside” took place in August, British troops arrived too late to stop loyalist violence.

Soon after, a split emerged in December within the IRA, with there now being two groups. First are the “official” IRA, who have adopted a Marxist platform and believe in political engagement to bring about a socialist workers republic. Second are the new militant “provisional” IRA who support armed defence of Catholic communities and believe that their campaign can only end in a single united republic of Ireland. Currently, the momentum seems to be with the provisional group, particularly with increasing loyalist violence. When a member of the official IRA came out to ask a Catholic group to disperse, he was stoned by the crowd.

Things have also been going south (pun intended) in the Republic. In April, a paramilitary group (possibly the provisional IRA or Saor Eire, but unconfirmed) committed a bank robbery and shot dead an unarmed member of the Irish Garda, Richard Fallon, the first to be murdered in the line of duty since the 40s. The next month, Jack Lynch, the Irish Taoiseach, was forced to fire his ministers of finance and agriculture as they are charged with trying to supply arms to paramilitaries in the North.

As tensions continued to ramp up between communities, it was inevitable we were in for another summer of violence. In the most recent incident, it is unclear as yet who struck first. Loyalist sources say the provisional IRA were using the imprisonment of Bernadette Devlin as an excuse to whip up violence. Republican sources say a loyalist mob were trying to drive Catholics living in the Short Strand area out of East Belfast. Whatever the cause, five people died and there was a huge amount of property damage. More importantly for what happened next, members of the provisional IRA used guns to fire back against loyalists in the Falls Road area.

A curfew was declared in the area as three thousand British Army went house to house, armed and firing tear-gas, in order to check for weapons and arrest potential IRA suspects. This, however, is not something that can be done quickly (there were more houses than soldiers) or easily, and took three days to complete. As such, supplies were running low for some households, as people even leaving to get food were liable to be shot.

This is where the march came in. Local Catholic women decided to take action themselves and marched in holding food, in full view of the press. They correctly made the calculation that the British Army would not shoot women armed only with bread and milk to be broadcast on the evening news. Some were blocked but many were able to get through and resupply the community.

It is unclear if the British raids will have done any more than American finding of caches in Vietnam but two things are definitely clear:

1. The Catholic community in the North are not going to have much trust of the British to protect them, if any indeed still remained.

2. Protection and support for the community is coming from the ground up, particularly women in these roles, rather than top down.

One place you can also see women regularly pushing things forward is in Orbit. Whilst not quite having an equal number, it is still the only place I can be certain to see multiple women writers between its two covers.

Orbit 7 ed. by Damon Knight

Cover by Paul Lehr

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Galactic Journey

Category Archives: Magazine/Anthology

[August 18, 1970] Landed minority (September 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

(August 16, 1970) It All Comes Tumbling Down [Vision of Tomorrow #12]

[August 12, 1970] New Worlds of Fantasy #2

[August 10, 1970] Orn-ery (September 1970 Amazing)

[August 2, 1970] Fimbulsommer (September-October 1970 IF)

[July 31, 1970] Not so Brillo… (August 1970 Analog)

[July 20, 1970] The Goat without Horns…among other things (August 1970 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

[July 14, 1970] Hit For Six (Vision of Tomorrow #11)

[July 12, 1960] The New Generation (August 1970 Fantastic)

[July 8, 1970] I'm Still Marching Some More (Orbit 7)

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction