Category Archives: Serial

[March 31, 1970] Seed stock (April 1970 Analog)

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

It's the end of the month, and that means the latest Analog is on tap.  This one starts and even mids with the usual drudgery… but the latter third breeds a little hope.

April 1970 cover of 'analog SCIENCE FICTION SCIENCE FACT' featuring a blue man in a large visor helmet with a single eye decal pointing over the shoulder of a hooded wizard writing in a notebook, wearing a large medallion. The caption reads HERE, THERE BE WITCHES
EVERETT B> COLE
by Kelly Freas

Here, There Be Witches, by Everett B. Cole

Frequently, some author will tailor a story to Analog editor John Campbell's particular idiosyncracies hoping to get some of that sweet, sweet four-cents-a-word payout.  In this case, Everett Cole has aimed at this kooky premise: the reason why humans didn't develop psionic powers (more than we have) is that true adepts were burned as witches.

And so, in this lead novella, we have a planet of exact humanoids going through their equivalent of the 17th Century.  The nobles are finding witches right and left because bumping off the psychics (who, naturally, are doing a bit better than the average population) is a lucrative business.  It's up to Hal Carlsen, agent of a galactic "Philosophical Corps", to alter the course of the planet's history.

Black and white image of aclose up man in a goggle-like mask and helmet with antennae. His hands are raised and clasped and smoke raises from one of his fingers on the righthand page the sillouette of a vulture sits in front of the moon in front of a body of water. The caption reads HHERE, THERE BE WITCHES
by Kelly Freas

Obviously, Cole succeeded at his mission—securing a check for several hundred dollars.  He does not accomplish much else, though.  The tale is by-the-numbers, and the premise is dumb on multiple levels.  Plus, I really didn't need several pages luridly describing the tortures that the accused had to endure.

Two stars.

Quiet Village, by David McDaniel

Black and white image of a man perched on one knee with a futuristic looking blaster in his hand. He carries a bow on his back. The caption reads 
QUIET VILLAGE
Force- like any other tool- is itself neither Good nor Evil.
The purpose- not the thing- determines value!
DAVID MCDANIEL
Illustrated by Vincent diFate
by Vincent DiFate

Three hundred years after The Plague eliminates most of the human population, pockets of America are slowly clawing their way back to civilization.  Their progress is hindered by rats—bandits clad in bullet-proof "street suits" and wielding blasters.  When a San Gabriel Valley community is threatened by a pack of rats, a contingent of Scouts is hired to flush them out.

Boy Scouts, that is.

This intriguing set-up quickly devolves into a competently told but otherwise uninteresting combat tale.  I suppose the "moral" is that, in times of trouble, a unified, God fearing organization like the Scouts will keep America going, like the Catholic church in the Dark Ages.  Or something.

A low three stars.

A Case of Overprotection, by Hazel Moseley

Ms. Moseley offers up a history of the Food and Drug Administration, notes its virtues, and decries its recent cautious slowness.  I appreciated the data, but I disagree with the sentiment.

Three stars.

Black and white caroon drawing of two surgeons in front of a large body on a table, organs clearly visible. Caption reads:
DEPARTMENT OF DIVERSE DATA
GASTRO-
INTESTINUS
DIAPANUS or GLASS GUT
E.T. from Polaris IV,
quite friendly as long as you keep him well fed.
A favorite object of research among E.T. biologists, since no X ray is required to study his metabolism.
by David Pattee

The Siren Stars (Part 2 of 3), by Nancy and Richard Carrigan

Black and white image of scantily clad male and female figures crawling among the weeds in front of a wooden house. A man in dark clothing and a large brimmed hat holding a large rifle stands in front of the structure. In the foreground is an overturned wooden boat. The caption reads THE SIREN STARS
by Kelly Freas

Here we are again with the bland adventures of bland adventurer John Leigh.  This time around, after the failure of John's attempt to infiltrate his own base (as practice for a mission to investigate a Soviet facility which has received signals from an alien race), he meets up with Elizabeth Ashley.

She is a woman.

Oh!  You want to know more about her?  Well, in many ways, she is like every woman in the world: appreciates expensive clothes, startles easily, and has preternatural intuition.  In other ways, she's most unlike women.  For instance, she is very smart—despite being a very beautiful woman.

You think I'm being overly snide?  Read this installment, if you can.  Virtually every description and depiction of Dr. Ashley either emphasizes her femininity (explicitly) or contrasts this or that character trait with stereotypical femininity.  It's ridiculous.

Anyway, Ashley is an astronomer who came up with the hypothesis that maybe the ultimate evolution of intelligence is the creation of sapient machines.  And maybe said machines would conquer the universe by sending signals to other smart species that promise great technological increases.  And maybe those technologies are actually a Trojan horse, and if they are built, the hapless dupes will realize too late that they've actually created alien robots, who will take over.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Well, Ashley obviously struck a nerve with that one—foreign mooks first try to kill her, then succeed in abducting her.  Because nothing hides a cunning plan like offing the one person who has made casual surmises (without evidence, mind you) of the truth behind it.

The Carrigans also offer up some local color, showing off the places they have obviously seen personally.  There are some truly insipid love scenes, including a very brief peek inside Ashley's thoughts, just so the reader knows she is genuinely attracted to John and isn't just some kind of enemy agent.  We also get some Fleming-lite action sequences.

Things end with John now tasked to go to the USSR not to see which way their radio dish is pointed (it's a moot point—the Americans have also gotten the Lorelei signal; one astronomer has gone insane) but to destroy any technology derived from it.  Also, to extract a (presumably beautiful, and definitely female) defector.

Well, at least the Carrigans acknowledged (tardily) that satellite photography was an easier way to see which way the Russkie dish was pointed…

Two stars.

Come You Nigh: Kay Shuns, by Lawrence A. Perkins

Black and white image of a man clad in white looking angrily at a sheet of paper in front of a desk of machinery.
by Craig Robertson

A two-man fighter craft of the Tellurian International Space Force is disabled by a Zhobehr magnetic beam and left adrift in the solar system.  This turns out to be a blessing in disguise as the crippled craft winds up near the enemy aliens' secret local base.  But how to broadcast their findings to Earth without 1) giving away their position, and 2) letting the aliens know they've been found out?

The clue is in the title.  It's a cute story that, thankfully, goes no longer than it needs to.

Three stars.

The Life Preservers, by Hank Dempsey

Black and white image of a futuristic two-turret tank with a castle drawn in the background.
by Vincent DiFate

Here we've got another story about mechanical teleportation by "Hank Dempsey" (Harry Harrison in disguise).  This time, it's set much further in the future.  Teleporters have been situated on planets throughout the galaxy for so long that they've had time to be abandoned for centuries. 

Preservers is the story of Emergency Plague Control, a corps of doctors whose job is to ensure the health of humanity.  Alien planets have not spawned harmful diseases—the ecosystems aren't similar enough.  But isolated groups of humans evolve new spins on old epidemics, and its up to the EPC to keep them in check.

And so, a team is dispatched to a primitive world, regressed for a thousand years, to do a check-up.  Unwittingly, they bring death with them…

It's a pretty good tale, more nuanced than I had expected, and told in Harrison's taut style.  Not brilliant, but worthy.

Three stars.

Seed Stock, by Frank Herbert

Dark image of a hand reaching to sow seeds on the surface of an obfuscated planet. A ship or satelite glows in the foreground. The caption reads 'seed stock'.
by Vincent DiFate

A few months ago, I attempted a book by Rex Gordon called The Yellow Fraction.  The premise was that a colony world had divided into two factions: the Greens advocated terraforming the world to be a paradise for humans; the Blues said the settlers should adapt to the planet.  (There was also a minority group that said the planet was no good, and they should just up and leave—the yellows.)

Frank Herbert's newest story presents the Green vs. Blue debate in a much terser, much more compelling fashion.  It is told from the point of view of Kroudor, a laborer with an instinctive knack for the rhythms of their new world.  While the highfalutin scientists struggle in vain to make their imported crops and livestock survive in increasingly difficult conditions, Kroudor and his wife, the technician Honida, find and cultivate local resources.

The result presages survival for the colony… if not quite that which had been envisioned when the group left Earth several years prior.

This is probably the best thing I've read by Herbert.  I imagine he sold it to Campbell because it has a bit of the anti-egghead bias the editor enjoys so much, but it is a story that would have fit in any other mag.

Four stars.

The Reference Library, by P. Schuyler Miller

Schuy sings the praises, this month, of Poul Anderson's future history as told in the tapestry of his dozens of published tales.  The occasion is the novel releases of Satan's World and The Rebel Worlds, both of which Miller liked, but we were less impressed with.  He likes the new collection Beyond the Beyond, too, whose contents include many stories we've covered on the Journey.

There's a neat bit about how SF veteran Alan E. Nourse is chartering a flight to Heidelberg's Worldcon this August—might be worth it for you folks who want to hop the Pond to West Germany.

Of Eight Fantasms and Magics, a Jack Vance collection of works that fit in the gap between SF and Fantasy, Schuy says, "If you don't like this kind of thing, stay away from it.  If you do, sample Vance: he is a master of the genre."

He also enjoys the 18th volume of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: "It's the best F&SF anthology in a long time."  This tallies with our assessment—that magazine finished at the top of the heap last year when we awarded the Galactic Stars

Finally, he lauds the A. Bertam Chandler collection, Catch the Star Winds, and contemplates making an encyclopedia for all of the Galactic Rim stories (whose main protagonist is Commodore John Grimes).

Signs of sprouting?

A dark haired woman is shown operating a large boxy computer, an IBM 2265 terminal.
a woman working at an IBM 2265 terminal

All told, this month's issue scores just 2.8 stars.  The concluding pages were such a comparatively pleasant experience that I'm left with a bit of optimism.  Sure, there's a Campbellian smugness that suffuses all that gets submitted; yet, the best authors seem to overcome that particular editorial tic.  Of course, this also suggests that Analog would get even better with a different man at the tiller.  That doesn't seem to be forthcoming any time soon…

As for the other sources of short fiction this month, we had a bumper crop.  From best to worst, there was:

Fantasy and Science Fiction (3.8), Fantastic (3.1), Galaxy (2.9), IF (2.8), Nova 1 (2.7), New Worlds (2.5), Orbit 6 (2.4), and Vision of Tomorrow (2.2)…and Andre Norton's collection of old and new stories: High Sorcery.

Individually, no outlet was outstanding (except for F&SF), but there was enough 4 and 5 star work to fill three full digests.  Also, women contributed 12% of the new fiction, which is on the higher side (again, thanks to Norton).

I suppose if you cast lots of seed, you're bound to get sprouts.  It just takes a lot of stock for this strategy to work.  And a lot of subscription fare!

Thank goodness books bought by the Journey are tax deductible.

Aren't they?



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[March 8, 1970] They say that it's the institution… (April 1970 Galaxy and the incomplete Court)

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

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

There ain't no Justice

It was only a few months that President Dicky tried to ram a conservative Supreme Court justice pick through the Senate to replace the seat left open by the retirement of the much laureled Chief Justice Earl Warren.  Clement Haynworth's candidacy went down to defeat in the Senate on November 21 of last year.

Now up is G. Harrold Carswell, until last year, the Chief Justice of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida.  He was elevated to the Fifth Circuit Appellate Court last June.  To all accounts, he is no less conservative than his predecessor, and he's a (former?) segregationist to boot.  His jurisprudence is also lacking: 40% of his rulings were overturned on appeal!  As Senator McGovern observed, "I find his record to be distinguished largely by two qualities: racism and mediocrity."  Nebraska's Senator Hruska damned with faint praise in his reply, to the effect saying, "Sure he's mediocre…but don't the mediocre warrant representation, too?"

Black-and-white photograph of a white man wearing a judge's robes.
G. Harrold Carswell

But as LIFE and other outlets are noting, Nixon's soothing rhetoric thinly veils a deeply conservative agenda, cutting social programs, withdrawing from world affairs, and trying to stack the Court with allies.  Carswell's nomination passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 16 of this year.  We'll see if the Senate as a whole can stomach him for the Court proper.

Plus ça change

Galaxy's editor Eljer Jakobsson is like Richard Nixon (well, perhaps this is a stretch, but indulge me—I need some sort of transition here!) He is trying all of the styles at his disposal in this new decade of the 1970s and seeing what sticks.  The result remains inconsistent, but not unworthy.

This month's issue trumpets Silverbob's newest serial (sure to be novelized, perhaps as we speak) The Tower of Glass.  Stephen Tall has the lead "breakthrough novelette", which I presumed meant this was his first work, but checking my index cards, I see it's not, since he first wrote a story for Worlds of Tomorrow four years ago.  And then there's Ray Bradbury, undeservedly getting a third of the cover's masthead, presumably because of his pop culture stature.

The editor starts out the issue with an interesting piece, noting that even if there something to genetic races, it's meaningless anyway because none of us stick exclusively to our own (something folks of my persuasion blame on how lovely those shiksas always end up…) It's short and sweet.  Then it's onto the "breakthrough novelette".

Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall, by Stephen Tall

Ink drawing of the faces of three men wearing astronaut helmets, shown against a background of black space. Text next to the drawing says: Allison, Carmichael and Tattersall. Space history echoes with their achievements. If you haven't yet read about them, start now! Text further below shows the name Stephen Tall.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

The three names in the title belong to a trio of compatible astronauts sent on the first expedition to the Jovian moon, Callisto.  A biologist, a mathematician, and a computer engineer, the three have just barely settled in for the several month trip when the first of them, Tattershall, makes an interesing hypothesis: space is a near vacuum but not a complete one—what if the interplanetary cosmos harbors life?  Incredibly diffuse, extremely voluminous life, to be sure.  Unrecognizable at a passing glance, certainly.  But there, nonetheless.

Seek, and ye shall find.  As the Albratross sails for Jupiter, the ship sails by and inside a number of planetoid-sized creatures, sensed only by their abnormal particle densities.  Unfortunately for the "Callistonauts", one of them take a fancy for their krypton-powered engine, and their fuel supply soon becomes dangerously depleted.

If this story appeared in Analog, it'd be a thrilling (or maybe just turgidly technical) SF action piece.  In F&SF, maybe fantastically whimsical or horrific.  Here, it's… pleasant.  More inches are devoted to the genial interactions of the tic-tac-toe playing Allison and Carmichael, the blissful absorption in ant farms of Tattershall, and the dietary proclivities of all three.  Plus, lots of discussion of biology.

Frankly, I suspect space life as posited by Tall is impossible.  Things don't scale like that (and someone tell Irwin Allen…) Still, it's a nice story.

Three stars.

Discover a Latent Moses, by Michael G. Coney

Two-page spread. On the left-hand page is the title: Discover a Latent Moses, then the name of the author, Michael G. Coney, and text further below says: Green Earth was a memory, and memories were not for builders. On the right-hand page is an ink drawing of the top portion of a tower in ruins, the rest of which is covered by the sands of a vast desert.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Here are the adventures of Jacko, Paladin, Switch, Cockade, and the Old Man, a band of humans surviving the Fifth Ice Age perhaps fifty years from now.  They live under a dozen feet of snow in an entombed town, surviving on canned food and bottled booze.  But they dream of land in the warmer West… if only they can outmaneuver the winged, snow skiing, Flesh Eaters.  It reminds me of a bit of Michael Moorcock's series involving the ice schooner.

It's never explained what causes the big freeze.  The general consensus of scientists is that industrial emissions will cause a global warming, but I've read at least one article lately that suggests smog particles will block the Sun and cause cooling.  Maybe that's it.  Or maybe, like in Robert Silverberg's Time of the Great Freeze, the next Ice Age will trump any artificial effects.

Anyway, the story is excitingly told and the characters vivid, if cardboard.  It's enjoyable reading, but it brings little new to the table.

Three stars.

The Tower of Glass (Part 1 of 3), by Robert Silverberg

Two-page spread with an ink drawing of amorphous gelatinous blobs that seem alive. At the bottom of the right-hand page is the title: The Tower of Glass, the name of the author, Robert Silverberg, and text further below says: Krug rivaled God Almighty as the creator of Heaven and Earth and Man. Now he just wanted to talk to all three of them!
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Robert Silverberg sure loves him some dark futures.

Over the next several decades, the world will undergo plague and war that mow down the Third World.  Birth control and ennui take care of the rest.  But the productivity of the race remains as high as ever, thanks to mechanization, computerization…and the development of androids.  These perfect physical specimens range from moronic (the gammas) to brilliant (the rarefied alphas—someone's been reading Huxley), and they fill the role of technician, nanny, nurse, and (but only secretly) lover.

The much-reduced human population lives effete, rich, and pampered, interplanetary and even nearby interstellar, knit globally by a network of "transmats" that eliminate commutes and homogenize culture.  This, then, is the world 250 years hence, contemporary with Star Trek, but oh so different.

For one thing, this is no utopia.  The androids seem quiescent, but there is indication that they might be on the verge of insurrection, or perhaps being manipulated to do so by human interests.  And then there are the women…

Silverberg seems to hate worlds in which women are anything but shallow playthings.  There is no narrative reason for women to get such short shrift in this story, and they do in all of Bob's stories, so I suspect it's more tic, less deliberate intent.

Anyway, that's the background.  The story involves billionaire Simeon Krug and the constellation of relatives, top staff, and associates who surround him.  Krug is building a 600 meter transmission tower in the tundras of Ontario to reply to a message recently received from the stars: "2-4, 2-5, 1-3" repeated ad nauseum.

So far, the story seems to be about thwarted expectations: Krug is disappointed that the alien senders seem to hail from a bright O-class star, precluding anything akin to humanity.  His son is dissatisfied with both his unexciting human wife and his vat-produced android paramour.  The android foreman Thor Watchman is dissatisfied with a nameless something, probably attached to his inferior position in human society, even as one of the most powerful beings on Earth.

It's all written with Silverberg's usual, if somewhat overdramatic, brilliance and not a little emphasis on sex.  There are some very nifty concepts here, from the eternal dawn or noon that teleportation affords, to the "jacking in" to vast computet networks (the ultimate evolution of ARPANET, perhaps).

So, bad taste in my mouth aside, I am interested to see where this goes.  It's in the same vein as his blue fire stories, which I liked.

Four stars.

Darwin, the Curious, by Ray Bradbury, Darwin, in the Fields, by Ray Bradbury, and Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn, by Ray Bradbury

A trio of pointless poems from the master of mawk: what if Chas sat in a field all day, and on the way home, passed a fox?

Two stars—the illustrations illuminating them are nice.

The Rub, by A. Bertram Chandler

Two-page spread. On the left-hand page is an ink drawing of a woman looking in horror at a humanoid figure crawling on the ceiling. On the right-hand page is the name of the author, A. Bertram Chandler, additional text that says: Can anything be more terrifying than realizing all your dreams? and the title: The Rub. The text of the story begins below the title.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

The adventures of John Grimes, intrepid if cantankerous officer of the Space Scout Service, have been going on for more than a decade.  Like Horatio Hornblower, we've now gotten most of his career, from Ensign through Commodore.  There's not a lot of room left to fill.  How then can Chandler keep this cash cow going?

Why, by returning to the mystical planet of Kinsolving, where dreams become reality.  In this case, Grimes ends up in a nightmare parallel universe where, instead of meeting his lovely wife, Sonya, and advancing to flag rank, he instead marries a shrew and ends up in a dead-end job as commander of a fourth-rate backwater base.

And yet, even schlub Grimes has got a touch of that seadog magic…

I quite enjoyed this story, although it ends just a touch too abruptly.  Four stars.

Sunpot (Part 3 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé

Drawn illustration of an irregularly-shaped spaceship near a big round planet floating in black space. Above the illustration is text in cartoonish letters. First is the title: Sunpot, by Vaughn Bodé. Next to it is this text: Sunpot, the planet, moves across the quiet opulence of fat solar space like the great red phallic temple of Brother Mercury... White Venus awaits in the distance.
illustration by Vaughn Bodé

The adventures of the Sunpot continue to take turns for the worse—this time, the pages aren't even printed in the right order.

I said one star last time, but there's (a little) less sexism this time, and the pictures are pretty, even if the typeface is still illegible.

Two stars.

Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys

An elegant piece of calligraphy with the words: Galaxy Bookshelf, Algis Budrys. Tiny stars decorate the space around the letters.

The magazine's book column is devoted solely to The Universal Baseball Association, Inc, by J. Henry Waugh.  It is about a fellow who creates his own private universe, centered around a baseball team, using a self-devised chart and dice to randomly determine what happens next.  It's a bit like how Philip K. Dick created The Man in the High Castle (he used bamboo sticks and the I Ching.

As Budrys puts it:

It does convey a convincing approximation of how a God might be infinitely creative and yet not in direct control of his creation, omnipotent and yet prey to events, omniscient and nevertheless blind to the future.

Though not technically SF or F, and thus perhaps not sold in the same outlets as our beloved regulars, Budrys recommends in no uncertain terms that we read it.

No Planet Like Home, by Robert Conquest

Undecipherable drawing composed of multiple circular shapes that resemble eyes.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

A race of humanoid aliens, prone to frequent mutation, wrings their collective hands over what to do about a comically tragic pinhead nephew of a Senator.  The aliens scour the galaxy until they find a race that constitutes a close physical match so they can deposit the hapless lad on their world.

Three guesses which world, and the first two don't count.

Two stars for being obvious.

Kindergarten, by James E. Gunn

Heavily darkened illustration, probably shaped like a coastline seen from above.
illustration by Jack Gaughan

Speaking of, here's a (charmingly illustrated) tale about a precocious child who creates a planet for his amusement, but its inhabitants are too dangerous to be allowed to live.  The world's genesis takes, of course, six days.  The name of the planet is…

Well, you already know the answer.

Two stars.

Diverging courses

The Supreme Court's constitution has evolved since 1950, becoming for a time one of the most liberal Courts in the nation's history.  The building remains the same, but the members change…and only time will tell if we'll be happy with the new direction.

The magazine that Gold launched in 1950 also continues its slow, insensible slide toward whatever lies ahead in the '70s.  It still retains the same dimensions as when it started, the same tactile feel to its cover and pages.  But its cover art, its typeface, its stable of authors, the literary style, all have evolved.  Perhaps not always for the better, but generally still worthy.

Sure, I'll renew.

Page of a magazine. At the top is a drawing of a man standing next to a crashed car. Below it is this text: It doesn't take a genius to figure out how much you hate missing the best story of you favorite writer or the major part of a great novel. But we can't compute a formula to stock every newsstand in the country with enough copies of our popular magazines to satisfy every reader. So we sometimes miss you and you miss us, and that's a double tragedy. But there's an answer. It doesn't take a genius to handle it either. All it takes is a minute of your time, for which we want to repay you with a handsome saving over the newsstand price. Just fill in the coupon or write the information on a piece of plain paper and mail it to us. Then you'll be sure instead of sorry. To the right of this text is a sample cover of Galaxy magazine, showing an illustration of a woman's face inside concentric curves. At the bottom of the page is a form to order a magazine subscription.



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[March 2, 1970] Par for the course (April 1970 IF)


by David Levinson

The Veep that couldn’t shoot straight

I’m no fan of golf (unless it involves little windmills), but a lot of people seem to like it. They show it on TV and not a week goes by without at least one golf joke in the funny pages. It also intersected with politics last month. February continues to be the month that gives me very little to talk about, so I guess this is it.

The Professional Golfers’ Association likes to start their tour early in the pleasant climes of Hawaii and California. One such event is the Bob Hope Desert Classic held on a variety of courses in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs. The highlight of the tournament for many is the pro-am event, where the pros competing in the tournament are matched with (celebrity) amateurs for one day’s round.

Pro Doug Sanders—best known for his odd swing and dapper dress—found himself in a foursome with Bob Hope, California Senator (and former song-and-dance man) George Murphy, and Vice President Spiro Agnew. On his very first shot, the Veep managed to hook the ball so far to the left it ended up on the path for an adjacent fairway. (Probably the farthest left he’s gone since being elected governor.) Trying to get back to the right fairway, he then sliced hard to the right. (This whole thing is starting to sound like a metaphor for Agnew’s political career.)

Bob Hope and Doug Sanders were standing in the path of the ball. Hope managed to duck out of the way, but Sanders was struck on the head. The blow drew blood, which Hope mopped up with a towel. Agnew was duly apologetic, and Sanders played gamely onward. At the nine-hole break, he was examined by a doctor, and the wound was sprayed with a pain-deadener.

Wire photo of Doug Sanders, Vice President Agew, and Bob Hope Wire photo of the aftermath.

Agnew went on to have a terrible day. He frequently missed putts and took penalties for giving up on a hole. As the AP put it, “Agnew chatted amiably with the fans when his ball landed in or near them, which was often.” Sanders didn’t do much better, though he was already having a poor tournament. He won $200, far less than the top prize of $25,000. Agnew rather crassly quipped that it should just about cover his medical bills.

Am I picking on Spiro Agnew? Yes. Yes, I am. After his recent attack on the press, he deserves all the opprobrium he can get. He’s already being talked about as the clear front-runner for the Republicans in 1976. Let’s nip that idea in the bud right now.

Down the fairway

When he took over as editor, Ejler Jakobsson got off to a strong start. Since then, there’s been something of a return to form, although those C+ to B- issues have felt fresher than they did in recent years under Fred Pohl. Has he sent this issue cleanly down the fairway, hit a hole in one, or—worst of all—smacked the reader in the head with an errant shot? Let’s find out.

Cover of the April 1970 edition of if Science Fiction, featuring a large undersea robot illustration. Art for Waterclap by Gaughan.Arrival at Ocean-Deep. Art for “Waterclap” by Gaughan

Waterclap, by Isaac Asimov

The long-standing lunar base and the new deep sea base at the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench must compete for the limited financial resources offered by the Planetary Project Council. After the first fatal accident on the Moon, safety engineer Stephen Demerest travels to Ocean-Deep, ostensibly to learn more about their safety procedures. His real purpose is to convince them to turn down any increase in funding at the expense of the Moon base, and he’s willing to take extreme measures.

Black and white sketch of a man in a space suit making a point to two other similarly dressed patrons.Demerest makes his case. Art by Gaughan

This is a very unusual Asimov story. There’s no puzzle, the characters are a little more fleshed out than is typical, and the tone is a lot darker. He pulls it off quite well. It could be tightened up here and there, and Demerest’s real plans are foreshadowed a little too strongly, but all in all, it’s solid, with a maturity that’s often not in evidence in the Good Doctor’s work.

A high three stars.

To Touch a Star, by Robert F. Young

Angry at being rendered impotent as punishment for a crime he didn’t commit, Ben Powers steals the starship Mary and heads for the one place he can reverse his condition. Unfortunately for him, the ship’s computer is intelligent and programmed to combat theft.

black and white illustration of the Mary, a Sputnik-like figure, being exposed to ChiMuZeta (whatever that is). Art uncreditedThe Mary being exposed to ChiMuZeta (whatever that is). Art uncredited

Science fiction editors have long rejected out of hand any story which ends with the characters becoming Adam and Eve. Can we extend that to include any Biblical figure? Just in the last couple of months, we’ve had Jesus, Jonah, and even God. It’s trite. Add in Young’s nonsensical science, and this is an awful story. Only the author’s ability to write halfway decent sentences keeps this from the bottom of the barrel.

A low two stars.

Spaceman, by Lee Harding

Facing a long layover on the planet Hydria, Captain Marnsworth takes the opportunity to find out why his best friend jumped ship there three years earlier. What he finds shocks him to the core.

A squiggly black and white drawing of a surprised mans face.Marnsworth can’t comprehend what he sees. Art uncredited, but obviously Gaughan

The back to nature movement is popular with young people, especially hippies. Star Trek even used it for a plot last year. Concern for how the technological life and separation from nature, especially life in space, will affect humanity is a worthy subject for SF to confront. This really could have been the story to do that; Harding doesn’t take sides, showing value in both approaches. But it’s too long. That or Marnsworth’s general confusion makes the narrative heavy going. Either way, it brings the story down.

Three stars.

Swap, by Ron Goulart

Ron Goulart give us another of his tales of technology gone very wrong. This time, it’s computerized spouse swapping sending the protagonist to the wrong part of town. It’s got that typical Goulart wackiness, but with a darker than usual undertone. If you’re familiar with Ron, you’ve got a pretty good idea whether you’ll like this or not; if you aren’t, this isn’t a bad place to start.

Three stars.

Black and white sketch of a shadowy figure standing over another who is picking themselves up off of the ground.When blind dates go wrong. Art by Gaughan

Ride a Tin Can, by R.A. Lafferty

Two folklorists investigate a race of goblinesque creatures that most people don’t think are intelligent.

A sketch of a goblinesque creature with large ears and eyes, and an open pointed mouthThe Shelni hope to ride a tin can one of these days. Art by Gaughan

For me, the best Lafferty stories are those that actually don’t have much in the way of plot. This one has a bit, but not enough to spoil the essential Lafferty-ness of the whole thing. I could say the same thing here as I did about the Goulart story. I liked it.

Three stars.

Thou Spark of Blood, by Gene Wolfe

One hundred and thirty-five days into the first mission to Mars, the three astronauts aboard are cracking up. They’ve been out of contact with Earth for weeks, and most of the equipment for improving their quality of life has also broken down. When the man in the middle seat is found with his throat cut, tensions run high, with the two survivors accusing each other of murder.

an outlined drawing of a man in a space suit holding up the limp body of another inside of a padded chamber.How do you dispose of a body without a functioning airlock? Art by Gaughan

Gene Wolfe started out writing in a slightly New Wave style, but seems to have fallen into a more traditional form since—he’s not the better for it. I also saw the ending of this one coming. Despite this, I was originally prepared to give the story three stars, but the more I think about it, I can’t. There’s a massive flaw that I can’t really discuss without giving away the ending, but it renders the whole thing completely unbelievable.

Two stars.

Whipping Star (Part 4 of 4), by Frank Herbert

Saboteur Extraordinaire Jorj McKie and the Bureau of Sabotage race to prevent the death of the Caleban Fannie Mae. If she dies, almost every sentient being in the galaxy will die with her.

Two figures in a sketchy style with swirly lines confront eachother in a moment of tension.The final confrontation as the clock runs out. Art by Gaughan

Herbert manages to bring his novel to a fairly satisfying conclusion. There’s enough action and about as much tension as you can expect in a story like this. We also learn the true nature of the Caleban, though it may stretch credibility. If I have a complaint, it’s that Herbert never really engages with the interesting questions he raised in Part 1 about the problems of communicating without common references. It’s still an engaging read, which might read better over the course of a few hours than a few months, though I don’t find myself at all motivated to test that hypothesis.

Three stars for this segment and the novel as a whole.

Reading Room, by Lester del Rey

Lester del Rey turns his attention to two recent Buck Rogers books, one a retrospective on the long-running comic strip, the other a reprint of the original two stories by Philip Francis Nowlan. He uses the occasion to discuss Buck Rogers’ limited connection to SF as it is and its role in furthering the ideas of the Yellow Peril. He even asks if the comic might have played a role in the internment of Japanese Americans during the War by keeping those ideas alive.

A high three stars.

Bordered in bold text Reading Room
Lester Del ReySumming up

That’s another issue in the books. No holes in one and maybe a couple of bogeys, but at least the reader never gets conked with an errant shot. The magazine seems to be drifting back into its old routine. The freshness I mentioned earlier that keeps it different from the Pohl era is still there, but it’s starting to get a little stale. Asking for a four or five star story every month is probably too much, but the magazine needs a real highlight every now and then to keep the reader interested. Fingers crossed for next month.






[February 28, 1970] Revolutionaries… (March 1970 Analog)

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

Turbulent times

Unless you've been living under a rock the past two years, you know the shockwaves from The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are still reverberating.  The open fighting on the convention floor, the fascist polemic of Mayor Daley, the protests, the baby blue and olive drab helmets, and the crippled candidacy of the man tasked to thwart Dick Nixon from taking the White House.

Aside from the shambolic shuffle toward further embroilment in southeast Asia, two other phenomena have kept the convention in the public eye.  The first is last year's neck-clutch of a movie, Medium Cool.  Half drama, half documentary, Haskell Wexler's film follows a jaded Chicago news cameraman in the weeks leading up to the crisis point.  Indeed (and I didn't realize this at the time), the footage of Robert Forster and Verna Bloom in and around the convention hall during the clashes, hippie vs. fuzz, Dixiecrat vs. DFL, was all shot live. 

A brunette woman in a yellow dress walks in front of a line of police officers. There are hippies of various ages at the left side of the frame, including a young boy.
Verna Bloom, playing an emigrant from West Virginia, searches Grant Park for her lost son

If you haven't caught the film, check your local listings.  It may still be running in your local cinema.  Be warned: it will take you back.  If you're not ready for it, you will be overwhelmed.

A movie poster for <i>Medium Cool</i>. The tagline is
Robert Forster is the news man.  You'll recognize Marianna Hill (Forster's girlfriend) as a guest star in Star Trek's "Dagger of the Mind"

As for the other reminder, for the past two years, the papers have kept us apprised on the trials of the "Chicago Eight", charged by the United States Department of Justice with conspiracy, crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot.  They included Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale.

(in the midst of his trial, Abbie Hoffman jumped on the stage at Woodstock during the performance of The Who to protest the incarceration of White Panther poet and musician, John Sinclair—it was a trippy scene)

Abbie Hoffman: "I think this is a pile of shit!  While John Sinclair rots in prison…"

Pete Townsend: "Fuck off!  Get off my fucking stage!"

A blurry black-and-white still of a floppy-haired white man in a white tunic. The image is timestamped 02:10:56:06
Pete Townsend, just after recovering the stage

The verdicts came down on February 18, a mixed bag of positive and negative news for the accused.  Apparently, four folks on the jury held out until the bitter end, but eventually went with guilty for some of the charges.  The verdicts were:

Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin were charged with and convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot.  All of the defendants were charged with and acquitted of conspiracy; Froines and Weiner were charged with teaching demonstrators how to construct incendiary devices and acquitted of those charges.  Bobby Seale had already skated when his case ended in mistrial.

Six men with long, wild hair stand smiling at the camera, arms wrapped around each other
Six of the "Seven": (l. to r.) Abbie Hoffman, John Froines, Lee Weiner, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden

So, it's jail time for five of the eight while their cases go to appeal.  You can bet that these results aren't going to lessen the flames of discontent in this country, at least for the vocal minority.

A news clipping, showing a crowd of people in front of a statue. Two people carry signs. One says 'COURTS OF INJUSTICE CANNOT PREVAIL!'. The other says 'FREE MARTIN SOSTRE'. The caption of the news clipping reads 'Protest rally in New York: Surrounded by demonstrators protesting the conspiracy trials of the Chicago 7 and the Panther 21, William M. Kunstler, defense attorney in the Chicago trial, addresses rally Monday in Madison Square Park in New York. One youth was injured in a clash with police, and windows were broken in several stores.'
From page 3 of my local paper on the 24th

Steady and staid

You wouldn't be aware of any of this turmoil if you lived under a rock and did nothing but read Analog Science Fiction.  It remains a relic and deliberate artifact of a halcyon past as envisioned by editor John Campbell.  The latest issue is a representative example.

The cover of the Analog issue. It shows a man with a gun looking over a desert cliff at a massive radio telescope facility.
by Kelly Freas

The Siren Stars (Part 1 of 3), by Richard Carrigan and Nancy Carrigan

First up, we introduce a new writing duo as well as a new James Bond-style hero.  John Leigh is a veteran, a fair hand with a souped up, armored Triumph sports car, and most importantly, a Physicist.  Shortly after serving his hitch in Korea, he is recruited by SPI—no, not the wargame company, but "Science Processing, Inc."

Leigh's latest mission is to infiltrate a Soviet radio telescope facility.  It seems that the Russkies have picked up signals from an alien civilization, and Leigh needs to take pictures of their dish to see which way it's pointing, and also to pick up the computer data tapes to see what the Reds have heard.

At the end of Part One, Leigh has infiltrated his own facility as a dry run for his attempt in the USSR, only to find that the Soviets are already trying to infiltrate the American base for some reason.

A two paneled image, white lines on a black background. There is a psychedelic image of a woman strumming a harp in a futuristic city.
by Kelly Freas

We get a lot of inches of Leigh driving his cool car, a lot of glimpses of incidental women through the eyes of men ("The blonde at the mail desk had been hired for her ornamental qualities as well as her fast hand with the correspondence…Like most men, [Leigh] approved highly of ornamental mail girls providing they didn't mangle the correspondence too badly."  "Emily Parkman was that rarity among women—the completely discreet human being.") and a lot of "thrilling" action, like a car chase in a parking garage.

I'm bored.  Two stars.

One Step from Earth, by Hank Dempsey

A single panel image, black ink on white background. Two figures are in insectoid spacesuits. One is standing on top of an jet engine, and the other is on the ground, holding a round ball. The legend at the top right reads 'ONE STEP FROM EARTH: The length of a step depends on how you measure distance -- and on who's trying to step on you!'
by Vincent DiFate

I hear tell Hank Dempsey is really Harry Harrison—I suspect he's nom d'pluming since this is going to be the first tale in a collection that deals with teleportation, coming out later this year.  Hey, if the apple will support multiple bites, why not chomp that baby?

Anyway, this is the story of our first manned trip to Mars.  A robot ship drops off a matter transmitter just big enough for a scientist to crawl through in a space suit.  The components of a base and a larger transmitter are teleported to the Red Planet.  Before their assembly can be finished, one of the two-man crew succumbs to a mysterious malady.  Our hero must decide between spending life in quarantine on Earth or becoming the first permanent resident of Barsoom.

It's fine for what it is, an episode involving grit, courage, and pioneering spirit.  Three stars.

Rover Does Tricks in Space, by Walter B. Hendrickson, Jr.

A grey image of a nuclear rocket on a black and white background. The background breaks the page in half vertically, and the grey rocket crosses it diagonally. On the white half, a legend in black leathers reads 'ROVER DOES TRICKS IN SPACE'

This is one of the best articles I've read on NERVA, the nuclear rocket stage being developed for use with the Saturn V.  Apparently, they've gotten the thing to work, which means that it could, if produced, perhaps triple the lifting capacity of our biggest rocket.  And once in space, NERVA engines could halve the trip time to our neighboring planets.

But here's why I suspect we'll never actually build the thing: the Saturn V assembly line is being shut down in the wake of the successful Moon landing.  NERVA is expensive, so its benefits only really manifest once a space program is mature, rockets are being made by the dozen, and orbital infrastructure has been established.  That doesn't like it'll happen any time soon.

Sure, NASA is working on its reusable, winged "space shuttle", which will reduce cost to orbit once it's operational, but that's a fair piece down the road, and I don't see a place for nuclear engines in that program.  Still, the option is there for someday.

In any event, four stars for this clear and interesting piece.

Protection, by Steven Shaw

A two panel image, black ink on white background. The left panel is of three muscled humanoid figures. They are all wearing helmets and armored vests, but only one is carrying a ray gun. The right panel shows some scientific equipment under shadowy trees.
by Vincent DiFate

This piece starts promisingly, alternating viewpoints between a native sentinel on an alien planet, squatting near the defensive line, and the security man providing protection for a scientific expedition.  When members of the team start crossing the line, they are slaughtered ignominiously by some unknown technology possessed by the aborigines.

I was enthralled until the story abruptly ended, the lead-up all in service of the "twist"—the aliens were using simple poison-tipped blowdarts.  What an allegory!  It's like our well-equipped troops getting aced by the "primitive" Viet Cong!  How the proud fall!

Except that it is repeatedly established that the security men are wearing body armor.  Last I heard, flak jackets repel bamboo reeds almost as well as bullets!  Moreover, were the humans really unable to recover the darts presumably still in the corpses, nor identify the poison coursing through their bloodstreams?

One star.

Ravenshaw of WBY, Inc., by W. Macfarlane

An two-paneled image, black ink on a white background. A floating platform hovers above the ground, with a fantastical astronomy lab atop it. There is a figure on the platform, facing away from the viewer. Two figures, a man and a woman, look up at the platform from the ground in the bottom left corner. The bottom right corner has the legend 'RAVENSHAW OF WBY, INC.: It takes a special sort of man to let logic go to hell -- and act on what he sees, even when he knows it's impossible!'
by Vincent DiFate

Here's a story that I found almost indistinguishable from the serial.  The hero is even named Leigh (in this case, Arleigh Ravenshaw).  He's a veteran with a knack for innovation—for instance, in Vietnam, he plied the local kids with ice cream to get them to turn in mines and weapons caches.  I'm sure it's that easy.

Ravenshaw is recruited to work for FBY (Flying Blue Yonder), a San Diego-based agency that entertains every crackpot in the region in the hopes that there might be wheat amongst the chaff (an endeavor Campbell surely thinks much of, but I can tell you, having worked with the publishing arm of the American Astronautical Society, which occasionally gets unsolicited papers, cranks are just that—cranks).  He is accompanied by a "palomino-haired" young woman with a "bitter-honey voice" and a penchant for dressing bright, clashing colors.

On their first mission, to the desert near Borrego Springs on the trail of the creators of a matter converter, they find a wall-less room that houses an iodine thief from a parallel universe…and what may be the younger version of Ravenshaw's female companion.

Apparently, this will be the first in a series of loosely connected (and rather tedious) tales.  Two stars.

An image, black lines on a white background, of a small alien going through grass. The alien resembles a hybrid of a stag beetle and a lawn sprinkler, and is about the same size. The title of the image is 'Department of Diverse Data', suggesting it is a comic series. The caption reads
by David Pattee

Wrong Rabbit, by Jack Wodhams

An image, black lines on white background, of two men in hazmat suits holding cattle prods, facing an alien stuck in a ring. The alien looks like an enormous sort of walrus-bear-cat thing, with blobby lobster claws.
by Vincent DiFate

Earth has a working matter transmitter setup, with each booth operated by a single technician linked psychically with her or his unit.  One day, wires get crossed, and the passenger of a similar, alien network ends up in a human booth…swapped with a human stuck in an extraterrestrial receptacle.  Chaos ensues.

Wodhams tells the tale in alternating viewpoints to illustrate that both races, despite being repulsively different from each other, have surprisingly convergent societies and thought processes.  Ultimately, the two reach a rapprochement and combine their networks.

I feel this tale would have been more effective had the two perspectives differed considerably.  I also felt the constant use of nonsense terms as shorthand for untranslateable concepts ("I cannot describe to you the feeling of kooig that permeated by slaktuc.") was silly given just how similar the two species turned out to be, at least in mindset.

Two stars.

Revolutionaries, by M. R. Anver

A two-paneled image, black on a white background. On the left panel, there is a bust of an old man looking outward, and two full-body drawings of women. One mostly-naked woman, or possibly alien, is looking down, holding a tool like a futuristic metal detector. The other woman is wearing a short dress, looking out at the viewer. The legend on the left-hand panel reads, 'REVOLUTIONARIES: Many things will be changed in an interstellar culture -- but some things haven't changed since Cheops was cheated by the Pyramid contractor!' On the right panel, another bust of an old man looks outward. There is a planet in the background, with two spaceships flying over its surface. Below the image of the planet are two futuristic-looking space cars.
by Vincent DiFate

Achates is a new Federation colony, a joint effort by humans and the blue-furred humanoids of Azure.  An important election is coming up, between Ronan, head of the bi-racial United Party, and the reactionary Manoc—who is willing to win at any price, including a coup d'etat after a potential UP victory.

In the middle of it all is John Cameron, a Federation observer, who appears to be playing both sides against the middle… but are his loyalties really in question?

Anver seems to have taken a page from Mack Reynolds' book, turning in a competent, but unexciting (and not at all SFnal), political action thriller.

Three stars.

The Reference Library, by P. Schuyler Miller

Analog's veteran book reviewer covers Orbit 5, which he notes wanders further from the truly SFnal than ever before, but he finds it a worthy effort, nonetheless.  He damns with faint praise the books we also didn't sing huge praises of: The Palace of Eternity, Masque World, and Galactic Pot-Healer—which just goes to show how good Miller's taste is!  Which means you should perhaps avoid J. T. McIntosh's Six Gates from Limbo and seek out Edmond Hamilton's World of the Starwolves, which we never covered, but Miller does.

Tallying the results

A woman in a blue dress, sitting at a printer desk. In the background, a man in a dark suit is punching into a large computer.
IBM 360 Model 65 with a woman at the IBM 1052 printer in the foreground, a man at the Direct-Access Storage Devices (DASDs) in the back

Analog these days reminds me nothing so much as Hugh Heffner's Playboy.  Where the latter magazine is aimed squarely at the smug youngish libertarian with delusions of yacht-hood, Analog is for the smug youngish libertarian with aspirations in engineering.  Every story reinforces the notion that, if you're a scientifically educated man, you too can save Democracy, make the girls swoon, and show up those stuffy institutionalists.  Perhaps Campbell sees his mag as a kind of Fountain of Youth to recover never-gained glories.  Or maybe this kind of slop is just the secret to getting 200,000 subscribers.

Regardless, I'm getting pretty tired of it.  Maybe others are, too.  If they rate tales as I do, this issue scored just 2.4 stars—the lowest of any mag this month.  It is beaten by Amazing (2.8), IF (2.8), Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.8), The Year 2000 (3), New Worlds (3), Galaxy (3.2), and Vision of Tomorrow (3.5)

The overall average this month was 2.9, and the four and five star material in the eight mags that came out would fill two full-size mags.  If you're keeping count, women produced about 9% of new short fiction published this month. 

Luckily, as you can see, Analog just constituted one end of the bell-shaped distribution.  Somebody's gotta be tail-end Charlie, I suppose.  I'm just regretting that I drew the short straw and have to be the one to review it every month.

On the other hand, I could have gotten John Boston's gig and suffered through Amazing since Goldsmith left its helm.  And anyway, since things are finally starting to look up for him over there, maybe there's hope on the horizon for this hoary, once-honorable magazine…

An advertisement for Universe Book Club, which allows you 4 books per year, for 98 cents plus shipping and handling. Subjects include astrology (described as 'The Space Age Science'), ESP, reincarnation, the supernatural, yoga, hypnosis, and 'the black arts'.
Does astrology really count as a science?  Space Age, my Aunt Petunia!



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


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[February 12, 1970] Up Front (March 1970 Amazing)

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

Let’s be up front.  That is, the front of the March 1970 Amazing, depicting a space-suited person with outstretched arms following or yearning after or paying homage to an apparently departing spacecraft.  The contents page says it’s by Willis, illustrating a story called “Breaking Point.” However, Ted White’s editorial says, first, that he’s contacted some “promising young artists” whose work will appear on future covers, but right now they’re “sifting” the European covers that they apparently buy in bulk and having stories written around them “whenever possible,” like Greg Benford’s “Sons of Man” a couple of issues ago.  And this issue’s “Breaking Point” was written around the present cover, so the story illustrates the cover rather than vice versa.

Cover of Amazing magazine showing a silver space vessel skimming a rocky surface and seemingly poised to hurtle along a fiery path traced in the orbit above a planet daubed in yellows, with traces of red and mottled greens.  In the foreground a space-suited figure trails in its wake, arms outstretched
by Willis

And now that we have that straight, who’s this Willis guy?  Well, informed rumor has it that the cover is actually by our very familiar friend Johnny Bruck, from the German Perry Rhodan #201 from 1965.  The style and subject matter certainly look like Bruck’s.

Moving on to more straightforward matters: the contents look much like the previous White issues, with a serial installment, several new short stories plus a reprint, editorial, book reviews, fanzine reviews, and letter column. 

White’s editorial is mostly devoted to the tortuous history of his novel By Furies Possessed, serialized starting in this issue. This is another of his commendable efforts to educate the readership about How Publishing Works.  And he says it in black and white!  “It helps to Know Somebody, to Have Friends.” Well worth reading.  White also notes the addition of Arnold Katz, Arnie to fandom, who as Associate Editor “will have the task of pouring [sic, I hope] through all those smouldering [ditto] old issues” looking for Classic Reprints.  He also announces a new program of Reader Feedback: since he gets more letters than he can print, he will forward unprinted letters to the authors on whose work they comment, cutting up the letters concerning multiple stories.  I wonder how long that laborious task can be maintained.

The book review column is its usually slightly incestuous but quite readable pool of contention, with editor White praising Ursula LeGuin’s new juvenile A Wizard of Earthsea as not at all juvenile, and Greg Benford praising White’s new juvenile No Time Like Tomorrow only a bit less fulsomely.  Dennis O’Neil responds lukewarmly to The Andromeda Strain, Richard Lupoff offers qualified praise to Michael Moorcock’s The Black Corridor (“doesn’t quite make it, but it was a worthwhile effort . . . and will be equally worthwhile for serious readers of science fiction”), and—whoa!  What’s this?  Speaking of incestuous, or maybe recursive, Hank Stine is here to refute Richard Delap’s mild praise last issue of Harry Harrison’s Captive Universe: “This book is a crime.  If it is as common a crime as the smoking of marijuana, it is no matter; the offense is the same. . . .  There was simply no reason for this book to have been written and no reason to read it. . . . It could have been written twenty years ago”—and it was, “at least once a year since then.” (Sounds about right.)

And here’s Delap, pounding away at Josephine Saxton’s The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith.  He praises the earlier, shorter version “The Consciousness Machine” published in F&SF, but . . . “In discarding the concept used in the shorter version—an emblematic fantasy of the subconscious recorded pictorially by a machine used in psychoanalysis—the author has left her tale stranded in a hazy, directionless waste, discarding all the original sf elements in favor of unnecessarily extended feminine symbolism.” (Actually, I liked it pretty well, though maybe that makes me hazy and directionless too.) Oh, and I see I skipped over Alexei Panshin’s very succinct praise of R.A. Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions, which concludes: “It’s a wild book full of prodigious lies, and I’ll probably read it again.”

The letter column is the usual mix of the inane and the intelligent, with some apparent self-parody (“The November Amazing is a groove! . . . The first installment of the Philip K. Dick novel was a trip! . . . Dick must be stoned out of his mind—on talent!  And Ray Russell . . . came through with a mind-blower. . . .”).  Or maybe it’s just part of the inane.  Rocks are thrown at John J. Pierce’s anti-New Wave comments.  The only news here about the magazine’s functioning is that its artists must be near at hand because its deadlines are too short, so mailing stories to the West Coast and receiving art by return mail is not feasible.  The fanzine review column is full of fanzines, some analyzed with more nuance than I suspect goes into their production.

As for the fiction . . . it’s still a frustratingly mixed bag. 

By Furies Possessed (Part 1 of 2), by Ted White

Halftone ink illustration of a well-groomed taller man dressed in tights, a robe, and a tie, shaking the hand of a shorter person (facing away from the viewer) who carries a satchel and appears to be wearing a suit
by Gray Morrow

White’s serial novel By Furies Possessed comes with a celebrity blurb.  On the cover: “Big and powerful, gut-hard stuff!—Philip K. Dick.” Inside the magazine, there’s more, equally fulsome, from PKD.  I will as usual withhold comment until the serial is complete.  But looking through the first few pages, I see that White has rung a change on Tuckerization, Wilson Tucker's practice of giving his characters the names of prominent SF figures.  White, the sometime jazz critic, has named his protagonist Tad Dameron.  Tadd Dameron—birth name Tadley—was a respected jazz pianist, composer, and arranger who died young (1917-1965).

Breaking Point, by William C. Johnstone

Did I say straightforward above?  Let me take that back.  Breaking Point is blurbed as “Story Behind the Cover,” though the Cover is actually Behind the Story, as White’s editorial discloses.  The author, William C. Johnstone, is there said to be “a writer new to SF and these pages, but he’s somewhat better known in Hollywood, where he has accumulated numerous TV and screen credits.  He originally queried us about a novel he wanted to write, and the cover-story commission grew out of this.  ‘Breaking Point’ is actually the opening story in a projected book-length series.  You’ll be reading the rest of the stories here as fast as they’re written and we can publish them.” However, plausible gossip has it that Johnstone is actually a pseudonym of White, and the style is noticeably similar to White’s.

In any case, this introductory story is not actually a story.  It is an introduction, or maybe a first chapter.  A spaceship full of colonists-to-be, dormant in the Sleep of the Long Moment, malfunctions and breaks up into component modules.  A crew member caught in a corridor outside the modules hangs onto one of them and dies when it hits atmosphere.  (That must be what the cover is alleged to depict.) The module lands on an Earth-type planet (the four occupants are out breathing the air almost immediately).  The viewpoint character, Aaron, awakes to discover that one of the others, Chaimon, is hysterical because his girlfriend was in a different module and now he’ll never see her again.  Aaron, a psychotherapist, divines that their acquaintance was only a matter of days and Chaimon’s disturbance results from a vivid Dream of the Long Moment, and talks him down.  Then they see a headlight racing across the valley below.  There are people here!  And that’s it, after seven pages.  Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment, if any.  Two stars, subject to revision.

Trial by Silk, by Christopher Anvil

Christopher Anvil’s Trial by Silk begins with a demonstration of the moral hazard of payment by the word.  The good ship Starlight has been directed to an unnamed planet for shore leave, and Captain Engstrom is warning the crew of its perils—but he can’t explain them.  He begins: “Men—ah—This is very difficult.  I don’t quite know how—But it’s my duty to tell you, as a captain, that the—er—women—ah—on this planet—are . . . not—quite the way they seem.” And he goes on for some time in this vein, mentioning the food and drink, and concluding, “Whatever you do, don’t enjoy yourself.  –I mean—You know what I mean! –Anyway—That’s it.” This spiel, and the description of the crew laughing during it and after it, and everybody talking and joking about it before they actually manage to get off the spaceship, goes on for four and a half pages.

Halftone ink illustration of a man (wearing a vest, trousers, and calf-height motorcycle boots) and woman (wearing a short dress, necklace, and heels) in front of a sign reading 'sizzle palace'. The woman, is talking and and gesturing with her hands, while the man's head appears bowed in consideration.
by Ralph Reese

At that point, the story actually begins, and proves to be a discourse on other sorts of moral hazard.  Upon entering the nearby city, the spacemen are met by beautiful women offering to show them the sights—the “fountains, pools, lakes, theatres, wine shops, a communal feast and barbecue center, free communal dwellings, drug shops, fume dispensaries, sizzle palaces.” The narrator, the ship’s first officer, asks what’s a sizzle palace? His guide says “It’s terrible.  I can’t talk about it.” The sizzle palace has a skull and crossbones logo on it—as does, he notices, his guide’s hair clip, and the small bottle of highly captivating scent that she keeps applying.  They go to a public feast site where food (mainly meat) and drink are constantly replenished, and people including crew members are compulsively stuffing their faces.  He sees a cook seasoning meat from a box with the label Addicteen, also with skull and crossbones. 

The narrator bails on this G-rated orgy and says to a doctor who is treating its casualties, “I’m from off-planet.  What’s the purpose of this pleasure set-up?” The doctor responds with a bolus of Anvillean philosophy (i.e., Campbellian, but cruder): “Why, to let the unfit pleasure-lovers eliminate themselves!  If you let them have their own way, they will wreck any civilization ever built—unless you make allowance to get rid of them. . . .  Yes, you see, rot and corruption set into every civilization ever built, unless an iron discipline is imposed or some means is provided to exterminate the hedonists who spread the corruption.  The best way to get rid of them, obviously, is to provide them with exactly what they want.  It is the genius of our planet that we have worked out how to do it.  The expense is really very modest, as long as you let them finish themselves off fast, so their numbers don’t become too great.”

So why couldn’t the captain, who has been to this planet before, explain that to the crew in just that many words?  Because if he had, there wouldn’t be much of a story at all, let alone those delicious four and a half pages of remunerative surplusage at the beginning.

Speaking of philosophy, there’s an earlier exchange with the narrator’s alluring guide when he asks her why there’s hardly anybody around who looks older than 35.  She explains that when people are worn out, they “take a recoup”—i.e., go into the recuperator, which renews them.  Forever?  No, most last until 28 or 29; 35 is “frightfully old.” She giggled.  “Who would want to live that long?” So the recoup wears them out?  “No, silly.  Man was made for pleasure, and it’s the pleasure that wears him out, not the recoup.” The narrator protests that in this system, people lose half their lives.  She says, “But shouldn’t a life be measured by the total amount of pleasure received; not by the years it lasts?” Narrator responds, “What about accomplishment?” and she says, “You belong up there with them!”—referring to the people who actually do the work of keeping the society going, who pass by above the fray on overhead walkways with disapproving looks—and she walks away.

So why didn’t this appear in Analog?  Too unsubtle even for Campbell, maybe.  It's a toss-up whether it is more tedious than offensive, or vice versa.  Either way, one star.

I'm Too Big but I Love to Play, by James Tiptree, Jr.

Psychedelic ink illustration of a solitary suited figure piloting a car-sized vessel.  The turbulence of the ship's passage and the interior shadows of the cockpit create a woman's 'hair', flowing back from the woman's face which is silhouetted across the vehicle's nose.
by Michael Hinge

Matters are somewhat redeemed by the next item, James Tiptree, Jr.’s “I’m Too Big But I Love to Play,” which is a little reminiscent of A.E. van Vogt, or what van Vogt might be like if he had a sense of humor and his writing were less ponderous.  The protagonist is an energy being who spends his life (Tiptree’s pronoun usage) sailing around the universe on energy currents, until the day he discovers Earth and the subtle energy exchanges of human communication and interaction.  What fun!  He tries to join in but can’t get it right, causing havoc wherever he goes.  This Tiptree guy loves to play and he seems to be about the right size, though he, like his protagonist, needs to get a little more practice.  Three stars.

The Tree Terror, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The “Amazing Classic” this issue is David H. Keller’s “The Tree Terror,” from the October 1933 Amazing, and it is actually a charming relic, unlike some of its decidedly un-charming predecessors.  Keller is back on his usual theme—people mess with the natural order of things and disaster results.  President Tompkins of Cellulose Consolidated needs more cellulose, because it’s essential to making “a thousand synthetic products.” And he needs lots of it, and cheap, and near to his factories.  Horticulturist Simcox is ordered to do it or be fired.

So Simcox goes to work, consulting a paleo-botanist who tells him about club mosses, which (supported by stems) grew a hundred feet high during the Carboniferous and which we are now burning as coal.  Then he talks to a biologist who is irradiating ferns, and figures out how to return club moss to its ancestral glory, and bingo!  We’re in Sorceror’s Apprentice territory, starting with a test plantation in rural Nebraska and proceeding straightway to dense forests of club moss with roots so deep they can grow almost anywhere, and do.  “Their falling trunks began to block the highways, arteries of commerce.  Only by constant vigilance were the railroads kept open and safe.” Food crops are crowded out.  Everyone flees to the cities to starve.  (At least the club moss doesn’t grow in concrete.)

Now Simcox returns to confront Tompkins and demands that this captain of industry rise to the occasion.  He’s brought with him an eccentric genius who has invented a machine that costs three dollars to make and will grind up club moss and turn it into food.  Simcox tells Tompkins he’d better crank up his company to distribute these machines nationwide so the starving millions can go out and eat the club moss out of existence.  “Broadcast it!  Put food into the stomach and hope into the soul of the desperate men of the nation!” And you don’t have to pay the inventor, he’s too busy on his next invention.  Harmlessly amusing, three stars.

Is Anybody Out There?, by Greg Benford and David Book

Greg Benford and David Book continue their “Science in Science Fiction” series with “Is Anybody Out There?,” which as you might suspect is about the prospects of intelligent life elsewhere than Earth.  They lay out plainly and methodically the numerous questions that have to be answered en route to getting the big answer, and the current state of knowledge about each, and they don’t obscure the fact that most of their answers are essentially pulled out of the air, er, are very gross estimates.  This lucid presentation is a pleasure to read compared with the run of SF mag science articles.  Four stars.

Summing Up

Uneven.  Promising.  Disappointing.  Have patience.  The same things I said for years about the Goldsmith/Lalli version of the magazine, punctuated by transitory bursts of excellence.  I am tempted to get a rubber stamp made.  Meanwhile, how about one of those transitory bursts?



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


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

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

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

A pleasant Escapade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Thing in America

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

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

The Galaxy Bookshelf, by Algis Budrys

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

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

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

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

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

Now on to the fiction!

The Region Between, by Harlan Ellison

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, my goodness, five stars.

The Propheteer, by Leo P. Kelley

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

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

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

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

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

Two stars.

A Place of Strange, by George C. Willick

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

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

Indeed, there must be.

Two stars.

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

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

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

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

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

Sunpot (Part 2 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé

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

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

A waste of space.  One star.

Reflections, by Robert F. Young

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

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

Three stars.

Summing up

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

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

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

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



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


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[February 2, 1970] Deceptive Appearances (March 1970 IF)


by David Levinson

The Super Fight

Back in 1967, a radio producer by the name of Murray Woroner came up with the idea of using a computer to work out who the best heavyweight fighter of all time is. He polled 250 boxing writers and came up with a list of 16. He then worked closely with a programmer to input everything that could be determined about each boxer into a computer.

Match-ups were set up as a single-elimination tournament to be broadcast as a series of radio plays. Each fight was run through an NCR 315 computer the night before broadcast to create a blow-by-blow account of the fight. Woroner and boxing announcer Guy LeBow would then “call” the fight as if it were really happening. In the end, Rocky Marciano beat Jack Dempsey and was awarded a championship belt worth $10,000.

The arbiter, an NCR 315.The arbiter, an NCR 315.

Ali was not happy. The computer had him losing in the quarter finals to Jim Jeffries, a boxer he has little respect for. He sued for defamation of character, asking for $1 million. They settled when Ali agreed to take part in a filmed version of a computerized fight between him and Marciano in return for $10,000 and a cut of the box office.

Last year, Ali and Marciano got together and sparred for over 70 rounds, filming a few different versions of events that the computer might predict. Marciano dropped 50 pounds and wore a toupee so he’d look more like he did in his prime. Ali probably had to get back in shape too, since he’s been banned from boxing for refusing induction into the army. Instinct seems to have taken over for both men. Ali bloodied Marciano’s nose and opened cuts over his eyes (Rocky always bled easily); at one point, Ali was so exhausted he refused to go back into the ring (until he got another $2,000) and could barely raise his arms enough to eat breakfast the next day. Filming ended just three weeks before Marciano was killed in a plane crash last Labor Day.

Armed with hours of footage and the top secret computer result, Woroner and his team put together a film they dubbed The Super Fight. On January 20th, it aired in 1,500 theaters in the US, Canada, and Europe via closed-circuit television, with viewers paying a whopping $5.00 a head.

How did it turn out? Ali is not happy. The computer had him knocked out in the 13th round. He’s talking about another defamation suit. Maybe he’ll change his mind when he finds out that was only in the US and Canada. European viewers saw Ali win by TKO. The producers are also talking about destroying all the prints.

Boxing Poster captioned AT THIS THEATRE JANUARY 20, 1970 - 10 PM-E.S.T.
THE SUPER FIGHT
ONE SHOWING ONLY
THE ONLY 2 UNDEFEATED HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONS IN HISTORY 
ROCKY MARCIANO VS MUHAMMAD ALI (CASSIUS CLAY)
ON FILM LIVE! IN COLOR TICKETS ON SALE NOW!Movie poster for the event. That “LIVE!” is a little deceptive, which is something else Ali is complaining about.

It’s a rather science-fictional concept we’ve seen in other guises. Maybe Murray Woroner got his original idea from the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon.” Of course, any statistician will tell you that a single simulation doesn’t really say anything. Rolling a die once doesn’t tell you if it’s fair; it takes hundreds or thousands of repetitions to determine that. But when the computer needs 45 minutes to determine the events of one match, this is the best that can be expected. For now.

Not what it looks like

Authors like to counter readers’ expectations. It’s a good way to evoke a response, particularly in a genre that has a fair number of cliches and formulas. Sometimes, the surprise comes from the author doing something that’s not what you expect that particular writer to do or say. This month’s IF offers some of both.

Cover of the March 1970 issue of IF science fiction, depicting an astronaut carrying an antenna on the surface of the moon, looking out onto the Earth and its magnetic field depicted in white, orange, red and blue.Art actually for “SOS,” rather than just suggested by. Maybe because it’s by Mike Gilbert, not the overworked Jack Gaughan.

SOS, by Poul Anderson

Some 2,000 years from now, the Earth’s magnetic field is fading, prior to a reversal of the magnetic poles. The feudalistic Westrealm and the communist Autarchy of Great Asia compete for dwindling resources as they search desperately for a way to survive the pending catastrophe. The Autarchy secretly invades a Westrealm research station on the dark side of the moon, preparatory to a surprise attack on the West’s space fleet. It’s up to the scientists to find a way to prevent it.

Black and white illustration depicting two astronauts on the surface on the moon, one is running and the other stands with his arm up. Behind them stands a large white structure while ships launch in the distance. The caption reads SOS. Poul Anderson. Earth flipped- but Man stayed right on his course!The invasion arrives. Art uncredited

This feels like a fairly typical Anderson story of the well-done sort all the way through. But then he hits the reader with a punch to the gut right at the end. The ending and the commentary from the author are surprising in light of most of his work. It’s a good story, but weakened by two things: the title completely gives away the resolution; worse, there’s a couple of paragraphs at the beginning that undercut the emotional impact of the ending.

A high three stars, but could have been better.

Telemart 3, by Bob Shaw

Shaw gives us the tale of an unpleasant man who married for money and his wife who seems intent on spending all of it. The problem is made worse by the titular device, which allows her to buy things from the comfort of her living room with instant delivery. It’s probably meant as commentary on consumerism, but feels more like a sexist rant about women and money.

Two stars.

Sketchy illustration of a man throwing what appears to be a lamp.Matters come to a head. Art by Gaughan

The Thing in the Stone, by Clifford Simak

After a car accident that killed his wife and child and may have given him brain damage, Wallace Daniels retired to the countryside of south-western Wisconsin, where he has visions that seem to let him go walking in the geologic past. There’s also something alive buried deep in the limestone, not to mention an unpleasant and shiftless neighbor. Not everything is as it seems.

Illustration of the silhouette of a man walking along the ocean shore.Daniels finds himself in the deep past, before life has truly left the ocean. Art by Gaughan

This story has almost everything I don’t like about Simak: the pastoralism, wandering back and forth over the line between science fiction and fantasy, the slow progression. I understand why people like him, but he just isn’t for me. If you like those aspects of his work, you may like this one a lot.

Three stars for me, might be four for Simak fans.

The Ethics of Trade, by Timothy M. Brown

This month’s (official) new author gives us a series of letters from the operators of a company that provides dangerous animals to zoos to one of their clients. There’s nothing really new here, but it’s done fairly well. Brown does a good job of calling the letter writer into question, even though we only hear his side.

Three stars.

Cover depicting a scaly claw dragging a black tear down the center of the page. The caption reads: THE ETHICS OF TRADE
TIMOTHY M. BROWN
an IF firstRigellian wombats are very, very dangerous. Art by Gaughan

In the Silent World, by Ed Bryant

Julie is a co-ed with telepathy. As far as she know, she’s the only telepath in the world. At least, until an overwhelming cry of loneliness prompts another to contact her.

Sketch of a mouthless woman with long blonde hair.Julie, I suppose. Art uncredited, but looks like Gaughan

Nothing about this story is bad, but nothing is particularly outstanding either. I saw the ending coming almost as soon as the other telepath made contact. There’s not much more to say about it.

Three stars.

Traps, by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski

Planet 3-10004-2 can’t be approved for colonization until all land animals have been properly classified; Rysling has taken the contract to capture the last unclassified species. He’s puzzled by the presence of another ship and the cryptic messages left by its pilot. Even more puzzling is the effect the creature he’s after seems to have on him.

Illustration of a man looking on the ground in despair.Rysling’s not sure who or what he is. Art by Gaughan

Dann seems to be a new author, but Zebrowski had a story in a collection that came out last month, so this isn’t quite an IF first. The premise and the powers of the creature are hard to buy, but it’s told well enough. There’s enough talent here to make the story readable; we’ll see if either author has any staying power.

Three stars.

Whipping Star (Part 3 of 4), by Frank Herbert

Herbert’s tale of Saboteur Extraordinary Jorj McKie and his efforts to stop a “reformed” sadist from causing the death of an alien, thus triggering the deaths of nearly every sentient being in the galaxy, plods along. Last month, I said the story was holding my interest and praised the action. Neither of those things is true this month. This installment is nothing but conversations. There are a couple of brief bits of action, but neither is more than a flash.

I’m also getting a little bored. There may not be enough here for a novel. The idea of examining communication without a common perspective is sound, but the whole thing might have been trimmed to a longish novella.

Three fading stars.

The bad guys make an ineffectual attempt to eliminate McKie. Art by GaughanThe bad guys make an ineffectual attempt to eliminate McKie. Art by Gaughan

The Time Judge, by Dannie Plachta

A criminal is dragged through time and condemned by the title character to a fitting punishment.

Art nouveau cover depicting a judge pointing downward to the author and title 
DANNIE PLACHTA
THE TIME JUDGE
The accused found no end to his crime- no beginning to justice!Here come da judge. Art by Gaughan

Actually, we don’t know if the punishment is fitting, since we’re never told the nature of the crime, just of the judge’s disgust. For that matter, the punishment wasn’t all that uncommon in its day. As with nearly every Plachta story, the nicest thing I can say is that it’s very short.

Two stars.

Love Thy Neighbor, by E. Clayton McCarty

Jake Terrell starts seeing something out of the corner of his eye. Then it jumps into his head, and he begins behaving oddly.

Cover depicting 5 sets of sketchily drawn sets of eyes going down the page. Some look at figures in the margin. The bottom set is punctuated with tiny stick figures with heads as pupils. The caption reads LOVE THY NEIGHBOR
E. CLAYTON McCARTY
The loving aliens came- and there went the neighborhood! It’s a stretch, but I see how this connects with the story. Art uncredited

Another story that’s like a piece of popcorn. You consume it without really noticing it, nor is there anything memorable about it, good or bad. A decently told piece of filler.

Three low, but not too low stars.

All Brothers Are Men, by Basil Wells

Three alien religious fanatics are part of a conspiracy to drive humans off their world. Two of them started out as the personality of the third implanted into mind-wiped bodies. The years apart have undermined their commonality, and two of them may no longer believe in the cause.

Illustration of a fluffy, large eyed, dish eared alien with a beak, holding a paper airplane.Not sure what the paper airplane is doing here. Art by Gaughan

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is that the humans aren’t really in it. They’re a distant, never seen presence affecting the characters’ society in ways they don’t like. For a guy who started out 30 years ago and probably spends more time writing mysteries and westerns than SF, Wells has managed to stay up-to-date. This is by no means a New Wave tale, but it still manages to have a modern sensibility.

A very solid three stars.

Miscellany

Elsewhere in the magazine, the letters were almost universally in praise of the savaging Ejler Jakobsson gave John Campbell in two editorials over the latter’s piece on race and IQ. I particularly liked the point made by one writer, who notes that Campbell’s premise is based tightly on statistical analysis of something poorly defined and understood, while he flatly rejects statistical evidence indicating clear connections between smoking and lung cancer and heart disease.

Summing up

Looking over what I’ve written, this seems like a weak issue, but it’s not as bad as I make it sound. The Simak is undoubtedly the best in the issue; it might even be a four-star story, but my own prejudices keep me from rating it that high. The Anderson and Wells are fine stories, if not outstanding. The rest are mostly just there. The only really bad story is the Shaw (Plachta’s not bad, just stupid). Frank Herbert might manage to salvage his novel in the final episode, but I’m not holding my breath.






[January 31, 1970] Both sides now (February 1970 Analog)

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

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

All night long

Woody Allen likes to quip that being "bi-sexual" (liking both men and women) doubles of your chance of getting a date on the weekend.

NASA has just doubled the amount of weather they can look at in a single launch.  TIROS-M (does the "M" stand for "Mature"?) was launched from California on January 23rd into a two-hour orbit over the poles.  12 times a day, it circles the Earth, which rotates underneath.  Unlike the last 19 TIROS satellites, TIROS-M can see in the dark.  That means it gets and transmits a worldwide view of the weather twice a day rather than once.

More than that, the satellite is called the "space bus" because it carries a number of other experiments, measuring the heat of the Earth as well as solar proton radiation.  Launched "pickaback" with TIROS-M was Oscar 5, an Aussie satellite that broadcasts on a couple of bands so ham radio fans can track signals from orbit.  Maybe Kaye Dee will write more about that one in her next piece!

Clouds got in my way

If the distinctive feature of the Earth as viewed from space is its swaddling blanket of clouds, then perhaps the salient characteristic of this month's Analog is its conspicuous degree of padding.  Almost all of the stories are longer than they need to be, at least if their purpose be readability and conveying of point.  Of course, more words means more four-cent rate…


by Kelly Freas, illustrating "Birthright"

Birthright, by Poul Anderson

Emil Darmody is the manager for the terran trading station on the planet of Suleiman, a sub-jovian hulk of a world with a thick hydrogen atmosphere, primitive alien inhabitants, and a rare and valuable spice.  When Burbites, an off-world alien race who are the main purchasers of the spice, drop robots to harvest the spice themselves, Darmody must find an ingenious way to stop them without inciting an interstellar incident.  In doing so, he attracts the attention of trade magnate Nicholas Van Rijn, who likes the adventurous sort.


by Kelly Freas

If someone were to ask for a generic example of a story set in the Polesotechnic League, you could do worse than to pick this one.  It has all the usual features: compelling astronomy and sufficiently alien beings; a bold, if naive, hero; women as competent professionals; daring-do; and a cameo by the corpulent and lusty Van Rijn.

Three stars.

Dali, for Instance, by Jack Wodhams


by Peter Skirka

And now, the padding begins.  Golec is a truly alien being who wakes up one day in the form of a human on present-day Earth.  Eventually, he recalls that the mind transference was intentional, a form of reconnaissance.  The problem is, it's not reversible, and he finds his new body disgusting.  Knowing that there may be others of his race on the planet in the same predicament, he seeks them out.  Golec is told that he might as well go native.  Things could be worse.

All of this should have been a one-page prelude to an actual story.

Two stars.

The Wind from a Star, by Margaret L. Silbar

I'm very happy to see Ms. Silbar back, as her last piece, on quarks, was excellent.  This time, she talks about a topic near and dear to my heart: the solar wind.

I've actually just given a talk on this very subject, so most of what she says is familiar.  It's nicely laid out, very interesting, and with some details that are new to me.  Newcomers may find it a little abstruse, and as with her last piece, an extra page or two of explanation, or splitting things up into two, simpler articles, might have been in order.  Asimov would have taken three or four (though, to be fair, he has half the space).

Four stars.

The Fifth Ace, by Robert Chilson


by Kelly Freas

The planet of Hyperica is the outpost of the Realm of Humanity closest to the "Empire", a separate polity of unknown constitution.  One day, a liaison between the two governments brings a gift from the Empire: several giant cat-creatures in cages.  They break out of confinement at the same time an Imperial spy-craft crashlands on Hyperica.  The local Hypericans attempt to deal with both.

This one took me two reads to grasp for some reason.  Much of the story is told from the point of view from the felinoids, who are intelligent and the real invasion, the spy ship being a decoy.  There is a lot of description of the stratified human culture, a host of characters, and a great deal of lovingly depicted gore. 

A lot of pages for not a lot of story.  I did appreciate the portrayal of actual aliens, but I didn't need a page of explanation of how their retractable claws work.

Two stars.

In Our Hands, the Stars (Part 3 of 3), by Harry Harrison


by Kelly Freas

In this installment, the Daleth-drive equipped Galathea, takes off for Mars with an international contingent of observers.  Shortly into the flight, both Soviet and American agents vie for control of the ship.  The ending is not at all what I expected.

This is such a curious book, in some ways just a vessel for delivering polemics.  Worthy polemics, perhaps, on the nobility and folly of national pride.  Nevertheless, it's definitely not one of Harrison's best, with none of his New Wave flourishes, nor any of the progressive brilliance of, say, Deathworld.  His characters are bland—Martha a particular travesty—and there's not much in the way of story.  In fact, I think the whole thing could have been a compelling, four-star novella… forty or fifty pages, tops.

As is, the final installment keeps things from falling below three stars, but no more.

The Biggest Oil Disaster, by Hayden Howard


by Leo Summers

A man named Sirbuh ('hubris' backwards) has a penchant for wildcatting oil wells in the deep sea.  When one of his digs creates the biggest oil spill in history, blackening California's beaches, Sibrah doubles down and calls for the use of a nuke to both seal it and create an undersea storage cavern.  Sibrah's son, devastated by the environmental catastrophe and sickened by Sibrah's cold calculations, can only watch as the inevitable unfolds. 

I assume this is a parable on the excesses of capitalism, though editor Campbell probably enjoyed it as an endorsement of the casual use of atomic weapons.  Either way, it goes on far too long and repetitiously.

Two stars.

The Reference Library (Analog, February 1970), by P. Schuyler Miller

Miller is a great book reviewer; even though he's been writing for decades, and despite writing for the most conservative of the SF mags, he keeps an open mind.  I'm afraid this year might have broken him, though.  The New Wave claimed the Hugos, and so Schuy is trying to wrap his head around the New Wave.  The result is a column that's a bit more scattered and less engaging than most.

He does have fun moments, though, particularly his review of Moorcock's The Final Programme:

"[Jerry Cornelius] is the Cthulhu mythos of the New Wave.  Michael Moorcock..originated him in his "novel" but other authors are making him the antihero of their "stories" just as a group of authors did with the assumptions and beings created by H.P. Lovecraft..

May all of Lovecraft's most powerful entities help the poor befuddled soul who tries to fit all the Cornelius stories together."

Miller also reviews Asimov's Opus 100, which he liked better than Algis Budrys did.  Perhaps Mrs. Miller hasn't had her posterior pinched by the Good Doctor.

Reading the data

It's not so much that Analog is bad these days, it's just that it isn't very good.  The Star-O-Meter for this one pegged at 2.6.  That's worse than virtually all the other mags/anthologies this month:

  • Fantastic (3.3)
  • Galaxy (3.3)
  • IF (3.1)
  • New Worlds (3.1)
  • New Writings #16 (3)
  • Vision of Tomorrow (3)
  • Venture (2.8)

    Only Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.3) was worse, a most unusual state of affairs.

    In the spirit of TIROS-M, here are some other vital figures for the month: ten magazines/anthologies were released this month (though Crime Prevention in the 30th Century only had two new stories).  The four and five star stuff would fill three magazines, which I suppose is a normal distribution.

    Women wrote 5% of new fiction.  On the other hand, Silbar's piece means 33% of the nonfiction is by a woman.  Progress!

    Like NASA, the Journey is expanding its capacity to review the flood of new material.  Let's pray for more stuff in the greater-than-three-star territory.

    It's more fun to review "the day side" of fiction!



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[January 22, 1970] Sergeant Pepper's New Wave Writers' Club Band: New Worlds, February 1970


by Fiona Moore

February’s rain and sleet freeze the toes right off the feet, as Flanders and Swann once sang. Still, there’s reason to celebrate: the Family Law Reform Act has come into effect, reducing the age of majority from 21 to 18 for most purposes, homosexual sex being a notable exception. Decimalisation continues apace, with the half-crown coin being taken out of circulation (don’t worry, you can exchange it at most banks).

Term has resumed at Royal Holloway College and my students are attacking the writings of Margaret Mead with their usual enthusiasm. However, there is also widespread unease among our Nigerian foreign student community over the capitulation of Biafra: many of them have had no news of their families, and are also concerned about when they will be able to go home. The university is rallying round to make sure everyone is housed, and there are jobs aplenty in Southwest London if they need to stay a while, but it is still an anxious situation for them.


Jubilant street scene in Lagos upon the news of surrender, January 12, 1970

No news of Yoko Ono after December’s festive anti-war campaign. Rumour has it she and her husband have gone off to New York for some reason, so I expect I’ll be covering her activities less often. What all this means for her husband’s band, I’m not sure.

On to New Worlds, which continues its trajectory back to being an SFF magazine, but unfortunately almost every story is suffering from a lack of originality this month.

Cover of New Worlds, February 1970. The text is red, the background is black. In the centre is a black and white image of a car running over a nude female torso.Cover by Roy Cornwall

Lead-In

Mostly introducing new writers and illustrators to the magazine, as well as showcasing the pieces by Ballard and Watson, and drawing the reader’s attention to a new, presumably ongoing, feature of the publication—of which, more later.

Journey Across a Crater by J.G. Ballard

A black and white image of the left side of a White androgynous face photographed through distorted glass.

A piece about a crash-landed astronaut finding his way to civilisation. There are resonances with Ballard’s earlier story “You and Me and The Continuum” (Impulse Magazine 1:1, 1966), and also some vivid sexual imagery about car crashes, which makes sense given that the Lead-In tells us Ballard is currently working on a novel about these. Interesting enough as a revisitation of familiar Ballard themes but no new ground broken. Three stars.

Soul Fast by Gwyneth Cravens

A black and white photocollage of kitchen utensils.Illustration, artist uncredited (possibly Charles Platt)

A story by a woman in New Worlds is always worth remarking on, particularly a woman who is a current editor of the New Yorker. However, I can’t help but notice that women writers in New Worlds always seem to get pigeonholed into writing about domestic or otherwise nurturing themes. This one, for instance, is about food and the role it plays in relationships. There are some interesting satirical commentaries on race and how over-privileged White Americans with superficial attitudes towards spirituality crib from Black and Asian cultures, which makes it worth checking out. Four stars.

Japan by Ian Watson

A series of black and white cartoons depicting impressions of Japan
Illustration by Judy Watson

This is the standout piece of the issue. Watson, a Tokyo resident, introduces Japan to English readers in a surreal, outré travelogue emphasising the weird SF-ness of living in a country where the atmosphere isn’t breathable, earthquakes and fires are endemic, sexual fetishes are catered to in the mainstream media, and consumerism takes on the status of art. The illustrations are by Watson’s wife Judy. It’s beautifully written, though, having been to Japan once or twice myself, I worry that it’s over-emphasising the strangeness of the country to a point where it might simply confirm Europeans’ stereotype that the East is a bizarre and hostile place. Nonetheless, five stars.

Apocrypha by D.M. Thomas

A poem about the life of Jesus. It’s not terribly original, but I did find it engaging and nicely written. Three stars.

6B 4C DD1 22 by Michael Butterworth

A black and white illustration depicting a face with tentacles emerging from the forehead and cranium.Illustration by Alan Stephanson

Another not-terribly-original piece in the vein of “let’s drop acid and describe the resulting trip as an SFF story.” The mind-altered protagonist lurches back and forth between several different realities, some more surreal than others, with recurring characters playing different roles. I like Butterworth’s way with prose, and some of the metaphors and descriptions are genuinely arresting, but I’d like to declare a moratorium on anyone using Alice in Wonderland as an acid trip metaphor; it’s been done to death. Similarly, while I really like the accompanying art, it looks exactly the same as every other set of illustrations intended to show an acid trip (see above). Four stars.

A Spot in the Oxidised Desert by Paul Green

A black and white line drawing of a rust patchIllustration by John Bayley

A short prose poem from the point of view of a dying sentient tank in a future desert battlefield. Possibly the most innovative piece this issue. Four stars.

The Bait Principle by M John Harrison

A black and white illustration of a small stylised human figure menaced by giant, but very cute, cats.Illustration by Ivor Latto

Patients in an asylum begin to share each other’s delusions, and, in doing so, bring them into reality, leading to an ailurophobe being tormented by human-sized cats. This is an amusing twist on the familiar crazy-people-are-actually-seeing-the-truth genre, but at the end of the day that’s all it is. Two stars.

The Wind in the Snottygobble Tree: Conclusion by Jack Trevor Story

Black and white photograph of a double decker bus in an urban streetIllustration by Roy Cornwall

Finally this serial lurches to an end, with some heavy-handed satire about the Catholic and Scientologist churches, spies and the police. I have the feeling that the story-so-far summary is in fact retroactively adding elements, but I’m not interested enough to go back and find out. The eponymous tree finally appears (it's a species of yew, apparently), but I don’t think it’s got much to do with the story apart from being a bit gross. One star.

A Vid by James Sallis

A short poem which didn’t really do much for me. Two stars.

Books

By Mike Walters, John T. Sladek and Douglas Hill. There’s a delightfully excruciating pun on the first page, although Walters has to contort his review in order to fit it.

Music

As regards the new feature I mentioned above: New Worlds now has a music column! This is certainly a welcome innovation, and I look forward to seeing whether the New Wave has a particularly distinctive take on album reviews.

Overall, I’d say the magazine is suffering this month from a lack of originality. Everything is competently written at worst and sometimes really beautiful, but most of it is things that have been done before. Even the music column is something we see over and over in other magazines, and whether the fact that the reviewers are from the usual New Worlds crowd will make a difference is uncertain.

Is the New Wave played out? Can it (and Mr. Yoko Ono’s musical career) survive into the new decade? Time will tell.



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[January 8, 1970] Slow Sculpture, Fast reading (the February 1970 Galaxy Science Fiction)

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

A little off the top

And so it begins.  For eight years, NASA enjoyed an open budget spigot and, through persistence and endless shoveling of money (though a fraction of what's spent on defense, mind you), got us to the Moon.  Now the tap has been cut to a trickle, and the first casualties are being announced.

Black and white photo of Apollo manager George Low speaking into a microphone in front of a NASA press backdrop.
Apollo manager George Low at a press conference on the 4th

Of the 190,000 people employed at the space agency, a whopping 50,000 are going to get the axe before the end of the year.  Saturn V production is being halted.  Lunar missions are going down to a twice-per-year cadence (as opposed to the six in thirteen months we had recently).

Apollo 20, originally scheduled to land in Tycho crater in December 1972, has been canceled.  Astronauts Don Lind, Jack Lousma, and Stuart Roosa now get to cool their heels indefinitely.  Apollos 13-16 will go up over the next two years followed by "Skylab", a small orbital space station built from Saturn parts.  Then we'll get the last three Apollo missions.

After that… who knows?  If only the Soviets had given us more competition…

Oh, and in the silly season department:

Cartoon drawing of a man holding a newspaper looking out at an apple core shaped moon. The paper reads IT COULD SAY A GREAT DEAL ABOUT THE MOON TO THE VERY CORE. NASA SCIENTIST DECLARES INTENT TO PROPOSE NUCLEAR BLAST ON THE MOON.

On the 6th, Columbia University's Dr. Gary V. Latham, seismologist and principal seismic investigator for Apollo program, withdrew his proposal that an atomic bomb be detonated on the Moon.  You'll recall Apollo 12 sent the top half of Intrepid into the lunar surface so the seismometers Conrad and Bean had emplaced could listen to the echoes and learn about the Moon's interior. 

Latham got some pretty harsh criticism of his idea, so he dialed things back, suggesting NASA should find way to hit the Moon hard enough to create strong internal reverberations. Let's hope they don't use Apollo 13…

A sampling from the upper percentiles

The news may be dour on the space front, but the latest issue of Galaxy is, in contrast, most encouraging!

The February 1970 cover of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine featuring a long-haired abstractly drawn woman in a psychedelic art style that resembles stained glass.
by Jack Gaughan, illustrating "Slow Sculpture"

The Shaker Revival, by Gerald Jonas

In the early 1990s, America has become a hollow shell, spiritually.  All of the worst elements of our modern day have amplified: the hippies have sold out to become consumers, Black Americans are confined to walled Ghettoes, kids are dropping out in growing multitudes.

Into this era, a movement is born—the New Shakers.  They live the Four Noes: No hate.  No war.  No money.  No sex.

Pencil Drawing of a man and a woman side by side. The woman has long hair and shaded cheeks. The man wears a hat, has a long moustache and holds a saxophone.
a riff on American Gothic by Jack Gaughan

This hero of this tale, such as there is one, is a journalist who is doing a series of interviews on the movement.  As time goes on, we learn that he is also tracking down his missing son, whom he believes has been inducted by the growing cult.

It's fascinating stuff, but there's no end, nor is the piece indicated as "Part One of [N]".  On the other hand, it is concluded with "MORE TO COME", which is less dispositive than it might be since that phrase gets used often in the story proper.

Black and white photo of two men in suits sitting side by side. the photo reads GERALD JONAS INTERVIEWING HARLAN ELLISON AT THE NYCON.

I'm going to give it four stars on the assumption that we're going to see more stories in this world a la Silverberg's Blue Fire series.  If this turns out to be a literary cul de sac, then we can drop the score retroactively.

Slow Sculpture, by Theodore Sturgeon

Photocopied image of an open book with a black and white illustration of a womans face. Her hair flows upward and off of the pages. The lefthand page reads SLOW SCULPTURE by Theodore Sturgeon.
by Jack Gaughan

Ted Sturgeon can write.

There are some stories your read, and you just know it's going to be superlative.  I've felt guilty these last few months, handing out five-star reviews so sparingly, wondering if my standards had gotten too high.  And then I read something that is truly superior, and I realize that, for five stars to mean anything, it's got to be saved for the very best.

I shan't spoil things for you.  It's about a man and a woman, the former an engineer, the latter a cipher, both troubled.  It involves electricity and bonsai and an understated romance (no one writes romance like Ted Sturgeon), and it is the best thing I've read in a dog's age.

Five stars and a warm glow.

Sleeping Beauty, by A. Bertram Chandler

Image of an open book. The lefthand page is a black and white illustration of a large mantis-like creature, and a man in a vest half the size standing beside. From the center in bold letters is SLEEPING BEAUTY. The top right page reads A. Bertram Chandler. A paragraph of text runs down.
by Jack Gaughan

Another bi-month, another sequel, this one involving Lieutenant Grimes in command of the Adder courier ship.  As a result of his last adventure, Grimes is (supposed to be) no longer in the passenger business.  Instead, he is sent to a nearby star to meet with an insectoid Shari queen.  Unfortunately, the cargo they ask him to transport is…a pupate Shari princess.

This is all fine and good, so long as the nascent queen remains in cold stasis.  A power outage causes her to hatch, however, and she soon has the crew in her thrall.  Worse, she has increasing interracial designs on the young Lieutenant!

Yet another pleasant but unremarkable adventure.  We're definitely going to see a fix-up Ace Double half, I'm sure.

Three stars.

The Last Night of the Festival, by Dannie Plachta

Image of an open book. An art nouveau style black and white illustration of a young couple walking surrounded by rounded shapes in the forest fills both pages. They wear long gowns and large hats.
by Jack Gaughan

Two archetypes, Dawn and Dusk, walk through a macabre parade filled with hedonistic and gory spectacles.  Each scene is punctuated by an italicized interstitial with some oblique reference to Nazi Germany.  The story is illustrated like a picture book such that the text only fills perhaps a third of the page.

Like much of Plachta's work, it's an abstract and abstruse piece.  Are the two on their way to Hell?  Do they represent actual people?  I'd appreciate it more if I knew what he was trying to say.

Two stars.

Downward to the Earth (Part 3 of 4), by Robert Silverberg

Image oF an open book. the top lefthand corner is shaded in pencil. The Top right page is illustrated by a drawing of a small creature overlooking a ravine. The text below says DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH.
by Jack Gaughan

Continues the journey of Edmund Gunderson toward the mist country of the planet he once administered as a mining colony.  The key beats include a reunion with his lover, Seema, who stayed behind when he left.  She has become enamored with the planet, surrounding her station with a garden of native life.  She is also caring for her husband, Kurtz, who was horribly distorted by his attempt to participate in the Rebirth ceremonies of the elephantine indigenous Nildoror.

Another key beat is his entry into the misty cold of the temperate zone.  It is implied that Rebirth involves the swapping of consciousnesses between the Nildoror and the simian Sulidoror, the other intelligent race on the planet.  We learn that Gunderson plans to emulate Kurtz—to offer himself as a Rebirth candidate as a sort of expiation for his sins against the indigenes.

This section is more episodic and Heart of Darkness than the prior ones, and it left me a bit cold.  I do appreciate how much time Silverberg has spent developing a truly alien world, however, and the anti-colonialist sentiment is welcome.  I just have trouble relating to or even buying the characters, and that deliberate abstraction, distancing, gives the whole affair a shambling sleep-walk feel to it.

If that's your bag, you'll love it.  For me, we're at three stars for this installment.

After They Took the Panama Canal, by Zane Kotker

Drawn image of a woman and two cartoonishly drawn men in the background, man on right wears a top hat and holds a bird. Caption reads MOST STORIES OF CONQUEST ARE WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS OR THE VANQUISHED. THIS IS NOT.

America is conquered by the Soviets.  Rape, re-education, and reduction ensue.

All this is told compellingly from the point of view of Myra, a not particularly bright (by design) woman, who is selected to be a consort to several conquerors, and to bear several of their children.  In the end, she helps lead a revolt of sorts.

I cannot tell the sex of the author from the name, but the style is unlike those employed by any male authors I know.  In any event, the narrative is reminiscent of 1954's A Woman in Berlin, a harrowing autobiographical account of a journalist in Germany's capital when the Russians came.

Four stars.

Sunpot (Part 1 of 4), by Vaughn Bodé

Open page image of Comic Sunpot Featuring images of Apollo and Captain Belinda Bump's bare breasts.

Here we've got a tongue-in-cheek space adventure starting Captain Belinda Bump, who for some reason is topless throughout the strip.  Actually, it seems quite natural to go nude in space—after all, Niven's Belters are nudists.  However, prurience seems intended: Bump is referred to as "Nectar Nipples" and "Wobble Boobs", and the overall style feels something like a black and white version of what fills the final pages of Playboy each month.

In this short installment, Captain Bump runs across the next Apollo mission.  High jinks ensue.

The art is fun, and I want to like the characters, but Bodé needs a new letterer.  Maybe he can borrow Sol Rosen from Marvel.

Three stars.

Doing the math

While nothing in this magazine quite hits the highs of Sturgeon, and Plachta keeps swinging and missing (no one I've talked to has managed to decipher Ronnie's intent), it's still a pleasant read from front to back.  I have a suspicion Galaxy will outlive Apollo.

That's something, at least!



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