[With Takumi Shibano the first Trans-Pacific guest of honor at a Worldcon (Baycon, this year), it is appropriate that we at long last present our first Japanese correspondent: science fiction fan and jazz enthusiast, Yo Aoyama!]
by Yo Aoyama
Hello! Yo Aoyama here: 26 and a lifelong resident of Japan. As a lover of music, novels and movies, I am honored to be able to participate in this journey from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
When Gideon told me about his fanzine the last time he and his wife were in Japan, I knew I had to join the Journey. Japanese movies and science fiction have already been featured many times, but now you've got a home-grown correspondent to tell you the latest information about Japanese science fiction movies, novels, comics, and more!
The rice field near my home.
It is relatively recently that the genre of science fiction has been recognized in Japan, but it has been booming in recent years. "UchūJin ("Cosmic Dust")" by Takumi Shibano, mentioned in Alison's article last month, was launched in 1957, and "SF Magazine" was launched by Hayakawa Shobo in 1959. At first, "SF Magazine" mainly introduced overseas works, but since 1961, they have held contests for new writers in Japan and have been discovering many talents. In 1963, the Japanese Science Fiction Writers Club was also established, and now science fiction is becoming a major genre in Japan.
For this installment, I want to tell you about The Girl Who Leapt Through Time from the short collection of the same name released in March last year by Yasutaka Tsutsui, who was selected as an honorable mention in the second SF contest and is also active in publishing a fanzine himself.
The cover for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
When you think of time travel, what works come to mind? Wells' Time Machine? Or is it the hit movie Planet of the Apes that came out earlier this year? Unlike those workers, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was initially announced as a children's literature for junior high and high school students, but adults are beginning to realize its charm, and it is a work everyone on the Journey should know about!
The star of this work is Kazuko Yoshiyama, a girl in her third year of junior high school (9th grade). One day, while cleaning the science room with two of her classmates, the scent of lavender drifting from the laboratory test tube causes her to faint. Three days later, Kazuko discovers her ability to jump through time after almost being hit by a truck, finding herself exactly 24 hours before the incident. How did she gain this power? How is it related to the scent of lavender? And if it is all the result of a suspicious experiment, who is responsible? Moreover, how does it connect to the string of mysterious events happening around her, including a terrific local earthquake. Initially confused by the ability she has suddenly gained, she is determined to solve the mystery by making full use of it.
"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" blends many genres beyond science fiction: romance, mystery, children's literature, but the charm of this work is that deep knowledge of (and utilization of the elements in) the science fiction genre. This is largely conveyed through the character of Fukushima-sensei, Kazuo's science teacher.
Fukushima-sensei describes himself as "a person who collects and researches mysterious phenomena…not a scientist, but a researcher, just recording what happened as it is." Interestingly, when describing the phenomenon, he references a David Lang, who suddenly disappeared in front of his wife, two children and two friends, as described in the book, "Mysteries of the Supernatural", by Frank Edwards, published in Japanese by Hayakawa Publishing in 1963. Clearly Fukushima-sensei (and Leapt author Tsutsui) have a firm grounding in both contemporary science fiction and 'weird' books.
"Mysteries of the Supernatural—BUT THAT HAPPENED!"
In this way, Fukushima-sensei plays a commentary role while also moving the story along by hinting at the true nature of Kazuko's mystery. He explains the phenomenon using the terms "teleportation" and "timeleap". I have not seen the word "timeleap" elsewhere, and it is likely a sort of author-coined 'Japanglish'. Compared to the common term "time travel", it is a perfect expression for the events of this work, which mainly involve travel in short periods of time without using tools such as time machines.
"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" is published as the 5th book in the ten-volume "Junior SF" series published by the Tsuru Shobo company, many of which I have read. These 'children's books' have a charm that is anything but childish. Science fiction is no longer just for adults. And with books like these, the boys and girls who read them will be inspired to one day create a reality that mirrors the stories they read in their youth.
We’re beginning a brand new series of Doctor Who, and you know what that means. I get to ramble at length about it! The Dominators is our opening serial, coming from the pen of Norman Ashby, who I don’t believe has written for Doctor Who before, nor, as far as I can gather, anywhere else. How very curious.
Is this debut the start of greater things, or an omen of troubles to come? Let’s take a look at Doctor Who: The Dominators. (Note: this review covers four episodes in one go, so it's a little bit of a departure from earlier formats).
In Case You Missed It
The Dominators begins with the arrival of a couple of blokes with terrible fashion sense to the peaceful-to-a-fault world of Dulkis. No, it’s not the Doctor and Jamie, but the Dominators, Rago (Ronald Allen) and Toba (Kenneth Ives). They’ve popped in to refuel their ship, and perhaps also conquer this world and enslave its people. Nice blokes.
The Doctor and company (including new companion Zoe) arrive and soon encounter a team of local surveyors (the Dulceans) who are very surprised to find them here on this island, which until about five minutes ago was positively swimming in radiation. It turns out the Doctor’s choice of location for a beach holiday was a nuclear test site.
They’re soon joined by Cully (Arthur Cox). He's the sole person on the island who has seen the Dominators and lived to tell the tale. He tells them of how he and his friends crash-landed on the island, and approached the Dominators for help only to be slaughtered.
The Doctor and Jamie rush off to investigate these interlopers while Cully and Zoe travel to the planet’s capital to beg for help. Jamie and the Doctor get themselves captured (of course). Cully and Zoe can’t get anyone to listen to them, much less lift a finger to help them deal with the invaders.
The Doctor and Jamie fool the Dominators into thinking they’re too stupid to be worth any notice, or to even be useful as slave labour. The same can’t be said of the survey team, who end up as the Dominators’ slaves.
Zoe and Cully get captured on their return to the island. Unlike the survey team, they have the gumption to do something about it. They manage to get their hands on a weapon and attempt to take out the Dominators’ (frankly adorable) robot servants, but the plan goes awry thanks to the untimely intervention of the Doctor and Jamie. Cully and Jamie end up trapped in an underground bunker, separated from the rest of the group, while the Doctor and Zoe fall back into the Dominators’ hands.
Jamie and Cully don’t stay trapped for long, however. They turn out to be rather good at disabling the robots, which creates enough of a distraction for the Dominators that the Doctor gets a chance to look around their ship and work out their plan. All this time, the Dominators have been drilling for something, but for what? The island has no mineral resources or oil. However, it is on a thin area of the planet’s crust, making it the ideal place to access the mantle. They’re making a volcano, and plan to blow up a nuclear device inside. The plan is all kinds of daft, but the bottom line is that they’re planning to reduce the planet to irradiated slag to provide fuel for their fleet.
Cully and Jamie rescue the others (the robots are really quite useless at being killing machines) and the Doctor cooks up a plan (and some homemade bombs) for them to continue distracting the Dominators. Meanwhile the rest of the group digs a tunnel to intercept the Dominators’ nuclear device (that part was Jamie’s idea).
They manage to get through in the nick of time, but unable to disarm the nuclear device, the Doctor has no choice but to take it out of harm’s way. By which I mean he smuggles it onto the Dominators’ ship, killing them when it goes off.
The day saved, the Dulceans depart back to the capital, and the Doctor and company had better get going themselves before the Dominators’ man-made volcano blows them all to kingdom come.
Thoughts And Rambles
For me, the most interesting source of tension in this serial is that between the Dominators Rago and Toba. They really, truly cannot stand one another. Both are equally unpleasant, but they have completely incompatible approaches to villainy. Rago’s the cold one. He passes up plenty of opportunities to just kill everyone and have done with it, not out of any compassion but because he would rather not waste resources. Toba, on the other hand, is a volcano in shoulderpads. Just look at him funny and he’ll set his cute little robots on you. I had wondered (and was a bit disappointed when this did not happen) if they would end up killing each other, their cruelty and ambition being their undoing. It would feel more appropriate to the general tone and messaging of Doctor Who than… well, I will get to that in a moment.
The funny thing is that if Rago had listened to Toba and just killed the Doctor in the first place, his plan would have gone off without a hitch. Take note, future villains.
Oh, and speaking of which. The plan. I think there is someone at the BBC who lives to think up new ways of annoying anybody with an O-Level in science. My inner know-it-all simply cannot let it be. There is a deep lack of understanding of how harnessing nuclear energy works. The Dominators use nuclear fuel, but have no reactor, just using the passive radiation from the raw fuel to power their ship. Not exactly efficient. Without a reactor you’ve just got a load of hot rocks. And if you have a lot of them all in one place…well, now you DO have a reactor, don’t you? One which you can’t control.
So the Dominators’ plan to get more fuel for their nuclear-disaster-waiting-to-happen is to dig holes into the planet’s crust, fire rockets into them to trigger an upwelling of magma, then drop a small nuclear device into the base of the resulting volcano. And then it'll spew radioactive lava. Which, for some reason, will cover the whole world. The planet basically becomes a petrol station for the fleet. One: That’s not how volcanoes work. Two: That is not how radiation works. Three: That’s not how… planets work.
The incredibly peaceful Dulceans have this atomic test island, by the way, because a couple of hundred years ago they decided to do research into nuclear energy. As part of their research, they built a bomb (for some reason), set it off, and panicked when it did exactly what bombs are supposed to do. And then they swore off nuclear research altogether. I am going to have a migraine.
It’s one thing to make up daft science about stuff far beyond our scope of knowledge but this is just a bit silly.
However. I can let bad science slide. If it’s a fun idea, who am I to rain on everybody’s parade? What I’m not sure I can let slide is the much more serious issue with this serial.
For all these years, Doctor Who has been quite strictly pacifistic in its philosophy. When the guns come out, the Doctor is in the thick of things trying to persuade everyone to put them away and talk. However, in this serial he spends much of his time trying to persuade the Dulceans in the opposite direction. Now, I’m all for nuanced critique of the limitations of pacifism, but that’s not what this is. It’s the narrative equivalent of having an argument with yourself in the shower.
The Dulceans are pacifist to a degree that goes beyond absurdity. Pacifist does not mean ‘doormat’. Yet the Dulceans are willing to just give up and give their invaders whatever they want. They’re a parody of hippies (sans the free love, but you can’t really show that sort of thing on teatime television), and a bad one at that. They’re very rigid thinkers, the youth accepting the word of their elders as gospel. And they lack curiosity, the council seeing no need to investigate the arrival of the Dominators. Though they might have two hearts, they don't have the slightest ember of rebellion in either of them. Not exactly counter-cultural icons, are they? Nice people, sure, but not a fair representation of pacifists, hippie or otherwise, and their problems would have been over a lot sooner if they’d just been willing to attack the Dominators as soon as they’d started causing trouble.
And that’s a weird message for Doctor Who, isn’t it? Not that it’s a lesson that the Dulceans would even have learned. In the end, the Doctor took care of the threat for them.
Oh, yes. The Doctor killed the Dominators, and I am pretty certain he did not actually have to. If he had time to go and plant the nuclear device aboard the Dominators’ ship, he had time to hop into the TARDIS. He could have flung the device out into space or dropped it on some lifeless moon. It would probably have been quicker; I’m pretty sure the TARDIS was actually the closest ship to the bunker. He had to go out of his way to dispatch the Dominators. That doesn’t seem like a very Doctorish thing to do. Sure, the Doctor might not step in if a villain is about to get themselves killed through their own foolishness, but I wouldn’t say that he makes a habit of making sure they meet a sticky end.
And just to top it all off, this act was ultimately pointless. It was an act of revenge, not one that served to actually ensure the continued safety of the Dulceans. The Dominators mention many times that they are just a small part of a vast fleet bent on conquering the galaxy, and yet the serial ends without any consideration for said fleet. The planet Dulkis may have been spared for now, but do you think it will last long against the full onslaught of the Dominators’ empire?
The Bottom Line
It’s not that this is a bad story, per se. I quite enjoyed it. The Dominators were fairly fun to watch, the Quarks were far too cute to be scary but ultimately quite charming, and I developed a fondness for Cully. He’s a bit of a boy in a man's body, but he’s good in a crisis and possesses a degree of backbone and curiosity not seen in the rest of his people. Plot-wise, it’s not the most exciting or inventive fare, but I am just so glad it wasn’t another base-under-siege.
The problem is the messaging. Ultimately, whether intentional or not, the moral is clear: resisting oppression and pacifism are mutually exclusive. That runs counter to every Doctor Who story I can remember. More often than not the villains are the architects of their own destruction. The heroes win the day with their wits and the strength of their convictions, not through blowing stuff up or slaying a retreating foe.
All in all, it’s a decent story. It just misses the entire point of Doctor Who.
"May you live in interesting times" is supposedly an ancient Chinese curse, even though the proverb is completely unknown in China.
But be that as it may, we are certainly living in very interesting times, because it has been a long, hot summer of protests and violence here in Europe as well as abroad. Whether in Paris, Prague, Zurich, Rome, Warsaw, Bonn or West Berlin, whether on the western or eastern side of the iron curtain, it seems as if every single day there is another protest, another riot and the violent response of the authorities in the news.
The massive protests against West Germany's new emergency powers act did not just attract university students. Here we have a group of priests protesting the new law.Former concentration camp prisoners donned their old prisoner uniforms to protest the West German emergency measures act. A similar law was abused in the 1930s and paved Hitler's way to power.Soviet tanks crush protests in Prague, CzecheslovakiaMassive protests in Paris on May 1.Student protesters clash with the police in Paris.A burned out bus during students protests in Mexico City.A sit-in in Zurich where protesters took over an empty department store.
Burning Streets and Sappy Songs
Maybe the fact that this has been such a violent year is the reason why the pop songs dominating the West German charts are so extremely saccharine. Songs by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones regularly hit the West German charts, but the breakout star of 1968 in West Germany is a young Dutch singer known as Heintje (real name Hein Simons) who just celebrated his thirteenth birthday last month.
Now young Heintje has a beautiful voice – at least for now, because puberty will eventually hit. However, the songs he is made to sing are painfully saccharine. His breakout hit was "Mama", a song that's already thirty years old and was originally written for Beniamino Gigli. His follow-up "Du sollst nicht weinen" (You shall not cry), a version of "La Golondrina", a Mexican song that is already more than a hundred years old, is currently topping the West German charts. And Heintje (or rather his manager) have even more plans. A new song called "Oma so lieb" (Grandma so kind) is coming out soon and Heintje will also appear in the movie Zum Teufel mit der Penne (To Hell With School).
Meanwhile, enjoy this performance of his breakout hit "Mama":
Escape at the Newsstand
While some are seeking escape from the violence on the news in sappy pop songs, others head for the spinner rack at their local newsstand to peruse the offerings and lose themselves in fantastic worlds.
A typical West German newsstand.Another example of a typical West German newsstand.
I've written before about the so-called “Heftromane”, digest-sized 64-page fiction magazines sold at newsstands, gas stations, grocery stores and wherever magazines are sold. West German newsstands carry a bewildering array of "Heftromane" in variety of genres. Westerns, crime novels, war novels and romance novels with subgenres such as aristocratic romance, Alpine romance and medical romance are still the most popular, but there are also a number of science fiction series to be found.
The State of the United Galactic Empire
The eight hundred pound gorilla of West German science fiction is still Perry Rhodan. The series launched in September 1961 and is still going strong seven years later. In fact, I just picked up issue No. 366 today.
Perry Rhodan's own Solar Empire and the Great Empire of Perry's Arkonian allies joined forces to form the United Galactic Empire. However, this new Empire continues to be beset by crises from within and without. And so Perry Rhodan and friends have been travelling to distant galaxies and also tangling with time cops.
A major internal crisis facing the United Galactic Empire was the revolt of the planet Plophos. Under the rule of the tyrannical Iratio Hondro, the Plophosians managed to shoot down Perry Rhodan's flagship Crest, imprisoned the crew and tried to poison them. However, Perry Rhodan managed to escape with the aid of Mory Abro, daughter of a Plophosian opposition leader.
Perry Rhodan's future wife Mory Abro is caught in the embrace of a bug-eyed monster on Jonny Bruck's cover for issue 186.
Initially, Mory and Perry disliked each other intensely, but during their perilous flight they fell in love. Eventually, Perry Rhodan and Mory Abro were married and had twins, a girl named Suzan Betty and a boy named Michael Reginald. So Perry Rhodan finally found some happiness after losing his first wife Thora all the way back in issue 78.
Since Perry Rhodan and most of his supporting cast are near immortal due to their cellular activators, time moves fast in the series and so the twins are already adults in the current issues. Suzan Betty studied mathematics, founded a chain of banks and eventually married the brilliant but scatterbrained scientist Geoffry Abel Waringer, initially against her parents' wishes.
Suzan Betty Rhodan poses with Gucky the telepathic Mousebeaver and Gucky's son Jumpy on the cover of issue 302.
Unlike his sister, Michael Reginald Rhodan chafed against finding himself in the shadow of his father. He ran away from home several times as a boy and finally left for good at age twenty-four. Fascinated by the French Revolution, he took the name Roi Danton, started dressing in eighteenth century garb for reasons best known to himself and joined the Free Traders, eventually rising to their king.
Michael Reginald Rhodan a.k.a. Roi Danton displays his rather unusual sense of style on the cover of issue 300.
Since the death of Thora, Perry Rhodan was sorely lacking in regular female characters, so Mory Abro and Suzan Betty Rhodan are welcome additions to the series. Even more welcome would be women authors, for the writing staff of Perry Rhodan is still all male. Which is a massive oversight, especially since West Germany does have female science fiction writers such as Lore Matthaey, prolific writer, translator and editor of the Utopia Zukunftsroman series, or the writer behind the pseudonym Garry McDunn, who I have on good authority is actually a woman.
Perry Rhodan's Rivals
Success breeds imitators and so other "Heftroman" publishers launched their own science fiction series, all inspired by Perry Rhodan and all inevitably starring square-jawed spacemen.
I already wrote about Ren Dhark, the Martin Kelter publishing company's foray into the science fiction genre. The brainchild of Perry Rhodan writer Kurt Brand, the saga about Terran colonists who crash-landed on the planet Hope is still going strong two years later. By now, the Terrans and their leader Ren Dhark have found not only traces of intelligent aliens they've named the Mysterious (because no one knows what they look like) but also a giant spaceship called Point of Interrogation. Ren Dhark and his crew repaired and launched the Point of Interrogation and are currently searching for both the Mysterious and Earth, which Ren Dhark, who was born in space aboard the colony ship Galaxis, has never seen.
Ren Dhark is enjoyable enough and has gradually also established its own identity as more than just a Perry Rhodan copy. The mystery behind the mysterious Mysterious is certainly compelling, though I hope the resolution, when it eventually comes, lives up to the mystery.
In November 1966, Bastei Verlag entered the science fiction arena with Rex Corda – Der Retter der Erde (Rex Corda – Saviour of the Earth). The brainchild of West German science fiction author H.G. Francis (real name Hans Gerhard Franciskowsky), the series finds Earth first near destroyed in a nuclear war and then caught in the middle of an intergalactic conflict between the Laktones and the Orathones, which has lasted for millennia. The titular characters Rex Corda is a US senator who tries to save the Earth from getting destroyed by the two warring factions.
The cover for the first issue of Rex Corda.
Rex Corda is a lot more political than either Perry Rhodan or Ren Dhark and the parallels to the war in Vietnam are more than obvious. Maybe this is why Rex Corda only lasted for thirty-eight issues, ending last year.
Don't worry, the attractive woman Rex Corda is protecting from an intergalactic petrodactyl is his sister.
The End of Utopia
After the cancellation of Rex Corda, H.G. Francis and his writing team launched a new science fiction series in the pages of the long-running science fiction anthology series Utopia Zukunfsroman.
Ad Astra – Chet Morrows Weg zu den Sternen (Ad Astra – Chet Morrow's Way to the Stars) started last year. The series is set in a solar system not unlike what could be found in the pages of pulp magazines like Planet Stories twenty years ago. Chet Morrow serves as an ensign aboard the interplanetary spaceship Dyna-Carrier, which is beset by saboteurs. After unmasking the saboteurs, Chet Morrow is promoted to Second Lieutenant and has many adventures around the solar system, while finding traces of alien visitors. Eventually, Chet Morrow becomes commander of the interstellar spaceship Sword of Terra and heads the first expedition to Alpha Centauri, which not only turns out to be inhabited, but also houses a human colony consisting of the descendants of ancient Romans who were abducted by aliens.
The cover for the first Ad Astra novel "Sabotage at the Dyna-Carrier" looks very much like a Perry Rhodan cover.
Ad Astra was certainly thrilling, and indeed the quality of the two H.G. Francis science fiction series Rex Corda and Ad Astra was higher than the average Perry Rhodan clone. Alas, Ad Astra was prematurely cut short, when Utopia Zukunftsroman was cancelled earlier this year after fifteen years. Worse, Ad Astra ended on a down note with the Earth and much of the solar system seemingly destroyed by a rogue comet.
Utopia Zukunftsroman may be history, but its competitor Terra Science Fiction is still being published, though the anthology series was rebranded as Terra Nova this year. The publisher Zauberkreis Verlag also entered the science fiction anthology market with Zauberkreis SF two years ago.
The final issue of Utopia Zukunftsroman featured a German translation of "Objectif Tamax" by French science fiction author Peter Randa.
But even if the West German "Heftroman" market does not look too promising for any science fiction series not named Perry Rhodan, a very interesting series in another genre just launched.
Things Get Spooky
Silber-Krimi (Silver Mystery) is a long-running crime fiction anthology series which started in 1952. Over the years, several recurring sleuths popped up in the pages of Silber-Krimi, the best known of them FBI Agent Jeff Conter and the crime-solving Butler Parker. But while the crimes in Silber-Krimi may occasionally seem far-fetched, they are still happening in our world.
This changed with issue 747 in July, when the regular Silber-Krimi bore the subtitle "Silber Grusel Krimi – Ein Roman für starke Nerven" (Silver Spooky Mystery – a novel for readers with strong nerves). Intrigued, I picked up the issue and was treated to "Das Grauen schleicht durch Bonnards Haus" (Horror creeps through Bonnard's house) by the appropriately named Dan Shocker.
After a spooky opening with a young man being pursued by beings unknown, the novel introduces us to Larry Brent, an FBI agent on holiday in France. FBI agents are popular protagonists in West German crime fiction, likely due to the enormous success of the "Heftroman" series G-Man Jerry Cotton.
However, it's very much a busman's holiday for Larry Brent, for no sooner has he arrived in France than he finds a body, completely drained of blood. Regular readers of spooky stories will find this quite ominous. And indeed, Larry Brent is attacked by a bona fide vampire soon thereafter. He vows to stop the bloodsucking fiend and finds that he is not the only one who is investigating the vampire killings. No, an agent of a mysterious organisation named PSA (short for Psychoanalytische Spezialabteilung, i.e. Psychoanalytic Special Unit) is also on the case. The story ends with the vampires vanquished and Larry Brent becoming on agent of the PSA himself.
"Das Grauen schleicht durch Bonnards Haus" is a satisfying horror novel, though the author clearly has no idea what psychoanalysis is and that it has nothing to do with investigating paranormal phenomena and everything with Sigmund Freud. Nonetheless, the novel proved popular enough that Larry Brent is getting a second outing this month.
But who is the author behind the outlandish pseudonym Dan Shocker? Well, it turns out that he is Jürgen Grasmück. Though only twenty-eight years old and using a wheelchair since his teens, Grasmück has already had a lengthy career. He started writing science fiction novels at sixteen and was a staff writer on both Ad Astra and Rex Corda. Grasmück tended to include horror elements into his science fiction novels and has clearly found his calling with the Larry Brent novels.
Quo Vadis, Heftroman?
Even though Perry Rhodan continues to be popular, other science fiction series have had a hard time in the West German "Heftroman" market. Will we eventually see another challenger to Perry Rhodan arise or was Ad Astra the last attempt to establish an ongoing science fiction series?
Meanwhile, occult investigator Larry Brent is an intriguing new character to arrive in the pages of the rather staid Silber-Krimi. Will his adventures continue, or will Larry Brent's second case also be his last?
Back in April, I reported on the early days of the “Prague Spring,” First Secretary Alexander Dubček’s effort to reform Czechoslovakian communism and create “socialism with a human face.” Dubček managed to keep his plans afloat through the spring and much of the summer, but—as anyone who has been following the news is aware—the Soviet bear has flexed its claws and put an end to ideas of openness and freedom of speech. But not without creating a few cracks in the Warsaw Pact.
A Soviet armored vehicle comes to a fiery end.
The first sign of trouble came in June. Military maneuvers by Warsaw Pact forces took place in Czechoslovakia as scheduled, but Soviet troops were slow to leave the country after the conclusion. A number of communist leaders visited Prague over the course of a week in early August; some, like East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht and Hungary’s János Kádár, probably trying to bring Dubček to heel, while Yugoslavia’s Tito and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu were no doubt more encouraging. Ceaușescu certainly was, since he signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Czechoslovakia and has loudly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the last few days.
It’s not clear what straw broke the camel’s back, though the announcement that Czechoslovakia was considering loans from the World Bank might have accelerated things. In any case, at 11:00 PM on August 20th Warsaw Pact forces rolled across the border in numbers not seen in Europe since the end of World War II. Dubček and other reformist leaders were arrested, and the Soviets tried to install a puppet government, but the people of Czechoslovakia weren’t having it. On the 22nd, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia met hastily and elected a new central committee and presidium, which then unanimously re-elected Dubček as First Secretary.
Somewhat more peaceful resistance.
The invasion triggered protests around the world, even by some Communist parties in western and neutral countries. In Czechoslovakia, although the military was never ordered to oppose Warsaw Pact forces, the invaders have been met with protests and violence. Alas, it was not enough. The arrested leaders signed an agreement to roll back their reforms on the 26th, and after returning to Prague on the 27th, Dubček gave a tearful radio address, asking Czechoslovakians to end their resistance as well as for their forgiveness for his surrender. As I write, that is where things stand, and like Hungary a dozen years ago, Czechoslovakia has been brought back into the fold.
Lost in the fog
A couple of the protagonists in this month’s IF spend their stories wandering in a daze. Unfortunately, the far less successful of the tales takes up nearly a third of the magazine and feels like a lot more, overwhelming an otherwise decent issue.
Scientists on Mars make an unexpected find. Art by Chaffee
A group of scientists investigate an ancient Martian temple and discover that the jeweled eyes of the sculptures contain moving holographic images. Meanwhile one of their number, linguist Rimkin, suffers a severe mental breakdown.
Art by Gaughan
Normally, I’d complain about the idea of an ancient Martian temple, but Delany’s writing is just so gorgeous I don’t care. He also has the skill to keep the viewpoint entirely with a man slowly losing his mind, keep the story coherent and include a discussion of information storage that ties the whole thing together. Not his best work, but still excellent.
Four stars.
Report on Japanese Science Fiction, by Takumi Shibano
Top Japanese fan Takumi Shibano (for more on him see last month’s article by my colleague Alison Scott) tells us about the state of science fiction in Japan. The first half of the article offers a brief history of the genre in Japan, from the inter-war years to today; the second half is a run-down of the authors in the field today and the sort of things they write. The history is very good, while the second half is a bit dry. But maybe something in there will catch a publisher’s eye and prompt a translation or two.
A high three stars.
Deathchild, by Sterling Lanier
A baby named Joseph is the ultimate weapon; anyone who comes into unprotected contact with him dies horribly. Is he enough to keep a surging communist China from conquering all of Asia and bring them to the negotiation table?
Feeding time. Art by Virgil Finlay
After a slow start under John Campbell’s tutelage, Lanier seems to have come into his own as an author. There’s certainly some good writing here, however it’s too long. Worse, the concept behind Project Inside Straight is utterly absurd. The quality of the line-by-line writing is just enough to keep the story’s head above water.
Three propped-up stars.
Paddlewheel on the Styx, by Lohr Miller
From the title, I was expecting something in the mode of John Kendrick Bangs or Riverworld. Instead, we have the tale of an attempt to rescue a crashed spaceship on the shore of a river of molten metal on Mercury. It’s beautifully poetic, but it falters a bit right at the end. I will forgive the lapse, though, because this month’s new author is very new indeed: he won’t be 14 until sometime in November. This is very well done for someone so young, and I hope we see more from master Miller in the future.
A solid three stars.
The Proxy Intelligence, by A.E. van Vogt
Space vampires and some nonsense about intelligence. ‘Nuff said.
The head vampire meets the scientist and his beautiful daughter. Art by Gaughan
This unasked-for sequel to Asylum (Astounding, May 1942) is a confused mess. The protagonist wanders through the story in a daze due to his exposure a vastly superior intelligence, but unlike with Delany’s story the reader comes away knowing even less than the “hero.” In desperation, I tracked down the original story. While it did clarify who all the characters are, I can’t say it helped otherwise.
Barely two stars.
If… and When, by Lester del Rey
This month, del Rey looks at what is coming to be known as materials science, the study of improving the materials we use to make things and developing entirely new ones. He covers a wide variety of topics, such as building materials that can be eaten in a pinch, metals that dampen impacts, materials that can be induced to return to a given shape, and many more ideas. This was all inspired by The New Materials by David Fishlock, which he makes sound very interesting indeed. But then, this is a field I’ve long had something of an interest in.
Four stars for me, maybe slightly less if your interests are different.
Dom Priego is a university student doing a hitch in the military. His unit is tasked with boarding an enemy spaceship carrying a matter transmitter and keeping them from sending through a huge mass of men and equipment.
Dom fights his way through the enemy ship. Art by Adkins
On the surface, Harrison has given us an entertaining space opera, but underneath it is the philosophical question of why we fight. Overall, this is very well done, but I think it’s the wrong length. Either the combat scenes need to be tightened up, reducing the story by a couple of pages, or it needs to be a lot longer, so we can get to know Dom better, say some stuff from before he signed up and why he did so.
In this sequel to The Mother Ship, more aliens come to Earth. First some blue lizards who leave behind some mysterious missile-like objects, followed by the Siggies, who everybody likes. Earth people start picking up aspects of the alien culture, and then things start to go wrong.
Siggie religion features quaint rituals. Art by Brand
I liked this one a bit more than the first story. Maybe that’s because I have an easier time accepting the underlying premise. In any case, it’s a pithy tale dealing with both religion and the effects of colonization.
Three stars.
Summing up
This could have been a pretty good issue. All but one story are average to very good. Even the low score for “Deathchild” is mostly due to the highly unbelievable premise; up until that is revealed, it’s a good read. But then there’s van Vogt. A “complete novel condensation in a special section” it says on the cover. As I said, if it’s condensed, they took out too much. As for the special section, the magazine is the same length it always is; the story just squats right in the middle like some sort of unpleasant toad. Can we please go back to serials?
Three out of the four have potential, but I’d rather have the whole Zelazny.
In the backround (and sometimes the foreground) of my reading of this month's issue of Analog was the Democratic National Convention held over four tumultuous days in the Windy City. This was not four days of politicians patting themselves on the back, as we saw in Miami Beach for the GOP Convention—amid the citywide busdrivers and telephone workers strike, there was tumult, walk-outs, protests, and a general breakdown of the democratic process.
Il Duce, Mayor Daley, intent on turning his town into a police state in the pursuit of Law and Order: 12,000 cops plus a contingent of National Guard were on hand last weekend.
The writing was on the wall that first day when Julian Bond arrived with his alternate set of Georgia delegates, the group that broadly represented the demographic makeup of the Georgia Democratic Party. First, they were not even allowed in; then they were grudglingly placed in the cheap seats of the balcony. All while Daniel Inouye, Senator from Hawaii, gave a stirring, unprecedented keynote speech in which he decried the anarchy and violence occurring outside the convention halls, but nevertheless put on the assembly the responsibility of rectifying the racial injustice that led to such agitation.
Eventually, the delegates prepared to vote on the certification of the Georgia delegation that had been approved by the party—the less integrated one. Actually, first they voted on if they were going to vote on it that evening. It was during this battle that the Michigan delegation offered their seats to the alternate Georgia delegation, a move that enraged members of the "official" delegation.
With regard to who was going to get the Presidential nomination, by the end of the first night, it was clear McCarthy was a dead duck, and few were mentioning McGovern. However, there was a rising "draft Kennedy" movement that peaked on Day 2 despite Ted repeatedly saying he wasn't interested. More dramatically, Day 2 marked the day police evicted 1,000 protesters from nearby Lincoln Park, CBS correspondent Dan Rather got punched by plainclothes security for not wearing his credentials prominently, dozens of delegates, mostly Black, walked out, and Georgia Governor Lester Maddox took his ball and went home, saying he was going to stump for segregationalist independent candidate, George Wallace.
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out…
And that night, I'm pretty sure they still hadn't certified the Georgia delegation.
On the third day, 10,000 protesters gathered at Grant Park, a terrific anti-War demonstration broke out on the floor of the convention, and the minority position tried in vain to make an end to bombing North Vietnam a part of the party plank. By the time Humphrey was anointed the candidate (a foregone conclusion by that point), it was an anti-climax and anything but a triumphant coronation. And what a change twenty years has wrought: the Southern delegations that walked out on the convention in '48 are now behind Humphrey, where the liberals who admired the fiery populist now reject the man they view as Johnson's stooge.
Discontent was rampant. Delegates were frustrated that they were not listened to, that the motions they were voting on were not sufficiently explained, and that Mayor Daley was strong-arming them into voting the way he wanted them to. Not to mention that there wasn't enough food to feed everyone in the convention's vicinity, and the hot dogs on site were terrible. Many said 1968 marked the death of the party convention, at least in its current incarnation.
But the political strife was as nothing compared to the rivers of blood that were shed as blue-helmeted cops clashed with protestors. "The Whole World is Watching" and "Fuck LBJ" intertwined with shouts and screams, and all of it was televised in full color (but not live, as that was impossible due to the strikes and Daley's security efforts).
The only bright spot of that third evening was the nomination of D.C. and Black native son the Rev. Channing Phillips, the first American of African descent to be nominated by a major political party for President.
By the fourth day, I was exhausted, yet I tuned in anyway. I'm glad I did. That evening, the convention played a retrospective on RFK. It was too hagiographic, and frankly, the wounds too fresh to bear close watching, at least for me. But when it was over, something amazing happened. Virtually the entire audience of delegates, excluding just the groups from Texas and Illinois, rose to its feet and began clapping. Louder and louder, and then they started singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Over and over, "Glory Glory Hallelujah, His truth is marching on." Daley's henchmen tried to impose order. They gaveled. They called out the Sergeants-in-Arms. Nothing deterred the delegates. All of the anger, all the discontent, all of the frustrated might-have-beens boiled over in that moment into this display of singing, of shouting, of clapping.
It was only defused when a moment of silence was called for the memory of Dr. King, and then the convention could continue. The business of the moment was the nomination of a Vice President. That morning Humphrey had already tapped Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, and there was no serious opposition.
Yet, and in a truly touching moment, Julian Bond's name was advanced as a candidate (so, the first Black VP nominee of a major party in history), and he garnered 27 and a half votes before voluntarily withdrawing his name. Humbly, self-effacingly, he noted that he was too young to accept.
Bond withdraws his name from consideration.
Muskey and Humphrey gave their acceptance speeches that night. There was a lot on their shoulders—the need to deliver speeches that thread the needle, knitting the party back together, both addressing and condemning what had happened in Chicago.
That didn't happen. What we got was a limp flatness of platitudes. When I woke up, I learned that 20 delegates, supporters of McCarthy, had been beaten up in their hotel and arrested. The charge pelting the cops with sardines. McCarthy pointedly did not congratulate Humphrey that morning; the Vice President, now the newly christened candidate, had made no comment on the incident, tacitly endorsing it.
So that's that. HHH is our bulwark against Nixon. Muskie is his backstop. Wallace just got a shot in the arm, and I can only think that's a blow against Democratic hopes. Americans are disunited as we have not been for many decades.
It is hard to go on with my assigned task after all that, but the job remains, and I'm the one who has to do it. The convention was four days of Hell. Accordingly, the September 1968 issue of Analog was a slog, too, though of a different kind.
The ocean planet of Nandy-Cline is in the sights of the Parahuans, a rapacious race of aliens that was beaten back by the Federation seventy years ago, and wants another try at the apple. They're being cautious. The humans beat them once, which is almost heresy to the arrogant Parahuans. To justify losing to the inferior homo sapiens, they decide there must be a secret cabal of superhumans that leads and coordinates our species. They must know more in order to sway political power from those supporting the Voice of Caution to those in favor of the Voice of Action.
To that end, they have set up a submarine base on the planet and abducted the human, Ticos Cay. Why? Because he is nearly 200 years old and seems to have found the secret of immortality. It is clear to the Parahuans that he must be in the employ of the "Tuvelas", our putative ubermenschen. They torture him, at length, but he resists because the same disciplines that have extended his life also grant him the ability to blot out pain. Nevertheless, he will succumb—unless he can get outside help.
Enter Nile Etland, a young biologist living on Nandy-Cline. She and her two giant mutant otters, sapient and clever, are looking for Cay, who has disappeared from the floating island where he was doing research. Cay's only hope is that the Parahuans will take Etland for a Tuvela and treat her with comparative kid gloves, testing her abilities, rather than killing her outright.
Etland, to her credit, is up to the challenge…
The premise for this one is excellent, and something I love about James H. Schmitz is his ability with (indeed preference for) featuring heroines over heroes. That said, the writing in this piece is often plodding and explanatory, and I found my momentum frequently flagging.
So, three stars for this installment. Now that all the pieces have been set up, perhaps the next half will be more exciting.
The Powers of Observation, by Harry Harrison
by Leo Summers
The Soviets have developed a new kind of super spy. He looks just like a man, but for some reason weighs over 400 pounds. If that leads you to guess that he's the Communist version of Hymie the robot from Get Smart, give yourself a cigar.
But the American agent tasked to pursue him through the back roads of Yugoslavia has a few gimmicks up his sleeve, too…
Well-written, but nothing spectactular. Three stars.
Steamer Time?, by Wallace West
As America grapples with its oppressive smog situation, some are calling for a return to the good ol' days—the days of the Stanley Steamer. I'm just a little too young to remember when steam cars battled internal combustion vehicles for supremacy, so I don't have the nostalgia for them that Wallace West infuses his piece with. The arguments for steam are largely that it burns clean, with its only waste gas being carbon dioxide (of course, while not strictly a "pollutant", there are other problems with it; viz. our 1958 article on the potential for industry-caused global heating). Steam engines were also more fuel-efficient, though I don't know if that's still the case.
The arguments against steam, to me, would be the long time to develop a head of steam. In the old days, waiting for your boiler to heat up was acceptable since the alternative was cranking up your IC car, and risking breaking an arm when the crank snapped back. With the invention of the electric starter, that became a non-issue. Perhaps the steam folks have a plan, too.
Anyway, the piece is readable, if a bit gushing. I'm sure the auto industry will never allow an IC competitor to emerge, although as we speak, two electric cars are racing across the nation, so who knows?
Three stars.
Hi Diddle Diddle, by Peter E. Abresch
by Leo Summers
A harried reserve USAF captain, assigned to the UFO division, gets tired of all the cranks and reporters and spins a yarn for them: the cigar-shaped "ships" are really space cows feeding on the gasses of our upper atmosphere. His creation is recounted credulously, and hysteria sweeps the nation. Eventually, even Soviet agents are involved.
But what if the captain actually guessed too close to the mark?
This is a tedious story, and it just goes on and on. Analog rarely does humor well.
Two stars.
A Flash of Darkness, by Stanley Schmidt
by Leo Summers
Mars Rover (MR) Robot is having a bit of trouble on Mars. The autonomous machine uses a holographic laser rather than a camera for navigation (apparently it's lighter; I don't buy it). When night falls, the rover finds its vision fogged and then blinded by something beyond its ken. It's up to the technicians back on Earth, and maybe a little intuition in MR Robot's mechanical brain, to solve the problem.
This could have been an interesting piece, but I felt the ending was a let-down. You'll see why.
Two stars.
Parasike, by Michael Chandler
by Leo Summers
A fellow pretending to use numerology to make guaranteed stock picks turns out to be a quack of a different duck. He is promptly recruited by America's super-secret psi corps.
A lot of talking, a lot of fatuous acceptance of psi as science—in short, the perfect Campbell story.
Two stars.
Counting off
August has been one of the roughest months of one of the roughest years in recent history. Analog finished at 2.5, which is lousy, but not that far removed from the rest: Fantasy and Science Fiction (2.5), Amazing (2.6), If (2.9). Only Galaxy finished above the three-star barrier (3.1)
You could take all the 4/5 star stuff, and you wouldn't even fill a single issue. That's awful. Women were down to their usual publication rate, producing 6.5% of all new fiction this month.
It's going to take bold new leadership to change that trend, just as it will take bold new leadership to fix the country. That new leadership doesn't seem to be near in coming. I just hope we can withstand another Long Hot Summer…
Not all movies show up in theaters. Movies made for television began a few years ago, at least here in the USA, with a thriller called See How They Run. There have been quite a few since then.
A similar phenomenon is the fact that theatrical movies are frequently altered for television. Of course, films are often cut for broadcast, either to reduce the running time or to remove material deemed inappropriate for the tender sensibilities of American viewers.
But did you know that new footage is sometimes added to movies before they show up on TV? That's because they're too short to fill up the time slot allotted to them.
An example is Roger Corman's cheap little monster movie The Wasp Woman. In theaters, it ran just over an hour. On television, new scenes increased the length by about ten minutes.
Wasting time in front of the TV screen recently, I came across such an elongated theatrical film, as well as one made for television only. Let's take a look at both.
This thing began life in 1963 under the a much less laughable title.
Anybody who went to see this movie pushed the panic button.
The Madmen of Mandoras (somehow they lost the word The on the poster) was a low budget flick that lasted about an hour (although it probably seemed a lot longer than that if you were stuck watching it.)
Dramatic lettering, dramatic clouds.
New stuff was added to the beginning of the film to make it long enough to show up on TV. Unlike The Wasp Woman, they gave it a new title.
Apparently, the American television audience needs everything spelled out for them.
That gives away the movie's only plot twist, but at least it's truth in advertising.
Let's get the new stuff out of the way. We begin with a scientist carrying some important papers out of a lab.
Secure scientific facility or local high school?
The guy is almost immediately killed when his car blows up.
Exploding car number one.
The fellow was carrying the formula for an antidote to a deadly gas. Somebody doesn't want that information to get out.
Big news!
This event draws the attention of some kind of intelligence agency. The boss (who turns out to be working with the bad guys, although that doesn't really have much to do with the plot) assigns a couple of operatives to investigate the incident.
Secret agents or college students?
The man's long hair and mustache and the woman's short skirt provide evidence that we're not in 1963. Don't get too attached to these characters, because pretty soon the woman is shot dead and the man is killed another way.
Exploding car number two.
At this point, we go back to the original movie. After demonstrating the deadly power of the gas by showing a film of an elephant lying down, the scientist who knows the antidote for the stuff and his young beatnik daughter are kidnapped.
It's quite obviously just taking a nap.
Our nominal hero is the husband of the scientist's older daughter. Some guy reveals enough information to the married couple to send them off to the fictional Latin American nation of Mandoras (you know, the place where they have madmen) before getting shot dead. The protagonists deal with the problem of his corpse by stuffing it in a phone booth.
"When in Mandoras, stay at the luxurious Mandoras Hotel."
Another guy shows up and provides exposition. It seems that a team of Nazi doctors worked to preserve the Führer for future use at the end of the war. (In other words, They Saved Hitler's Brain.)
"We must save Charlie Chaplin's life!"
The two lovebirds act like ordinary tourists despite this remarkable bit of information. They happen to run across the younger daughter in a local nightclub. The kidnappers gave her some money and told her to have a good time, as long as she didn't contact anybody at home. She seems perfectly fine with this arrangement, despite the fact that her father is still in the hands of the bad guys.
Little sister doing the Twist, proof that we're in 1963.
Since we're in a nightclub, we have to kill time with a dance act. After all, we have a whole hour of movie to fill.
A little something for the leg men in the audience.
Somehow or other our heroes wind up in the secret headquarters of the Madmen of Mandoras. Dad is being tortured with bright lights and loud noises in an attempt to get him to reveal the secret of the antidote. Like a lot of other things in the film, this doesn't make much sense, since the bad guys just want to stop the antidote from being used.
"Let me out of this movie! I can't stand it any more!"
Then we get our big shock scene, which might have been surprising if the title didn't give it away.
As an example of the film's close attention to detail, note that the swastika is backwards.
Director Larry Buchanan made some very cheap films during the past few years. Starting last year, he's been responsible for extremely low budget color remakes — uncredited, of course — of old black-and-white science fiction and horror films. These are intended to be sold directly to television. Zontar, the Thing From Venus, for example, is obviously based on Roger Corman's 1956 flick It Conquered the World.
His latest effort in this vein is, in my opinion, very loosely inspired by the beach moviePajama Party (which doesn't actually take place on the beach, but you know what I mean.)
Don't believe me? I don't blame you, but I'll provide some evidence in a bit. Let's get started.
Even the titles are cheap.
We start with a few scenes of women suddenly disappearing, whether they're playing tennis, at a restaurant, or taking a shower. Don't pay any attention to this, as it never comes up again.
The plot really starts at a government facility.
Does NASA really need a lot of decoding?
They get a message from outer space that says — you guessed it — Mars Need Women. Thanks for reminding me what movie I'm watching!
A Martian appears from nowhere, without even the shimmering effect seen on Star Trek. His name is Dop, and he's played by Tommy Kirk, star of some Disney movies. He also played a Martian named Go Go in — a-ha! — Pajama Party. Coincidence? I think not.
"Make fun of my name and I'll disintegrate you."
Dop explains that some kind of problem with the Martian Y chromosome has resulted in men outnumbering women by one hundred to one. (That's a lot worse than Five to Twelve.)
The Martians would like to have five Earth women volunteer to journey to the red planet to solve the problem. (I'm not a geneticist or a mathematician, but that seems like an awfully small number to repopulate a whole planet.)
No dice, so we get some scenes of military types communicating on the radio.
This speaker gets so much screen time it's practically a guest star.
There's also a bunch of stock footage of planes flying around.
"I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth . . ."
This accomplishes nothing. The Martians decide to land on Earth and grab five women themselves. (Like I said, forget about their ability to just make women vanish.)
The Martian spaceship, not to be confused with the Enterprise.
Five Martians hide out in an abandoned ice factory and make plans.
"We will conquer these puny Earthlings with the advanced technology of flashlights and headphones."
First they have to disguise themselves as Earthlings. This requires some criminal activity. A gas station supplies cash and a map of the city. (I would have thought the Martians would be advanced enough to find their way around, but I guess not.)
"I sure hope this place has a men's room."
Next is borrowing a car. So much for using their power of teleportation for getting from point A to point B.
"Oh, cool, it's got AM/FM radio."
Then they need some clothes. This leads to a scene in which they reveal that Martians gave up wearing ties fifty years ago.
"Would this be too dressy for a kidnapping?"
Dop and one of his buddies spot an announcement for a lecture by a brilliant scientist. We're told that her book Space Genetics won a Pulitzer Prize.
A lecture on sex in space? Must be a science fiction convention.
Doctor Marjorie Bolen is played by Yvonne Craig, best known for playing Batgirl on the popular Batman TV show. So the audience can tell she's a genius, she sometimes wears spectacles.
"Why Doctor Bolen, you're beautiful without your glasses!"
Pretty soon Dop and Bolen (sounds like a law firm) are on a date at a local planetarium. Guess what's on display.
Irony!
Meanwhile, the other Martians stalk their intended targets. The first is an exotic dancer.
A guy far away from home? Of course he goes to a strip club!
Next is an airline stewardess.
"Coffee, tea, or me?" (Yeah, I stole that from the title of a recent book. Sue me.)
Third is a homecoming queen.
"Two, Four, Six, Eight, Who Will We Repopulate?"
Last is a painter. That doesn't quite fit with the other three, who are typical male fantasies of desirable women, but I guess they needed some variety.
"I call this one Portrait of the Artist as an Impending Victim of Abduction."
Naturally, the disappearances are big news.
"Oh, look what's showing on TV tonight."
The authorities seem powerless to stop them.
"Martians, Shmartians, let's see what Little Orphan Annie is up to."
Suffice to say that romance blooms between Dop and Bolen, even though we're told Martians gave up love long before they gave up ties. The kidnapped women are rescued and the Martians go home, apparently to face the extinction of their species.
"Let's see, Mrs. Marjorie Dop. Nah, it would never work."
A very silly film indeed.
One star.
Surely there's something better on television than these two losers.
The Cassiopeia Affair by Chloe Zerwick & Harrison Brown
In Redo Valley, Virginia, a radiotelescope complex in the late 20th century hunts for extra-terrestrial intelligence. One night Max Gaby detects a signal coming from Cassiopeia 3579. Inside there is a two-dimensional picture being sent out via binary.
Can you solve the binary-code puzzle?
This provides proof of an alien intelligence.
At the same time, conflict is brewing between Russia and China, one that could plunge the world into nuclear war. Is this evidence of intelligent life among the stars the greatest hope we have for peace?
Yes, this is yetanotherstory of RadioAstronomy. These are now becoming as regular in science fiction as space adventures and superhuman mutants, but this stands out as a wonderful example. I believe this is the first fiction from the pair, with Zerwick being primarily a visual artist and Brown being a scientist. Together they have created something masterful.
Although much of the novel is taken up by discussions of scientific theories or information on how to programme radio telescopes, it is raised up by excellent writing and a real understanding of character. Whilst Judith Merrill criticised it for being dull, I never found it so. It was a book I was dying to pick up whenever I got the opportunity. It is a testament to the authors that it never felt dry.
Regarding the characters, it is a huge cast, but one where they all feel considered and with depth, not merely props for discussion. These include Max Gaby as the wide-eyed believer, Barney Davidson the grouchy cynic, Rudolph Calder the Machiavellian hawk and Adam Lurie the disillusioned drunk who is secretly sleeping with Gaby’s wife.
Throughout there are little moments that make it feel real, such as Gaby calling Adam up at 4 am about a possible sighting and Adam grumpily insisting on having his shower and coffee first, or when someone tries to bribe Davidson and he threatens to kill him.
The characters are not perfect either, we regularly change perspective and sometimes see that they are downright unpleasant. But it is made clear we are not meant to sympathise with everyone’s point of view, rather to gain an insight into their motivations.
It also tries to consider the politics of the situation carefully. It demonstrates how different factions will react and what they will want to do with this information. A particularly interesting, if depressing, touch is that the hawks on both sides of the Iron Curtain distrust Gaby as he is a refugee from Hungary in 1956. This element gives it both a sense of excitement and verisimilitude that is often missing from these heavier works.
These kinds of harder science fiction stories are not usually the ones that appeal to me. However, I was enthralled. It may be even more enjoyed by fans of Clarke and Niven and I would not be surprised to see it on the Hugo ballot next year.
This is the third in a series of novels dealing with alternate universes. The first was Worlds of the Imperium. The Noble Editor gave it a moderately positive review.
Both books featured a fellow named Brion Bayard, a man from our own universe who went on to be an agent for the Imperium, a British/German empire that dominates another version of Earth.
Bayard plays a small but important role in this new novel, but the main character is a man named Johnny Curlon. He's also the narrator. Let's say hello to him.
Johnny is a big, strong guy who lives in Florida and runs a fishing boat. The story starts off with some tough hoods trying to intimidate him, but he deals with them easily. At this point, I thought I was reading one of John D. MacDonald's Florida-based suspense novels, particularly those featuring Travis McGee, a big, strong guy who owns a houseboat.
(If you haven't read them, give 'em a try. They're really good.)
Anyway, we find out this is a science fiction novel when Johnny gets rescued from his floundering boat, which the bad guys have sabotaged, by our old pal Brion. He carries Johnny around in a vehicle that can not only travel between universes, but is able to pass through solid matter and become invisible. Mighty handy little gizmo.
Naturally, Johnny is confused by all this. It seems that he's the key to preventing lots of universes from being wiped out by something called the Blight (capital letter and all.) There are antagonists eager to use Johnny for their own purposes.
At this point, Johnny's knife, which is actually part of an ancient sword handed down to him by his ancestors, gets reunited with another part of the ancient weapon. That's our first hint that this SF novel is going to seem a lot like a fantasy adventure.
Johnny winds up working with a fellow who is very obviously the main bad guy. (Obvious to the reader, anyway, although it's quite a while until Johnny catches on.) They travel to a universe whose only human inhabitant is a stunningly beautiful woman, straight out of a sword-and-sorcery story. She even has a pet griffin, and there's a giant around.
(This middle section of the book reminds me of Robert A. Heinlein's novel Glory Road. That was science fiction disguised as fantasy. This one is fantasy disguised as science fiction, to some degree.)
After leaving that magical place with another piece of the sword, the villain takes Johnny to the universe he wants to rule. It's a place where Richard Lionheart didn't die in battle, but lived to be a weak ruler. He wound up surrendering his kingdom to the French, so France is still in control of England, which is called New Normandy.
(Brion already told Johnny that he was the last descendent of the Plantagenets, so it all ties together, sort of.)
The bad guy's plan would come at the cost of destroying a bunch of universes. (You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, I guess.) Can our hero set things right? (Go ahead, take a guess.)
In typical Laumer fashion, this is an action-packed yarn that moves at a dizzying pace. It's not as tightly plotted as some, and I'd say it's the weakest book in the Imperium series. The middle section — you know, all that fantasy stuff — seems to come from another novel entirely. There's a lot of pseudoscientific blather trying to explain what's going on, and none of it makes any sense.
Nine years ago John Breton nearly lost his wife. Now, a decade later, he and Kate are drifting apart, their knives out at every opportunity, their marriage a fast cooling ember. John has thrown himself bodily into his geological consulting business, and his wife has picked a hobby John has no interest in, befriending Miriam Palfrey, an automatic writer. At a typical crashingly dull dinner party with the Palfreys, characterized by endless sniping, John decides only profound drunkenness will get him through the night.
Whereupon he receives a call:
"You've been living with my wife for almost exactly nine years–and I'm coming to take her back."
Because nine years ago, Kate had died. Two years into their marriage, a stupid fight had compelled Kate's husband to stay home, while she trooped through the night, headed for a party she would never attend, intercepted by a brutal rapist and killer.
John, calling himself Jack at the time, was devastated, wracked with guilt. More than this: he began to be unhinged from time, taking trips weekly to the scene of the crime. Jack resolved to stop Kate's murder, even if it meant rending the very fabric of space and causality.
Two timelines were created: Timeline A, in which Jack led a lonely, monomaniacal life, and Timeline B, in which a sleek and unappreciative John enjoyed his misbegotten wife, the fruits of the labor of his alter ego.
Thus, Jack hatched a plan–move sideways to Timeline B…and fill John's shoes, whether he liked it or not.
But the law of conservation of energy is a hard fact, in the multiverse as well as the universe. Jack Breton's actions threaten not only the rocky relationship of Kate and John, but also the whole of humanity.
According to the book's blurb, this is Shaw's third book, but the first to achieve wide distribution. I don't know what his first book was, but I read his second, Night Walk last year. Between that and his short stories, it was clear Shaw was a gifted author just waiting to grow out of his adolescence.
With The Two-Timers, he has done so.
I picked the book up just before bed and had to force myself to put it down. Eight hours later, it was in my hands again, and it did not leave until I'd finished the story come lunchtime (it was a welcome companion as I waited in the courthouse for a jury duty that never materialized).
The characters are vividly, deeply realized, all of them evolving throughout the story. We initially hate John and sympathize with Jack, but neither of the Bretons is wholly irredeemanble, nor sympathetic. And Kate is no prize to be won; she is an independent entity with her own virtues, failings, and feelings. Shaw reminds me a bit of Larry Niven, drawing people with quick, deft strokes. But Shaw has a sensitive style, working more with emotions than hard science. It's the people that matter in this piece; the SFnal content is exciting, necessary, but secondary.
The pacing in the book is exquisite, from the painful depiction of a marriage gone sour at the beginning, to the arrival of Jack, through the resolution of the resulting triangle. The interspersed scenes of the slow collapse of the physical universe around them are deftly handled, as is the closing in of Lieutenant Blaize Convery, the detective who knows Breton saved his wife nine years ago; he just can't figure out how.
As Lorelei (who picked up the book on my recommendation and tore through it in short order) notes, aside from the poetic writing, the real triumph of the book is that you get so many viewpoint characters, and so many changing perspectives on these characters, and none of it is confusing. It's just masterfully done.
It's a hard book to read in parts. The emotions here are fraught ones, and there are some rather unpleasant (though never gratuitous) scenes. Nevertheless, these are emotions that must be explored, and thankfully, the mystery and the brilliant writing carry you past them, as well as the satisfying resolution of the threesome's story. My only quibble is that the end doesn't quite work, logistically, though it makes sense thematically. And as Lorelei notes, it's a touch rushed.
Nevertheless, The Two-Timers is a terrific work, definitely a strong contender for my Hugo ballot next year.
We Americans love a good revolution story. After all, our nation was founded by a rebellion, and the appeal of an underdog throwing off an oppressor has been popular since David threw a rock at Goliath.
C.C. MacApp takes a stab at the theme with his latest book, Omha Abides, a tale of the 35th Century. 1500 years before, the Gaddyl had conquered the Earth. The amphibian aliens did not succeed without a fight, but their advanced technology, particularly their craft-shielding Distorters, proved decisive. Human civilization was shattered, the population reduced to a bare fraction, many of them condemned to slavery. Meanwhile, the Gaddyl build their own fiefdoms amidst the ruins of the human cities and built an interstellar teleport transit hub in Arizona.
Now Earth is a hunting preserve, humanity largely quiescent. The North American continent is home to just 25 million people…and half a million overlord Gaddyl. The humans who are not slaves roam in bands or live in primitive statelets. They have no hope of taking back the planet, until a series of events precipitously brings success in their reach.
Our hero is Murno, a freed man who lives with his family in Fief Bay, once known as San Francisco. A new, cruel lord has ascended to the fief throne, and he has decided that no longer shall free humans be off limits to hunting parties.
At the same time, Murno is contacted by the underground. He is entrusted with three items, two of them Gaddyl, and one of ancient human make, which he is tasked to take east, beyond the Sierras, beyond the mysterious Grove, even past the mighty Rockies, to where the mythical deity named "Omha" waits.
If you had a subscription to the recently defunct magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow, you may have read about half of this book. Victoria Silverwolf reviewed Under the Gaddyl Tree, which comprises about the first third of the book, and Trees Like Torches, which contains bits from the middle. Victoria gave both stories three stars and felt they were competent, but nothing special.
Often, the expansion of stories into a novel results in something less than the sum of its parts. The opposite occurs in this case. Now, instead of just being isolated, mildly interesting adventure stories, now Murno's encounters with Gaddyl, blue mutant humans, a giant grove of telepathic trees, and so on, gird a compelling plot. Humanity shouldn't have a chance against the Gaddyl. But neither should an electron, per classical physics, be able to jump energy levels. But thanks to quantum physics and the Uncertainty Principle, given a short enough period of time, an electron can possess abnormal amounts of energy.
Similarly, a confluence of circumstances makes for a successful rebellion opportunity. Because humanity had been waiting for its chance. The telepathic Blues had spies in pivotal places. There was an underground poised for action. There really is an Omha (and you can guess what its nature is early on, which will also clue you in on how to pronounce the word).
Add the trigger of the Gaddyl getting a bit too complacent and a bit too cruel, as well as the theft of some vital technologies, and a human victory becomes plausible.
The pacing of the book is a little off. Much of the human victory isn't even detailed until the last 25 pages of the book (though it turns out that's not really too short a span; MacApp pulls it off). Also, much reference is made to Murno baffling his alien pursuers with "trail puzzles", a phrase with which I'm not familiar, and whose meaning I still don't apprehend. Occasionally, the story does lapse into conventional adventure fare–more like a tale of the American West than the American future.
But, it's a book with real cinematic quality to it; the scenes in California were particularly resonant for me, a Golden State native. The Gaddyl are portrayed perhaps a touch too human, but I appreciated the range of types, from scoundrel to honorable enemy. And as an American, I suppose I've got as much a soft spot for overthrowing tyranny as anyone.
Four stars.
by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele
Last year's pairing of E.C Tubb and Juanita Coulson's has gotten an encore. In fact, both novels are sequels. My esteemed colleague and editor had favorable reviews of both, so I was excited to read them:
Earl Dumarest, the itinerant interstellar provocateur and do-gooder from The Winds of Gath returns in Derai, hunting news of Earth. On his way he takes a job escorting the Lady Derai of the House of Caldor back to her family on the planet Hive. He soon determines that Derai is a telepath. Her father sent her to the college of Cyclans to treat the constant fear and nightmares brought on by hearing the minds of those around her. Derai ran away from the college, where Cybers (once-humans with emotion and sensation excised who now can connect to a collective mind) wanted to use her genetics, turning her into a mindless vessel to bear telepathic children. Her home planet has its own risks – her uncle wants to take over the House, planning to assassinate her father and half-brother, and marry Derai to her cousin to gain legitimacy.
Dumarest keeps much of his thoughts to himself, both from the other characters and the reader, but cannot keep his developing feelings for Derai from her telepathic ability. He carries himself as a man who has seen too much. He inspires loyalty, and in those he has helped that is understandable, but it also comes from some who have only just met him. One man he meets through a mutual friend takes the chance of being burned to death to get a blade to Dumarest in a deadly maze arena.
Dumarest almost seems to resist the plot, needing to be pushed into each new quest. At times, his struggle as a character made him feel like a disparate individual, one side grim and withdrawn, another altruistic at great cost to himself; it's as if author Tubbs had two distinct directions for the novel in mind, and was unable to find the balance between them. Dumarest's staid demeanor only allows him to rebuff so much, and he is, if reluctantly, still prompted to aid disenfranchised travelers, save a gambler from himself, and compete in a tournament to prolong the head of Caldor House's life. Each time he intends to leave the House to its own devices, his feelings for Derai bring him back.
Tubb has a lurid, graphic style of description. It's equally evocative of beauty and violence. In a particularly unsettling set of scenes, Dumarest barely escapes being eaten alive like his companions by bird-sized bees. For how memorable the depictions of the insects were, I anticipated them playing a larger role in the overall story. The scenes stuck with me for several days due to the excessively grisly details.
Something else that ate at my brain: thanks to medical advancements and travel stasis Dumarest and Derai are chronologically far older than they seem, but Derai was described as childlike far too often for my liking. Tubb could have left it at one use of "nubile".
Geoff is a member of the Federation, the galactic government introduced in Coulson's Crisis on Cheiron. He embarks on what could be a suicide mission to the protectorate of Deliayan, Pa-Lüna. Both humans and Deliyans have been exploiting the people of Pa-Lüna, tricking them into indentured servitude. When a man is murdered right in front of him over a stone, Geoff investigates, finding the stone in question has strange, enchanting properties. He and Tahn, a Pa-Lünan, set out for the protectorate, and they meet Nedra, priestess of a mysterious goddess.
From the outset, he is on a clock: a past planetary mission left his team dead, and him with the lingering impacts from a past poisoning that flares, causing him pain and debilitating him with growing frequency. The nature of his sense of duty and outlook, framed by his limited lifespan, is compelling.
Geoff is a skeptic, both of motive and means. He views the people of Pa-Lüna with a mix of respect and condescension, but Geoff witnesses the tangible effects of the stones of song. They induce a euphoria and they, or their "goddess", can heal the sick and injured and strengthen her followers over time. Does the Goddess bestow gifts freely or are her worshipers trading one form of servitude for another, framed in a softer light? Are the powers of the Stones and the goddess's telepathic messages divine or an advanced, but still mortal mechanism?
I appreciated the exploration of what is becoming a new trend in sci-fi–rejecting overt military intrusions and favoring a system that furthers a newly-contacted culture's sovereignty. It's not a bad direction to go, though authors vary in degrees of patronizing the native people of these worlds, from treating them roughly as equals to regarding them as "primitive" beings who need protecting. And it does say something that it takes someone from outside the system to truly put things in motion, no matter how long change has been brewing. Having the fight be against not just an alien threat but also a human, institutional threat asks if human expansion is truly helping, needs tempering, or if it is causing more harm in the end.
All in all, a solid book. Had I not recently read several other books with a similar premise I would have liked it even more. However, I can't fault Coulson for the trends of this year. She created a rich tapestry and I would be happy to explore her worlds and characters in future stories.
At an event at the Institut Français in London recently, I was able to see the newly-translated animated film Asterix the Gaul (made in 1967, but only released in English this year). While it’s not a great adaptation, it is nice to see a series that’s only growing in popularity in the French-speaking world getting wider exposure.
Asterix the Gaul movie poster
In case you’ve missed the Asterix phenomenon, some background. Asterix le Gaulois, or Asterix the Gaul, is a Franco-Belgian comic from the writing and drawing team of Goscinny and Uderzo, originally serialised in 1959, with the first album coming out in 1961. Since then it’s only become more and more popular, with the ninth album, Asterix et les Normands (Asterix and the Normans) reaching 1.2 million sales in its first two days of release earlier this year.
On the face of it, Asterix might seem an unlikely hit. The story is a humourous historical fantasy, starting with a “what if…” premise to the effect that, after Caesar conquered Gaul and, as any schoolchild studying Latin knows, divided it into three parts, a small Gaulish village remained unconquered, due to their druid having invented a magic potion that gives the drinker super-strength. Our protagonist, Asterix, is a diminutive but sharp-witted warrior; his best pal is Obelix, a giant who has permanent super-strength due to having fallen in a vat of magic potion as a baby. Together, they have adventures traveling around Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, resisting Romans and meeting interesting, if frequently ethnically stereotyped, people.
Asterix' pal Obelix is a menhir salesman. He's barely in this story.
However, if you have a chance to read the albums, you can see the appeal. The puns are thick, heavy and groanworthy (particularly as regards the character names: the Gauls all have names ending in -ix, meaning we get people called Assurancetourix and Abracourix, and the Romans in -us, giving us Humerus and Fleurdelotus), and the anachronism humour nonstop. Additionally Goscinny and Uderzo have a lot of affectionate fun with projecting stereotypes of modern European nations back onto their Roman past equivalents. The story of plucky, likeable people resisting an oppressor is one with relevance to all political stripes. The Romans are always comically stupid and the violence cartoonish, keeping the tone from getting too heavy for children.
Asterix and Panoramix resisting Roman oppression
The series has appeared in English translation twice before now, both times in English children’s comics (Valiant and Ranger) and on neither occasion faithful, transporting the action to ancient Britain in the apparent belief that British audiences would be incapable of sympathising with French characters. However, word at the Institut is that an approved translation by Anthea Bell is currently in production and should be released next year.
Our hero was described in one English translation as an "ancient Brit with bags of grit." No, really.
The film Asterix the Gaul is a 70-minute animation, apparently originally planned as a telemovie but instead winding up in cinematic release. The visuals are, for the most part, decently done, and it has a jaunty theme tune by Gerard Calvi. The English voice cast are for the most part adopting American accents (the main exceptions being Stopthemusix the Bard and Julius Caesar, who are both using British received pronunciation), which seems an odd decision as French comics popular in other markets, such as Tintin, don’t generally do well in the American sphere, and it might be better to try and sell to the wider English-speaking world.
The plot more or less follows that of the comic album Asterix le Gaulois, the first adventure in the series. Roman centurion Phonus Balonus (Caius Bonus in the original comic), wanting to know the secret of the Gauls’ super-strength, sends a spy into the village disguised as a Gaul. Upon learning that the secret is the potion brewed by druid Panoramix, the Romans kidnap him, with Phonus Balonus planning to use his strengthened legions to become Emperor. Asterix sneaks into their camp with a view to rescuing Panoramix, but, on finding his friend in good spirits and having fun winding up the Romans, Asterix surrenders and joins him, with the pair living a luxurious life at the Romans’ expense. Finally Panoramix pretends to give in, but in fact brews a potion which makes the drinkers’ hair and beards grow uncontrollably. Realising that they can’t keep the gag going indefinitely, Panoramix pretends to brew an antidote, while also secretly furnishing Asterix with a small amount of magic potion. When the pair make their escape, they run into Caesar himself, who has come to investigate the mysterious goings-on in person.
Julius Caesar does not approve of Panoramix's beard-growing potion.
The decision to adapt the first book in the series, and without the input of the creators, is arguably the film’s biggest problem. A lot of the running gags and characters which have contributed to the series’ appeal, such as Obelix’s tiny dog Idéfix and the ongoing feud between fishmonger Ordraflfabétix and blacksmith Cétautomatix, were worked out in later volumes, and the story feels thin without them. Although Asterix has never exactly been known for its female characters (there are exactly two women regulars, both stereotypes and only one having an actual name), in the film the village seems to be a homosexual commune, with no women or children at all. Goscinny and Uderzo were reportedly very unhappy with this movie, and it’s a shame they weren’t involved, as they could have revised their earlier story to include this later material.
The translation is generally serviceable. The punning names are retained and even arguably improved, with the bard Assurancetourix becoming Stopthemusix and Abraracourcix the chief becoming Tonabrix. The narration has a few heavy-handed gags like “Caesar had a lot of Gaul,” and there are more subtle jokes for those who remember their classics, like Phonus Balonus proposing to his second-in-command Marcus Sourpus that they form a triumvirate (not knowing that a triumvirate is, by definition, made up of three men). There’s a long and rather unfunny sequence with a singing ox-cart driver that feels like it’s just in to fill time, but there is also a blink-and-you-miss-it moment where Panoramix appears to be gathering marijuana in the woods.
That's some suspicious-looking smoke. Panoramix.
All in all, while it’s not the best introduction to the series, it gives English-speaking audiences a general flavour. It’s good to see a cartoon series where the main character lives by his wits more than his fists, and where bullies are shown as hapless incompetents who can be defeated by ridicule. Reportedly a new film is in production, based on Asterix et Cleopatre (Asterix and Cleopatra), with the creators’ full involvement, and I look forward to seeing if it is an improvement.
There's an interesting piece by Ted White in May's Science Fiction Review. He talks about how the magazines are on a slow, inexorable decline due to a number of factors. The biggest is that SF mags used to be just one subgenre of the myriad pulps, all of which had their lurid covers prominently displayed at every corner newsstand. Sure, the SF pulps weren't exactly of a piece with their mystery, Western, and thriller brethren, but Joe Palooka didn't care, grabbing the most attractive issues. So, SF thrived, making a profit even if it sold just 25% of a print run.
Note Astounding (now Analog) in the upper left and Amazing in the upper right
Then the pulps died in the 50s, partly due to changing tastes, mostly due to the collapse of American News Company, the main distributor for monthly mags (and comics). The remaining SF mags were consigned to lesser shelves, all by themselves. The average schmo got his entertainment from TV.
The profit mark has now risen to 50%–in other words, at least half of the issues printed must sell for the run to break even. This makes it very risky for the mags to try to expand their market by printing more issues. If they, say, print 50K and sell 35K, well and good. But if they then print 200K and sell 96K…they've lost money on the run.
Add to that even SF people are losing interest in mags, lured by paperbacks and the new paperback anthologies, and dismayed (as I have been) by the declining quality of stories over the last ten years. The only thing that keeps us subscribing is inertia and brand loyalty. That'll wear off unless the magazines manage to turn the ship.
The magazines have been around for almost half a century. Assuming they are around in the 21st Century, and if this trend continues, they will service an increasingly small fraction of the SF-interested community. They will be like the horseshoe crab: living fossils, unchanged for 300 million years, clinging to life in a wildly different environment.
But that's all speculation. For now, enough good stuff still comes out in the mags to keep me buying. Though the high variability of the latest issue of F&SF may cause me to revisit that policy…
Over Hill and Dale
by Chesley Bonestell—this is the same nebula featured repeatedly in the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor"
Ogre!, by Ed Jesby
It's been four years since Ed Jesby offered up his first tale, Sea Wrack, which was so-so. His sophomore tale, Ogre!, is an improvement.
Knut the Ogre takes a nap sometime in the Middle Ages. When he awakes, covered in loam and with mushrooms growing in his ears, he finds he has slept clear through to the 20th Century. There (then), the seven-foot beast befriends a timid bookie on the run from the Mob. You see, Ogres are actually misunderstood creatures, quite nice and mild despite the calumny heaped upon them by humans.
Together, Knut and the bookie (and the bookie's seamstress pal) hatch a scheme to get the bookie off the hook and out of the business. And of course, it involves horses:
To Harry the plan seemed to be basically sound: after all the way to make money was on the races; there was no better way. You took bets or you made them, all other ways of earning a living were mysterious, square, or the result of inheritance.
It's really a charming tale, and it put me in a charitable mood for the rest of the issue. More fool me…
Four stars.
Butterfly Was 15, by Gilbert Thomas
A scurrilous German scientist has learned how to manipulate others with the judicious use of electrodes and remote transmitters. He meets his match when he locks horns with a traditional psychologist with methods of his own.
This is supposed to be a funny piece. I found its themes of mind control and Ephebophilia to be thoroughly repellent.
Once again, we turn to our friend, Brian, who will likely never volunteer for anything ever again…
by Brian Collins
We now find ourselves in the final installment of the latest F&SF serial, but unfortunately it’s so long as to encompass nearly half the novel. We run into trouble before we’ve even jumped into the story proper, as the recap section commits the grievous sin of telling us about things that we have not been able to read for ourselves. At the end of the previous installment you may recall that Sos and Sol are about to fight in the battle circle to see who takes custody of Sola and Soli, Sol’s wife and adopted daughter respectively. Apparently, between installments, Sos lost the fight, and is now journeying up “the mountain” to commit ritual suicide.
I do not understand how this happened. It could be that Anthony had turned in an early draft of the novel and had intended to write the fight scene between Sos and Sol, but all the same, this is such a glaring oversight as to show incompetence. I was confused at first because I thought I had somehow missed the ending of the previous installment, but no, I had not missed anything; it’s just that the fight and its immediate aftermath were kept “offscreen.”
Now up to date, we find Sos who, naturally, does not die on his way up this freezing mountain, but falls unconscious and is rescued by a small society of people who are somewhere between the crazies (the civilized people) and the nomads who roam the wasteland. We come across the second major female character of the novel (foreboding music plays), who, as you would expect, goes unnamed at first. She’s a short athletic girl whom Anthony repeatedly calls childlike and “Elfen,” but also attractive, which makes me wonder if Anthony might be appealing to a certain subspecies of male reader here. The girl steals Sos’s bracelet and makes him work for it, all but forcing him into taking her as his wife. As if the institution of marriage were not already filled with holes, the system presented in this novel may be fit for ants, spiders, and other small invertebrates, but not actual humans.
Since this is at least theoretically the last stretch of the narrative, in which we find our hero at his lowest point before he rises from the darkness, I need not go into great detail as to what happens next—except for one thing: Sosa (for that is her name now) reveals that she’s been desperate to find a husband, having gone through several men already, because she feels great angst at not being able to produce a child. Infertility is often sad news, to be sure, but in a world where contraception is presumably hard to acquire, I can’t imagine this strikes Sos’s ears as too sad; after all, he’s still committed to Sola in his heart.
Piers Anthony seems to understand women about as much as I understand the inner workings of a submarine.
Having given up his rope in his fight with Sol (another major detail we are not told about until after the fact), Sos has not only regained his confidence but taken up fists as his new weapon. I don't recall if we get his new full name (as men in the novel’s world have a monosyllable followed by their weapon of choice), but Sos the Fist sounds…….
Anyway, there is an inevitable rematch, and this time Sos is victorious. The ending here implies that there may be a sequel in the works, but I’m not waiting to see what Anthony does next. 1 out of 5 stars for this installment, and barely 2 out of 5 stars for the novel.
Someone in the zines was complaining that magazines never run worthy poetry anymore, that back in the golden days of the 50s, most of the pieces were memorable.
Keeping up the trend, De Camp offers up a snatch of doggerel comparing the titanic beasts of yore with the primate beasts of now. Pretty pat stuff.
It is amazing the lengths to which people will go to maintain a sinecure. Harry Van Deventer is the richest man in the world, senile and filled with infantile rage and a teen's hormones. His hangers-on can only manage him by keeping his surroundings perfectly controlled—a willing nurse here, an emergency surgery to fix a day's incaution there. But even a 24/7 watch can slip up…
It's hard to imagine a man both so utterly terrible and yet so rich and powerful that so many would endure so much to keep him alive. But I suppose venality trumps all.
Three stars.
The Evaporation of Jugby, by Stephen Barr
Wadsworth Jugby is a big zero, a department store Vice President-without-portfolio, mediocre in every way. He finally gets the opportunity to live life from a different perspective when his friend, Dan Byron, invents a psyche-swapping machine. Intoxicated by his exchange, he eagerly agrees to expand the scope of the experiment, round-robining with six other folks. The end is…well, given away by the title.
Fluff, with one funny line:
"Jugby could suggest a puzzled frown without lowering his eyebrows-some monkeys can do this."
Two stars.
The Dying Lizards, by Isaac Asimov
Last month, the Good Doctor had a terrific article on the dinosaurs. This month, unfortunately, he indulges in speculation, which never works out well.
The topic this time 'round is the sudden death of the dinosaurs. He advances various climatic and medical hypotheses, discarding each one in turn. He poopoos the idea of mammals being "superior" as we existed alongside dinosaurs for most, if not all, of their tenure on Earth. Asimov leaves off with the suggestion that an external event caused it, specifically a nearby supernova that spiked radiation-induced mutations.
Again, I have trouble seeing how the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and icthyosaurs and pleisiosaurs could all have destructive mutations but not the birds and mammals. I think Ike's cute idea that dinosaurs evolved intelligence and killed themselves with powerful weapons, which would have occurred in the blink of an paleontological eye and thus escape excavation, is more plausible.
Three stars.
A Scare in Time, by David R. Bunch
The demarkations of time, the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and centuries, have met in their onion dome. Tired of being measured and metered by humanity, they plot their ultimate revenge…only to have it foiled by human ingenuity.
A cute modern fairy tale. Three stars.
The Moving Finger Types, by Henry Slesar
Twilight Zone department: Legget couldn't figure out what was wrong with his life. It was like his every move was laid down in a script, and he'd lost the page. Little did he know, that's exactly what had happened.
A fun bit on predestination told in Slesar's competent screenwriter fashon.
Four stars.
by Gahan Wilson
Mixed feelings
You can see my problem. If you read from either end of this issue, you've got a good 30 pages of material (and you can count Merril's book column, too, though I rarely agree with her assessments, and her tastes are drifting far afield of SF these days). But if you read through the middle, that's a lot of one-star territory to slog through. A lot.
Is half a loaf better than none? More importantly, is it worth fifty cents a month?
I’ve reviewed some frightening movies in this magazine before – the existential middle-aged angst of Seconds, the gothic horror of Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and the eerie uncanny feeling of Planet of the Vampires, among others. But I’ve never reviewed a movie that’s scary in quite the same way as the new movie Targets.
Targets is frightening because it’s so real. It’s loosely based on the story of the Texas Tower Sniper. This real-life horror happened on August 1, 1966, when a seemingly ordinary man, a Marine veteran named Charles Whitman, climbed the long stairs of the Main Building at the University of Texas with rifles and a sawed-off shotgun and then began indiscriminately opening fire during a class break on campus.
Whitman killed 14 people that day, students walking on the campus mall and people shopping along distant Guadalupe Street, people cowering and people walking innocently. 31 more were injured, stark and frightening numbers we all hope will never be reached again.
A news photo from that terrible day in Austin, Texas.
As subsequent news reports shared, Whitman was a man with a bit of a broken life. He was an orphan who was adopted by an exacting family in which the father was never satisfied. He served in the Marines but never saw battle, instead studying engineering. At the time of his shooting, it seems he was in an unhappy marriage and struggling with mental health. And though we might try to guess what caused Whitman to snap that day, in the end, the inner life of Charles Whitman will always be a mystery. And in that lack of closure lies perhaps the greatest horror of all, because Whitman is a Rorschach test, a person onto whom we can project our own confusion, our fears and our worries about the modern world.
The blurry line between fiction and reality
In Targets our killer has the banal name of Bobby Thompson, played by Tim O’Kelly. Thompson lives in the quiet and peaceful San Fernando Valley. He’s in his 20s, lives with his parents and seems like an ordinary young man who suddenly seems to get into his head to… murder his family brutally.
Director Peter Bogdanovich, in his feature debut, does a fantastic job of creating that shock value for viewers, as we are lulled into a calm, false sense of security. Everything at the Thompson house seems very calm and serene on the surface, very 1968 you might say, in which everything seems quite placid on the surface of things.
And just like in our terrible year of assassinations and wars and riots in the streets, below the surface of a seemingly peaceful existence is an unbelievable amount of roiling turmoil desperately trying to escape.
But in this movie, Bogdanovich also brings in another element, one that really gives this film a smartly designed feeling of tension. Because there’s another plot in this film. Boris Karloff essentially plays himself in this movie, in documentary-like scenes in which washed-up old horror actor Byron Orlok decides he is out of step with the times. Nobody likes his outdated style of horror anymore. His work and his style are no longer relevant, so Orlok has decided to return to London to retire.
Mr. Bogdanovich on the left, Mr. Karloff on the right.
But Orlok’s companion, film director Sammy Michaels – played by director Bogdanovich! – persuades Orlok to make one final public appearance in Los Angeles. They decide to attend a premiere of his final film at a drive-in in LA suburb Reseda and arrange his appearance there.
As the day goes on, we witness two parallel threads. In one, we see Orlok make his preparations to attend the premiere and hear him talk about the changes in modern society from his time in the limelight. In the other, deeply chilling thread, we witness Thompson on top of an oil tank in the San Fernando Valley, assassinating innocent people who are just driving down the freeway.
Those assassination scenes feel like they take an eternity because of the smart ways Bogdanovich, designer Polly Plott and cinematographer László Kovács compose the scene: with bland, sun-washed colors, an alienating sense of distance, the random way Thompson seems to be sprawled on the tanker floor. And his escape is also presented in an equally powerful, equally bland way. Though an oil company employee discovers him, that man is dispatched in an un-cinematic manner and Thompson’s escape does not present him in a light that makes the assassin heroic in any way.
Eventually Thompson flees to a movie theatre, the same theatre where Orlok’s film will be premiering. In an ironical fulfilment his own fears, Orlok’s is rendered irrelevant by the real-world horrors of 1968. We see a few scenes of the film. It looks like a Roger Corman adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, and ten years ago that film would have fit the times well. But 1968 requires sterner horrors. ‘68 requires Rosemary’s Baby and The Hour of the Wolf and the more existential fears of Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It perhaps requires a different type of horror as in The Devil Rides Out. And it requires the profoundly upsetting horror of Targets.
Targets is not a perfect film. It’s a bit fannish feeling, no surprise because Bogdanovch is a prominent writer for film journals and reportedly is working on a documentary of the great director John Ford. Orlok is named after the lead character in the classic 1922 German expressionistic vampire film Nosferatu – a film student reference if I ever heard one – and the slightly postmodern feel of the Orlok scenes take away from the horror of the massacre.
The drive-in before it was full.
But despite that, in this year of Kennedy and King, when Cronkite is talking over scenes from Vietnam every night at 6:00 and American cities are on fire, Targets hits close to the bone. I had real trouble overcoming my sheer personal horror at the events on the screen. In other words, I appreciated the artfulness of this movie but it took every force of will to keep myself in my seat and not walk out on it. Sometimes horror is too difficult to face, or maybe it’s too pervasive to face directly. Maybe we need something more indirect to allow ourselves to appreciate the fear. Poor innocent pregnant Rosemary isn’t like us. But Bobby Thompson? Any of us can snap, for no reason. That evil within every one of us is the most frightening thing I can imagine.
3½ stars – but again, be warned this is a very upsetting film.
![[September 10, 1968] Across time and space… (<i>The Girl Who Leapt Through Time</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/680916cover.jpeg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
</small![[September 8, 1968] Those Darn Space-Hippies (<i>Doctor Who</i>: The Dominators)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/680908dinkyrobots.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 6, 1968] Adventures for a Dime: Science Fiction and Horror Dime Novels in West Germany](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/UTOPIA_SF_568.jpg?resize=349%2C372&ssl=1)
![[September 2, 1968] What might have been (October 1968 <i>IF</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/IF-1968-10-Cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
Scientists on Mars make an unexpected find. Art by Chaffee
Art by Gaughan
Feeding time. Art by Virgil Finlay
The head vampire meets the scientist and his beautiful daughter. Art by Gaughan
Dom fights his way through the enemy ship. Art by Adkins
Siggie religion features quaint rituals. Art by Brand
Three out of the four have potential, but I’d rather have the whole Zelazny.![[August 31, 1968] The Sound and the Fury (September 1968 <i>Analog</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/680831cover.jpg?resize=606%2C372&ssl=1)
![[August 30, 1968] TV or Not TV, That is The Question (<i>They Saved Hitler's Brain</i> and <i>Mars Needs Women</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Untitled-2.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[August 24, 1968] Here, There, and Nowhere (August 1968 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/680824galactoscope.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[August 22, 1968] Vive de Gaul– Asterix the Gaul Movie](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/H0472-L230456154.jpeg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[August 20, 1968] A tale of two issues (September 1968 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/680820cover.jpg?resize=659%2C372&ssl=1)
![[August 18, 1968] The Horror is Real (<i>Targets</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/680818targets.jpg?resize=500%2C372&ssl=1)
