Well, this is exciting! For the first time ever, two identical Mariner probes are on their way to an interstellar destination. On March 27, Mariner 7 blasted off for Mars, joining its sister, Mariner 6, which was launched last month.
Normally, twin probes are launched for redundancy, and it's a good thing. Venus-boundMariner 1 died when its booster exploded back in '62. Mars-bound Mariner 3 never hatched from its egg (the shroud of its Atlas-Agena rocket) back in 1964. Mariner 5, which went to Venus in 1967, was a solo mission (indeed, a spare Mariner of the 3/4 class).
But now we've got two Mariners winging their way to the Red Planet, which means we'll get twice the coverage and a redundant set of data, always a welcome occurrence for scientists! We'll have more on them when they pass by Mars in July.
Mack ho!
by Kelly Freas
Just as we have two Mariners dominating the head of this article, so we have science fictioneer Mack Reynolds dominating this latest issue of Analog science fiction. Under his own name, and under his pseudonym "Guy McCord", more than half of this issue is a Reynolds contribution. If you like the guy, you'll like the mag. If not…
We once again return to the Reynolds' late 20th Century, where America languishes under the stratified People's Capitalism. This novel is also the second adventure of one of the last private detectives, Rex Bader (whose first job was just a couple of months ago. As with that freshman outing, Bader is offered a job that seems too good to be true, and he refuses, but no one else buys that he did.
In this case, the job was offered by the head of one of the world's biggest corporations. He wants Bader to go to cross the Iron Curtain to contact other corporation buffs so as to help take down the Meritocracy—the powers that be that have entrenched themselves in the highest levels of society.
The mob also contacts Bader, wanting him to be their double agent. Then the Defense Department gets involved. Finally, a group of latter-day Technocrats make their pitch. Presumably, the "fifth way" will be Rex Bader's own.
This book is typical Reynolds: the setting has been well established over the years, all the way back to the Joe Mauser, Mercenary days. There are historical dissertations woven in at every opportunity, mostly on early 20th Century political theory. The writing is serviceable, somewhat wry—a more grounded Keith Laumer.
What makes this particular piece stand out are the new wrinkles Reynolds introduces. First, this is the first time we've learned how elections work in this world: it's based on income—one vote for every dollar earned (investment income does not impart voting rights). Thus, the masses on "Negative Income Tax" have no franchise.
Reynolds continues to invent plausible future technology, too. My favorite is the pocket TV/phone/credit card/identity all citizens carry. A handy device, but also vulnerable to surveillance—which is done by computers which listen for key words; if they hear any, they alert a government agent.
So on the one hand, as far as quality of writing and enjoyment is concerned, I'd give this piece three stars. But I admire Reynolds for doing stuff few others do, so I'm actually awarding four.
Hey But No Presto, by Jack Wodhams
by Leo Summers
Folks are being snatched out of psionic teleportation booths as they try to go to Earth. They get sent to this backwater planetary resort where they are charged outrageous rates to stay in mediocre lodgings. They stay because the cost to go home is set even higher. An interstellar cop is sent to investigate.
This one-note tale is so padded, it could replace a warehouse of pillows. One star.
They're Trying to Tell Us Something (Part 2 of 2), by Thomas R. McDonough
Last month, Tom McDonough talked about pulsars—those rapidly beeping star-type objects—and did his darndest to convince us that they are artificial beacons operated by Little Green Men (LGM).
This second part is more of the same, though he actually does mention other possibilities, including the most fashionable one that they are rotating neutron stars. My problem with this segment is it is heavy on the layman's lingo and light on the showing of work. It all feels a bit fluffy. Also, he talks about how pulsars emit light bursts at twice the frequency as their radio bursts, and he makes it seem like that's mysterious. If the pulsar is really a rotating neutron star, then it makes sense for any emissions to be linked. Why we only get radio signals from one side, I don't understand off the top of my head, but I suspect anyone with a Bachelors in Physics could tell me.
Three stars.
Cultural Interference, by Walter L. Kleine
by Leo Summers
A couple of scientists begin an experiment with broadcast power. Coincidentally, a couple of extraterrestrial spaceships accidentally intercept and soak up the power, causing them to crash. Chaos ensues.
Wireless power seems to be the rage these days, figuring prominently in Keith Laumer's serial, And Now They Wake. This particular tale is overpadded and pointless.
Two stars.
Opportunist, by Guy McCord
by Kelly Freas
This is the third tale of Caledonia, a backwards planet probably in the same universe as his United Planets tales in which every world has its own uniquely evolved political and social structure. Caledonians all hail from a single crashed colony ship, and their culture is a mix of Scots and indigenous American, based on the few books that survived planetfall (shades of Star Trek's "A Piece of the Action".
In this installment, Caledonia has been largely subjugated by mining concerns from Sidon, and the native Caledonians must resort to guerrila tactics. John of the Hawks, Chief Raid Cacique of the Loch Confederation is captured by the Sidonians and offered a job in their civilian government. After being told the virtues of civilization and capitalism, he decides to hang up his claidheamhor and war bonnet and sell out.
I din't like it. Two stars.
Oh ho!
Well now, here is a case of science fiction definitely being less compelling than science. With the exception of the serial, this was a drab ish, barely scoring 2.7. This puts Analog under Fantasy and Science Fiction (3), IF (3.1), Galaxy (3.5), and New Worlds (3.6). Campbell's mag only beat out the usual losers: Fantastic (2.5), Famous #8 (1.8), and Famous #9 (2).
From eight mags, you could barely fill two big ones with the good stories this month, although part of the reason for that is Famous being so awful. Women produced just 7% of the new fiction stories this month.
I guess the moral is: read your newspapers and your Pohl (and UK) mags first. Pick up Analog only if you've finished the rest. Or if you really like Mack Reynolds…
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory may have discovered clues to the origins of life in space. Looking at interstellar clouds, believed to be where planets and stars are formed, traces of formaldehyde have been detected.
140’ Radio Telescope at Green Bank, responsible for this discovery
The reason this is important is that it is a sign of the presence of methane, formaldehyde occurring in the oxidation process. From the Miller-Urey experiments, it is widely believed that for primitive life to occur, you need a reducing atmosphere to allow complex molecules to form. Along with already detected ammonia and water, these appear to show the elements needed for a reducing atmosphere are already present in these clouds.
If this is found to hold up, we may be a step closer to understanding the birth of life on Earth.
On British television, we are also seeing a kind of rebirth. Of Out of the Unknown without the driving force of Irene Shubik.
Out of the Unknown
With Shubik’s departure for The Wednesday Play, following the commissioning of scripts, it has been up to new producer Alan Bromly to make them a reality.
In many ways Bromly is the opposite of Shubik, an old hand at directing and TV production back to the early 50s, but with little experience in Science Fiction. Rather he has made a name for himself across a range of different productions, most notably the anthology slot BBC Sunday Night Theatre, soap opera Compact and films such as The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp.
So how did it turn out?
(I would like to take a brief moment to thank my colleague Fiona for using her contacts at the BBC to provide us with colour publicity photos. I am still using a Black & White set at home).
Big Prophets, Short Returns
The hunt for good science fiction begins.
This series of plays opens with a well-known novel, Robert Sheckley’s Immortality Inc. Even though this does a reasonable job of condensing the story into a 50-minute slot, and it bounces along quite nicely, I find both versions a bit soulless. I just find I am not really invested in who gets the body, which is a big problem for the central conflict.
“Why, yes I do look a lot younger than Cushing did, let’s not go on about it…”
Different issues plague the other novel adaptation of the season, Asimov’s The Naked Sun.
The script makes an effort to place this as a sequel to the 1964 production of The Caves of Steel, with Bailey opening the story talking about “Caves of Steel”, his delight at being partnered again with Daneel, and Secretary Minim referencing the previous case in Brooklyn. Even if Paul Maxwell (Fireball XL-5’s Steve Zodiac) is no Peter Cushing, he still does well paired-off against relative newcomer David Collings.
As people know of the original novel, the case is pretty interesting and, even if at times it feels a bit overwrought with all the yelling, the twists and turns of the story kept me engaged. The problem stems from the conversations largely being communicated through viewscreens. Unfortunately, whilst Rudolph Cartier is an experienced director (and did a great job on Level Seven), he fails to give it flair Saville did in The Machine Stops.
Herbie awakes to find himself in yet another Asimov adaptation
Of course, Shubik could never choose just one Asimov script, so our second is Liar! Robot romantic comedies seem to have become a regular feature of Out of the Unknown (see also Andover and the Android, Satisfaction Guaranteed) but this one missed the mark for me somewhat.
This has never been my favourite of Asimov’s Robot stories and the teleplay has similar issues. I find the psychic robot too contrived and I really don’t enjoy how much of it is built around Calvin’s attraction to her colleague.
It is well-made and Gifford gives a great performance as the robot psychologist (now her third on-screen depiction), so it will probably appeal more to others. But it is not entirely to my tastes.
“I am no longer just Captain Blue, I am now also Captains Lilac, Pink, Fuschia, Green and Khaki”
The third big name writer to be adapted in this run is Clifford Simak and his stories are the ones that tread into the most traditionally SFnal territory, starting with the first contact tale of Beach Head.
I will concede that it looks excellent, with the unusual design of the robots and the aliens being particularly noteworthy. However, this was the weakest installment for me, with three different problems.
Firstly, not all of the performances are pitched right, particularly Ed Bishop playing the lead role very broadly. This is more important in this story where neither the robots nor the aliens speak or emote. As such we rely on the human actors to carry the weight.
Secondly, the action in the first half is divided between robots outside and humans inside, making the pacing glacial until the aliens arrive.
Finally and most significantly, as Victoria said in her review of the original tale, this is not a particularly good example of a puzzle story and it doesn’t add up to much. So, however much it is nice to look at, you spend your time going through a lot of dull content for a rather empty ending.
Set course for planetfall…again!
The other Simak marks another first for Out of the Unknown, Shubik electing to remake a script already done for Out of this World, Target Generation.
Even those SF fans who did not catch its first use will find the tale a familiar one. It is not that it is not a good exploration of the standard themes about blind faith and static thinking leading to our doom, just not one with many surprises. Possibly one for the casual viewer not so aware of science fiction cliches.
Medical Marvels
Channeling his inner Timothy Leary to find the truth in a pill
The Yellow Pill is also a script reused from Out of This World, actually being the first episode of that series, yet I felt its restaging works better than the Simak. This is because it is somewhat more unusual in its content.
Whilst its staging could feel a bit old fashioned, largely only utilising a single set, this play-like feeling adds to the sense of unreality we are meant to experience. Add into this a strong script, great performances and the questioning of what is real, and it still feels fresh.
The most important use of futuristic medical devices, removing bags under the eyes
The Yellow Pill is only one of several scripts that concentrate on the medical aspects of technological progress. Kornbluth’s The Little Black Bag looks at what might happen if future medical equipment ends up in the past.
Even though I feel this has a solid idea at its core, the episode could have done with a bit of a reworking. It does have some great moments (particularly in the last ten minutes), however the pacing goes back and forth too much for my tastes. I also found that parts are over-explained, whilst other vital questions are left hanging.
The generation gap on show
Michael Ashe’s The Fosters (an original for OOTU) seems at first like it might be a piece of domestic drama about the conflict between respectable middle-class families and rebellious youth. But it unfolds nicely in little moments, with the titular couple’s unusual knowledge and strange eating habits bringing with it unease and tension. Even though the end reveal is a bit of a letdown, the journey is a strong one.
Pregnancy screening has come a long way from HIT
Even though the UK’s fertility rate has been steadily declining for the last few years, overpopulation is still a major topic among SF writers. Brian Hayles (of Ice Warrior fame) continues that discussion in 1+1=1.5, an original where the wife of a population control officer becomes pregnant for the second time.
The result is a bit of a mixed bag. It has interesting elements with the catchy jingles on population control, reminiscent of The Year of the Sex Olympics, and it has in its lead roles the great pairing of Bernard Horsfall and Julia Lockwood.
However, I found the mystery of how Mary got pregnant was overemphasized, resulting in a rather dull conclusion, when I would have preferred a focus on the more interesting human side.
The Human Element
“I wonder if I can get the cricket on this?”
This human element can be seen in the final of the original productions, Donald Bull’s Something in the Cellar. This is a Nigel Kneale-esque production, putting a science fictional twist on the gothic haunted house story.
I will concede it does stretch out a bit, but it is still spooky and character driven, with the voice of the “mum” being particularly unsettling.
Two Worlds, how to choose between them?
This kind of character-driven storytelling is also present in John Wyndham’s Random Quest, a story of dual time-scales.
Whilst I was never as much of a fan of this Wyndham as some of his other works, and found the script a bit drawn out, I cannot fault the production overall. The design of the parallel universe England is well realized, with the Edwardian touches being very clever. It would also be easy to find the whole conceit rather confusing, but the crew did a great job of helping the audience understand the split in the narrative.
Apparently, this has gone down extremely well and there has even been interest floated in adapting it for the big screen.
An inebriated Hale doesn’t realise the trouble coming to him
Even though the original story, as Mark noted, is nothing special, this is a largely straight adaptation raised up by a number good choices:
• The casting of George Cole and Peter Halliday as Hale and Wilson respectively.
• Jeremy Paul expands the wider implications of the tale, making mentions of problems of inflation, sexuality and psychological breakdown.
• Making the death of Wilson the mid-point of the story, rather than the ending.
• Douglas Camfield’s direction making it a creepy tale of paranoia instead of a farce.
I do find it curious Shubik chose it for the same season as the conceptually similar Immortality Inc., but this one shines rather than dulls in comparison.
“It is all quite simple. You are actually a science fiction writer, in a dream, that is drawing from SF cliches, that is part of a teleplay on BBC2, which is adapted from a novelette, originally published in Astounding Magazine.”
The series is finished with one of its finest ever productions, Get Off Of My Cloud.
Adapted from the excellent story Dreams are Sacred by Peter Phillips (well known to British readers due to its inclusion in the highly regarded Spectrum III anthology) it is a comical take on the cliches of pulp science fiction whilst also asking questions about the nature of fantasy versus reality.
As well as transferring the setting to the UK and adding in some wonderful Britishisms (Raymond Cusick did the design work for this episode and his incorporation of Daleks and the TARDIS are marvelous) it also builds on the idea of our childhood fears and looks at how we conquer them.
The Queen is Dead, Long Live the King
Just a few of the excellent SF anthologies currently available at your local bookshop
Whilst there have been teething troubles in a few of the stories, overall, I have enjoyed this season. It continues to show the value of the science fiction anthology series which, just like its paperback equivalent, offers a great way to explore a multitude of themes and ideas.
Whatever mysteries are unlocked by scientists, I have no doubt that SF writers will continue to find interesting questions to explore and there will be a place for this kind of television.
Following their marriage in Gibraltar, experimental artist Yoko Ono and her husband, John Lennon, did something unusual for their honeymoon. In Amsterdam they stayed in bed… for peace.
In complete contrast to the infamous Two Virgins album cover, they were fully attired and let the press observe them for 8 hours a day during their week long stay. They said they wanted to promote peace via staying put and letting their hair grow out.
Is this a way to use their fame for a good cause? Or a stunt to drum up publicity? Whatever the case may be, it has drummed up a lot of media attention and discussion. And it is also certain the modern media has made communication of a message across the world easier than ever before.
Whether or not it will have any lasting effect remains the question, both for this protest and the short-lived quarterly magazine, Famous Science Fiction.
The cover and first internal art illustrate the main novella for this issue, the first in Diffin’s Dark Moon series. This was first published in Astounding’s May 1931 issue.
The original, looks better in colour
In this tale, earthquakes and tidal waves are plaguing the Earth, and mysterious creatures are attacking airliners. This all seems related to a new satellite that has entered orbit, a “dark moon” (named as such because it can only be seen when it transverses other bodies).
Travelling to explore this world are Chet Bullard and Walter Harkness, two Howard Hughes-esque business magnates, pursued by their rival Herr Schwartzmann.
It is full of the cliches of the day, including villainous Central Europeans, radium powered weapons, rescuing of a damsel-in-distress and giant insectoid and serpentine monsters. It also has the usual tendency of pulp fiction for over-description to the point of redundancy.
However, it moves along well, like a Douglas Fairbank adventure movie, with enough derring-do to keep you entertained. In addition, it makes more efforts than most short stories to place us fully in this future world, with mentions of a prior invasion from mole people living under the Earth and explanations of the fashions of the 1970s (apparently Harkness dresses much the same way I do in my profile picture).
This is a hard story to truly judge as it is really only the first section of a trilogy of tales. The cover image doesn’t take place until three quarters of the way through and they soon simply return to Earth. If it was written today, it probably wouldn’t gain more than two stars. However, I will be generous, in due deference to age, and give it a low Three Stars.
Art and Artiness by Lester Del Rey
This is the text of Del Rey’s speech that he was unable to give at the 1967 WorldCon. In essence, it is a broad-side against the New Wave. Whilst there are some interesting points that could be discussed, such as whether man in a crisis acts selfishly or selflessly, it comes across to me more as a poorly considered rant including such statements as:
“Art has been used as a cop-out for incompetent craftmanship.”
“It isn’t reality or integrity these writers are using. Instead, they’re using a cheap excuse for doing lazy work.”
“They have moved from the college writing class to the too-easy sale of stories without the need to rub against the real world of action under stress. They are empty men, and the only reality they can fully know is the pettiness of their character.”
So, Lester, allow me a quick retort.
Let us start be considering the ABC of the British New Wave (Aldiss, Ballard & moorCock). Starting with biography, Aldiss served in Burma with Royal Signal Corps and Ballard spent World War 2 in a Japanese internment camp. These seem reasonable environments for observing men under stress. None of the three, to the best of my knowledge, attended university creative writing courses.
Moving on to the craft itself. With the significant shrinking of the short fiction markets over the last ten years, I think it is hard to claim that the new wave get “too-easy sales”. Looking at the new fiction we reviewed last month at GJ, only around a quarter of it could be described as new wave in the broadest definitions. And it should be noted we don’t regularly review some of the pulpier publishers like Belmont and Arkham House. Indeed most of those we have are published in New Worlds, a magazine largely kept afloat by Moorcock churning out the better end of pulp adventures in a tea-fuelled fugue state.
Which leads us to the other point, these kinds of writers have shown they can indeed write and appreciate the “good-old stuff” very well at various points in their careers. Moorcock started off his career with the Sojan the Swordsman stories to back-up Tarzan Adventures. Whilst Aldiss wrote his take on H. G. Wells in The Saliva Tree and has edited collections of old-style adventures such as All-About Venus. Whilst this is not true for Ballard, it can be certainly be seen in plenty of others like Dick, Ellison and Silverberg. To misquote the late President, they choose to write in this style, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. There are just as many examples of this style of writing done poorly as there is done well. Just as is the case if you pick up a copy of Amazing in the 20s or Astounding in the 40s.
I do not mean to downplay the value of the former styles of SF (I wouldn’t be reviewing this magazine if I didn’t think it had value) but to show the flaws in Del Rey’s attacks. This is not a considered essay on the value of old-style writing but an ill-conceived personal attack on other writers without much more useful content than you could find in any rambling fanzine letter. A shame to see this from an old hand who should know better.
One Star
The Eld by Miriam Allen deFord
In each generation in each province is born an Eld, an individual able to spit venom, who is the approver of all culture to be produced. This is the story of how Rhambabja’s Eld was forced to kill himself for breaking his sacred duty of impartiality.
This is the first original for the magazine and feels a bit of an odd one. I think it is a criticism of critics but all wrapped up with a strange love triangle and in a world without much depth. At least it is short, readable and still more coherent than Del Rey’s speech.
A low two stars
The Eternal Man by D. D. Sharp
Reclusive scientist Herbert Zulerich, discovers the elixir of life. However, he forgets an important element in the formula and remains alive, but completely unable to move. With no friends to speak of, will anyone be able to help him regain his mobility?
This vignette was first published in Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories in August 1929, but is probably better known for being the earliest story included in Conkiln’s legendary anthology A Treasury of Science Fiction.
Apparently, it is featured on many fans “best” lists, although I am not sure I know why. As well as the writing style being poor, it is not particularly original either. It is a basic adaptation of an old fairytale concept combined with the lonely immortal conceit, and even my enjoyment of those kinds of stories cannot overcome its predictability. Add on to that the need to state the moral in neon lights at the ending and I just think the whole thing is very poor.
This very short piece is the other original for the magazine. Receiving a prophecy of their destruction, Cuitlazuma, ruler of the Aztec nation, commissions his scientists to find the secret of eternal life.
Well-meaning but clumsy is the best way to describe this vignette. It attempts to subvert the common European misconceptions of the pre-Columbian Mexico, but it does not feel entirely successful.
Two Stars
First Fandom by Robert A. Madle
Madle here discusses the formation and work of the First Fandom group. These are people involved in SF pre-1938 and work to celebrate it. Such activities include the First Fandom Hall of Fame (so far given to E. E. Smith, Gernsback, Keller & Hamilton) and publication of the First Fandom Magazine.
Not rating this as it is more of an advertisement than an article.
Why The Heavens Fell by Epaminondas T. Snooks, DTG
Illustration by Frank R. Paul
The biography reveals this was written by C. P. Mason, the associate editor of Wonder Stories and published in the same magazine in 1932. The DTG, stands for “Don’t Tell Gernsback”.
Whatever the writer’s name may be, this story tells of Prof. Shnickelfritz and his various inventions. The problem is the power required to run them at the level wanted is huge due to the law of inverse squares. As such, a lobbying effort begins for the government to repeal it.
Lowdnes makes a big deal out of the fundamental flaw in the story, that the US congress cannot repeal universal laws. However, the real problem is it’s a joke story that is not particularly funny. We are told it is intended to mock unscientific science fiction but it ends up being a dull shaggy dog story.
The opener here comes from Astounding’s July 1930 edition and is the first of Wright’s series of Cmdr. John Hanson adventures. This premier installment is, surprisingly, structured as a reminiscence of the older Hanson on a classified adventure from his youth. The so called “forgotten planet” (for its name is now scrubbed from all records) has risen in revolt against the Alliance and threatens war with the universe. In order to avoid loss of life Hanson is sent to try to show the inhabitants the error of their ways.
This is a pretty standard space opera of the 30s, the kind of sub-Doc Smith adventures that littered the magazine pages. Whilst the frame is somewhat interesting it contains a number of unexamined questionable choices that dragged the tale down for me.
Two Stars
A Glance Ahead by John Kendrick Bangs
The story dates from 16th December 1899 in Harper’s Weekly and republished in Bangs’ collection, Over The Plum Pudding in 1901. Richard Lupoff gives a great introduction to the man, elucidating on his biography and many works.
After falling asleep on Christmas Eve 1898, Dawson wakes up in 3568. A world where people are immortal consciousnesses with choices of bodies, the government runs all industries for everyone’s good, and poverty has been eliminated.
This is another of the Looking Backward style tales, much in vogue towards the end of the last century. Unfortunately, it is not a particularly good example. It is told through a conversation between Dawson’s incorporeal form and his valet, with lots of ejaculation from Dawson of “my word”. Also, several of the ideas would be silly even for the time, such as everyone having so many gold coins from the wealth created that all their cellars are full (paper money was already common as were cheques, whilst Bellamy hypothesized an electronic card-based system). Finally, his utopian views are very much rooted in the rich white society of the time. To take just one example:
“The Negro, Mr. Dawson, if the histories say rightly, was an awful problem for a great many years. He has so many good points and so many bad that no one knew exactly what to do about him. Finally the sixty-third amendment was passed ordering his deportation to Africa. It seemed like a hardship at first, but in 2683 he pulled himself together and today has a continent of his own. Africa is his, and when nations are at war together they hire their troops from Africa. They make splendid soldiers, you know.”
Interesting as a historical artifact, but little more.
One Star
Space Storm by Harl Vincent
The only original in this issue represents what maybe the last work of this recently deceased master of the pulp era.
Within this tale the Hyperion, an outdated space freighter, has been crippled by a magnetic storm and is trying to limp its way back to Earth. We follow second mate Tom Gardner as he suddenly finds himself in command of a failing ship and a mutinous crew.
Having been in correspondence with Vincent, Lowdnes is able to share that he had to give up writing due to his engineering career, and had only been able to take it up again upon retirement. This is a real shame as, unlike some of his contemporaries, he has clearly continued to evolve over the intervening years, with a good understanding of character and clean prose.
I will admit this style of story is not to my tastes so I will give it Three Stars but I wouldn’t be surprised if Niven fans rated it higher.
The Borders of Science Fiction by Robert A. W. Lowdnes
Lowdnes wades headfirst into the contentious subject of “what is science fiction?”. He gives his own idea that “how essential to the story is the science of science element” should be the deciding factor in borderline cases.
This is an interesting concept, but I find he stretches things in his argument. Stating that therefore A Connecticut Yankee and Glory Road are science fiction and almost all works of the New Wave such as The Crystal World are not because “if the [scientific element] was removed the story would be unchanged” feels odd to me.
Still, I enjoy seeing attempts like this. Whilst I favour a broader definition, my other half would favour it being even more rigid (they refuse to even accept Orwellian fiction or scientific disaster stories as SF). More discussion is always welcome.
Three Stars
Death From the Stars by A. Rowley Hilliard
Illustration by M. Marchioni
This comes from Gernsback’s Wonder Stories of October 1931 and seems to replace the previously advertised Thief of Time by S. P. Meek.
George Dixon and Julius Humboldt seek to discover if life can exist on meteorites. To do this they combine the powder of a meteorite with animal and plant matter into a block. However, whilst observing it, the rays from it horrifically change George. He now radiates death to anything near him. Can Julius help restore his friend?
I found the entire thing hard-to-read pseudo-scientific gobbledygook.
One Star
First Fandom by Robert A. Madle
Madle uses the column this issue to discuss what happened at the last meeting of First Fandom at Baycon. Given they have their own magazine, can they not just print this there?
The Derelict of Space by Ray Cummings
Illustration Frank R. Paul
Our last tale was first published in the 1931 Fall issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly, from a plot outline by William T. Thurmond.
A ship’s crew discover a long-lost vehicle floating in space. This device was one Ronald Deely had disappeared in decades ago, claiming he could use it to travel in time. This derelict “Ship of Doom”, as it is nicknamed, did not have any space travel capacity, so what happened?
Before this I had yet to read anything of Ray Cummings I had enjoyed and, whilst this is better than some, I still have not. The solution to the mystery will probably be obvious to most readers within the first few pages and, for a story that relies on character interactions everyone is remarkably wooden. There are some atmospheric moments but that is all I can think to recommend it.
A low Two Stars
The Final Reckoning
Just a quick look at the other readers' views of the stories in the penultimate 3 issues. We are actually pretty aligned on much of it, although I rate the Sharp and Campbell stories lower. I was sure why Lowdnes says the Silverberg is an original when I have a copy in my Nebulas. However, after conversing with the author he said that US editors generally pay little attention to UK publications, so it is probably simply a case of ignorance.
An Ending?
In the editorial and letters pages Lowdnes reveals that the magazine is no longer on a regular schedule, cannot accept any more subscriptions and contains no details of future contents. This is apparently due to the problems of distribution on American newsstands making the financial situation untenable.
A few other places you can get the “Good Old Stuff”
Magazine of Horror had these problems a few years back and was able to return so we will have to see if Famous does too. However, I wonder if anthologies are now filling this niche, bringing in a mix of 30+ year old SF with newer pieces.
Whatever the case, it appears its current 15 minutes in the spotlight is up. But if it does return, you can be sure we will be here to cover it.
West Germany has a new president, the seventy-year-old Social Democrat Gustav Heinemann, who up to now was secretary of justice in the grand coalition cabinet. Heinemann was elected with the narrowest of majorities, beating his conservative opponent by only six votes.
West Germany's new president Gustav Heinemann is sharing a laugh with Social Democratic floor leader Helmut Schmidt.
The West German president is mainly a ceremonial figure; he has very little political power. The president is also elected by the members of the West German federal and state parliaments rather than the people. Apparently, we cannot be trusted to elect our own president, because our parents and grandparents elected Paul von Hindenburg more than forty years ago.
But even though I had no chance to vote for Gustav Heinemann, I welcome his election, because I've come to know Mr. Heinemann as a highly principled politician who stands for peace and justice and opposed the rearmament of West Germany.
In his first speech after his election, Gustav Heinemann promised that he wanted to be a president for the people, even if the people did not get to elect him. Personally, I believe that he is exactly the right president for these difficult times.
More than just Conan
When Lancer started reprinting the adventures of Conan the Cimmerian three years ago, exactly thirty years after Robert E. Howard's untimely death, they not only pushed the already simmering revival of the genre Fritz Leiber called sword and sorcery into overdrive, but also opened the floodgates for other vintage fantasy stories and novels to come back into print.
No longer do you have to sift through the crumbling pages of Weird Tales or Unknown or pay extortionate prices for Gnome Press or Arkham House hardcover reprints to track down an early adventure of Conan or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. On the contrary, the heroes of yesteryear are right there in the spinner rack of your local newsstand, gas station, grocery store or bookstore, sporting striking covers by talented artists like Frank Frazetta or J. Jones. The sword and sorcery revival has truly been a boon for fans of vintage weird fiction.
Among the authors of yesteryear coming back into print is none other than Robert E. Howard himself. For while Howard will probably always be associated with Conan first, he was extremely prolific, penning more than two hundred stories in various genres in his short life. In this article, I want to take a look at some of the other Robert E. Howard heroes whose adventures you can find on the shelves right now.
The Philosophical Atlantean: King Kull
Spurred on by the success of their Conan reprints, Lancer made a foray into the rest of Howard's oeuvre and reprinted the adventures of Howard's other Barbarian hero, Kull of Atlantis.
Like Conan, Kull is a wandering adventurer who winds up becoming king of the civilised kingdom of Valusia after slaying the previous ruler. Kull only appeared in two stories in Weird Tales, though the ever enterprising L. Sprague de Camp found several unpublished and sometimes unfinished Kull stories in Howard's trunk (and I have it on good authority that it really is a trunk), had Lin Carter finish the incomplete stories and assembled King Kull.
Because of his superficial similarities to the Cimmerian Barbarian, Kull is considered a prototype Conan. But that would be unfair, because even though they are both adventurers turned kings, Kull is a very different character from Conan, quieter, more introspective, more philosophical, more – dare I say it – gullible.
The Conan stories cover the entire spectrum of Conan's career, from teenaged thief to middle-aged king. The Kull stories, on the other hand, focus almost entirely on his time as King of Valusia – with one exception. Because for Kull we get something we never got for Conan: the story of why he left his home Atlantis in the first place. And no, it's not for the reason you think.
"Exile of Atlantis" introduces us to a teenaged Kull, an outsider adopted into a tribe of Atlantean barbarians. Most of the story is given over to a hunting expedition as well as a dream sequence, where Kull sees his future as king. But what spurs Kull into leaving home is seeing a young woman from his village about to be burned at the stake for daring to fall in love with a Lemurian pirate. Kull is disgusted by this and mercy-kills the woman before the flames can reach her. Then he flees, pursued by furious tribespeople.
"Exile of Atlantis" was never published during Howard's lifetime and it's easy to see why—it's more vignette than story. But it does set the tone for the adventures that follow and introduces Kull both as a perpetual outsider as well as someone who is willing to question and defy tradition, if necessary. Finally, forbidden love as well as Kull's firm believe that love should trump tradition, custom and law is a recurring theme throughout the stories, as Kull helps several young couples to get together with their one true love, against legal and parental opposition.
"The Shadow Kingdom" was the first of the two Kull stories published during Howard's lifetime in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales and very much sets the stage for what is to follow. The story introduces us to King Kull, as he is watching a parade in his honour, while musing about identity, the nature of reality and the great questions of life.
However, Kull has more immediate problems to deal with, because the Pictish ambassador, Ka-nu the Ancient, warns him of a conspiracy in his own court and sends one of his warriors, Brule the Spear-Slayer, to aid and protect Kull. Those who have read the Conan stories have encountered the Picts before. Based on the ancient inhabitants of Scotland, the Picts reoccur throughout Howard's work, though Howard's Picts bear no resemblance to their historical counterparts.
Kull is initially irritated by Brule, who seems to know the royal palace better than Kull himself. But the two men quickly become fast friends, when Brule informs Kull that an ancient pre-human race of shapeshifting Serpent Men has invaded the kingdom and the royal palace and are quietly replacing guards, courtiers and councillors and are planning to murder and replace Kull, too.
Hugh Rankin's interior art for "The Shadow Kingdom" shows Kull and Brule battling the Serpent Men.
"The Shadow Kingdom" is a chillingly paranoid story reminiscent of John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" and the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though it predates both. Apparently, there are folk who believe that the Serpent Men from "The Shadow Kingdom" really existed and still exist today, similar to how some people believed that the Shaver Mysteries which infested Amazing Stories some twenty years ago were real.
After their ordeal in "The Shadow Kingdom", Brule remains Kull's constant companion and frequently has to rescue his friend from conspirators and assassins as well as from Kull's own gullibility and tendency to get lost in his thoughts. In "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune", the only other Kull story published during Howard's lifetime, Kull becomes fascinated with the House of Thousand Mirrors inhabited by the wizard Tuzun Thune and keeps gazing into those mirrors, wondering whether he is real or merely a mirror image himself. Just as Kull is about to be sucked into the mirror completely, Brule appears, kills the wizard and smashes the mirrors.
Brule has smashed the mirror and the wizard, once again saving Kull, in the interior art for "The Mirrors of Tusun Thune".
"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune" will seem familiar to anybody whose ever visited a hall of mirrors at a fun fair or carnival. The story "Delcardes' Cat" also clearly appears to be inspired by travelling fun fairs and fraudulent sideshow attractions. This time around, Kull becomes fascinated with Saremes, an ancient and wise talking cat owned by the noblewoman Delcardes who asks Kull's permission to marry a commoner. Kull has deep and philosophical discussions with Saremes and never once wonders why this regal feline is always carried around by the masked slave Kuthulos.
Things come to a head, when Saremes informs Kull that his friend Brule is in danger and that Kull must dive into a lake inhabited by an ancient amphibian race to rescue him. Brule, however, is not in danger, but once again has to rescue Kull from a plot by his archenemy, the skull-faced wizard Thulsa Doom. As for the cat, she may be wise and ancient and beautiful, but she obviously cannot speak. Instead, her voice was provided by the masked slave Kuthulos. It's easy to imagine Howard witnessing a similar performance in a small carnival somewhere in rural Texas in his youth.
"By This Axe I Rule!" features yet another plot against Kull, instigated by disgruntled noblemen and a rabble-rousing poet. Kull himself, meanwhile, is depressed that some people still mourn the tyrannical king Borna whom Kull slayed and replaced and that even the Cult of the Serpent Men still has worshippers. Kull is also frustrated that even as king he is still constrained by the ancient laws of Valusia, such as a law which forbids free men to marry slaves, even though a young nobleman petitions Kull to allow him to wed the slave girl Ala with whom he has fallen in love. Not long thereafter, Kull meets Ala herself and confesses to her that even as a king, he is still slave to Valusia's cruel ancient laws.
The conspirators strike that night and invade Kull's bedchamber. Kull fights them off with battle axe, but there are too many of them. However, he is saved in the nick of time, because Ala overheard the plot against the king and sounded the alarm. Grateful, Kull takes his battle axe to smash the stone tablets containing Valusia's outdated laws and declares that he is the law now. Then he personally sees to it that Ala and her lover are allowed to marry.
If "By This Axe I Rule!" seems a little familiar, that's maybe because it is. For after the story failed to sell, Howard rewrote it as "The Phoenix on the Sword", the story which introduced Conan the Cimmerian to the world. But while "The Phoenix on the Sword" is a great story, I still prefer "By This Axe I Rule!" because the touching love story between Ala and the young nobleman and the scene of Kull taking his battle axe to the outdated laws of Valusia are sadly absent from the Conan story.
It is notable how many of the Kull stories are concerned with forbidden love and how Kull is clearly frustrated by outdated marriage laws keeping lovers apart until he literally smashes those laws to pieces. Considering that the US Supreme Court struck down state laws forbidding mixed race marriages in several southern states only two years ago (not using a battle axe), I for one can only cheer on Kull and his creator.
But while there is a lot of romance in the Kull stories, Kull himself has no romantic entanglements with women – very much unlike Conan – and even muses at one point that the love of a woman is not for him. One can see homoerotic undertones in Kull's relationship with Brule, though Howard could not clearly spell this out in the late 1920s. Or maybe Kull just prefers celibacy.
It may be blasphemy, but I prefer Kull to Conan. Everybody who enjoys the adventures of the Cimmerian Barbarian should pick up King Kull.
Five stars.
The Avenging Puritan: Red Shadows
J. Jones' striking portrait of Solomon Kane for Red Shadows.
Another Robert E. Howard character who predates Conan is Solomon Kane, a sixteenth century Puritan who is on a mission from God (or so he believes) "to ease evil men of their lives". The idea sounds fascinating, but once again the Solomon Kane stories are only found in forty-year-old issues of Weird Tales and have never been reprinted. Until now.
Luckily, my friend Bobby, who shares my interest in the works of Robert E. Howard and other Weird Tales authors of yesteryear, sent me a copy of Red Shadows, a collection of all the Solomon Kane stories, including those that were never published and sometimes not even finished during Howard's lifetime. Red Shadows is a hardcover volume with interior illustrations by J. Jones published by the small press Donald M. Grant Publisher Inc. which also published two collections of Howard's humorous westerns about a very big, very strong and not very bright hillbilly named Breckenridge Elkins and his chaotic family. Sadly I don't own either of those.
The Solomon Kane stories, however, are excellent, mixing historical adventure of the sort that used to be found in the pages of the pulp magazine Adventure with horror elements. Unlike with Kull, we never learn why Solomon Kane does what he does. There are hints, particularly in the poems included in the collection, that Kane was always a violent man and sailed with Sir Francis Drake, but we never learn how Solomon Kane came by his strong religious convictions or how he came to believe that he is on a mission from God.
Early stories show Solomon Kane wandering around England and later the Black Forest in Germany, tangling with pirates and observing several cases of vengeance from beyond the grave. These are fine adventure stories and suitably spooky gothic morality tales. But then Solomon Kane's wanderings literally take him into the heart of darkness with the novelette "Red Shadows", first published in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales.
C.C. Senf's cover for the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales shows the villainous Le Loup murdering a young woman.
"Red Shadows" begins in France, where Solomon Kane finds a mortally injured young woman by the side of the road and comforts her as she dies. Before she draws her final breath, the woman tells Kane that she was assaulted and left for dead by a bandit named Le Loup. "Men will die for this," Kane vows darkly and embarks onto a hunt for Le Loup and his associates which will take him several years and across the world.
Kane finally tracks down Le Loup in a village in the darkest heart of Africa. When the opponents finally come face to face, Le Loup asks Kane whether the woman he murdered was Kane's bride, wife, or sister and is stunned when he learns that Kane had never met the young woman before that fateful day.
In the course of "Red Shadows", Kane also meets and befriends N'Longa, an African shaman, a so-called juju man. Though a sympathetic character, N'Longa initially appears to be an outdated and racist stereotype speaking broken English. However, as Solomon Kane and N'Longa share further adventures, it gradually becomes clear that N'Longa is much more than a mere stereotype. Not only is his magic real, he is also clearly the smartest person in the Solomon Kane stories. Indeed, N'Longa even calls out Kane on his prejudices at one point. Finally, N'Longa also gives Kane a magical weapon, an ancient juju staff, which turns out to be the biblical Staff of Solomon, now wielded by his latter day namesake.
Pulp fiction set in Africa is often full of offensive and downright racist caricatures. Howard does not completely manage to avoid these pitfalls, when describing Kane's wanderings through Africa, encountering vampires, harpies, hidden cities and monsters sealed away in ancient tombs. However, it is also notable that Solomon Kane himself makes no racial distinctions between the people he helps and is as willing to save an angelic blonde English girl from being sacrificed to an ancient god as he is to protect an African village from winged monsters and liberate African slaves from their Arab captors.
Hugh Rankin's colourful cover art for the June 1930 issue of Weird Tales illustrates the Solomon Kane story "The Moon of Skulls", where Kane rescues the kidnapped English girl Marilyn from the African vampire queen Nefari.
During his wanderings through Africa, we also see Kane's religious convictions gradually crumbling. As a devout Puritan, he initially abhors magic, but he also sees that N'Longa's magic, though not even remotely Christian, is nonetheless a force for good as is the Staff of Solomon, which predates both Judaism and Christianity.
Solomon Kane is a complex and fascinating character. He has the religious zeal of Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, memorably portrayed by Vincent Price (who would be perfect to play Solomon Kane) on film last year, only that he is a heroic figure, whereas Hopkins is the darkest of villains.
Gothic horror at its very best.
Five stars.
The Time and Space-Displaced Fugitive: Almuric
Almuric is an oddity even for Robert E. Howard's extremely varied oeuvre. It's his sole foray into Burroughs style planetary romance and one of only two novels Howard wrote. Almuric was serialised posthumously in Weird Tales from May to August 1939 and reprinted by Ace in 1964.
Taking his cue from Burroughs' Barsoom novels, Almuric opens with a framing story. The scientist Professor Hildebrand recounts his meeting with Esau Cairn, whom the Professor describes as "definitely not a criminal", but "a man born in the wrong time". Cairn stumbles into Hildebrand's observatory while on the run for murdering the corrupt politician Boss Blaine (don't worry, he had it coming), the police hot on his heels. Cairn is determined to go down fighting and die in a shootout with the police just like Bonnie and Clyde, who to Howard were not just the subject of a popular movie, but outlaws who operated in his home state of Texas and were shot dead not far from his hometown Cross Plains. Luckily, Professor Hildebrand has a better idea and uses a machine he invented to teleport Cairn to the planet Almuric.
Once there, Cairn takes over as the narrator and has the sort of adventures you would expect from a Burroughs style planetary romance. He encounters the local wildlife as well as a species of ape men named the Guras. After putting his boxing skills to good use and proving his mettle, Cairn is adopted into a tribe of Guras and falls in love with Athla, daughter of the chief. Lucky for Cairn, female Guras look like regular human women.
More adventures follow, as Cairn is captured by a rival tribe, has to fight various monsters and must rescue Athla from a species of winged humanoids called the Yagas whose queen Yasmeena not only has carnal designs on Cairn, but also wants to sacrifice Athla to her gods.
In theory, Robert E. Howard would seem to be the perfect writer for a Burroughs style planetary romance. In practice, however, Almuric is the weakest work by Howard I've read so far. The novel feels choppy and disjointed and there are lengthy passages where Cairn gives us all sorts of information about the world of Almuric and its inhabitants. This is very uncommon for Howard who normally doesn't resort to lengthy encyclopaedic descriptions, but integrates the information into the plot. It almost feels as if Howard's private notes about the world of Almuric, similar to "The Hyborian Age" essay which details the world of Conan, had somehow ended up in the novel itself.
So why is Almuric so different from Howard's other works? The answer is simple. Almuric was published posthumously and very likely remained unfinished at the time of Howard's death and was completed by another writer. We do not know who this writer was, since Weird Tales does not credit them. A likely suspect is fellow Weird Tales author as well as Howard's literary agent Otis Adalbert Kline, who penned several planetary romances himself. Alas, Kline died in 1946, so we will never know for sure.
Even a weak novel by Robert E. Howard is still better than those by many other writers at their best.
Three and a half stars.
Lovecraftian Terrors: Wolfshead
Following the success of their Conan reprints, Lancer is gradually branching out into other works by Robert E. Howard and brought us not only King Kull, but also Wolfshead, a collection of seven horror stories by Robert E. Howard with a striking cover by Frank Frazetta.
Unsurprisingly, the titular story, which appeared in the April 1926 issue of Weird Tales, published when Howard was only twenty years old, is a werewolf story and apparently the sequel to another story, which Lancer in their infinite wisdom chose not to include. "Wolfshead" is not a bad story by any means, though very much the work of a beginning writer.
"Wolfshead" was the first Robert E. Howard story to make the cover of Weird Tales, illustrated by E.M. Stevenson.
In "The Horror From the Mound", first published in the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales, Howard puts his unique spin on that other classic monster of modern horror, the vampire. However, his vampire is not residing in a coffin in the bowels of a castle in Transylvania, but much closer to home (at least from Howard's point of view) in an Indian burial mound in Texas, which a white rancher unwisely disturbs after having been warned not to do so by his Mexican neighbour.
The cover of the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales features a vampire, but not Howard's vampire.
The remaining stories are clearly influenced by H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos and feature mysterious tomes of black magic and unspeakable monsters from beyond. The Lovecraft influence is not that surprising, since Lovecraft and Howard did not just both write for Weird Tales, but were also pen pals who kept up a voluminous correspondence, much of which apparently survives and will hopefully see print someday.
But even though they influenced each other, Robert E. Howard was a very different writer than H.P. Lovecraft and also brings a very different sensibility to his stories. For while Lovecraft's protagonists tend to be driven mad by their encounters with the unspeakable, Howard's protagonists usually fight the monster or die trying, though the poet Justin Geoffrey, protagonist of "The Black Stone", does go mad after an encounter with a cursed stone, an unspeakable cult and a terrifying monster.
The cover of the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales does not illustrate "The Black Stone", but it's still a great cover.
Howard's stories also have a wider range of settings from Texas via Ireland, France and Hungary all the way to Middle East, which is the setting of "The Fires of Asshurbanipal", which combines Lovecraftian horror with the high adventure of the Conan stories.
The cover of the December 1936 issue of Weird Tales by J. Allen St. John illustrates Robert E. Howard's "The Fires of Asshurbanipal"
"The Valley of the Worm" and "The Cairn on the Headland", include two more subjects that are dear to Howard's heart, reincarnation and Norse mythology. "The Valley of the Worm" features James Allison, a terminally ill man on his deathbed, remembering a previous life as Niord, a Norse tribesman who fights a giant snake in a scene strikingly illustrated by Frank Frazetta on the cover and later takes his revenge on a monstrous Lovecraftian entity that slaughtered his tribe. The Picts, another subject that clearly fascinated Howard judging by their repeated appearances in his stories, also show up. Apparently, Howard wrote several stories about James Allison remembering his past lives and I hope that all of them will eventually see print again.
"The Cairn on the Headland" is set in Ireland, where the two-fisted scholar James O'Brien not only relives the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 AD, in which he took part in a previous life as the Irish warrior Red Cumal, but also has to save Ireland from the wrath of the Norse god Odin who took part in said battle disguised as a Viking chieftain and lies buried in the titular Cairn, which O'Brien's villainous companion unwisely disturbs. Howard has Irish ancestry and was clearly fascinated by the history and mythology of his forebearers.
Wolfshead includes but a small selection of the many horror stories that Howard wrote, but it also offers a taste of how varied Howard's works were. I hope that this is but the first of many collections of Robert E. Howard's horror stories to come.
A great and varied horror collection by a true master of the genre.
Four and a half stars.
There's Gold in Them Pulps and in That Trunk, Too: Other Howard works we may hopefully see again soon
The untimely death of Robert E. Howard is one of the great tragedies of our genre. Whenever I read a Howard story and marvel at what a great writer he was, I also mourn all the stories he never got to write, all the tales that remain untold. Howard pivoted to the more lucrative western market towards the end of his life, but would he have returned to Conan or even Kull or Solomon Kane later in life, just as his nigh contemporary Fritz Leiber keeps returning to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? We will never know.
However, the success of the Conan reprints is giving us the chance to explore the rest of Howard's work. Another Howard hero, Bran Mak Morn, last king of the Picts who defends his people against Roman occupiers, is set to be reprinted later this year. There is still so much more to discover such as the tales Howard wrote for Weird Tales' sister magazine Oriental Stories and other adventure-focussed pulps like Top-Notch or Thrilling Adventure, featuring the adventures of the American treasure hunter Kirby O'Donnell and the Texan gunfighter Francis Xavier Gordon a.k.a. El Borak in Kurdistan and Afghanistan at the turn of the century. For Oriental Stories, Howard also wrote several historical stories set during the Crusades, which are allegedly excellent.
Francis Xavier Gordon a.k.a. El Borak is a cover boy for the December 1936 issue of Thrilling Adventures.Donald von Gelb's striking cover art for the February 1931 issue of Oriental Stories illustrates Robert E. Howard's "Red Blades of Black Cathay", co-written with his friend Tevis Clyde Smith.
For the infamous shudder pulps, Howard penned several tales featuring the occult investigator Steve Harrison and for Weird Tales, he wrote the Fu Manchu type thriller "Skull Face". Howard also had a funny side, which is in full display in the humorous westerns featuring the big and dumb hillbilly Breckenridge Elkins as well as his stories featuring the boxing sailor Steve Costigan, which first appeared in the pulp magazine Fight Stories. I've read one of the Steve Costigan stories and it was hilarious. I hope that eventually we will get to read them all.
This gruesome cover of the February 1936 issue of Thrilling Mystery illustrates Robert E. Howard's story "Graveyard Rats".
And then, of course, there is also Howard's trunk of unpublished stories. Who knows what gems still lurk in there?
Belgian Italian singer Salvatore Adamo is not only the second bestselling musician in the world after The Beatles, but also adorns the cover of the latest issue of the West German teen magazine Bravo.
Possessing the constitution of a wet paper towel, I feel very unwell at the moment, so what better time to curl up on the sofa and watch Doctor Who? Robert Holmes is back in the writer’s seat, bringing us a tale of piracy on the highest seas of all—space! Drink up, me hearties, yo ho—it’s time to be castin’ a weather eye o’er “The Space Pirates”. Yarrr!
In Case You Missed It
We kick things off with a pirate attack on an unmanned space beacon. The pirates move quickly, setting charges in and around the beacon to blow it apart at the weak points, then take off with their spoils. It’s the latest in a long line of attacks by pirates seeking the rare (and very valuable) mineral ‘argonite’. Until now, they’ve carried out their attacks unimpeded, but by going after government property, they’ve attracted the attention of the Space Corps.
Enter General Hermack (Jack May). He’s on the hunt for the pirates, when he’s not being used as a mouthpiece to deliver copious amounts of background explanation.
However, his first attempt to catch the pirates falls short, as they’re long gone by the time his forces arrive at the site of the latest destroyed beacon. He will have to try a change of tactic: place men on the beacons to raise an early alarm in the event of an attack.
The pirates, as it happens, attack the very first beacon Hermack places his men on. Handy.
But where, you may wonder, is the Doctor in all this Who?
He’s finally deigned to show up, at the worst possible time and place—on the beacon, right before the pirate attack.
The pirates kill all but one of the guards aboard the beacon, and seal the Doctor and his friends inside a compartment before setting their charges and departing with their captive.
Then they blow the whole thing up.
Meanwhile, the General and his ship have an encounter with The Most American Man In The Universe. Meet Milo Clancey (Gordon Gostelow). He’s got the bearing of a Gold Rush prospector and the wardrobe to match. With a heavy mistrust of the government and a tendency to say things like ‘what in tarnation’, it’s like he wandered in from a different genre. He is naturally my favourite.
The mistrust goes both ways. Clancey resents the government for not doing anything to help when his own cargo transports were attacked, and Hermack just plain doesn’t like the guy, convincing himself (rather dubiously) that Milo is the criminal mastermind behind these pirate attacks.
Criminal mastermind? The man can’t make toast without cremating it.
As for the Doctor and company, they’ve got their own problems. Their compartment is intact, being towed through space with the other separated segments of the beacon, but they’re running out of air. And fast. The Doctor’s attempts to reunite the compartment with the rest of the station result only in flinging them further out into space. To use his own words, what a silly idiot he is.
It’s a rare serious moment for him. He’s not been this close to utter despair since Jamie and Zoe got fictionalised back in “The Mind Robber”. The poor little chap needs a hug.
Back with the actual plot, General Hermack pays a visit to the nearby mining planet of Ta, where the Issigri Mining Corporation, led by Madeleine Issigri (Lisa Daniely), digs up mountains of argonite. Madeleine’s father started the business, but she’s taken over since his mysterious disappearance—a disappearance Milo Clancey was suspected of involvement in. She also has fascinating taste in headgear.
With Clancey’s own mines running dry, Hermack suspects that he might be out for revenge on Madeleine, jealous of her success. Especially since he’s been beaten at his own game by an attractive woman like her. Eugh.
Out of options, the Doctor and company end up huddled on the floor in a heap, waiting for the oxygen to run out. They’d look rather cute if it wasn’t such a dire situation. However, they’re in luck. A certain space cowboy happens upon the pod, and hoping to find out what’s inside, cuts it open, freeing the Doctor and his friends.
He does commit the small faux pas of shooting Jamie, but the lad gets better so there’s no sense holding a grudge.
Clancey brings the Doctor and his friends aboard, but it’s not much of a rescue. The space corps, having remained on his tail all this time, saw him dock with the pod, and they’ve got rather the wrong end of the stick. Ignoring their demands for him to surrender, Clancey instead deploys a cloud of copper needles, which magnetise to the argonite hull of the pursuing ship, jamming their guidance systems and preventing them from firing, or moving at all.
He then tears out of there, leaving the space corps in his coppery dust. He knows just where to hide out: Ta, the mining planet. Possibly the riskiest place for him to be right now, and therefore nobody will expect him to be daft enough to go there.
It’s not the first time he’s been to Ta. He worked down there a long time ago with his business partner, Madeleine’s father. Once they land, he tells the group to stay put while he does some ship maintenance.
The Doctor and his friends are however pathologically incapable of following that sort of instruction, so they immediately wander off. Jamie’s uneasy about trusting Clancey, what with the shooting incident, and Zoe’s been calculating the original trajectory of the pirates. Assuming they didn’t change direction, they’d have landed on Ta, and very close-by at that.
If they find the pirates and their stolen beacon, they’ll find the TARDIS, and maybe then they’ll go off and find a story where they’re actually integral to the plot.
As Hermack prepares to leave Madeleine’s office and help out his stranded second-in-command, he notices something peculiar: a model ship, of the exact type used by the pirates. It’s top-of-the-line, and very expensive. Madeleine tells him her company recently acquired two of them. How very interesting… it’s starting to look like Madeleine may be more involved in this whole affair than she lets on.
Soon finding themselves lost in the labyrinth of mining tunnels (of course) the Doctor and his friends don’t take long to stumble onto the pirates, setting off all their alarms in the process. As a gang of angry pirates corner them, the three take the only escape route available: a crack in the tunnel wall. What’s on the other side? Who knows, but going by the screaming, it doesn’t sound as if they’re having a good time.
What In Tarnation?!
For the most part, it’s not a bad story really. The setting is neat, the characters are… not terribly interesting, but fine. The pacing is okay, and there’s enough excitement to hold our attention. It gets a resounding “It’s all right I suppose,” from me.
However, there is so much "As you know, Bob"-ing it absolutely destroys the experience. Characters constantly repeat information to one another for the benefit of the fourth wall. What’s worse, it keeps happening. There’s at least three different scenes explaining how flipping marvellous and prized as a material argonite is, and only one of those actually involves a newcomer to the setting who would actually need such an explanation. It’s like Robert Holmes wrote several different versions of an exposition scene, and unsure of which to use, simply shoved all of them into the final draft of the script. It’s a waste of time and insulting to the viewer.
That felt a little harsh, but in my defence I am beset by maladies and reserve the right to be a bit grumpy.
I feel a strange urge to apologise to my American readers (which, I assume, is most of you) on behalf of the BBC. I don't work for it, but I'm British, so close enough. I’m not sure there is a single BBC actor who can do a half-decent American accent, but by golly they do insist upon trying. We’ve not only got one, but TWO faux-Americans knocking around with their dodgy accents this serial. Oh, and Hermack, whose accent is… um. You know, I’m sure it’s meant to be something, but I really couldn’t tell you what. Maybe I’ll apologise to all the countries, just to be safe.
At least Clancey’s whole character is funny. He really does look and act like he wandered onto the wrong set. It’s just so incongruous with what you generally expect to see in a futuristic science fiction setting, and I love it. It’s ridiculous, sure, but I think that they could have gone even further with this bizarre genre mishmash. For a story called "The Space Pirates" there’s rather less swashbuckling than I’d have liked. They’re more like… over-enthusiastic scrap metal dealers. But then, “The Space Over-Enthusastic Scrap Metal Dealers” is a bit of a mouthful for the BBC continuity announcers to say.
Final Thoughts
I think I was a bit off the mark committing to the yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-o'-rum lingo earlier. This is not that kind of story. No… it’s a rootin’-tootin’ twilight-of-the-old-west story. Yee haw, giddy-up, etc.
Sorry. I’ll stop now.
Wait, one more thing. Why does it feel like the Doctor is an afterthought to this story? He’s barely involved. We’re three episodes in and he’s only met one of the main characters. The rest have absolutely no idea he exists. He’s not involved in the events beyond getting stuck on a dismantled space station. And even that doesn’t do anything to the plot beyond creating a small detour for Clancey. Take him out, and the main plot doesn’t actually change.
Maybe it’s not a bad story. But it’s not (so far) a good Doctor Who story.
As I mentioned last month, this issue begins yet another new era for New Worlds. With the retirement of Mike Moorcock and Charles Platt from full-time editorialship in the last issue, it is Langdon Jones that steps up to the mark as editor this time.
For that reason alone, it should be an interesting one, but last month’s issue also pointed out that the April issue was going to have an apocalyptic theme:
The named list from last month.
With Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius saving the world from destruction, the advert proudly declared, “Is The Apocalypse Already Upon us??” Gone is the optimistic, forward-looking shiny and new future as suggested by the SF of the 1950’s, and in its place we have post-apocalyptic gloom, doom, decay and squalor. It has been an ongoing theme in the magazine for the last few years.
To be fair, the white cover with a minimalist approach to titling and imagery, this month by the recently deceased Mervyn Peake, does not give an impression of 'gloom and doom'. Far from it. I found it more interesting than the recent generic covers. A good start.
Lead In by The Publishers
Much is made of the fact that this issue has the UK debut of the US’s enfant terrible Harlan Ellison.
In a post-apocalyptic US we are told of teenager Vic and his telepathic dog, Blood. Vic is a teenage boy who spends his time scavenging the world for basic needs—food, companionship, and sex—as well as generally avoiding other groups, known as roverpaks, doing the same thing. They meet Quilla June – unusual because most women live where it is safer, underground. Vic rapes Quilla June before they are attacked by another roverpak. Blood is hurt in the scuffle. Quilla June escapes and returns to her underground home of Topeka.
Determined to get food and find Quilla June, Vic leaves Blood on the surface and follows Quilla June underground, to discover that bringing Vic underground was the original plan by the subterranean city elders. New blood (see what Ellison did there?) is needed to replenish the depleted stock of men! Vic sees this as a great opportunity for sex with lots of different women, but soon tires of being basically a sex slave. He escapes back to the surface with Quilla June, only to find Blood hurt and in need of food to survive. The open ending leaves Vic with a quandary – does he leave Blood or feed Blood?
This one should activate all the seismic shockmeters: there’s sex, masturbation, rape, gore, violence, cannibalism, radioactive mutations and a distinct lack of morals and ethics as Vic and Blood try to survive. (It's a little concerning when I'm told that Ellison used his own dealings with gang culture in the US as inspiration for this story.)
As good as it is, that’s not to say that there aren't worrying elements – Quilla June’s change from rape victim to willing participant is a little jarring to me, but to some extent this reflects the brutal society Vic and Blood live in and the amoral stance that Vic has towards life. Unsurprisingly, when presented with a version of what pre-War domesticity is like, he rebels and runs away back to his previous life.
Undoubtedly memorable and a million miles away from the classic hero template of older SF work, A Boy and his Dog reinvents the apocalyptic adventure story and generally holds up. I found it bold, interesting, lively and yes, controversial. As good as Delany’s Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stonesback in the December issue. 5 out of 5.
The Ash Circus by M. John Harrison
And here’s M. John Harrison’s take on Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius (more of which later.) They do say that imitation is the best form of flattery, and here Harrison copies the beginning of Ian Fleming’s James Bond movie You Only Live Twice before having Jerry return to a decaying London, then travel to Scotland and Manchester to become inspired by Byron and then get involved in a putsch in London, before meeting the authoritarian Miss Brunner again.
It’s actually not bad as a mixture of James Bond and The Avengers television series, with the dark humour of Cornelius coming to the fore, but it is less out-there than Moorcock’s own Cornelius material (again – more of which later.) This may, of course, make the story more readable than some of Jerry’s other esoteric stories. 4 out of 5.
How the Sponsors Helped Out by Anthony Haden-Guest
Poetry – or rather a list of different things sent by companies to ‘The Front’ – Hamleys sent toys, IBM sent a brain, and so on. This being New Worlds the poem doesn’t miss throwing out a few choice expletives in the mixture – guess what Playboy sent? I dare not repeat the word here. Mildly amusing. 3 out of 5.
Labyrinth by D. M. Thomas
More poetry. Described as ‘a poem for light and movement’, Thomas manages to produce strange typewritten boxes that are at times undecipherable. A typical ‘form over content’ type piece. 2 out of 5.
Another one of Ballard’s stories where novels are compressed into paragraphs. The clever part is that each paragraph begins with the letters of the alphabet. Described as ‘An Entertainment for George MacBeth’, this one reads like the description of an exotic holiday beach party and also feels, rather oddly at times, like a James Bond plot – not the first time I’ve thought that for this issue. One of the more enjoyable of Ballard’s recent stories for me, perhaps because it feels a little more like the material Ballard was writing when I first noticed him. 4 out of 5.
Inside by J. J. Mundis
The inevitable 'naked lady of the month' picture.
Another strange story from J J Mundis after the rather odd ‘Luger’ story last month. This time, a depressing stream of consciousness story that’s all sex, drugs and allegory about being empty inside. Nothing really worth remembering. 2 out of 5.
For Czechoslovakia by George MacBeth
Yet more poetry, this time from the poet J. G. Ballard wrote for earlier. As expected, it is dark, gloomy and depressing, combining prose passages from The Diary of a German Soldier, written in 1939 interspersed with verses written by MacBeth using the process of automatic writing. I’m intrigued by the process, if less impressed by the poetry. 3 out of 5.
After Harrison’s version, we now return to the originator of the Jerry Cornelius stories.
More artwork by Mal Dean.
This month Jerry continues his meandering travels across time with Karen von Krupp to try and find Bishop Beezley. Lots of prose in small sections (with even an homage of J. G. Ballard in Ballard style lists of text), whose connections are rather obtuse, lots of sex and Miss Brunner – again! (see also M. John Harrison’s story.)
The plot’s undecipherable, but I feel that this is one you appreciate for the enthusiastic energy rather than the plot. Who knows what’s going on, but the writer clearly had fun writing it. 4 out of 5.
Book Reviews
A Turning World by Brian W. Aldiss
Where Aldiss muses on how perspectives change through time, throwing in a couple of reviews along the way – basically, a discussion on how others might see us in the future.
The Cannon Kings by Joyce Churchill
Referring to recent publications, Joyce Churchill (also known as M. John Harrison) writes about the importance of Germany’s armaments manufacturers in the first half of the 20th century.
A Slight Case of Tolkien by James Cawthorn
It is left to James Cawthorn to review the genre books. This month he looks at Jack Vance’s Catch A Falling Star, Robert Burnet (sic) Swann’s Moondust, Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial, Clifford Simak’s So Bright the Vision coupled with Jeff Sutton’s The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, James Blish and Norman L. Knight’s A Torrent of Faces, Ron Goulart’s ‘light-hearted’ The Sword Swallower and a well-deserved reprint of William Hope Hodgson’s horror classic, The House on the Borderland.
Summing Up
This one’s heavy on the espionage Bond-type vibes this month, what with not one but two Jerry Cornelius stories and a Ballard that reads like a Bond story in a Ballard style. As a first issue of the new regime with Langdon Jones as editor, it is not bad – although it may have been better had the Cornelius stories been spread out across different issues. Personally I like the stories, but they're not for everyone, and there's a lot of it here.
But then there’s the Harlan Ellison story that surpassed even my high expectations of his work. If the 'impending apocalypse' is represented by this story, then it's a memorable one to be sure, if decidedly downbeat. According to Ellison, the future is dark and tough.
I can’t see this one being published in the US in the usual science fiction magazines, but even allowing for its deliberate shock tactics, it really impressed – much more than say Bug Jack Barron, which tried to shock readers in a similar way, I think.
If I needed anything to show how much the British genre scene has changed in the last few years, this would be my example, albeit written by an American. Shocking and controversial, yes – but perhaps the best story I’ve read in New Worlds to date. A real coup for the new editorship.
And now for the man to whom the news wouldn't be the news without the news… here's Gidi!
Dateline: 1969
Apparently, President Nixon and Soviet head of government Kosygin have agreed not to blow up nuclear bombs on the ocean floor, of which there have been somewhere between zero and not many. This is being hailed as a tremendous accomplishment in the field of disarmament. The next great achievement will be banning test explosions on the 32nd day of every month.
I think the two deserve a Flying Fickle Finger of Fate, or the "Penetrating Pinky" as the producer calls it.
Dateline: 1969
Britain is building a giant radio telescope to hear the beginning of the universe. Astronomers believe the cosmos apparently was once compressed into a tiny point, even smaller than Governor Reagan's brain, and when it expanded, the temperature of the stuff dropped, as it always does when you maintain the amount of matter but increase the volume of its container.
A temperature that was once immeasurably high has now gotten so low that it radiates at very low energy levels—detectable by super-sensitive antennas! I imagine the observatory will determine if this radio hiss is uniformly distributed or not. They're also looking for quasars, those objects that are super bright in the radio spectrum, but invisible to the naked eye, and which may be the most distant (and thus, the oldest) objects in the universe.
Of course, we all know the oldest thing you can get on the radio is Jack Benny…
Dateline: 1969
Two airliners were hijacked to Havana yesterday. That's the sixth time this year that there has been a "double-header" seizing. We must be running out of rebels and Communists by now—I would not be surprised to hear that the hijackers are just retirees looking for someplace cheaper than Miami.
Dateline: 1969
President Nixon is coming to San Diego tomorrow. This will lay to rest any dispute, at least while he's here, as to the biggest Dick in town.
What's the news inside this issue?
I've just come back from a little bubble of time inside the roiling chaos that is the real world. It was a little Los Angeles SF conclave called Escapade, filled with fans of all things fannish. Keeping me company on this trip was the lastest issue of F&SF. Although not quite such a rousing success as the con, the issue did have a couple of things to strongly recommend it. Read on, and you'll see what they were:
by Bert Tanner
Deeper Than the Darkness, by Gregory Benford
Greg Benford is a young man, part of an identical twin fannish duo, who I'm pretty sure lives right here in San Diego. He was catapulted into the ranks of the professionals when he won an F&SF writing contest a few years back, and he's written a couple of pieces since then.
His latest is a space adventure involving Captain Clark, a tramp ship skipper impressed into navy service when the mysterious Quarm begin impinging on Terran star colonies. Clark is one of the few men of caucasian ancestry left after the hot wars of the fraught centuries, and human civilization is now dominated by Asians and Polynesians. Society is changed, too, more of a communal affair knitted together by cooperative social activies. Prime among them is Sabal, also referred to as The Game, which is a sort of roleplaying exercise in which each participant offers up vignettes, epigrams, and other creative orations designed to complement rather than dispute the last speaker. When fully harmony is reached, the Game is over.
It is frequent usage of Sabal that keeps the novice crew together as it reaches Regeln, a colony recently ravaged by the Quarm. But Sabal is no defense against, and indeed, a exacerbator for, the particular malady spread by the aliens—a kind of extreme agrophobia that drives humans to literally burrow away from the light, from each other, from the universe.
This downbeat tale is readable, but its psychological and racial underpinnings are a little implausible and more than a little unsettling.
Three stars.
Some Very Odd Happenings at Kibblesham Manor House, by Michael Harrison
A WW2 veteran runs across a much aged and enervated war buddy. Over beers, it turns out that the afflicted soldier has had an unfortunate run-in with the Celtic cult of Cybele, the Earth Mother. Said sect, prominent two thousand years ago, demands great sacrifices of its adherents. The male priests must scourge themselves, ultimately sacrificing that which most distinguishes them as men.
And Kibblesham, built on an ancient temple, infects all who inhabit it with Cybele's compulsion…
This is one of many old-fashioned pieces in the book, almost Lovecraftian in tone. Not really to my taste.
Some 12,000 years ago, before the final Ice Age, great magical societies were the rule. One of the age's great sorcerers is a man simply known as Warlock. In his 200 years of life, he has seen his powers wane several times, each instance compelling him to move on to a new locale, where his mana has been restored. Upon investigation, Warlock determines a terrible truth, one which spells doom for his spell-based civilization.
In the meantime, a stupid swordsman named Hap, wielding the eldritch blade Glilendree (or is it the other way around?), shows up to challenge the wizard. The ensuing battle is noteworthy, indeed.
This is one of Niven's only fantasies, and it's superb. While "magic was common before the modern age" is a frequently mined lode, from Lord of the Rings to Conan to Norton's recent Operation: Time Search, Niven is the first, perhaps, to explain why the magic goes away.
Five stars.
Trouble on Kort, by William M. Lee
This is a police mystery set on the planet of Kort, on which a dozen outworlders have disappeared (kidnapped?) and a dozen natives have taken their own lives—all in the space of just a matter of weeks. Peace Corps officer Jan Pierson is sent in to investigate.
It's a rather unremarkable tale, oddly juvenile in tone and occasionally tedious, but it's not unenjoyable. I appreciated the love interest, the Kortian named "Marty", who did not get enough page time.
A low three.
The House, by P. M. Hubbard
A married couple, awarded a homestead plot in the bombed out fringes of London, tries to build a house amidst the rubble. But the tumulus they choose as a foundation may already be occupied…
This tale is atmospheric but rather trivial, another of the throwbacks. Two stars.
The Incredible Shrinking People, by Isaac Asimov
Last issue, the Good Doctor explained the pitfalls of neglecting physics when dealing with miniaturized or enlarged people. This time, Isaac explains how he accounted for same while writing the novelization of Fantastic Voyage.
Neat stuff. Four stars.
The Freak, by Pg Wyal
There are beggars and there are beggars. The most deformed, crippled, and otherwise unordinary ones band together to form a union of sorts. Tired of their low income, they go on strike, ensuring that the beautiful citizens of Gothopolis have no one to compare themselves to.
Soon, the "normal" Gothopolians go crazy, and their John Lindsay analog must come up with a drastic solution.
The build-up wasn't bad, but the message isn't as profound as Wyal (or editor Ferman) thought it was.
Two stars.
Say goodnight, Dick!
Just as the week's news was much of a muchness, so was this issue of F&SF more a marking of time than the making of a landmark. Still, I am grateful for the Asimov and particularly the Niven, and the rest was not so much unpleasant as forgettable.
Good enough for now. I look forward, as always, to next month's issue—and I hope you do, too!
The other shoe dropped on February 17: Star Trek is officially canceled. Moreover, ABC won't pick it up for its "Second Season" in January. Fan efforts are being directed at CBS, but I can't say the prospects are promising.
One has to wonder if the decision was made due to the spate of lousy episodes that have plagued the second half of the Third Season. On the other hand, the decision was probably made based on the reaction to the first half of the season, which was actually quite good, so maybe Trek was always destined for the block.
This makes the latest episode, what appears to be the penultimate (if, indeed, they even air the last episode sometime in May after eight weeks of reruns and substitutions), particularly bittersweet. "All Our Yesterdays" is possibly Trek's finest hour, even as the clock ticks the show's last minutes.
That the show is so good comes as no surprise; writer Jean Lisette Aroeste wrote the sublime "Is There in Truth No Beauty", and director Marvin Chomsky ran the excellent "Day of the Dove". It is also an unique episode in many ways, from the profusion of excellent sets, to the complete absence of the Enterprise from the show (a phenomenon I cannot recall occurring in any prior episode).
For those who missed it, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet of Sarpedon, a civilized world doomed to be destroyed when its star, Beta Niobe, goes nova—in just a handful of hours. I guess they're there to pick up refugees (if so, there won't be very many…)
The Big Three find themselves in what looks like a post office or safety deposit box annex attended by an elderly Mr. Atoz. This fellow, assisted by several kindly replicas, is a "librarian" who has used his "Atavachron" (a great name for a time machine) to send all of the citizens of Sarpedon into the past, where they will be safe from the stellar explosion. Mr. Atoz assumes the three officers are Sarpedonites who are late to the party, and he gives them run of the archive to find eras to jaunt to.
"You've run up some considerable overdue book fines, young man!"
Well, through misadventure, Kirk ends up in Cromwellian England, where he is locked up under accusation of witchcraft, and McCoy and Spock end up in the planet's last Ice Age, risking frostbite and worse. Apparently, Sarpedon's past is identical to that of Earth, which would be egregious if we hadn't seen similar phenomena in "Miri" and "Bread and Circuses". Indeed, this is actually a welcome data point rather than risible.
"You're under arrest, guv'nor…for overdue book fines!"
"It's colder than a witch's left…" "Agreed, Doctor."
Luckily for Kirk, his judge is one of the refugees from the future, who helps him find the portal back to the library. Luckily for the other two, a lovely woman named Zarabeth, exiled from a time prior to the Enterprise's era, rescues them and gives them refuge in her cave. She quickly falls for Spock (who wouldn't?) and the half-Vulcan finds himself reverting to savagery as a result of his psychic bond with primordial Vulcans of five thousand years ago. Spock peeves at McCoy, moons at Zarabeth, and acts the least Spocklike we've seen him since "This Side of Paradise" in a very honest and affecting way.
Bones convinces Spock to go back to where they arrived in the Ice Age so as to find their way back to the library, which they manage with the help of Kirk. Returned to his time, Spock becomes himself again, but not without a touch of subdued regret at the loss of yet another opportunity at love.
The pacing for this episode is leisurely but consistent, really letting us soak in the environs, the characters, their emotions. The Act-end cliffhangers are unusual and sometimes not even danger points. All of the cast turn in masterful performances, and the guests do as well—standouts include Mr. Atoz (the actor last seen in "Bread and Circuses") and the magistrate who saves Kirk. Mariette Hartley (Zarabeth) is fine, and there is no question that she is lovely, but it's the pickpocket who Kirk rescues in his era, with her period speech and game manner, who is truly memorable. The optical effects are stunning, particularly the Atavachron portal effect.
"Just give the book back. No one will press charges."
Though something of a cul de sac in terms of development of the setting (time travel on Sarpedon only goes to Sarpedon, and the system blows itself up at the end of the episode), it is the opposite of a bottle show. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this episode, and so much that is right.
Five stars
Historically Inaccurate
by Erica Frank
In this episode, we see a mirror-image of the usual dynamic between Spock and Doctor McCoy. The doctor is the rational one, driven to find a solution that lets them get back to the Enterprise—while Spock is distracted by strange circumstances and a pretty lady, and he risks isolating them both because of his emotions.
He attacked McCoy over the epithet "pointy-eared Vulcan"… and although the insult was clear in McCoy's voice, it's also a simple fact: Spock is a Vulcan and his ears are pointy. McCoy has said more directly insulting things to him in the past, but this was apparently his breaking point.
You'd think if he wanted McCoy to shut up, he'd use the Vulcan neck pinch on him. Instead, he grabs him by the throat and brings him in close.
We are supposed to believe that tensions have come to a head because Spock is stuck in the past and atavistic patterns are controlling his behavior. That Spock reverts to savagery because the Vulcans of several thousand years ago were warlike barbarians who ate "animal flesh" and fought for dominance over petty insults.
The problem with that is…
Five thousand years ago on Earth, the Aegean Bronze Age was starting. Imhotep built the Step Pyramid of Djoser; around the same time, Stonehenge was built. Those were ancient human cultures, but they were not so alien from modern humans that a person transported to that time would find their entire nature changed. A modern human thrown back to that time — even with their cell structure and brain patterns adjusted to fit in — would act much like humans do today.
Our records show that human activities and motivations have been very similar throughout history, even as our technology and religions have changed. People complained about politicians, bemoaned their rebellious teenagers, and mourned the passing of beloved pets. Some fought over minor differences and more sensible people denounced those who could not get along with their neighbors. Some were involved in huge, elaborate projects that would not see completion in their lifetimes, and yet they found reason to participate and build on the work of those who had gone before.
Visitors at Stonehenge, perhaps considering what life might have been like 5,000 years ago on Earth.
"Stonehenge 1960s" photo by Annabel M, CC-BY 2.0
Are we to believe that Vulcans were violent barbarians much more recently than humans? That while humans were developing cuneiform and hieroglyphs, establishing the basics of accounting and medical texts, Vulcans were irrational and vicious—but have since surpassed humans in technology and developed powerful psychic abilities?
Something about this doesn't add up. I can more easily believe that Spock, badly disoriented by the trip through time and deeply worried about his friend's survival, latched onto the first viable way to cope: Accept that they are stuck here and focus on surviving in their new home.
Of course, this is only plausible if one believes that Spock would give up his friendship with Kirk for a life with McCoy and a woman he met an hour ago. That possibility raises even more questions.
Four stars. I can quibble over some of the "science," but the character dynamics were riveting.
Treasure from Trash
by Joe Reid
This week’s episode of Star Trek contained many interesting elements: a star about to go Nova, eliminating a solar system and the desperate race to find survivors. A man with duplicate copies of himself. A civilization with the power to travel in time. All interesting concepts that could fill volumes of science fiction. Sadly, these concepts were cheapened by the unnecessary common plot devices which ran rampant in this episode. From jumping to conclusions to failing to ask questions, there didn’t appear to be any characters in this episode unwilling to make critical mistakes that made situations worse than they already were.
Let’s start our examination on an individual level with Kirk and Atoz. Kirk and crew went to a doomed planet where everyone was gone, looking for people to save. Atoz, having saved everyone, was perplexed as to why these newcomers hadn’t escaped yet. This left us with a comedy of errors that shouldn’t have occurred. Had Kirk or Atoz not jumped to conclusions and taken a minute to fully introduce themselves and state their purposes, all parties would have been allowed to move on with their respective businesses without incident. Instead, we were forced to bear witness to two men fighting so hard to save each other they were willing to almost kill each other.
"Kirk, go to your room!"
The second cause of frustration in this episode revolved around the fact that questions were never asked during the times when people were the safest. Again, our two subjects are Atoz and Kirk, but mainly Kirk. Had Kirk asked before he leapt to aid the sound of a screaming woman, he might have saved himself some trouble. Even Spock and McCoy fell into the same situation, chasing after Kirk’s voice as he had the woman. Have none of them ever been taught that the time to ask questions is when you are still at the library, not after you’ve left? Eventually Kirk and crew were able to formulate questions after they found themselves in predicaments. They discovered the answers which led to their salvations. All completely avoidable.
At the end of the day, these mistakes lead to the exploration of fantastical places with many surprises. The journey to the frozen wastes, where Spock and McCoy find the lonely and beautiful prisoner, pushes Spock and McCoy to the brink both physically and emotionally. Kirk has to find unwilling allies in a strange past to save himself from his own prison, and after all that, has to fight to prevent re-imprisonment to save the lives of this crew. I found it amazing that this episode was able to push beyond the cheap narrative devices to deliver a worthy hour of TV. It ultimately rewarded the viewer’s patience for putting up with these forgivable follies to get to some good sci-fi at the end. All gripes aside, I enjoyed watching “All Our Yesterdays”.
It's a highly superior clutch of books this month around—plus a double review of the new Vonnegut…
by Victoria Silverwolf
Sophomore Efforts
By coincidence, the last two books I read were both the second novels to be published by their authors. Otherwise, they are as different as they could be.
Coleman's first book was something called Seeker From the Stars. I haven't read it, so I can't comment. In fact, I was completely unfamiliar with this author, so I asked my contacts in fandom and the publishing industry about him. I turned up a couple of interesting facts.
Firstly, he's one of the few Black science fiction writers. (The most notable is, of course, the great Samuel R. Delany.) That's a good thing for the field. The more variety of writers, the better the fiction.
Secondly, he's currently in jail for burglary. It seems that he's taken up writing while incarcerated. That seems like a decent path to rehabilitation, so let's wish him good luck while paying his debt to society.
But is the book any good? Let's find out.
At some time in the future, humanity has reached the far reaches of the solar system. However, a conglomeration of business interests known as the Five Companies has put a stop to further development of space science, unless they control it. They're so powerful that they have their own secret police. Not even the World Government or the Space Patrol can keep them from crippling research.
Our protagonist is Catherine Rogers. She is part of a private space research group that dares to defy the Five Companies. Trouble starts when a scientist shows up at their headquarters, shot by the secret police. Just before dying, he gives Catherine and her colleagues a book and a key to a hidden cache of highly advanced technology brought from another world.
We quickly find out that two aliens in the form of glowing spheres are on Earth. One of them is insanely evil. He kidnapped the other, who is essentially the queen bee of her species. He intends to mate with her against her will, forcing her to produce one hundred million offspring (!) who will be raised to be as wicked as himself.
He wants to feed off the life force of human beings, and teach his children to do the same, wiping out humanity. Complicating matters is the fact that the evil alien shares his mind with one of the leaders of the secret police, who wants to get his hands on the advanced technology.
This all happens very early in the book, and we've got a long way to go. Suffice to say that Catherine and her friends work with the good alien, who has enormous psychic powers, to defeat the bad one.
The author's writing style isn't very sophisticated, sad to say, nor is the plot. Much of the time I imagined this story as a comic book. On the good side, the pace keeps getting faster and faster. By the end, it makes Keith Laumer look like Henry James.
I also appreciate the fact that the heroes are of mixed races, and a large number of them are women. All in all, however, I have to confess that this is a disappointing work.
Randall's first novel was called Hedgerow. I haven't read that one either, but apparently it's a Gothic Romance without supernatural elements.
Unlike Coleman, I'm familiar with this author. She had two excellent stories published in Fantastic a few years ago.
Will she be as adept at a longer length? Let's take a look.
An automobile accident claims the lives of the parents of two sisters. Elizabeth (twenty-four years old) escapes without a scratch, but Gabrielle (nineteen) is severely injured. The two young women move into a house owned by the great-aunt of a doctor who cared for Gabrielle during her long and painful recovery.
The house is located on an island off the coast of New England, the perfect setting for a Gothic Romance. Elizabeth and the doctor fall in love, giving us the other mandatory element for this genre.
The first half of the book is narrated by Gabrielle. On the very first page she feels the presence of Alarice, a woman who lived in the house long ago. (She's the dead sister of the great-aunt. Throughout the book, there's a strong parallel between the two pairs of sisters, including a love triangle.)
It's obvious from the start that Gabrielle is mentally and emotionally unstable, after her traumatic experience, so it's not always clear what's real and what's not. The second half of the book is narrated by Elizabeth, who gives us a very different perspective on events, including the tragic accident.
I haven't mentioned a third narrator, who shows up only a few pages from the end, adding a genuinely chilling touch.
This is a beautifully written book, with great psychological insight into its characters. Besides gorgeous language that makes me want to read it out loud, it has a plot as intricately woven as a spider web. We witness the same things happen from different viewpoints, completely changing what we thought we knew.
Five stars.
by Brian Collins
This month's Ace Double is a very good one for both Fritz Leiber fans and readers in general. The quality packed into this Double is unsurprising, though, since it is all reprints. There's the short collection Night Monsters, which contains four stories that all run in the horror vein. Three of these stories were previously printed in Fantastic, and so Victoria covered them some years ago. The other half is The Green Millennium, one of Leiber's more overlooked novels, first published in 1953 and not having seen print in the U.S. in about fifteen years.
The longest story here is also the best, at least in terms of the sheer beauty of Leiber's prose. It's Southern California in the early '60s, and the narrator is recounting the strange ramblings of a friend of his who would disappear under mysterious circumstances. Said friend believes that not only is oil a corrupting force, but that oil might somehow be alive. The supernatural is never seen but is strongly alluded to, in passages so evocative, so oppressive, that they compare with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The plot itself is rather structureless, but this doesn't matter because Leiber is so good at chronicling modern horrors such as industry and the urban landscape. I lived in California (in Pasadena) for a short time, and I'll be sure never to return.
Another contender for best in the collection is a more personal, more melancholy story. A middle-aged man, a chess-player, astronomer, and divorcee who reads somewhat like a stand-in for Leiber, sees a silhouetted figure behind him in the doubled mirrors he sees going up and down the stairs every night. Without giving away the ending, the apparition may be the ghost of a theatre actress he had met by chance who had committed suicide not long after their encounter. The man, in an attack of conscience, is confronted with a memory he had suppressed, of a person he had deeply wronged, though he didn't know it at the time. It's a ghost story, a striking portrait of guilt, and in a strange way, a love story.
As an unintended companion to the previous story, this one is interesting. It also features a ghostly woman who has been wronged, albeit the crime committed upon her is much worse. We're led to believe at first that this woman is simply a temptress, but while she may creep up on the unsuspecting male lead, she is not a totally malicious specter. "I'm Looking for 'Jeff'" is about a decade older than the other stories, and it certainly shows a restraint (given the horrific crime at the center) that Leiber would probably not show if he had written it today. My one real problem is the ending, which is an expositional monologue from a third party that explains the twist, rather than Leiber showing us what happened.
The last and shortest is also the most lighthearted; it's what you might call a horror-comedy. An actress is quite literally fading (her body is becoming more transparent) as her popularity is on the decline, so she resorts to a very old family ritual that might make her famous again—at a price. The satire is cute, although I think Leiber tackled something similar but better and more seriously in "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes." I'm also not sure about those rhyming couplets. It's fine, but ultimately minor.
Phil Gish is aimless and unemployed, but his life quickly gets turned upside down when he meets a green cat he takes an immediate liking to. He calls the cat Lucky, and like Lovecraft, who liked taking care of strays, he thinks of the animal as his own—only for Lucky to run off. Man gets cat, man loses cat, man goes looking for cat. This is the skeleton on which the book's plot is built, but it balloons into something much weirder and more convoluted.
The future America of The Green Millennium is dystopic, but not in ways we now take as obvious. Robots have become normalized, taking away much of human labor, and the people themselves are largely hedonists desperate for stimulation—not even for pleasure itself but more to fight off boredom. Despite being first published in 1953, it reads like something written in the past few years—in the wake of the New Wave and even something like Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Certainly it could not have been serialized in the magazines of the time, what with the explicit references to sex and drug use.
The plot, at its core, is simple, but Leiber introduces a colorful array of characters, all of whom want Lucky as much as Phil does. These characters include, but are not limited to, a husband-wife wrestling duo, an analyst who sounds like he himself could use an analyst, a woman with prosthetic legs that hide what seem to be hooves for feet, a pack of corporate higher-ups who may as well be mobsters, actual mobsters, and a few others I have not mentioned. The green cat might be an alien, or a mutant, or a weapon devised by the Soviets, I won't say which.
I might sound inebriated as I'm trying to explain all this, but let me assure you that I haven't smoked or ingested marijuana in five months!
Leiber is a mixed bag when it comes to comedy: he can be pretty funny, but he can also write The Wanderer. The Green Millennium is a madcap SF comedy that was written at a time (the early '50s) when Leiber could seemingly do no wrong, and it demonstrates his keen understanding of things that haunt the modern American. Most importantly, it's just a lot of fun.
On a routine flight from Stockholm to London, sixteen travellers (eight women and eight men) with no connection to each other, find themselves whisked to another world. Their new environs are suggestive of nothing so much as a zoo habitat designed to be reminiscent of home. To wit: a strip of highway flanked by a supermarket and a hotel, complete with electricity and running water. Two automobiles sans engines. A few workshops. A nightly replenished supply of booze, groceries, and tools.
Russell Graheme, M.P., quickly takes charge of the unwilling emigrants, organizing exploration parties. Soon, contact is made with a medievalist enclave, a Stone Age encampment…and what appear to be flocks of fairies.
What is this world? Who brought them there? And to what end? Those are the key riddles answered in this terrific little new book.
It's sort of a cross between Cooper's book Transit (in which five humans are transported to an extraterrestrial island) and Philip José Farmer's "Riverworld" series (in which everyone who ever lived is transported, along with his/her culture, to the banks of an extraterrestrial world-river) with a touch of the whimsy of L. Sprague de Camp (viz. The Incomplete Enchanter). It reads extremely quickly, and what with the short chapters and quick running time, you'll be done with the novel (novella?) before you know it.
What really engaged me, beyond the tight writing and fine characterization, was the central message of hope throughout the book. In "Riverworld", the various cultures who find themselves alongside each other in the hereafter almost immediately form belligerent statelets; war is the constant in Farmer's series. But in Seahorse, it's all about making peaceful contact, working together, having a productive goal. There's no Lord of the Flies to this story (though it is not unmitigatedly happy, either). Cooper clearly has a positive view of humanity, or at least wants to inspire us toward his idealistic vision. Count me in.
Five stars.
Contrast this upbeat book with the other one I read recently…
By page 100, Gideon determined that Slaughterhouse Five is not a book one enjoys, but rather experiences.
Two thirds of the way through the book, Gideon realized he'd been hoodwinked. Slaughterhouse Five is not science fiction at all, but rather the author's attempt to convey his experiences as a POW in Nazi Germany during the War, culminating in his presence at the firebombing of Dresden (now sited in East Germany). The SFnal wrapping, in which Billy Pilgrim is abducted by 4D aliens who unstick him in time and incarcerate him in an extraterrestrial zoo, seems there mostly to get eyes on the book. Or maybe to maintain a certain detachment from the material by changing the genre from "memoir."
For the same reason Billy Pilgrim, the eternal schlemiel, gets to be the closest thing the book has to a hero rather than the author, himself. The only way Vonnegut could work through his battle fatigue and War-derived ennui was to make the protagonist as hopeless and hapless as possible, to reflect the flannel-wrapped blinders through which the author now sees the world. To Vonnegut, Earth is a pathetic stage on which man inflicts indignity on himself and then on others. Then they die. So it goes.
On or about page 81, Gideon got a little tired of the fairy-tale language Vonnegut employs. It worked in Harrison Bergeron, but it's a bit of a one-trick pony.
Somewhere along the line, Gideon figured that the inclusion of the starlet, Miss Montana (who exists to provide someone besides the enormous Mrs. Pilgrim for Billy to stick his hefty wang into) was so that, in addition to appealing to SF fans, the book would appeal to horny SF fans. And horny readers in general. And because S.E.X. s.e.l.l.s.
Kilgore Trout, if he existed, would probably be reprinted these days in Amazing.
About a third of the way in, Gideon determined that he would write the review of Slaughterhouse Five in the style of Slaughterhouse Five.
Whatever the book is not, it is, at the very least, a memorable account of the author's feelings toward and memories of those dark last months of the war. It is a poignant counterpoint to all the jingoistic WW2 films that have come out this decade, and perhaps a more suitable epitaph for the millions who died in that conflict. So it goes.
Four stars.
by Cora Buhlert
War is hell: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Last month, thousands of people gathered in Dresden to remember the victims of the Allied bombings in the night from February 13 to 14, 1945, the night from Shrove Tuesday to Ash Wednesday and never was a day more aptly named. These memorial gatherings happen every year and while the number of East German officials and politicians attending and the degree of belligerence in their speeches waxes and wanes with the greater political situation (East German officials like using the Dresden bombings for propaganda purposes as an example of the infamy of the West), one thing that remains constant is the number of Dresdeners who come to remember the dead and the nigh total destruction of their city.
The burnt out ruin of the Church of Our Lady in Dresden, once a jewel of Baroque architecture.The Semper opera house in Dresden after the bombings. The exterior is still standing, but the once gorgeous interior is burned completely out.
I have never seen Dresden before 1945, though my grandmother who grew up in the area told me it was a beautiful city and how much she missed attending performances at the striking Semper opera house, which was largely destroyed by the bombings and is in the process of being rebuilt (The proposed completion date is 1985). However, I have visited the modern Dresden with its constant construction activity and incongruous mix of burned out ruins, historical buildings in various stages of reconstruction and newly constructed modernist office and apartment blocks and could keenly feel what was lost.
Views of the modern rebuilt Dresden in postcard form
I also know survivors of the Dresden bombings such as my university classmate Norbert who witnessed Dresden burning as teenager evacuated to the countryside and who – much like Kurt Vonnegut – was forced to help with the clean-up work and body recovery and wrote a harrowing account of his experiences for the university literary magazine.
Of course, Dresden was not the only German city bombed. Every bigger German city has its own Dresden, that night when entire neighbourhoods were wiped out and thousands of people, the vast majority of them civilians, were killed. For my hometown of Bremen, the night was the night of August 18, 1944, when Allied bombers destroyed the Walle neighbourhood next to Bremen harbour (while miraculously missing most of the harbour itself, similar to how the bombing of Dresden miraculously missed the industrial plants on the outskirts of the city). My grandfather, a retired sea captain, lived in the Walle neighbourhood. He was one of the lucky ones and survived, though his home in a housing estate for retired seafarers was destroyed. I remember sifting through the still smoking rubble of Grandpa's little house with my Mom the next day, looking for anything that might have survived the bombs and the firestorm and finding only two bronze buddha statues that Grandpa had brought back from Thailand. These two buddhas now stand guard in my living room, the war damage still visible. Meanwhile, the street where Grandpa once lived no longer exists on modern city maps at all.
An aerial view of Dresden's old slaughterhouse, where Kurt Vonnegut was imprisoned and survived the bombing of the city.
This is the perspective from which I read Kurt Vonnegut's latest novel Slaughterhouse Five, which uses science fiction as a vehicle for Vonnegut to describe his experiences as a prisoner of war who survived the bombing of Dresden and – like my classmate Norbert – never forgot what he saw that night and in the days that followed.
The result, much like the contemporary Dresden with the burned out ruin of the Church of Our Lady overlooking a parking lot and a hyper-modern restaurant and entertainment complex sitting directly opposite the newly restored Baroque Zwinger palace, is jarring and incongruous. Vonnegut's protagonist is Billy Pilgrim, an American everyman whose suburban postwar life is disrupted when he is abducted by aliens and becomes unstuck in time, forced to revisit the bombing of Dresden over and over and over again.
No, this photo of the burnt out ruin of the Church of Our Lady in winter was not taken in 1945, but in 1960. It still looks the same today.A banner advertises an exhibtion of contemporary Soviet art, while the ruins of Baroque Dresden loom in the background.The ultra-modern restaurant complex Am Zwinger, the largest in all of East Germany, opened only last year – directly opposite the newly restored Baroque Zwinger palace.Aerial view of the ultra-modern restaurant complex Am Zwinger, which includes a self-service restaurant, the Radeberger beer cellar and the Café Espresso, pictured here. Just don't expect the coffee on offer to actually taste like espresso.Tourists lounge in the terrace café of the restaurant complex Am Zwinger, overlooking the recently rebuilt Baroque Zwinger palace.
Slaughterhouse Five is not so much a novel, it is a metaphor for the trauma of war, a trauma that still hasn't subsided even twenty-four years later but that keep rearing its ugly head again and again. Many veterans report having flashbacks to particularly traumatic experiences during the war – any war. But while those flashbacks are purely psychological, poor Billy Pilgrim physically travels back in time to the worst night of his life over and over again.
Barely a blip on the radar
The bombings of World War II loom large in the collective memory of people in Germany and the rest of Europe, yet they are comparatively rarely addressed in contemporary German literature. Der Untergang (The End: Hamburg) by Hans Erich Nossack from 1948, Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben (A Time to Love and a Time to Die) by Erich Maria Remarque (who was not even in Germany, but sitting high and dry in Switzerland during WWII) from 1954 and Vergeltung (Retaliation) by Gert Ledig from 1956 are some of the very few examples. It's not as if World War II plays no role in German literature at all, because we have dozens of war novels. However, these are all tales about the experiences of soldiers on the frontline, not about the civilians getting bombed to smithereens back home. Most likely, this is because war novels focus on the experiences of men (and note that both Slaughterhouse Five and Remarque's A Time to Love and a Time to Die focus on soldiers experiencing bombings and air raids) and the experiences of men are deemed important. Meanwhile, the people who suffered and died during the bombing nights of World War II were mainly women, children, old people, sick people, prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers and their experiences are not deemed nearly as relevant.
Considering how utterly destructive the bombing of Dresden was, it's notable that it is barely a blip on the radar of German literature in both East and West. Erich Kästner's memoir Als ich ein kleiner Junge war (When I was a little boy) touches on the bombing of Dresden, where Kästner grew up, though the book is not about the bombing itself, which Kästner did not experience first-hand, because he was living in Berlin at the time. And for the twentieth anniversary of the Dresden bombings, Ulrike Meinhof, one of the brightest lights of West German journalism, penned a scathing article for the leftwing magazine Konkret, condemning Winston Churchill and Royal Air Force commander Arthur Harris for ordering the attack on Dresden under false pretences. "Was Winston Churchill a war criminal?" the cover of the respective issue of Konkret asked, while quite a lot of readers wondered why this was even a question.
So should Slaughterhouse Five, a work by an American author, albeit one who witnessed the bombing of Dresden first-hand, become the definitive account of the destruction of Dresden and of the bombing nights of World War II in general? I hope not, because I want to read more accounts by German civilians about the bombings of World War II. Nonetheless, I'm glad that Slaughterhouse Five exists, as an account about the horrors of war by one who has seen them. I'm also glad that this novel was published in the US, because too many Americans still consider the bombings of cities and civilians during World War II justified. Maybe Slaughterhouse Five will make some of them reconsider, especially since – as I said above – it wasn't just Dresden that was destroyed by bombing. It was also Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Rotterdam, Coventry, Guernica, Hamburg and right now, it's Hanoi. And the next generation's Billy Pilgrim is currently locked up in a bamboo cage in the Vietnamese jungle somewhere, watching the flames over Hanoi turn the sky blood red.
Not a pleasant book at all, but an important one. Four and a half stars.
And now for something much more pleasant. For after a difficult book like Slaughterhouse Five, you need a palate cleanser. Luckily, I found the perfect palate cleanser in The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs, a young American writer currently living in Britain. The Face in the Frost is thirty-year-old Bellairs' third book and his first foray in the fantasy genre.
John Bellairs
The novel starts off with a prologue that informs us that this is a book about wizards – just in case readers of Bellairs' previous two books, collections of Catholic humour pieces, are confused – and then introduces us to the setting, two adjacent kingdoms known only as the North and the South Kingdom. Such prologues can be dry and boring, but Bellairs' whimsical humour, which is on display throughout the book, makes them fun to read.
Once the introductions are out of the way, we meet our protagonist, the wizard Prospero ("not the one you're probably thinking of", Bellairs helpfully informs us) or rather his home, "a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples", which Prospero shares with a sarcastic talking mirror which can offer glimpses of faraway times and places, though mostly, it's just annoying and also has a terrible singing voice.
Prospero's house, as illustrated by Marilyn Fitschen
This first chapter very much sets the tone for the entire novel, humorous and whimsical – with moments of dread occasionally creeping in. For Prospero has been plagued by bad dreams of late, he has the feeling that a malicious presence is watching him and finds himself menaced by a fluttering cloak, while getting a mug of ale from his own cellar. To top off Prospero's very bad day, he finds himself attacked by a monstrous moth that "smells like a basement full of dusty newspapers".
Luckily, Prospero's friend and fellow wizard Roger Bacon – and note that this time around, Bellairs does not inform us, that this is not the one we're thinking of, so this likely is the famed medieval scholar and creator of a talking brazen head – chooses just this evening to drop by for a visit, after having been kicked out of England, when a spell went awry and instead of constructing a wall of brass around the island in order to keep out Viking raiders, Bacon instead raised a wall of glass with predictable results.
As the two old friends discuss the day's events, it quickly becomes clear that something or rather someone is after Prospero and all that this is linked to a mysterious book that Bacon tried to locate on Prospero's behalf. However, it's late at night, so the two wizards go to bed, only to awaken in the morning to find the house surrounded by sinister grey-cloaked figures, sent by a rival wizard. There's no way out – except via an underground river that the two wizards navigate aboard a model ship, after shrinking themselves down to toy size.
A Magical Mystery Tour
What follows is a marvellous, magical quest, as Prospero and Bacon attempt to figure out just who is after Prospero and once they do, how to stop that villainous sorcerer from casting a spell that will plunge the whole world into everlasting winter. On the way, the two wizards encounter such fascinating locations as the village of Five Dials, which turns out to be an illusion, a magical Potemkin village of hollow houses inhabited by hollow people. They also escape all sorts of horrors their opponent sends against them such as a magical puddle that will capture a person's reflection, should they happen to look into it, and of course the titular face that appears in a frost-encrusted window to mock and menace Prospero.
Fantasy is experiencing something of a boom right now, triggered by the paperback release of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lancer's reprints of Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian. But while Conan has inspired a veritable legion of other fantastic swordsmen and barbarian warriors from Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné to Lin Carter's Thongor, Lord of the Rings has inspired very few imitators. Until now.
This does not mean that The Face in the Frost is a carbon copy of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Quite the contrary, it's very much its own story, even though the Tolkien inspiration is clear and was acknowledged by Bellairs. Furthermore, Bellairs' light and frothy tone makes The Face in the Frost a very different, if no less magical experience than Professor Tolkien's magnum opus.
The Face in the Frost is a delightful book, skilfully mixing humour and whimsy with horror and dread, and the illustrations by Marilyn Fitschen help bring the wonderful world of Prospero and Roger Bacon to life. The ending certainly leaves room for a sequel and I hope that we will get to read it sooner rather than later. At any rate, I can't wait to see what John Bellairs writes next.
A wondrous confection of whimsy, horror and pure joy. Five stars.
by Robin Rose Graves
Society Without Gender…
Another year, another Le Guin. For those tuning in for the first time, my introduction to Le Guin began two years ago, with her novel City of Illusions, which left me disappointed. Last year, I read A Wizard of Earthsea, where finally I saw Le Guin’s potential realized. When I saw she has another book coming out this year, I was interested, but reined in my expectations when I realized The Left Hand of Darkness would take place in the same universe as City of Illusions.
This is book four of the Hainish Cycle, but fortunately, you do not need to read these books in order to understand the story. In fact, I found little connection between this book and the previous one.
Genly Ai is an envoy sent to the snowy planet of Winter to convince the people to join the Ekumen (a sort of alliance between planets). Winter, or Gethen in their native language, is not as technologically advanced as the rest of the universe. They have yet to build airplanes, let alone a vehicle capable of space travel. Following an outsider’s perspective allows readers to learn about a new culture alongside the narrative main character.
As per my experience with her previous works, Le Guin excels at creating compelling and unique settings. Smaller, intermediate chapters offer folkloric stories from the planet of Winter to further enhance the reader’s understanding of Gethenian culture.
All the characters are human, though the Gethenians differ in one key way. They are completely androgynous except for once a month when they enter their reproductive cycle (known as “kemmer”) where they then shift into either male or female (as in they can either impregnate or become pregnant.) Which role a Gethenian will take on during kemmer is not predetermined and can change between cycles.
This confuses and occasionally disgusts Genly Ai, who regards all characters with he and him pronouns, perhaps because he is male and unable to empathize with or respect anyone who isn’t.
Without gender, Le Guin posits that there is no sexuality, no rape, no war. People who get pregnant are not treated as lesser. Children are raised by everyone, not just the person who gave birth to them. Jobs account for kemmer, giving time off for those experiencing their cycle, and special buildings are set aside for reproduction.
Contrasted with the world we live in today, this book subtly calls out the sexism of our own society, while also exemplifying how we may improve. I was pleasantly surprised by the feminist slant of this book.
Five stars.
Reflections in a Mirage, by Leonard Daventry
By Jason Sacks
Leonard Daventry is a British science fiction author whose work tends to follow standard pathways – until it doesn’t. As my fellow Galactic companion Gideon Marcus wrote about one of Mr. Daventry’s previous novels, Daventry likes to explore ideas of free love and complex relationships, using familiar set-ups with slightly surprising resolutions.
His latest book, Reflections in a Mirage, is an excellent demonstration of how Mr. Daventry takes on those challenges while delivering his own unique view of the world. Unfortunately, this novel is perhaps overly ambitious for its length. Mirage consequently falls short of the author’s clear goals.
We return to the lead character Daventry established back in 1965 in A Man of Double Deed: Claus Coman is a telepath, a so-called “keyman” who can create connections to minds of both humans and non-humans. Coman is enlisted to join a motley band of outcasts and criminals who journey to one of the many worlds which humanity has discovered among the vast stars: a forbidding but intriguing planet called Sacron. Coman at least has the comfort of traveling with longtime companion Jonl, a woman with whom he’s had a complex relationship.
But just as many British exiles to Australia rebelled against their crew, the group of 50 outcasts rebel against the crew of their space cruiser. A violent, vicious battle kills most of the men who can fly the cruiser, and terrible damage is visited upon the ship. They only have one choice: to land on the planet which is ironically called Paradise 1. Paradise 1 seems to be a desert world, nearly bereft of any life whatsoever, but there are hints the planet may be more complex than it initially seems.
In fact, we get an intriguing revelation towards the end of the book (with a few concepts which will be well understood by Star Trek fans), but I found myself hungering for more context of the deeper story. At a mere 191 paperback pages, I was constantly under the impression that Daventry had to cut out important elements to the story; its brevity leaves the conclusion feeling a bit unsatisfying.
Reflections in a Mirage is at its best when it explores the human relationships it depicts. Coman’s relationship with Jonl is at the center of the story and provides a happy connection where so many of the other connections are tenuous. Daventry spends some time showing Jonl’s relationship with other women on the colony ship – the men and women are partitioned away from each other – and alludes to furtive, loving relationships among the women. There are similar hints about some of the men's connections to each other, and a strong implication that this society accepts a full gamut of sexuality, from polygamy to homosexuality and even to asexuality.
All of that is very interesting, and places this novel firmly in a “new wave” mindset, but there’s just not enough of it to satisfy. Ultimately, Reflections in a Mirage has the potential to be great, but I felt Daventry needed at least 100 more pages to fully illuminate his story.
You’ll probably be more satisfied reading some of the other works in this column. (I do recommend the LeGuin and Vonnegut books.)
This episode opened with the Enterprise circling an uninhabitable lava planet with a poisonous atmosphere, but anomalous readings of some kind of civilization or power source. They planned to leave anyway, until they got a message…from Abraham Lincoln.
"Welcome to Washington, Captain Kirk!"
Our crew is now very experienced with meetings with aliens who seem to be people from history or mythology. Most of them wanted to call his bluff immediately, but Kirk played along: he wanted to find out what's happening.
What's happening: A creature made of rock has decided to figure out what good and evil are by pitting four "good" heroes against four "evil" villains for the edification of its people.
Your host for the evening: an Excalbian rock creature that can read minds, terraform parts of a lava world, and shapeshift.
The Excalbian had arranged for Kirk and Spock—two people on the side of "good" (and the only living people involved)—to be joined by Abraham Lincoln, whom Kirk respects deeply, and Surak, the Vulcan philosopher who led the Vulcans out of war into their modern peaceful, logical society.
Abraham Lincoln dresses and speaks like a 19th-century statesman. Ancient Vulcan philosophers apparently dress and speak like the hippies who hang out at Haight & Ashbury in San Francisco today.
They were given opponents: Four of the worst villains from history (three of which we have never heard of before this episode)—two humans, one Klingon, and one other.
The Excalbians wished to "discover which is the stronger" of good or evil, and they had arranged what they call a "drama" with all the delicacy of a small child placing bugs in a jar and shaking it. In essence, "Here, we have put you all together and demanded you fight… whoever lives, that side must be the strongest."
As leverage to force the "good" side to fight, Kirk's crew would all be killed if he fails. The villains faced no such threats. Nor could they; whatever family or friends or honored associates they once had, none are alive today.
The villain line-up, from left to right: Genghis Khan, who needs (or at least gets) no introduction; Colonel Green, a genocidal war leader from 21st century Earth; Zora, a mad scientist from Tiburon; Kahless the Unforgettable, the Klingon tyrant.
At first, I wondered about the inclusion of Zora and Kahless: Is Klingon history so well-known to Kirk and Spock that the Excalbians can draw him from their minds? But the Federation and Klingons have been at odds for some time; they might well be familiar with their most famous historical figures. Zora seemed an outlier—until I remembered where I'd heard of Tiburon. It was the home of Dr. Sevrin, who led the quest for Planet Eden. (Apparently Tiburon has a history of unethical doctors.) Spock might well have known more about the planet's history.
The events that followed were annoyingly predictable. Green briefly attempted to negotiate, which was a distraction for an attack; the villains were driven off; Surak followed to speak to them, which resulted in his death; Lincoln tried to rescue him only to die as well; Kirk and Spock managed to defeat or drive off all four of the villains by themselves.
The Excalbian declared them the winners, but said he does not see any difference between their two philosophies. Kirk pointed out that he was fighting for the lives of his crew but the villains were fighting for personal power or glory. The Excalbian did not seem convinced, but sent them on their way, unharmed.
What was missing: Any mention that the value of "good" over "evil" is not shown on a battlefield, but in day-to-day living. That one strength of "good" is cooperation and shared resources—nearly irrelevant in a fabricated setting, with no time to develop tools, and a pre-selected pool of people who were chosen to play specific roles.
Colonel Green, the only white man on the "villain" team, watches from behind a rock while his companions fight for their lives. Maybe their lack of unity did matter.
I would have liked more consideration of the true nature of the six historical people: Just before they beamed "Lincoln" aboard the Enterprise, Spock said his readings were those of a "living rock" with claws. It seems likely that all the other people were Excalbians playing the part of historical characters. They were offered "power" if they won—but what would that mean? Would the other Excalbians hand them each spaceships and send them along to their respective planets? What could they possibly offer Genghis Khan?
Three stars. Interesting, but the pacing was odd (long, slow buildup to a couple of quick fight scenes), and I wanted more from both the philosophical and science fiction aspects.
Fair to Middlin’
by Janice L. Newman
Star Trek does like its ‘message’ episodes. Sometimes, as with "Day of the Dove or "The Enterprise Incident", the scriptwriter does a pretty good job of addressing the issues of the day. Other times, the scriptwriter does a poor or muddled job of Saying Something, as in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield".
The Savage Curtain falls somewhere between these two extremes. Roddenberry had a couple of pretty clear messages he wanted to send: “violence can be justified if the cause is just” and “peace is an admirable goal, but one that takes time and sacrifice, and in the meantime sometimes violence is necessary”. It’s not surprising that the man who wrote (or re-wrote) “A Private Little War” would want to make these points. But in doing so, he missed the chance to make a much clearer distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, one that would have served the story better.
The ‘evil’ characters in the episode showed an absolutely remarkable amount of teamwork. Colonel Green immediately took charge, and the others simply deferred to him and obeyed him. It stretched credibility just a little to see GHENGIS KHAN passively taking orders without so much as a peep of protest. In order to tell the exact story Roddenberry wanted to tell, characters that should have been backstabbing each other to get ahead or refusing to work together at all instead acted as a well-oiled unit. They had to trust each other, support each other, and listen to each other. In fact, the ‘evil’ characters had to act a little bit good. (While the ‘good’ characters in turn had to commit violence to make the story work, necessitating that they behave in an ‘evil’ way.)
How much more effective could it have been if the ‘evil’ characters had actually behaved in a selfish, anti-social, backbiting manner, and were defeated by people who worked together for the common good? How much more powerful could the message have been if the ‘good’ side found a solution that wasn’t based in violence, using teamwork, cleverness, and the combination of their knowledge and skills?
Maybe it would have been trite, but the idea of good and evil being absolutes is pretty trite, too.
The bit with Uhura explaining that race relations had progressed so far that words were no big deal was nice, though.
Three stars.
By What Right
by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele
In an episode that gave us Abraham Lincoln in space, cultural figures from Klingon and Vulcan history, and an amazing alien design, the thing that I kept thinking about after the episode was this:
KIRK: “How many others have you done this to? What gives you the right to hand out life and death?”
ROCK: “The same right that brought you here. The need to know new things.”
The question has been posed before. What right does Starfleet have? As early as season one, in "The Naked Time", a crewman despaired over humanity polluting space and sticking their noses where they “didn't belong”. His distress was exaggerated by an alien liquid, but the question was real. Is the crew—or Starfleet at large—doing harm in their quest for knowledge? The first directive shows that there has been significant thought on this, instructing Kirk not to infringe on cultures and to make repairs when possible if there has been a violation of the directive. It's an imperfect rule, and one that is broken frequently. Kirk or another officer decides that he knows better, or finds a reason why the directive doesn’t apply. There have been times when that directive hampers life-saving action.
The Excalabian’s actions are cruel by human standards, and as a means to understand the philosophy of “good vs. evil” make no sense to me. But that itself works as a mirror. I have no insight into the alien mind, no way to know what metric it judges by, no concept of how it views humans in relationship to itself. Equal beings? The way humans might regard a very clever animal? Insects under a microscope? Maybe even the way humans view other humans that fall outside their range of “people”.
This amoral broadcast brought to you in living color on NBC!
Human history is full of examples of people seeking knowledge and trampling over others to get it. The many places considered “untouched” on Earth that already have inhabitants, lands reshaped and mined for resources, animals hunted to extinction. The victims of experiments done under the guise of “progress”, psychological and physical studies done without permission, or care for the comfort or pain of the subjected person. Plenty of this has been done deliberately, but lack of ill-intent doesn't change the consequences either. As astronauts practice maneuvers in space, it is important for us, now, to remember that everything leaves a trace. The moon is a remarkable example, but hardly the only one. Just because we can doesn't mean we should – and yet, humans have a place in the universe too, and knowledge is part of that.
The question is not one with an easy answer, and might not have a correct answer. I think it is a question we should not stop asking though, because if we stop, that is when we have decided that yes we *do* know better, and stop caring what, or who gets hurt.
Even with all that philosophy, the episode still felt much like re-do of Kirk fighting the Gorn Captain in Arena, with more puzzling pieces than actual interesting plot.
2 stars
Truly Alien
by Joe Reid
“The Savage Curtain" was something unique. We have witnessed previous episodes where alien races test humans to see if they are honorable, or understand empathy, or if they are worthy of something. This week we had an alien race that wished to weigh the concepts of good and evil by playing the parts of the noble and of the wicked themselves; instead of seeking to understand something conceptually, they chose to understand experientially. Coupled with the inhumanity of their physical appearance, they were the most alien aliens that we have seen in a very long time from this show.
If I wished to understand women better, what options would be available to me? I suppose that I could talk to a woman to learn about them. I could go to my local library and borrow a few books about women. Hell, I could even watch women to attempt to learn about them through observation. I don’t have the ability nor would choose to become a woman and fully live as one merely to satisfy my curiosity. Excuse that poor and possibly male-chauvinistic example.
Let’s say I wanted to understand Phantom Limb Syndrome. That is the sensations that amputees experience from limbs that are no longer there. It would be impossible for me to truly understand what it is like without experiencing it. My point being that who would be willing to go through dismemberment to experientially understand something? Although through grave misfortune we could experience such a thing, we would experience it as ourselves. The Excalbians had the ability to learn by becoming who they were not. The very concept is alien.
"Don't look so stone-faced, Captain. Haha. That's an alien joke."
Walking a mile in another man’s shoe is one thing, walking with another man’s legs is entirely different. As novel as this ability of the Excalbians is, what’s more interesting and alien is the lack of judgment they had against the concepts of good and evil. It was as if these creatures never ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as humanity had in the story from the book of Genesis. How would beings such as the Excalbians gain that knowledge? Kirk and crew had a clear sense of right and wrong, the Excalbians seemed to not only lack it, but also held no bias of one over the other. Kirk apparently came to the same conclusion. As the Enterprise left Excalbia at the end of the episode, the crew cast no negative aspersions against the Excalbians for their lack of understanding. They were aliens and they got what they were after. Thankfully no one died.
In this episode the crew clearly found a new lifeform and new civilization. This one being a powerful yet innocent race of aliens whose reasoning is far removed from human rationale. They were refreshingly different and a welcomed change to the way that aliens are usually presented, as humans with some greasepaint.
4 stars
Eclipse Glasses for War
by Jessica Dickinson Goodman
On September 11th of this year, people on the west coast of America will see most of a solar eclipse. Adults who are smart or at least a little prepared will be viewing it through special eclipse sunglasses. Those of us with small children will be building cardboard boxes with pinholes in them, since there’s nearly nothing as futile as putting unwanted sunglasses on a toddler.
The boxes work like this: you pick a box big enough for both of your heads — like a home television box — and poke a round hole in it. When the appointed time to look comes, you put the box on your heads with the pinhole behind your right shoulder, aim the pinhole at the sun, and look the other way. The shadow of the earth will then creep across that perfect bright dot beaming onto the opposite wall of the box, allowing you and your child to track its progress without risking young eyes.
The dark box is a child’s version of Plato’s Cave, allowing us to safely view astronomical truths too large and too bright to safely see with the naked soul. It is also a bit like going to the movies: the appointed time, the rising tension, peak, and denouement, the use of light and darkness to tell a story. Most important to the experience is both the smallness and safety of it and of us: the sun is no more in that box than we are on its surface, but viewing it so allows us access to realities we could not otherwise safely imbibe.
That’s how I think of Star Trek’s suite of war analogy episodes, thoughtfully listed by Erica in the head article. The daily truth of America’s war on Vietnam involves numbers so astronomical, forms of violence so molten and charring, it is difficult to look directly at, much less explain to a child. But there are some dimensions of the conflict which can be conveyed in an episode like this, just as that pinhole box can convey the sun’s roundness, brightness, the semi-circular shape of earth’s intruding and then receding shadow, and the emotional excitement of having a Mama put a funny box over your head for 45 minutes during playtime. Likewise, this episode gave us some shapes from the war: the torture of POWs becomes Sarek’s simulated cries over the hilltop; the horror of punji sticks embedded in the darkling trails of the jungle become stakes carved and thrown by the characters. And tens of thousands of soldiers become four against four; brutal still, yes, but grokable. We don’t have Lodges and Westmorelands, Ho Chi Mins and Mao Tse-Tungs, but we can see the flickers of them in the shadows on the wall.
A poor man's Hanoi Hilton
Maybe you didn’t see this week’s episode as an allegory for Vietnam, but remember, we too are in the box or the cave, and what we bring with us affects what we see there. I see punji sticks and you may see the Bataan Death March. I see POWs and you may see a lynched man. But this episode gives space for us to approach different forms of violence and peace, evil and good, as and when we need to.
One way it does this is with the abject silliness of seeing Abraham Lincoln in space, shipless and fancy free. See, the episode seems to say, nothing is real here; this is just a silly sci fi show. But that is part of the box too and of the cave. The silliness of joining a new context shakes us free of our old one and allows us to see the dot on the wall, its roundness, its brightness, and the exact geometries of its transfiguration in a way we could never see the sun directly. The disgust I felt for the rock monster treating our beloved crew as chess pieces and bargaining chips only lightly touched on the incandescent rage I feel towards the Westmorelands and Maos of the world—playing greater power games as children die bloody. But it did allow me to touch it, to engage with it, to see it as small enough to understand the shape of it for once rather than be overwhelmed and blinded by its light.
This was not a good episode, as detailed above. The dialogue and morals were cloudy and at times crudely wrought. But as one in a series of episodes touching on different aspects of our nation’s current war, it did what it was supposed to: give us 48 minutes in the dark and the quiet to think about things we might not otherwise have been able to, see the shape and changing ways of them, and come out of it having touched something far beyond our reach.
Three stars.
[Come join us tomorrow (March 13th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]
![[April 4, 1969] Hey, Mack! (April 1969 <i>Analog</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/690331cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[April 2, 1969] A New Beginning? (Out of the Unknown: Season Three)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Picture3.jpg?resize=389%2C289&ssl=1)
![[March 31, 1969] 15 Minutes of Famous (Famous #8 & 9)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/690406famousx2.jpg?resize=618%2C372&ssl=1)
![[March 28, 1969] Life Beyond Conan: The Other Heroes of Robert E. Howard](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/KNGKLLWGLQ1967.jpg?resize=390%2C372&ssl=1)
![[March 26, 1969] Avast, Ye Scurvy Dogs! (<i>Doctor Who</i>: The Space Pirates [Parts 1-3])](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690326thisiswhyiama2jaimieenthusiast.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[March 24, 1969] Apocalypse Impending? <i>New Worlds</i>, April 1969](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/New-Worlds-April-1969.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
The named list from last month.
Cover by Mervyn Peake.
In a post-apocalyptic US we are told of teenager Vic and his telepathic dog, Blood. Vic is a teenage boy who spends his time scavenging the world for basic needs—food, companionship, and sex—as well as generally avoiding other groups, known as roverpaks, doing the same thing. They meet Quilla June – unusual because most women live where it is safer, underground. Vic rapes Quilla June before they are attacked by another roverpak. Blood is hurt in the scuffle. Quilla June escapes and returns to her underground home of Topeka.
More poetry. Described as ‘a poem for light and movement’, Thomas manages to produce strange typewritten boxes that are at times undecipherable. A typical ‘form over content’ type piece. 2 out of 5.
The inevitable 'naked lady of the month' picture.
Artwork by Mal Dean.
More artwork by Mal Dean.
![[March 20, 1969] Going through the motions… (April 1969 <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690320cover.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[March 18, 1969] What a way to go! (<i>Star Trek</i>: "All Our Yesterdays")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690318title.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[March 14, 1969 ] (March 1969 Galactoscope)](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690314covers.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
![[March 12, 1969] Rock Opera (<i>Star Trek</i>: "The Savage Curtain")](https://i0.wp.com/galacticjourney.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/690312curtain.jpg?resize=672%2C372&ssl=1)
